A Canticle for Leibowitz

1

Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.

Never before had Brother Francis actually seen a pilgrim with girded loins, but that this one was the bona fide article he was convinced as soon as he had recovered from the spine-chilling effect of the pilgrim’s advent on the far horizon, as a wiggling iota of black caught in a shimmering haze of heat. Legless, but wearing a tiny head, the iota materialized out of the mirror glaze on the broken roadway and seemed more to writhe than to walk into view, causing Brother Francis to clutch the crucifix of his rosary and mutter an Ave or two. The iota suggested a tiny apparition spawned by the heat demons who tortured the land at high noon, when any creature capable of motion on the desert (except the buzzards and a few monastic hermits such as Francis) lay motionless in its burrow or hid beneath a rock from the ferocity of the sun. Only a thing monstrous, a thing preternatural, or a thing with addled wits would hike purposefully down the trail at noon this way. Brother Francis added a hasty prayer to Saint Raul the Cyclopean, patron of the misborn, for protection against the Saint’s unhappy protégés. (For who did not then know that there were monsters in the earth in those days? That which was born alive was, by the law of the Church and the law of Nature, suffered to live, and helped to maturity if possible, by those who had begotten it. The law was not always obeyed, but it was obeyed with sufficient frequency to sustain a scattered population of adult monsters, who often chose the remotest of deserted lands for their wanderings, where they prowled by night around the fires of prairie travelers.) But at last the iota squirmed its way out of the heat risers and into clear air, where it manifestly became a distant pilgrim; Brother Francis released the crucifix with a small Amen.

The pilgrim was a spindly old fellow with a staff, a basket hat, a brushy beard, and a waterskin slung over one shoulder. He was chewing and spitting with too much relish to be an apparition, and he seemed too frail and lame to be a successful practitioner of ogre-ism or highwaymanship. Nevertheless, Francis slunk quietly out of the pilgrim’s line of sight and crouched behind a heap of rubbled stone where he could watch without being seen. Encounters between strangers in the desert, while rare, were occasions of mutual suspicion, and masked by initial preparations on both sides for an incident that might prove either cordial or warlike. Seldom more than thrice annually did any layman or stranger travel the old road that passed the abbey, in spite of the oasis which permitted that abbey’s existence and which would have made the monastery a natural inn for wayfarers if the road were not a road from nowhere, leading nowhere, in terms of the modes of travel in those times. Perhaps, in earlier ages, the road had been a portion of the shortest route from the Great Salt Lake to Old El Paso; south of the abbey it intersected a similar strip of broken stone that stretched east-and westward. The crossing was worn by time, but not by Man, of late.

The pilgrim approached within hailing distance, but the novice stayed behind his mound of rubble. The pilgrim’s loins were truly girded with a piece of dirty burlap, his only clothing except for hat and sandals. Doggedly he plodded ahead with a mechanical limp while assisting his crippled leg with the heavy staff. His rhythmic gait was that of a man with a long road behind him and a long way yet to go. But, upon entering the area of the ancient ruins, he broke his stride and paused to reconnoiter.

Francis ducked low.

There was no shade amid the cluster of mounds where a group of age-old buildings once had been, but some of the larger stones could, nevertheless, provide cooling refreshment to select portions of the anatomy for travelers as wise in the way of the desert as the pilgrim soon proved himself to be. He searched briefly for a rock of suitable proportions. Approvingly, Brother Francis noted that he did not grasp the stone and rashly tug, but instead, stood at a safe distance from it and, using his staff as a lever and a smaller rock for a fulcrum, he jostled the weightier one until the inevitable buzzing creature crawled forth from below. Dispassionately the traveler killed the snake with his staff and flipped the still wriggling carcass aside. Having dispatched the occupant of the cool cranny beneath the stone, the pilgrim availed himself of the cool cranny’s ceiling by the usual method of overturning the stone. Thereupon, he pulled up the back of his loincloth, sat with his withered buttocks against the stone’s relatively chilly underside, kicked off his sandals, and pressed the soles of his feet against what had been the sandy floor of the cool cranny. Thus refreshed, he wiggled his toes, smiled toothlessly and began to hum a tune. Soon he was singing a kind of crooning chant in a dialect not known to the novice. Weary of crouching, Brother Francis shifted restlessly.

While he sang, the pilgrim unwrapped a biscuit and a bit of cheese. Then his singing paused, and he stood for a moment to cry out softly in the vernacular of the region: “Blest be Adonoi Elohim, King of All, who maketh bread to spring forth from the earth,” in a sort of nasal bleat. The bleat being finished, he sat again, and commenced eating.

The Wanderer had come a long way indeed, thought Brother Francis, who knew of no adjacent realm governed by a monarch with such an unfamiliar name and such strange pretensions. The old man was making a penitential pilgrimage, hazarded Brother Francis — perhaps to the “shrine” at the abbey, although the “shrine” was not yet officially a shrine, nor was its “saint” yet officially a saint. Brother Francis could think of no alternate explanation of the presence of an old wanderer on this road leading to nowhere.

The pilgrim was taking his time with the bread and cheese, and the novice grew increasingly restless as his own anxiety waned. The rule of silence for the Lenten fast days did not permit him to converse voluntarily with the old man, but if he left his hiding place behind the rubble heap before the old man departed, he was certain to be seen or heard by the pilgrim, for he had been forbidden to leave the vicinity of his hermitage before the end of Lent.

Still slightly hesitant, Brother Francis loudly cleared histhroat, then straightened into view.

“Whup!”

The pilgrim’s bread and cheese went flying. The old man grabbed his staff and bounded to his feet.

“Creep up on me, will you!”

He brandished the staff menacingly at the hooded figure which had arisen from beyond the rock pile. Brother Francis noticed that the thick end of the staff was armed with a spike. The novice bowed courteously, thrice, but the pilgrim overlooked this nicety.

“Stay back there now!” he croaked. “Just keep your distance, sport. I’ve got nothing you’re after — unless it’s the cheese, and you can have that. If it’s meat you want, I’m nothing but gristle, but I’ll fight to keep it. Back now! Back!”

“Wait—” The novice paused. Charity, or even common courtesy, could take precedence over the Lenten rule of silence, when circumstances demanded speech, but to break silence on his own decision always left him slightly nervous.

“I’m not a sport, good simpleton,” he continued, using the polite address. He tossed hack his hood to show his monastic haircut and held up his rosary beads. “Do you understand these?”

For several seconds the old man remained in catlike readiness for combat while he studied the novice’s sun-blistered, adolescent face. The pilgrim’s had been a natural mistake. Grotesque creatures who prowled the fringes of the desert often wore hoods, masks, or voluminous robes to hide deformity. Among them were these whose deformity was not limited to the body, those who sometimes looked on travelers as a dependable source of venison.

After a brief scrutiny, the pilgrim straightened.

“Oh — one of them.” He leaned on his staff and scowled.

“Is that the Leibowitz Abbey down yonder?” he asked, pointing toward the distant cluster of buildings to the south.

Brother Francis bowed politely and nodded at the ground.

“What are you doing out here in the ruins?”

The novice picked up a chalklike fragment of stone. That the traveler might be literate was statistically unlikely, but Brother Francis decided to try. Since the vulgar dialects of the people had neither alphabet nor orthography, he chalked the Latin words for “Penance, Solitude, and Silence,” on a large flat stone, and wrote them again below in ancient English, hoping, in spite of his unacknowledged yearning for someone to talk to, that the old man would understand and leave him to his lonely Lenten vigil.

The pilgrim smiled wryly at the inscription. His laugh seemed less a laugh than a fatalistic bleat. “Hmmm-hnnn! Still writing things backward,” he said; but if he understood the inscription, he did not condescend to admit it. He laid aside his staff, sat on the rock again, picked his bread and cheese out of the sand, and began scraping them clean. Francis moistened his lips hungrily, but looked away. He had eaten nothing but cactus fruit and one handful of parched corn since Ash Wednesday; the rules of fast and abstinence were rather strict for vocational vigils.

Noticing his discomfort, the pilgrim broke his bread and cheese; he offered a portion to Brother Francis.

In spite of his dehydrated condition, caused by his meager water supply, the novice’s mouth flooded with saliva. His eyes refused to move from the hand that offered the food. The universe contracted; at its exact geometric center floated that sandy tidbit of dark bread and pale cheese. A demon commanded the muscles of his left leg to move his left foot half a yard forward. The demon then possessed his right leg to move the right foot ahead of the left, and it somehow forced his right pectorals and biceps to swing his arm until his hand touched the hand of the pilgrim. His fingers felt the food; they seemed even to taste the food. An involuntary shudder passed over his half-starved body. He closed his eyes and saw the Lord Abbot glaring at him and brandishing a bullwhip. Whenever the novice tried to visualize the Holy Trinity, the countenance of God the Father always became confused with the face of the abbot, which was normally, it seemed to Francis, very angry. Behind the abbot a bonfire raged, and from the midst of the flames the eyes of the Blessed Martyr Leibowitz gazed in death-agony upon his fasting protégé, caught in the act of reaching for cheese.

The novice shuddered again. “Apage Satanas!” he hissed as he danced back and dropped the food. Without warning, he spattered the old man with holy water from a tiny phial sneaked from his sleeve. The pilgrim had become indistinguishable from the Archenemy, for a moment, in the somewhat sun-dazed mind of the novice.

This surprise attack on the Powers of Darkness and Temptation produced no immediate supernatural results, but the natural results seemed to appear ex opere operate. The pilgrim-Beelzebub failed to explode into sulfurous smoke, but he made gargling sounds, turned a bright shade of red, and lunged at Francis with a bloodcurdling yell. The novice kept tripping on his tunic as he fled from flailing of the pilgrim’s spiked staff, and he escaped without nail holes only because the pilgrim had forgotten his sandals. The old man’s limping charge became a skippity hop. He seemed suddenly mindful of scorching rocks under his bare soles. He stopped and became preoccupied. When Brother Francis glanced over his shoulder, he gained the distinct impression that the pilgrim’s retreat to his cool spot was being accomplished by the feat of hopping along on the tip of one great toe.

Ashamed of the odor of cheese that lingered on his fingertips, and repenting his irrational exorcism, the novice slunk back to his self-appointed labors in the old ruins, while the pilgrim cooled his feet and satisfied his wrath by flinging an occasional rock at the youth whenever the latter moved into view among the rubble mounds. When his arm at last grew weary, he flung more feints than stones, and merely grumbled over his bread and cheese when Francis ceased to dodge.

The novice was wandering to and fro throughout the ruins, occasionally staggering toward some focal point of his work with a rock, the size of his own chest, locked in a painful embrace. The pilgrim watched him select a stone, estimate its dimensions in hand-spans, reject it, and carefully select another, to be pried free from the rock jam of the rubble, to be hoisted by Francis and stumblingly hauled away. He dropped one stone after a few paces, and, suddenly sitting, placed his head between his knees in an apparent effort to avoid fainting. After panting awhile, he arose again and finished by rolling the stone end-over-end toward its destination. He continued this activity while the pilgrim, no longer glaring, began to gape.

The sun blazed its midday maledictions upon the parched land, laying its anathema on all moist things. Francis labored on in spite of the heat.

When the traveler had washed down the last of his sandy bread and cheese with a few squirts from his waterskin, he slipped feet into sandals, arose with a grunt, and hobbled through the ruins toward the site of the novice’s labors. Noticing the old man’s approach, Brother Francis scurried to a safe distance. Mockingly, the pilgrim brandished his spiked cudgel at him, but seemed more curious about the youth’s masonry than he seemed eager for revenge. He paused to inspect the novice’s burrow.

There, near the east boundary of the ruins, Brother Francis had dug a shallow trench, using a stick for a hoe and hands for a shovel. He had, on the first day of Lent, roofed it over with a heap of brush, and used the trench by night as refuge from the desert’s wolves. But as the days of his fasting grew in number, his presence had increased his spoor in the vicinity until the nocturnal lupine prowlers seemed unduly attracted to the area of the ruins and even scratched around his brush heap when the fire was gone.

Francis had first attempted to discourage their nightly digging by increasing the thickness of the brush pile over his trench, and by surrounding it with a ring of stones set tightly in a furrow. But on the previous night, something had leaped to the top of his brush pile and howled while Francis lay shivering below, whereupon he had determined to fortify the burrow, and, using the first ring of stones as a foundation, had begun to build a wall. The wall tilted inward as it grew; but since the enclosure was roughly an oval in shape, the stones in each new layer crowded against adjacent stones to prevent an inward collapse. Brother Francis now hoped that by a careful selection of rocks and a certain mount of juggling, dirt-tamping, and pebble-wedging, he would be able to complete a dome. And, a single span of unbuttressed arch, somehow defying gravity, stood there over the burrow as a token of this ambition. Brother Francis yelped like a puppy when the pilgrim rapped curiously at this arch with his staff.

Solicitous for his abode, the novice had drawn nearer during the pilgrim’s inspection. The pilgrim answered his yelp with a flourish of the cudgel and a bloodthirsty howl. Brother Francis promptly tripped on the hem of his tunic and sat down. The old man chuckled.

“Hmmm-hnnn! You’ll. need a strange shape of a rock to fit that gap,” he said, and rattled his staff back and forth in a vacant space in the highest tier of stones.

The youth nodded and looked away. He continued to sit in the sand, and, by silence and by his lowered gaze, he hoped to tell the old man that he was neither free to converse nor free to accept willingly another’s presence in his place of Lenten solitude. The novice began writing with a dry twig in the sand: Et ne nos inducas in…

“I’ve not offered to change these stones into bread for you yet, have I?” the old traveler said crossly.

Brother Francis glanced up quickly. So! the old man could read, and read Scripture, at that. Furthermore, his remark implied that he had understood both the novice’s impulsive use of holy water and his reason for being here as well. Aware now that the pilgrim was teasing him, Brother Francis lowered his eyes again and waited.

“Hmmm-hnnn! So you’re to be left alone, are you? Well, then, I’d best be on my way. Tell me, will your brothers at the abbey let an old man rest a bit in their shade?”

Brother Francis nodded. “They’ll give you food and water too,” he added softly, in charity.

The pilgrim chuckled. “For that, I’ll find you a rock to fit that gap before I go. God with you.”

But you need not — The protest died unspoken. Brother Francis watched him hobbling slowly away. The pilgrim wandered in and about among the rubble mounds. He paused occasionally to inspect a stone or pry at one with his staff. His search would surely prove fruitless, the novice thought, for it was a repetition of a search which the youth himself had been making since mid-morning. He had decided at last that it would be easier to remove and rebuild a section of the highest tier than to find a keystone that approximated the hourglass shape of the gap in that tier. But, surely, the pilgrim would soon exhaust his patience and wander on his way.

Meanwhile, Brother Francis rested. He prayed for the recovery of that inward privacy which the purpose of his vigil demanded that he seek: a clean parchment of the spirit whereon the words of a summons might be written in his solitude — if that other Immensurable Loneliness which was God stretched forth Its hand to touch his own tiny human loneliness and to mark his vocation there. The Little Book, which Prior Cheroki had left with him on the preceding Sunday, served as a guide to his meditation. It was centuries old, and it was called Libellus Leibowitz, although only an uncertain tradition attributed its authorship to the Beatus himself.

“Parum equidem te diligebam, Domine, juventute mea; quare doleo nimis… Too little, O Lord, did I love Thee in the time of my youth; wherefore I grieve exceedingly in the time of my age. In vain did I flee from Thee in those days…”

“Hoy! Over here!” came a shout from beyond the rubble mounds.

Brother Francis glanced up briefly, but the pilgrim was not in sight. His eyes fell again to the page.

“Repugnans tibi, ausus sum quaerere quid, quid doctius mihi fide, certius spe, aut dulcius caritate visum esset. Quis itaque stultior me…”

“Hey boy!” the cry came again. “I found you a stone, one likely to fit.”

This time when Brother Francis looked up, he caught a glimpse of the pilgrim’s staff waving signals to him beyond the top of a rubble heap. Sighing the novice returned to his reading.

“O inscrutabilis Scrutater animarum, cui patet omne cor, si me vocaveras, olim a te fugeram. Si autem nunc velis vocare me indignum…”

And, irritably from beyond the rubble mound: “All right, then, suit yourself. I’ll mark the rock and set a stake by it. Try it or not, as you please.”

“Thank you,” the novice sighed, but doubted that the old man heard him. He toiled on with the text:

“Libera me, Domine, ab vitiis meis, ut solius tuae voluntatis mihi cupidus sim, et vocationis…”

“There, then!” the pilgrim shouted. “It’s staked and marked. And may you find your voice soon, boy. Olla allay!”

Soon after the last shout faded and died, Brother Francis caught a glimpse of the pilgrim trudging away on the trail that led toward the abbey. The novice whispered a swift blessing after him, and a prayer for safe wayfaring.

His privacy having been restored, Brother Francis returned the book to his burrow and resumed his haphazard stonemasonry, not yet troubling himself to investigate the pilgrim’s find. While his starved body heaved, strained, and staggered under the weight of the rocks, his mind, machinelike kept repeating the prayer for the certainty of his vocation:

“Libere me, Domine, ab vitiis meis… Set me free, O Lord, from my own vices, so that in my own heart I may be desirous of only Thy will, and be aware of Thy summons if it come… ut solius tuae voluntatis mihi cupidus sim, et vocatinonis tuae conscius si digneris me vocare. Amen.

“Set me free, O Lord, from my own vices, so that in my own heart…”

A sky-herd of cumulus clouds, on their way to bestow moist blessings on the mountains after cruelly deceiving the parched desert, began blotting out the sun and trailing dark shadow-shapes across the blistered land below, offering intermittent but welcome respite from the searing sunlight. When a racing cloud-shadow wiped its way over the ruins, the novice worked rapidly until the shadow was gone, then rested until the next bundle of fleece blotted out the sun.

It was quite by accident that Brother Francis finally discovered the pilgrim’s stone. While wandering thereabouts, he stumbled over the stake which the old man had driven into the ground as a marker. He found himself on his hands and knees staring at a pair of marks freshly chalked on an ancient stone:

The marks were so carefully drawn that Brother Francis immediately assumed them to be symbols, but minutes of musing over them left him still bemused. Witch markings perhaps? But no, the old man had called: “God-with-you,” as a witch would not. The novice pried the stone free from the rubble and rolled it over. As he did so, the rock mound rumbled faintly from within; a small stone clattered down the slope. Francis danced away from a possible avalanche, but the disturbance was momentary. In the place where the pilgrim’s rock had been wedged, however, there now appeared a small black hole.

Holes were often inhabited.

But this hole seemed to have been so tightly corked by the pilgrim’s stone that scarcely a flea could have entered it before Francis had overturned the rock. Nevertheless, he found a stick and gingerly thrust it into the opening. The stick encountered no resistance. When he released it, the stick slid into the hole and vanished, as if into a larger underground cavity. He waited nervously. Nothing slithered forth.

He sank to his knees again and cautiously sniffed at the hole. Having noticed neither an animal odor nor any hint of brimstone, he rolled a bit of gravel into it and leaned closer to listen. The gravel bounced once, a few feet below the opening, and then kept rattling its way downward, struck something metallic in passing, and finally came to rest somewhere far below. Echoes suggested an underground opening the size of a room.

Brother Francis climbed unsteadily to his feet and looked around. He seemed alone, as usual, except for his companion buzzard which, soaring on high, had been watching him with such interest lately that other buzzards occasionally left their territories near the horizons and came to investigate.

The novice circled the rubble heap, but found no sign of a second hole. He climbed an adjacent heap and squinted down the trail. The pilgrim had long since vanished. Nothing moved along the old roadway, but he caught a fleeting glimpse of Brother Alfred crossing a low hill a mile to the east in search of firewood near his own Lenten hermitage. Brother Alfred was deaf as a post. There was no one else in view. Francis foresaw no reason whatever to scream for help, but to estimate in advance the probable results of such a scream, if the need should arise, seemed only an exercise of prudence. After a careful scrutiny of the terrain, he climbed down from the mound. Breath needed for screaming would be better used for running.

He thought of replacing the pilgrim’s stone to cork the hole as before, but the adjacent stones had shifted slightly so that it no longer fit its previous place in the puzzle. Besides, the gap in the highest tier of his shelter wall remained unfilled, and the pilgrim was right: the stone’s size and shape suggested a probable fit. After only brief misgivings, he hoisted the rock and staggered back to his burrow.

The stone slipped neatly into place. He tested the new wedge with a kick; the tier held fast, even though the jolt caused a minor collapse a few feet away. The pilgrim’s marks, though blurred by his handling of the stone, were still dear enough to be copied. Brother Francis carefully redrew them on another rock, using a charred stick as a stylus. When Prior Cheroki made his Sabbath tour of the hermitages, perhaps the priest would be able to say whether the marks had meaning, either as charm or curse. To fear the pagan cabals was forbidden, but the novice was curious at least to learn what sign would be overhanging his sleeping pit, in view of the weight of the masonry on which the sign was written.

His labors continued through the heat of the afternoon. A corner of his mind kept reminding him of the hole — the interesting, and yet fearsome, little hole — and the way the rattle of gravel had caused faint echoes from somewhere below ground. He knew that the ruins all about him here were very old. He knew also, from tradition that the ruins had been gradually eroded into these anomalous heaps of stone by generations of monks and occasional strangers, men seeking a load of stone or looking for the bits of rusty steel which could be found by shattering the larger sections of columns and slabs to extract the ancient strips of that metal, mysteriously planted in the rocks by men of an age almost forgotten to the world. This human erosion had all but obliterated the resemblance to buildings, which tradition ascribed to the ruins in an earlier period, although the abbey’s present master-builder still took pride in his ability to sense and to point out the vestige of a floor plan here and there. And there was still metal to be found, if anyone cared to break enough rock to find it.

The abbey itself had been built of these stones. That several centuries of stonemasons might have left anything of interest still to be discovered in the ruins, Francis regarded as improbable fancy. And yet, he had never heard anyone mention buildings with basements or underground rooms. The master-builder, he recalled at last, had been quite specific in saying that the buildings at this site had had aspects of hasty construction, lacked deep foundations, and had rested for the most part on flat surface slabs.

With his shelter approaching completion, Brother Francis ventured back to the hole and stood looking down at it; he was unable to put off the desert-dweller’s conviction that wherever a place exists to hide from the sun, something is already hiding in it. Even if the hole was now uninhabited, something would certainly slither into it before tomorrow’s dawn. On the other hand, if something already lived in the hole, Francis thought it safer to make its acquaintance by day than by night. There seemed to be no tracks in the vicinity except his own, the pilgrim’s, and the tracks of the wolves.

Making a quick decision, he began clearing rubble and sand away from the hole. After half an hour of this, the hole was no larger, but his conviction that it opened into a subterranean pit had become a certainty. Two small boulders, half buried, and adjoining the opening, were obviously jammed together by the force of too much mass crowding the mouth of a shaft; they seemed caught in a bottleneck.

When he pried one stone toward the right, its neighbor rolled left, until no further motion was possible. The reverse effect occurred when he pried in the opposing direction, but he continued to jostle at the rock-jam.

His lever spontaneously leaped from his grasp, delivered a glancing blow to the side of his head, and disappeared in a sudden cave-in. The sharp blow sent him reeling. A flying stone from the rockslide struck him in the back and he fell gasping, uncertain whether or not he was falling into the pit until the instant his belly hit solid ground and he hugged it. The roar of the rockfall was deafening but brief.

Blinded by dust, Francis lay gasping for breath and wondering whether he dared to move, so sharp was the pain in his back, Having recovered a little breath, he managed to get one hand inside his habit and groped for the place between his shoulders where a few crushed bones might be. The place felt rough, and it stung. His fingers came away damp and red. He moved, but groaned and lay quietly again.

There was a soft beating of wings. Brother Francis glanced up in time to see the buzzard preparing to alight on a rubble heap a few yards away. The bird took wing again at once, but Francis imagined that it had eyed him with a sort of motherly concern in the manner of a worried hen. He rolled over quickly. A whole black heavenly host of them had gathered, and they circled at a curiously low altitude. Just skimming the mounds. They soared higher when he moved. Suddenly ignoring the possibility of chipped vertebrae or a crushed rib, the novice climbed shakily to his feet. Disappointed, the black sky-horde rode back to altitude on their invisible elevators of hot air, then disbanded and dispersed toward their remoter aerial vigils. Dark alternatives to the Paraclete whose coming he awaited, the birds seemed eager at times to descend in place of the Dove; their sporadic interest had been unnerving him of late, and he promptly decided, after some experimental shrugging, that the sharp rock had done no more than bruise and scrape

A dust column which had plumed up from the site of the cave-in was tapering away on the breeze. He hoped someone would see it from the abbey’s watchtowers and come to investigate. At his feet, a square opening yawned in the earth, where one flank of the mound had collapsed into the pit below. Stairs led downward, but only the top steps remained unburied by the avalanche which had paused for six centuries in mid-fall to await the assistance of Brother Francis before completing its roaring descent.

On one wall of the stair well a half-buried sign remained legible. Mustering his modest command of pre-Deluge English, he whispered the words haltingly:

Provision limitations, single occupant: 180 days; divide by actual number of occupants. Upon entering shelter, see that First Hatch is securely locked and sealed, that the intruder shields are electrified to repel contaminated persons attempting entry, that the warning lights are ON outside the enclosure…

The rest was buried, but the first word was enough for Francis. He had never seen a “Fallout,” and he hoped he’d never see one. A consistent description of the monster had not survived, but Francis had heard the legends. He crossed himself and backed away from the hole. Tradition told that the Beatus Leibowitz himself had encountered a Fallout, and had been possessed by it for many months before the exorcism which accompanied his Baptism drove the fiend away.

Brother Francis visualized a Fallout as half-salamander, because, according to tradition, the thing was born in the Flame Deluge, and as half-incubus who despoiled virgins in their sleep, for, were not the monsters of the world still called “children of the Fallout”? That the demon was capable of inflicting all the woes which descended upon Job was recorded fact, if not an article of creed.

The novice stared at the sign in dismay. Its meaning was plain enough. He had unwittingly broken into the abode (deserted, he prayed) of not just one, but fifteen of the dreadful beings! He groped for his phial of holy water.

2

“A spiritu fornicationis,

Domino, libera nos.

From the lightning and the tempest,

O Lord, deliver us.

From the scourge of the earthquake,

O Lord, deliver us.

From plague, famine, and war,

O Lord, deliver us.

“From the place of ground zero,

O Lord, deliver us.

From the rain of the cobalt,

O Lord, deliver us.

From the rain of the strontium,

O Lord, deliver us.

From the fall of the cesium,

O Lord, deliver us.

“From the curse of the Fallout,

O Lord, deliver us.

From the begetting of monsters,

O Lord, deliver us.

From the curse of the Misborn,

O Lord deliver us.

A morte perpetua,

Domine, libera nos.

“Peccatores,

te rogamus, audi nos.

That thou wouldst spare us,

we beseech thee, hear us.

That thou wouldst pardon us,

we beseech thee, hear us.

That thou wouldst bring us truly to penance,

te rogamus, audi nos.”

Snatches of such versicles from the Litany of the Saints came whispering on each panting breath as Brother Francis lowered himself gingerly into the stair well of the ancient Fallout Shelter, armed as he was only with holy water and an improvised torch lighted from the banked embers of last night’s fire. He had waited more than an hour for someone from the abbey to come investigate the dust plume. No one had come.

To abandon his vocational vigil even briefly, unless seriously ill or unless ordered to return to the abbey, would be regarded as an ipso facto renunciation of his claim of a true vocation to life as a monk of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz. Brother Francis would have preferred death. He was faced, therefore, with the choice of investigating the fearsome pit before sunset, or of spending the night in his burrow in ignorance of whatever might lurk in the shelter and might reawaken to prowl in darkness. As a nocturnal hazard, the wolves already made trouble enough, and the wolves were merely creatures of flesh and blood. Creatures of less solid substance, he preferred to meet by the light of day; although, to be sure, scant daylight fell into the pit below, the sun now being low in the west.

The debris which had crashed down into the shelter formed a hill with its crest near the head of the stairs, and there was only a narrow squeezeway between the rocks and the ceiling. He went through it feet first and found himself forced to continue feet first, because of the steepness of the slope. Thus confronting the Unknown face-to-backside, he groped for footholds in the loose heap of broken stone and gradually worked his way downward. Occasionally, when his torch flickered low, he paused to tilt its flame downward, letting the fire spread further along the wood; during such pauses, he tried to appraise the danger about him and below. These was little to be seen. He was in an underground room, but at least one third of its volume was filled by the mound of debris that had fallen through the stair well. The cascade of stone had covered all the floor, crushed several pieces of furniture that he could see, and perhaps had completely buried others. He saw battered metal lockers leaning awry, waist-deep in rubble. At the far and of the room was a metal door, hinged to swing toward him, and tightly sealed by the avalanche. Still legible in flaking paint on the door were the stenciled letters:

INNER HATCH

SEALED ENVIRONMENT

Evidently the room into which he was descending was only an antechamber. But whatever lay beyond Inner Hatch was sealed there by several tons of rock against the door. Its environment was Sealed indeed, unless it had another exit.

Having made his way to the foot of the slope, and after assuring himself that the antechamber contained no obvious menace, the novice went cautiously to inspect the metal door at closer range by torchlight. Printed under the stenciled letters of Inner Hatch was a smaller rust-streaked sign:

WARNING: this hatch must not be sealed before all personnel have been admitted, or before all steps of safety procedure prescribed by Technical Manual CD-Bu-83A have been accomplished. When Hatch is sealed, air within shelter will he pressurized 2.0 p.s.i. above ambient barometric level to minimize inward diffusion. Once sealed, the hatch will be automatically unlocked by the servomonitor system when, but not before, any of the following conditions prevail: (1) when the exterior radiation count falls below the danger level, (2) when the air and water repurification system fails, ( 3 ) when the food supply is exhausted, (4) when the internal power supply fails. See CD-Bu-83A for further instructions.

Brother Francis found himself slightly confused by the Warning, but he intended to heed it by not touching the door at all The miraculous contraptions of the ancients were not to be carelessly tampered with, as many a dead excavator-of-the-past had testified with his dying gasp.

Brother Francis noticed that the debris which had been lying in the antechamber for centuries was darker in color and rougher in texture than the debris which had weathered under the desert sun and in the sandy wind before today’s cave-in. One could tell by a glance at the stones that Inner Hatch had been blocked not by today’s rockslide but by one more ancient than the abbey itself. If Fallout Shelter’s Sealed Environment contained a Fallout, the demon had obviously not opened Inner Hatch since the time of the Flame Deluge, before the Simplification. And, if it had been sealed beyond the metal door for so many centuries, there was small reason, Francis told himself, to fear that it might come bursting through the hatch before Holy Saturday.

His torch burned low. Having found a splintered chair leg, he set it ablaze with his waning flame, then began gathering bits of broken furniture with which to build a dependable fire, meanwhile pondering the meaning of that ancient sign: Fallout Survival Shelter.

As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus , and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended. He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter? Brother Francis shook his head. The Warning on Inner Hatch mentioned food, water, and air; and yet surely these were not necessities for the fiends of Hell. At times, the novice found pre-Deluge English more perplexing than either Intermediate Angelology or Saint Leslie’s theological calculus.

He built his fire on the slope of the rubble pile, where it could brighten the darker crannies of the antechamber. Then he went to explore whatever might remain uncovered by debris. The ruins above ground had been reduced to archaeological ambiguity by generations of scavengers, but this underground ruin had been touched by no hand but the hand of impersonal disaster. The place seemed haunted by the presences of another age. A skull, lying among the rocks in a darker corner, still retained a gold tooth in its grin — clear evidence that the shelter had never been invaded by wanderers. The gold incisor flickered when the fire danced high.

More than once in the desert had Brother Francis encountered, near some parched arroyo, a small heap of human bones, picked clean and whitening in thesun.he was not especially squeamish, and one expected such things. He was, therefore, not startled when he first noticed the skull in the corner of the antechamber, but the flicker of gold inits grin kept catching his eye while he pried at the doors (locked or stuck) of the rusty lockers and tugged at the drawers (also stuck) of a battered metal desk. The desk might prove to be a priceless find, if it contained documents or a small book or two that had survived the angry bonfires of the Age of Simplification. While he kept trying to open the drawers, the fire burned low; he fancied that the skull began emitting a faint glow of its own. Such a phenomenon was not especially uncommon, but in the gloomy crypt, Brother Francis found it somehow most disturbing. He gathered more wood for the fire, returned to jerk and tug at the desk, and tried to ignore the skull’s flickering grin. While a little wary yet of lurking Fallouts, Francis had sufficiently recovered from his initial fright to realize that the shelter, notably the desk and the lookers, might well be teeming with rich relics of an age which the world had, for the most part, deliberately chosen to forget.

Providence had bestowed a blessing here. To find a bit of the past which had escaped both the bonfires end the looting scavengers was a rare stroke of luck these days. There was, however, always a risk involved. Monastic excavators, alert for ancient treasures, had been known to emerge from a hole in the ground, triumphantly carrying a strange cylindrical artifact, and then — while cleaning it or trying to ascertain its purpose — press the wrong button or twist the wrong knob, thereby ending the matter without benefit of clergy. Only eighty years ago the Venerable Boedullus had written with obvious delight to his Lord Abbot that his small expedition had uncovered the remains of, in his own words, “the site of an intercontinental launching pad, complete with several fascinating subterranean storage tanks.” No one at the abbey ever knew what the Venerable Boedullus meant by “intercontinental launching pad,” but the Lord Abbot who had reigned at that time sternly decreed that monastic antiquarians must; on pain of excommunication, avoid such “pads” thenceforth. For his letter to the abbot was the last that anyone ever saw of the Venerable Boedullus, his party, his “launching pad” site, and the small village which had grown up over that site; an interesting lake now graced the landscape where the village had been, thanks to some shepherds who diverted the course of a creek and caused it to flow into the crater to store water for their flocks in time of drought. A traveler who had come from that direction about a decade ago reported excellent fishing in that lake, but the shepherds thereabouts regarded the fish as the souls of the departed villagers and excavators; they refused to fish there because of Bo’dollos, the giant catfish that brooded in the deep.

“…nor shall any other excavation be initiated which does nor have as its primary purpose the augmentation of the Memorabilia,” the Lord Abbot’s decree had added — meaning that Brother Francis should search the shelter only for books and papers, not tampering with interesting hardware.

The gold-capped tooth kept winking and glittering at the corner of his eye while Brother Francis heaved and strained at the desk drawers. The drawers refused to budge. He gave the desk a final kick and turned to glare impatiently at the skull: Why don’t you grin at something else for a change?

The grin remained. The gold-toothed residuum lay with its head pillowed between a rock and a rusty metal box. Quitting the desk, the novice picked his way across the debris at last for a clever inspection of the mortal remains. Clearly, the person had died on the spot, struck down by the torrent of stones and half buried by the debris. Only the skull and the bones of one leg had not been covered. The femur was broken, the back of the skull was crushed.

Brother Francis breathed a prayer for the departed, then very gently lifted the skull from its resting place and turned it around so that it grinned toward the wall. Then his eye fell on the rusty box.

The box was shaped like a satchel and was obviously a carrying case of some kind. It might have served any number of purposes, but it had been rather badly battered by flying stones. Gingerly he worked it loose from the rubble and carried it closer to the fire. The lock seemed to be broken, but the lid had rusted shut. The box rattled when he shook it. It was not an obvious place to look for books or papers, but — obviously too — it was designed to be opened and closed, and might contain a scrap or two of information for the Memorabilia. Nevertheless, remembering the fate of Brother Boedullus and others, he sprinkled it with holy water before attempting to pry it open, and he handled the ancient relic as reverently as was possible while battering at its rusty hinges with a stone.

At last he broke the hinges, and the lid fell free. Small metal tidbits bounced from trays, spilled among the rocks, some of them falling irretrievably into crevices. But, in the bottom of the box in the space beneath the trays, he beheld — papers! After a quick prayer of thanksgiving, he regathered as many of the scattered tidbits as he could, and, after loosely replacing the lid, began climbing the hill of debris toward the stair well and the thin patch of sky, with the box hugged tightly under one arm.

The sun was blinding after the darkness of the shelter. He scarcely bothered to notice that it was sinking dangerously low in the west, but began at once to search for a flat slab on which the contents of the box could be spread for examination without risk of losing anything in the sand.

Minutes later, seated on a cracked foundation slab, he began removing the tidbits of metal and glass that filled the trays. Most of them were small tubular things with a wire whisker at each end of each tube. These, he had seen before. The abbey’s small museum had a few of them, of various size, shape and color. Once he had seen a shaman of the hill-pagan people wearing a string of them as a ceremonial necklace. The hill people thought of them as “parts of the body of the god” — of the fabled Machina analytica, hailed as the wisest of their gods. By swallowing one of them, a shaman could acquire “Infallibility,” they said. He certainly acquired Indisputability that way, among his own people — unless he swallowed one of the poison kind. The similar tidbits in the museum were connected together too — not in the form of a necklace, but as a complex and rather disorderly maze in the bottom of a small metal box, exhibited as: “Radio Chassis: Application Uncertain.”

Inside the lid of the carrying case, a note had been glued; the glue had powdered, the ink had faded, and the paper was so darkened by rusty stains that even good handwriting would have been hard enough to read, but this was written in a hasty scrawl. He studied it intermittently while emptying the trays. It seemed to be English, of a sort, but half an hour passed before he deciphered most of the message:

Carl —

Must grab plane for [undecipherable] in twenty minutes.

For God’s sake, keep Em there till we know if we’re at war.

Please! try to get her on the alternate list for the shelter. Can’t get her a seat my plane. Don’t tell her why I sent her over with this box of junk, but try to keep her there till we know [undecipherable] at worst, one of the alternates not show.

I.E.L.

P.S. I put the seal on the lock and put TOP SECRET on the lid just to keep Em from looking inside. First tool box I happened to grab. Shove it in my locker or something.

The note seemed hasty gibberish to Brother Francis, who was at the moment too excited to concentrate on any single item more than the rest. After a final sneer at the notewriter’s hasty scrawl, he began the task of removing the trayracks to get at the papers in the bottom of the box. The trays were mounted on a swinging linkage which was obviously meant to swing the trays out of the box in stair-step array, but the pins were rusted fast, and Francis found it necessary to pry them out with a short steel tool from one of the tray compartments.

When Brother Francis had removed the last tray, he touched the papers reverently: only a handful of folded documents here, and yet a treasure; for they had escaped the angry flames of the Simplification, wherein even sacred writings had curled, blackened, and withered into smoke while ignorant mobs howled and hailed it a triumph. He handled the papers as one might handle holy things, shielding them from the wind with his habit, for all were brittle and cracked from age. There was a sheaf of rough sketches and diagrams. There were hand-scribbled notes, two large folded papers, and a small book entitled Memo.

First he examined the jotted notes. They were scrawled by the same hand that had written the note glued to the lid, and the penmanship was no less abominable. Poundpastrami, said one note, can kraut, six bagels, — bring home for Emma. Another reminded: Remember-pick up Form 1040, Uncle Revenue. Another was only a column of figures with a circled total from which a second amount was subtracted and finally a percentage taken, followed by the word damn! Brother Francis checked the figures; he could find no fault with the abominable penman’s arithmetic at least, although he could deduce nothing about what the quantities might represent.

Memo, he handled with special reverence, because its title was suggestive of “Memorabilia.” Before opening it, he crossed himself and murmured the Blessing of Texts. But the small book proved a disappointment. He had expected printed matter, but found only a hand-written list of names, places, numbers and dates. The dates ranged through the latter part of the fifth decade, and earlier part of the sixth decade, twentieth century. Again it was affirmed! — the contents of the shelter came from the twilight period of the Age of Enlightenment. An important discovery indeed.

Of the larger folded papers, one was tightly rolled as well, and it began to fall apart when he tried to unroll it; he could make out the words RACING FORM, but nothing more. After returning it to the box for later restorative work, he turned to the second folded document; its creases were so brittle that he dared inspect only a little of it, by parting the folds slightly and peering between them.

A diagram, it seemed, but — a diagram of white lines on dark paper!

Again he felt the thrill of discovery. It was dearly a blueprint! — and there was not a single original blueprint left at the abbey, but only inked facsimiles of several such prints. The originals had faded long ago from overexposure to light. Never before had Francis seen an original, although he had seen enough hand-painted reproductions to recognize it as a blueprint, which, while stained and faded, remained legible after so many centuries because of the total darkness and low humidity in the shelter. He turned the document over — and felt brief fury. What idiot had desecrated the priceless paper? Someone had sketched absent-minded geometrical figures and childish cartoon faces all over the back. What thoughtless vandal —

The anger passed after a moment’s reflection. At the time of the deed, blueprints had probably been as common as weeds, and the owner of the box the probable culprit. He shielded the print from the sun with his own shadow while trying to unfold it further. In the lower right-hand corner was a printed rectangle containing, in simple block letters, various titles, dates, “patent numbers,” reference numbers, and names. His eye traveled down the list until it encountered:

“CIRCUIT DESIGN BY: Leibowitz, I. E.”

He closed his eyes tightly and shook his head until it seemed to rattle. Then he looked again. There it was, quite plainly:

CIRCUIT DESIGN BY: Leibowitz, I. E.

He flipped the paper over again. Among the geometric figures and childish sketches, dearly stamped in purple ink, was the form:

The name was written in a clear feminine hand, not in the hasty scrawl of the other notes. He looked again at the initialed signature of the note in the lid of the box: I. E. L. — and again at “CIRCUIT DESIGN BY…” And the same initials appeared elsewhere throughout the notes.

There had been argument, all highly conjectural, about whether the beatified founder of the Order, if finally canonized, should be addressed as Saint Isaac or as Saint Edward. Some even favored Saint Leibowitz as the proper address, since the Beatus had, until the present, been referred to by his surname.

“Beate Leibowitz, ora pro me!” whispered Brother Francis. His hands were trembling so violently that they threatened to ruin the brittle documents.

He had uncovered relics of the Saint.

Of course, New Rome had not yet proclaimed that Leibowitz was a saint, but Brother Francis was so convinced of it that he made bold to add: “Sancte Leibowitz, ora pro me!” Brother Francis wasted no idle logic in leaping to his immediate conclusion: he had just been granted a token of his vocation by Heaven itself. He had found what he had been sent into the desert to find, as Brother Francis saw it. He was called to be a professed monk of the Order.

Forgetting his abbot’s stem warning against expecting a vocation to come in any spectacular or miraculous form the novice knelt in the sand to pray his thanks and to offer a few decades of the rosary for the intentions of the old pilgrim who had pointed out the rock leading to the shelter. May you find your Voice soon, boy, the wanderer had said. Not until now did the novice suspect that the pilgrim meant Voice with a capital V.

“Ut solius tuae voluntatis mihi cupidus sim, et vocationis tuae conscius, si digneris me vocare…

It would be left to the abbot to think that his “voice” was speaking the language of circumstances and not the language of cause and effect. It would be left to the Promotor Fidei to think that “Leibowitz,” perhaps, was not an uncommon name before the Flame Deluge, and that I. E. could as easily represent “Ichabod Ebenezer” as “Isaac Edward.” For Francis, there was only one.

From the distant abbey, three bell notes rang out across the desert, a pause, then the three notes were followed by nine.

“Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae,” the novice dutifully responded glancing up in surprise to see that the sun had become a fat scarlet ellipse that already touched the western horizon. The rock barrier around his burrow was not yet complete.

As soon as the Angelus was said, he hastily repacked the papers in the rusty old box. A call from Heaven did not necessarily involve charismata for subduing wild beasts or befriending hungry wolves.

By the time twilight had faded and the stars had appeared, his makeshift shelter was as well fortified as he could make it; whether it was wolf-proof remained to be tested. The test would not be long in coming. He had already heard a few howls from the west. His fire was rekindled, but there was no light left outside the circle of firelight to permit the gathering of his dally collection of purple cactus fruit — his only source of nourishment except on Sundays, when a few handfuls of parched corn were sent from the abbey after a priest had made his rounds with the Holy Sacrament. The letter of the rule for a Lenten vocational vigil was not so strict as its practical application. As applied, the rule amounted to simple starvation.

Tonight, however, the gnawing of hunger was less troublesome to Francis than his own impatient urge to run back to the abbey and announce the news of his discovery. To do so would be to renounce his vocation no sooner than it had come to him; he was here for the duration of Lent, vocation or no vocation, to continue his vigil as if nothing extraordinary had occurred.

Dreamily, from near the fire, he gazed into the darkness in the direction of Fallout Survival Shelter and tried to visualize a towering basilica rising from the site. The fantasy was pleasant, but it was difficult to imagine anyone choosing this remote stretch of desert as the focal point of a future diocese. If not a basilica, then a smaller church — The Church of Saint Leibowitz of the Wilderness — surrounded by a garden and a wall, with a shrine of the Saint attracting rivers of pilgrims with girded loins out of the north. “Father” Francis of Utah conducted the pilgrims on a tour of the ruins, even through “Hatch Two” into the splendors of “Sealed Environment” beyond, the catacombs of the Flame Deluge where… where… well, afterwards, he would offer Mass for them on the altar stone which enclosed a relic of the church’s name-saint — a bit of burlap? fibers from the hangman’s noose? fingernail clippings from the bottom of the rusty box? — or perhaps RACING FORM. But the fantasy withered. The chances of Brother Francis becoming a priest were slight — not being a missionary Order, the Brothers of Leibowitz needed only enough priests for the abbey itself and a few smaller communities of monks in other locations. Furthermore, the “Saint” was still only a Beatus officially, and would never be formally declared a saint unless he wrought a few more good solid miracles to underwrite his own beatification, which was not an infallible proclamation, as canonization would be, although it permitted the monks of the Leibowitz Order formally to venerate their founder and patron, outside of the Mass and the Office. The proportions of the fantasy church dwindled to the size of a wayside shrine; the river of pilgrims shrank to a trickle. New Rome was busy with other matters, such as the petition for a formal definition on the question of the Preternatural Gifts of the Holy Virgin, the Dominicans holding that the Immaculate Conception implied not only indwelling grace, but also that the Blessed Mother had had the preternatural powers which were Eve’s before the Fall; some theologians of other Orders, while admitting this to be pious conjecture, denied that it was necessarily the case, and contended that a “creature” might be “originally innocent” but not endowed with preternatural gifts. The Dominicans bowed to this, but contended that the belief had always been implicit in other dogma — such as the Assumption (preternatural immortality) and the Preservation from Actual Sin (implying preternatural integrity) and still other examples. While attempting to settle this dispute, New Rome had seemingly left the case for the canonization of Leibowitz to gather dust on the shelf.

Contenting himself with a small shrine of the Beatus and a casual trickle of pilgrims, Brother Francis drowsed. When he awoke, the fire was reduced to glowing embers. Something seemed amiss. Was he quite alone? He blinked around at the encompassing darkness.

From beyond the bed of reddish coals, the dark wolf blinked back.

The novice yelped and dived for cover.

The yelp, he decided as he lay trembling within his den of stones and brush, had been only an involuntary breach of the rule of silence. He lay hugging the metal box and praying that the days of Lent might pass swiftly, while padded feet scratched about his enclosure.

3

“…and then, father, i almost took the bread and cheese.”

“But you didn’t take it?”

“No.”

“Then there was no sin by deed.”

“But I wanted it so badly, I could taste it.”

“Willfully? Did you deliberately enjoy the fantasy?”

“No.”

“You tried to get rid of it.”

“Yes.”

“So there was not culpable gluttony of thought either. Why are you confessing this?”

“Because then I lost my temper and splashed him with holy water.”

“You what? Why?”

Father Cheroki, wearing his stole, stared at the penitent who knelt in profile before him in the scorching sunlight on the open desert; the priest kept wondering how it was possible for such a youth (not particularly intelligent insofar as he could determine) to manage to find occasions or near-occasions of sin while completely isolated on barren desert, far from any distraction or apparent source of temptation. There should be very little trouble a boy could get into out here, armed as he was with only a rosary, a flint, a penknife, and a prayerbook. So it seemed to Father Cheroki. But this confession was taking up quite a lot of time; he wished the boy would get on with it. His arthritis was bothering him again, but because of the presence of the Holy Sacrament on the portable table which he took with him on his rounds, the priest preferred to stand, or to stay on his knees along with the penitent. He had lighted a candle before the small golden case which contained the Hosts, but the flame was invisible in the sun-glare, and the breeze might even have blown it out.

“But exorcism is permissible these days, without any specific higher authorization. What are you confessing — being angry?”

“That too.”

“At whom did you become angry? At the old man — or at yourself for almost taking the food?”

“I — I’m not sure.”

“Well, make up your mind,” Father Cheroki said impatiently. “Either accuse yourself, or else not.”

“I accuse myself.”

“Of what?” Cheroki sighed.

“Of abusing a sacramental in a fit of temper.”

“ ‘Abusing’? You had no rational reason to suspect diabolic influence? You just became angry and squirted him with it? Like throwing the ink in his eye?”

The novice squirmed and hesitated, sensing the priest’s sarcasm. Confession was always difficult for Brother Francis. He could never find the right words for his misdeeds, and in trying to remember his own motives, he became hopelessly confused. Nor was the priest helping matters by taking the “either-you-did-or-else-you-didn’t” stand — even though, obviously, either Francis had or else he hadn’t.

“I think I lost my senses for a moment,” he said finally.

Cheroki opened his mouth, apparently meaning to pursue the matter, then thought better of it. “I see. What next then?”

“Gluttonous thoughts,” Francis said after a moment.

The priest sighed. “I thought we were through with that. Or is this another time?”

“Yesterday. There was this lizard, Father. It had blue and yellow stripes, and such magnificent hams — thick as your thumb and plump, and I kept thinking how it would taste like chicken, roasted all brown and crisp outside, and—”

“All right,” the priest interrupted. Only a hint of revulsion crossed his aged face. After all, the boy was spending a lot of time in the sun. “You took pleasure in these thoughts? You didn’t try to get rid of the temptation?”

Francis reddened. “I — I tried to catch it. It got away.”

“So, not merely thought — deed as well. Just that one time?”

“Well-yes, just that.”

“All right, in thought and deed, willfully meaning to eat meat during Lent. Please be as specific as you can after this. I thought you had examined your conscience properly. Is there anything else?’

“Quite a lot.”

The priest winced. He had several hermitages to visit; it was a long hot ride, and his knees were hurting. Please get on with it as quickly as you can,” he sighed.

“Impurity, once.”

“Thought, word, or deed?”

“Well, there was this succubus, and she—”

“Succubus? Oh — nocturnal. You were asleep?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then why confess it?”

“Because afterwards.”

“Afterwards what? When you woke up?”

“Yes. I kept thinking about her. Kept imagining it all over again.”

“All right, concupiscent thought, deliberately entertained. You’re sorry? Now, what next?”

All this was the usual sort of thing that one kept hearing time after endless time from postulant after postulant, novice after novice, and it seemed to Father Cheroki that the least Brother Francis could do would be to bark out his self-accusations one, two, three, in a neat orderly manner, without all this prodding and prompting. Francis seemed to find difficulty in formulating whatever he was about to say; the priest waited.

“I think my vocation has come to me, Father, but—” Francis moistened his cracked lips and stared at a bug on a rock.

“Oh, has it?” Cheroki’s voice was toneless

“Yes, I think — but would it be a sin, Father, if when I first got it, I thought rather scornfully of the handwriting? I mean?”

Cheroki blinked. Handwriting? Vocation? What kind of a question was — He studied the novice’s serious expression for a few seconds, then frowned.

“Have you and Brother Alfred been passing notes to each other?” he asked ominously.

“Oh, no, Father!”

“Then whose handwriting are you talking about?”

“The Blessed Leibowitz.”

Cheroki paused to think. Did there, or did there not, exist in the abbey’s collection of ancient documents, any manuscript penned personally by the founder of the Order? — an original copy? After a moment’s reflection, he decided in the affirmative; yes, there were a few scraps of it left, carefully kept under lock and key.

“Are you talking about something that happened back at the abbey? Before you came out here?”

“No, Father. It happened right over there—” He nodded toward the left. “Three mounds over, near the tall cactus.”

“Involving your vocation, you say?”

“Y-yes, but—”

“Of course,” Cheroki said sharply, “you could NOT POSSIBLY be trying to say that — you have received — from the Blessed Leibowitz, dead now, lo, the last six hundred years — a handwritten invitation to profess your solemn vows? And you, uh, deplored his handwriting? — Forgive me, but that’s the impression I was getting.”

“Well, it’s something like that, Father.”

Cberoki sputtered. Becoming alarmed, Brother Francis produced a scrap of paper from his sleeve and handed it to the priest. It was brittle with age and stained. The ink was faded.

“Pound pastrami,” Father Cheroki pronounced, slurring over some of the unfamiliar words, “can kraut, six bagels — bring home for Emma.” He stared fixedly at Brother Francis for several seconds “This was written by whom?”

Francis told him.

Cheroki thought it over. “It’s not possible for you to make a good confession while you’re in this condition. And it wouldn’t be proper for me to absolve you when you’re not in your right mind.” Seeing Francis wince, the priest touched him reassuringly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, son, we’ll talk it over after you’re better. I’ll hear your confession then. For the present—” He glanced nervously at the vessel containing the Eucharist. “I want you to gather up your things and return to the abbey at once.”

“But, Father, I—”

“I command you,” the priest said tonelessly, “to return to the abbey at once.”

“Y-yes, Father.”

“Now, I’m not going to absolve you, but you might make good act of contrition and offer two decades of the rosary as penance anyhow. Would you like my blessing?”

The novice nodded, fighting tears. The priest blessed him arose, genuflected before the Sacrament, recovered the golden vessel, and reattached it to the chain around his neck. Having pocketed the candle, collapsed the table, and strapped it in place behind the saddle, he gave Francis a last solemn nod, then mounted and rode away on his mare to complete his circuit of the Lenten hermitages. Francis sat in the hot sand and wept.

It would have been simple if he could have taken the priest to the crypt to show him the ancient room, if he could have displayed the box and all its contents, and the mark the pilgrim had made on the rock. But the priest was carrying the Eucharist, and could not have been induced to climb down into a rock-filled basement on his hands and knees, or to paw though the contents of the old box and enter into archaeological discussions; Francis had known better than to ask. Cheroki’s visit was necessarily solemn, as long as the locket he was wearing contained a single Host; although, alter it was empty, he might be amenable to some informal listening. The novice could not blame Father Cheroki for leaping to the conclusion that he had gone out of his mind. He was a little groggy from the sun, and he had stammered quite a bit. More than one novice had turned up with addled wits after a vocational vigil.

There was nothing to do but obey the command to return.

He walked to the shelter and glanced into it once again, to reassure himself that it was really there; then he went to get the box. By the time he had it repacked and was ready to leave, the dust plume had appeared in the southeast, heralding the arrival of the supply carrier with water and corn from the abbey. Brother Francis decided to wait for his supplies before starting the long trek home.

Three donkeys and one monk ambled into view at the head of the dust streamer. The lead donkey plodded under the weight of Brother Fingo. In spite of the hood, Francis recognized the cook’s helper from his hunched shoulders and from the long hairy shins that dangled on either side of the donkey so that Brother Fingo’s sandals nearly dragged the ground. The animals that followed came loaded with small bags of corn and skins of water.

“Sooooee pig-pig-pig! Sooee pig!” Fingo called, cupping his hands to his mouth and broadcasting the hog-call across the ruins as if he had not seen Francis waiting for him beside the trail. “Pig pig pig! — Oh, there you are, Francisco! I mistook you for a bone pile. Well, we’ll have to fatten you up for the wolves. There you are, help yourself to the Sunday slops. How goes the hermit trade? Think you’ll make it a career? Just one waterskin, mind you, and one sack of corn. And watch Malicia’s hind feet; she’s in rut and feels frolicky — kicked Alfred back there, crunch! right in the kneecap. Careful with it!” Brother Fingo brushed back his hood and chortled while the novice and Malicia fenced for position. Fingo was undoubtedly the ugliest man alive, and when he laughed, the vast display of pink gums and huge teeth of assorted colors added little in his charm; he was a sport, but the sport could scarcely be called monstrous; it was a rather common hereditary pattern in the Minnesota country from whence he came; it produced baldness and a very uneven distribution of melanin, so that the gangling monk’s hide was a patchwork of beef-liver and chocolate splashes on an albino background. However, his perpetual good humor so compensated for his appearance that one ceased to notice it after a few minutes; and after long acquaintance, Brother Fingo’s markings seemed as normal as those of a painted pony. What might have seemed hideous if he were a sulking fellow, managed almost to become as decorative as clown’s make-up when accompanied by exuberant good cheer. Fingo’s assignment to the kitchen was punitive and probably temporary. He was a woodcarver by trade, and normally worked in the carpenter’s shop. But some incident of self-assertion, in connection with a figure of the Blessed Leibowitz which he had been permitted to carve, had caused the abbot to order him transferred to the kitchen until he showed some signs of practicing humility. Meanwhile, the figure of the Beatus waited in the carpentry shop, half-carved.

Fingo’s grin began to fade as he studied Francis’ countenance while the novice unloaded his grain and water from the frisky she-ass. “You look like a sick sheep, boy,” he said to the penitent. “What’s the trouble? Is Father Cheroki in one of his slow rages again?”

Brother Francis shook his head. “Not that I could tell.”

“Then what’s wrong? Are you really sick?”

“He ordered me back to the abbey.”

“Wha-a-at?” Fingo swung a hairy shin over the jackass and dropped a few inches to the ground. He towered over Brother Francis, clapped a meaty hand on his shoulder, and peered down into his face. “What is it; the jaundice?”

“No. He thinks I’m—” Francis tapped his temple and shrugged.

Fingo laughed. “Well, that’s true, but we all knew that. Why is he sending you back?”

Francis glanced down at the box near his feet. “I found some things that belonged to the Blessed Leibowitz. I started to tell him, but he didn’t believe me. He wouldn’t let me explain. He—”

“You found what?” Fingo smiled his disbelief, then dropped to his knees and opened the box while the novice watched nervously. The monk stirred the whiskered cylinders in the trays with one finger and whistled softly. “Hill-pagan charms, aren’t they? This is old, Francisco, this is really old.” He glanced at the note in the lid. “What’s this gibberish?” he asked, squinting up at the unhappy novice.

“Pre-Deluge English.”

“I never studied it, except what we sing in choir.”

“It was written by the Beatus himself.”

“This?” Brother Fingo stared from the note to Brother Francis and back to the note. He shook his head suddenly, clamped the lid back on the box, and stood up. His grin had become artificial. “Maybe Father’s right. You better hike back and have Brother Pharmacist brew you up one of his toad-stool specials. That’s the fever, Brother.”

Francis shrugged, “Perhaps.”

“Where did you find this stuff?”

The novice pointed. “Over that way a few mounds. I moved some rocks. There was a cave-in, and I found a basement. Go see for yourself.”

Fingo shook his head. “I’ve got a long ride ahead.”

Francis picked up the box and started toward the abbey while Fingo returned to his donkey, but after a few paces the novice stopped and called back.

“Brother Spots — could you take two minutes?”

“Maybe,” answered Fingo; “What for?”

“Just walk over there and look in the hole.”

“Why?”

“So you can tell Father Cheroki if it’s really there.”

Fingo paused with one leg half across his donkey’s back.

“Ha!” He withdrew the leg. “All right. If it’s not there, I’ll tell you.”

Francis watched for a moment while the gangling Fingo strode out of sight among the mounds; then he turned to shuffle down the long dusty trail toward the abbey, intermittently munching corn and sipping from the waterskin. Occasionally he glanced back. Fingo was gone much longer than two minutes. Brother Francis had ceased to watch for his reappearance by the time he heard a distant bellow from the ruins far behind him. He turned. He could make out the distant figure of the woodcarver standing atop one of the mounds. Fingo was waving his arms and vigorously nodding his head in affirmation. Francis waved back, then hiked wearily on his way.

Two weeks of near-starvation had exacted their tribute. After two or three miles he began to stagger. When still nearly a mile from the abbey, he fainted beside the road. It was late afternoon before Cheroki, riding back from his rounds, noticed him lying there, hastily dismounted, and bathed the youth’s face until he gradually brought him around. Cheroki had encountered the supply donkeys on his way back and had paused to hear Fingo’s account, confirming Brother Francis’ find. Although he was not prepared to believe that Francis had discovered anything of real importance, the priest regretted his earlier impatience with the boy. Having noticed the box lying nearby with its contents half-spilled in the road, and having glanced briefly at the note in the lid, while Francis sat groggy and confused at the edge of the trail, Cheroki found himself willing to regard the boy’s earlier babblings as the result of romantic imagination rather than of madness or delirium. He had neither visited the crypt nor closely examined the contents of the box, but it was obvious, at least, that the boy had been misinterpreting real events rather than confessing hallucinations.

“You can finish your confession as soon as we get back,” he told the novice softly, helping him to climb up behind the saddle on the mare. “I think I can absolve you if you don’t insist on personal messages from the saints. Eh?”

Brother Francis was too weak at the moment to insist on anything.

4

“You did the right thing,” the abbot grunted at last. He had been slowly pacing the floor of his study for perhaps five minutes, his wide peasant face wearing a thick-furrowed muscular glower, while Father Cheroki sat nervously on the edge of his chair. Neither priest had spoken since Cheroki had entered the room in answer to his ruler’s summons; Cheroki jumped slightly when Abbot Arkos finally grunted out the words.

“You did the right thing,” the abbot said again, stopping in the center of the room and squinting at his prior, who finally began to relax It was nearly midnight and Arkos had been preparing to retire for an hour or two of sleep before Matins and Lauds. Still damp and disheveled from a recent plunge in the bathing barrel, he reminded Cheroki of a were-bear only incompletely changed into a man. He was wearing a coyote-skin robe, and the only hint of his office was the pectoral cross that nestled in the black fur on his chest and flashed with candlelight whenever he turned toward the desk. His wet hair hung over his forehead, and with his short jutting beard and his coyote skins, he looked, at the moment, less like a priest than a military chieftain, full of restrained battle-anger from a recent assault. Father Cheroki, who came of baronial stock from Denver, tended to react formally to men’s official capacities, tended to speak courteously to the badge of office while not allowing himself to see the man who wore it, in this respect following the Court customs of many ages. Thus Father Cheroki had always maintained a formally cordial relationship with the ring and the pectoral cross, with the office, of his abbot, but permitted himself to see as little as possible of Arkos the man. This was rather difficult under present circumstances, the Reverend Father Abbot being fresh out of his bath, and padding around his study in his bare feet. He had apparently just trimmed a corn and cut too deep; one great toe was bloody. Cheroki tried to avoid noticing it, but felt very ill at ease.

“You do know what I’m talking about?” Arkos growled impatiently.

Cheroki hesitated. “Would you mind, Father Abbot, being specific — in case it’s connected with something I might have heard about only in confession?”

“Hah? Oh! Well, I’m bedeviled! You did hear his confession. I clean forgot. Well, get him to tell you again, so you can talk — though Heaven knows, it’s all over the abbey anyhow. No, don’t go see him now. I’ll tell you, and don’t answer on whatever’s sealed. You’ve seen that stuff?” Abbot Arkos waved toward his desk where the contents of Brother Francis’ box had been emptied for examination.

Cheroki nodded slowly. “He dropped it beside the road when he fell. I helped gather it up, but I didn’t look at it carefully.”

“Well, you know what he claims it is?”

Father Cheroki glanced aside. He seemed not to hear the question.

“All right, all right,” the abbot growled, “never mind what he claims it is. Just go look it over carefully yourself and decide what you think it is.”

Cheroki went to bend over the desk and scrutinize the papers carefully, one at a time, while the abbot paced and kept talking, seemingly to the priest but half to himself.

“It’s impossible! You did the right thing to send him back before he uncovered more. But of course that’s not the worst part. The worst part is the old man he babbles about. It’s getting too thick. I don’t know anything that could damage the case worse than a whole flood of improbable ‘miracles.’ A few real incidents, certainly! It has tobe established that the intercession of the Beatus has brought about the miraculous — before canonization can occur. But there can be too much! Look at the Blessed Chang — beatified two centuries ago, but never canonized — so far. And why? His Order got too eager, that’s why. Every time somebody got over a cough, it was a miraculous cure by the Beatus. Visions in the basement, evocations in the belfry; It sounded more like a collection of ghost stories than a list of miraculous incidents. Maybe two or three incidents were really valid, but when there’s that much chaff — well?”

Father Cheroki looked up. His knuckles had whitened on the edge of the desk and his face seemed strained. He seemed not to have been listening. “I beg your pardon, Father Abbot?”

“Well, the same thing could happen here, that’s what,” said the abbot, and resumed his slow padding to and fro.

“Last year there was Brother Noyon and his miraculous hangman’s noose. Ha! And the year before that, Brother Smirnov gets mysteriously cured of the gout — how? — by touching a probable relic of our Blessed Leibowitz, the young louts say. And now this Francis, he meets a pilgrim — wearing what? — wearing for a kilt the very burlap cloth they hooded Blessed Leibowitz with before they hanged him. And with what for a belt? A rope. What rope? Ahh, the very same—” He paused, looking at Cheroki. “I can tell by your blank look that you haven’t heard this yet? No? All right, so you can’t say. No, no, Francis didn’t say that. All he said was—” Abbot Arkos tried to inject a slightly falsetto quality into his normally gruff voice. “All Brother Francis said was — ’I met a little old man, and I thought he was a pilgrim heading for the abbey because he was going that way, and he was wearing an old burlap sack tied around with a piece of rope. And he made a mark on the rock, and the mark looked like this.’ “

Arkos produced a scrap of parchment from the pocket of his fur robe and held it up toward Cheroki’s face in the candle-glow. Still trying, with only slight success, to imitate Brother Francis: “ ‘And I couldn’t figure out what it meant. Do you know?’”

Cheroki stared at the symbols

and shook his head.

“I wasn’t asking you,” Arkos gruffed in his normal voice. “That’s what Francis said. I didn’t know either.”

“You do now?”

“I do now. Somebody looked it up. That is a lamedh, and that is a sadhe. Hebrew letters.”

“Sadhe lamedh?”

“No. Right to left. Lamedh sadhe. An ell, and a tee-ess sound. If it had vowel marks, it might be ‘loots, ‘lots, ‘lets, ‘lets, ‘latz, ‘litz — anything like that. If it had some letters between those two, it might sound like Lllll — guess-who.”

“Leibo-Ho, no!”

“Ho, yes! Brother Francis didn’t think of it. Somebody else thought of it. Brother Francis didn’t think of the burlap hood and the hangman’s rope; one of his chums did. So what happens? By tonight, the whole novitiate is buzzing with the sweet little story that Francis met the Beatus himself out there, and the Beatus escorted our boy over to where that stuff was and told him he’d find his vocation.”

A perplexed frown crossed Cheroki’s face. “Did Brother Francis say that?”

“NOO!” Arkos roared. “Haven’t you been listening? Francis said no such things. I wish he had, by gum; then I’d HAVE the rascal! But he tells it sweet-and-simple, rather stupidly, in fact, and lets the others read in the meanings. I haven’t talked to him myself. I sent the Rector of the Memorabilia to get his story.”

“I think I’d better talk to Brother Francis,” Cheroki murmured.

“Do! When you first came in, I was still wondering whether to roast you alive or not. For sending him in, I mean. If you had let him stay out there on the desert, we wouldn’t have this fantastic twaddle going around. But, on the other hand, if he’d stayed out there, there’s no telling what else he might have dug out of that cellar. I think you did the right thing, to send him in.”

Cheroki, who had made the decision on no such basis, found silence to be the appropriate policy.

“See him,” growled the abbot. “Then send him to me.”

It was about nine on a bright Monday morning when Brother Francis rapped timidly at the door of the abbot’s study. A good night’s sleep on the hard straw pallet in his old familiar cell, plus a small bite of unfamiliar breakfast, had not perhaps done any wonders for starved tissue or entirely cleared the sun-daze from his brain, but these relative luxuries had at least restored him to sufficient clarity of mind to perceive that he had cause to be afraid. He was, in fact, terrified, so that his first tap at the abbot’s door went unheard. Not even Francis could hear it. After several minutes, he mustered the courage to knock again.

“Benedicamus Domine.”

“Deo? gratias?” asked Francis.

“Come in, my boy, come in!” called an affable voice, which, after some seconds of puzzling, he recognized with amazement to have been that of his sovereign abbot.

“You twist the little knob, my son,” said the same friendly voice after Brother Francis had stood frozen on the spot for some seconds, with his knuckles still in position for knocking.

“Y-y-yes—” Francis scarcely touched the knob, but it seemed that the accursed door opened anyway; he had hoped that it would he tightly stuck.

“The Lord Abbot s-s-sent for — me?” squawked the novice.

Abbot Arkos pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “Mmmm — yes, the Lord Abbot sent for — you. Do come in and shut the door.”

Brother Francis got the door closed and stood shivering In the center of the room. The abbot was toying with some of the wire-whiskered things from the old toolbox.

“Or perhaps it would be more fitting,” said Abbot Arkos, “If the Reverend Father Abbot were sent for by you . Now that you have been so favored by Providence and have become so famous, eh?” He smiled soothingly.

“Heh heh?” Brother Francis laughed inquiringly. “Oh n-n-no, m’Lord.”

“You do not dispute that you have won overnight fame? That Providence elected you to discover THIS—” he gestured sweepingly at the relics on the desk “ — this JUNK box, as its previous owner no doubt rightly called it?”

The novice stammered helplessly, and somehow managed to wind up wearing a grin.

“You are seventeen and plainly an idiot, are you not?”

“That is undoubtedly true, m’Lord Abbot.”

“What excuse do you propose for believing yourself called to Religion?”

“No excuse, Magister meus.”

“Ah? So? Then you feel that you have no vocation to the Order?”

“Oh, I do!” the novice gasped.

“But you propose no excuse?”

“None.”

“You little cretin, I am asking your reason. Since you state none, I take it you are prepared to deny that you met anyone in the desert the other day, that you stumbled on this — this JUNK box with no help, and that what I have been hearing from others is only — feverish raving?”

“Oh, no, Dom Arkos!”

“Oh, no, what?”

“I cannot deny what I saw with my own eyes, Reverend Father.”

“So, you did meet an angel — or was it a saint? — or perhaps not yet a saint? — and he showed you where to look?”

“I never said he was—”

“And this is your excuse for believing yourself to have a true vocation, is it not? That this, this — shall we call him a ‘creature’? — spoke to you of finding a voice, and marked a rock with his initials, and told you it was what you were looking for, and when you looked, under it — there THIS was. Eh?”

“Yes, Dom Arkos.”

“What is your opinion of your own execrable vanity?”

“My execrable vanity is unpardonable, m’Lord’n’Teacher.”

“To imagine yourself important enough to be unpardonable is an even vaster vanity,” roared the sovereign of the abbey.

“M’Lord, I am indeed a worm.”

“Very well, you need only deny the part about the pilgrim. No one else saw such a person, you know. I understand he was supposed to have been headed in this direction? That he even said he might stop here? That he inquired about the abbey? Yes? And where would he have disappeared to, if he ever existed? No such person came past here. The brother on duty at that time in the watchtower didn’t see him. Eh? Are you now ready to admit that you imagined him?”

“If there are not really two marks on that rock where he — then maybe I might—”

The abbot dosed his eyes and sighed wearily. “The marks are there — faintly,” he admitted. “You might have made them yourself.”

“No, m’Lord.”

“Will you admit that you imagined the old creature?”

“No, m’Lord.”

“Very well, do you know what is going to happen to you now?”

“Yes, Reverend Father”

“Then prepare to take it.”

Trembling, the novice gathered up his habit about his waist and bent over the desk. The abbot withdrew a stout hickory ruler from the drawer, tested it on his palm, then gave Francis a smart whack with it across the buttocks.

“Deo gratias!” the novice dutifully responded, gasping slightly.

“Care to change your mind, my boy?”

“Reverend Father, I can’t deny—”

WHACK!

“Deo gratias!”

WHACK!

“Deo gratias!”

Ten times was this simple but painful litany repeated, with Brother Francis yelping his thanks to Heaven for each scorching lesson in the virtue of humility, as he was expected to do. The abbot paused after the tenth whack. Brother Francis was on tip-toe and bouncing slightly. Tears squeezed from the corners of clenched eyelids.

“My dear Brother Francis,” said the Abbot Arkos “are you quite sure you saw the old man?”

“Certain,” he squeaked, steeling himself for more.

Abbot Arkos glanced clinically at the youth, then walked round his desk and sat down with a grunt. He glowered for a time at the slip of parchment bearing the letters.

“Who do you suppose he could have been?” Abbot Arkos muttered absently.

Brother Francis opened his eyes, causing a brief shed of water.

“Oh, you’ve convinced me, boy, worse luck for you.

Francis said nothing, but prayed silently that the need to convince his sovereign of his veracity would not often arise. In response to an irritable gesture from the abbot, he lowered his tunic.

“You may sit down,” said the abbot, becoming casual if not genial

Francis moved toward the indicated chair, lowered himself halfway into it, but then winced and stood up again. “If it’s all the same to the Reverend Father Abbot—”

“All right, then stand. I won’t keep you long anyhow. You’re to go out and finish your vigil.” He paused, noticing the novice’s face brighten a little. “Oh no you don’t!” he snapped. “You’re not going back to the same place. You’ll trade hermitages with Brother Alfred, and not go near those ruins again. Furthermore, I command you not to discuss the matter with anyone, except your confessor or with me, although, Heaven knows, the damage is already done. Do you know what you’ve started?”

Brother Francis shook his bead. “Yesterday being Sunday, Reverend Father, we weren’t required to keep silent, and at recreation I just answered the fellows’ questions. I thought—”

“Well, your fellows have cooked up a very cute explanation, dear son. Did you know that it was the Blessed Leibowitz himself you met out there?”

Francis looked blank for a moment then shook his head again. “Oh, no, m’Lord Abbot. I’m sure it couldn’t have been. The Blessed Martyr wouldn’t do such a thing.”

“Wouldn’t do such-a -what thing?”

“Wouldn’t chase after somebody and try to hit him with a stick that had a nail in one and.”

The abbot wiped his mouth to hide an involuntary smile. He managed to appear thoughtful after a moment. “Oh, I don’t know about that, now. It was you he was chasing, wasn’t it? Yes, I thought so. You told your fellow novices about that part too? Yes, eh? Well, you see, they didn’t think that would exclude the possibility of his being the Beatus. Now I doubt if there are very many people that the Beatus would chase with a stick, but—” He broke off, unable to suppress laughter at the expression on the novice’s face. “All right, son-but who do you suppose he could have been?”

“I thought perhaps be was a pilgrim on his way to visit our shrine, Reverend Father.”

“It isn’t a shrine yet, and you’re not to call it that. And anyway he wasn’t, or at least, he didn’t. And he didn’t pass our gates, unless the watch was asleep. And the novice on watch denies being asleep, although he admitted feeling drowsy that day. So what do you suggest?”

“If the Reverend Father Abbot will forgive me, I’ve been on watch a few times myself.”

“And?”

“Well, on a bright day when there’s nothing moving but the buzzards, after a few hours you just start looking up at the buzzards.”

“Oh you do, do you? When you’re supposed to be watching the trail!”

“And if you stare at the sky too long, you just kind of blank-out-not really asleep, but, sort of, preoccupied.”

“So that’s what you do when you’re on watch, do you?” the abbot growled.

“Not necessarily. I mean, no, Reverend Father, I wouldn’t know it if I had, I don’t think. Brother Je — I mean — a brother I relieved once was like that. He didn’t even know it was time for the watch to change. He was just sitting there in the tower and staring up at the sky with his mouth open. In a daze.”

“Yes, and the first time you go stupefied that way, along’ll come a heathen war-party out of the Utah country, kill a few gardeners, tear up the irrigating system, spoil our crops, and dump stones in the well before we can start defending ourselves. Why are you looking so — oh, I forgot — you were Utah-born before you ran away, weren’t you? But never mind, you could, just possibly, be right about the watch — how he could have missed seeing the old man, that is. You’re sure he was just an ordinary old man — not anything more? Not an angel? Not a beatus?”

The novice’s gaze drifted ceilingward in thought, then fell quickly to his rulers face. “Do angels or saints cast shadows?”

“Yes — I mean no, I mean — how should I know! He did cast a shadow, didn’t he?”

“Well — it was such a small shadow you could hardly see it.”

“What!”

“Because it was almost noon.”

“Imbecile!I’m not asking you to tell me what he was. I know very well what he was, if you saw him at all.” Abbot Arkos thumped repeatedly on the table for emphasis. “I want to know if you — You! — are sure beyond a doubt that he was just an ordinary old man!”

This line of questioning was puzzling to Brother Francis. In his own mind, there was no neat straight line separating the Natural from the Supernatural order, but rather, an intermediate twilight zone. There were things that were clearly natural, and there were Things that were clearly supernatural, but between these extremes was a region of confusion (his own) — the preternatural — where things made of mere earth, air, fire, or water tended to behave disturbingly like Things. For Brother Francis, this region included whatever he could see but not understand. And Brother Francis was never “sure beyond a doubt,” as the abbot was asking him to be, that he properly understood much of anything. Thus, by raising the question at all, Abbot Arkos was unwittingly throwing the novice’s pilgrim into the twilight region, into the same perspective as the old man’s first appearance as a legless black strip that wriggled in the midst of a lake of heat illusion on the trail, into the same perspective as he had occupied momentarily when the novice’s world had contracted until it contained nothing but a hand offering him a particle of food. If some creature more-than-human chose to disguise itself as human, how was he to penetrate its disguise, or suspect there was one? If such a creature did not wish to be suspected, would it not remember to cast a shadow, leave footprints, eat bread and cheese? Might it not chew spice-leaf, spit at a lizard, and remember to imitate the reaction of a mortal who forgot to put on his sandals before stepping on hot ground? Francis was not prepared to estimate the intelligence or ingenuity of hellish or heavenly beings, or to guess the extent of their histrionic abilities, although he assumed such creatures to be either hellishly or divinely clever. The abbot, by raising the question at all, had formulated the nature of Brother Francis’ answer, which was: to entertain the question itself, although he had not previously done so.

“Well, boy?”

“M’Lord Abbot, you don’t suppose he might have been—”

“I’m asking you not to suppose. I’m asking you to be flatly certain. Was he, or was he not, an ordinary flesh-and-blood person?”

The question was frightening. That the question was dignified by coming from the lips of so exalted a person as his sovereign abbot made it even more frightening, though he could plainly see that his ruler stated it merely because he wanted a particular answer. He wanted it rather badly. If he wanted it that badly, the question must be important. If the question was important enough for an abbot, then it was far too important for Brother Francis who dared not be wrong.

“I-I think he was flesh and blood, Reverend Father, but not exactly “ordinary.” In some ways, he was rather extra ordinary.”

“What ways?” Abbot Arkos asked sharply.

“Like-how straight he could spit. And he could read, I think.”

The abbot dosed his eyes and rubbed his temples in apparent exasperation. How easy it would have been flatly to have told the boy that his pilgrim was only an old tramp of some kind, and then to have commanded him not to think otherwise. But by allowing the boy to see that a question was possible, he had rendered such a command ineffective before he uttered it. Insofar as thought could be governed at all, it could only be commanded to follow what reason affirmed anyhow; command it otherwise, and it would not obey. Like any wise ruler, Abbot Arkos did not issue orders vainly, when to disobey was possible and to enforce was not possible. It was better to look the other way than to command ineffectually. He had asked a question that he himself could not answer by reason, having never seen the old man, and had thereby lost the right to make the answer mandatory.

“Get out,” he said at last, without opening his eyes.

5

Somewhat mystified by the commotion at the abbey, Brother Francis returned to the desert that same day to complete his Lenten vigil in rather wretched solitude. He had expected some excitement about the relics to arise, but the excessive interest which everyone had taken in the old wanderer surprised him. Francis had spoken of the old man, simply because of the part he had played, either by accident or by design of Providence, in the monk’s stumbling upon the crypt and its relics. The pilgrim was only a minor ingredient, as far as Francis was concerned, in a mandala design at whose center rested a relic of a saint. But his fellow novices had seemed more interested in the pilgrim than in the relic, and even the abbot had summoned him, not to ask about the box, but to ask about the old man. They had asked him a hundred questions about the pilgrim to which he could reply only: “I didn’t notice,” or “I wasn’t looking right then,” or “If he said, I don’t remember,” and some of the questions were a little weird. And so he questioned himself: Should I have noticed? Was I stupid not to watch what he did? Wasn’t I paying enough attention to what he said? Did I miss something important because I was dazed?

He brooded on it in the darkness while the wolves prowled about his new encampment and filled the nights with their howling. He caught himself brooding on it during times of the day that were assigned as proper for the prayers and spiritual exercises of the vocational vigil, and he confessed as much to Prior Cheroki the next time the priest rode his Sunday circuit. “You shouldn’t let the romantic imaginations of the others bother you; you have enough trouble with your own,” the priest told him, after chiding him for neglecting the exercises and prayers. “They don’t think up questions like that on the basis of what might be true; they concoct the questions on the basis of what might be sensational if it just happened to be true. It’s ridiculous! I can tell you that the Reverend Father Abbot has ordered the entire novitiate to drop the subject.” After a moment, he unfortunately added: “There really wasn’t anything about the old man to suggest the supernatural — was there?” with only the faintest trace of hopeful wonder in his tone.

Brother Francis wondered too. If there had been a suggestion of the supernatural, he had not noticed it. But then too, judging by the number of questions he had been unable to answer, he had not noticed very much. The profusion of the questions had made him feel that his failure to observe had been, somehow, culpable. He had become grateful to the pilgrim upon discovering the shelter. But he had not interpreted events entirely in terms of his own interests, in accordance with his own longing for some shred of evidence that the dedication of his lifetime to the labors of the monastery was born not so much of his own will as it was of grace, empowering the will, but not compelling it, rightly to choose. Perhaps the events had a vaster significance that he had missed, during the totality of his self-absorption.

What is your opinion of your own execrable vanity?

My execrable vanity is like that of the fabled cat whostudied ornithology, m’Lord.

His desire to profess his final and perpetual vows — was it not akin to the motive of the cat who became an ornithologist? — so that he might glorify his own ornithophagy, esoterically devouring Penthestes atricapillus but never eating chickadees. For, as the cat was called by Nature to be an ornithophage, so was Francis called by his own nature hungrily to devour such knowledge as could be taught in those days, and, because there were no schools but the monastic schools, he had donned the habit first of a postulant, later of a novice. But to suspect that God as well as Nature had beckoned him to become a professed monk of the Order?

What else could he do? There was no returning to his homeland, the Utah. As a small child, he had been sold to a shaman, who would have trained him as his servant and acolyte. Having run away, he could not return, except to meet grisly tribal “justice.” He had stolen a shaman’s property (Francis’ own person), and while thievery was an honorable profession among the Utah, getting caught was a capital crime when the thief’s victim was the tribal warlock. Nor would he have cared to lapse back into the relatively primitive life of an illiterate shepherd people, after his schooling at the abbey.

But what else? The continent was lightly settled. He thought of the wall-map in the abbey’s library, and of the sparse distribution of the crosshatched areas, which were regions — if not of civilization — then of civil order, where some form of lawful sovereignty, transcending the tribal, held sway. The rest of the continent was populated, very thinly, by the people of the forest and the plain, who were, for the most part, not savages, but simple clanfolk loosely organized into small communities here and there, who lived by hunting, gathering, and primitive agriculture, whose birth rate was barely high enough (discounting monster-births and sports) to sustain the population. The principal industries of the continent, excepting a few seacoast regions, were hunting, farming, fighting, and witchcraft — the last being the most promising “industry” for any youth with a choice of careers and having in mind as primary ends, maximum wealth and prestige.

The schooling which Francis had been given at the abbey prepared him for nothing which was of practical value in a dark, ignorant, and workaday world, where literacy was nonexistent and a literate youth, therefore, seemed of no worth to a community unless he could also farm, fight, hunt or show some special talent for inter-tribal theft, or for the divining of water and workable metal. Even in the scattered domains where a form of civil order existed, the fact of Francis’ literacy would help him not at all, if he must lead a life apart from the Church. It was true that petty barons sometimes employed a scribe or two, but such cases were rare enough to be negligible, and were as often filled by monks as by monastery-schooled laymen.

The only demand for scribes and secretaries was created by the Church herself, whose tenuous hierarchic web was stretched across the continent (and occasionally to far-distant shores, although the diocesans abroad were virtually autonomous rulers, subject to the Holy See in theory but seldom in practice, being cut off from New Rome less by schism than by oceans not often crossed) and could be held together only by a communication network. The Church had become, quite coincidentally and without meaning to be, the only means whereby news was transmitted from place to place across the continent. If plague came to the northeast, the southwest would soon hear of it, as a coincidental effect of tales told and retold by messengers of the Church, coming and going from New Rome.

If the nomadic infiltration in the far northwest threatened a Christian diocese, an encyclical letter might soon be read from pulpits far to the south and east, warning of the threat and extending the apostolic benediction to “men of any station, so long as they be skilled at arms, who, having the means to make the journey, may be piously disposed to do so, in order to swear fealty to Our beloved son, N., lawful ruler of that place, for such a period of time as may seem necessary for the maintenance of standing armies there for defense of Christians against the gathering heathen horde, whose ruthless savagery is known to many and who, to Our deepest grief, tortured, murdered, and devoured those priests of God which We Ourselves sent to them with the Word, that they might enter as lambs into the fold of the Lamb, of whose flock on Earth We are the Shepherd; for, while We have never despaired nor ceased to pray that these nomadic children of the darkness may be led into the Light and enter Our realms in peace (for it is not to be thought that peaceful strangers should be repelled from a land so vast and empty; nay, they should be welcomed who come peacefully, even should they be strangers to the visible Church and its Divine Founder, so long as they hearken to that Natural Law which is written in the hearts of all men, binding them to Christ in spirit, though they be ignorant of His Name), it is nevertheless meet and fitting and prudent that Christendom, while praying for peace and the conversion of the heathen, should gird itself for defense in the Northwest, where the hordes gather and the incidents of heathen savagery have lately increased, and upon each of you, beloved sons, who can bear arms and shall travel to the Northwest to join forces with those who prepare rightfully to defend their lands, homes, and churches, We extend, and hereby bestow, as a sign of Our special affection, the Apostolic Benediction.”

Francis had thought briefly of going to the northwest, if he failed to find a vocation to the Order. But, although he was strong and skillful enough with blade and bow, he was rather short and not very heavy, while — according to rumor — the heathen was nine feet tall. He could not testify as to the truth of the rumor, but saw no reason to think it false.

Besides dying in battle, there was very little that he could think of to do with his lifetime — little that seemed worth the doing — if he could not devote it to the Order.

His certainty of his vocation had not been broken, but only slightly bent, by the scorching administered to him by the abbot, and by the thought of the cat who became an ornithologist when called only by Nature to become an ornithophage. The thought made him unhappy enough to permit him to be overcome by temptation, so that, on Palm Sunday, with only six days of starvation remaining until the end of Lent, Prior Cheroki heard from Francis (or from the shriveled and sun-scorched residuum of Francis, wherein the soul remained somehow encysted) a few brief croaks which constituted what was probably the most succinct confession that Francis ever made or Cheroki ever heard:

“Bless me, Father; I ate a lizard.”

Prior Cheroki having for many years been confessor to fasting penitents, found that custom had, with him, as with a fabled gravedigger, given it all “a property of easiness,” so that he replied with perfect equanimity and not even a blink: “Was it an abstinence day, and was it artificially prepared?”

Holy Week would have been less lonely than the earlier weeks of Lent, had the hermits not been, by then, past caring; for some of the Passiontide liturgy was carried outside the abbey walls to touch the penitents at their vigil sites; twice the Eucharist came forth, and on Maundy Thursday the abbot himself made the rounds, with Cheroki and thirteen monks, to perform the Mandatum at each hermitage. Abbot Arkos’ vestments were concealed under a cowl, and the lion almost managed to seem humble kitten as he knelt, and washed and kissed the feet of his fasting subjects with maximum economy of movement and a minimum of flourish and display, while the others chanted the antiphons.

“Mandatum novum do vobis: ut diligatis invicem…” On Good Friday a Procession of the Cross brought out a veiled crucifix, stopping at each hermitage to unveil it gradually before the penitent, lifting the cloth inch by inch for the Adoration, while the monks chanted the Reproaches:

“My people, what have I done to thee? or in what have I grieved thee? Answer…I exalted thee with virtuous power; and thou hangest me from the gibbet of a cross…”

And then, Holy Saturday.

The monks carried them in one at a time — famished and raving. Francis was thirty pounds lighter and several degrees weaker than he had been on Ash Wednesday. When they set him on his feet in his own cell, he staggered, and before he reached the bunk, he fell. The brothers hoisted him into it, bathed him, shaved him, and anointed his blistered skin, while Francis babbled deliriously about something in a burlap loincloth, addressing it at times as an angel and again as a saint, frequently invoking the name of Leibowitz and trying to apologize.

His brethren, forbidden by the abbot to speak of the matter, merely exchanged significant glances or nodded mysteriously among themselves.

Reports filtered to the abbot.

“Bring him here,” he grunted at a recorder as soon as he heard that Francis could walk. His tone sent the recorder scurrying.

“Do you deny saying these things?” Arkos growled.

“I don’t remember saying them, m’Lord Abbot,” said the novice, eyeing the abbot’s ruler. “I may have been raving.”

“Assuming that you were raving — would you say it again now?”

“About the pilgrim being the Beatus? Oh, no, Magister meus!”

“Then assert the contrary.”

“I don’t think the pilgrim was the Beatus”

“Why not just a straightforward He was not?”

“Well, never having seen the Blessed Leibowitz personally, I wouldn’t—”

“Enough!” the abbot ordered. “Too much! That’s all I want to see of you and hear of you for a long, long time! Out! But just one thing — DON’T expect to profess your vows with the others this year. You won’t be permitted.”

For Francis it was like a blow in the stomach with the endof a log.

6

As topic for conversation, the pilgrim remained forbidden subject matter in the abbey; but with respect to the relics and the fallout shelter the prohibition was, of necessity, gradually relaxed — except for their discoverer who remained under orders not to discuss them, and preferably to think of the matter as little as possible. Still, he could not avoid hearing things now and again, and he knew that in one of the abbey’s workshops, monks were at work on the documents, not only his own but some others that had been found in the ancient desk, before the abbot ordered that the shelter be closed.

Closed! The news jolted Brother Francis. The shelter scarcely had been touched. Beyond his own adventure, there had been no attempt to penetrate further into the secrets of the shelter except to open the desk which he had tried to open, with no success, before he noticed the box. Closed! With no attempt to discover what might lie beyond the inner door marked “Hatch Two” nor to investigate “Sealed Environment.” Without even removing the stones or the bones. Closed! The investigation abruptly choked off, withoutapparent cause.

Then there began a rumor.

“Emily had a gold tooth. Emily had a gold tooth. Emily had a gold tooth.” It was, in fact, quite true. It was one of those historical trivialities that manage somehow to outlive important facts which someone should have bothered to remember but which went unrecorded until some monastic historian was forced to write: “Neither the contents of the Memorabilia nor any archaeological source yet uncovered disclose the name of the ruler who occupied the White Palace during the middle and late sixties, although Fr. Barcus has claimed, not without supporting evidence, that his name was—”

And yet, it was clearly recorded in the Memorabilia that Emily had worn a gold tooth.

It was not surprising that the Lord Abbot commanded that the crypt be sealed forthwith. Remembering how he had lifted the ancient skull and turned it to face the wall, Brother Francis suddenly feared the wrath of Heaven. Emily Leibowitz had vanished from the face of the Earth at the beginning of the Flame Deluge, and only after many years would her widower admit that she was dead.

It was said that God, in order to test mankind which had become swelled with pride as in the time of Noah, had commanded the wise men of that age, among them the Blessed Leibowitz, to devise great engines of war such as had never before been upon the Earth, weapons of such might that they contained the very fires of Hell, and that God had suffered these magi to place the weapons in the hands of princes, and to say to each prince: “Only because the enemies have such a thing have we devised this for thee, in order that they may know that thou hast it also, and fear to strike. See to it, m’Lord, that thou fearest them as much as they shall now fear thee, that none may unleash this dread thing which we have wrought.”

But the princes, putting the words of their wise men to naught, thought each to himself: If I but strike quickly enough, and in secret, I shall destroy these others in their sleep, and there will be none to fight back; the earth shall be mine.

Such was the folly of princes, and there followed the Flame Deluge

Within weeks — some said days — it was ended, after the first unleashing of the hell-fire. Cities had become puddles of glass, surrounded by vast acreages of broken stone. While nations had vanished from the earth, the lands littered with bodies, both men and cattle, and all manner of beasts, together with the birds of the air and all things that flew, all things that swam in the rivers, crept in the grass, or burrowed in holes; having sickened and perished, they covered the land, and yet where the demons of the Fallout covered the countryside, the bodies for a time would not decay, except in contact with fertile earth. The great clouds of wrath engulfed the forests and the fields, withering trees and causing the crops to die. There were great deserts where once life was, and in those places of the Earth where men still lived, all were sickened by the poisoned air, so that, while some escaped death, none was left untouched; and many died even in those lands where the weapons had not struck, because of the poisoned air.

In all parts of the world men fled from one place to other places, and there was a confusion of tongues. Much wrath was kindled against the princes and the servants of the princes and against the magi who had devised the weapons. Years passed, and yet the Earth was not cleansed. So it was clearly recorded in the Memorabilia.

From the confusion of tongues, the intermingling of the remnants of many nations, from fear, the hate was born. And the hate said: Let us stone and disembowel and burn the ones who did this thing. Let us make a holocaust of those who wrought this crime, together with their hirelings and their wise men; burning, let them perish, and all their works, their names, and even their memories. Let us destroy them all, and teach our children that the world is new, that they may know nothing of the deeds that went before. Let us make a great simplification, and then the world shall begin again.

So it was that, after the Deluge, the Fallout, the plagues, the madness, the confusion of tongues, the rage, there began the bloodletting of the Simplification, when remnants of mankind had torn other remnants limb from limb, killing rulers, scientists, leaders, technicians, teachers, and whatever persons the leaders of the maddened mobs said deserved death for having helped to make the Earth what it had become. Nothing had been so hateful in the sight of these mobs as the man of learning, at first because they had served the princes, but then later because they refused to join in the bloodletting and tried to oppose the mobs, calling the crowds “bloodthirsty simpletons.”

Joyfully the mobs accepted the name, took up the cry: Simpletons! Yes, yes! I’m a simpleton! Are you a simpleton? We’ll build a town and we’ll name it Simple Town, because by then all the smart bastards that caused all this, they’ll bedead! simpletons! let’s go. this ought to show ‘em! anybody here not a simpleton? Get the bastard, if there is!

To escape the fury of the simpleton packs, such learned people as still survived fled to any sanctuary that offered itself. When Holy Church received them, she vested them in monks’ robes and tried to hide them in such monasteries and convents as had survived and could be reoccupied, for the religious were less despised by the mob except when they openly defied it and accepted martyrdom. Sometimes such sanctuary was effective, but more often it was not. Monasteries were invaded, records and sacred books were burned, refugees were seized and summarily hanged or burned. The Simplification had ceased to have plan or purpose soon after it began, and became an insane frenzy of mass murder and destruction such as can occur only when the last traces of social order are gone. The madness was transmitted to the children, taught as they were — not merely to forget — but to hate, and surges of mob fury recurred sporadically even through the fourth generation after the Deluge. By then, the fury was directed not against the learned, for there were none, but against the merely literate.

Isaac Edward Leibowitz, after a fruitless search for his wife, had fled to the Cistercians where he remained in hiding during the early post-Deluge years. After six years, he had gone once more to search for Emily or her grave, in the far southwest. There he had become convinced at last of her death, for death was unconditionally triumphant in that place. There in the desert he quietly made a vow. Then he went back to the Cistercians, took their habit, and after more years became a priest. He gathered a few companions about him and made some quiet proposals. After a few more years, the proposals filtered to “Rome,” which was no longer Rome (which was no longer a city), having moved elsewhere, moved again, and still again — in less than two decades, after staying in one place for two millennia. Twelve years after the proposals were made, Father Isaac Edward Leibowitz had won permission from the Holy See to found a new community of religious, to be named after Albertus Magnus, teacher of Saint Thomas, and patron of men of science. Its task, unannounced and at first only vaguely defined, was to preserve human history for the great-great-great-grandchildren of the children of the simpletons who wanted it destroyed. Its earliest habit was burlap rags and bindlestiffs — the uniform of the simpleton mob. Its members were either “bookleggers” or “memorizers,” according to the tasks assigned. The bookleggers smuggled books to the southwest desert and buried them there in kegs. The memorizers committed to rote memory entire volumes of history, sacred writings, literature, and science, in case some unfortunate book smuggler was caught, tortured, and forced to reveal the location of the kegs. Meanwhile, other members of the new Order located a water hole about three days’ journey from the book cache and began the building of a monastery. The project, aimed at saving a small remnant of human culture from the remnant of humanity who wanted it destroyed, was then underway.

Leibowitz, while taking his own turn at booklegging, was caught by a simpleton mob; a turncoat technician, whom the priest swiftly forgave, identified him as not only a man of learning, but also a specialist in the weapons field. Hooded in burlap, he was martyred forthwith, by strangulation with a hangman’s noose not tied for neck-breaking, at the same time being roasted alive — thus settling a dispute in the crowd concerning the method of execution.

The memorizers were few, their memories limited.

Some of the book kegs were found and burned, as well as several other bookleggers. The monastery itself was attacked thrice before the madness subsided.

From the vast store of human knowledge, only a few kegs of original books and a pitiful collection of hand-copied texts, rewritten from memory, had survived in the possession of the Order by the time the madness had ended.

Now, after six centuries of darkness, the monks still preserved this Memorabilia, studied it, copied and recopied it, and patiently waited. At the beginning, in the time of Leibowitz, it had been hoped — and even anticipated as probable — that the fourth or fifth generation would begin to want its heritage back. But the monks of the earliest days had not counted on the human ability to generate a new cultural inheritance in a couple of generations if an old one is utterly destroyed, to generate it by virtue of lawgivers and prophets, geniuses or maniacs; through a Moses, or through a Hitler, or an ignorant but tyrannical grandfather, a cultural inheritance may be acquired between dusk and dawn, and many have been so acquired. But the new “culture” was an inheritance of darkness, wherein “simpleton” meant the same thing as “citizen” meant the same thing as “slave.” The monks waited. It mattered not at all to them that the knowledge they saved was useless, that much of it was not really knowledge now, was as inscrutable to the monks in some instances as it would be to an illiterate wild-boy from the hills; this knowledge was empty of content, its subject matter long since gone. Still, such knowledge had a symbolic structure that was peculiar to itself, and at least the symbol-interplay could be observed. To observe the way a knowledge-system is knit together is to learn at least a minimum knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday — someday, or some century — an Integrator would come, and things would be fitted together again. So time mattered not at all. The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years, for they, though born in that darkest of ages, were still the very bookleggers and memorizers of the Beatus Leibowitz; and when they wandered abroad from their abbey, each of them, the professed of the Order — whether stable-hand or Lord Abbot — carried as part of his habit a book, usually a Breviary these days, tied up in a bindlestiff.

After the shelter was closed, the documents and relics which had been taken from it were quietly rounded up, one at a time and in an unobtrusive manner, by the abbot. They became unavailable for inspection, presumably locked in Arkos’ study. For all practical purposes, they had vanished. Anything which vanished at the level of the abbot’s study was not safe subject matter for public discussion. It was something to be whispered about in quiet corridors. Brother Francis seldom heard the whispers. Eventually, they stopped, only to be revived when a messenger from New Rome muttered with the abbot in the refectory one night. An occasional snatch of their muttering reached adjacent tables. The whispers lasted for a few weeks after the messenger’s departure, then subsided again.

Brother Francis Gerard of Utah returned to the desert the following year and fasted again in solitude. Once more he returned, weak and emaciated, and soon was summoned into the presence of Abbot Arkos, who demanded to know whether he claimed further conferences with members of the Heavenly Hosts.

“Oh, no, m’Lord Abbot. Nothing by day but buzzards.”

“By night?” Arkos asked suspiciously.

“Only wolves,” said Francis, adding cautiously: “I think.”

Arkos did not choose to belabor the cautious amendment, but merely frowned. The abbot’s frown, Brother Francis had come to observe, was the causative source of radiant energy which traveled through space with finite velocity and which was as yet not very well understood except in terms of its withering effect upon whatever thing absorbed it, that thing usually being a postulant or novice. Francis had absorbed a five-second burst of the stuff by the time the next question was put to him.

“Now what about last year?”

The novice paused to swallow. “The — old — man?”

“The old man.”

“Yes, Dom Arkos.”

Trying to keep any hint of a question mark out of his tone, Arkos droned: “Just an old man. Nothing more. We’re sure of that now.”

“I think it was just an old man, too.”

Father Arkos reached wearily for the hickory ruler.

WHACK!

“Deo gratias!”

WHACK!”

“Deo…”

As Francis returned to his cell, the abbot called after him down the corridor: “By the way, I intended to mention…”

“Yes, Reverend Father?”

“No vows this year,” he said absently, and vanished into his study.

7

Brother Francis spent seven years in the novitiate, seven Lenten vigils in the desert, and became highly proficient in the imitation of wolf calls. For the amusement of his brethren, he summoned the pack to the vicinity of the abbey by howling from the walls after dark. By day, he served in the kitchen, scrubbed the stone floors, and continued his classroom study of antiquity.

Then one day a messenger from a seminary in New Rome came riding to the abbey on an ass. After a long conference with the abbot, the messenger sought out Brother Francis. He seemed surprised to find that youth, now fully a man, still wearing the habit of a novice and scrubbing the kitchen floor.

“We have been studying the documents you discovered, for some years now,” he told the novice. “Quite a few of us are convinced they’re authentic.”

Francis lowered his head. “I’m not permitted to mention the matter, Father,” he said.

“Oh, that.” The messenger smiled and handed him a scrap of paper bearing the abbot’s seal, and written in the ruler’s hand: Ecce Inquisitor Curiae. Ausculta et obsequere. Arkos, AOL, Abbas.

“It’s all right,” he added hastily, noticing the novice’s sudden tension. “I’m not speaking to you officially. Someone else from the court will take your statements later. You know, don’t you, that your papers have been in New Rome for some time now? I just brought some of them back.”

Brother Francis shook his head. He knew less, perhaps, than anyone, concerning high-level reactions to his discovery of the relies. He noticed that the messenger wore the white habit of the Dominicans, and he wondered with a certain uneasiness about the nature of the “court” whereof the Black Friar had spoken. There was an inquisition against Catharism in the Pacific Coast region, but he could not imagine how that court could be concerned with relics of the Beatus. Ecce Inquisitor Curiae, the note said. Probably the abbot meant “investigator.” The Dominican seemed a rather mild-humored man, and was not carrying any visible engines of torture.

“We expect the case for canonization of your founder to be reopened soon,” the messenger explained. “Your Abbot Arkos is a very wise and prudent man.” He chuckled. “By turning the relics over to another Order for examination, and by having the shelter sealed before it was fully explored — well, you do understand, don’t you?”

“No, Father. I had supposed he thought the whole thing too trivial to spend any time on.”

The Black Friar laughed. “Trivial? I think not. But if your Order turns up evidence, relics, miracles, and whatever, the court has to consider the source. Every religious community is eager to see its founder canonized. So your abbot very wisely told you: ‘Hands off the shelter.’ I’m sure it’s been frustrating for all of you, but — better for the cause of your founder to let the shelter be explored with other witnesses present.”

“You’re going to open it again?” Francis asked eagerly.

“No, not I. But when the court is ready, it will send observers. Then anything that is found in the shelter that might affect the case will be safe, in case the opposition questions its authenticity. Of course, the only reason for suspecting that the contents of the shelter might affect the cause is — Well, the things you found.”

“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 my 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.

The knowledge that the color scheme of blueprints was an accidental feature of those ancient drawings lent impetus to his plan. A glorified copy of the Leibowitz print could be made without incorporating the accidental feature. With the color scheme reversed, no one would recognize the drawing at first. Certain other features could obviously be modified. He dared change nothing that he did not understand, but surely the parts tables and the block-lettered information could be spread symmetrically around the diagram on scrolls and shields. Because the meaning of the diagram itself was obscure, he dared not alter its shape or plan by a hair; but since its color scheme was unimportant, it might as well be beautiful. He considered gold inlay for the squiggles and doohickii, but the thingumbob was too intricate for goldwork, and a gold quid would seem ostentatious. The quiggles just had to be done jet black, but that meant that the lines should be off-black, to assert the quiggles. While the unsymmetrical design would have to stay as it was, he could think of no reason why its meaning would be altered by using it as a trellis for a climbing vine, whose branches (carefully dodging the quiggles) might be made to furnish an impression of symmetry or render asymmetry natural. When Brother Horner illuminated a capital M, transmuting it into a wonderful jungle of leaves, berries, branches, and perhaps a wily serpent, it nevertheless remained legible as M. Brother Francis saw no reason for supposing that the same would not apply to the diagram.

The general shape, over-all, with a scrolled border, might well become a shield, rather than the stark rectangle which enclosed the drawing in the print. He made dozens of preliminary sketches. At the very top of the parchment would be a representation of the Triune God, and at the very bottom — the coat of arms of the Albertian Order, with, just above it the image of the Beatus.

But there was no accurate likeness of the Beatus in existence, so far as Francis knew. There were several fanciful portraits, but none dating back to the Simplification. There was, as yet, not even a conventional representation, although tradition told that Leibowitz had been rather tall and somewhat stooped. But perhaps when the shelter was reopened — Brother Francis’ preliminary sketchwork was interrupted one afternoon by his sudden awareness that the presence which loomed behind him and cast its shadow across his copy-table was that of — was that of — No! Please! Beate Leibowitz, audi me! Mercy, Lord! Let it be anybody but —

“Well, what have we here?” rumbled the abbot, glancing over his designs.

“A drawing, m’Lord Abbot.”

“So I notice. But what is it?”

“The Leibowitz blueprint.”

“That one you found? What? It doesn’t look much like it. Why the changes?”

“It’s going to be—”

“Speak louder!”

“ — AN ILLUMINATED COPY!” Brother Francis involuntarily shrieked.

“Oh.”

Abbot Arkos shrugged and wandered away.

Brother Horner, a few seconds later, while wandering past the apprentice’s desk was surprised to notice that Francis had fainted.

8

To the amazement of Brother Francis, Abbot Arkos no longer objected to the monk’s interest in the relics. Since the Dominicans had agreed to examine the matter, the abbot had relaxed; and since the cause for the canonization had resumed some progress in New Rome, he appeared at times to forget entirely that anything special had happened during the vocational vigil of one Francis Gerard, AOL, formerly of Utah, presently of the scriptorium and copyroom. The incident was eleven years old. The preposterous whisperings in the novitiate concerning the pilgrim’s identity had long since died away. The novitiate of Brother Francis’ time was not the novitiate of today. The newest of the new crop of youngsters had never heard of the affair.

The affair had cost Brother Francis seven Lenten vigils among the wolves, however, and he never fully trusted the subject as safe. Whenever he mentioned it, he would dream that night of wolves and of Arkos; in the dream, Arkos kept flinging meat to the wolves, and the meat was Francis.

The monk found, however, that he might continue his project without being molested, except by Brother Jeris who continued to tease. Francis began the actual illumination of the lambskin. The intricacies of scrollwork and the excruciating delicacy of the gold-inlay work would, because of the brevity of his spare-project time, make it a labor of many years; but in a dark sea of centuries wherein nothing seemed to flow, a lifetime was only brief eddy, even for the man who livedit. there was a tedium of repeated days and repeated seasons; then there were aches and pains, finally Extreme Unction, and a moment of blackness at the end — or at the beginning, rather. For then the small shivering soul who had endured the tedium, endured it badly or well, would find itself in a place of light, find itself absorbed in the burning gaze of infinitely compassionate eyes as it stood before the Just One. And then the King would say: “Come,” or the King would say: “Go,” and only for that moment had the tedium of years existed. It would be hard to believe differently during such an age as Francis knew.

Brother Sarl finished the fifth page of his mathematical restoration, collapsed over his desk, and died a few hours later. Never mind. His notes were intact. Someone, after a century or two, would come along and find them interesting, would perhaps complete his work. Meanwhile, prayers ascended for the soul of Sarl.

Then there was Brother Fingo and his woodcarving. He had been returned to the carpentry shop a year or two ago and was permitted occasionally to chisel and scrape at his half-finished image of the Martyr. Like Francis, Fingo had only an hour now and then to work at his chosen task; the woodcarving progressed at a rate that was almost imperceptible unless one looked at the carving only after intervals of several months. Francis saw it too frequently to notice the growth. He found himself charmed by Fingo’s easy-going exuberance, even while realizing that Fingo had adopted his affable manner to compensate for his ugliness, and he liked to spend idle minutes, whenever he could find them, watching Fingo work.

The carpentry shop was rich with the odors of pine, cedar, spruce shavings, and human sweat. Wood was not easy to obtain at the abbey. Except for fig trees and a couple of cottonwoods in the immediate vicinity of the water hole, the region was treeless. It was a three-day ride to the nearest stand of scrub that passed for timber, and the woodgatherers often were gone from the abbey for a week at a time before they came back with a few donkeyloads of branches for making pegs, spokes, and an occasional chair leg. Sometimes they dragged back a log or two for replacing a rotting beam, But with such a limited wood supply, carpenters were necessarily woodcarvers and sculptors as well.

Sometimes, while watching Fingo carve, Francis would sit on a bench in the corner of the workshop and sketch, trying to visualize details of the carving which were, as yet, only roughly hewed in the wood. The vague outlines of the face were there, but still masked by splinters and chisel-marks. With his sketches, Brother Francis tried to anticipate the features before they emerged from the grain. Fingo glanced at his sketches and laughed. But as the work progressed, Francis could not escape the feeling that the face of the carving was smiling a vaguely familiar smile. He sketched it thus, and the feeling of familiarity increased. Still, he could not place the face, or recall who had smiled so wryly.

“Not bad, really Not bad at all,” said Fingo of his sketches.

The copyist shrugged. “I can’t get over the feeling that I’ve seen him before.”

“Not around here, Brother. Not in my time.”

Francis fell ill during Advent, and several months had passed before he visited the workshop again.

“The face is nearly finished, Francisco,” said the woodcarver. “How do you like it now?”

“I know him!” Francis gasped, staring at the merry-but-sad wrinkled eyes, the hint of a wry smile at the corners of the mouth — somehow almost too familiar.

“You do? Who is it then?” wondered Fingo.

“It’s — well, I’m not sure. I think I know him. But—”

Fingo laughed. “You’re just recognizing your own sketches,” he offered in explanation.

Francis was not so certain. Still, he could not quite place the face.

Hmm-hnnn! the wry smile seemed to say.

The abbot found the smile irritating, however. While he allowed the work to be completed, he declared that be would never permit it to be used for the purpose originally planned — as an image to be placed in the church if the canonization of the Beatus were ever accomplished. Many years later, when the whole figure was completed, Arkos caused it to be set up in the corridor of the guesthouse, but later transferred it to his study after it had shocked a visitor from New Rome.

Slowly, painfully, Brother Francis was making the lambskin a blaze of beauty. Word of his project spread beyond the copyroom, and the monks often gathered around his table to watch the work and murmur admiration. “Inspiration,” someone whispered. “There’s evidence enough. It could have been the Beatus he met out there—”

“I don’t see why you don’t spend your time on something useful,” grumbled Brother Jeris, whose sarcastic wit had been exhausted by several years of patient answers from Brother Francis. The skeptic had been using his own free-project time for making and decorating oilskin shades for the lamps in the church, thereby winning the attention of the abbot, who soon placed him in charge of the perennials. As the account ledgers soon began to testify, Brother Jeris’ promotion was justified.

Brother Horner, the old master copyist, fell ill. Within weeks, it became apparent that the well-loved monk was on his deathbed. A Mass of Burial was chanted early in Advent. The remains of the saintly old master-copyist were committed to the earth of their origin. While the community expressed its grief in prayer, Arkos quietly appointed Brother Jeris as master of the copyroom.

On the day after his appointment, Brother Jeris informed Brother Francis that be considered it appropriate for him to put away the things of a child and start doing a man’s work. Obediently, the monk wrapped his precious project in parchment, protected it with heavy boards, shelved it, and began making oilskin lampshades in his spare time. He murmured no protest, but contented himself with realizing that someday the soul of dear Brother Jeris would depart by the same road as the soul of Brother Horner, to begin that life for which this world was but a staging ground — might begin it at a rather early age, judging by the extent to which he fretted, fumed, and drove himself; and afterward, God willing, Francis might be allowed to complete his beloved document.

Providence, however, took an earlier hand in the matter, without summoning the soul of Brother Jeris to its Maker. During the summer which followed his appointment as master, a prothonotary apostolic and his retinue of clerks came by way of a donkey train to the abbey from New Rome; he introduced himself as Monsignor Malfreddo Aguerra, the postulator for the Beatus Leibowitz in the canonization procedure. With him were several Dominicans. He had come to observe the reopening of the shelter and the exploration of “Sealed Environment.” Also, to investigate such evidence as the abbey could produce that might have a bearing on the case, including — to the abbot’s dismay — reports of an alleged apparition of the Beatus which had, so travelers said, come to one Francis Gerard of Utah, AOL.

The Saint’s advocate was warmly greeted by the monks, was quartered in the rooms reserved for visiting prelates, was lavishly served by six young novices instructed to be responsive to his every whim, although, as it turned out., Monsignor Aguerra was a man of few whims, to the disappointment of would-be caterers. The finest wines were opened; Aguerra sipped them politely but preferred milk. Brother Huntsman snared plump quail and chaparral cocks for the guest’s table; but after inquiring about the feeding habits of the chaparral cocks (“Corn fed, Brother?”—”No, snake-fed, Messér”), Monsignor Aguerra seemed to prefer monks-gruel in the refectory. If only he had inquired about the anonymous bits of meat in the stews, he might have preferred the truly succulent chaparral cocks. Malfreddo Aguerra insisted that life go on as usual at the abbey. But, nevertheless, the advocate was entertained each evening at recreation by fiddlers and a troupe of clowns until he began to believe that “life as usual” at the abbey must be extraordinarily lively, as lives of monastic communities go.

On the third day of Aguerra’s visit, the abbot summoned Brother Francis. The relationship between the monk and his ruler, while not close, had been formally friendly, since the time the abbot permitted the novice to profess his vows, and Brother Francis was not even trembling when he knocked at the study door and asked: “You sent for me, Reverend Father?”

“Yes, I did,” Arkos said, than asked evenly: “Tell me, have you ever thought about death?”

“Frequently, m’Lord Abbot.”

“You pray to Saint Joseph that your death will not be an unhappy one?”

“Umm — often, Reverend Father.”

“Then I suppose you’d not care to be suddenly stricken? To have someone use your guts to string a fiddle? To be fed to the hogs? To have your bones be buried in unconsecrated ground? Eh?”

“Nnn-noo, Magister meus.”

“I thought not, so be very careful about what you say to Monsignor Aguerra.”

“I — ?”

“You.” Arkos rubbed his chin and seemed lost in unhappy speculation. “I can see it too clearly. The Leibowitz cause is shelved. Poor Brother is struck down by a falling brick. There he lies, moaning for absolution. In the very midst of us, mind you. And there we stand, looking down in pity — clergy among us — watching him croak his last, without even a last blessing on the lad. Hellbound. Unblessed. Unshrived. Under our very noses. A pity, eh?”

“M’Lord?” Francis squawked.

“Oh, don’t blame me. I’ll be too busy trying to keep your brothers from carrying out their impulse to kick you to death.”

“When?”

“Why not at all, we hope. Because you are going to be careful, aren’t you? — about what you say to the monsignor. Otherwise I may let them kick you to death.”

“Yes, but—”

“The postulator wants to see you at once. Please stifle your imagination, and be certain about what you say. Please try not to think.”

“Well, I think I can.”

“Out, son, out.”

Francis felt fright when he first tapped at Aguerra’s door, but he saw quickly that the fright was unfounded. The prothonotary was a suave and diplomatic elder who seemed keenly interested in the small monk’s life.

After several minutes of preliminary amenities, he approached the slippery subject: “Now, about your encounter with the person who may have been the Blessed Founder of—”

“Oh, but I never said he was our Blessed Leibo…”

“Of course you didn’t, my son. Of course you didn’t. Now I have here an account of the incident — gathered purely from hearsay sources, of course — and I’d like for you to read it, and then either confirm it or correct it.” He paused to draw a scroll from his case; he handed it to Brother Francis.

“This version is based on traveler’s stories,” he added. “Only you can describe what happened — first hand — so I want you to edit it most scrupulously.”

“Certainly, Messér. But what happened was really very simple—”

“Read, read! Then we’ll talk about it, eh?”

The fatness of the scroll made it apparent that the hearsay account was not “really very simple.” Brother Francis read with mounting apprehension. The apprehension soon grow to the proportions of horror.

“You look white, son,” said the postulator. “Is something troubling you?”

“Messér, this — it wasn’t like this at all!”

“No? But indirectly at least, you must have been the author of it. How could it have been otherwise? Weren’t you the only witness?”

Brother Francis closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. He had told the simple truth to fellow novices. Fellow novices had whispered among themselves. Novices had told the story to travelers. Travelers had repeated it to travelers. Until finally — this! Small wonder that Abbot Arkos had enjoined discussion. If only he had never mentioned the pilgrim at all!

“He only spoke a few words to me. I saw him just that once. He chased me with a stick, asked me the way to the abbey, and made marks on the rock where I found the crypt. Then I never saw him again.”

“No halo?”

“No, Messér.”

“No heavenly choir?”

“No!”

“What about the carpet of roses that grew up where he walked?”

“No, no! Nothing like that, Messér,” the monk gasped.

“He didn’t write his name on the rock?”

“As God is my judge, Messér, he only made those two marks. I didn’t know what they meant.”

“Ah, well,” sighed the postulator. “Travelers’ stories are always exaggerated. But I wonder how it all got started. Now suppose you tell me how it really happened.”

Brother Francis told him quite briefly. Aguerra seemed saddened. After a thoughtful silence, he took the fat scroll, gave it a parting pat, and dropped it into the waste-bin.

“There goes miracle number seven,” he grunted.

Francis hastened to apologize.

The advocate brushed it aside. “Don’t give it a second thought. We really have enough evidence. There are several spontaneous cures — several cases of instantaneous recovery from illness caused by the intercession of the Beatus. They’re simple, matter of fact, and well documented. They’re what cases for canonization are built on. Of course they lack the poetry of this story, but I’m almost glad it’s unfounded — glad for your sake. The devil’s advocate would have crucified you, you know.”

“I never said anything like—”

“I understand, I understand! It all started because of the shelter. We reopened it today, by the way.”

Francis brightened. “Did — did you find anything more of Saint Leibowitz’?”

“Blessed Leibowitz, please!” monsignor corrected. “No, not yet. We opened the inner chamber. Had a devil of a time getting it unsealed. Fifteen skeletons inside and many fascinating artifacts. Apparently the woman — it was a woman, by the way-whose remains you found was admitted to the outer chamber, but the inner chamber was already full. Possibly it would have provided some degree of protection if a falling wall hadn’t caused the cave-in. The poor souls inside were trapped by the stones that blocked the entrance. Heaven knows why the door wasn’t designed to swing inward.”

“The woman in the antechamber, was she Emily Leibowitz?”

Aguerra smiled. “Can we prove it? I don’t know yet. I believe she was, yes — I believe — but perhaps I’m letting hope run away with reason. We’ll see what we can uncover yet; we’ll see. The other side has a witness present. I can’t jump to conclusions.”

Despite his disappointment at Francis’ account of the meeting with the pilgrim, Aguerra remained friendly enough. He spent ten days at the archaeological site before returning to New Rome, and he left two of his assistants behind to supervise further excavation. On the day of his departure, he visited Brother Francis in the scriptorium.

“They tell me you were working on a document to commemorate the relics you found,” said the postulator. “Judging by the descriptions I’ve heard, I think I should very much like to see it.”

The monk protested that it was really nothing, but he went immediately to fetch it, with such eagerness that his hands were trembling as he unpacked the lambskin. Joyfully he observed that Brother Jeris was looking on, while wearing a nervous frown.

The monsignor stared for many seconds. “Beautiful!” he exploded at last. “What glorious color! It’s superb, superb. Finish it — Brother, finish it!”

Brother Francis looked up at Brother Jeris and smiled questioningly.

The master of the copyroom turned quickly away. The back of his neck grew red. On the following day, Francis unpacked his quills, dyes, gold leaf, and resumed his labor on the illuminated diagram.

9

A few months after the departure of Monsignor Aguerra, there came a second donkey train — with a full complement of clerks and armed guards for defense against highwaymen, mutant maniacs, and rumored dragons — to the abbey from New Rome. This time the expedition was headed by a monsignor with small horns and pointy fangs, who announced that he was charged with the duty of opposing the canonization of the Blessed Leibowitz, and that he had come to investigate — and perhaps fix responsibility for, he hinted — certain incredible and hysterical rumors which had filtered out of the abbey and lamentably reached even the gates of New Rome. He made it evident that he would tolerate no romantic nonsense, as a certain earlier visitor perhaps had done.

The abbot greeted him politely and offered him an iron cot in a cell with a south exposure, after apologizing for the fact that the guest suite had been recently exposed to smallpox. The monsignor was attended by his own staff, and ate mush and herbs with the monks in the refectory — quail and chaparral cocks being unaccountably scarce that season, so the huntsmen reported.

This time, the abbot did not feel it necessary to warn Francis against any too liberal exercise of his imagination. Let him exercise it, if he dared. There was small danger of the advocatus diaboli giving immediate credence even to the truth, without first giving it a thorough thrashing and thrusting his fingers into its wounds.

“I understand you are prone to fainting spells,” said Monsignor Flaught when he had Brother Francis alone and had fixed him with what Francis decided was a malign glare.

“Tell me, is there any epilepsy in your family? Madness? Mutant neural patterns?”

“None, Excellency.”

“I’m not an ‘Excellency,’“ snapped the priest. “Now, we’re going to get the truth out of you.”A little simple straight-forward surgery should be adequate, his tone seemed to imply, with only a minor amputation being required.

“Are you aware that documents can be artificially aged?” he demanded.

Brother Francis was not so aware.

“Do you realize that the name, Emily, did not appear among the papers you found?”

“Oh, but it—” He paused, suddenly uncertain.

“The name which appeared was Em, was it not? — which might be a diminutive for Emily.”

“I — I believe that is correct, Messér.”

“But it might also be a diminutive for Emma, might it not? And the name Emma DID appear in the box!”

Francis was silent.

“Well?”

“What was the question, Messér?”

“Never mind! I just thought I’d tell you that the evidence suggests that ‘Em’ was for Emma, and “Emma” was not a diminutive of Emily. What do you say to that?”

“I had no previous opinion, on the subject, Messér, but — ’

“But what?”

“Aren’t husband and wife often careless about what they call each other?”

“ABE YOU BEING FLIPPANT WITH ME?”

“No, Messér.”

“Now, tell the truth! How did you happen to discover that shelter, and what is this fantastic twaddle about an apparition?”

Brother Francis attempted to explain. The advocatus diaboli interrupted with periodic snorts and sarcastic queries, and when he was finished, the advocate raked at his story with semantic tooth and nail until Francis himself wondered if he had really seen the old man or had imagined the incident.

The cross-examining technique was ruthless, but Francis found the experience less frightening than an interview with the abbot. The devil’s advocate could do no worse than tear him limb from limb this one time, and the knowledge that the operation would soon be over helped the amputee to bear the pain. When facing the abbot, however, Francis was always aware that a blunder could be punished again and again, Arkos being his ruler for a lifetime and the perpetual Inquisitor of his soul.

And Monsignor Flaught seemed to find the monk’s story too distressingly simple-minded to warrant full-scale attack, after observing Brother Francis’ reaction to the initial onslaught.

“Well, Brother, if that’s your story and you stick to it, I don’t think we’ll be bothered with you at all. Even if it’s true — which I don’t admit — it’s so trivial it’s silly. Do you realize that?”

“That’s what l always thought, Messér,” sighed Brother Francis, who had for many years tried to detach the importance which others had attached to the pilgrim.

“Well, it’s high time you said so!” Flaught snapped.

“I always said that I thought he was probably just an old man.”

Monsignor Flaught covered his eyes with his hand and sighed heavily. His experience with uncertain witnesses led him to say no more.

Before leaving the abbey, the advocatus diaboli, like the Saint’s advocate before him, stopped at the scriptorium and asked to see the illuminated commemoration of the Leibowitz blueprint (“that dreadful incomprehensibility” as Flaught called it). This time the monk’s hands trembled not with eagerness but with fear, for once again he might be forced to abandon the project. Monsignor Flaught gazed at the lambskin in silence. He swallowed thrice. At last he forced himself to nod.

“Your imagery is vivid,” he admitted, “but we all knew that, didn’t we?” He paused. “You’ve been working on it how long now?”

“Six years, Messér — intermittently.”

“Yes, well, it would seem that you have at least as many years to go.”

Monsignor Flaught’s horns immediately shortened by an inch, and his fangs disappeared entirely. He departed the same evening for New Rome.

The years flowed smoothly by, seaming the faces of the young and adding gray to their temples. The perpetual labor of the monastery continued, daily storming heaven with the ever-recurring hymn of the Divine Office, daily supplying the world with a slow trickle of copied and recopied manuscript, occasionally renting clerks and scribes to the episcopate, to ecclesiastical tribunals, and to such few secular powers as would hire them. Brother Jeris developed ambitions of building a printing press, but Arkos quashed the plan when he heard of it. There was neither sufficient paper nor proper ink available, nor any demand for inexpensive books in a world smug in its illiteracy. The copyroom continued with pot and quill.

On the Feast of the Five Holy Fools, a Vatican messenger arrived with glad tidings for the Order. Monsignor Flaught had withdrawn all objections and was doing penance before an ikon of the Beatus Leibowitz. Monsignor Aguerre’s case was proved; the Pope had directed that a decree be issued recommending canonization. The date for the formal proclamation was set for the coming Holy Year, and was to coincide with the calling of a General Council of the Church for the purpose of making a careful restatement of doctrine concerning the limitation of the magisterium to matters of faith and morals; it was a question which had been settled many times in history, but it seemed to re-arise in new forms in every century, especially in those dark periods when man’s “knowledge” of wind, stars, and rain was really only belief. During the time of the council, the founder of the Albertian Order would be enrolled in the Calendar of Saints.

The announcement was followed by a period of rejoicing at the abbey. Dom Arkos, now withered by age and close to dotage, summoned Brother Francis into his presence and wheezed:

“His Holiness invites us to New Rome for the canonization. Prepare to leave.”

“I, m’Lord?”

“You alone. Brother Pharmacist forbids me to travel, and it would not be well for Father Prior to leave while I am ill.

“Now don’t faint on me again,” Dom Arkos added querulously. “You’re probably getting more credit than you deserve for the fact that the court accepted the death date of Emily Leibowitz as conclusively proved. But His Holiness invited you anyway. I suggest you thank God and claim no credit.”

Brother Francis tottered. “His Holiness… ?”

“Yes. Now, we’re sending the original Leibowitz blueprint to the Vatican. What do you think about taking along your illuminated commemoration as a personal gift to the Holy Father?”

“Uh,” said Francis.

The abbot revived him, blessed him, called him a good simpleton, and sent him to pack his bindlestiff.

10

The trip to New Rome would require at least three months, perhaps longer, the time depending to some extent on the distance which Francis could cover before the inevitable band of robbers relieved him of his ass. He would be traveling alone and unarmed, carrying only his bindlestiff and begging bowl in addition to the relic and its illuminated replica. He prayed that ignorant robbers would have no use for the latter; for, indeed, among the bandits of the wayside were sometimes kindly thieves who took only what was of value to them, and permitted their victim to retain his life, carcass, and personal effects. Others were less considerate.

As a precaution, Brother Francis wore a black patch over his right eye. The peasants were a superstitious lot and could often be routed by even a hint of the evil eye. Thus armed and equipped, he set out to obey the summons of the Sacerdos Magnus, that Most Holy Lord and Ruler, Leo Pappas XXI.

Nearly two months after leaving the abbey, the monk met his robber on a heavily wooded mountain trail, far from any human settlement except the Valley of the Misborn, which lay a few miles beyond a peak to the west, where, leperlike, a colony of the genetically monstrous lived in seclusion from the world. There were some such colonies which were supervised by hospitalers of Holy Church, but the Valley of the Misborn was not among them. Sports who had escaped death at the hands of the forest tribes had congregated there several centuries ago. Their ranks were continually replenished by warped and crawling things that sought refuge from the world, but some among them were fertile and gave birth. Often such children inherited the monstrosity of the parent stock. Often they were born dead or never reached maturity. But occasionally the monstrous trait was recessive, and an apparently normal child resulted from the union of sports. Sometimes, however, the superficially “normal” offspring were blighted by some invisible deformity of heart or mind that bereft them, seemingly, of the essence of humanity while leaving them its appearances. Even within the Church, some had dared espouse the view that such creatures truly had been deprived of the Dei imago from conception, that their souls were but animal souls, that they might with impunity under the Natural Law be destroyed as animal and not Man, that God had visited animal issue upon the species as a punishment for the sins that had nearly destroyed humankind. Few theologians whose belief in Hell had never failed them would deprive their God of recourse to any form of temporal punishment, but for men to take it upon themselves to judge any creature born of woman to be lacking in the divine image was to usurp the privilege of Heaven. Even the idiot which seems less gifted than a dog, or a pig, or a goat, shall, if born of woman, be called an immortal soul. thundered the magisterium, and thundered it again and again. After several such pronouncements, aimed at curbing infanticide, had issued from New Rome, the luckless misborn had come to be called the “Pope’s nephews,” or the “Pope’s children,” by some.

“Let that which is born alive of human parents be suffered to live,” the previous Leo had said, “in accordance with both the Natural Law and the Divine Law of Love; let it be cherished as Child and nurtured, whatever its form and demeanor, for it is a fact available to natural reason alone, unaided by Divine Revelation, that among the Natural Rights of Man the right to parental assistance in an attempt to survive is precedent to all other rights, and may not be modified legitimately by Society or State except insofar as Princes are empowered to implement that right. Not even the beasts of the Earth act otherwise.”

The robber that accosted Brother Francis was not in any obvious way one of the malformed, but that he came from the Valley of the Misborn was made evident when two hooded figures arose from behind a tangle of brush on the slope that overlooked the trail and hooted mockingly at the monk from ambush, while aiming at him with drawn bows. From such a distance, Francis was not certain of his first impression that one hand grasped a bow with six fingers or an extra thumb; but there was no doubt at all that one of the robed figures was wearing a robe with two hoods, although be could make out no faces, nor could be determine whether the extra hood contained an extra head or not.

The robber himself stood in the trail directly ahead. He was a short man, but heavy as a bull, with a glazed knob of a pate and a jaw like a block of granite. He stood in the trail with his legs spread wide and his massive arms folded across his chest while he watched the approach of the small figure astride the ass. The robber, as best Brother Francis could see, was armed only with his own brawn and a knife which be did not bother to remove from his belt-thong, He beckoned Francis forward. When the monk stopped fifty yards away, one of the Pope’s children unleashed an arrow; the missile whipped into the trail just behind the donkey, causing the animal to spurt ahead.

“Get off,” the robber ordered.

The ass stopped in the path. Brother Francis tossed back his hood to reveal the eye patch and raised a trembling finger to touch it. He began lifting the patch slowly from his eye.

The robber tossed back his bead and laughed a laugh that might have sprung, Francis thought, from the throat of Satan; the monk muttered an exorcism, but the robber appeared untouched.

“You black-sacked jeebers wore that one out years ago,” he said. “Now get off.”

Brother Francis smiled, shrugged, and dismounted without further protest. The robber inspected the donkey, patting its flanks, examining teeth and hooves.

“Eat? Eat?” cried one of the robed creatures on the hillside.

“Not this time,” barked the robber. “Too scrawny.”

Brother Francis was not entirely convinced that they were talking about the donkey.

“Good day to you, sir,” the monk said pleasantly. “You may take the ass. Walking will improve my health, I think.” He smiled again and started away.

An arrow slashed into the trail at his feet.

“Stop that!” howled the robber, then to Francis: “Now strip. And let’s see what’s in that roll and in the package.”

Brother Francis touched his begging bowl and made a gesture of helplessness, which brought only another scornful laugh from the robber.

“I’ve seen that alms-pot trick before too,” he said. “The last man with a bowl had half a heklo of gold hidden in his boot. Now strip.”

Brother Francis, who was not wearing boots, hopefully displayed his sandals, but the robber gestured impatiently. The monk untied his bindlestiff, spread its contents for display, and began to undress. The robber searched his clothing, found nothing, and tossed the clothing back to its owner, who breathed his gratitude; he had been expecting to be left naked on the trail.

“Now let’s see inside that other package.”

“It contains only documents, sir,” the monk protested. “Of value to no one except the owner.”

“Open it.”

Silently Brother Francis untied the package and unwrapped the original blueprint and the illuminated commemoration thereof. The gold-leaf inlay and the colorful design flashed brilliantly in the sunlight that filtered through the foliage. The robber’s craggy jaw dropped an inch. He whistled softly.

“What a pretty! Now wouldn’t the woman like that to hang on the cabin wall!”

Francis went sick inside.

“Gold!” the robber shouted to his robed accomplices on the hill.

“Eat? Eat?” came the gurgling and chortling reply.

“We’ll eat, never fear!” called the robber, then explained conversationally to Francis: “They get hungry after a couple of days just sitting there. Business is bad. Traffic’s light these days.”

Francis nodded. The robber resumed his admiration of the illuminated replica.

Lord, if Thou hast sent him to test me, then help me to die like a man, that he may take it only over the dead body of Thy servant. Holy Leibowitz, see this deed and pray for me —

“What is it?” the robber asked. “A charm?” He studied the two documents together for a time. “Oh! One is a ghost of the other. What magic is this?” He stared at Brother Francis with suspicious gray eyes. “What is it called?”

“Uh — Transistorized Control System for Unit Six-B,” the monk stammered.

The robber, who had been looking at the documents upside down, could nevertheless see that one diagram involved a figure-background reversal of the other-an effect which seemed to intrigue him as much as the gold leaf. He traced out the similarities in design with a short and dirty forefinger, leaving a faint smudge on the illuminated lambskin. Francis held back tears.

“Please!” the monk gasped. “The gold is so thin, it’s worth nothing to speak of. Weigh it in your hand. The whole thing weighs no more than the paper itself. It’s of no use to you. Please, sir, take my clothing instead. Take the donkey, take my bindlestiff. Take whatever you will, but leave me these. They mean nothing to you.”

The robber’s gray gaze was meditative. He watched the monk’s agitation and rubbed his jaw. “I’ll let you keep your clothes and your donkey and everything except this,” he offered. “I’ll just take the charms, then.”

“For the love of God, sir, then kill me tool” Brother Francis wailed.

The robber snickered. “We’ll see. Tell me what they’re for.”

“Nothing. One is a memento of a man long dead. An ancient. The other is only a copy.”

“What good are they to you?”

Francis closed his eyes for a moment and tried to think of a way to explain. “You know the forest tribes? How they venerate their ancestors?”

The gray eyes of the robber flashed angrily for a moment.

“We despise our ancestors,” he barked. “Cursed be they who gave us birth!”

“Cursed, cursed!” echoed one of the shrouded archers on the hillside.

“You know who we are? Where we are from?”

Francis nodded. “I meant no offense. The ancient whose relic this is — he is not our ancestor. He was our teacher of old. We venerate his memory. This is only like a keepsake, no more.”

“What about the copy?”

“I made it myself. Please, sir, it took me fifteen years. It’s nothing to you. Please — you wouldn’t take fifteen years of a man’s life — for no reason?”

“Fifteen years?” The robber threw back his head and howled with laughter. “You spent fifteen years making that?”

“Oh, but—” Francis was suddenly silent. His eyes swung toward the robber’s stubby forefinger. The finger was tapping the original blueprint.

“That took you fifteen years? And it’s almost ugly beside the other.” He slapped his paunch and between guffaws kept pointing at the relic. “Ha! Fifteen years! So that’s what you do way out there!Why? What is the dark ghost-image good for? Fifteen years to make that! Ho ho! What a woman’s work!”

Brother Francis watched him in stunned silence. That the robber should mistake the sacred relic itself for the copy of the relic left him too shocked to reply.

Still laughing, the robber took both documents in his hands and prepared to rip them both in half.

“Jesus, Mary, Joseph!” the monk screamed and went to his knees in the trail. “For the love of God, sir!”

The robber tossed the papers on the ground. I’ll wrestle you for them!” he offered sportingly. “Those against my blade.”

“Done,” said Francis impulsively, thinking that a contest would at least afford Heaven a chance to intervene in an unobtrusive way. O God, Thou who strengthened Jacob so that he overcame the angel on the rock…

They squared off. Brother Francis crossed himself. The robber took his knife from his belt-thong and tossed it after the papers. They circled.

Three seconds later, the monk lay groaning on the flat of his back under a short mountain of muscle. A sharp rock seemed to be severing his spine.

“Heh-heh,” said the robber, and arose to reclaim his knife and roll up the documents.

Hands folded as if in prayer, Brother Francis crept after him on his knees, begging at the top of his lungs. “Please, then, take only one, not both! Please!”

“You’ve got to buy it back now,” the robber chortled. “I won them fair enough.”

“I have nothing, I am poor!”

“That’s all right if you want them that bad, you’ll get gold. Two heklos of gold, that’s the ransom. Bring it here any time. I’ll tuck your things in my shanty. You want them back, just bring the gold.”

“Listen, they’re important to other people, not to me. I was taking them to the Pope. Maybe they’ll pay you for the important one. But let me have the other one just to show them. It’s of no importance at all.”

The robber laughed over his shoulder. “I believe you’d kiss a boot to get it back.”

Brother Francis caught up with him and fervently kissed his boot.

This proved too much for even such a fellow as the robber. He shoved the monk away with his foot, separated the two papers, and flung one of them in Francis’ face with a curse. He climbed aboard the monk’s donkey and started riding it up the slope toward the ambush. Brother Francis snatched up the precious document and hiked along beside the robber, thanking him profusely and blessing him repeatedly while the robber guided the ass toward the shrouded archers.

“Fifteen years!” the robber snorted, and again shoved Francis away with his foot. “Begone!” He waved the illuminated splendor aloft in the sunlight. “Remember — two heklos of gold’ll ransom your keepsake. And tell your Pope I won it fair.”

Francis stopped climbing. He sent a glowing cross of benediction after the departing bandit and quietly praised God for the existence of such selfless robbers, who could make such an ignorant mistake. He fondled the original blueprint lovingly as he hiked away down the trail. The robber was proudly displaying the beautiful commemoration to his mutant companions on the hill.

“Eat! Eat” said one of them, petting the donkey.

“Ride, ride,” corrected the robber. “Eat later.”

But when Brother Francis had left them far behind, a great sadness gradually engulfed him. The taunting voice still rang in his ears. Fifteen years! So that’s what youdo over there! Fifteen years! What a woman’s work! Ho ho ho ho…

The robber had made a mistake. But the fifteen years were gone anyhow, and with it all the love and torment that had gone into the commemoration.

Cloistered as he had been, Francis had become unaccustomed to the ways of the outside world, to its harsh habits and curt attitudes. He found his heart deeply troubled by the robber’s mockery. He thought of Brother Jeris’ gentler mockery of earlier years. Maybe Brother Jeris had been right.

His head hung low in his hood as he traveled slowly on.

At least there was the original relic. At least.

11

The hour had come. Brother Francis, in his simple monk’s habit, had never felt less important than at that moment, as he knelt in the majestic basilica before the beginning of the ceremony. The stately movements, the vivid swirls of color, the sounds which accompanied the ceremonious preparations for ceremony, already seemed liturgical in spirit, makingit difficult to bear in mind that nothing of importance was happening yet. Bishops, monsignori, cardinals, priests, and various lay-functionaries in elegant, antiquated dress moved to and fro in the great church, but their comings and goings were graceful clockwork which never paused, stumbled, or changed its mind to rush in the other direction. A sampetrius entered the basilica; so grandly was he attired that Francis at first mistook the cathedral workman for a prelate. The sampetrius carried a footstool. He carried it with such casual pomp that the monk, if he had not been kneeling, might have genuflected as the object drifted by. The sampetrius dropped to one knee before the high altar, then crossed to the papal throne where he substituted the new footstool for one which seemed to have a loose leg; thereupon, he departed by the same route as he had come. Brother Francis marveled at the studied elegance of movement that accompanied even the trivial. No one hurried. No one minced or fumbled. No motion occurred which did not quietly contribute to the dignity and overpowering beauty of this ancient place, even as the motionless statues and paintings contributed to it. Even the whisper of one’s breathing seemed to echo faintly from distant apses.

Terribilis est locus iste: hic domus Dei est, et porta caeli; terrible indeed, House of God, Gate of Heaven!

Some of the statues were alive, he observed after a time. A suit of armor stood against the wall a few yards to his left. Its mailed fist held the staff of a gleaming battle-ax. Not even the plume of its helmet had stirred during the time Brother Francis had been kneeling there. A dozen identical suits of armor stood at intervals along the walls. Only after seeing a horsefly crawl through the visor of the “statue” on his left did he suspect that the warlike husk contained an occupant. His eye could detect no motion, but the armor emitted a few metallic creaks while it harbored the horsefly. These, then, must he the papal guard, so renowned in knightly battle: the small private army of God’s First Vicar.

A captain of the guard was making a stately tour of his men. For the first time, the statue moved. It lifted its visor in salute. The captain thoughtfully paused and used his kerchief to brush the horsefly from the forehead of the expressionless face inside the helmet before passing on. The statue lowered its visor and resumed its immobility.

The stately decor of the basilica was briefly marred by the entrance of pilgrim throngs. The throngs were well organized and efficiently ushered, but they were patently strangers to this place. Most of them seemed to tread on tiptoe to their stations, cautious to create no sound and as little movement as possible, unlike the sampetrii and New Roman clergy who made sound and motion eloquent. Here and there among the pilgrims someone stifled a cough or stumbled.

Suddenly the basilica became warlike, as the guard was strengthened. A new troop of mailed statues tramped into the sanctuary itself, dropped to one knee, and tilted their pike-staffs, saluting the altar before taking their posts. Two of them stood flanking the papal throne. A third fell to his knees at the throne’s right hand; he remained kneeling there with the sword of Peter lying across his upraised palms. The tableau became motionless again, except for occasional dancing of flame among the altar candles.

Upon the hallowed silence burst a sudden peal of trumpets.

The sound’s intensity mounted until the throbbing Ta-ra Ta-ra-raa could be felt upon one’s face and grew painful to the ears. The voice of the trumpets was not musical but annunciatory. The first notes began in mid-scale, then climbed slowly in pitch, intensity, and urgency, until the monk’s scalp crawled, and there seemed to be nothing at all in the basilica but the explosion of the tubas.

Then, dead silence — followed by the cry of a tenor:

FIRST CANTOR: “Appropinquat agnis pastor et ovibus pascendis.”

SECOND CANTOR: “Genua nunc flectantur omnia.”

FIRST CANTOR : “Jussit olim Jesus Petrum pascere gregem Domini.”

SECOND CANTOR: “Ecce Petrus Pontifex Maximus.”

FIRST CANTOR: “Gaudeat igitur populus Christi, et gratias agat Domino.”

SECOND CANTOR: “Nam docebimur a Spiritu sancto.”

CHOIR: “Alleluia, alleluia—”

The crowd arose and then knelt in a slow wave that followed the movement of the chair containing the frail old man in white who gestured his blessings to the people as the gold, black, purple, and red procession moved him slowly toward the throne. Breath kept choking up in the throat of the small monk from a distant abbey in a distant desert. It was impossible to see everything that was happening, so overwhelming was the tide of music and motion, drowning one’s senses and sweeping the mind along willy-nilly toward that which was soon to come.

The ceremony was brief. Its intensity would have become unendurable had it been longer. A monsignor — Malfreddo Aguerra, the Saint’s advocate himself, Brother Francis observed — approached the throne and knelt. After a brief silence, he voiced his plea in plain chant.

“Sancte pater, ab Sapientia summa petimus ut ille Beatus Leibowitz cujus miracula mirati sunt multi…”

The request called upon Leo to enlighten his people by solemn definition concerning the pious belief that the Beatus Leibowitz was indeed a saint, worthy of the dulia of the Church as well as the veneration of the faithful.

“Gratissima Nobis causa, fili,” the voice of the old man in white sang in response, explaining that his own heart’s desire was to announce by solemn proclamation that the blessed Martyr was among the saints, but also that it was by divine guidance alone, sub ducatu sancti Spititus, that he might comply with Aguerra’s request. He asked all to pray for that guidance.

Again the thunder of the choir filled the basilica with the Litany of the Saints: “Father-of-Heaven, God, have mercy on us. Son, Repurchaser-of-the-World, God, have mercy on us. Ghost-Most-Holy, God, have mercy on us. O Sacred Three-foldhood, God-One-and-Only, miserere nobis! Holy Mary, pray for us. Sancta Dei Genitrix, ora pro nobis. Sancta Virgo virginum, ora pro nobis…” The thunder of the litany continued. Francis looked up at a painting of the Blessed Leibowitz, newly unveiled. The fresco was of heroic proportions. It portrayed the trial of the Beatus before the mob, but the face was not wryly smiling as it smiled in Fingo’s work. It was, however, majestic, Francis thought, and in keeping with the rest of the basilica.

“Omnes sancti Martyres, orate pro nobis…”

When the litany was finished, again Monsignor Malfreddo Aguerra made his plea to the Pope, asking that the name of Isaac Edward Leibowitz be formally enrolled in the Calendar of Saints. Again the guiding Spirit was invoked, as the Pope chanted the Veni, Creator Spiritus.

And yet a third time Malfreddo Aguerra pleaded for the proclamation.

“Surgat ergo Petros ipse.…”

At last it came. The twenty-first Leo intoned the decision of the Church, rendered under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, proclaiming the existing fact that an ancient and rather obscure technician named Leibowitz was truly a saint in Heaven, whose powerful intercession might, and of right ought to be, reverently implored. A feast day was named for a Mass in his honor.

“Holy Leibowitz, intercede for us,” Brother Francis breathed with the others.

After a brief prayer, the choir burst into the Te Deum. After a Mass honoring the new saint, it was finished.

Escorted by two scarlet-liveried sedarii of the outer palace, the small party of pilgrims passed though a seemingly endless sequence of corridors and antechambers, halting occasionally before the ornate table of some new official who examined credentials and goose-quilled his signature on a licet adire for a sedarius to hand to the next official, whose title grew progressively longer and less pronounceable as the party proceeded. Brother Francis was shivering. Among his fellow pilgrims were two bishops, a man wearing ermine and gold, a clan chief of the forest people, converted but still wearing the panther skin tunic and panther headgear of his tribal totem, a leather-clad simpleton carrying a hooded peregrine falcon on one wrist — evidently as a gift to the Holy Father — and several women, all of whom seemed to be wives or concubines — as best Francis could judge by their actions — of the “converted” clan chief of the panther people; or perhaps they were ex-concubines put away by canon but not by tribal custom.

After climbing the scala caelestis, the pilgrims were welcomed by the somberly clad ca meralis gestor and ushered into the small anteroom of the vast consistorial hall.

“The Holy Father will receive them here,” the high-ranking lackey softly informed the sedarius who carried the credentials. He glanced over the pilgrims, rather disapprovingly, Francis thought. He whispered briefly to the sedarius. The sedarius reddened and whispered to the clan chief. The clan chief glowered and removed his fanged and snarling headdress, letting the panther head dangle over his shoulder. There was a brief conference about positions, while His Supreme Unctuousness, the leading lackey, in tones so soft as to seem reproving, stationed his visiting chess pieces about the room in accordance with some arcane protocol which only the sedarii seemed to understand.

The Pope was not long in arriving. the little man in the white cassock, surrounded by his retinue, strode briskly into the audience room. Brother Francis experienced a sudden dizzy spell. He remembered that Dom Arkos had threatened to flay him alive if he fainted during the audience, and he steeled himself against it.

The line of pilgrims knelt. The old man in white gently bade them arise. Brother Francis finally found the courage to focus his eyes. In the basilica, the Pope had been only a radiant spot of white in a sea of color. Gradually, here in the audience room, Brother Francis perceived at closer range that the Pope was not, like the fabled nomads, nine feet tall. To the monk’s surprise, the frail old man, Father of Princes and Kings, Bridge-Builder of the World, and Vicar on Earth of Christ, appeared much less ferocious than Dom Arkos, Abbas.

The Pope moved slowly along the line of pilgrims greeting each, embracing one of the bishops, conversing with each in his own dialect or through an interpreter, laughing at the expression of the monsignor to whom he transferred the task of carrying the falconer’s bird, and addressing the clan leader of the forest people with a peculiar hand gesture and a grunted word of forest dialect which caused that panther-clad chieftain to glow with a sudden grin of delight. The Pope noticed the dangling panther headgear and paused to replace it on the tribesman’s head. The latter’s chest bulged with pride; he glared about the room, apparently to catch the eye of His Supreme Unctuousness, the leading lackey, but that official seemed to have vanished into the woodwork.

The Pope drew nearer to Brother Francis.

Ecce Petrus Pontifex…. Behold Peter, the high priest. Leo XXI, himself: “Whom alone, God did appoint Prince over all countries and kingdoms, to root up, pull down, waste, destroy, plant, and build, that he might preserve a faithful people—” And yet in the face of Leo, the monk saw a kindly meekness which hinted that he was worthy of that title, loftier than any bestowed upon princes and kings, whereby he was called “the slave of the slaves of God.”

Francis knelt quickly to kiss the Fisherman’s ring. As he arose, he found himself clutching the relic of the Saint behind him as if ashamed to display it. The Pontiff’s amber eyes compelled him gently. Leo spoke softly in the curial manner: an affectation which he seemed to dislike as burdensome, but which he practiced for custom’s sake in speaking to visitors less savage than the panther chief.

“Our heart was deeply grieved when we heard of your misfortune, dear son. An account of your journey reached our ears. At our own request you traveled here, but while on your way, you were set upon by robbers. Is that not true?”

“Yes, Holy Father. But it is really of no importance. I mean — It was important, except—” Francis stammered.

The white old man smiled gently. “We know that you brought us a gift, and that it was stolen from you along the way. Be not troubled for that. Your presence is gift enough to us. Long have we cherished the hope of greeting in person the discoverer of Emily Leibowitz’ remains. We know, too, of your labors at the abbey. For the Brothers of Saint Leibowitz, we have always felt a most fervent affection. Without your work, the world’s amnesia might well be total. As the Church, Mysticum Christi Corpus, is a Body, so has your Order served as an organ of memory in that Body. We owe much to your holy Patron and Founder. Future ages may owe him even more. May we hear more of your journey, dear son?”

Brother Francis produced the blueprint. “The highwayman was kind enough to leave this in my keeping, Holy Father. He — he mistook it for a copy of the illumination which I was bringing as a gift.”

“You did not correct his mistake?”

Brother Francis blushed. “I’m ashamed to admit, Holy Father—”

“This, then, is the original relic you found in the crypt?”

“Yes—”

The Pope’s smile became wry. “So, then — the bandit thought your work was the treasure itself? Ah — even a robber can have a keen eye for art, yes? Monsignor Aguerra told us of the beauty of your commemoration. What a pity that it was stolen.”

“It was nothing, Holy Father. I only regret that I wasted fifteen years.”

“Wasted? How ‘wasted’? If the robber had not been misled by the beauty of your commemoration, he might have taken this, might he not?”

Brother Francis admitted the possibility.

The twenty-first Leo took the ancient blueprint in his withered hands and carefully unrolled it. He studied its design for a time in silence, than: “Tell us, do you understand the symbols used by Leibowitz? The meaning of the, uh, thing represented?”

“No, Holy Father, my ignorance is complete.”

The Pope leaned toward him to whisper: “So is ours.” He chuckled, pressed his lips to the relic as if kissing an altar stone, then rerolled it and handed it to an attendant. “We thank you from the bottom of our heart for those fifteen years, beloved son,” be added to Brother Francis. “These years were spent to preserve this original. Never think of them as wasted. Offer them to God. Someday the meaning of the original may be discovered, and may prove important.” The old man blinked — or was it a wink? Francis was almost convinced that the Pope had winked at him. “We’ll have you to thank for that.”

The wink, or the blink, seemed to bring the room into clearer focus for the monk. For the first time, he noticed a moth-hole in the Pope’s cassock. The cassock itself was almost threadbare. The carpet in the audience room was worn through in spots. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling in several places. But dignity had overshadowed poverty. Only for a moment after the wink did Brother Francis notice hints of poverty at all. The distraction was transient.

“By you, we wish to send our warmest regards to all members of your community and to your abbot,” Leo was saying.

“To them, as to you, we wish to extend our apostolic benediction. We shall give you a letter to them announcing the benediction.” He paused, then blinked, or winked, again.

“Quite incidentally, the letter will be safeguarded. We shall affix to it the Noli molestare, excommunicating anyone who waylays the bearer.”

Brother Francis murmured his thanks for such insurance against highwaymanship; he did not deem it fitting to add that the robber would be unable to read the warning or understand the penalty. “I shall do my best to deliver it, Holy Father.”

Again, Leo leaned close to whisper: “And to you, we shall give a special token of our affection. Before you leave, see Monsignor Aguerra. We would prefer to give it to you by our own hand, but this is not the proper moment. The monsignor will present it for us. Do with it what you will.”

“Thank you very much indeed, Holy Father.”

“And now good-bye, beloved son.”

The Pontiff moved on, speaking to each pilgrim in the line, and when it was over: the solemn benediction. The audience had ended.

Monsignor Aguerra touched Brother Francis’ arm as the pilgrim group passed out the portals. He embraced the monk warmly. The postulator of the Saint’s cause had aged so greatly that Francis recognized him only with difficulty at close range. But Francis, too, was gray at the temples, and had grown wrinkled about the eyes from squinting over the copy-table. The monsignor handed him a package and a letter as they descended the scala caelestis.

Francis glanced at the letter’s address and nodded. His own name was written on the package, which bore a diplomatic seal. “For me, Messér?”

“Yes, a personal token from the Holy Father. Better not open it here. Now, can I do anything for you before you leave New Rome? I’d be glad to show you anything you’ve missed.”

Brother Francis thought briefly. There had already been an exhaustive tour. “I would like to see the basilica just once again, Messér,” he said at last.

“Why, of course. But is that all?”

Brother Francis paused again. They had fallen behind the other departing pilgrims. “I would like to confess,” he added softly.

“Nothing easier than that,” said Aguerra, adding with a chuckle: “You’re in the right town, you know. Here, you can get anything absolved that you’re worried about. Is it something deadly enough to require the attention of the Pope?”

Francis reddened and shook his head.

“How about the Grand Penitentiary, then? He’ll not only absolve you if you’re repentant, he’ll even hit you over the head with a rod in the bargain.”

“I meant — I was asking you, Messér,” the monk stammered.

“Me? Why me? I’m nobody fancy. Here you are in a whole town full of red hats, and you want to confess to Malfreddo Aguerra.”

“Because — because you were our Patron’s advocate,” the monk explained.

“Oh, I see. Why of course I’ll hear your confession. But I can’t absolve you in the name of your Patron, you know. It’ll have to be the Holy Trinity as usual. Will that do?”

Francis had little to confess, but his heart had long been troubled — at the prompting of Dom Arkos — by the fear that his discovery of the shelter might have hindered the case for the Saint. Leibowitz’ postulator heard him counseled him, and absolved him in the basilica, then led him around that ancient church. During the ceremony of canonization and the Mass that followed, Brother Francis had noticed only the majestic splendor of the building. Now the aged monsignor pointed to crumbling masonry, places in need of repair, and the shameful condition of some of the older frescoes. Again he caught a glimpse of a poverty which dignity veiled. The Church was not wealthy in this age.

At last, Francis was free to open the package. The package contained a purse. In the purse were two heklos of gold. He glanced at Malfreddo Aguerra. The monsignor smiled.

“You did say that the robber won the commemoration from you in a wrestling match, didn’t you?” Aguerra asked.

“Yes, Messér.”

“Well then, even if you were forced into it, you made the choice to wrestle him for it yourself, didn’t you? You accepted his challenge?”

The monk nodded.

“Then I don’t think you’d be condoning the wrong if you bought it back.” He clapped the monk’s shoulder and blessed him. Then it was time to go.

The small keeper of the flame of knowledge trudged back toward his abbey on foot. There were days and weeks on the trail, but his heart was singing as he approached the robber’s outpost. Do with it what you will, Pope Leo had said of the gold. Not only that, the monk had now, in addition to the purse, an answer to the robber’s scornful question. He thought of the books in the audience room, waiting there for a reawakening.

The robber, however, was not waiting at his outpost as Francis had hoped. There were recent footprints in the trail at that place, but the prints led cross-trail and there was no sign of the robber. The sun filtered through the trees to cover the ground with leafy shadows. The forest was not dense, but it offered shade. He sat down beside the trail to wait.

An owl hooted at midday from the relative darkness in the depths of some distant arroyo. Buzzards circled in a patch of blue beyond the treetops. It seemed peaceful in the forest that day. As he listened sleepily to the sparrows fluttering in nearby brush, he found himself not greatly concerned about whether the robber came today or tomorrow. So long was his journey, that he would not be unhappy to enjoy a day of rest while wailing. He sat watching the buzzards. Occasionally he glanced down the trail that led toward his distant home in the desert. The robber had chosen an excellent location for his lair. From this place, one could observe more than a mile of trail in either direction while remaining unobserved in the thatch of forest.

Something moved on the trail in the distance.

Brother Francis shielded his eyes and studied the distant movement. There was a sunny area down the road where a brush fire had cleared several acres of land around the trail that led southwest. The trail shimmered under a mirror of heat in the sunswept region. He could not see clearly because of the shiny reflections, but there was motion in the midst of the heat. There was a wriggling black iota. At times it seemed to wear a head. At times it was completely obscured in the heat glaze, but nevertheless he could determine that it was gradually approaching. Once, when the edge of a cloud brushed at the sun, the heat shimmer subsided for a few seconds; his tired and myopic eyes determined then that the wriggling iota was really a man, but at too great a distance for recognition. He shivered. Something about the iota was too familiar.

But no, it couldn’t possibly be the same.

The monk crossed himself and began telling his rosary beads while his eyes remained intent on the distant thing in the heat shimmer.

While he had been waiting there for the robber, a debate had been in progress, higher on the side of the hill. The debate had been conducted in whispered monosyllables, and had lasted for nearly an hour. Now the debate was ended. Two-Hoods had conceded to One-Hood. Together, the Pope’s children stole quietly from behind their brush table and crept down the side of the hill.

They advanced to within ten yards of Francis before a pebble rattled. The monk was murmuring the third Ave of the Fourth Glorious Mystery of the rosary when he happened to look around.

The arrow hit him squarely between the eyes.

“Eat! Eat! Eat!” the Pope’s child cried.

On the trail to the southwest the old wanderer sat down on a log and closed his eyes to rest them against the sun. He fanned himself with a tattered basket hat and munched his spice-leaf quid. He had been wandering for a long time. The search seemed endless, but there was always the promise of finding what he sought across the next rise or beyond the bend in the trail. When he had finished fanning himself, he clapped the hat back on his head and scratched at his brushy beard while blinking around at the landscape. There was a patch of unburned forest on the hillside just ahead. It offered welcome shade, but still the wanderer sat there in the sunlight and watched the curious buzzards. They had congregated, and they were swooping rather low over the wooded patch. One bird made bold to descend among the trees, but it quickly flapped into view again, flew under power until it found a rising column of air, then went into gliding ascent. The dark host of scavengers seemed to be expending more than a usual amount of energy at flapping their wings. Usually they soared, conserving strength. Now they thrashed the air above the hillside as if impatient to land.

As long as the buzzards remained interested but reluctant, the wanderer remained the same. There were cougars in these hills. Beyond the peak were things even worse than cougars, and sometimes they prowled afar.

The wanderer waited. Finally the buzzards descended among the trees. The wanderer waited five minutes more. At last he arose and limped ahead toward the forested patch, dividing his weight between his game leg and his staff.

After a while he entered the forested area. The buzzards were busy at the remains of a man. The wanderer chased the birds away with his cudgel and inspected the human remnants. Significant portions were missing. There was an arrow through the skull, protruding at the back of the neck. The old man looked nervously around at the brush. There was no one in sight, but there were plenty of footprints in the vicinity of the trail. It was not safe to stay.

Safe or not, the job had to be done. The old wanderer found a place where the earth was soft enough for digging with hands and stick. While he dug, the angry buzzards circled low over the treetops. Sometimes darting earthward but then flapping their way skyward again. For an hour, then two, they fluttered anxiously over the wooded hillside.

One bird finally landed. It strutted indignantly about a mound of fresh earth with a rock marker at one end. Disappointed, it took wing again. The flock of dark scavengers abandoned the site and soared high on the rising currents of air while they hungrily watched the land.

There was a dead hog beyond the Valley of the Misborn. The buzzards observed it gaily and glided down for a feast. Later, in a far mountain pass, a cougar licked her chops and left her kill. The buzzards seemed thankful for the chance to finish her meal.

The buzzards laid their eggs in season and lovingly fed their young: a dead snake, and bits of a feral dog.

The younger generation waxed strong, soared high and far on black wings, waiting for the fruitful Earth to yield up her bountiful carrion. Sometimes dinner was only a toad. Once it was a messenger from New Rome.

Their flight carried them over the midwestern plains. They were delighted with the bounty of good things which the nomads left lying on the land during their ride-over toward the south.

The buzzards laid their eggs in season and lovingly fed their young. Earth had nourished them bountifully for centuries. She would nourish them for centuries more…

Pickings were good for a while in the region of the Red River; but then out of the carnage, a city-state arose. For rising city-states, the buzzards had no fondness, although they approved of their eventual fall. They shied away from Texarkana and ranged far over the plain to the west. After the manner of all living things, they replenished the Earth many times with their kind.

Eventually it was the Year of Our Lord 3174.

There were rumors of war.