“True. But which of us is confused? Are you sure?”
“Let’s not quarrel Father. I’m not with the Mercy Cadre. I work on the Exposure Survey Team. We don’t kill anybody.”
Abbot Zerchi gazed at him in silence for a moment. The visitor was a short muscular man with a pleasant round face and a balding pate that was sunburned and freckled. He wore a green serge uniform, and a cap with the Green Star insignia lay in his lap.
Why quarrel, indeed? The man was a medical worker, not an executioner. Some of the Green Star’s relief work was admirable. Occasionally it was even heroic. That in some instances it wrought evil, according to Zerchi’s belief, was no reason to regard its good works as tainted. The bulk of society favored it, and its workers were in good faith. The doctor had tried to be friendly. His request had seemed simple enough. He had been neither demanding nor officious about it. Still, the abbot hesitated before saying yes.
“The work you want to do here — will it take long?”
The doctor shook his head. “Two days at most, I think. We have two mobile units. We can bring them into your courtyard, hitch the two trailers together, and start right to work. We’ll take the obvious radiation cases, and the wounded, first. We treat only the most urgent cases. Our job is clinical testing; The sick ones will get treatment at an emergency camp.
“And the sickest ones get something else at a mercy camp?”
The worker frowned. “Only if they want to go. Nobody makes them go.”
“But you write out the permit that lets them go.”
“I’ve given some red tickets, yes. I may have to this time. Here—” He fumbled in his jacket pocket and brought out a red cardboard form, something like a shipping label with a loop of wire for attaching it to a buttonhole or a belt loop. He tossed it on the desk. “A blank ‘crit-dose’ form. There it is. Read it. It tells the man he’s sick, very sick. And here — here’s a green ticket too. It tells him he’s well and has nothing to worry about. Look at the red one carefully! ‘Estimated exposure in radiation units.’ ‘Blood count.’ ‘Urinalysis,’ On one side, it’s just like the green one. On the other side, the green one’s blank, but look at the back of the red one. The fine print — it’s directly quoted from Public Law 10-WR-3E. It has to be there. The law requires it. It has to be read to him. He has to be told his rights. What he does about it is his own affair. Now, if you’d rather we parked the mobile units down the highway, we can—”
“You just read it to him, do you? Nothing else?”
The doctor paused. “It has to be explained to him, if be doesn’t understand it.” He paused again, gathering irritation. “Good Lord, Father, when you tell a man he’s a hopeless case, what are you going to say? Read him a few paragraphs of the law, show him the door, and say: ‘Next, please!’? ‘You’re going to die, so good day’? Of course you don’t read him that and nothing else, not if you have any human feeling at all!”
“I understand that; What I want to know is something else. Do you, as a physician, advise hopeless cases to go to a mercy camp?”
“I—” The medic stopped and closed his eyes. He rested his forehead on his hand. He shuddered slightly. “Of course I do,” he said finally. “If you’d seen what I’ve seen, you would too. Of course I do.”
“You’ll not do it here.”
“Then we’ll—” The doctor quenched an angry outburst. He stood up, started to put on his cap, then paused. He tossed the cap on the chair and walked over to the window. He looked gloomily down at the courtyard, then out at the highway. He pointed. “There’s the roadside park. We can set up shop there. But it’s two miles. Most of them will have to walk.” He glanced at Abbot Zerchi, then looked broodingly down into the courtyard again. “Look at them. They’re sick, hurt, fractured, frightened. The children too. Tired, lame, and miserable. You’d let them be herded off down the highway to sit in the dust and the sun and—”
“I don’t want it to be that way,” said the abbot. “Look — you were just telling me how a man-made law made it mandatory for you to read and explain this to a critical radiation case. I offered no objection to that in itself. Render unto Caesar to that extent, since the law demands it of you. Can you not, then, understand that I am subject to another law, and that it forbids me to allow you or anyone else on this property, under my rule, to counsel anyone to do what the Church calls evil?”
“Oh, I understand well enough.”
“Very well. You need only make me one promise and you may use the courtyard.”
“What promise?”
“Simply that you won’t advise anyone to go to a “mercy camp.” Limit yourself to diagnosis. If you find hopeless radiation cases, tell them what the law forces you to tell them, be as consoling as you wish, but don’t tell them to go kill themselves.”
The doctor hesitated. “I think it would be proper to make such a promise with respect to patients who belong to your Faith.”
Abbot Zerchi lowered his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said finally, “but that’s not enough.”
“Why? Others are not bound by your principles. If a man is not of your religion, why should you refuse to allow—” He choked off angrily.
“Do you want an explanation?”
“Yes.”
“Because if a man is ignorant of the fact that something is wrong, and acts in ignorance, he incurs no guilt, provided natural reason was not enough to show him that it was wrong. But while ignorance may excuse the man, it does not excuse the act, which is wrong in itself. If I permitted the act simply because the man is ignorant that it is wrong, then I would incur guilt, because I do know it to be wrong. It is really that painfully simple.”
“Listen, Father. They sit there and they look at you. Some scream. Some cry. Some just sit there. All of them say, “Doctor, what can I do?’ And what am I supposed to answer? Say nothing? Say, ‘You can die, that’s all.’ What would you say?”
“ ‘Pray.’ “
“Yes, you would, wouldn’t you? Listen, pain is the only evil I know about. It’s the only one I can fight.”
“Then God help you.”
“Antibiotics help me more.”
Abbot Zerchi groped for a sharp reply, found one, but swiftly swallowed it. He searched for a blank piece of paper and a pen and pushed them across the desk. “Just write: ‘I will not recommend euthanasia to any patient while at this abbey,’ and sign it. Then you can use the courtyard.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then I suppose they’ll have to drag themselves two miles down the road.”
“Of all the merciless—”
“On the contrary. I’ve offered you an opportunity to do your work as required by the law you recognize, without overstepping the law I recognize. Whether they go down the road or not is up to you.”
The doctor stared at the blank page. “What is so magic about putting it in writing?”
“I prefer it that way.”
He bent silently over the desk and wrote. He looked at what he had written, then slashed his signature under it and straightened. “All right, there’s your promise. Do you think it’s worth any more than my spoken word?”
“No. No indeed.” The abbot folded the note and tucked it into his coat. “But it’s here in my pocket, and you know it’s here in my pocket, and I can look at it occasionally, that’s all. Do you keep promises, by the way, Doctor Cors?”
The medic stared at him for a moment. “I’ll keep it.” He grunted, then turned on his heel and stalked out.
“Brother Pat!” Abbot Zerchi called weakly. “Brother Pat, are you there?”
His secretary came to stand in the doorway. “Yes, Reverend Father?”
“You heard?”
“I heard some of it. The door was open, and I couldn’t help hearing. You didn’t have the silencer—”
“You heard him say it? ‘Pain’s the only evil I know about.’ You heard that?”
The monk nodded solemnly.
“And that society is
the only thing which determines whether an act is wrong or not? That too?”
“Yes.”
“Dearest God, how did those two heresies get back into the world after all this time? Hell has limited imaginations down there. ‘The serpent deceived me, and I did eat.’ Brother Pat, you’d better get out of here, or I’ll start raving.”
“Domne, I—”
“What’s keeping you? What’s that, a letter? All right, give it here.”
The monk handed it to him and went out. Zerchi left it unopened and glanced at the doctor’s pledge again. Worthless, perhaps. But still the man was sincere. And dedicated. He’d have to be dedicated to work for the kind of salary the Green Star paid. He had looked underslept and overworked. He’d probably been living on benzedrine and doughnuts since the shot that killed the city. Seeing misery everywhere and detesting it, and sincere in wanting to do something about it. Sincere — that was the hell of it. From a distance, one’s adversaries seemed fiends, but with a closer view, one saw the sincerity and it was as great as one’s own. Perhaps Satan was the sincerest of the lot.
He opened the letter and read it. The letter informed him that Brother Joshua and the others had departed from New Rome for an unspecified destination in the West. The letter also advised him that information about Quo pererinatur had leaked to the ZDI, who had sent investigators to the Vatican to ask questions about the rumored launching of an unauthorized starship…Evidently the starship was not yet in space.
They’d learn soon enough about Quo peregrinatur, but with the help of Heaven, they’d find out too late. What then? he wondered.
The legal situation was tangled. The law forbade starship departures without commission approval. Approval was hard to get and slow in coming. Zerchi was certain that the ZDI and the commission would consider the Church was breaking the law. But a State-Church concordat had existed for a century and a half now; it clearly exempted the Church from licensing procedures, and it guaranteed to the Church the right to send missions to “whatever space installations and/or planetary outposts shall not have been declared by the aforesaid Commission to be ecologically critical or closed to unregulated enterprise.” Every installation in the solar system was “ecologically critical” and “closed” at the time of the concordat, but the concordat further asserted the Church’s right to “own space vessels and travel unrestricted to open installations or outposts.” The concordat was very old. It had been signed in the days when the Berkstrun starship drive was only a dream in the wide imagination of some who thought that interstellar travel would open up the universe to an unrestricted, outflow of population.
Things had turned out otherwise. When the first starship was born as an engineering drawing, it became plain that no institution except government had the means or the funds to build them; that no profit was to be derived from transporting colonies to extrasolar planets for purposes of “interstellar mercantilism.” Nevertheless, the Asian rulers had sent the first colony ship. Then in the West the cry was heard: “Are we to let the ‘inferior’ races inherit the stars?” There had been a brief flurry of starship launchings as colonies of black people, brown, white, and yellow people were hurled into the sky toward the Centaur, in the name of racism. Afterwards, geneticists had wryly demonstrated that — since each racial group was so small that unless their descendants intermarried, each would undergo deteriorative genetic drift due to inbreeding on the colony planet — the racists had made cross-breeding necessary to survival.
The only interest the Church had taken in space had been concern for the colonists who were sons of the Church, cut off from the flock by interstellar distances. And yet she had not taken advantage of that provision of the concordat which permitted the sending of missions. Certain contradictions existed between the concordat and the laws of the State which empowered the commission, at least as the latter law might in theory affect the sending of missions. The contradiction had never been adjudicated by the courts, since there had never been cause for litigation. But now, if the ZDI intercepted Brother Joshua’s group in the act of launching a starship without a commission permit or charter, there would be cause. Zerchi prayed that the group would get away without a test in the courts, which might take weeks or months. Of course there would be a scandal afterwards. Many would charge not only that the Church had violated Commission rulings but charity too, by sending ecclesiastical dignitaries and a bunch of rascal monks, when she might have used the ship as refuge for poor colonists, hungry for land. The conflict of Martha and Mary always recurred.
Abbot Zerchi suddenly realized that the tenor of his thinking had changed during the previous day or two. A few days ago, everyone had been waiting for the sky to burst asunder. But nine days had passed since Lucifer had prevailed in space and scorched a city out of existence. Despite the dead, the maimed, and the dying, there had been nine days of silence. Since the wrath had been stayed thus far, perhaps the worst could be averted. He had found himself thinking of things that might happen next week or next month, as if — after all — there might really be a next week or a next month. And why not? Examining conscience, he found that he had not altogether abandoned the virtue of hope.
A monk returned from an errand in the city that afternoon and reported that a camp for refugees was being set up at the park two miles down the highway. “I think it’s being sponsored by Green Star, Domne,” he added.
“Good!” the abbot said. “We’re overflowing here, and I’ve had to turn three truckloads of them away.”
The refugees were noisy in the courtyard, and the noise jangled overwrought nerves. The perpetual quiet of the old abbey was shattered by strange sounds: the boisterous laughter of men telling jokes, the cry of a child, the rattle of pots and pans, hysterical sobbing, a Green Star medic shouting: “Hey, Raff, go fetch an enema hose.” Several times the abbot suppressed an urge to go to the window and call to them for silence.
After bearing it as long as he could, he picked up a pair of binoculars, an old book, and a rosary, and went up to one of the old watchtowers where a thick stone wall cut off most of the sounds from the courtyard. The book was a slim volume of verse, really anonymous, but by legend ascribed to a mythical saint, whose “canonization” was accomplished only in fable and the folklore of the Plains, and not by any act of the Holy See. No one, indeed, had ever found evidence that such a person as Saint Poet of the Miraculous Eyeball had ever lived: the fable had probably arisen out of the story that one of the early Hannegans had been given a glass eyeball by a brilliant physical theorist who was his protégé — Zerchi could not remember whether the scientist had been Esser Shon or Pfardentrott — and who told the prince that it had belonged to a poet who had died for the Faith. He had not specified which faith the poet had died for — that of Peter or that of the Texarkanan schismatics — but evidently the Hannegan had valued it, for he had mounted the eyeball in the clutch of a small golden hand which was still worn upon certain state occasions by princes of the Harq — Hannegan dynasty. It was variously called the Orbis judicans Conscientias or the Oculus Poetae ]udicis, and the remnants of the Texarkana Schism still revered it as a relic. Someone a few years back had proposed the rather silly hypothesis that Saint Poet was the same person as the “scurrilous versificator” once mentioned in the Journals of the Venerable Abbot Jerome, but the only substantiating “evidence” for this notion was that Pfardentrott — or was it Esser Shon? — had visited the abbey during the reign of Venerable Jerome at about the same date as the “scurrilous versificator” entry in the Journal, and that the gift of the eyeball to Hannegan had occurred at some date after that visit to the abbey. Zerchi suspected that the thin book of verse had been penned by one of the secular scientists who had visited the abbey to study the Memorabilia at about that time, and that one of them could probably be identified with the “scurrilous versificator” and possibly with the Saint Poet of folklore and fable. The anonymous verses were a bit too daring, Zerchi thought, to have been written by a monk of the
Order.
The book was a satirical dialogue in verse between two agnostics who were attempting to establish by natural reason alone that the existence of God could not be established by natural reason alone. They managed only to demonstrate that the mathematical limit of an infinite “doubting the certainty with which something doubted is known to be unknowable when the ‘something doubted’ is still a preceding statement of ‘unknowability’ of something doubted,” that the limit of this process at infinity can only be equivalent to a statement of absolute certainty, even though phrased as an infinite series of negations of certainty. The text bore traces of St. Leslie’s theological calculus, and even as a poetic dialogue between an agnostic identified only as “Poet” and another only as “Thon,” it seemed to suggest a proof of the existence of God by an epistemological method, but the versifier had been a satirist; neither poet nor don relinquished his agnostic premises after the conclusion of absolute certainty had been reached, but concluded instead that: Non cogitamus, ergo nihil sumus.
Abbot Zerchi soon tired of trying to decide whether the book was high intellectual comedy or more epigrammatic buffoonery. From the tower, he could see the highway and the city as far as the mesa beyond. He focused the binoculars on the mesa end watched the radar installation for a time, but nothing unusual appeared to be happening there. He lowered the glasses slightly to watch the new Green Star encampment down at the roadside park. The area of the park had been roped off. Tents were being pitched. Utility crews worked at tapping the gas and power lines. Several men were engaged in hoisting a sign at the entrance to the park, but they held it edgewise to his gaze and he could not read it. Somehow the boiling activity reminded him of a nomad “carnival” coming to town. There was a big red engine of some sort. It seemed to have a firebox and something like a boiler, but he could not at first guess its purpose. Men in Green Star uniforms were erecting something that looked like a small carousel. At least a dozen trucks were parked on the side road. Some were loaded with lumber, others with tents and collapsible cots. One seemed to be hauling firebricks, and another was burdened with pottery and straw.
A Canticle For Leibowitz l-1 Page 30
