A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller [133]
“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