Walter M. Miller - A Canticle For Leibowitz

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A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ

Walter M. Miller, Jr.

This edition contains the complete text

of the original hardcover edition.

NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ

A Bantam Book/published by arrangement with

the Author

PRINTING HISTORY

Lippincott edition published October 1959

Catholic Digest edition published September 1960

Parts of this book appeared in a different form in

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION,

Bantam edition/February 1961

20 printings through December 1974

New Bantam edition/August 1976

15 printings through February 1988

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording, or by any information

storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing

from the publisher.

For information address: Bantam Books.

ISBN 0-553-27381-7

Published stimultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell

Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and

the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 666 Fifth Avenue, New

York, New York 10103.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

a dedication is only

a scratch where it itches--

for ANNE, then

in whose bosom RACHEL lies

muselike

guiding my clumsy song,

and giggling between the lines

--with blessings, Lass

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

To all those whose assistance, in various ways, contributed to making this

book possible, the author expresses his appreciation and gratitude, especially

and explicitly to the following: Mr. and Mrs. W. M. Miller, Sr., Messrs. Don

Congdon, Anthony Boucher, and Alan Williams, to Dr. Marshal Taxay, the Reverend

Alvin Burggraff, C.S.P., to Ss Francis and Clare, and to Mary, for reasons known

to each of them.

CONTENTS

Part I Fiat Homo 1

Part II Fiat Lux 111

Part III Fiat Voluntas Tua 223

Fiat Homo

Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed

documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during

that young novice's Lenten fast in the desert.

Never before had Brother Francis actually seen a pilgrim with girded

loins, but that this one was the bona fide article he was convinced as soon as

he had recovered from the spine-chilling effect of the pilgrim's advent on the

far horizon, as a wiggling iota of black caught in a shimmering haze of heat.

Legless, but wearing a tiny head, the iota materialized out of the mirror glaze

on the broken roadway and seemed more to writhe than to walk into view, causing

Brother Francis to clutch at the crucifix of his rosary and mutter an Ave or

two. The iota suggested a tiny apparition spawned by the heat demons who

tortured the land at high noon, when any creature capable of motion on the

desert (except the buzzards and a few monastic hermits such as Francis) lay

motionless in its burrow or hid beneath a rock from the ferocity of the sun.

Only a thing monstrous, a thing preternatural, or a thing with addled wits would

hike purposefully down the trail at noon this way.

Brother Francis added a hasty prayer to Saint Raul the Cyclopean, patron

of the misborn, for protection against the Saint's unhappy proteges. (For who

did not then know that there were monsters in the earth in those days? That

which was born alive was, by the law of the Church and the law of Nature,

suffered to live, and helped to maturity if possible, by those who had begotten

it. The law was not always obeyed, but it was obeyed with sufficient frequency

to sustain a scattered population of adult monsters, who often chose the

remotest of deserted lands for their wanderings, where they prowled by night

around the fires of prairie travelers.) But at last the iota squirmed its way

out of the heat risers and into clear air, where it manifestly became a distant

pilgrim; Brother Francis released the crucifix with a small Amen.

The pilgrim was a spindly old fellow with a staff, a basket hat, a brushy

beard, and a waterskin slung over one shoulder. He was chewing and spitting with

too much relish to be an apparition, and he seemed too frail and lame to be a

successful practitioner of ogre-ism or highwaymanship. Nevertheless, Francis

slunk quietly out of the pilgrim's line of sight and crouched behind a heap of

nibbled stone where he could watch without being seen. Encounters between

strangers in the desert, while rare, were occasions of mutual suspicion, and

marked by initial preparations on both sides for an incident that might prove

either cordial or warlike.

Seldom more than thrice annually did any layman or stranger travel the old

road that passed the abbey, in spite of the oasis which permitted that abbey's

existence and which would have made the monastery a natural inn for wayfarers if

the road were not a road from nowhere, leading nowhere, in terms of the modes of

travel in those times. Perhaps, in earlier ages, the road had been a portion of

the shortest route from the Great Salt Lake to Old El Paso; south of the abbey

it intersected a similar strip of broken stone that stretched east- and

westward. The crossing was worn by time, but not by Man, of late.

The pilgrim approached within hailing distance, but the novice stayed

behind his mound of rubble. The pilgrim's loins were truly girded with a piece

of dirty burlap, his only clothing except for hat and sandals. Doggedly he

plodded ahead with a mechanical limp while assisting his crippled leg with the

heavy staff. His rhythmic gait was that of a man with a long road behind him and

a long way yet to go. But, upon entering the area of the ancient ruins, he broke

his stride and paused to reconnoiter.

Francis ducked low.

There was no shade amid the cluster of mounds where a group of age-old

buildings once had been, but some of the larger stones could, nevertheless,

provide cooling refreshment to select portions of the anatomy for travelers as

wise in the way of the desert as the pilgrim soon proved himself to be. He

searched briefly for a rock of suitable proportions. Approvingly, Brother

Francis noted that he did not grasp the stone and rashly tug, but instead, stood

at a safe distance from it and, using his staff as a lever and a smaller rock

for a fulcrum, he jostled the weightier one until the inevitable buzzing

creature crawled forth from below. Dispassionately the traveler killed the snake

with his staff and flipped the stillwriggling carcass aside. Having dispatched

the occupant of the cool cranny beneath the stone, the pilgrim availed himself

of the cool cranny's ceiling by the usual method of overturning the stone.

Thereupon, he pulled up the back of his loincloth, sat with his withered

buttocks against the stone's relatively chilly underside, kicked off his

sandals, and pressed the soles of his feet against what had been the sandy floor

of the cool cranny. Thus refreshed, he wiggled his toes, smiled toothlessly and

began to hum a tune. Soon he was singing a kind of crooning chant in a dialect

not known to the novice. Weary of crouching, Brother Francis shifted restlessly.

While he sang, the pilgrim unwrapped a biscuit and a bit of cheese. Then

his singing paused, and he stood for a moment to cry out softly in the

vernacular of the region: "Blest be Adonoi Elohim, King of All, who maketh bread

to spring forth from the earth," in a sort of nasal bleat. The bleat being

finished, he sat again, and commenced eating.

The wanderer had come a long way indeed, thought Brother Francis, who knew

of no adjacent realm governed by a monarch with such an unfamiliar name and such

strange pretensions. The old man was making a penitential pilgrimage, hazarded

Brother Francis--perhaps to the "shrine" at the abbey, although the "shrine" was

not yet officially a shrine, nor was its "saint" yet officially a saint. Brother

Francis could think of no alternate explanation of the presence of an old

wanderer on this road leading to nowhere.

The pilgrim was taking his time with the bread and cheese, and the novice

grew increasingly restless as his own anxiety waned. The rule of silence for the

Lenten fast days did not permit him to converse voluntarily with the old man,

but if he left his hiding place behind the rubble heap before the old man

departed, he was certain to be seen or heard by the pilgrim, for he had been

forbidden to leave the vicinity of his hermitage before the end of Lent.

Still slightly hesitant, Brother Francis loudly cleared his throat, then

straightened into view.

"Whup!"

The pilgrim's bread and cheese went flying. The old man grabbed his staff

and bounded to his feet.

"Creep up on me, will you!"

He brandished the staff menacingly at the hooded figure which had arisen

from beyond the rock pile. Brother Francis noticed that the thick end of the

staff was armed with a spike. The novice bowed courteously, thrice, but the

pilgrim overlooked this nicety.

"Stay back there now!" he croaked. "Just keep your distance, sport. I've

got nothing you're after--unless it's the cheese, and you can have that. If it's

meat you want, I'm nothing but gristle, but I'll fight to keep it. Back now!

back!"

"Wait--" The novice paused. Charity, or even common courtesy, could take

precedence over the Lenten rule of silence, when circumstances demanded speech,

but to break silence on his own decision always left him slightly nervous.

"I'm not a sport, good simpleton," he continued, using the polite address.

He tossed back his hood to show his monastic haircut and held up his rosary

beads. "Do you understand these?"

For several seconds the old man remained in catlike readiness for combat

while he studied the novice's sun-blistered, adolescent face. The pilgrim's had

been a natural mistake. Grotesque creatures who prowled the fringes of the

desert often wore hoods, masks, or voluminous robes to hide deformity. Among

them were those whose deformity was not limited to the body, those who sometimes

looked on travelers as a dependable source of venison.

After a brief scrutiny, the pilgrim straightened.

"Oh--one of them." He leaned on his staff and scowled. "Is that the

Leibowitz Abbey down yonder?" he asked, pointing toward the distant cluster of

buildings to the south.

Brother Francis bowed politely and nodded at the ground.

"What are you doing out here in the ruins?"

The novice picked up a chalklike fragment of stone. That the traveler

might be literate was statistically unlikely, but Brother Francis decided to

try. Since the vulgar dialects of the people had neither alphabet nor

orthography, he chalked the Latin words for "Penance, Solitude, and Silence," on

a large flat stone, and wrote them again below in ancient English, hoping, in

spite of his unacknowledged yearning for someone to talk to, that the old man

would understand and leave him to his lonely Lenten vigil.

The pilgrim smiled wryly at the inscription. His laugh seemed less a laugh

than a fatalistic bleat. "Hmmm-hnnn! Still writing things backward," he said;

but if he understood the inscription, he did not condescend to admit it. He laid

aside his staff, sat on the rock again, picked his bread and cheese out of the

sand, and began scraping them clean. Francis moistened his lips hungrily, but

looked away. He had eaten nothing but cactus fruit and one handful of parched

corn since Ash Wednesday; the rules of fast and abstinence were rather strict

for vocational vigils.

Noticing his discomfort, the pilgrim broke his bread and cheese; he

offered a portion to Brother Francis.

In spite of his dehydrated condition, caused by his meager water supply,

the novice's mouth flooded with saliva. His eyes refused to move from the hand

that offered the food. The universe contracted; at its exact geometric center

floated that sandy tidbit of dark bread and pale cheese. A demon commanded the

muscles of his left leg to move his left foot half a yard forward. The demon

then possessed his right leg to move the right foot ahead of the left, and it

somehow forced his right pectorals and biceps to swing his arm until his hand

touched the hand of the pilgrim. His fingers felt the food; they seemed even to

taste the food. An involuntary shudder passed over his half-starved body. He

closed his eyes and saw the Lord Abbot glaring at him and brandishing a

bullwhip. Whenever the novice tried to visualize the Holy Trinity, the

countenance of God the Father always became confused with the face of the abbot,

which was normally, it seemed to Francis, very angry. Behind the abbot a bonfire

raged, and from the midst of the flames the eyes of the Blessed Martyr Leibowitz

gazed in death-agony upon his fasting protege, caught in the act of reaching for

cheese.

The novice shuddered again. "Apage Satanas!" he hissed as he danced back

and dropped the food. Without warning, he spattered the old man with holy water

from a tiny phial sneaked from his sleeve. The pilgrim had become

indistinguishable from the Archenemy, for a moment, in the somewhat sun-dazed

mind of the novice.

This surprise attack on the Powers of Darkness and Temptation produced no

immediate supernatural results, but the natural results seemed to appear ex

opere operato. The pilgrim-Beelzebub failed to explode into sulfurous smoke, but

he made gargling sounds, turned a bright shade of red, and lunged at Francis

with a bloodcurdling yell. The novice kept tripping on his tunic as he fled from

flailing of the pilgrim's spiked staff, and he escaped without nail holes only

because the pilgrim had forgotten his sandals. The old man's limping charge

became a skippity hop. He seemed suddenly mindful of scorching rocks under his

bare soles. He stopped and became preoccupied. When Brother Francis glanced over

his shoulder, he gained the distinct impression that the pilgrim's retreat to

his cool spot was being accomplished by the feat of hopping along on the tip of

one great toe.

Ashamed of the odor of cheese that lingered on his fingertips, and

repenting his irrational exorcism, the novice slunk back to his self-appointed

labors in the old ruins, while the pilgrim cooled his feet and satisfied his

wrath by flinging an occasional rock at the youth whenever the latter moved into

view among the rubble mounds. When his arm at last grew weary, he flung more

feints than stones, and merely grumbled over his bread and cheese when Francis

ceased to dodge.

The novice was wandering to and fro throughout the ruins, occasionally

staggering toward some focal point of his work with a rock, the size of his own

chest, locked in a painful embrace. The pilgrim watched him select a stone,

estimate its dimensions in hand-spans, reject it, and carefully select another,

to be pried free from the rock jam of the rubble, to be hoisted by Francis and

stumblingly hauled away. He dropped one stone after a few paces, and, suddenly

sitting, placed his head between his knees in an apparent effort to avoid

fainting. After panting awhile, he arose again and finished by rolling the stone

end-over-end toward its destination. He continued this activity while the

pilgrim, no longer glaring, began to gape.

The sun blazed its midday maledictions upon the parched land, laying its

anathema on all moist things. Francis labored on in spite of the heat.

When the traveler had washed down the last of his sandy bread and cheese

with a few squirts from his waterskin, he slipped feet into sandals, arose with

a grunt, and hobbled through the ruins toward the site of the novice's labors.

Noticing the old man's approach, Brother Francis scurried to a safe distance.

Mockingly, the pilgrim brandished his spiked cudgel at him, but seemed more

curious about the youth's masonry than he seemed eager for revenge. He paused to

inspect the novice's burrow.

There, near the east boundary of the ruins, Brother Francis had dug a

shallow trench, using a stick for a hoe and hands for a shovel. He had, on the

first day of Lent, roofed it over with a heap of brush, and used the trench by

night as refuge from the desert's wolves. But as the days of his fasting grew in

number, his presence had increased his spoor in the vicinity until the nocturnal

lupine prowlers seemed unduly attracted to the area of the ruins and even

scratched around his brush heap when the fire was gone.

Francis had first attempted to discourage their nightly digging by

increasing the thickness of the brush pile over his trench, and by surrounding

it with a ring of stones set tightly in a furrow. But on the previous night,

something had leaped to the top of his brush pile and howled while Francis lay

shivering below, whereupon he had determined to fortify the burrow, and, using

the first ring of stones as a foundation, had begun to build a wall. The wall

tilted inward as it grew; but since the enclosure was roughly an oval in shape,

the stones in each new layer crowded against adjacent stones to prevent an

inward collapse. Brother Francis now hoped that by a careful selection of rocks

and a certain amount of juggling, dirt-tamping, and pebble-wedging, he would be

able to complete a dome. And, a single span of unbuttressed arch, somehow

defying gravity, stood there over the burrow as a token of this ambition.

Brother Francis yelped like a puppy when the pilgrim rapped curiously at this

arch with his staff.

Solicitous for his abode, the novice had drawn nearer during the pilgrim's

inspection. The pilgrim answered his yelp with a flourish of the cudgel and a

bloodthirsty howl. Brother Francis promptly tripped on the hem of his tunic and

sat down. The old man chuckled.

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ACANTICLEFORLEIBOWITZWalterM.Miller,Jr.Thiseditioncontainsthecompletetextoftheoriginalhardcoveredition.NOTONEWORDHASBEENOMITTED.ACANTICLEFORLEIBOWITZABantamBook/publishedbyarrangementwiththeAuthorPRINTINGHISTORYLippincotteditionpublishedOctober1959CatholicDigesteditionpublishedSeptember1960Partsofth...

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Walter M. Miller - A Canticle For Leibowitz

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