The Poet at Dinner

“And my system of negotiable and transferable apologetics would have been of particular value to you, Thon Taddeo.”

“Would have?”

“Yes. It's a pity. Someone stole my blue-headed goat.”

“Blue-headed goat?”

“He had a head as bald as Hannegan's, Your Brilliance, and as blue as the tip of Brother Armbruster's nose. I meant to make you a present of the animal, but some dastard filched him before I came.”

The abbot clenched his teeth and held his heel poised over the Poet's toe. Thon Taddeo was frowning slightly, but he seemed determined to untangle the Poet's obscure skein of meaning.

“Do we need a blue-headed goat?” he asked his clerk.

“I can see no pressing urgency about it, sir,” said the clerk,

“But the need is obvious!” said the Poet. “They say you are writing equations that will one day remake the world. They say a new light is dawning. If there's to be light, then somebody will have to be blamed for the darkness of the past.”

“Ah, thence the goat.” Thon Taddeo glanced at the abbot. “A sickly jest. Is it the best he can do?”

“You'll notice he's unemployed. But let us talk of something sensib-”

“No, no, no, no!” objected the Poet. “You mistake my meaning, your brilliance. The goat is to be enshrined and honored, not blamed! Crown him with the crown Saint Leibowitz sent you, and thank him for the light that's rising. Then blame Leibowitz, and drive him into the desert. That way you won't have to wear the second crown. The one with thorns. Responsibility, it's called.”

The Poet's hostility had broken out into the open, and he was no longer trying to seem humorous. The thon gazed at him icily. The abbot's heel wavered over the Poet's toe, and again had reluctant mercy on it.

“And, when,” said the Poet, “your patron's army comes to seize this abbey, the goat can be placed in the courtyard and taught to bleat ‘There's been nobody here but me, nobody here but me' whenever a stranger comes by.”

Ending

The answer was near at hand; there was still the serpent whispering: For God doth know that in what day soever you eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as Gods. The old father of lies was clever at telling half-truths: How shall you know good and evil, until you have sampled a little? Taste and be as Gods. But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood among men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well.

Dom Paulo summoned the younger priest. It was very nearly time to go. And soon it would be a new year.

That was the year of the unprecedented torrent of rain of the desert, causing seed long dry to burst into bloom.

That was the year a vestige of civilization came to the nomads of the Plains, and even the people of Laredo began to murmur that it was possibly all for the best. Rome did not agree.

In that year a temporary agreement was formalized and broken between the states of Denver and Texarkana . It was the year that the Old Jew returned to his former vocation of Physician and Wanderer, the year that the monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz buried an abbot and bowed to a new one. There were bright hopes for tomorrow.

It was the year a king came riding out of the east, to subdue the land and own it. It was a year of Man.

It was unpleasantly hot beside the sunny trail that skirted the wooded hillside, and the head\t had aggravated the Poet's thirst. After a long time he dizzily lifted his head from the ground and tried to look around. The melee had ended; things were fairly quiet now, except for the cavalry officer. The buzzards were even gliding down to land.

There were several dead refugees, one dead horse, and the dying cavalry officer who was pinned under the horse. At intervals, the cavalryman awoke and faintly screamed. Now he screamed for Mother, and again he screamed for a priest. At times he awoke to scream for his horse. His screaming disquieted the buzzards and further disgruntled the Poet, who was feeling peevish anyhow. He was a very dispirited Poet. He had never expected the world to act in a courteous, seemly, or even sensible manner, and the world had seldom done so; often he had taken heart in the consistency of its rudeness and stupidity. But never before had the world shot the Poet in the abdomen with a musket. This he found not heartening at all.

Even worse, he had not now the stupidity of the world to blame, but his own. The Poet himself had blundered. He had been minding his own business and bothering no one when he noticed the party of refugees galloping toward the hill from the east with a cavalry troop in close pursuit. To avoid the affray, he had hidden himself behind some scrub that grew from the lip of the embankment flanking the trail, a vantage point from which he could have seen the whole spectacle without being seen. It was not the Poet's fight. He cared nothing whatever for the political and religious tastes of either the refugees or the cavalry troop. If slaughter had been fated, fate could have found no less disinterested a witness than the Poet. Whence, then, the blind impulse?

The impulse had sent him leaping from the embankment to tackle the cavalry officer in the saddle and stab the fellow three times with his own belt-knife before the two of them toppled to the ground. He could not understand why he had done it. Nothing had been accomplished. The officer's men had shot down him before ever climbed to his feet. The slaughter of refugees had continued. They had all ridden away in pursuit of other fugitives, leaving the dead behind.

He could hear his abdomen growl. The futility, alas, of trying to digest a rifle ball. He had done the useless deed, he decided finally, because of the part with the dull saber. If the officer had merely hacked the woman out of the saddle with one clean stroke, and ridden on, the Poet would have overlooked the dead. But to keep hacking and hacking that way—

He refused to think about it again. He thought of water.

“O God—O God—” the officer kept complaining.

“Next time, sharpen your cutlery” the Poet wheezed.

But there would be no next time.

The Poet could not remember ever fearing death, but he had often suspected Providence of plotting the worst for him as to the manner of dying when the time came to go. He had expected to rot away. Slowly and not very fragrantly. Some poetic insight had warned him that he would surely die a blubbering leprous lump, cravenly penitential but impenitent. Never had he anticipated anything so blunt and final as a bullet in the stomach, and with not even an audience at hand to hear his dying quips. The last thing they had heard him say when they shot him was: ‘Oof!' –his testament for posterity, Ooof! – a memorabile for you, Dominissime.

“Father? Father?” The officer moaned.

At least three clergymen lay dead among the refugees, and yet the officer was not now being so particular about specifying his denominational persuasions. Maybe I'll do, the Poet thought.

The officer was trying to reload when the Poet took the gun away from him. He seemed delirious, and kept trying to cross himself.

“Go ahead,” the Poet grunted, finding the knife.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…”

“Ego te absolvo, son,” said the Poet, and plunged the knife into his throat.

Afterward, he found the officer's canteen and drank a little. The water was hot from the sun, but it seemed delicious. He lay with his head pillowed on the officer's horse and waited for the shadow of the hill to creep over the road. Jesus, how it hurt! That last bit isn't going to be easy to explain, he thought, and me without my eyeball too. If there's really anything to explain. He looked at the dead cavalryman.

“Hot as hell down there, isn't it?” he whispered hoarsely.

The cavalryman was not being informative. The Poet took another drink from the canteen, then another. Suddenly there was a very painful bowel movement. He was quite unhappy about it for a moment or two.

The buzzards strutted and preened, and quarreled over dinner; it was not yet properly cured. They waited a few days for the wolves. There was plenty for all. Finally they ate the Poet.

As always the wild black scavengers of the skies laid their eggs in season and lovingly fed their young. They soared high over prairies and mountains and plains, searching for the fulfillment of that share of life's destiny which was theirs accordint to the plan of Nature. Their philosophers demonstrated by unaided reason alone that the Supreme Cathartes aura regans had created the world especially for buzzards. They worshipped him with hearty appetites for many centuries.

Then, after the generations of the darkness came the generations of the light. And they called it the Year of Our Lord 3781 – a year of His peace, they prayed.

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 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 – an idiot screams his mindless anguish amidst the rubble. But quickly, let it be inundated by the choir, chanting Alleluias and 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.

Kyrie eleison.

Lucifer is fallen.

Christe eleison.

Lucifer is fallen,

Kyrie eleison, eleison imas.

Girl with Dying Child

“I had a cat once, when I was a boy,” the abbot murmured slowly. “He was a big grey 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 that 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 ad 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 told me. 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. 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 afterwards it was 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 I had only let him get to those bushes, and die the way a cat would if you just let it alone – with dignity. Zeke was only a cat, but –”

“Shut up!” she whispered.

“-but even the ancient pagans noticed that Nature imposes on you nothing 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 the 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 words 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 feared that the girl would laugh in his face. When the 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.

“Are you going to tell me where you wanted to go, child?”

“Nowhere. I've changed my mind.”

Dom Paulo and Benjamin

Benjamin shrugged eloquently. ‘Difference, secular scholars, he echoed, tossing out the words like discarded apple pits. ‘ I have been called a “secular scholar” at various times by certain people and sometimes I've been staked, stoned, and burned for it.'

‘Why, you never – ' The priest stopped, frowning sharply. That madness again. Benjamin was peering at him suspiciously, and his smile had gone cold. Now, thought the abbot, he's looking at me as if I were one of Them – whatever formless “Them” it was that drove him here to solitude. Staked, stoned, and burned? Or did his “I” mean “We,” as in “I, my people?”

‘Benjamin – I am Paulo. Torqumada is dead. I was born seventy-odd years ago, and pretty soon I'll die. I have loved you, old man, and when you look at me I wish you would see Paulo of Pecos and no other.

Benjamin wavered for a moment. His eyes became moist. ‘I sometimes – forget-‘

‘And sometimes you forget that Benjamin is only Benjamin, and not all of Israel .'

‘Never!' snapped the hermit, eyes blazing again. ‘For thirty-two centuries, I-' He stopped and closed his mouth tightly.

‘Why?” the abbot whispered, almost in awe. ‘Why do you take the burden of a people and its past upon yourself alone?'

The hermit's eyes flashed a brief warning, but he swallowed a throaty sound and lowered his face into his hands. ‘You fish in dark waters.'

‘Forgive me.'

‘The burden – it was pressed upon me by others.' He looked up slowly. ‘Should I refuse to take it?'

The priest sucked in his breath. For a time there was no sound in the shanty but the sound of the wind. There was a touch of divinity in this madness! Dom Paulo thought. The Jewish community was thinly scattered in these times. Benjamin had perhaps outlived his children, or somehow become an outcast. Such an old Israelite might wander for years without encountering others of his people. Perhaps in that loneliness he had acquired the silent conviction that he was the last , the one, the only. And, being the last, he ceased to be Benjamin, becoming Israel . And upon his heart had settled the history of five thousand years, no longer remote, but become as the history of his own lifetime. His ‘I' was the converse of the imperial ‘We.'

But I, too, am a member of a oneness, thought Dom Paulo, a part of a congregation and a continuity, Mine, too, have been despised by the world. Yet for me the distinction between self and nation is clear. For you, old man, it has somehow become obscure. A burden pressed upon you by others? And you accepted it? What must it weigh? What would it weigh for me? He set his shoulders under it and tried to heave, testing the bulk of it: I am a Christian monk and priest, and I am, therefore, accountable before God for the actions and deeds of every monk and priest who has breathed and walked the earth since Christ, as well as for acts of my own.

He shuddered and began shaking his head.

No, no. It crushed the spine, this burden. It was too much for any man to bear, save Christ alone. To be cursed for a faith was burden enough. To bear the curses was possible, but then – to accept the illogic behind the curses, the illogic which called one to task not only for himself, but also for every member of his race or faith, for their actions as well as one's own? To accept that too? –as Benjamin was trying to do?

No, no.

And yet, Dom Paulo's own faith told him that the burden was there, and had been ever since Adam's time – and the burden imposed by a fiend crying in mockery, ‘ Man! at man. ‘ Man! ' –calling each to account for the deeds of all since the beginning; a burden impressed upon every generation before the opening of the womb, the burden of the guilt of original sin. Let the fool dispute it. The same fool with great delight accepted the other inheritance – the inheritance of ancestral glory, virtue, triumph, and dignity which rendered him ‘courageous and noble by reason of birthright,' without protesting that he personally had done nothing to earn that inheritance beyond being born of the race of Man. The protest was reserved for the inherited burden which rendered him ‘guilty and outcast by reason of birthright,' and against that verdict he strained to close his ears. The burden, indeed, was hard. His own faith told him, too, that the burden had been lifted from him by the One whose image hung from a cross above the altars, though the burden's imprint was still there. The imprint was an easier yoke, compared to the full weight of the original curse. He could not bring himself to say it to the old man, since the old man already knew he believed it. Benjamin was looking for Another. And the last old Hebrew sat alone on a mountain and did penance for Israel and waited for a Messiah.

Ending

The last monk, upon entering, paused in the lock. He stood in the open hatchway and took oh 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, rook one last look at the ocean, then stepped back and closed the hatch.

There care 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 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 cool clean currents. He was very hungry that season.