Free A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller

the exercises and prayers. “They don’t think up questions like that on the basis of what might be true; they concoct the questions on the basis of what might be sensational if it just happened to be true. It’s ridiculous! I can tell you that the Reverend Father Abbot has ordered the entire novitiate to drop the subject.” After a moment, he unfortunately added: “There really wasn’t anything about the old man to suggest the supernatural-was there?” with only the faintest trace of hopeful wonder in his tone.
    Brother Francis wondered too. If there had been a suggestion of the supernatural, he had not noticed it. But then too, judging by the number of questions he had been unable to answer, he had not noticed very much. The profusion of the questions had made him feel that his failure to observe had been, somehow, culpable. He had become grateful to the pilgrim upon discovering the shelter. But he had not interpreted events entirely in terms of his own interests, in accordance with his own longing for some shred of evidence that the dedication of his lifetime to the labors of the monastery was born not so much of his own will as it was of grace, empowering the will, but not compelling it, rightly to choose. Perhaps the events had a vaster significance that he had missed, during the totality of his self-absorption.
    What is your opinion of your own execrable vanity?
    My execrable vanity is like that of the fabled cat who studied ornithology, m’Lord.
    His desire to profess his final and perpetual vows-was it not akin to the motive of the cat who became an ornithologist?-so that he might glorify his own ornithophagy, esoterically devouring Penthestes atricapillus but never eating chickadees. For, as the cat was called by Nature to be an ornithophage, so was Francis called by his own nature hungrily to devour such knowledge as could be taught in those days, and, because there were no schools but the monastic schools, he had donned the habit first of a postulant, later of a novice. But to suspect that God as well as Nature had beckoned him to become a professed monk of the Order?
    What else could he do? There was no returning to his homeland, the Utah. As a small child, he had been sold to a shaman, who would have trained him as his servant and acolyte. Having run away, he could not return, except to meet grisly tribal “justice.” He had stolen a shaman’s property (Francis’ own person), and while thievery was an honorable profession among the Utah, getting caught was a capital crime when the thief’s victim was the tribal warlock. Nor would he have cared to lapse back into the relatively primitive life of an illiterate shepherd people, after his schooling at the abbey.
    But what else? The continent was lightly settled. He thought of the wall-map in the abbey’s library, and of the sparse distribution of the crosshatched areas, which were regions-if not of civilization-then of civil order, where some form of lawful sovereignty, transcending the tribal, held sway. The rest of the continent was populated, very thinly, by the people of the forest and the plain, who were, for the most part, not savages, but simple clanfolk loosely organized into small communities here and there, who lived by hunting, gathering, and primitive agriculture, whose birth rate was barely high enough (discounting monster-births and sports) to sustain the population. The principal industries of the continent, excepting a few seacoast regions, were hunting, farming, fighting, and witchcraft-the last being the most promising “industry” for any youth with a choice of careers and having in mind as primary ends, maximum wealth and prestige.
    The schooling which Francis had been given at the abbey prepared him for nothing which was of practical value in a dark, ignorant, and workaday world, where literacy was nonexistent and a literate youth, therefore, seemed of no worth to a community unless he could also farm, fight, hunt or show some