A Canticle For Leibowitz (S.F. MASTERWORKS), page 1
A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ
WALTER M. MILLER
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Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Introduction
Fiat Homo
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Fiat Lux
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Fiat Voluntas Tua
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Website
Also by Walter M. Miller Jr
Acknowledgment
Dedication
About the Author
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
‘The physicists have known sin,’ said J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1947, of their responsibility for the atomic bomb, ‘and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.’
This is a novel about that sin, and about how the knowledge of it could be lost through the sin’s repetition on a catastrophically larger scale – and how those who forgot it could then go ahead and repeat it, and repeat it again. The recurrent catastrophe is enabled by a quite specific sin: that of scientists who put their knowledge at the service of any ruler who will finance their work, regardless of the uses to which it is put.
Therein lies the continuing relevance of this book. But it takes more than relevance to keep a book almost continuously in print for over fifty years. It takes more, even, than literary skill, of which the book has plenty – it’s a delight to read, and to re-read: a strong, measured story, stately in scope but page-turning in pace, dispensing along the way a treasury of wry observation, of black humour, dry wit, and humane sensibility.
What has made this intensely Catholic novel a classic of science fiction is the heroic value it gives to reason, to knowledge, to science, and to the very human refusal to lie down and die. Written from within a mature convert’s learned, troubled faith, the novel does more than set religion against the wisdom of the world, or Christianity against humanism: it remains open to a reading that takes the Church’s doctrines as symbols of a story that makes sense in secular terms.
The outline: for centuries after our civilization self-destructs in a nuclear war, only the Church preserves fragments of scientific knowledge. Shortly after the war, the converted, repentant weapons engineer Leibowitz founded a religious order to save books from the wrath of mobs who blamed science and book-learning for their atrocious suffering (a nuclear war alone would not be enough to destroy all scientific knowledge – only frenzied survivors could bring about such a Year Zero). In the desert monasteries of a battered and blighted North America, monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz copy and re-copy every scrap that their often-martyred ‘bookleggers’ have perilously saved. Centuries later these ancient texts – the Memorabilia – help spark a new Renaissance, to eventually reboot an industrial civilization more advanced than ours. This civilization, in its turn … But you’re ahead of me. So is the Church, which this time takes its remnant – and the vastly expanded Memorabilia – to the stars.
The millennium-spanning tale is told in close-up. We follow monks reverently copying circuit-diagrams they don’t understand, and cherishing documents we know to be detritus. We hear litanies in which Fallout is the name of a demon. Dramatic ironies multiply as one of the first new scientists disdains a cleric’s quaint conjecture of evolution as an explanation for the origin of species. Petty barbarian chiefs expand their empires and, in blood and fire, forge civilization anew. After every battle and martyrdom, the buzzards win, until the last. When even the buzzards lose, it’s game over.
Miller – a veteran of the Allied bombing of Italy, guilt-ridden over his part in the destruction of the ancient monastery at Monte Cassino – combined an engineer’s love of technology with the understanding that technological progress could co-exist with, and indeed worsen, social and moral regress. His rigour with doctrine and liturgy is balanced by a playful recognition of the inevitability of legendary accretions, and of the conflicting demands these place on the guardians of the faith: on the one hand tolerating and indeed blessing the pious beliefs of simple folk; on the other, endlessly scraping the barnacles and weeds of superstition from the smooth hull and straight keel of orthodoxy’s ark. A familiar figure from Christian legend wanders through the story from the beginning. We see characters and incidents from one section become legends in the next. And in the end, we witness what may be a miracle or a mutation – our choice, either way, as ever.
Although the successor civilization has a slower-than-light starship drive and fledgling interstellar colonies, the texture of its daily life is a recognizable extension of ours, or rather of the 1960s: cars, television, communications satellites, cold war, and nuclear tensions. Written in the late 1950s, the story reads as if from a decade later, as though the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Second Vatican Council, the Death of God controversy, and the Moon landings had already happened. This is as far ahead as it sees, or needs to see. The society depicted is increasingly secular, and the church-state moral conflict Miller chooses to highlight for its last hours is of literally agonizing import: euthanasia for those doomed to die, very soon, in great pain. He picks the fight well: this is one where no one, no one at all, expects the force to falter, or the rock to move.
Likewise, the international alignment – pitting Western and Eastern alliances against each other – echoes our recent past. Though implausible as a post-atomic recurrence, this isn’t necessarily a failure of imagination. Miller was, as his many short stories show, well capable of imagining far-future worlds. It’s perhaps best seen as a dramatic device that brings home the always-potential imminence of the Flame Deluge, which could still be in our near future, as it always will be until it happens or we change our ways.
To close the circuit, and to clinch the book’s argument, that eerie contemporary resonance makes the connection that John Clute has identified as one of the imaginative roots of SF: ruins and futurity. A few years ago I stood where an ancient empire stopped, at Cramond on the Firth of Forth, and looked up from the buried walls of a Roman barracks to watch an airliner on approach. Out of the blue the juxtaposition recalled the final chapters of Canticle, and I shivered.
We may smile at the monks of the Order of Leibowitz, laboriously inking in a blueprint instead of just copying the lines, but the last laugh is on us.
Ken MacLeod
FIAT HOMO
1
Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.
Never before had Brother Francis actually seen a pilgrim with girded loins, but that this one was the bona fide article he was convinced as soon as he had recovered from the spine-chilling effect of the pilgrim’s advent on the far horizon, as a wiggling iota of black caught in a shimmering haze of heat. Legless, but wearing a tiny head, the iota materialized out of the mirror glaze on the broken roadway and seemed more to writhe than to walk into view, causing Brother Francis to clutch the crucifix of his rosary and mutter an Ave or two. The iota suggested a tiny apparition spawned by the heat demons who tortured the land at high noon, when any creature capable of motion on the desert (except the buzzards and a few monastic hermits such as Francis) lay motionless in its burrow or hid beneath a rock from the ferocity of the sun. Only a thing monstrous, a thing preternatural, or a thing with addled wits would hike purposefully down the trail at noon this way.
Brother Francis added a hasty prayer to Saint Raul the Cyclopean, patron of the misborn, for protection against the Saint’s unhappy protégés. (For who did not then know that there were monsters in the earth in those days? That which was born alive was, by the law of the Church and the law of Nature, suffered to live, and helped to maturity if possible, by those who had begotten it. The law was not always obeyed, but it was obeyed with sufficient frequency to sustain a scattered population of adult monsters, who often chose the remotest of deserted lands for their wanderings, where they prowled by night around the fires of prairie travelers.) But at last the iota squirmed its way out of the heat risers and into clear air, where it manifestly became a distant pilgrim; Brother Francis released the crucifix with a small Amen.
The pilgrim was a spindly old fellow with a staff, a basket hat, a brushy beard, and a waterskin slung over one shoulder. He was chewing and spitting with too much relish to be an apparition, and he seemed too frail and lame to be a successful practitioner of ogreism or highwaymanship. Nevertheless, Francis slunk quietly out of the pilgrim’s line of sight and crouched behind a heap of rubbled stone where he could watch without being seen. Encounters between strangers in the desert, while rare, were occasions of mutual suspicion, and 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 still-wriggling carcass aside. Having dispatched the occupant of the cool cranny beneath the stone, the pilgrim availed himself of the cool cranny’s ceiling by the usual method of overturning the stone. Thereupon, he pulled up the back of his loincloth, sat with his withered buttocks against the stone’s relatively chilly underside, kicked off his sandals, and pressed the soles of his feet against what had been the sandy floor of the cool cranny. Thus refreshed, he wiggled his toes, smiled toothlessly and began to hum a tune. Soon he was singing a kind of crooning chant in a dialect not known to the novice. Weary of crouching, Brother Francis shifted restlessly.
While he sang, the pilgrim unwrapped a biscuit and a bit of cheese. Then his singing paused, and he stood for a moment to cry out softly in the vernacular of the region: ‘Blest be Adonoi Elohim, King of All, who maketh bread to spring forth from the earth,’ in a sort of nasal bleat. The bleat being finished, he sat again, and commenced eating.
The wanderer had come a long way indeed, thought Brother Francis, who knew of no adjacent realm governed by a monarch with such an unfamiliar name and such strange pretensions. The old man was making a penitential pilgrimage, hazarded Brother Francis – perhaps to the ‘shrine’ at the abbey, although the ‘shrine’ was not yet officially a shrine, nor was its ‘saint’ yet officially a saint. Brother Francis could think of no alternate explanation of the presence of an old wanderer on this road leading to nowhere.
The pilgrim was taking his time with the bread and cheese, and the novice grew increasingly restless as his own anxiety waned. The rule of silence for the Lenten fast days did not permit him to converse voluntarily with the old man, but if he left his hiding place behind the rubble heap before the old man departed, he was certain to be seen or heard by the pilgrim, for he had been forbidden to leave the vicinity of his hermitage before the end of Lent.
Still slightly hesitant, Brother Francis loudly cleared 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.
