A Canticle For Leibowitz

by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

  "And now a word from—"

  "Turn it off!" Zerchi groaned.

  The young priest who was with him snapped off the set and stared wide-eyed at the abbot. "I don't believe it!"

  "What? About the Pope? I didn't either. But I heard it earlier, and New Rome has had time to deny it. They haven't said a word."

  "What does it mean?"

  "Isn't that obvious? The Vatican diplomatic service is on the job. Evidently they sent in a report on the Guam conference. Evidently it horrified the Holy Father."

  "What a warning! What a gesture!"

  "It was more than a gesture, Father. His Holiness isn't chanting Battle Masses for dramatic effect. Besides, most people will think he means 'against the heathen' on the other side of the ocean, and 'justice' for our side. Or if they know better, they'll still mean that themselves." He buried his face in his hands and rubbed them up and down. "Sleep. What's sleep, Father Lehy? Do you remember? I haven't seen a human face in ten days that didn't have black circles under its eye. I could hardly doze last night for somebody screaming over in the guesthouse."

  "Lucifer's no sandman, that's true."

  "What are you staring at out that window?" Zerchi demanded sharply. "That's another thing. Everybody keeps looking at the sky, staring up and wondering. If it's coming, you won't have time to see it until the flash, and then you'd better not be looking. Stop it. It's unhealthy."

  Father Lehy turned away from the window. "Yes, Reverend Father. I wasn't watching for that though. I was watching the buzzards."

  "Buzzards?"

  "There've been lots of them, all day. Dozens of buzzards — just circling."

  "Where?"

  "Over the Green Star camp down the highway."

  "That's no omen, then. That's just healthy vulture appetite. Agh! I'm going out for some air."

  In the courtyard he met Mrs. Grales. She carried a basket of tomatoes which she lowered to the ground at his approach.

  "I brought ye somewhat, Father Zerchi," she told him.

  "I saw yer sign being down, and some poor girl inside the gate, so I reckoned ye'd not mind a visit by yer old tumater woman. I brought ye some tumaters, see?"

  "Thank you, Mrs. Grales. The sign's down because of the refugees, but that's all right. You'll have to see Brother Elton about the tomatoes, though. He does the buying for our kitchen."

  "Oh, not for buying, Father. He-he! I brought 'em to yer for free. Ye've got lots to feed, with all the poor things yer putting up. So they're for free. Where'll I put 'em?"

  "The emergency kitchen's in the — but no, leave them there. I'll get someone to carry them to the guesthouse."

  "Port 'em myself. I ported them this far." She hoisted the basket again.

  "Thank you, Mrs. Grales." He turned to go.

  "Father, wait!" she called. A minute, yer honor, just a minute of your time—"

  The abbot suppressed a groan. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Grales, but it's as I told you—" He stopped, stared at the face of Rachel. For a moment, he had imagined — Had Brother Joshua been right about it? But surely, no. "It's — it's a matter for your parish and diocese, and there's nothing I can—"

  "No, Father, not that!" she said. "It be somewhat else I wanted to ask of ye." (There! It had smiled! He was certain of it!) "Would ye hear my confession, Father? Beg shriv'ness for bothering ye, but I'm sad for my naughties, and I would it were you as shrives me."

  Zerchi hesitated. "Why not Father Selo?"

  "I tell ye truthful, yer honor, it's that the man is an occasion of sin for me. I go meanin' well for the man, but I look once on his face and forget myself. God love him, but I can't."

  "If he's offended you, you'll have to forgive him."

  "Forgive, that I do, that I do. But at a goodly distance. He's an occasion of sin for me, I'll tell, for I go losing my temper with him on sight."

  Zerchi chuckled. "All right, Mrs. Grales I'll hear your confession, but I've got something I have to do first. Meet me in the Lady Chapel in about half an hour. The first booth. Will that be all right?"

  "Ay, and bless ye, Father!" She nodded profusely. Abbot Zerchi could have sworn that the Rachel head mirrored the nods, ever so slightly.

  He dismissed the thought and walked over to the garage. A postulant brought out the car for him. He climbed in, dialed his destination, and sank back wearily into the cushions while the automatic controls engaged the gears and nosed the car toward the gate. In passing the gate, the abbot saw the girl standing at the roadside. The child was with her. Zerchi jabbed at the CANCEL button. The car stopped. "Waiting," said the robot controls.

  The girl wore a cast that enclosed her hips from the waist to left knee. She was leaning on a pair of crutches and panting at the ground. Somehow she had got out of the guesthouse and through the gate, but she was obviously unable to go any farther. The child was holding on to one of her crutches and staring at the traffic on the highway.

  Zerchi opened the car door and climbed out slowly. She looked up at him, but turned her glance quickly away.

  "What are you doing out of bed, child?" he breathed. "You're not supposed to be up, not with that hip. Just where did you think you were going?"

  She shifted her weight, and her face twisted with pain.

  "To town," she said. "I've got to go. It's urgent."

  "Not so urgent that somebody couldn't go do it for you. I'll get Brother—"

  "No, Father, no! Nobody else can do it for me. I've got to go to town."

  She was lying. He felt certain she was lying. "All right, then," he said. "I'll take you to town. I'm driving in anyway."

  "No! I'll walk! I'm—" She took a step and gasped. He caught her before she fell.

  "Not even with Saint Christopher holding your crutches could you walk to town, child. Come on, now, let's get you back to bed."

  "I've got to get to town, I tell you!" she shrieked angrily.

  The child, frightened by its mother's anger, began crying monotonously. She tried to calm its fright, but then wilted: "All right, Father. Will you drive me to town?"

  "You shouldn't be going at all."

  "I tell you, I've got to go!"

  "All right, then. Let's help you in . . . the baby . . . now you."

  The child screamed hysterically when the priest lifted it into the car beside the mother. It clung to her tightly and resumed the monotonous sobbing. Because of the loose moist dressings and the singed hair, the child's sex was difficult to determine at a glance, but Abbot Zerchi guessed it to be a girl.

  He dialed again. The car waited for a break in the traffic, then swerved onto the highway and into the mid-speed lane. Two minutes later, as they approached the Green Star encampment, he dialed for the slowest lane.

  Five monks paraded in front of the tent area, in a solemn hooded picket line. They walked to and fro in procession beneath the Mercy Camp sign, but they were careful to stay on the public right-of-way. Their freshly painted signs read:

  ABANDON EVERY HOPE

  YE

  WHO ENTER HERE

  Zerchi had intended to stop to talk to them, but with the girl in the car be contented himself with watching as they drifted past. With their habits and their hoods and their slow funereal procession, the novices were indeed creating the desired effect. Whether the Green Star would be sufficiently embarrassed to move the camp away from the monastery was doubtful, especially since a small crowd of hecklers, as it had been reported to the abbey, had appeared earlier in the day to shout insults and throw pebbles at the signs carried by the pickets. There were two police cars parked at the side of the highway, and several officers stood nearby to watch with expressionless faces. Since the crowd of hecklers had appeared quite suddenly, and since the police cars had appeared immediately afterwards, and just in time to witness a heckler trying to seize a picket's sign, and since a Green Star official had thereupon gone huffing off to get a court order, the abbot suspected that the heckling had been as carefully staged as the picketing, to enable the Gree
n Star officer to get his writ. It would probably be granted, but until it was served, Abbot Zerchi meant to leave the novices where they were.

  He glanced at the statue which the camp workers had erected near the gate. It caused a wince. He recognized it as one of the composite human images derived from mass psychological testing in which subjects were given sketches and photographs of unknown people and asked such questions as: "Which would you most like to meet?" and "Which do you think would make the best parent?" or "Which would you want to avoid?" or "Which do you think is the criminal?" From the photographs selected as the "most" or the "least" in terms of the questions, a series of "average faces," each to evoke a first-glance personality judgment had been constructed by computer from the mass test results.

  This statue, Zerchi was dismayed to notice, bore a marked similarity to some of the most effeminate images by which mediocre, or worse than mediocre, artists had traditionally misrepresented the personality of Christ. The sweet-sick face, blank eyes, simpering lips, and arms spread wide in a gesture of embrace. The hips were broad as a woman's, and the chest hinted at breasts — unless those were only folds in the cloak. Dear Lord of Golgotha, Abbot Zerchi breathed, is that all the rabble imagine You to be? He could with effort imagine the statue saying: "Suffer the little children to come unto me," but he could not imagine it saying: "Depart from me into everlasting fire, accursed ones," or flogging the money-changers out of the Temple. What question, he wondered, had they asked their subjects that conjured in the rabble-mind this composite face? It was only anonymously a christus. The legend on the pedestal said: COMFORT. But surely the Green Star must have seen the resemblance to the traditional pretty christus of poor artists. But they stuck it in the back of a truck with a red flag tied to its great toe, and the intended resemblance would be hard to prove.

  The girl had one hand on the door handle; she was eying the car's controls. Zerchi swiftly dialed FAST LANE. The car shot ahead again. She took her hand from the door.

  "Lots of buzzards today," he said quietly, glancing at the sky out the window.

  The girl sat expressionless. He studied her face for a moment. "Are you in pain, daughter?"

  "It doesn't matter."

  "Offer it to Heaven, child."

  She looked at him coldly. "You think it would please God?"

  "If you offer it, yes."

  "I cannot understand a God who is pleased by my baby's hurting!"

  The priest winced. "No, no! It is not the pain that is pleasing to God, child. It is the soul's endurance in faith and hope and love in spite of bodily afflictions that pleases Heaven. Pain is like negative temptation. God is not pleased by temptations that afflict the flesh; He is pleased when the soul rises above the temptation and says, 'Go, Satan.' It's the same with pain, which is often a temptation to despair, anger, loss of faith—"

  "Save your breath, Father. I'm not complaining. The baby is. But the baby doesn't understand your sermon. She can hurt, though. She can hurt, but she can't understand."

  What can I say to that? the priest wondered numbly. Tell her again that Man was given preternatural impassibility once, but threw it away in Eden? That the child was a cell of Adam, and therefore— It was true, but she had a sick baby, and she was sick herself, and she wouldn't listen.

  "Don't do it, daughter. Just don't do it."

  "I'll think about it," she said coldly.

  "I had a cat once, when I was a boy," the abbot murmured slowly. "He was a big gray tomcat with shoulders like a small bulldog and a head and neck to match, and that sort of slouchy insolence that makes some of them look like the Devil's own. He was pure cat. Do you know cats?"

  "A little."

  "Cat lovers don't know cats. You can't love all cats if you know cats, and the ones you can love if you know them are the ones the cat lovers don't even like. Zeke was that kind of cat."

  "This has a moral, of course?" She was watching him suspiciously.

  "Only that I killed him."

  "Stop. Whatever you're about to say, stop."

  "A truck hit him, crushed his back legs. He dragged himself under the house. Once in a while he'd make a noise like a cat fight and thrash around a little, but mostly he just lay quietly and waited. 'He ought to be destroyed,' they kept telling me. After a few hours he dragged himself from under the house. Crying for help. 'He ought to be destroyed,' they said. I wouldn't let them do it. They said it was cruel to let him live. So finally I said I'd do it myself, if it had to be done. I got a gun and a shovel and took him out to the edge of the woods. I stretched him out on the ground while I dug a hole. Then I shot him through the head. It was a small-bore rifle. Zeke thrashed a couple of times, then got up and started dragging himself toward some bushes. I shot him again. It knocked him flat, so I thought he was dead, and put him in the hole. After a couple of shovels of dirt, Zeke got up and pulled himself out of the hole and started for the bushes again. I was crying louder than the cat. I had to kill him with the shovel. I had to put him back in the hole and use the blade of the shovel like a cleaver, and while I was chopping with it, Zeke was still thrashing around. They told me later it was just spinal reflex, but I didn't believe it. I knew that cat. He wanted to get to those bushes and just lie there and wait. I wished to God that I had only let him get to those bushes, and die the way a cat would if you just let it alone — with dignity. I never felt right about it. Zeke was only a cat, but—"

  "Shut up!" she whispered.

  "—but even the ancient pagans noticed that Nature imposes nothing on you that Nature doesn't prepare you to bear. If that is true even of a cat, then is it not more perfectly true of a creature with rational intellect and will — whatever you may believe of Heaven?"

  "Shut up, damn you shut up!" she hissed.

  "If I am being a little brutal," said the priest, "then it is to you, not to the baby. The baby, as you say, can't understand. And you, as you say, are not complaining. Therefore—"

  "Therefore you're asking me to let her die slowly and—"

  "No! I'm not asking you. As a priest of Christ I am commanding you by the authority of Almighty God not to lay hands on your child, not to offer her life in sacrifice to a false god of expedient mercy. I do not advise you, I adjure and command you in the name of Christ the King. Is that clear?"

  Dom Zerchi had never spoken with such a voice before, and the ease with which the words came to his lips surprised even the priest. As he continued to look at her, her eyes fell. For an instant he had feared that the girl would laugh in his face. When Holy Church occasionally hinted that she still considered her authority to be supreme over all nations and superior to the authority of states, men in these times tended to snicker. And yet the authenticity of the command could still be sensed by a bitter girl with a dying child. It had been brutal to try to reason with her, and he regretted it. A simple direct command might accomplish what persuasion could not. She needed the voice of authority now, more than she needed persuasion. He could see it by the way she had wilted, although he had spoken the command as gently as his voice could manage.

  They drove into the city. Zerchi stopped to post a letter, stopped at Saint Michael's to speak for a few minutes with Father Selo about the refugee problem, stopped again at ZDI for a copy of the latest civil delouse directive. Each time he returned to the car, he half expected the girl to be gone, but she sat quietly holding the baby and absently stared toward infinity.

  "Are you going to tell me where you wanted to go, child?" he asked at last.

  "Nowhere. I've changed my mind."

  He smiled. "But you were so urgent about getting to town."

  "Forget it, Father. I've changed my mind."

  "Good. Then we'll go back home. Why don't you let the sisters take care of your daughter for a few days?"

  "I'll think about it."

  The car sped back along the highway toward the abbey. As they approached the Green Star camp, he could see that something was wrong. The pickets were no longer marching their tour.
They had gathered in a group and were talking, or listening, to the officers and a third man that Zerchi could not identify. He switched the car over to the slow lane. One of the novices saw the car, recognized it, and began waving his sign. Dom Zerchi had no intention of stopping while the girl was in the car, but one of the officers stepped out into the slow lane just ahead of them and pointed his traffic baton at the vehicle's obstruction detectors; the autopilot reacted automatically and brought the car to a stop. The officer waved the car off the road. Zerchi could not disobey. The two police officers approached, paused to note license numbers and demand papers. One of them glanced in curiously at the girl and the child, took note of the red tickets. The other waved toward the now-stationary picket line.

  "So you're the bejeezis behind all this, are you?" He grunted at the abbot. "Well, the gentleman in the brown tunic over there has a little news for you. I think you'd better listen." He jerked his head toward a chubby courtroom type who came pompously toward them.

  The child was crying again. The mother stirred restlessly.

  "Officers, this girl and baby aren't well. I'll accept the process, but please let us drive on back to the abbey now. Then I'll come back alone."

  The officer looked at the girl again. "Ma'am?"

  She stared toward the camp and looked up at the statue towering over the entrance. "I'm getting out here," she told them tonelessly.

  "You'll be better off, ma'am," said the officer, eying the red tickets again.

  "No!" Dom Zerchi caught her arm. "Child, I forbid you—"

  The officer's hand shot out to seize the priest's wrist.

  "Let go!" he snapped, then softly: "Ma'am, are you his ward or something?"

  "No."