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 mostly horizontal or vertical, and crossed each other with either a little jump-mark or a dot; they made right-angle turns to get around doohickii, and they never stopped in mid-space but always terminated at a squiggle, quiggle, quid, or thingumbob. It made so little sense that a long period of staring at it produced a stupefying effect. Nevertheless he began work at duplicating every detail, even to the copying of a central brownish stain which he thought might be the blood of the Blessed Martyr, but which Brother Jeris suggested was only the stain left by a decayed apple core.
Brother Jeris, who had joined the apprentice copyroom at the same time as Brother Francis, seemed to enjoy teasing him about the project. “What, pray,” he asked, squinting over Francis” shoulder, “is the meaning of “Transistorized Control System for Unit Six-B,” learned Brother?”
“Clearly, it is the title of the document,” said Francis, feeling slightly cross.
“Clearly. But what does it mean?”
“It is the name of the diagram which lies before your eyes, Brother Simpleton. What does ‘Jeris’ mean?”
“Very little, I’m sure,” said Brother Jeris with mock humility. “Forgive my density, please. You have successfully defined the name by pointing to the creature named, which is truly the meaning of the name. But now the creature-diagram itself represents something, does it not? What does the diagram represent?”
“The transistorized control system for unit six-B, obviously.”
Jeris laughed. “Quite clear! Eloquent! If the creature is the name, then the name is the creature. ‘Equals may be substituted for equals,’ or ‘The order of an equality is reversible,’ but may we proceed to the next axiom? If ‘Quantities equal to the same quantity may substitute for each other’ is true, then is there not some ‘same quantity’ which both name and diagram represent? Or is it a closed system?”
Francis reddened. “I would imagine,” he said slowly, after pausing to stifle his annoyance, “that the diagram represents an abstract concept, rather than a concrete thing. Perhaps the ancients had a systematic method for depicting a pure thought. It’s clearly not a recognizable picture of an object.”
“Yes, yes, it’s clearlyun recognizable!” Brother Jeris agreed with a chuckle.
“On the other hand, perhaps it does depict an object, but only in a very formal stylistic way — so that one would need special training or—”
“Special eyesight?”
“In my opinion, it’s a high abstraction of perhaps transcendental value expressing a thought of the Beatus Leibowitz.”
“Bravo! Now what was he thinking about?”
“Why — ’Circuit Design,’” said Francis, picking the term out of the block of lettering at the lower right.
“Hmmm, what discipline does that art pertain to, Brother? What is its genus, species, property, and difference? Or is it only an ‘accident’?”
Jeris was becoming pretentious in his sarcasm, Francis thought, and decided to meet it with a soft answer. “Well, observe this column of figures, and its heading: ‘Electronics Parts Numbers.’ There was once, an art or science, called Electronics, which might belong to both Art and Science.”
“Uh-huh! Thus settling ‘genus’ and ‘species.’ Now as to ‘difference,’ if I may pursue the line. What was the subject matter of Electronics?”
“That too is written,” said Francis, who had searched the Memorabilia from high to low in an attempt to find clues which might make the blueprint slightly more comprehensible — but to very small avail. “The subject matter of Electronics was the electron,” he explained.
“So it is written, indeed. I am impressed. I know so little of these things. What, pray, was the ‘electron?’“
“Well, there is one fragmentary source which alludes to it as a “Negative Twist of Nothingness.’“
“What! How did they negate a nothingness? Wouldn’t that make it a 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.