A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Page B

somethingness?”
    “Perhaps the negation applies to ‘twist.’”
    “Ah! Then we would have on “Untwisted Nothing,” eh? Have you discovered how to untwist a nothingness?”
    “Net yet,” Francis admitted.
    “Well keep at it, Brother! How clever they must have been, those ancients-to know how to untwist nothing. Keep at it, and you may learn how. Then we’d have the “electron” in our midst, wouldn’t we? Whatever would we do with it? Put it on the altar in the chapel?”
    “All right,” Francis sighed, “I don’t know. But I have a certain faith that the ‘electron’ existed at one time, although I don’t know how it was constructed or what it might have been used for.”
    “How touching!” chuckled the iconoclast, and returned to his work.
    The sporadic teasing of Brother Jeris saddened Francis, but did nothing to lessen his devotion to his project.
    The exact duplication of every mark, blotch, and stain proved impossible, but the accuracy of his facsimile proved sufficient for the deception of the eye at a distance of two paces, and therefore adequate for display purposes, so that the original might be sealed and packed away. Having completed the facsimile, Brother Francis found himself disappointed. The drawing was too stark. There was nothing about it to suggest at first glance that it might be a holy relic. The style was terse and unpretentious-fittingly enough, perhaps, for the Beatus himself, and yet-
    A copy of the relic was not enough. Saints were humble people who glorified not themselves but God, and it was left to others to portray the inward glory of the saintly by outward, visible signs. The stark copy was not enough: it was coldly unimaginative and did not commemorate the saintly qualities of the Beatus in any visible way.
    Glorificemus, thought Francis, while he worked on the perennials. He was copying pages of the Psalms at the moment for later rebinding. He paused to regain his place in the text, and to notice meaning in the words-for after hours of copying, he had ceased to read at all, and merely allowed his hand to retrace the letters which his eyes encountered. He noticed that he had been copying David’s prayer for pardon, the fourth penitential psalm, “Miserere mei, Deus …for I know my iniquity, and my sin is always before me.” It was a humble prayer, but the page before his eyes was not written in a humble style to match. The M in Miserere was gold-leaf inlay. A flourishing arabesque of interwoven gold and violet filaments filled the margins and grew into nests around the splendid capitals at the beginning of each verse. However humble the prayer itself, the page was magnificent. Brother Francis was copying only the body of the text onto new parchment, leaving spaces for the splendid capitals and margins as wide as the text lines. Other craftsmen would fill in riots of color around his simply inked copy and would construct the pictorial capitals. He was learning to illuminate, but was not yet proficient enough to be trusted at gold-inlay work on the perennials.
    Gloreficemus. He was thinking of the blueprint again.
    Without mentioning the idea to anyone, Brother Francis began to plan. He found the finest available lambskin and spent several weeks of his spare time at curing it and stretching it and stoning it to a perfect surface, which he eventually bleached to a snowy whiteness and carefully stored away. For months afterward, he spent every available minute of his free time looking through the Memorabilia, again seeking clues to the meaning of the Leibowitz print. He found nothing resembling the squiggles in the drawing, nor anything else to help him interpret its meaning, but after a long time he stumbled across a fragment of a book which contained a partially destroyed page whose subject matter was blueprinting. It seemed to be a piece of an encyclopaedia. The reference was brief and some of the article was missing, but after reading it several times, he began to