“May I ask how that is, Father?”
“Well, one of the embarrassments at the time of the beatification was the early life of Blessed Leibowitz — before he became a monk and a priest. The advocate for the other side kept trying to cast doubt on the early period, pre-Deluge. He was trying to establish that Leibowitz never made a careful search — that his wife might even have been alive at the time of his ordination. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, of course; sometimes dispensations have been granted — but that’s beside the point. The advocatus diaboli was just trying to cast doubt on your founder’s character. Trying to suggest that he had accepted Holy Orders and taken vows before being certain his family responsibility was ended. The opposition failed, but it may try again. And if those human remains you found really are—” He shrugged and smiled.
Francis nodded. “It would pinpoint the date of her death.”
“At the very beginning of the war that nearly ended everything. And in my own opinion — well, that handwriting in the box, it’s either that of the Beatus or a very clever counterfeit.”
Frauds reddened.
“I’m not suggesting that you were involved in any counterfeit scheme,” the Dominican added hastily, upon noticing the blush.
The novice, however, had only been remembering his own opinion of the scrawl.
“Tell me, how did it happen? — how you located the site, I mean. I’ll need the whole story of it.”
“Well, it started because of the wolves.”
The Dominican began taking notes.
A few days after the messenger’s departure from the abbey, Abbot Arkos called for Brother Francis. “Do you still feel that your vocation is with us?” Arkos asked pleasantly.
“If m’Lord Abbot will pardon my execrable vanity—”
“Oh, let’s ignore your execrable vanity Јor a moment. Do you or don’t you?”
“Yes, Magister meus.”
The abbot beamed. “Well, now, my son. I think we’re convinced of it too. If you’re ready to commit yourself for all time, I think the time’s ripe for you to profess your solemn vows.” He paused for a moment, and, watching the novice’s face, seemed disappointed not to detect any change of expression. “What’s this? You’re not glad to hear it? You’re not — ? Ho! what’s wrong?”
While Francis’ face had remained a politely attentive mask, the mask gradually lost color. His knees buckled suddenly.
Francis had fainted.
Two weeks later, the novice Francis, having perhaps set an endurance record for survival time on desert vigils, left the ranks of the novitiate and, vowing perpetual poverty, chastity, obedience, together with the special pledges peculiar to the community, received blessings and a bindlestiff in the abbey, and became forever a professed monk of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, chained by chains of his own forging to the foot of the Cross and the rule of the Order. Thrice the ritual inquired of him: “If God calleth thee to be His Booklegger, wilt then suffer death before betraying thy brethren?” And thrice Francis responded: “Aye, Lord.”
“Then arise Brother Bookleggers and Brother Memorizers and receive the kiss of brotherhood. Ecce quam bonum, et quam jucundum…”
Brother Francis was transferred from the kitchen and assigned to less menial labor. He became apprentice copyist to an aged monk named Horner, and, if things went well for him, he might reasonably look forward to a lifetime in the copyroom, where he would dedicate the rest of his days to such tasks as the hand-copying of algebra texts and illuminating their pages with olive leaves and cheerful cherubim surrounding tables of logarithms.
Brother Horner was a gentle old man, and Brother Francis liked him from the start. “Most of us do better work on the assigned copy,” Horner told him, “if we have our own project too. Most of the copyists become interested in some particular work from the Memorabilia and like to spend a little time at it on the side. For example, Brother Sarl over there — his work was lagging, and he was making mistakes. So we let him spend an hour a day on a project he chose for himself. When the work gets so tedious that he starts making errors in copy, he can put it aside for a while and work on his own project. I allow everyone to do the same. If you finish your assigned work before the day’s over but don’t have your own project, you’ll have to spend the extra time on our perennials.
“Perennials?”
“Yes, and I don’t mean plants. There’s a perennial demand from the whole clergy for various books — Missals, Scripture, Breviaries, the Summa, encyclopediae, and the like. We sell quite a lot of them. So when you don’t have pet project, we’ll put you on the perennials when you finish early. You’ve plenty of time to decide.”
“What project did Brother Sarl pick?”
The aged overseer paused. “Well, I doubt if you’d even understand it. I don’t. He seems to have found a method for restoring missing words and phrases to some of the old fragments of original text in the Memorabilia. Perhaps the left-hand side of a half-burned book is legible, but the right edge of each page is burned, with a few words missing at the end of each line. He’s worked out a mathematical method for finding the missing words. It’s not foolproof, but it works to some degree. He’s managed to restore four whole pages since he began the attempt.”
Francis glanced at Brother Sarl, who was an octogenarian and nearly blind. “How long did it take him?” the apprentice asked.
“About forty years,” said Brother Horner. “Of course he’s only spent about five hours a week at it, and it does take considerable arithmetic.”
Francis nodded thoughtfully. “If one page per decade could be restored, maybe in a few centuries—”
“Even less,” croaked Brother Sarl without looking up from his work. “The more you fill in, the faster the remainder goes. I’ll get the next page done in a couple of years. After that, God willing, maybe—” His voice tapered off into a mumble. Francis frequently noticed that Brother Sarl talked to himself while working.
“Suit yourself,” said Brother Horner. “We can always use more help on the perennials, but you can have your own project when you want one.”
The idea came to Brother Francis in an unexpected flash.
“May I use the time,” he blurted, “to make a copy of the Leibowitz blueprint I found?”
Brother Horner seemed momentarily startled. “Well — I don’t know, son. Our Lord Abbot is, well — just a little sensitive on that subject. And the thing may not belong in the Memorabilia. It’s in the tentative file now.”
“But you know they fade, Brother. And it’s been handled a lot in the light. The Dominicans had it in New Rome for so long—”
“Well — I suppose it would be a rather brief project. If Father Arkos doesn’t object, but—” He waggled his head in doubt.
“Perhaps I could include it as one of a set,” Francis hastily offered. “What few recopied blueprints we have are so old they’re brittle. If I made several duplicates — of some of the others—”
Horner smiled wryly. “What you’re suggesting is, that by including the Leibowitz blueprint in a set, you might escape detection.”
Francis reddened.
“Father Arkos might not even notice, eh? — if he happened to wander through.”
Francis squirmed.
“All right,” said Horner, his eyes twinkling slightly. “You may use your unassigned time to make duplicates of any of the recopied prints that are in bad condition. If anything else gets mixed up in the lot, I’ll try not to notice.”
Brother Francis spent several months of his unassigned time in redrawing some of the older prints from the Memorabilia’s files before daring to touch the Leibowitz print. If the old drawings were worth saving at all, they needed to be recopied every century or two anyhow. Not only did the original copies fade, but often the redrawn versions became nearly illegible after a time, due to the impermanence of the inks employed. He had not the slightest notion why the ancients had used white lines and lettering on a dark background, in
preference to the reverse. When he roughly resketched a design in charcoal, thereby reversing the background, the rough sketch appeared more realistic than the white-on-dark, and the ancients were immeasurably wiser than Francis; if they had taken the trouble to put ink where blank paper would ordinarily be, and leave slivers of white paper where an inked line would appear in a straightforward drawing, then they must have had their reasons. Francis recopied the documents to appear as nearly like the originals as possible — even though the task of spreading blue ink around tiny white letters was particularly tedious, and quite wasteful of ink, a fact which caused Brother Horner to grumble.
He copied an old architectural print, then a drawing for a machine part whose geometry was apparent but whose purpose was vague. He redrew a mandala abstraction, titled “STATOR WNDG MOD 73-A 3-PH 6-P 1800-BPM 5-HP CL-A SQUIRREL CAGE,” which proved completely incomprehensible, and not at all capable of imprisoning a squirrel, The ancients were often subtle; perhaps one needed a special set of mirrors in order to see the squirrel. He painstakingly redrew it anyhow.
Only after the abbot, who occasionally passed through the copyroom, had seen him working at another blueprint at least three times (twice Arkos had paused for a quick look at Francis’ work), did he summon the courage to venture to the Memorabilia files for the Leibowitz blueprint, nearly a year after beginning his free-time project.
The original document had already been subjected to a certain amount of restorative work. Except for the fact that it bore the name of the Beatus, it was disappointingly like most of the others he had redrawn.
The Leibowitz print, another abstraction, appealed to nothing, least of all to reason. He studied it until he could see the whole amazing complexity with his eyes closed but knew no more than he had known before. It appeared to be no more than a network of lines connecting a patchwork of doohickii, squiggles, quids, laminulae, and thingumbob. The lines were mostly horizontal or vertical, and crossed each other with either a little jump-mark or a dot; they made right-angle turns to get around doohickii, and they never stopped in mid-space but always terminated at a squiggle, quiggle, quid, or thingumbob. It made so little sense that a long period of staring at it produced a stupefying effect. Nevertheless he began work at duplicating every detail, even to the copying of a central brownish stain which he thought might be the blood of the Blessed Martyr, but which Brother Jeris suggested was only the stain left by a decayed apple core.
Brother Jeris, who had joined the apprentice copyroom at the same time as Brother Francis, seemed to enjoy teasing him about the project. “What, pray,” he asked, squinting over Francis” shoulder, “is the meaning of “Transistorized Control System for Unit Six-B,” learned Brother?”
“Clearly, it is the title of the document,” said Francis, feeling slightly cross.
“Clearly. But what does it mean?”
“It is the name of the diagram which lies before your eyes, Brother Simpleton. What does ‘Jeris’ mean?”
“Very little, I’m sure,” said Brother Jeris with mock humility. “Forgive my density, please. You have successfully defined the name by pointing to the creature named, which is truly the meaning of the name. But now the creature-diagram itself represents something, does it not? What does the diagram represent?”
“The transistorized control system for unit six-B, obviously.”
Jeris laughed. “Quite clear! Eloquent! If the creature is the name, then the name is the creature. ‘Equals may be substituted for equals,’ or ‘The order of an equality is reversible,’ but may we proceed to the next axiom? If ‘Quantities equal to the same quantity may substitute for each other’ is true, then is there not some ‘same quantity’ which both name and diagram represent? Or is it a closed system?”
Francis reddened. “I would imagine,” he said slowly, after pausing to stifle his annoyance, “that the diagram represents an abstract concept, rather than a concrete thing. Perhaps the ancients had a systematic method for depicting a pure thought. It’s clearly not a recognizable picture of an object.”
“Yes, yes, it’s clearlyun recognizable!” Brother Jeris agreed with a chuckle.
“On the other hand, perhaps it does depict an object, but only in a very formal stylistic way — so that one would need special training or—”
“Special eyesight?”
“In my opinion, it’s a high abstraction of perhaps transcendental value expressing a thought of the Beatus Leibowitz.”
“Bravo! Now what was he thinking about?”
“Why — ’Circuit Design,’” said Francis, picking the term out of the block of lettering at the lower right.
“Hmmm, what discipline does that art pertain to, Brother? What is its genus, species, property, and difference? Or is it only an ‘accident’?”
Jeris was becoming pretentious in his sarcasm, Francis thought, and decided to meet it with a soft answer. “Well, observe this column of figures, and its heading: ‘Electronics Parts Numbers.’ There was once, an art or science, called Electronics, which might belong to both Art and Science.”
“Uh-huh! Thus settling ‘genus’ and ‘species.’ Now as to ‘difference,’ if I may pursue the line. What was the subject matter of Electronics?”
“That too is written,” said Francis, who had searched the Memorabilia from high to low in an attempt to find clues which might make the blueprint slightly more comprehensible — but to very small avail. “The subject matter of Electronics was the electron,” he explained.
“So it is written, indeed. I am impressed. I know so little of these things. What, pray, was the ‘electron?’“
“Well, there is one fragmentary source which alludes to it as a “Negative Twist of Nothingness.’“
“What! How did they negate a nothingness? Wouldn’t that make it a somethingness?”
“Perhaps the negation applies to ‘twist.’“
“Ah! Then we would have on “Untwisted Nothing,” eh? Have you discovered how to untwist a nothingness?”
“Net yet,” Francis admitted.
“Well keep at it, Brother! How clever they must have been, those ancients — to know how to untwist nothing. Keep at it, and you may learn how. Then we’d have the “electron” in our midst, wouldn’t we? Whatever would we do with it? Put it on the altar in the chapel?”
“All right,” Francis sighed, “I don’t know. But I have a certain faith that the ‘electron’ existed at one time, although I don’t know how it was constructed or what it might have been used for.”
“How touching!” chuckled the iconoclast, and returned to his work.
The sporadic teasing of Brother Jeris saddened Francis, but did nothing to lessen his devotion to his project.
The exact duplication of every mark, blotch, and stain proved impossible, but the accuracy of his facsimile proved sufficient for the deception of the eye at a distance of two paces, and therefore adequate for display purposes, so that the original might be sealed and packed away. Having completed the facsimile, Brother Francis found himself disappointed. The drawing was too stark. There was nothing about it to suggest at first glance that it might be a holy relic. The style was terse and unpretentious — fittingly enough, perhaps, for the Beatus himself, and yet —
A copy of the relic was not enough. Saints were humble people who glorified not themselves but God, and it was left to others to portray the inward glory of the saintly by outward, visible signs. The stark copy was not enough: it was coldly unimaginative and did not commemorate the saintly qualities of the Beatus in any visible way.
Glorificemus, thought Francis, while he worked on the perennials. He was copying pages of the Psalms at the moment for later rebinding. He paused to regain his place in the text, and to notice meaning in the words — for after hours of copying, he had ceased to read at all, and merely allowed his hand to retrace the letters which his eyes encountered. He noticed that he had been copying David’s prayer for pardon, the fourth penitential psalm, “Miserere mei, Deus …for I know m
y iniquity, and my sin is always before me.” It was a humble prayer, but the page before his eyes was not written in a humble style to match. The M in Miserere was gold-leaf inlay. A flourishing arabesque of interwoven gold and violet filaments filled the margins and grew into nests around the splendid capitals at the beginning of each verse. However humble the prayer itself, the page was magnificent. Brother Francis was copying only the body of the text onto new parchment, leaving spaces for the splendid capitals and margins as wide as the text lines. Other craftsmen would fill in riots of color around his simply inked copy and would construct the pictorial capitals. He was learning to illuminate, but was not yet proficient enough to be trusted at gold-inlay work on the perennials.
Gloreficemus. He was thinking of the blueprint again.
Without mentioning the idea to anyone, Brother Francis began to plan. He found the finest available lambskin and spent several weeks of his spare time at curing it and stretching it and stoning it to a perfect surface, which he eventually bleached to a snowy whiteness and carefully stored away. For months afterward, he spent every available minute of his free time looking through the Memorabilia, again seeking clues to the meaning of the Leibowitz print. He found nothing resembling the squiggles in the drawing, nor anything else to help him interpret its meaning, but after a long time he stumbled across a fragment of a book which contained a partially destroyed page whose subject matter was blueprinting. it seemed to be a piece of an encyclopaedia. The reference was brief and some of the article was missing, but after reading it several times, he began to suspect that he — and many earlier copyists — had wasted a lot of time and ink. The white-on-dark effect seemed not to have been a particularly desirable feature, but one which resulted from the peculiarities of a certain cheap reproduction process. The original drawing from which the blueprint had been made had been black-on-white. He had to resist a sudden impulse to beat his head against the stone floor. All that ink and labor to copy an accident! Well, perhaps Brother Horner need not be told. It would be a work of charity to say nothing about it, because of Brother Horner’s heart condition.
A Canticle For Leibowitz l-1 Page 8
