A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller

your own project when you want one.”
    The idea came to Brother Francis in an unexpected flash.
    “May I use the time,” he blurted, “to make a copy of the Leibowitz blueprint I found?”
    Brother Horner seemed momentarily startled. “Well-I don’t know, son. Our Lord Abbot is, well-just a little sensitive on that subject. And the thing may not belong in the Memorabilia. It’s in the tentative file now.”
    “But you know they fade, Brother. And it’s been handled a lot in the light. The Dominicans had it in New Rome for so long-”
    “Well-I suppose it would be a rather brief project. If Father Arkos doesn’t object, but-” He waggled his head in doubt.
    “Perhaps I could include it as one of a set,” Francis hastily offered. “What few recopied blueprints we have are so old they’re brittle. If I made several duplicates-of some of the others-”
    Horner smiled wryly. “What you’re suggesting is, that by including the Leibowitz blueprint in a set, you might escape detection.”
    Francis reddened.
    “Father Arkos might not even notice, eh?-if he happened to wander through.”
    Francis squirmed.
    “All right,” said Horner, his eyes twinkling slightly. “You may use your unassigned time to make duplicates of any of the recopied prints that are in bad condition. If anything else gets mixed up in the lot, I’ll try not to notice.”
    Brother Francis spent several months of his unassigned time in redrawing some of the older prints from the Memorabilia’s files before daring to touch the Leibowitz print. If the old drawings were worth saving at all, they needed to be recopied every century or two anyhow. Not only did the original copies fade, but often the redrawn versions became nearly illegible after a time, due to the impermanence of the inks employed. He had not the slightest notion why the ancients had used white lines and lettering on a dark background, in preference to the reverse. When he roughly resketched a design in charcoal, thereby reversing the background, the rough sketch appeared more realistic than the white-on-dark, and the ancients were immeasurably wiser than Francis; if they had taken the trouble to put ink where blank paper would ordinarily be, and leave slivers of white paper where an inked line would appear in a straightforward drawing, then they must have had their reasons. Francis recopied the documents to appear as nearly like the originals as possible-even though the task of spreading blue ink around tiny white letters was particularly tedious, and quite wasteful of ink, a fact which caused Brother Horner to grumble.
    He copied an old architectural print, then a drawing for a machine part whose geometry was apparent but whose purpose was vague. He redrew a mandala abstraction, titled “STATOR WNDG MOD 73-A 3-PH 6-P 1800-BPM 5-HP CL-A SQUIRREL CAGE,” which proved completely incomprehensible, and not at all capable of imprisoning a squirrel, The ancients were often subtle; perhaps one needed a special set of mirrors in order to see the squirrel. He painstakingly redrew it anyhow.
    Only after the abbot, who occasionally passed through the copyroom, had seen him working at another blueprint at least three times (twice Arkos had paused for a quick look at Francis’ work), did he summon the courage to venture to the Memorabilia files for the Leibowitz blueprint, nearly a year after beginning his free-time project.
    The original document had already been subjected to a certain amount of restorative work. Except for the fact that it bore the name of the Beatus, it was disappointingly like most of the others he had redrawn.
    The Leibowitz print, another abstraction, appealed to nothing, least of all to reason. He studied it until he could see the whole amazing complexity with his eyes closed but knew no more than he had known before. It appeared to be no more than a network of lines connecting a patchwork of doohickii, squiggles, quids, laminulae, and thingumbob. The lines were