A Canticle for Leibowitz

24

There were spaceships again in that century, and the ships were manned by fuzzy impossibilities that walked on two legs and sprouted tufts of hair in unlikely anatomical regions. They were a garrulous kind. They belonged to a race quite capable of admiring its own image in a mirror, and equally capable of cutting its own throat before the altar of some tribal god, such as the deity of Daily Shaving. It was a species which often considered itself to be, basically, a race of divinely inspired toolmakers; any intelligent entity from Arcturus would instantly have perceived them to be, basically, a race of impassioned after-dinner speech-makers.

It was inevitable, it was manifest destiny, they felt (and not for the first time) that such a race go forth to conquer stars. To conquer them several times, if need be, and certainly to make speeches about the conquest. But, too, it was inevitable that the race succumb again to the old maladies on new worlds, even as on Earth before, in the litany of life and in the special liturgy of Man: Versicles by Adam., Rejoinders by the Crucified.

We are the centuries.

We are the chin-choppers and the golly-woppers,

and soon we shall discuss the amputation of your head.

We are your singing garbage men, Sir and Madam,

and we march in cadence behind you, chanting rhymes that some think odd.

Hut two threep foa!

Left!

Left!

He-had-a-good-wife-but-he

Left!

Left!

Left!

Right!

Left!

Wir, as they say in the old country, marschieren weiter wenn alles in Scherben fällt.

We have your eoliths and your mesoliths and your neoliths. We have your Babylons and your Pompeiis, your Caesars and your chromium-plated (vital-ingredient-impregnated) artifacts.

We have your bloody hatchets and your Hiroshimas. We march in spite of Hell, we do —

Atrophy, Entropy, and Proteus vulgaris,

telling bawdy jokes about a farm girl name of Eve

and a traveling salesman called Lucifer.

We bury your dead and their reputations.

We bury you. We are the centuries.

Be born then, gasp wind, screech at the surgeon’s slap, seek manhood, taste a little of godhood, feel pain, give birth, struggle a little while, succumb:

(Dying, leave quietly by the rear exit, please.)

Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens — and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn’t the same. (AGH! AGH! AGH! — an idiot screams his mindless anguish amid the rubble. But quickly! let it be inundated by the choir, chanting Alleluias at ninety decibels.)

Hear then, the last Canticle of the Brethren of the Order of Leibowitz, as sung by the century that swallowed its name:

LUCIFER IS FALLEN; the code words, flashed electrically across the continent, were whispered in conference rooms, were circulated in the form of crisp memoranda stamped SUPREME SECRETISSIMO, were prudently withheld from the press. The words rose in a threatening tide behind a dike of official secrecy. There were several holes in the dike, but the holes were fearlessly plugged by bureaucratic Dutch boys whose forefingers became exceedingly swollen while they dodged verbal spitballs fired by the press.

FIRST REPORTER: What is Your Lordship’s comment on Sir Rische Thon Berker’s statement that the radiation count on the Northwest Coast is ten times the normal level?

DEFENSE MINISTER: I have not read the statement.

FIRST REPORTER: Assuming it to be true, what could be responsible for such an increase?

DEFENSE MINISTER: The question calls for conjecture. Perhaps Sir Rische discovered a rich uranium deposit. No, strike that out. I have no comment.

SECOND REPORTER: Does Your Lordship regard Sir Rische as a competent and responsible scientist?

DEFENSE MINISTER: He has never been employed by my department.

SECOND REPORTS: That is not a responsive answer.

DEFENSE MINISTER: It is quite responsive. Since he has never been employed by my department, I have no way of knowing his competence or responsibility. I am not a scientist.

LADY REPORTER: Is it true that a nuclear explosion occurred recently somewhere across the Pacific?

DEFENSE MINISTER: As Madam well knows, the testing of atomic weapons of any kind is a high crime and an act of war under present international law. We are not at war. Does that answer your question?

LADY REPORTER: No, Your Lordship, it does not. I did not ask if a test had occurred. I asked whether an explosion had occurred.

DEFENSE MINISTER: We set off no such explosion. If they set one off, does Madam suppose that this government would be informed of it by them?

( Polite laughter. )

LADY REPORTER: That does not answer my —

FIRST REPORTER: Your Lordship, Delegate Jerulian has charged the Asian Coalition with the assembly of hydrogen weapons in deep space, and he says our Executive Council knows it and does nothing about it. Is that true?

DEFENSE MINISTER: I believe it is true that the Opposition’s Tribune made some such ridiculous charge, yes.

FIRST REPORTER: Why is the charge ridiculous? Because they are not making space-to-earth missiles in space? Or because we are doing something about it?

DEFENSE MINISTER: Ridiculous either way. I should like to point out, however, that the manufacture of nuclear weapons has been prohibited by treaty ever since they were redeveloped. Prohibited everywhere — in space or on Earth.

SECOND REPORTER: REPORTER: But there’s no treaty to proscribe the orbiting of fissionable materials, is there?

DEFENSE MINISTER: Of course not. The space-to-space vehicles are all nuclear powered. They have to be fueled.

SECOND REPORTER: And there’s no treaty to prohibit orbiting of other materials from which nuclear weapons might be manufactured?

DEFENSE MINISTER (irritably): To my knowledge, the existence of matter outside our atmosphere has not been outlawed by any treaty or act of parliament. It is my understanding that space is chock-full of things like the moon and the asteroids, which are not made of green cheese.

LADY REPORTER: Is Your Lordship suggesting that nuclear weapons could be manufactured without raw materials from Earth?

DEFENSE MINISTER: I was not suggesting that, no. Of course it’s theoretically possible. I was saying that no treaty or law prohibits the orbiting of any special raw materials — only nuclear weapons.

LADY REPORTER: If there was a recent test shot in the Orient, which do you think more probable: a subterranean explosion that broke surface, or a space-to-earth missile with a defective warhead?

DEFENSE MINISTER: Madam, your question is so conjectural that you force me to say: “No comment.”

LADY REPORTER: I was only echoing Sir Rische and Delegate Jerulian.

DEFENSE MINISTER: They are free to indulge in wild speculation. I am not.

SECOND REPORTER: At the risk of seeming wry — What is Your Lordship’s opinion of the weather?

DEFENSE MINISTER: Rather warm in Texarkana, isn’t it? I understand they’re having some bad dust storms in the Southwest. We may catch some of it hereabouts.

LADY REPORTER: Are you in favor of Motherhood, Lord Ragelle?

DEFENSE MINISTER: I am sternly opposed to it, Madam. It exerts a malign influence on youth, particularly upon young recruits. The military services would have superior soldiers if our fighting men had not been corrupted by Motherhood.

LADY REPORTER: May we quote you on that?

DEFENSE MINISTER: Certainly, Madam — but only in my obituary, not sooner.

LADY REPORTER: Thank you. I’ll prepare it in advance.

Like other abbots before him, the Dom Jethrah Zerchi was by nature not an especially contemplative man, although as spiritual ruler of his community he was vowed to foster the development of certain aspects of the contemplative life in this flock, and, as a monk, to attempt the cultivation of a contemplative disposition in himself. Dom Zerchi was not very good at either of these. His nature impelled him toward action even in thought; his mind refused to sit still and contemplate. There was a quality of restlessness about him which had driven him to the leadership of the flock; it made him a bolder ruler, occasionally even a more successful ruler, than some of his predecessors, but that same restlessness could easily become a liability, or even a vice.

Zerchi was vaguely aware, most of the time, of his own inclination toward hasty or impulsive action when confronted by unslayable dragons. Just now, however, the awareness was not vague but acute. It operated in unfortunate retrospect. The dragon had already bitten St. George.

The dragon was an Abominable Autoscribe, and its malignant enormity, electronic by disposition, filled several cubical units of hollow wall space and a third of the volume of the abbot’s desk. As usual, the contraption was on the blink. It miscapitalized, mispunctuated, and interchanged various words. Only a moment ago, it had committed electrical lese majeste on the person of the sovereign abbot, who, after calling a computer repairman and waiting three days for him to appear, had decided to repair the stenographic abomination himself. The floor of his study was littered with typed scraps of trial dictation. Typical among these was one which bore the information:

testing tesTing testing? TESting testing? damNatioN?

whY the craZY capiTALs# now Is the tiMe foR alL gooD memoriZERS to Gum to tHe aCHe of the bookLEGgerS?

Drat; caN yOu do beTTer in LAtin# now traNsLaTe; nECCesse Est epistULam sacri coLLegio mIttendAm esse statim dictem? What’s wrong WITH tHe blasTED THing#

Zerchi sat on the floor in the midst of the litter and tried to massage the involuntary tremor out of his forearm, which had been recently electrified while exploring the Autoscribe’s intestinal regions. The muscular twitching reminded him of the galvanic response of a severed frog’s leg. Since he had prudently remembered to disconnect the machine before tampering with it, he could only suppose that the fiend who invented the thing had provided it with facilities for electrocuting customers even without power. While tweaking and tugging at connections in a search for loose wires, he had been assaulted by a high voltage filter capacitor which had taken advantage of an opportunity to discharge itself to ground through the person of the Reverend Father Abbot when Reverend Father’s elbow brushed against the chassis. But Zerchi had no way of knowing whether he had fallen victim to a law of Nature for filter capacitors or to a cunningly devised booby trap aimed at discouraging customer-tampering. Anyway, he had fallen. His posture on the floor had come about involuntarily. His only claim to competence at the repair of polylinguistic transcription devices lay in his proud record of once having extracted a dead mouse from the information storage circuitry, thereby correcting a mysterious tendency on the part of the machine to write double syllables (doudoubleble sylsylabablesles). Having discovered no dead mice this time, he could feel for loose wires and hope Heaven had granted him charismata as an electronic healer. But it was apparently not so.

“Brother Patrick!” he called toward the outer office, and climbed wearily to his feet.

“Hey, Brother Pat!” he shouted again.

Presently the door opened and his secretary waddled in, glanced at the open wall cabinets with their stupefying maze of computer circuitry, scanned the cluttered floor, then warily studied his spiritual ruler’s expression. “Shall I call the repair service again, Father Abbot?”

“Why bother?” Zerchi grunted. “You’ve called them three times. They’ve made three promises. We’ve waited three days. I need a stenographer. Now! Preferably a Christian. That thing—” he waved irritably toward the Abominable Autoscribe—”is a damned infidel or worse. Get rid of it. I want it out of here.”

“The APLAC?”

“The APLAC. Sell it to an atheist. No, that wouldn’t be kind. Sell it as junk. I’m through with it. Why, for Heaven’s sake, did Abbot Boumous — may his soul be blessed — ever buy the silly contraption?”

“Well, Domne, they say your predecessor was fond of gadgets, and it is convenient to be able to write letters in languages you yourself can’t speak.”

“It is? You mean it would be. That contraption — listen, Brother, they claim it thinks. I didn’t believe it at first. Thought, implying rational principle, implying soul. Can the principle of a ‘thinking machine’ — man-made — be a rational soul? Bah! It seemed a thoroughly pagan notion at first. But do you know what?”

“Father?”

“Nothing could be that perverse without premeditation! It must think! It knows good and evil, I tell you, and it chose the latter. Stop that snickering, will you? It’s not funny. The notion isn’t even pagan. Man made the contraption, but he didn’t make its principle. They speak of the vegetative principle as a soul, don’t they? A vegetable soul? And the animal soul? Then the rational human soul, and that’s all they list in the way of incarnate vivifying principles, angels being disembodied. But how do we know the list is comprehensive? Vegetative, animative, rational — and then what else? That’s what else, right there. That thing. And it fell. Get it out of here — But first I’ve got to get a radiogram off to Rome.”

“Shall I get my pad, Reverend Father?”

“Do you speak Alleghenian?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Neither do I, and Cardinal Hoffstraff doesn’t speak SouthWest.”

“Why not Latin, then?”

“Which Latin? The Vulgate or Modern? I don’t trust my own Anglo-Latin, and if I did, he’d probably not trust his.” He frowned at the bulk of the robotic stenographer. Brother Patrick frowned with him, then stepped over to the cabinets and began peering into the maze of subminiature circuit components.

“No mouse,” the abbot assured him.

“What are all these little knobs?”

“Don’t touch!” Abbot Zerchi yelped as his secretary curiously fingered one of several dozen sub-chassis dial settings. These sub-chassis controls were mounted in neat square array in a box, the cover of which the abbot had removed, bore the irresistible warning: FACTORY ADJUSTMENTS ONLY.

“You didn’t move it, did you?” he demanded, going to Patrick’s side.

“I might have wiggled it a little, but I think it’s back where it was.”

Zerchi showed him the warning on the box’s cover. “Oh,” said Pat, and both of them stared.

“It’s the punctuation, mostly, isn’t it, Reverend Father?”

“That and stray capitals, and a few confused words.”

They contemplated the squiggles, quiggles, quids, thingumbobs, and doohickii in mystified silence.

“Did you ever hear of the Venerable Francis of Utah?” the abbot asked at last.

“I don’t recall the name, Domne. Why?”

“I was just hoping he’s in a position to pray for us right now, although I don’t believe he was ever canonized. Here, let’s try turning this whatsis up a bit.”

“Brother Joshua used to be some kind of an engineer. I forget what. But he was in space. They have to know a lot about computers.

“I’ve already called him He’s afraid to touch it. Here, maybe it needs—”

Patrick edged away. “If you would excuse me, m’Lord, I—”

Zerchi glanced up at his wincing scribe. “Oh, ye of little faith!” he said, correcting another FACTORY ADJUSTMENT.

“I thought I heard someone outside.”

“Before the cock crows thrice — besides, you touched the first knob, didn’t you?”

Patrick wilted. “But the cover was off, and…”

“Hinc igitur effuge. Out, out, before I decide it was your fault.”

Alone again, Zerchi inserted the wall plug, sat at his desk, and, after muttering a brief prayer to Saint Leibowitz (who in recent centuries had come into wider popularity as the patron saint of electricians than he had ever won as the founder of the Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz), flipped the switch. He listened for spitting and hissing noises, but none came. He heard only the faint clicking of delay relays and the familiar purr of timing motors as they came up to full speed. He sniffed. No smoke or ozone to be detected. Finally, he opened his eyes. Even the indicator lights of the desktop control panel were burning as usual. FACTORY ADJUSTMENTS ONLY, indeed!

Somewhat reassured, he switched the format selector to RADIOGRAM , turned the process selector to DICTATE-RECORD, the translator unit to SOUTHWEST IN and ALLEGHENIAN OUT, made certain the transcription switch was on OFF, keyed his microphone button and began dictating:

“Priority Urgent: To His Most Reverend Eminence, Sir Eric Cardinal Hoffstraff, Vicar Apostolic Designate, Provisional Vicariate Extraterrestris, Sacred Congregation of Propaganda, Vatican, New Rome…

“Most Eminent Lord: In view of the recent renewal of world tensions, hints of a new international crisis, and even reports of a clandestine nuclear armaments race, we should be greatly honored if Your Eminence deems it prudent to counsel us concerning the present status of certain plans held in abeyance. I have reference to matters outlined in the Motu proprio of Pope Celestine the Eighth, of happy memory, given on the Feast of the Divine Overshadowing of the Holy Virgin, Anno Domini 3735, and beginning with the words—” he paused to look through the papers on his desk—”“Ab hac planeta nativitatis aliquos filios Ecclesiae usque ad planetas solium alienorum iam abisse et numquam redituros esse intelligimus.” Refer also to the confirming document of Anno Domini 3749, Quo peregrinatur grex, pastor secure, authorizing the purchase of an island, uh-certain vehicles. Lastly refer to Cam belli nunc remote, of the late Pope Paul, Anno Domini 3756, and the correspondence which followed between the Holy Father and my predecessor, culminating with an order transferring to us the task of holding the plan Quo peregrinatur in a state of, uh — suspended animation, but only so long as Your Eminence approves. Our state of readiness with respect to Quo peregrinatur has been maintained, and should it become desirable to execute the plan, we would need perhaps six weeks’ notice…”

While the abbot dictated, the Abominable Autoscribe did no more than record his voice and translate it into a phoneme code on tape. After he had finished speaking he switched the process selector to ANALYZE and pressed a button marked TEXT PROCESSING. The ready-lamp winked off. The machine began processing.

Meanwhile, Zerchi studied the documents before him.

A chime sounded. The ready-lamp winked on. The machine was silent. With only one nervous glance at the FACTORY ADJUSTMENT ONLY box, the abbot dosed his eyes and pressed the WRITE button.

Clatterty-chat-clatter-spatter-pip popperty-kak-fub-clotter, the automatic writer chattered away at what he hoped would be the text of the radiogram. He listened hopefully to the rhythm of the keys. That first clattery-chat-clatter-spatter-pip had sounded quite authoritative. He tried to hear the rhythms of Alleghenian speech in the sound of the typing, and after a time he decided that there was indeed a certain Allegheny lilt mixed into the rattle of the keys. He opened his eyes. Across the room, the robotic stenographer was briskly at work. He left his desk and went to watch it work. With utmost neatness, the Abominable Autoscribe was writing the Alleghenian equivalent of:

“Hey, Brother Pat!”

He turned off the machine in disgust. Holy Leibowitz! Did we labor for this? He could not see that it was any improvement over a carefully trimmed goose-quill and a pot of mulberry ink.

“Hey, Pat!”

There was no immediate response from the outer office, but after a few seconds a monk with a red beard opened the door, and, after glancing at the open cabinets, the littered floor, and the abbot’s expression, he had the gall to smile.

“What’s the matter, Magister meus? Don’t you like our modem technology?”

“Not particularly, no!” Zerchi snapped. “Hey, Pat!”

“He’s out, m’Lord.”

“Brother Joshua, can’t you fix this thing? Really.”

“Really? — No, I can’t.”

“I’ve got to send a radiogram.”

“That’s too bad, Father Abbot. Can’t do that either. They Just took our crystal and padlocked the shack.”

“They?”

“Zone Defense Interior. All private transmitters have been ordered off the air”

Zerchi wandered to his chair and sank into it. “A defense alert. Why?”

Joshua shrugged. “There’s talk about an ultimatum. That’s all I know, except what I hear from the radiation counters.”

“Still rising?”

“Still rising.”

“Call Spokane.”

By midafternoon the dusty wind had come. The wind came over the mesa and over the small city of Sanly Bowitts. It washed over the surrounding countryside, noisily through the tall corn in the irrigated fields, tearing streamers of blowing sand from the sterile ridges. It moaned about the stone walls of the ancient abbey and about the aluminum and glass walls of the modern additions to the abbey. It besmirched the reddening sun with the dirt of the land, and sent dust devils scurrying across the pavement of the six-lane highway that separated the ancient abbey from its modern additions,

On the side road which at one point flanked the highway and led from the monastery by way of a residential suburb into the city, an old beggar clad in burlap paused to listen to the wind. The wind brought the throb of practice rocketry explosively from the south. Ground-to-space interceptor missiles were being fired toward target orbits from a launching range far across the desert. The old man gazed at the faint red disk of the sun while he leaned on his staff and muttered to himself or to the sun, “Omens, omens—”

A group of children were playing in the weed-filled yard of a hovel just across the side road, their games proceeding under the mute but all-seeing auspices of a gnarled black woman who smoked a weed-filled pipe on the porch and offered an occasional word of solace or remonstrance to one or another tearful player who came as plaintiff before the grandmotherly court of her hovel porch.

One of the children soon noticed the old tramp who stood across the roadway, and presently a shout went up: “Lookit, lookit! It’s old Lazar! Auntie say, he be old Lazar, same one ‘ut the Lor’ Hesus raise up! Lookit! Lazar! Lazar!”

The children thronged to the broken fence. The old tramp regarded them grumpily for a moment, then wandered on along the road. A pebble skipped across the ground at his feet.

“Hey, Lazar…!”

“Auntie say, what the Lor’ Hesus raise up, it stay up! Lookit him! Ya! Still huntin’ for the Lor’ ‘ut raise him. Auntie say—”

Another rock skipped after the old man, but he did not look back. The old woman nodded sleepily. The children returned to their games. The dust storm thickened.

Across the highway from the ancient abbey, atop one of the new aluminum and glass buildings, a monk on the roof was sampling the wind. He sampled it with a suction device which ate the dusty air and blew the filtered wind to the intake of an air compressor on the floor below. The monk was no longer a youth, but not yet middle-aged. His short red beard seemed electrically charged, for it gathered pendant webs and streamers of dust; he scratched it irritably from time to time, and once he thrust his chin into the end of the suction hose; the result caused him to mutter explosively, then to cross himself.

The compressor’s motor coughed and died. The monk switched off the suction device, disconnected the blower hose and pulled the device across the roof to the elevator and into the cage. Drifts of dust had settled in the corners. He closed the gate and pressed the Down button.

In the laboratory on the uppermost floor, he glanced at the compressor’s gauge — it registered MAX NORM — he closed the door, removed his habit, shook the dust out of it, hung it on a peg, and went over it with the section device. Then, going to the deep sheet-steel sink at the end of the laboratory workbench; he turned on the cold water and let it rise to the 200 Jug mark. Thrusting his head into the water, he washed the mud from his beard and hair. The effect was pleasantly icy. Dripping and sputtering, he glanced at the door. The likelihood of visitors just now seemed small. He removed his underwear, climbed into the tank, and settled back with a shivery sigh.

Abruptly the door opened. Sister Helene came in with a tray of newly uncrated glassware. Startled, the monk leaped to his feet in the tub.

“Brother Joshua!” the sister shrieked. Half a dozen beakers shattered on the floor.

The monk sat down with a splash that sprayed the room. Sister Helene clucked, sputtered, squeaked, dumped the tray on the workbench, and fled. Joshua vaulted out of the sink and donned his habit without bothering to dry himself or put on his underwear. When he got to the door, Sister Helene was already out of the corridor — probably out of the building and halfway to the sister’s chapel just down the side lane. Mortified, he hastened to complete his labors.

He emptied the suction device’s contents and collected a sample of the dust in a phial. He took the phial to the workbench, plugged in a pair of headphones, and held the phial at a measured distance from the detector element of a radiation counter while he consulted his watch and listened.

The compressor had a built-in counter. He pressed a stud marked: Reset. The whirling decimal register flipped back to zero and began counting again. He stopped it after one minute and wrote the count on the back of his hand. It was mostly plain air, filtered and compressed; but there was a whiff of something else.

He closed the lab for the afternoon. He went down to the office on the subjacent floor, wrote the count on a wall chart, eyed its perplexing upswing; then sat at his desk and flipped the viewphone switch. He dialed by feel, while gazing at the telltale wallchart. The screen flashed, the phone beeped, and the viewer fluttered into focus on the back of an empty desk chair. After a few seconds a man slid into the chair and peered into the viewer. “Abbot Zerchi here,” the abbot grunted. “Oh, Brother Joshua. I was about to call you. Have you been taking a bath?”

“Yes, m’Lord Abbot.”

“You might at least blush!”

“I am.”

“Well, it doesn’t show up on the viewer. Listen. On this side of the highway, there’s a sign just outside our gates. You’ve noticed it, of course? It says, ‘Women Beware. Enter Not Lest’ — and so forth. You’ve noticed it?”

“Surely, m’Lord.”

“Take your baths on this side of the sign.”

“Certainly.”

“Mortify yourself for offending Sister’s modesty. I’m aware that you haven’t got any. Listen, I suppose you can’t even bring yourself to pass the reservoir without jumping in, baby-spanking bald, for a swim.”

“Who told you that, m’Lord? I mean — I’ve only waded—”

“Ye-e-s-s? Well, never mind. Why did you call me?”

“You wanted me to call Spokane.”

“Oh, yes. Did you?”

“Yes.” The monk gnawed at a bit of dry skin at the corner of his wind-cracked lips and paused uneasily. “I talked to Father Leone. They’ve noticed it too.”

“The increased radiation count?”

“That’s not all.” He hesitated again. He did not like saying it. To communicate a fact seemed always to lend it fuller existence.

“Well?”

“It’s connected with that seismic disturbance a few days ago. It’s carried by the upper winds from that direction. All things considered, it looks like fallout from a low altitude burst in the megaton range.”

“Heu!” Zerchi sighed and covered his eyes with a hand. ‘Luciferum ruisse mihi dicis?”

“Yes, Domne, I’m afraid it was a weapon.”

“Not possibly an industrial accident?”

“No.”

“But if there were a war on, we’d know. An illicit test? but not that either. If they wanted to test one, they could test it on the far side of the moon, or better, Mars, and not be caught.”

Joshua nodded.

“So what does that leave?” the abbot went on. “A display? A threat? A warning shot fired over the bow?”

“That’s all I could think of..

“So that explains the defense alert. Still, there’s nothing in the news except rumors and refusals to comment. And with dead silence from Asia.”

“But the shot must have been reported from some of the observation satellites. Unless — I don’t like to suggest this, but — unless somebody has discovered a way to shoot a space-to-earth missile past the satellites, without detection until it’s on the target.”

“Is that possible?”

“There’s been some talk about it, Father Abbot.”

“The government knows. The government must know. Several of them know. And yet we hear nothing. We are being protected from hysteria. Isn’t that what they call it? Maniacs! The world’s been in a habitual state of crisis for fifty years. Fifty?” What am I saying? It’s been in a habitual state of crisis since the beginning — but for half a century now, almost unbearable. And why, for the love of God? What is the fundamental irritant, the essence of the tension? Political philosophies? Economics? Population pressure? Disparity of culture and creed? Ask a dozen experts, get a dozen answers. Now Lucifer again. Is the species congenitally insane, Brother? If we’re born mad, where’s the hope of Heaven? Through Faith alone? Or isn’t there any? God forgive me, I don’t mean that. Listen, Joshua—”

“m’Lord?”

“As soon as you close up shop, come back over here…That radiogram — I had to send Brother Pat into town to get it translated and sent by regular wire. I want you around when the answer comes. Do you know what it’s about?”

Brother Joshua shook his head.

“Quo peregrinatur grex.”

The monk slowly lost color. “To go into effect, Domne?”

“I’m just trying to learn the status of the plan. Don’t mention it to anybody. Of course, you’ll be affected. See me here when you’re through.”

“Certainly.”

“Chris’tecum.”

“Cum spiri’tuo.”

The circuit opened, the screen faded. The room was warm, but Joshua shivered. He gazed out the window into a premature twilight murky with dust. He could see no farther than the storm fence next to the highway where a passing procession of truck headlights made traveling halos in the dust haze. After a while he became aware of someone standing near the gate where the driveway opened on to the turnpike approach. The figure was dimly visible in silhouette whenever the headlights’ aurorae flashed by in review. Joshua shivered again.

The silhouette was unmistakably that of Mrs. Grales. no one else would have been recognizable in such poor visibility, but the shape of the hooded bundle on her left shoulder; and the way her head tilted toward the right, made her outline uniquely that of Old Ma’am Grales. The monk pulled curtains across the window and turned on the light. He was not repelled by the old woman’s deformity; the world had grown blasé about such genetic mishaps and pranks of the genes. His own left hand still bore a tiny scar where a sixth finger had been removed during his infancy. But the heritage of the Diluvium Ignis was something he preferred to forget for the moment, and Mrs. Grales was one of its more conspicuous heirs.

He fingered a globe of the world on his desk. He spun it so that the Pacific Ocean and East Asia drifted past. Where? Precisely where? He twirled the globe faster, slapping it lightly again and again so that the world spun like a gaming wheel, faster and yet faster until the continents and oceans became a blur. Place your bets, Sir and Madam: Where? He braked the globe abruptly with his thumb. Bank: India pays off. Please collect, Madam. The divination was wild. He spun the globe again until the axial mountings rattled; “days” flitted by as briefest instants — In a reverse sense, he noticed suddenly. If Mother Gaia pirouetted in the same sense, the sun and other passing scenery would rise in the west and set in the east. Reversing time thereby? Said the namesake of my namesake: Move not, O Sun, toward Gabaon, nor thou, O Moon, toward the valley — a neat trick, forsooth, and useful in these times too. Back up, O Sun, et tu, Luna, recedite in orbitas reversas… He kept spinning the globe in reverse, as if hoping the simulacrum of Earth possessed the Chronos for unwinding time. A third of a million turns might unwind enough days to carry it back to the Diluvium Ignis. Better to use a motor and spin it back to the beginning of Man. He stopped it again with his thumb; once more the divination was wild.

Still he lingered in the office and dreaded going “home” again. “Home” was only across the highway, in the haunted halls of those ancient buildings whose walls still contained stones which had been the rubbled concrete of a civilization that had died eighteen centuries ago. Crossing the highway to the old abbey was like crossing an eon. Here in the new aluminum and glass buildings, he was a technician at a workbench where events were only phenomena to be observed with regard for their How, not questioning their Why. On this side of the road, the falling of Lucifer was only an inference derived by cold arithmetic from the chatter of radiation counters, from the sudden swing of a seismograph pen. But in the old abbey, he ceased to be a technician; over there he was a monk of Christ, a booklegger and memorizer in the community of Leibowitz. Over there, the question would be: “Why, Lord, why?” But the question had already come, and the abbot had said: “See me.”

Joshua reached for his bindlestiff and went to obey the summons of his ruler. To avoid meeting Mrs. Grales, he used the pedestrian underpass; it was no time for pleasant conversations with the bicephalous old tomato woman.

25

The dike of secrecy had broken. Several dauntless Dutch boys were swept away by the raging tide; the tide swept them right out of Texarkana to their country estates where they became unavailable for comment. Others remained at their posts and staunchly tried to plug new leaks. But the fall of certain isotopes in the wind created a universal byword, spoken on street corners and screamed by banner headlines: LUCIFER 1S FALLEN.

The Minister of Defense, his uniform immaculate, make-up unsmeared, and his equanimity unruffled, again faced the journalistic fraternity; this time the press conference was televised throughout the Christian Coalition.

LADY REPORTER: Your Lordship appears rather calm, in the face of the facts. Two violations of international law, both defined by treaty as warlike acts, have recently occurred. Doesn’t that worry the War Ministry at all?

DEFENSE MINISTER: Madam, as you very well knew, we do not have a War Ministry here; we have a Defense Ministry. And as far as I know, only one violation of international law has occurred. Would you mind acquainting me with the other?

LADY REPORTER: Which one are you not acquainted with — the disaster in Itu Wan, or the warning shot over the far South Pacific?

DEFENSE MINISTER (suddenly stern.): Surely Madam intends nothing seditious, but your question seems to give comfort, if not credence, to the utterly false Asian charges that the so-called Itu Wan disaster was the result of a weapon test by us and not by them!

LADY REPORTER: If it does, I invite you to throw me in jail. The question was based on a Near East neutralist account, which reported that the Itu Wan disaster was the result of an Asian weapon test, underground, which broke free. The same account said that the Itu Wan test was sighted from our satellites and immediately answered by a space-to-earth warning shot southeast Of New Zealand. But now that you suggest it, was the Itu Wan disaster also the result of a weapon test by us?

DEFENSE MINISTER (with forced patience): I recognize the journalistic requirement of objectivity. But to suggest that His Supremacy’s government would deliberately violate —

LADY REPORTER: His Supremacy is an eleven-year-old boy, and to call it his government is not only archaic, but a highly dishonorable — even cheap! — attempt to shift the responsibility for a full denial from your own —

MODERATOR: Madam! Please restrain the tenor of your —

DEFENSE MINISTER: Overlook it, overlook it! Madam, you have my full denial if you must dignify the fantastic charges. The so-called Itu Wan disaster was not the result of a weapon test by us. Nor do I have any knowledge of any other recent nuclear detonation.

LADY REPORTER: Thank you.

MODERATOR: I believe the editor of the Texarkana Star-Insight has been trying to speak.

EDITOR: Thank you. I should like to ask, Your Lordship: What did happen in Itu Wan?

DEFENSE MINISTER: We have no nationals in that area; we have had no observers there since diplomatic relations were broken during the last world crisis. I can, therefore, only rely upon indirect evidence, and the somewhat conflicting neutralist accounts.

EDITOR: That is to be understood.

DEFENSE MINISTER: Very well, then, I gather there was a sub-surface nuclear detonation — in the megaton range — andit got out of hand. it was rather obviously a test of some sort. Whether it was a weapon or, as some Asia-fringe “neutrals” claim, an attempt to divert an underground river — it was dearly illegal, and adjoining countries are preparing a protest to the World Court.

EDITOR: Is there any risk of war?

DEFENSE MINISTER: I foresee none. But as you know, we have certain detachments of our armed forces which are subject to conscription by the World Court to enforce its decisions, if needed. I foresee no such need, but I cannot speak for the court.

FIRST REPORTER: But the Asian coalition has threatened an immediate all-out strike against our space installations if the court does not take action against us. What if the court is slow in acting?

DEFENSE MINISTER: No ultimatum has been delivered. The threat was for Asian home consumption, as I see it; to cover their blunder in Itu Wan.

LADY REPORTER: How is your abiding faith in Motherhood today, Lord Ragelle?

DEFENSE MINISTER: I hope Motherhood has at least as much abiding faith in me as I have in Motherhood.

LADY REPORTER: You deserve at least that much, I’m sure.

The news conference, radiated from the relay satellite twenty-two thousand miles from Earth, bathed most of the Western Hemisphere with the flickering VHF signal which carried such intelligence to the panelescent wall screens of the multitudes. One among the multitudes, Abbot Dom Zerchi switched off the set.

He paced for a while, waiting for Joshua, trying not to think. But “not thinking” proved impossible.

Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America — burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again.

Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?

This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion, he thought.

The feeling of desperation passed abruptly when Brother Pat brought him the second telegram. The abbot ripped it open, read it at a glance and chuckled. “Brother Joshua here yet, Brother?”

“Waiting outside, Reverend Father.”

“Send him in.”

“Ho, Brother, shut the door and turn on the silencer. Then read this.”

Joshua glanced at the first telegram. “An answer from New Rome?”

“It came this morning. But turn on that silencer first. We’ve got things to discuss.”

Joshua closed the door and flipped a wall switch. Concealed loudspeakers squealed a brief protest. When the squealing stopped, the room’s acoustic properties seemed suddenly changed.

Dom Zerchi waved him toward a chair, and he read the, first telegram in silence.

“. . . no action whatever to be taken by you in connection with Quo peregrinatur grex,” he read aloud.

“You’ll have to shout with that thing on,” said the abbot, indicating the silencer. “What?”

“I was just reading. So the plan is canceled?”

“Don’t look so relieved. That came this morning. This came this afternoon.” The abbot tossed him the second telegram:

The monk’s face lost color. He replaced the telegram on the desk and sat back in his chair, lips tight together.

“You know what Quo peregrinatur is?”

“I know what it is, Domne, but not in detail.”

“Well, it started as a plan to send a few priests along with a colony group heading for Alpha Centauri. But that didn’t work out, because it takes bishops to ordain priests, and after the first generation of colonists, more priests would have to be sent, and so on. The question boiled down to an argument about whether the colonies would last, and if so, should provision be made to insure the apostolic succession on colony planets without recourse to Earth? You know what that would mean?”

“Sending at least three bishops, I imagine.”

“Yes, and that seemed a little silly. The colony groups have all been rather small. But during the last world crisis, Quo peregrinatur became an emergency plan for perpetuating the Church on the colony planets if the worst came to pass on Earth. We have a ship.”

“A starship?”

“No less. And we have a crew capable of managing it.”

“Where?”

“We have the crew right here.”

“Here at the abbey? But who — ?” Joshua stopped. His face grew even grayer than before. “But, Domne, my experience in space has been entirely in orbital vehicles, not in starships! Before Nancy died and I went to the Cisterc—”

“I know all about that. There are others with starship experience. You know who they are. There are even jokes about the number of ex-spacers that seem to feel a vocation to our Order. It’s no accident, of course. And you remember when you were a postulant, how you were quizzed about your experience in space?”

Joshua nodded.

“You must also remember being asked about your willingness to go to space again, if the Order asked it of you.”

“Yes.”

“Then you were not wholly unaware that you were conditionally assigned to Quo peregrinatur, if it ever came to pass?”

“I — I guess I was afraid it was so, m’Lord.”

“Afraid?”

“Suspected, rather. Afraid too, a little, because I’ve always hoped to spend the rest of my life in the Order.”

“As a priest?”

“That — well, I haven’t yet decided.”

“Quo peregrinatur will not involve releasing you from your vows or mean abandoning the Order.”

“The Order goes too?”

Zerchi smiled. “And the Memorabilia with it.”

“The whole kit-and — Oh, you mean on microfilm. Where to?”

“`The Centaurus Colony.”

“How long would we be gone, Domne?”

“If you go, you’ll never come back.”

The monk breathed heavily and stared at the second telegram without seeming to see it He scratched his beard and appeared bemused.

“Three questions,” said the abbot. “Don’t answer now, but start thinking about them, and think hard. First are you willing to go? Second, do you have a vocation to the priesthood? Third, are you willing to lead the group? And by willing, I don’t mean ‘willing under obedience’; I mean enthusiastic, or willing to get that way. Think it over; you have three days to think — maybe less.”

Modern change had made but few incursions upon the buildings and the grounds of the ancient monastery. To protect the old buildings against the encroachment of a more impatient architecture, new additions had been made outside the walls and even across the highway — sometimes at the expense of convenience. The old refectory had been condemned because of a buckling roof, and it was necessary to cross the highway in order to reach the new refectory. The inconvenience was somewhat mitigated by the culvert walkunder through which the brothers marched daily to meals.

Centuries old, but recently widened, the highway was the same road used by pagan armies, pilgrims, peasants, donkey carts, nomads, wild horsemen out of the East, artillery, tanks, and ten-ton trucks. Its traffic had gushed or trickled or dripped, according to the age and season. Once before, long ago, there had been six lanes and robot traffic. Then the traffic had stopped, the paving had cracked, and sparse grass grew in the cracks after an occasional rain. Dust had covered it. Desert dwellers had dug up its broken concrete for the building of hovels and barricades. Erosion made it a desert trail, crossing wilderness. But now there were six lanes and robot traffic, as before.

“Traffic’s light tonight,” the abbot observed as they left the old main gate. “Let’s hike across. That tunnel can be suffocating after a dust storm. Or don’t you feel like dodging buses?”

“Let’s go,” Brother Joshua agreed.

Low-slung trucks with feeble headlights (useful only for warning purposes) sped mindlessly past them with whining tires and moaning turbines. With dish antennae they watched the road, and with magnetic feelers they felt at the guiding strips of steel in the roadbed and were given guidance thereby, as they rushed along the pink, fluorescent river of oiled concrete. Economic corpuscles in an artery of Man, the behemoths charged heedlessly past the two monks who dodged them from lane to lane. To be felled by one of them was to be run over by truck after truck until a safety cruiser found the flattened imprint of a man on the pavement and stopped to clean it up. The autopilots’ sensing mechanisms were better at detecting masses of metal than masses of flesh and bone.

“This was a mistake,” Joshua said as they reached the center island and paused for breath. “Look who’s standing over there.”

The abbot peered for a moment, then clapped his forehead. “Mrs. Grales! I clean forgot: it’s her night to prowl me down. She’s sold her tomatoes to the sisters’ refectory, and now she’s after me again.”

“After you? She was there last night, and the night before, too. I thought she was waiting for a ride. What does she want from you?”

“Oh, nothing really. She’s finished gypping the sisters on the price of tomatoes, and now she’ll donate the surplus profit to me for the poor box. It’s a little ritual. I don’t mind the ritual. It’s what comes afterwards that’s bad. You’ll see.”

“Shall we go back?”

“And hurt her feelings? Nonsense. She’s seen us by now. Come on.”

They plunged into the thin stream of trucks again.

The two-headed woman and her six-legged dog waited with an empty vegetable basket by the new gate; the woman crooned softly to the dog. Four of the dog’s legs were healthy legs, but an extra pair dangled uselessly at its sides. As for the woman, one head was as useless as the extra legs of the dog. It was a small head, a cherubic head, but it never opened its eyes. It gave no evidence of sharing in her breathing or her understanding. It lolled uselessly on one shoulder, blind, deaf, mute, and only vegetatively alive. Perhaps it lacked a brain, for it showed no sign of independent consciousness or personality. Her other face had aged, grown wrinkled, but the superfluous head retained the features of infancy, although it had been toughened by the gritty wind and darkened by the desert sun.

The old woman curtsied at their approach, and her dog drew back with a snarl. “Evenin’, Father Zerchi,” she drawled, “a most pleasant evenin’ to yer — and to yer, Brother.”

“Why, hello, Mrs. Grales—”

The dog barked, bristled, and began a frenzied dance, feinting toward the abbot’s ankles with fangs bared for slashing. Mrs. Grales promptly struck her pet with the vegetable basket. The dog’s teeth slashed the basket; the dog turned on its mistress. Mrs. Grales kept it away with the basket; and after receiving a few resounding whacks, the dog retired to sit growling in the gateway.

“What a fine mood Priscilla’s in” Zerchi observed pleasantly. “Is she going to have pups?”

“Beg shriv’ness, yet honors,” said Mrs. Grales, “but’s not the pup’s motherful condition as makes her so, devil fret her! but ‘tis ‘at man of mine. He’s witched the piteous pup, he has — for love of witchin — and it makes her ‘feared of all. I beg yet honors’ shriv’ness for her naughties.”

“It’s all right. Well, good night, Mrs. Grales.”

But escape proved not that easy. She caught at the abbot’s sleeve and smiled her toothlessly irresistible smile.

“A minute, Father, only a minute for ‘n old tumater woman, if ye have it to spare.”

“Why, of course! I’d be glad—”

Joshua gave the abbot a sidelong grin and went over to negotiate with the dog concerning right of way. Priscilla eyed him with plain contempt.

“Here, Father, here,” Mrs. Grales was saying. “Take a little something for yer box. Here—” Coins rattled while Zerchi protested. “No, here, take of it, take of it,” she insisted. “Oh, I know as how ye always say, by fret! but I be not so poor’s ye might think on me. And ye do good work. If ye don’t take of it, that no-good man of mine’ll have it from me, and do him the Devil’s work. Here — I sold my tumaters, and I got my price, near, and I bought my feed for the week and even a play-pretty for Rachel. I want ye to have of it. Here.”

“It’s very kind…”

“Grryumpf!” came an authoritative bark from the gateway. “Grryumpf! Rowf! rowf! RrrrrrrOWWFF!” — followed by a rapid sequence of yaps, yeeps, and Priscilla’s howling in full retreat.

Joshua came wandering back with his hands in his sleeves.

“Are you wounded, man?”

“Grryumpf!” said the monk.

“What on earth did you do to her?”

“Grryumpf!” Brother Joshua repeated. “Rowf! Rowf! RrrrrrOWWFF!” — then explained: “Priscilla believes in werewolves. The yelping was hers. We can get past the gate now.”

The dog had vanished; but again Mrs. Grales caught at the abbot’s sleeve. “Only a minute more of yer, Father, and I’ll keep ye no longer. It’s little Rachel I wanted to see yer about. There’s the baptism and the christenin’ to be thought of, and I wished to ask yer if ye’d do the honor of—”

“Mrs. Grales,” he put in gently, “go see your own parish priest. He should handle these matters, not I. I have no parish — only the abbey. Talk to Father Selo at Saint Michael’s. Our church doesn’t even have a font. Women aren’t permitted, except in the tribune—”

“The sister’s chapel has a font, and women can—”

“It’s for Father Selo, not for me. It has to be recorded in your own parish. Only as an emergency could I—”

“Ay, ay, that I know, but I saw Father Selo. I brought Rachel to his church and the fool of a man would not touch her.”

“He refused to baptize Rachel?”

“That he did, the fool of a man.”

“It’s a priest you’re talking of, Mrs. Grales, and no fool, for I know him well. He must have his reasons for refusing. If you don’t agree with his reasons, then see someone else-but not a monastic priest. Talk to the pastor at Saint Maisie’s perhaps.”

“Ay, and that too have I done…” She launched into what promised to be a prolonged account of her skirmishings on behalf of the unbaptized Rachel. The monks listened patiently at first, but while Joshua was watching her, he seized the abbot’s arm above the elbow; his lingers gradually dug into Zerchi’s arm until the abbot winched in pain and tore the fingers away with his free hand.

“What are you doing?” he whispered, but then noticed the monk’s expression. Joshua’s eyes were fixed on the old woman as if she were a cockatrice. Zerchi followed his gaze, but saw nothing stranger than usual; her extra head was half concealed by a sort of veil, but Brother Joshua had certainly seen that often enough.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Grales,” Zerchi interrupted as soon as she fell short of breath. “I really must go now. I’ll tell you what: I’ll call Father Selo for you, but that’s all I can do. We’ll see you again, I’m sure.”

“Thank yer kindly, and beg yer shriv’ness for keeping yer.”

“Good night, Mrs. Grales.”

They entered the gate and walked toward the refectory. Joshua thumped the heel of his hand against his temple several times as if to jar something back into place.

“Why were you staring at her like that?” the abbot demanded. “I thought it rude”

“Didn’t you notice?”

“Notice what?”

“Then you didn’t notice. Well… let it pass. But who is Rachel? Why won’t they baptize the child? Is she the woman’s daughter?”

The abbot smiled without humor. “That’s what Mrs. Grales contends. But there’s some question as to whether Rachel is her daughter, her sister — or merely an excrescence growing out of her shoulder.”

“Rachel! — her other head?”

“Don’t shout so. She’ll hear you yet.”

“And she wants it baptized?”

“Rather urgently, wouldn’t you say? It seems to be an obsession.”

Joshua waved his arms. “How do they settle such things?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I’m grateful to Heaven that it’s not up to me to figure it out. If it werea simple case of siamese twins, it would be easy. But it isn’t. The old-timers say Rachel wasn’t there when Mrs. Grales was born.”

“A farmers’ fable!”

“Perhaps. But some are willing to tell it under oath. How many souls has an old lady with an extra head — a head that ‘just grew’? Things like that cause ulcers in high places, my son. Now, what was it you noticed? Why were you staring at her and trying to pinch my arm off like that?”

The monk was slow to answer. “It smiled at me,” he said at last.

“What smiled?”

“Her extra, uh — Rachel. She smiled. I thought she was going to wake up.”

The abbot stopped him in the refectory’s entranceway and peered at him curiously.

“She smiled,” the monk repeated very earnestly.

“You imagined it.”

“Yes, m’Lord.”

“Then look like you imagined it.”

Brother Joshua tried. “I can’t,” he admitted.

The abbot dropped the old woman’s coins in the poor box. “Let’s go on inside,” he said.

The new refectory was functional, chromium befixtured, acoustically tailored, and germicidally illuminated. Gone were the smoke-blackened stones, the tallow lamps, the wooden bowls and cellar-ripened cheeses. Except for the cruciform seating arrangement and a rank of images along one wall, the place resembled an industrial lunchroom. Its atmosphere had changed, as had the atmosphere of the entire abbey. After ages of striving to preserve remnants of culture from a civilization long dead, the monks had watched the rise of a new and mightier civilization. The old tasks had been completed; new ones were found. The past was venerated and exhibited in glass cases, but it was no longer the present. The Order conformed to the times, to an age of uranium and steel and flaring rocketry, amid the growl of heavy industry and the high thin whine of star drive converters. The Order conformed — at least in superficial ways.

“Accedite ad eum,” the Reader intoned.

The robed legions stood restlessly at their places during the reading. No food had yet appeared. The tables were bare of dishes. Supper had been deferred. The organism, the community whose cells were men, whose life had flowed through seventy generations, seemed tense tonight, seemed to sense a note amiss tonight, seemed aware, through the connaturality of its membership, of what had been told to only a few. The organism lived as a body, worshiped and worked as a body, and at times seemed dimly conscious as a mind that infused its members and whispered to itself and to Another in the lingua prima, baby tongue of the species. Perhaps the tension was increased as much by faint snort-growl of practice rocketry from the distant anti-missile missile range as by the unexpected postponement of the meal. The abbot rapped for silence, then gestured his prior, Father Lehy toward the lectern. The prior looked pained for a moment before speaking.

“We all regret the necessity,” he said at last, “of sometimes disturbing the quiet of contemplative life with news from the outside world. But we must remember too that we are here to pray for the world and its salvation, as for our own. Especially now, the world could use some praying for.” He paused to glance at Zerchi.

The abbot nodded.

“Lucifer is fallen,” said the priest, and stopped. He stood there looking down at the lectern as if suddenly struck dumb.

Zerchi arose. “That is Brother Joshua’s inference, by the way,” he interposed. “The Regency Council of the Atlantic Confederacy has said nothing to speak of. The dynasty has issued no statements. We know little more than we knew yesterday, except that The World Court is meeting in emergency session, and that the Defense Interior people are moving fast. There is a defense alert, and we’ll be affected, but don’t be disturbed. Father — ?”

“Thank you, Dome,” said the prior, seeming to regain his voice as Dom Zerchi was seated again. “Now, Reverend Father Abbot asked me to make the following announcements:

“First, for the next three days we shall sing the Little Office of Our Lady before Matins, asking her intercession for peace.

“Second, general instructions for civil defense in the event of a space-strike or missile-attack alert are available on the table by the entrance. Everybody take one. If you’ve read it, read it again.

“Third, in the event that an attack warning is sounded, the following brothers are to report immediately to Old Abbey courtyard for special instructions. If no attack warning comes, the same brothers will report there anyway day after tomorrow morning right after Matins and Lauds. Names — Brothers Joshua, Christopher, Augustin, James, Samuel—”

The monks listened with quiet tension, betraying no emotion. There were twenty-seven names in all, but no novices were among them. Some were eminent scholars, there were a janitor and a cook as well. At first hearing, one might assume that the names had been drawn from a box. By the time Father Lehy had finished the list, some of the brothers were eying each other curiously.

“And this same group will report to the dispensary for a complete physical examination tomorrow after Prime,” the prior finished. He turned to look questioningly at Dom Zerchi.

“Domne?”

“Yes, just one thing,” said the abbot, approaching the lectern. “Brothers, let us not assume that there is going to be war. Let’s remind ourselves that Lucifer has been with us — this time — for nearly two centuries. And was dropped only twice, in sizes smaller than megaton. We all know what could happen, if there’s war. The genetic festering is still with us from the last time Man tried to eradicate himself. Back then, in the Saint Leibowitz’ time, maybe they didn’t know what would happen. Or perhaps they did know, but could not quite believe it until they tried it — like a child who knows what a loaded pistol is supposed to do, but who never pulled a trigger before. They had not yet seen a billion corpses. They had not seen the still-born, the monstrous, the dehumanized, the blind. They had not yet seen the madness and the murder and the blotting out of reason. Then they did it, and then they saw it.

“Now — now the princes, the presidents, the praesidiums, now they know — with dead certainty. They can know it by the children they beget and send to asylums for the deformed; They know it, and they’ve kept the peace. Not Christ’s peace, certainly, but peace, until lately — with only two warlike incidents in as many centuries. Now they have the bitter certainty. My sons, they cannot do it again. Only a race of madmen could do it again—”

He stopped speaking. Someone was smiling,. It was only a small smile, but in the midst of a sea of grave faces it stood out like a dead fly in a bowl of cream. Dom Zerchi frowned. The old man kept on smiling wryly. He sat at the “beggar’s table” with three other transient tramps — an old fellow with a brushy beard, stained yellow about the chin. As a jacket, he wore a burlap bag with armholes. He continued to smile at Zerchi. He looked old as a rain-worn crag, and a suitable candidate for a Maundy laving. Zerchi wondered if he were about to stand up and make an announcement to his hosts — or blow a ramshorn at them, perhaps? — but that was only an illusion generated by the smile. He quickly dismissed the feeling that he had seen the old man before, somewhere. He concluded his remarks.

On his way back to his place, he paused. The beggar nodded pleasantly at his host. Zerchi came nearer.

“Who are you, if I may ask. Have I seen you somewhere before?”

“What?”

“Latzar shemi,” the beggar repeated.

“I don’t quite—”

“Call me Lazarus, then,” said the old one, and chuckled.

Dom Zerchi shook his head and moved on. Lazarus? There was, in the region, an old wives’ tale to the effect that — but what a shoddy sort of myth that was. Raised up by Christ but still not a Christian, they said. And yet he could not escape the feeling that he had seen the old man somewhere.

“Let the bread be brought for blessing,” he called, and the deferment of supper was at an end.

After the prayers, the abbot glanced toward the beggars’ table again. The old man was merely fanning his soup with a sort of basket hat. Zerchi dismissed it with a shrug, and the meal began in solemn silence.

Compline, the Church’s night prayer, seemed especially profound that night.

But Joshua slept badly afterwards. In a dream he met Mrs. Grales again. There was a surgeon who sharpened a knife, saying, “This deformity must be removed before it becomes malignant.” And the Rachel face opened its eyes and tried to speak to Joshua, but he could hear her only faintly, and understand her not at all.

“Accurate am I the exception,” she seemed to be saying, “I commensurate the deception. Am.”

He could make nothing of it, but he tried to reach through to save her. There seemed to be a rubbery wall of glass in the way. He paused and tried to read her lips. I am the, I am the —

“I am the Immaculate Conception,” came the dream whisper.

He tried to tear his way through the rubbery glass to save her from the knife, but it was too late, and there was a great deal of blood afterwards. He awoke from the blasphemous nightmare with a shudder and prayed for a time; but as soon as he slept, there was Mrs. Grales again.

It was a troubled night, a night that belonged to Lucifer. It was the night of the Atlantic assault against the Asian space installations.

In swift retaliation, an ancient city died.

26

“This is your Emergency Warning Network,” the announcer was saying when Joshua entered the abbot’s study after Matins of the following day, “bringing you the latest bulletin on the pattern of fallout from the enemy missile assault on Texarkana…”

“You sent for me, Domne?”

Zerchi waved him to silence and toward a seat. The priest’s face looked drawn and bloodless, a steel-gray mask of icy self-control. To Joshua, he seemed to have shrunk in size, to have aged since nightfall. They listened gloomily to the voice which waxed and waned at four-second intervals as the broadcasting stations were switched on and off the air as an impediment to enemy direction-finding equipment:

“…but first, an announcement just released by the Supreme Command. The royal family is safe. I repeat: the royal family is known to be safe. The Regency Council is said to have been absent from the city when the enemy struck. Outside of the disaster area, no civil disorders have been reported, and none is expected.

“A cease-fire order has been issued by the World Court of Nations, with a suspended proscription, involving the death sentence, against the responsible heads of government of both nations. Being suspended, the sentence becomes applicable only if the decree is disobeyed. Both governments cabled to the court their immediate acknowledgment of the order, and there is, therefore, a strong probability that the clash is at an end, a few hours after it began as a preventative assault against certain illegal space installations. In a surprise attack, the space forces of the Atlantic Confederacy last night struck at three concealed Asian missile sites located on the far side of the moon, and totally destroyed one enemy space station known to be involved in a guidance system for space-to-earth missiles. It was expected that the enemy would retaliate against our forces in space, but the barbarous assault on our capital city was an act of desperation which no one anticipated.

“Special bulletin: Our government has just announced its intention to honor the cease-fire for ten days if the enemy agrees to an immediate meeting of foreign ministers and military commanders on Guam. The enemy is expected to accept.”

“Ten days,” the abbot groaned. “It doesn’t give us enough time.”

“The Asian radio, however, is still insisting that the recent thermonuclear disaster in Itu Wan, causing some eighty thousand casualties, was the work of an errant Atlantic missile, and the destruction of the city of Texarkana was therefore retaliation in kind…”

The abbot snapped off the set. “Where’s the truth?” he asked quietly. “What’s to be believed? Or does it matter at all? When mass murders been answered with mass murder, rape with rape, hate with hate, there’s no longer much meaning in asking whose ax is the bloodier. Evil, on evil, piled on evil. Was there any justification in our “police action” in space? How can we know? Certainly there was no justification for what they did — or was there? We only know what that thing says, and that thing is a captive. The Asian radio has to say what will least displease its government; ours has to say what will least displease our fine patriotic opinionated rabble, which is what, coincidentally, the government wants it to say anyhow, so where’s the difference? Dear God, there must be half a million dead, if they hit Texarkana with the real thing. I feel like saying words I’ve never even heard. Toad’s dung. Hag pus. Gangrene of the soul. Immortal brain-rot. Do you understand me, Brother? And Christ breathed the same carrion air with us; how meek the Majesty of our Almighty God! What an Infinite Sense of Humor — for Him to become one of us! — King of the Universe, nailed on a cross as a Yiddish Schlemiel by the likes of us. They say Lucifer was cast down for refusing to adore the Incarnate Word; the Foul One must totally lack a sense of humor! God of Jacob, God even of Cain! Why do they do it all again?

“Forgive me, I’m raving,” he added, less to Joshua than to the old woodcarving of Saint Leibowitz that stood in one corner of the study. He had paused in his pacing to glance up at the face of the image. The image was old, very old. Some earlier ruler of the abbey had sent it down to a basement storeroom to stand in dust and gloom while a dry-rot etched the wood, eating away the spring grain and leaving the summer grain so that the face seemed deeply lined. The saint wore a slightly satiric smile. Zerchi had rescued it from oblivion because of the smile.

“Did you see that old beggar in the refectory last night?” he asked irrelevantly, still peering curiously at the statue’s smile.

“I didn’t notice, Domne. Why?”

“Never mind, I guess I’m just imagining it.” He fingered the mound of faggots where the wooden martyr stood. That’s where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins. And some of them are mine. Mine, Adam’s, Herod’s, Judas’s, Hannegan’s, mine. Everybody’s. Always culminates in the colossus of the State, somehow, drawing about itself the mantle of godhood, being struck down by wrath of Heaven: Why? We shouted it loudly enough — God’s to be obeyed by nations as by men. Caesar’s to be God’s policeman, not His plenipotentiary successor, nor His heir. To all ages, all peoples—”Whoever exalts a race or a State of a particular form of State or the depositories of power… whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God…” Where had that come from? Eleventh Pius, he thought, without certainty — eighteen centuries ago. But when Caesar got the means to destroy the world, wasn’t he already divinized? Only by the consent of the people — same rabble that shouted: “Non habemus regem nisi caesarem,” when confronted by Him — God Incarnate, mocked and spat upon. Same rabble that martyred Leibowitz…

“Caesar’s divinity is showing again.”

“Domne?”

“Let it pass. Are the brothers in the courtyard yet?”

“About half of them were when I passed. Shall I go see?”

“Do. Then come back here. I have something to say to you before we join them.”

Before Joshua returned, the abbot had got the Quo peregrinatur papers out of the wall safe.

“Read the precis,” he told the monk. “Look at the table of organization, read the procedural outline. You’ll have to study the rest in detail, but later.”

The communicator buzzed loudly while Joshua was reading.

“Reverend Father Jethrah Zerchi, Abbas, please,” droned the voice of a robot operator.

“Speaking.”

“Urgent priority wire from Sir Eric Cardinal Hoffstraff, New Rome. There is no courier service at this hour. Shall I read?”

“Yes, read the text of it. I’ll send someone down later to pick up a copy.”

“The text is as follows: ‘Grex peregrinus erit.Quam primum est factum suscipiendum vobis, jussu Sactae Sedis. Suscipite ergo operis partem ordini vestro propriam…’“

“Can you read that back in Southwest translation?” the abbot asked.

The operator complied, but in neither did the message seem to contain anything unexpected. It was a confirmation of the plan and a request for speed.

“Receipt acknowledged,” he said at last.

“Will there be a reply?”

“Reply as follows: Eminentissimo Domino Eric Cardinali Hoffstraff obsequitur Jethra Zerchius, A.O.L., Abbas. Ad has res disputandas iam coegi discessuros fratres ut hodie parati dimitti Roman prima aerisnave possint. End of text.”

“I read back: ‘Eminentissimo…’ “

“All right, that’s all. Out.”

Joshua had finished reading the precis. He closed the portfolio and looked up slowly.

“Are you ready to get nailed on it?” Zerchi asked.

“I — I’m not sure I understand.” The monk’s face was pale.

“I asked you three questions yesterday. I need the answers now.”

“I’m willing to go.”

“That leaves two to be answered.”

“I’m not sure about the priesthood, Domne.”

“Look, you’ll have to decide. You have less experience with starships than any of the others. None of the others is ordained. Someone has to be partially released from technical duties for pastoral and administrative duties. I told you this will not mean abandoning the Order. It won’t, but your group will become an independent daughter house of the Order, under a modified rule. The Superior will be elected by secret ballet of the professed, of course — and you are the most obvious candidate, if you have a vocation to the priesthood as well. Have you, or haven’t you? There’s your inquisition, and the time’s now, and a brief now it is too.”

“But Reverend Father, I’m not through studying—”

“That doesn’t matter. Besides the twenty-seven-man crew — all our people — others are going too: six sisters and twenty children from the Saint Joseph school, a couple of scientists, and three bishops, two of them newly consecrated. They can ordain, and since one of the three is a delegate of the Holy Father, they will even have the power to consecrate bishops. They can ordain you when they feel you’re ready. You’ll be in space for years, you know. But we want to know whether you have a vocation, and we want to know it now.”

Brother Joshua stammered for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Would you like half an hour? Would you like a glass of water? You go so gray. I tell you, son, if you’re to lead the flock, you’ll have to be able to decide things here-and-now. You need to now. Well, can you speak?”

“Domne, I’m not — certain—”

“You can croak anyhow, eh? Are you going to submit to the yoke, son? Or aren’t you broken yet? You’ll be asked to be the ass He rides into Jerusalem, but it’s a heavy load, and it’ll break your back, because He’s carrying the sins of the world.”

“I don’t think I’m able.”

“Croak and wheeze. But you can growl too, and that’s well for the leader of the pack. Listen, none of us has been really able. But we’ve tried, and we’ve been tried. It tries you to destruction, but you’re here for that. This Order has had abbots of gold, abbots of cold tough steel, abbots of corroded lead, and none of them was able, although some were abler than others, some saints even. The gold got battered, the steel got brittle and broke, and the corroded lead got stamped into ashes by Heaven. Me, I’ve been lucky enough to be quicksilver; I spatter, but I run back together somehow. I feel another spattering coming on, though, Brother, and I think it’s for keeps this time. What are you made of, son? What’s to be tried?”

“Puppy dog tails. I’m meat, and I’m scared, Reverend Father.”

“Steel screams when it’s forged, it gasps when it’s quenched. It creaks when it goes under load. I think even steel is scared, son. Take half an hour to think? A drink of water? A drink of wind? Totter off awhile. If it makes you seasick, then prudently vomit. If it makes you terrified, scream. If it makes you anything, pray. But come into the church before Mass, and tell us what a monk is made of. The Order is fissioning, and the part of us that goes into space goes forever. Are you called to be its shepherd, or are you not? Go and decide.”

“I guess there’s no way out.”

“Of course there is. You have only to say, ‘I’m not called to it.’ Then somebody else will be elected, that’s all. But go, calm down, and then come to us in church with a yes or a no. That’s where I’m going now.” The abbot arose and nodded a dismissal.

The darkness in the courtyard was nearly total. Only a thin sliver of light leaked from under the church doors. The faint luminosity of starlight was blurred by a dust haze. No hint of dawn had appeared in the east. Brother Joshua wandered in silence. Finally he sat on a curbing that enclosed a bed of rose bushes. He put his chin in his hands and rolled a pebble around with his toe. The buildings of the abbey were dark and sleeping shadows. A faint slice of cantaloupe moon hung low in the south.

The murmur of chanting came from the church: Excita, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni, ut salvos — Stir up thy might indeed, O Lord, and come to save us. That breath of prayer would go on and on, as long as there was breath to breathe it. Even if the brethren thought it futile…

But they couldn’t know it to be futile. Or could they? If Rome had any hope, why send the starship? Why, if they believed that prayers for peace on earth would ever be answered? Was not the starship an act of despair?… Retrahe me, Satanus, et discede! he thought. The starship is an act of hope. Hope for Man elsewhere, peace somewhere, if not here and now, then someplace: alpha centauri’s planet maybe, beta hydri, or one of the sickly straggling colonies on that planet of What’s-its-name in Scorpius. Hope, and not futility, is sending the ship, thou foul Seductor. It is a weary and dog-tired hope, maybe, a hope that says: Shake the dust off your sandals and go preach Sodom to Gomorrha. But it is hope, or it wouldn’t say go at all. It isn’t hope for Earth, but hope for the soul and substance of Man somewhere. With Lucifer hanging over, not sending the ship would be an act of presumption, as you, dirtiest one, tempted Our Lord: If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from the pinnacle. For angels will bear thee up.

Too much hope for Earth had led men to try to make it Eden, and of that they might well despair until the time toward the consumption of the world —

Someone had opened the abbey doors. Monks were leaving quietly for their cells. Only a dim glow spilled from the doorway into the courtyard. The light was dim in the church. Joshua could see only a few candles and the dim red eye of the sanctuary lamp. The twenty-six of his brethren were just visible where they knelt, waiting. Someone closed the doors again, but not quite for through a crack he could still see the red dot of the sanctuary lamp. Fire kindled in worship, burning in praise, burning gently in adoration there in its red receptacle. Fire, loveliest of the four elements of the world, and yet an element too in Hell. While it burned adoringly in the core of the Temple, it had also scorched the life from a city, this night, and spewed its venom over the land. How strange of God to speak from a burning bush, and of Man to make a symbol of Heaven into a symbol of Hell.

He peered up again at the dusty stars of morning. Well, there would be no Edens found out there, they said. Yet there were men out there now, men who looked up to strange suns in stranger skies, gasped strange air, tilled strange earth. On worlds of frozen equatorial tundra, worlds of steaming Arctic jungle, a little like Earth perhaps, enough like Earth so that Man might live somehow, by the same sweat of his brow. They were but a handful, these celestial colonists of Homo loquax nonnumquam sapiens, a few harassed colonies of humanity that had had small help from Earth thus far; and now they might expect no help at all, there in their new non-Edens, even less like Paradise than Earth had been. Fortunately for them, perhaps. The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. Well, they were going to destroy it again, were they — this garden Earth, civilized and knowing, to be torn apart again that Man might hope again in wretched darkness.

And yet the Memorabilia was to go with the ship! Was it a curse?. . . Discede, Seductor informis! It was no curse, this knowledge, unless perverted by Man, as fire had been, this night…

Why do I have to leave, Lord? he wondered. Must I go? And what am I trying to decide: to go, or to refuse to go? But that was already decided; there had been a summons to that — long ago. Egrediamur tellure, then, for it was commanded by a vow I pledged. So I go. But to lay hands on me and call me a priest, to call me abbas even, to set me to watch over the souls of my brethren? Must Reverend Father insist on that? But he isn’t insisting on that; he is only insisting on knowing whether God insists on that. But he is in such a terrible hurry. Is he really so sure of me as all that? To drop it on me this way, he must be more certain of me than I am of myself.

Speak up, destiny, speak up! Destiny always seems decades away, but suddenly it’s not decades away; it’s right now. But maybe destiny is always right now, right here, right this very instant, maybe.

Isn’t it enough that he’s sure of me? But no, that is not nearly enough. Got to be sure myself, somehow. In half an hour. Less than half, now. Audi me, Domine — please, Lord — It’s only one of your vipers of this generation, begging for something, begging to know, begging a sign, a sign, a portent, an omen. I’ve not enough time to decide.

He started nervously. Something — slithering?

He heard it as a quiet rustling in the dry leaves under the rose bushes behind him. It stopped, rustled, and slithered again. Would a sign from Heaven slither? An omen or a portent might. The Psalmist’s negotium perambulans in tenebris might. A sidewinder might.

A cricket, perhaps. It was only rustling. Brother Hegan had killed a sidewinder in the courtyard once, but…Now it slithered again! — a slow dragging in the leaves. Would it be an appropriate sign if it slithered out and stung him in the backside?

The sound of prayer came from the church again: Reminiscentur et convertentur all Dominum universi fines terrae. Et adorabunt in conspectu universae familiae gentium. Quoniam Domini est regnum; et ipse dominabitur… Strange words for tonight: All the ends of the Earth shall remember and turn unto the Lord…

The slithering stopped suddenly. Was it right behind him? Really, Lord, a sign isn’t absolutely essential. Really, I…

Something nudged at his wrist. He shot upward with a yelp and leaped away from the rose bushes. He seized a loose rock and threw it into the bushes. The crash was louder than he had expected. He scratched at his beard and felt sheepish. He waited. Nothing emerged from the bushes. Nothing slithered. He tossed a pebble. It too rattled offensively in the darkness. He waited, but nothing stirred in the bushes. Ask for an omen, then stone it when it comes — de essentia hominum.

A pink tongue of dawn was beginning to lick the stars from the sky. Soon he would have to go tell the abbot. And tell him what?

Brother Joshua brushed gnats from his beard and started toward the church, because someone had just come to the door and looked out — looking for him?

Unus panis, et unum corpus multi sumus , came the murmur from the church, omnes qui de uno… One bread and one body, though many, are we, and of one bread and one chalice have partaken…

He paused in the doorway to look back toward the rose bushes. It was a trap, wasn’t it? he thought. You’d send it, knowing I’d throw stones at it, wouldn’t you?

A moment later, he slipped inside and went to kneel with the others. His voice joined theirs in the entreaty; for a time he ceased to think, amid the company of monastic spacegoers assembled there. Annuntiabitur Domino generatio ventura… And these shall be declared to the Lord a generation to come; and the heavens shall show forth His justice. To a people that shall be born, which the Lord hath made…

When he became aware again, he saw the abbot motioning to him. Brother Joshua went to kneel next to him.

“Hoc officium, Fili — tibine imponemus oneri?” he whispered.

“If they want me,” the monk answered softly, “honorem accipiam.”

The abbot smiled. “You heard me badly. I said “burden,” not ‘honor.”Crucis autem onus si audisti ut honorem, nihilo errasti auribus.”

“Accipiam,” the monk repeated.

“You’re certain?”

“If they choose me, I shall be certain.”

“Well enough.”

Thus it was settled. While the sun rose, a shepherd was elected to lead the flock.

Afterward, the conventual Mass was a Mass for Pilgrims and Travelers.

It had not been easy to charter a plane for the flight to New Rome. Even harder was the task of winning clearance for the flight after the plane had been chartered. All civil aircraft had come under the jurisdiction of the military for the duration of the emergency, and a military clearance was required. It had been refused by the local ZDI. If Abbot Zerchi had not been aware of the fact that a certain air marshal and a certain cardinal archbishop happened to be friends, the ostensible pilgrimage to New Rome by twenty-seven bookleggers with bindlestiffs might well have proceeded on shank’s mare, for lack of permission to use rapid transport jet. By midafternoon, however, clearance had been granted. Abbot Zerchi boarded the plane briefly before takeoff — for last farewells.

“You are the continuity of the Order,” he told them.

“With you goes the Memorabilia. With you also goes the apostolic succession, and, perhaps — the Chair of Peter.

“No, no,” he added in response to the murmur of surprise from the monks. “Not His Holiness. I had not told you this before, but if the worst comes on Earth, the College of Cardinals — or what’s left of it — will convene. The Centaurus Colony may then be declared a separate patriarchate, with full patriarchal jurisdiction going to the cardinal who will accompany you. If the scourge falls on us here, to him, then, will go the Patrimony of Peter. For though life on Earth may be destroyed — God forbid — as long as Man lives elsewhere, the office of Peter cannot be destroyed. There are many who think that if the curse falls on Earth, the papacy would pass to him by the principle of Epikeia if there were no survivors here. But that is not your direct concern, brothers, sons, although you will be subject to your patriarch under special vows as these which bind the Jesuits to the Pope.

“You will be years in space. The ship will be your monastery. After the patriarchal see is established at the Centaurus Colony, you will establish there a mother house of the Visitationist Friars of the Order of Saint Leibowitz of Tycho. But the ship will remain in your hands, and the Memorabilia. If civilization, or a vestige of it, can maintain itself on Centaurus, you will send missions to the other colony worlds, and perhaps eventually to the colonies of their colonies. Wherever Man goes, you and your successors will go. And with you, the records and remembrances of four thousand years and more. Some of you, or those to come after you, will be mendicants and wanderers, teaching the chronicles of Earth and the canticles of the Crucified to the peoples and the cultures that may grow out of the colony groups. For some may forget. Some may be lost for a time from the Faith. Teach them, and receive into the Order those among them who are called. Pass on to them the continuity. Be for Man the memory of Earth and Origin. Remember this Earth. Never forget her, but — never come back.” Zerchi’s voice went hoarse and low. “If you ever come back, you might meet the Archangel at the east end of Earth, guarding her passes with a sword of flame. I feel it. Space is your home hereafter. It’s a lonelier desert than ours. God bless you, and pray for us.”

He moved slowly down the aisle, pausing at each seat to bless and embrace before he left the plane. The plane taxied onto the runway and roared aloft, He watched until it disappeared from view in the evening sky. Afterward, he drove back to the abbey and to the remainder of his flock. While aboard the plane, he had spoken as if the destiny of Brother Joshua’s group were as clear-cut as the prayers prescribed for tomorrow’s Office; but both he and they knew that he had only been reading the palm of a plan, had been describing a hope and not a certainty. For Brother Joshua’s group had only begun the first short lap of a long and doubtful journey, a new Exodus from Egypt under the auspices of a God who must surely be very weary of the race of Man.

Those who stayed behind had the easier part. Theirs was but to wait for the end and pray that it would not come.

27

“The area affected by local fallout remains relatively stationary,” said the announcer, “and the danger of further windspread has nearly vanished…”

“Well, at least nothing worse has happened yet,” remarked the abbot’s guest. “So far, we’ve been safe from it here. It looks like we’ll stay safe, unless the conference falls apart.”

“Will we now,” Zerchi grunted. “But listen a moment.”

“The latest death toll estimate,” the announcer continued, “on this ninth day after the destruction of the capital, gives two million, eight hundred thousand dead. More than half of this figure is from the population of the city proper. The rest is an estimate based on the percentage of the population in the fringe and fallout areas known to have received critical doses of radiation. Experts predict that the estimate will rise as more radiation cases are reported.

“This station is required by law to broadcast the following announcement twice daily for the duration of the emergency: ‘The provisions of Public Law 10-WR-3E in no way empower private citizens to administer euthanasia to victims of radiation poisoning. Victims who have been exposed, or who think they have been exposed, to radiation far in excess of the critical dosage must report to the nearest Green Star Relief Station, where a magistrate is empowered to issue a writ of Mori Vult to anyone properly certified as a hopeless case, if the sufferer desires euthanasia. Any victim of radiation who takes his own life in any manner other than that prescribed by law will be considered a suicide, and will jeopardize the sight of his heirs and dependents to claim insurance end other radiation relief benefits under the law. Moreover, any citizen who assists such a suicide may be prosecuted for murder. The Radiation Disaster Act authorizes euthanasia only after due process of law. Serious cases of radiation sickness must report to a Green Star Relief—”

Abruptly, and with such force that he twisted the dial knob free of its shaft, Zerchi switched off the receiver. He swung himself out of his chair and went to stand at the window and look down on the courtyard where a crowd of refugees were milling around several hastily built wooden tables: The abbey, old and new, was overrun by people of all ages and stations whose homes had been in the blighted regions. The abbot had temporarily readjusted the “cloistered” areas of the abbey to give the refugees access to virtually everything except the monks’ sleeping quarters. The sign outside the old gate had been removed, for there were women and children to be fed, clothed, and given shelter.

He watched two novices carrying a steaming cauldron out of the emergence kitchen. They hoisted it onto a table and began ladling out soup.

The abbot’s visitor cleared his throat and stirred restlessly in his chair. The abbot turned.

“Due process, they call it,” he growled. “Due process of mass, state-sponsored suicide. With all of society’s blessings.”

“Well,” said the visitor, “it’s certainly better than letting them die horribly, by degrees.”

“Is it? Better for whom? The street cleaners? Better to have your living corpses walk to a central disposal station while they can still walk? Less public spectacle? Less horror lying around? Less disorder? A few million corpses lying around might start a rebellion against those responsible. That’s what you and the government mean by better, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know about the government,” said the visitor, with only a trace of stiffness in his voice. “What I meant by better was ‘more merciful.’ I have no intention of arguing your moral theology with you. If you think you have a soul that God would send to Hell if you chose to die painlessly instead of horribly, then go ahead and think so. But you’re in a minority, you know. I disagree, but there’s nothing to argue about.”

“Forgive me,” said Abbot Zerchi. “I wasn’t getting ready to argue moral theology with you. I was speaking only of this spectacle of mass euthanasia in terms of human motivation. The very existence of the Radiation Disaster Act, and like laws in other countries, is the plainest possible evidence that governments were fully aware of the consequences of another war, but instead of trying to make the crime impossible, they tried to provide in advance for the consequences of the crime. Are the implications of that fact meaningless to you, Doctor?”

“Of course not, Father. Personally, I am a pacifist. But for the present we’re stuck with the world as it is. And if they couldn’t agree on a way to make an act of war impossible, then it is better to have some provisions for coping with the consequences than to have no provisions.”

“Yes and no. Yes, if it’s in anticipation of somebody else’s crime. No, if it’s in anticipation of one’s own. And especially no if the provision to soften the consequences are criminal too.”

The visitor shrugged. “Like euthanasia? I’m sorry, Father, I feel that the laws of society are what makes something a crime or not a crime. I’m aware that you don’t agree. And there can be bad laws, ill-conceived, true. But in this case, I think we have a good law. If I thought I had such a thing as a soul, and that there was an angry God in Heaven, I might agree with you.”

Abbot Zerchi smiled thinly. “Yon don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”

The visitor laughed politely. “A semantic confusion.”“

“True. But which of us is confused? Are you sure?”

“Let’s not quarrel Father. I’m not with the Mercy Cadre. I work on the Exposure Survey Team. We don’t kill anybody.”

Abbot Zerchi gazed at him in silence for a moment. The visitor was a short muscular man with a pleasant round face and a balding pate that was sunburned and freckled. He wore a green serge uniform, and a cap with the Green Star insignia lay in his lap.

Why quarrel, indeed? The man was a medical worker, not an executioner. Some of the Green Star’s relief work was admirable. Occasionally it was even heroic. That in some instances it wrought evil, according to Zerchi’s belief, was no reason to regard its good works as tainted. The bulk of society favored it, and its workers were in good faith. The doctor had tried to be friendly. His request had seemed simple enough. He had been neither demanding nor officious about it. Still, the abbot hesitated before saying yes.

“The work you want to do here — will it take long?”

The doctor shook his head. “Two days at most, I think. We have two mobile units. We can bring them into your courtyard, hitch the two trailers together, and start right to work. We’ll take the obvious radiation cases, and the wounded, first. We treat only the most urgent cases. Our job is clinical testing; The sick ones will get treatment at an emergency camp.

“And the sickest ones get something else at a mercy camp?”

The worker frowned. “Only if they want to go. Nobody makes them go.”

“But you write out the permit that lets them go.”

“I’ve given some red tickets, yes. I may have to this time. Here—” He fumbled in his jacket pocket and brought out a red cardboard form, something like a shipping label with a loop of wire for attaching it to a buttonhole or a belt loop. He tossed it on the desk. “A blank ‘crit-dose’ form. There it is. Read it. It tells the man he’s sick, very sick. And here — here’s a green ticket too. It tells him he’s well and has nothing to worry about. Look at the red one carefully! ‘Estimated exposure in radiation units.’ ‘Blood count.’ ‘Urinalysis,’ On one side, it’s just like the green one. On the other side, the green one’s blank, but look at the back of the red one. The fine print — it’s directly quoted from Public Law 10-WR-3E. It has to be there. The law requires it. It has to be read to him. He has to be told his rights. What he does about it is his own affair. Now, if you’d rather we parked the mobile units down the highway, we can—”

“You just read it to him, do you? Nothing else?”

The doctor paused. “It has to be explained to him, if be doesn’t understand it.” He paused again, gathering irritation. “Good Lord, Father, when you tell a man he’s a hopeless case, what are you going to say? Read him a few paragraphs of the law, show him the door, and say: ‘Next, please!’? ‘You’re going to die, so good day’? Of course you don’t read him that and nothing else, not if you have any human feeling at all!”

“I understand that; What I want to know is something else. Do you, as a physician, advise hopeless cases to go to a mercy camp?”

“I—” The medic stopped and closed his eyes. He rested his forehead on his hand. He shuddered slightly. “Of course I do,” he said finally. “If you’d seen what I’ve seen, you would too. Of course I do.”

“You’ll not do it here.”

“Then we’ll—” The doctor quenched an angry outburst. He stood up, started to put on his cap, then paused. He tossed the cap on the chair and walked over to the window. He looked gloomily down at the courtyard, then out at the highway. He pointed. “There’s the roadside park. We can set up shop there. But it’s two miles. Most of them will have to walk.” He glanced at Abbot Zerchi, then looked broodingly down into the courtyard again. “Look at them. They’re sick, hurt, fractured, frightened. The children too. Tired, lame, and miserable. You’d let them be herded off down the highway to sit in the dust and the sun and—”

“I don’t want it to be that way,” said the abbot. “Look — you were just telling me how a man-made law made it mandatory for you to read and explain this to a critical radiation case. I offered no objection to that in itself. Render unto Caesar to that extent, since the law demands it of you. Can you not, then, understand that I am subject to another law, and that it forbids me to allow you or anyone else on this property, under my rule, to counsel anyone to do what the Church calls evil?”

“Oh, I understand well enough.”

“Very well. You need only make me one promise and you may use the courtyard.”

“What promise?”

“Simply that you won’t advise anyone to go to a “mercy camp.” Limit yourself to diagnosis. If you find hopeless radiation cases, tell them what the law forces you to tell them, be as consoling as you wish, but don’t tell them to go kill themselves.”

The doctor hesitated. “I think it would be proper to make such a promise with respect to patients who belong to your Faith.”

Abbot Zerchi lowered his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said finally, “but that’s not enough.”

“Why? Others are not bound by your principles. If a man is not of your religion, why should you refuse to allow—” He choked off angrily.

“Do you want an explanation?”

“Yes.”

“Because if a man is ignorant of the fact that something is wrong, and acts in ignorance, he incurs no guilt, provided natural reason was not enough to show him that it was wrong. But while ignorance may excuse the man, it does not excuse the act, which is wrong in itself. If I permitted the act simply because the man is ignorant that it is wrong, then I would incur guilt, because I do know it to be wrong. It is really that painfully simple.”

“Listen, Father. They sit there and they look at you. Some scream. Some cry. Some just sit there. All of them say, “Doctor, what can I do?’ And what am I supposed to answer? Say nothing? Say, ‘You can die, that’s all.’ What would you say?”

“ ‘Pray.’ “

“Yes, you would, wouldn’t you? Listen, pain is the only evil I know about. It’s the only one I can fight.”

“Then God help you.”

“Antibiotics help me more.”

Abbot Zerchi groped for a sharp reply, found one, but swiftly swallowed it. He searched for a blank piece of paper and a pen and pushed them across the desk. “Just write: ‘I will not recommend euthanasia to any patient while at this abbey,’ and sign it. Then you can use the courtyard.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then I suppose they’ll have to drag themselves two miles down the road.”

“Of all the merciless—”

“On the contrary. I’ve offered you an opportunity to do your work as required by the law you recognize, without overstepping the law I recognize. Whether they go down the road or not is up to you.”

The doctor stared at the blank page. “What is so magic about putting it in writing?”

“I prefer it that way.”

He bent silently over the desk and wrote. He looked at what he had written, then slashed his signature under it and straightened. “All right, there’s your promise. Do you think it’s worth any more than my spoken word?”

“No. No indeed.” The abbot folded the note and tucked it into his coat. “But it’s here in my pocket, and you know it’s here in my pocket, and I can look at it occasionally, that’s all. Do you keep promises, by the way, Doctor Cors?”

The medic stared at him for a moment. “I’ll keep it.” He grunted, then turned on his heel and stalked out.

“Brother Pat!” Abbot Zerchi called weakly. “Brother Pat, are you there?”

His secretary came to stand in the doorway. “Yes, Reverend Father?”

“You heard?”

“I heard some of it. The door was open, and I couldn’t help hearing. You didn’t have the silencer—”

“You heard him say it? ‘Pain’s the only evil I know about.’ You heard that?”

The monk nodded solemnly.

“And that society is the only thing which determines whether an act is wrong or not? That too?”

“Yes.”

“Dearest God, how did those two heresies get back into the world after all this time? Hell has limited imaginations down there. ‘The serpent deceived me, and I did eat.’ Brother Pat, you’d better get out of here, or I’ll start raving.”

“Domne, I—”

“What’s keeping you? What’s that, a letter? All right, give it here.”

The monk handed it to him and went out. Zerchi left it unopened and glanced at the doctor’s pledge again. Worthless, perhaps. But still the man was sincere. And dedicated. He’d have to be dedicated to work for the kind of salary the Green Star paid. He had looked underslept and overworked. He’d probably been living on benzedrine and doughnuts since the shot that killed the city. Seeing misery everywhere and detesting it, and sincere in wanting to do something about it. Sincere — that was the hell of it. From a distance, one’s adversaries seemed fiends, but with a closer view, one saw the sincerity and it was as great as one’s own. Perhaps Satan was the sincerest of the lot.

He opened the letter and read it. The letter informed him that Brother Joshua and the others had departed from New Rome for an unspecified destination in the West. The letter also advised him that information about Quo pererinatur had leaked to the ZDI, who had sent investigators to the Vatican to ask questions about the rumored launching of an unauthorized starship…Evidently the starship was not yet in space.

They’d learn soon enough about Quo peregrinatur, but with the help of Heaven, they’d find out too late. What then? he wondered.

The legal situation was tangled. The law forbade starship departures without commission approval. Approval was hard to get and slow in coming. Zerchi was certain that the ZDI and the commission would consider the Church was breaking the law. But a State-Church concordat had existed for a century and a half now; it clearly exempted the Church from licensing procedures, and it guaranteed to the Church the right to send missions to “whatever space installations and/or planetary outposts shall not have been declared by the aforesaid Commission to be ecologically critical or closed to unregulated enterprise.” Every installation in the solar system was “ecologically critical” and “closed” at the time of the concordat, but the concordat further asserted the Church’s right to “own space vessels and travel unrestricted to open installations or outposts.” The concordat was very old. It had been signed in the days when the Berkstrun starship drive was only a dream in the wide imagination of some who thought that interstellar travel would open up the universe to an unrestricted, outflow of population.

Things had turned out otherwise. When the first starship was born as an engineering drawing, it became plain that no institution except government had the means or the funds to build them; that no profit was to be derived from transporting colonies to extrasolar planets for purposes of “interstellar mercantilism.” Nevertheless, the Asian rulers had sent the first colony ship. Then in the West the cry was heard: “Are we to let the ‘inferior’ races inherit the stars?” There had been a brief flurry of starship launchings as colonies of black people, brown, white, and yellow people were hurled into the sky toward the Centaur, in the name of racism. Afterwards, geneticists had wryly demonstrated that — since each racial group was so small that unless their descendants intermarried, each would undergo deteriorative genetic drift due to inbreeding on the colony planet — the racists had made cross-breeding necessary to survival.

The only interest the Church had taken in space had been concern for the colonists who were sons of the Church, cut off from the flock by interstellar distances. And yet she had not taken advantage of that provision of the concordat which permitted the sending of missions. Certain contradictions existed between the concordat and the laws of the State which empowered the commission, at least as the latter law might in theory affect the sending of missions. The contradiction had never been adjudicated by the courts, since there had never been cause for litigation. But now, if the ZDI intercepted Brother Joshua’s group in the act of launching a starship without a commission permit or charter, there would be cause. Zerchi prayed that the group would get away without a test in the courts, which might take weeks or months. Of course there would be a scandal afterwards. Many would charge not only that the Church had violated Commission rulings but charity too, by sending ecclesiastical dignitaries and a bunch of rascal monks, when she might have used the ship as refuge for poor colonists, hungry for land. The conflict of Martha and Mary always recurred.

Abbot Zerchi suddenly realized that the tenor of his thinking had changed during the previous day or two. A few days ago, everyone had been waiting for the sky to burst asunder. But nine days had passed since Lucifer had prevailed in space and scorched a city out of existence. Despite the dead, the maimed, and the dying, there had been nine days of silence. Since the wrath had been stayed thus far, perhaps the worst could be averted. He had found himself thinking of things that might happen next week or next month, as if — after all — there might really be a next week or a next month. And why not? Examining conscience, he found that he had not altogether abandoned the virtue of hope.

A monk returned from an errand in the city that afternoon and reported that a camp for refugees was being set up at the park two miles down the highway. “I think it’s being sponsored by Green Star, Domne,” he added.

“Good!” the abbot said. “We’re overflowing here, and I’ve had to turn three truckloads of them away.”

The refugees were noisy in the courtyard, and the noise jangled overwrought nerves. The perpetual quiet of the old abbey was shattered by strange sounds: the boisterous laughter of men telling jokes, the cry of a child, the rattle of pots and pans, hysterical sobbing, a Green Star medic shouting: “Hey, Raff, go fetch an enema hose.” Several times the abbot suppressed an urge to go to the window and call to them for silence.

After bearing it as long as he could, he picked up a pair of binoculars, an old book, and a rosary, and went up to one of the old watchtowers where a thick stone wall cut off most of the sounds from the courtyard. The book was a slim volume of verse, really anonymous, but by legend ascribed to a mythical saint, whose “canonization” was accomplished only in fable and the folklore of the Plains, and not by any act of the Holy See. No one, indeed, had ever found evidence that such a person as Saint Poet of the Miraculous Eyeball had ever lived: the fable had probably arisen out of the story that one of the early Hannegans had been given a glass eyeball by a brilliant physical theorist who was his protégé — Zerchi could not remember whether the scientist had been Esser Shon or Pfardentrott — and who told the prince that it had belonged to a poet who had died for the Faith. He had not specified which faith the poet had died for — that of Peter or that of the Texarkanan schismatics — but evidently the Hannegan had valued it, for he had mounted the eyeball in the clutch of a small golden hand which was still worn upon certain state occasions by princes of the Harq — Hannegan dynasty. It was variously called the Orbis judicans Conscientias or the Oculus Poetae ]udicis, and the remnants of the Texarkana Schism still revered it as a relic. Someone a few years back had proposed the rather silly hypothesis that Saint Poet was the same person as the “scurrilous versificator” once mentioned in the Journals of the Venerable Abbot Jerome, but the only substantiating “evidence” for this notion was that Pfardentrott — or was it Esser Shon? — had visited the abbey during the reign of Venerable Jerome at about the same date as the “scurrilous versificator” entry in the Journal, and that the gift of the eyeball to Hannegan had occurred at some date after that visit to the abbey. Zerchi suspected that the thin book of verse had been penned by one of the secular scientists who had visited the abbey to study the Memorabilia at about that time, and that one of them could probably be identified with the “scurrilous versificator” and possibly with the Saint Poet of folklore and fable. The anonymous verses were a bit too daring, Zerchi thought, to have been written by a monk of the Order.

The book was a satirical dialogue in verse between two agnostics who were attempting to establish by natural reason alone that the existence of God could not be established by natural reason alone. They managed only to demonstrate that the mathematical limit of an infinite “doubting the certainty with which something doubted is known to be unknowable when the ‘something doubted’ is still a preceding statement of ‘unknowability’ of something doubted,” that the limit of this process at infinity can only be equivalent to a statement of absolute certainty, even though phrased as an infinite series of negations of certainty. The text bore traces of St. Leslie’s theological calculus, and even as a poetic dialogue between an agnostic identified only as “Poet” and another only as “Thon,” it seemed to suggest a proof of the existence of God by an epistemological method, but the versifier had been a satirist; neither poet nor don relinquished his agnostic premises after the conclusion of absolute certainty had been reached, but concluded instead that: Non cogitamus, ergo nihil sumus.

Abbot Zerchi soon tired of trying to decide whether the book was high intellectual comedy or more epigrammatic buffoonery. From the tower, he could see the highway and the city as far as the mesa beyond. He focused the binoculars on the mesa end watched the radar installation for a time, but nothing unusual appeared to be happening there. He lowered the glasses slightly to watch the new Green Star encampment down at the roadside park. The area of the park had been roped off. Tents were being pitched. Utility crews worked at tapping the gas and power lines. Several men were engaged in hoisting a sign at the entrance to the park, but they held it edgewise to his gaze and he could not read it. Somehow the boiling activity reminded him of a nomad “carnival” coming to town. There was a big red engine of some sort. It seemed to have a firebox and something like a boiler, but he could not at first guess its purpose. Men in Green Star uniforms were erecting something that looked like a small carousel. At least a dozen trucks were parked on the side road. Some were loaded with lumber, others with tents and collapsible cots. One seemed to be hauling firebricks, and another was burdened with pottery and straw.

Pottery?

He studied the last truck’s cargo carefully. A slight frown gathered on his forehead. It was a load of urns or vases, all alike, and packed together with cushioning wads of straw. Somewhere, he had seen the like of them, but could not remember where.

Still another truck carried nothing but a great “stone” statue — probably made of reinforced plastic — and a square slab upon which the statue was evidently to be mounted. The statue lay on its back, supported by a wooden framework and a nest of packing material. He could see only its legs and one outstretched hand that thrust up through the packing straw. The statue was longer than the bed of the truck; its bare feet projected beyond tailgate. Someone had tied a red flag to one of its great toes. Zerchi puzzled over it. Why waste a truck on a statue, when there was probable need of another truckload of food?

He watched the men who were erecting the sign. At last one of them lowered his end of the board and climbed a ladder to perform some adjustment of the overhead brackets. With one end resting on the ground, the sign tilted, and Zerchi, by craning, managed to read its message:

Hurriedly, he looked again at the trucks. The pottery!

Recognition came to him. Once he had driven past a crematorium and seen men unloading the same sort of urns from a truck with the same company markings. He swung the binoculars again, searching for the truck loaded with firebrick. The truck had moved. At last he located it, now parked inside the area. The bricks were being unloaded near the great red engine. He inspected the engine again. What had at first glance appeared to be a boiler, now suggested an oven or a furnace. “Evenit diabolus!” the abbot growled, and started for the wall stairs.

He found Doctor Cors in the mobile unit in the courtyard.

The doctor was wiring a yellow ticket to the lapel of an old man’s jacket, while telling him that he should go to a rest camp for a while and mind the nurses, but that he’d be all right if he took care of himself.

Zerchi stood with folded arms, munching at the edge of his lips and coldly watching the physician When the old man was gone, Cors looked up warily.

“Yes?” His eyes took note of the binoculars and reexamined Zerchi’s face. “Oh,” he granted. “Well, I have nothing to do with that end of it, nothing at all.”

The abbot gazed at him for a few seconds, then turned and stalked out. He went to his office and had Brother Patrick call the highest Green Star official…

“I want it moved out of our vicinity.”

“I’m afraid the answer is emphatically no.”

“Brother Pat, call the workshop and get Brother Lufter up here.”

“He’s not there, Domne.”

“Then have them send me a carpenter and a painter. Anybody will do.”

Minutes later, two monks arrived.

“I want five lightweight signs made at once,” he told them. “I want them with good long handles. They’re to be big enough to be read from a block away, but light enough for a man to carry for several hours without getting dog-tired. Can you do that?”

“Surely, milord. What do you want them to say?”

Abbot Zerchi wrote it for them. “Make it big and make it bright,” he told them. “Make it scream at the eye. That’s all.”

When they were gone, he called Brother Patrick again.

“Brother Pat, go find me five good, young, healthy novices, preferably with martyr complexes. Tell them they may get what Saint Stephen got.”

And I may get even worse, he thought, when New Rome hears about it..

28

Compline had been sung, but the abbot stayed on in the church, kneeling alone in the gloom of evening.

Domine, mundorum omnium Factor, parsurus esto imprimis eis filiis aviantibus ad sideria caeli quorum victus dificilior…

He prayed for Brother Joshua’s group — for the men who had gone to take a starship and climb the heavens into a vaster uncertainty than any uncertainty faced by Man on Earth. They’d want much praying for; none was more susceptible than the wanderer to the ills that afflict the spirit to torture faith and nag a belief, harrowing the mind with doubts. At home, on Earth, conscience had its overseers and its exterior taskmasters, but abroad the conscience was alone, torn between Lord and Foe. Let them he incorruptible, he prayed, let them hold true to the way of the Order.

Doctor Cors found him in the church at midnight and beckoned him quietly outside. The physician looked haggard and wholly unnerved.

“I just broke my promise!” he stated challengingly.

The abbot was silent. “Proud of it?” he asked at last.

“Not especially.”

They walked toward the mobile unit and stopped in the bath of bluish light that spilled out its entrance. The medic’s lab-jacket was soaked with sweat, and he dried his forehead on his sleeve. Zerchi watched him with that pity one might feel for the lost.

“We’ll leave at once, of course,” said Cors. “I thought I’d tell you.” He turned to enter the mobile unit.

“Wait a minute,” the priest said. “You’ll tell me the rest.”

“Will I?” The challenging tone once again. “Why? So you can go threaten hell-fire? She’s sick enough now, and so’s the child. I’ll tell you nothing.”

“You already have. I know who you mean. The child, too, I suppose?”

Cors hesitated. “Radiation sickness. Flash burns. The woman has a broken hip. The father’s dead. The fillings in the woman’s teeth are radioactive. The child almost glows in the dark. Vomiting shortly after the blast. Nausea, anemia, rotten follicles. Blind in one eye. The child cries constantly because of the burns. How they survived the shock wave is hard to understand. I can’t do anything for them except the Eucrem team.”

“I’ve seen them.”

“Then you know why I broke the promise. I have to live with myself afterwards, man! I don’t want to live as the torturer of that woman and that child.”

“Pleasanter to live as their murderer instead?”

“You’re beyond reasonable argument.”

“What did you tell her?”

“‘If you love your child, spare her the agony. Go to sleep mercifully as quick as you can.’ That’s all. We’ll leave immediately. We’ve finished with the radiation eases and the worst of the others. It won’t hurt the rest of them to walk a couple of miles. There aren’t any more critical-dosage cases.

Zerchi stalked away, then stopped and called back. “Finish,” he croaked. “Finish and then get out. If I see you again — I’m afraid of what I’ll do.”

Cors spat. “I don’t like being here any better than you like having me. We’ll go now, thanks.”

He found the woman lying on a cot with the child in the corridor of the overcrowded guesthouse. They huddled together under a blanket and both were crying. The building smelled of death and antiseptic. She looked up at his vague silhouette against the light.

“Father?” Her voice was frightened.

“Yes.”

“We’re done for. See? See what they gave me?”

He could see nothing, but he heard her fingers pick at the edge of paper. The red ticket. He could find no voice to speak to her. He came to stand over the cot. He fished in his pocket and brought out a rosary. She heard the rattle of the beads and groped for it.

“You know what it is?”

“Certainly, Father.

“Then keep it. Use it.”

“Thank you.”

“Bear it and pray.”

“I know what I have to do.”

“Don’t be an accomplice. For the love of God, child, don’t—”

“The doctor said—”

She broke off. He waited for her to finish; she kept silent.

“Don’t be an accomplice.”

She still said nothing. He blessed them and left as quickly as possible. The woman had handled the beads with fingers that knew them; there was nothing he could say to her that she didn’t already know.

“The conference of foreign ministers on Guam has just ended. No joint policy statement has yet been issued; the ministers are returning to their capitals. The importance of this conference, and the suspense with which the world awaits the results, cause this commentator to believe that the conference is not yet ended, but only recessed so that the foreign ministers many confer with their governments for a few days. An earlier report which alleged that the conference was breaking up amid bitter invective has been denied by the ministries. First Minister Rekol had only one statement for the press: “I’m going back to talk to the Regency Council. But the weather’s been pleasant here; I may come back later to fish.”

“The ten-day waiting period ends today, but it is generally held that the cease-fire agreement will continue to be observed. Mutual annihilation is the alternative. Two cities have died, but it is to be remembered that neither side answered with a saturation attack. The Asian rulers contend that an eye was taken for an eye. Our government insists that the explosion in Itu Wan was not an Atlantic missile. But for the most part, there is a weird and brooding silence from both capitals. There has been little waving of the bloody shirt, few cries for wholesale vengeance. A kind of dumb fury, because murder has been done, because lunacy reigns, prevails, but neither side wants total war. Defense remains at battle alert. The General Staff has issued an announcement, almost an appeal, to the effect that we will not use the worst if Asia likewise refrains. But the announcement says further: ‘If they use dirty fallout, we shall reply in kind, and in such force that no creature will live in Asia for a thousand years.”

“strangely, the least hopeful note of all comes not from Guam but from the Vatican at New Rome. After the Guam conference ended, it was reported that Pope Gregory ceased to pray for peace in the world. Two special Masses were sung in the basilica: the Exsurge quare obdormis, Mass against the Heathen, and the Reminiscere, Mass in Time of War; then, the report says His Holiness retired to the mountains to meditate and pray for justice.

“And now a word from—”

“Turn it off!” Zerchi groaned.

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

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

“What does it mean?”

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

“What a warning! What a gesture!”

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

“Lucifer’s no sandman, that’s true.”

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

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

“Buzzards?”

“There’ve been lots of them, all day. Dozens of buzzards — just circling.”

“Where?”

“Over. the Green Star camp down the highway.”

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

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

“I brought ye somewhat, Father Zerchi,” she told him.

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

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

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

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

“Port ‘em myself. I ported them this far.” She hoisted the basket again.

“Thank you, Mrs. Grales.” He turned to go.

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

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

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

Zerchi hesitated. “Why not Father Selo?”

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

“If he’s offended you, you’ll have to forgive him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“To town,” she said. “I’ve got to go. It’s urgent.”

“Not so urgent that somebody couldn’t go do it for you. I’ll get Brother—”

“No, Father, no! Nobody else can do it for me. I’ve got to go to town.”

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

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

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

“I’ve got to get to town, I tell you!” she shrieked angrily.

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

“You shouldn’t be going at all.”

“I tell you, I’ve got to go!”

“All right, then. Let’s help you in…the baby… now you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Offer it to Heaven, child.”

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

“If you offer it, yes.”

“I cannot understand a God who is pleased by my baby’s hurting!”

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

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

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

“Don’t do it, daughter. Just don’t do it.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said coldly.

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

“A little.”

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

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

“Only that I killed him.”

“Stop. Whatever you’re about to say, stop.”

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

“Shut up!” she whispered.

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

“Shut up, damn you shut up!” she hissed.

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

“Therefore you’re asking me to let her die slowly and—”

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

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

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

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

“Nowhere. I’ve changed my mind.”

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

“Forget it, Father. I’ve changed my mind.”

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

“I’ll think about it.”

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

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

The child was crying again. The mother stirred restlessly.

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

The officer looked at the girl again. “Ma’am?”

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

“You’ll be better off, ma’am,” said the officer, eying the red tickets again.

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

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

“Let go!” he snapped, then softly: “Ma’am, are you his ward or something?”

“No.”

“Where do you get off forbidding the lady to get out?” the officer demanded. “We’re just a little impatient with you, mister, and it had better be—”

Zerchi ignored him and spoke rapidly to the girl. She shook her head.

“The baby, then. Let me take the baby back to the sisters. I insist—”

“Ma’am, is that your child?” the officer asked. The girl was already out of the car, but Zerchi was holding the child.

The girl nodded. “She’s mine.”

“Has he been holding you prisoner or something?”

“No.”

“What do you want to do, ma’am?”

She paused.

“Get back in the car,” Dom Zerchi told her.

“You cut that tone of voice, mister!” the officer barked.

“Lady, what about the kid?”

“We’re both getting out here,” she said.

Zerchi slammed the door and tried to start the car, but the officer’s hand flashed in through the window, hit the CANCEL button, and removed the key.

“Attempted kidnapping?” one officer grunted to the other.

“Maybe,” said the other, and opened the door. “Now let go of the woman’s baby!”

“To let it be murdered here?” the abbot asked. “You’ll have to use force.”

“Go around to the other side of the car, Fal.”

“No!”

“Now, just a little baton under the armpit. That’s it, pull! All right, lady — there’s your kid. No, I guess you can’t, not with those crutches Cors? Where’s Cors? Hey, Doc!”

Abbot Zerchi caught a glimpse of a familiar face coining through the crowd.

“Lift the kid out while we hold this nut, will you?”

Doctor and priest exchanged a silent glance, and then the baby was lifted from the car. The officers released the abbot’s wrists. One of them turned and found himself hemmed in by novices with upraised signs. He interpreted the signs as potential weapons, and his hand dropped to his gun.

“Back up!” he snapped.

Bewildered, the novices moved back.

“Get out.”

The abbot climbed out of the car. He found himself facing the chubby court official. The latter tapped him on the arm with a folded paper. “You have just been served with a restraining order, which I am required by the court to read and explain to you. Here is your copy. The officers are witnesses that you have been confronted with it, so you cannot resist service—”

“Oh, give it here.”

“That’s the right attitude. Now you are directed by the court as follows: ‘Whereas the plaintiff alleges that a great public nuisance has been — ’ “

“Throw the signs in the ash barrel over there,” Zerchi instructed his novices, “unless somebody objects. Then climb in the car and wait.” He paid no attention to the reading of the order, but approached the officers while the process server trailed behind, reading in monotonous staccato. “Am I under arrest?”

“We’re thinking about it.”

“‘ — and to appear before this court on the aforesaid date to show cause why an injunction — ’“

“Any particular charge?”

“We could make four or five charges stick, if you want it that way.”

Cors came back through the gate. The woman and her child had been escorted into the camp area. The doctor’s expression was grave, if not guilty.

“Listen, Father,” he said, “I know how you feel about all this, but—”

Abbot Zerchi’s fist shot out at the doctor’s face in a straight right jab. It caught Cors off balance, and he sat down hard in the driveway. He looked bewildered. He snuffled a few times. Suddenly his nose leaked blood. The police had the priest’s arms pinned behind him.

“ ‘ — and herein fail not,’“ the process server jabbered on, “‘lest a decree pro confesso — ’“

“Take him over to the car,” said one of the officers.

The car toward which the abbot was led was not his own but the police cruiser. “The judge will be a little disappointed in you,” the officer told him sourly. “Now stand still right there and be quiet. One move and you go in the locks.”

The abbot and the officer waited by the cruiser while the process server, the doctor, and the other officer conferred in the driveway. Cors was pressing a handkerchief to his nose.

They talked for five minutes. Thoroughly ashamed, Zerchi pressed his forehead against the metal of the car and tried to pray. It mattered little to him at the moment what they might decide to do. He could think only of the girl and the child. He was certain she had been ready to change her mind, had needed only the command, I, a priest of God, adjure thee, and the grace to hear it — if only they had not forced him to stop where she could witness “God’s priest” summarily overruled by “Caesar’s traffic cop.” Never to him had Christ’s Kingship seemed more distant.

“All right, mister. You’re a lucky nut, I’ll say that.”

Zerchi looked up. “What?”

“Doctor Cors refuses to file a complaint. He says he had one coming. Why did you hit him?”

“Ask him.”

“We did. I’m just trying to decide whether we take you in or just give you the summons. The court officer says you’re well known hereabouts. What do you do?”

Zerchi reddened. “Doesn’t this mean anything to you?” He touched his pectoral cross.

“Not when the guy wearing it punches somebody in the nose. What do you do?”

Zerchi swallowed the last trace of his pride. “I am the abbot of the Brothers of Saint Leibowitz at the abbey you see down the road.”

“That gives you a license to commit assault?”

“I’m sorry. If Doctor Cors will hear me, I’ll apologize. If you give me a summons, I promise to appear.”

“Fal?”

“The jail’s full of D.P.s.”

“Listen, if we just forget the whole thing, will you stay away from this place, and keep your gang out there where they belong?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Get moving. But if you so much as drive past here and spit, that’ll be it.”

“Thank you.”

A calliope was playing somewhere in the park as they drove away; and looking back, Zerchi saw that the carousel was turning. One officer mopped his face, clapped the process server on the back, and they all went to their cars and drove away. Even with five novices in the car, Zerchi was alone with his shame.

29

“I believe you’ve been warned about that temper before?” Father Lehy demanded of the penitent.

“Yes, Father.”

“You realize that the intent was relatively murderous?”

“There was no intent to kill.”

“Are you trying to excuse yourself?” the confessor demanded.

“No, Father. The intent was to hurt. I accuse myself of violating the spirit of the Fifth Commandment in thought and deed, and of sinning against charity and justice. And bringing disgrace and scandal upon my office.”

“You realize that you have broken a promise never to resort to violence?”

“Yes, Father. I deeply regret it.”

“And the only mitigating circumstance is that you just saw red and swung. Do you often let yourself abandon reason like that?”

The inquisition continued, with the ruler of the Abbey on his knees, and the prior fitting in judgment over his master.

“All right,” Father Lehy said at last, “now for your penance, promise to say—”

Zerchi was an hour and a half late getting to the chapel, but Mrs. Grales was still waiting. She was kneeling in a pew near the confessional, and she seemed half asleep. Embarrassed within himself, the abbot had hoped that she would not be there. He had his own penance to say before he could hear her. He knelt near the altar and spent twenty minutes finishing the prayers Father Lehy had assigned him as penance for that day, but when he moved back toward the confessional, Mrs. Grales was still there. He spoke to her twice before she heard him, and when she rose, she stumbled a little. She paused to feel at the Rachel face, exploring its eyelids and lips with withered fingers.

“Is something wrong, daughter?” he asked.

She looked up at the high windows. Her eyes wandered about the vaulted ceiling. “Ay, Father,” she whispered. “I feel the Dread One about, I do. The Dread One’s close, very close about us here. I feel need of shriv’ness Father — and something else as well.”

“Something else, Mrs. Grales?”

She leaned close to whisper behind her hand. “I need be giving shriv’ness to Him, as well.”

The priest recoiled slightly. “To whom? I don’t understand.”

“Shriv’ness — to Him who made me as I am,” she whimpered. But then a slow smile spread her mouth. “I — I never forgave Him for it.”

“Forgive God? How can you — ? He is just. He is Justice, He is Love. How can you say — ?”

Her eyes pleaded with him. “Mayn’t an old tumater woman forgive Him just a little for His Justice? Afor I be asking His shriv’ness on me?”

Dom Zerchi swallowed a dry place. He glanced down at her bicephalous shadow on the floor It hinted at a terrible Justice — this shadow shape. He could not bring himself to reprove her for choosing the word forgive. In her simple world, it was conceivable to forgive justice as well as to forgive injustice, for Man to pardon God as well as for God in pardon Man. So be it, then, and bear with her, Lord, he thought, adjusting his stole.

She genuflected toward the altar before they entered the confessional, and the priest noticed that when she crossed herself, her hand touched Rachel’s forehead as well as her own. He brushed back the heavy curtain, slipped into his half of the booth, and whispered through the grille, “What do you seek, daughter?”

“Blessings, Father, for I have sinned—”

She spoke haltingly. He could not see her through the mesh that covered the grille. There was only the low and rhythmic whimper of a voice of Eve. The same, the same, everlastingly the same, and even a woman with two heads could not contrive new ways of courting evil, but could only pursue a mindless mimicry of the Original. Still feeling the shame of his own behavior with the girl and the officers and Cors, he found it hard to concentrate. Still, his hands shook as he listened. The rhythm of the words came dull and muffled through the grille, like the rhythm of distant hammering. Spikes driven through palms, piercing timber. As alter Christus he sensed the weight of each burden for a moment before it passed on to the One who bore them all. There was the business about her mate. there were the murky and secret things, things to be wrapped in dirty newspaper and buried by night. That he could only make sense of a little of it, seemed to make the horror worse.

“If you are trying to say that you are guilty of abortion,” he whispered, “I must tell you that the absolution is reserved to the bishop and I can’t—”

He paused. There was a distant roaring, and the faint snort-growl of missiles being fired from the range.

“The Dread One! The Dread One!” whined the old woman.

His scalp prickled: a sudden chill of unreasonable alarm.

“Quickly! An act of contrition!” he muttered. “Ten Aves, ten Pater Nosters for your penance. You’ll have to repeat the confession again later, but now an Act of Contrition.”

He beard her murmuring from the other side of the grille. Swiftly he breathed an absolution: “Te absolvat Dominus Jesus Christus; ego autem eius auctoritate te absolvo ab omni vinculo…Denique, si absolvi potes, ex peccatis tuis ego te absolve in Nomine Patris…”

Before he had finished, a light was shining through the thick curtain of the confessional door. The light grew brighter and brighter until the booth was full of bright noon. The curtain began to smoke.

“Wait, wait!” he hissed. “Wait till it dies.”

“wait wait wait till it dies,” echoed a strange soft voice from beyond the grille. It was not the voice of Mrs. Grales.

“Mrs. Grales? Mrs. Grales?”

She answered him in a thick-tongued, sleepy murmur.

“I never meant to… I never meant to… never love .. . love…” it trailed away. It was not the same voice that had answered him a moment ago.

“Now, quickly, run!”

Not waiting to see that she heeded him, he bounded out of the confessional and ran down the aisle toward the altar of reservation. The light had dimmed, but it still roasted the skin with noon sunglare. How many seconds remained? The church was full of smoke.

He vaulted into the sanctuary, stumbled over the first step, called it a genuflection, and went to the altar. With frantic hands, he removed the Christ-filled ciborium from the tabernacle, genuflected again before the Presence, grabbed up the Body of his God and ran for it.

The building fell in on him.

When he awoke, there was nothing but dust. He was pinned to the ground at the waist. He lay on his belly in the dirt and tried to move. One arm was free, but the other was caught under the weight that held him down. His free hand still clutched the ciborium, but he had tipped it in falling, and the top had come off, spilling several of the small Hosts.

The blast had swept him clean out of the church, he decided. He lay in sand, and saw the remains of a rose bush caught in a rockfall. A rose remained attached to a branch of it — one of the Salmon Armenians, he noticed. The petals were singed.

There was a great roaring of engines in the sky, and blue lights kept winking through the dust. He felt no pain at first. He tried to crane his neck so as to get a look at the behemoth that sat on him, but then things started hurting. His eyes filmed. He cried out softly. He would not look back again. Five tons of rock had tucked him in. It held whatever remained of him below the waist.

He began recovering the little Hosts. He moved his free arm gingerly. Cautiously he picked each of them out of the sand. The wind threatened to send the small flakes of Christ wandering. Anyway, Lord, I tried, he thought. Anyone needing the last rites? Viaticum? They’ll have to drag themselves to me, if they do. Or is anybody left?

He could hear no voices above the terrible roaring.

A trickle of blood kept seeping into his eyes. He wiped at it with his forearm so as to avoid staining the wafers with gory fingers. Wrong blood, Lord, mine, not Yours. Dealba me.

He returned most of the scattered Victim to the vessel, but a few fugitive flakes eluded his reach. He stretched for them, but blacked out again.

“JesusMaryJoseph! Help!”

Faintly he heard an answer, distant and scarcely audible under the howling sky. It was the soft strange voice he had heard in the confessional, and again it echoed his words:

“jesus mary joseph help”

“What?” he cried.

He called out several times, but no further answer came. The dust had begun sprinkling down. He replaced the lid of the ciborium to keep the dust from mingling with the Wafers. He lay still for a time with his eyes closed.

The trouble with being a priest was that you eventually had to take the advice you gave to others. Nature imposes nothing that Nature hasn’t prepared you to bear. That’s what I get for telling her what the Stoic said before I told her what God said, he thought.

There was little pain, but only a ferocious itching that came from the captive part of him. He tried to scratch; his fingers encountered only bare rock. He clawed at it for a moment, shuddered, and took his hand away. The itch was maddening. Bruised nerves flashed foolish demands for scratching. He felt very undignified.

Well, Doctor Cors, how do you know that the itch is not the more basic evil than the pain?

He laughed a little at that one. The laugh caused a sudden blackout. He clawed his way out of the blackness to the accompaniment of someone screaming. Suddenly the priest knew that the screaming was his own. Zerchi was suddenly afraid. The itch had been transmuted into agony, but the screams had been those of raw terror, not of pain. There was agony now even in breathing. The agony persisted, but he could bear that. The dread had arisen from that last taste of inky blackness. The blackness seemed to brood over him, covet him, await him hungrily — a big black appetite with a yen for souls. Pain he could bear, but not that Awful Dark. Either there was something in it that should not be there, or there was something here that remained to be done. Once he surrendered to that darkness, there would be nothing he could do or undo.

Ashamed of his fright, he tried to pray, but the prayers seemed somehow unprayerful — like apologies, but not petitions — as if the last prayer had already been said, the last canticle already sung. The fear persisted. Why? He tried to reason with it. You’ve seen people die, Jeth. Seen many people die. It looks easy. They taper off, and then there’s a little spasm, and it’s over. That inky Dark — gulf between aham and Asti — blackest Styx, abyss between Lord and Man. Listen, Jeth, you really believe there’s Something on the other side of it, don’t you? Then why are you shaking so?

A verse from the Dies lrae drifted into mind, and it nagged at him:

“What am I, who am wretched, then to say? Whom shall I ask to be my protector, since even the just man is scarcely safe?” Vix securus? Why “scarcely safe”? Surely He would not damn the just? Then why are you shaking so?

Really, Doctor Cors, the evil to which even you should have referred was not suffering, but the unreasoning fear of suffering. Metus doloris. Take it together with its positive equivalent, the craving for worldly security, for Eden, and you might have your “root of evil,” Doctor Cors. To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law — a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.

The trouble with the world is me. Try that on yourself, my dear Cors. Thee me Adam Man we. No “worldly evil” except that which is introduced into the world by Man — me thee Adam us — with a little help from the father of lies. Blame anything, blame God even, but oh don’t blame me. Doctor Cors? The only evil in the world now, Doctor, is the fact that the world no longer is. What pain hath wrought?

He laughed weakly again, and it brought the ink.

“Me us Adam, but Christ, Man me; Me us Adam, but Christ, Man me,” he said aloud. “You know what, Pat? — they’d… together… rather get nailed on it, but not alone… when they bleed… want company. Because… because why it is. Because why it is the same as Satan wants Man full of Hell. I mean the same as Satan wants Hell full of Man. Because Adam… And yet Christ… But still me…Listen, Pat—”

This time it took longer to drive the inky Dark away, but he had to make it dear to Pat before he went into it all the way. “Listen, Pat, because… why it is I told her the baby had to… is why I. I mean. I mean Jesus never asked a man to do a damn thing that Jesus didn’t do. Same as why I. Why I can’t let go. Pat?”

He blinked several times. Pat vanished. The world congealed again and the blackness was gone. Somehow he had discovered what he was afraid of. There was something he had yet to fulfill before that Dark closed over him forever. Dear God, let me live long enough to fulfill it. He was afraid to die before he had accepted as much suffering as that which came to the child who could not comprehend it, the child he had tried to save for further suffering — no, not [or it, but in spite of it. He had commanded the mother in the name of Christ. He had not been wrong. But now he was afraid to slide away into that blackness before he had endured as much as God might help him endure.

Let it be for the child and her mother, then. What I impose, I must accept. Fas est .

The decision seemed to diminish the pain. He lay quietly for a time, then cautiously looked back at the rock heap again. More than five tons back there. Eighteen centuries back there. The blast had broken open the crypts, for he noticed a few bones caught between the rocks. He groped with his free hand, encountered something smooth, and finally worked it free. He dropped it in the sand beside the ciborium. The jawbone was missing, but the cranium was intact except for a hole in the forehead from which a sliver of dry and half-rotten wood protruded. It looked like the remains of an arrow. The skull seemed very old.

“Brother,” he whispered, for none but a monk of the Order would have been buried in those crypts.

What did you do for them, Bone? Teach them to read and write? Help them rebuild, give them Christ, help restore a culture? Did you remember to warn them that it could never be Eden? Of course you did. Bless you, Bone, he thought, and traced a cross on its forehead with his thumb. For all your pains, they paid you with an arrow between the eyes. Because there’s more than five tons and eighteen centuries of rock back there. I suppose there’s about two million years of it back there — since the first of Homo inspiratus.

He heard the voice again — the soft echo-voice that had answered him a little while ago. This time it came in a kind of childish singsong: “la la la, la-la-la—”

Although it seemed to be the same voice he had heard in the confessional, surely it could not be Mrs. Grales. Mrs. Grales would have forgiven God and run for home, if she had got out of the chapel in time — and please forgive the reversal, Lord. But he was not even sure that it was a reversal. Listen, Old Bone, should I have told that to Cors?

Listen, my dear Cors, why don’t you forgive God for allowing pain? If He didn’t allow it, human courage, bravery, nobility, and self-sacrifice would all be meaningless things. Besides, you’d be out of a job, Cors.

Maybe that’s what we forgot to mention, Bone. Bombs and tantrums, when the world grew bitter because the world fell somehow short of half-remembered Eden. The bitterness was essentially against God. Listen, Man, you have to give up the bitterness—”be granting shriv’ness to God,” as she’d say — before anything; before love.

But bombs and tantrums. They didn’t forgive.

He slept awhile. It was natural sleep and not that ugly mind-seizing nothingness of the Dark. A rain came, clearing the dust. When he awoke, he was not alone. He lifted his cheek out of the mud and looked at them crossly. Three of them sat on the rubble heap and eyed him with funereal solemnity. He moved, They spread black wings and hissed nervously. He flipped a bit of stone at them. Two of them took wing and climbed to circle, but the third sat there doing a little shuffle-dance and peering at him gravely. A dark and ugly bird, but not like that Other Dark. This one coveted only the body.

“Dinner’s not quite ready, brother bird,” he told it irritably. “You’ll have to wait.”

It would not have many meals to look forward to, he noticed, before the bird itself became a meal for another. Its feathers were singed from the flash, and it kept one eye closed. The bird was soggy with rain, and the abbot guessed that the rain itself was full of death.

“la la la, la-la-la wait wait wait till it dies la…”

The voice came again. Zerchi had feared that it might have been a hallucination. But the bird was hearing it too. It kept peering at something out of Zerchi’s range of vision. At last it hissed raucously and took wing.

“Help!” he shouted weakly.

“help,” parroted the strange voice.

And the two-headed woman wandered into sight around a heap of rubble. She stopped and looked down at Zerchi.

“Thank God! Mrs. Grales! See if you can find Father Lehy—”

“thank god mrs. grales see if you can…”

He blinked away a film of blood, and studied her closely.

“Rachel,” he breathed.

“rachel,” the creature answered.

She knelt there in front of him and settled back on her heels. She watched him with cool green eyes and smiled innocently. The eyes were alert with wonder, curiosity, and — perhaps something else — but she could apparently not see that he was in pain. There was something about her eyes that caused him to notice nothing else for several seconds. But then he noticed that the head of Mrs. Grales slept soundly on the other shoulder while Rachel smiled. It seemed a young shy smile that hoped for friendship. He tried again.

“Listen, is anyone else alive? Get—”

Melodious and solemn came her answer: “listen is anyone else alive—” She savored the words. She enunciated them distinctly. She smiled over them Her lips reframed them when her voice was done with them. It was more than reflexive imitation, he decided. She was trying to communicate something. By the repetition, she was trying to convey the idea: I am somehow like you.

But she had only just now been born.

And you’re somehow different, too, Zerchi noticed with a trace of awe. He remembered that Mrs. Grales had arthritis in both knees, but the body which had belonged to her was now kneeling there and sitting back on its heels in that limber posture of youth. Moreover, the old woman’s wrinkled skin seemed less wrinkled than before, and it seemed to glow a little, as if horny old tissue were being revivified. Suddenly he noticed her arm.

“You’re hurt!”

“you’re hurt.”

Zerchi pointed at her arm. Instead of looking where he pointed, she imitated his gesture, looking at his finger and extending her own to touch it — using the wounded arm. There was very little blood, hut there were at least a dozen cuts and one looked deep. He tugged at her finger to bring her arm closer. He plucked out five slivers of broken glass. Either she had thrust her arm through a window, or, more likely, had been in the path of an exploding windowpane when the blast had come. Only once when he removed an inch-long lance of glass did a trace of blood appear. When he pulled the others free, they left tiny blue marks, with no bleeding. The effect reminded him of a demonstration of hypnosis he had once witnessed, of something he had dismissed as a hoax. When he looked up at her face again, his awe increased. She was still smiling at him, as if the removal of the glass splinters had caused her no discomfort.

He glanced again at the face of Mrs. Grales. It had grown gray with the impersonal mask of coma. The lips seemed bloodless. Somehow he felt certain it was dying. He could imagine it withering and eventually falling away like a scab or an umbilical cord. Who, then, was Rachel? And what?

There was still a little moisture on the rain-wet rocks. He moistened one fingertip and beckoned for her to lean closer. Whatever she was, she had probably received too much radiation to live very long. He began tracing a cross on her forehead with the moist fingertip.

“Nisi baptizata es et nisi baptizari nonquis, te baptizo…”

He got no farther than that. She leaned quickly away from him. Her smile froze and vanished. No! her whole countenance seemed to shout. She turned away from him. She wiped the trace of moisture from her forehead, closed her eyes, and let her hands lie limply in her lap. An expression of complete passivity came over her face. With her head bowed that way, her whole attitude seemed suggestive of prayer. Gradually, out of the passivity, a smile was reborn. It grew. When she opened her eyes and looked at him again, it was with the same open warmth as before. But she glanced around as if searching for something.

Her eyes fell on the ciborium. Before he could stop her, she picked it up. “No!” he coughed hoarsely, and made a grab for it. She was too quick for him, and the effort cost him a blackout. As he drifted back to consciousness and lifted his head again, he could see only through a blur. She was still kneeling there facing him. Finally he could make out that she was holding the golden cup in her left hand, and in her right, delicately between thumb and forefinger, a single Host. She was offering it to him, or was he only imagining it, as he had imagined awhile ago that he was talking to Brother Pat?

He waited for the blur to clear. This time it wasn’t going to clear, not completely. “Domine, non sum dignus…” he whispered, “sed tantum die verbo . . ,”

He received the Wafer from her hand. She replaced the lid of the ciborium and set the vessel in a more protected spot under a jutting rock. She used no conventional gestures, but the reverence with which she had handled it convinced him of one thing: she sensed the Presence under the veils. She who could not yet use words nor understand them, had done what she had as if by direct instruction, in response to his attempt at conditional baptism.

He tried to refocus his eyes to get another look at the face of this being, who by gestures alone had said to him: I do not need your first Sacrament, Man, but I am worthy to convey to you this Sacrament of Life. Now he knew what she was, and he sobbed faintly when he could not again force his eyes to focus on those cool, green, and untroubled eyes of one born free.

“Magnificat anima mea Dominum,” be whispered. “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour; for He hath regarded the lowliness of His handmaid…” He wanted to teach her these words as his last act, for he was certain that she shared something with the Maiden who first had spoken them.

“Magnificat anima mea Dominum et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo, salutari meo, quia respexit humilitatem . . ,”

He ran out of breath before be had finished. His vision went foggy; he could no longer see her form. But cool fingertips touched his forehead, and he heard her say one word:

“Live.”

Then she was gone. He could hear her voice trailing away in the new ruins. “la la la, la-la-la…”

The image of those cool green eyes lingered with him as long as life. He did not ask why God would choose to raise up a creature of primal innocence from the shoulder of Mrs. Grales, or why God gave to it the preternatural gifts of Eden — these gifts which Man had been trying to seize by brute force again from Heaven since first he lost them. He had seen primal innocence in those eyes, and a promise of resurrection. One glimpse had been a bounty, and he wept in gratitude. Afterwards he lay with his face in the wet dirt and waited.

Nothing else ever came — nothing that he saw, or felt, or heard.

30

They sang as they lifted the children into the ship. They sang old space chanteys and helped the children up the ladder one at a time and into the hands of the sisters. They sang heartily to dispel the fright of the little ones. When the horizon erupted, the singing stopped. They passed the last child into the ship.

The horizon came alive with flashes as the monks mounted the ladder. The horizons became a red glow. A distant cloudbank was born where no cloud had been. The monks on the ladder looked away from the flashes. When the flashes were gone, they looked back.

The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages of imprisonment in the Earth.

Someone barked an order. The monks began climbing again. Soon they were all inside the ship.

The last monk, upon entering, paused in the lock. He stood in the open hatchway and took off his sandals. “Sic transit mundus,” he murmured, looking back at the glow. He slapped the soles of his sandals together, beating the dirt out of them The glow was engulfing a third of the heavens. He scratched his beard, took one last look at the ocean, then stepped back and closed the hatch.

There came a blur, a glare of light, a high thin whining sound, and the starship thrust itself heavenward.

The breakers beat monotonously at the shores, casting up driftwood. An abandoned seaplane floated beyond the breakers. After a while the breakers caught the seaplane and threw it on the shore with the driftwood. It tilted and fractured a wing. There were shrimp carousing in the breakers, and the whiting that fed on the shrimp, and the shark that munched the whiting and found them admirable, in the sportive brutality of the sea.

A wind came across the ocean, sweeping with it a pall of fine white ash. The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers. The breakers washed dead shrimp ashore with the driftwood. Then they washed up the whiting. The shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the cold clean currents. He was very hungry that season.