A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller [118]
“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 were a 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