A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller [30]
Brother Francis Gerard of Utah returned to the desert the following year and fasted again in solitude. Once more he returned, weak and emaciated, and soon was summoned into the presence of Abbot Arkos, who demanded to know whether he claimed further conferences with members of the Heavenly Hosts.
“Oh, no, m’Lord Abbot. Nothing by day but buzzards.”
“By night?” Arkos asked suspiciously.
“Only wolves,” said Francis, adding cautiously: “I think.”
Arkos did not choose to belabor the cautious amendment, but merely frowned. The abbot’s frown, Brother Francis had come to observe, was the causative source of radiant energy which traveled through space with finite velocity and which was as yet not very well understood except in terms of its withering effect upon whatever thing absorbed it, that thing usually being a postulant or novice. Francis had absorbed a five-second burst of the stuff by the time the next question was put to him.
“Now what about last year?”
The novice paused to swallow. “The-old-man?”
“The old man.”
“Yes, Dom Arkos.”
Trying to keep any hint of a question mark out of his tone, Arkos droned: “Just an old man. Nothing more. We’re sure of that now.”
“I think it was just an old man, too.”
Father Arkos reached wearily for the hickory ruler.
WHACK!
“Deo gratias!”
WHACK!
“Deo…”
As Francis returned to his cell, the abbot called after him down the corridor: “By the way, I intended to mention…”
“Yes, Reverend Father?”
“No vows this year,” he said absently, and vanished into his study.
7
Brother Francis spent seven years in the novitiate, seven Lenten vigils in the desert, and became highly proficient in the imitation of wolf calls. For the amusement of his brethren, he summoned the pack to the vicinity of the abbey by howling from the walls after dark. By day, he served in the kitchen, scrubbed the stone floors, and continued his classroom study of antiquity.
Then one day a messenger from a seminary in New Rome came riding to the abbey on an ass. After a long conference with the abbot, the messenger sought out Brother Francis. He seemed surprised to find that youth, now fully a man, still wearing the habit of a novice and scrubbing the kitchen floor.
“We have been studying the documents you discovered, for some years now,” he told the novice. “Quite a few of us are convinced they’re authentic.”
Francis lowered his head. “I’m not permitted to mention the matter, Father,” he said.
“Oh, that.” The messenger smiled and handed him a scrap of paper bearing the abbot’s seal, and written in the ruler’s hand: Ecce Inquisitor Curiae. Ausculta et obsequere. Arkos, AOL, Abbas.
“It’s all right,” he added hastily, noticing the novice’s sudden tension. “I’m not speaking to you officially. Someone else from the court will take your statements later. You know, don’t you, that your papers have been in New Rome for some time now? I just brought some of them back.”
Brother Francis shook his head. He knew less, perhaps, than anyone, concerning high-level reactions to his discovery of the relies. He noticed that the messenger wore the white habit of the Dominicans, and he wondered with a certain uneasiness about the nature of the “court” whereof the Black Friar had spoken. There was an inquisition against Catharism in the Pacific Coast region, but he could not imagine how that court could be concerned with relics of the Beatus. Ecce Inquisitor Curiae, the note said. Probably the abbot meant “investigator.” The Dominican seemed a rather mild-humored man, and was not carrying any visible engines of torture.
“We expect the case for canonization of your founder to be reopened soon,” the messenger explained. “Your Abbot Arkos is a very wise and prudent man.” He chuckled. “By turning the relics over to another Order for examination, and by having the shelter sealed before it was fully explored - well, you do understand, don’t you?”
“No, Father. I had supposed he thought