The Memorabilia was full of ancient words, ancient formulae, ancient reflections of meaning, detached from minds that had died long ago, when a different sort of society had passed into oblivion. There was little of it that could still be understood. Certain papers seemed as meaningless as a Breviary would seem to a shaman of the nomad tribes. Others retained a certain ornamental beauty or an orderliness that hinted of meaning, as a rosary might suggest a necklace to a nomad. The earliest brothers of the Leibowitzian Order had tried to press a sort of Veronica’s Veil to the face of a crucified civilization; it had come away marked with an image of the face of ancient grandeur, but the image was faintly printed, incomplete, and hard to understand. The monks had preserved the image, and now it still survived for the world to inspect and try to interpret if the world wanted to do so. The Memorabilia could not, of itself, generate a revival of ancient science or high civilization, however, for cultures were begotten by the tribes of Man, not by musty tomes; but the books could help, Dom Paulo hoped — the books could point out directions and offer hints to a newly evolving science. It had happened once before, so the Venerable Boedullus had asserted in his De Vestigiis Antecesserum Civitatum.
And this time, thought Dom Paulo, we’ll keep them reminded of who kept the spark burning while the world slept. He paused to look back; for a moment he had imagined that he had heard a frightened bleat from the Poet’s goat.
The clamor from the basement soon blanketed his hearing as he descended the underground stairs toward the source of the turmoil. Someone was hammering steel pins into stone. Sweat mingled with the odor of old books. A feverish bustle of unscholarly activity filled the library. Novices hurried past with tools. Novices stood in groups and studied floor plans. Novices shifted desks and tables and heaved a makeshift machinery, rocking it into place. Confusion by lamplight. Brother Armbruster, the librarian and Rector of the Memorabilia, stood watching it from a remote alcove in the shelves, his arms tightly folded and his face grim. Dom Paulo avoided his accusing gaze.
Brother Kornhoer approached his ruler with a lingering grin of enthusiasms. “Well, Father Abbot, we’ll soon have a light such as no man alive has ever seen.”
“This is not without a certain vanity, Farther,” Paulo replied.
“Vanity, Domne? To put to good use what we’ve learned?”
“I had in mind our haste to put it to use in time to impress a certain visiting scholar. But never mind. Let’s see this engineer’s wizardry.”
They walked toward the makeshift machine. It reminded the abbot of nothing useful, unless one considered engines for torturing prisoners useful. An axle, serving as the shaft, was connected by pulleys and belts to a waist-high turnstile. Four wagon wheels were mounted on the axle a few inches apart. Their thick iron tires were scored with grooves, and the grooves supported countless birds’-nests of copper wire, drawn from coinage at the local smithy in Sanly Bowitts. The wheels were apparently free to spin in mid-air, Dom Paulo noticed, for their tires touched no surface. However, stationary blocks of iron faced the tires, like brakes, with out quite touching them. The blocks too had been wound with innumerable turns of wire—”field coils” as Kornhoer called them. Dom Paulo solemnly shook his head.
“It’ll be the greatest physical improvement at the abbey since we got the printing press a hundred years ago,” Kornhoer ventured proudly.
“Will it work?” Dom Paulo wondered.
“I’ll stake a month’s extra chores on it, m’Lord.”
You’re staking more than that, thought the priest, but suppressed utterance. “Where does the light come out?” he asked, peering at the odd contraption again.
The monk laughed. “Oh, we have a special lamp for that. What you see here is only the ‘dynamo.’ It produces the electrical essence which the lamp will burn.”
Ruefully, Dom Paulo contemplated the amount of space the dynamo was occupying. “This essence,” he murmured, “ — can’t it be extracted from mutton fat, perhaps?”
“No, no — The electrical essence is, well — Do you want me to explain?”
“Better not. Natural science is not my bent. I’ll leave it to you younger heads.” He stepped back quickly to avoid being brained by a timber carried past by a pair of hurrying carpenters. “Tell me,” he said, “if by studying writings from the Leibowitzian age you can learn how to construct this thing, why do you suppose none of our predecessors saw fit to construct it?”
The monk was silent for a moment. “It’s not easy to explain,” he said at last. “Actually, in the writings that survive, there’s no direct information about the construction of a dynamo. Rather, you might say that the information is implicit in a whole collections of fragmentary writings. Partially implicit. And it has to be got out by deduction. But to get it, you also need some theories to work from — theoretical information our predecessors didn’t have.”
“But we do?”
“Well, yes — now that there have been a few men like—” his tone became deeply respectful and he paused before pronouncing the name “ — like Thon Taddeo—”
“Was that a complete sentence?” the abbot asked rather sourly.
“Well, until recently, few philosophers have concerned themselves with new theories in physics. Actually, it was the work of, of Thon Taddeo—” the respectful tone again, Dom Paulo noted, “ — that gave us the necessary working axioms. His work of the Mobility of Electrical Essences, for example, and his Conservation Theorem—”
“He should be pleased, then, to see his work applied. But where is the lamp itself, may I ask? I hope it’s no larger than the dynamo.”
“This is it, Domne,” said the monk, picking up a small object from the table. It seemed to be only a bracket for holding a pair of black rods and a thumbscrew for adjusting their spacing. “These are carbons,” Kornhoer explained.
“The ancients would have called it an ‘arc lamp.’ There was another kind, but we don’t have the materials to make it.”
“Amazing. Where does the light come from?”
“Here.” The monk pointed to the gap between the carbons. “It must be a very tiny flame,” said the abbot.
“Oh, but bright! Brighter, I expect, than a hundred candles.”
“No!”
“You find that impressive?”
“I find it preposterous—” noticing Brother Kornhoer’s sudden hurt expression, the abbot hastily added: “ — to think how we’ve been limping along on beeswax and mutton fat.”
“I have been wondering,” the monk shyly confided, “if the ancients used them on their altars instead of candles.”
“No,” said the abbot. “Definitely, no. I can tell you that. Please dismiss that idea as quickly as possible, and don’t even think of it again.”
“Yes, Father Abbot.”
“Now, where are you going to hang that thing?”
“Well—” Brother Kornhoer paused to stare speculatively around the gloomy basement. “I hadn’t given it any thought. I suppose it should go over the desk where, Thon Taddeo—” (Why does he pause like that whenever he says it, Dom Paulo wondered irritably.) “ — will be working.”
“We’d better ask Brother Armbruster about that,” the abbot decided, and then noticing the monk’s sudden discomfort: “What’s the matter? Have you and Brother Armbruster been—”
Kornhoer’s face twisted apologetically. “Really, Father Abbot, I haven’t lost my temper with him even once. Oh, we’ve had words, but—” He shrugged. “He doesn’t want anything moved. He keeps mumbling about witchcraft and the like. It’s not easy to reason with him. His eyes are half-blind now from reading by dim light — and yet he says it’s Devil’s work we’re up to. I don’t know what to say.”