A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller [146]
He tried to refocus his eyes to get another look at the face of this being, who by gestures alone had said to him: I do not need your first Sacrament, Man, but I am worthy to convey to you this Sacrament of Life. Now he knew what she was, and he sobbed faintly when he could not again force his eyes to focus on those cool, green, and untroubled eyes of one born free.
“Magnificat anima mea Dominum,” be whispered. “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour; for He hath regarded the lowliness of His handmaid…” He wanted to teach her these words as his last act, for he was certain that she shared something with the Maiden who first had spoken them.
“Magnificat anima mea Dominum et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo, salutari meo, quia respexit humilitatem..,”
He ran out of breath before be had finished. His vision went foggy; he could no longer see her form. But cool fingertips touched his forehead, and he heard her say one word:
“Live.”
Then she was gone. He could hear her voice trailing away in the new ruins. “la la la, la-la-la…”
The image of those cool green eyes lingered with him as long as life. He did not ask why God would choose to raise up a creature of primal innocence from the shoulder of Mrs. Grales, or why God gave to it the preternatural gifts of Eden-these gifts which Man had been trying to seize by brute force again from Heaven since first he lost them. He had seen primal innocence in those eyes, and a promise of resurrection. One glimpse had been a bounty, and he wept in gratitude. Afterwards he lay with his face in the wet dirt and waited.
Nothing else ever came-nothing that he saw, or felt, or heard.
30
They sang as they lifted the children into the ship. They sang old space chanteys and helped the children up the ladder one at a time and into the hands of the sisters. They sang heartily to dispel the fright of the little ones. When the horizon erupted, the singing stopped. They passed the last child into the ship.
The horizon came alive with flashes as the monks mounted the ladder. The horizons became a red glow. A distant cloudbank was born where no cloud had been. The monks on the ladder looked away from the flashes. When the flashes were gone, they looked back.
The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages of imprisonment in the Earth.
Someone barked an order. The monks began climbing again. Soon they were all inside the ship.
The last monk, upon entering, paused in the lock. He stood in the open hatchway and took off 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, took one last look at the ocean, then stepped back and closed the hatch.
There came 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 in 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 cold clean currents. He was very hungry that season.
The End
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