Dom Paulo frowned slightly as they crossed the room toward the alcove where Brother Armbruster still stood glowering upon the proceedings.
“Well, you’ve got your way now,” the librarian said to Kornhoer as they approached. “When’ll you be putting in a mechanical librarian, Brother?”
“We find hints, Brother, that once there were such things,” the inventor growled. “In descriptions of the Machina analytica, you’ll find references to—”
“Enough, enough,” the abbot interposed; then to the librarian: “Thon Taddeo will need a place to work. What do you suggest?”
Armbruster jerked one thumb toward the Natural Science alcove. “Let him read at the lectern in there like anyone else.”
“What about setting up a study for him here on the open floor, Father Abbot?” Kornhoer suggested in hasty counter-proposal.
“Besides a desk, he’ll need an abacus, a wall slate, and a drawing board. We could partition it off with temporary screens.”
“I thought he was going to need our Leibowitzian references and earliest writings?” the librarian said suspiciously.
“He will.”
“Then he’ll have to walk back and forth a lot if you put him in the middle. The rare volumes are chained, and the chains won’t reach that far.”
“That’s no problem,” said the inventor. “Take off the chains. They look silly anyway. The schismatic cults have all died out or become regional. Nobody’s heard of the Pancratzian Military Order in a hundred years.”
Armbruster reddened angrily. “Oh no you don’t,” be snapped. “The chains stay on.”
“But why?”
“It’s not the book burners now. It’s the villagers we have to worry about. The chains stay on.”
Kornhoer turned to the abbot and spread his bands. “See, m’Lord?,”
“He’s right,” said Dom Paulo. “There’s too much agitation in the village. The town council expropriated our school, don’t forget. Now they’ve got a village library, and they want us to fill its shelves. Preferably with rare volumes, of course. Not only that, we had trouble with thieves last year. Brother Armbruster’s right. The rare volumes stay chained.”
“All right,” Kornhoer sighed. “So he’ll have to work in the alcove.”
“Now, where do we hang your wondrous lamp?”
The monks glanced toward the cubicle. It was one of fourteen identical stalls, sectioned according to subject matter, which faced the central floor. Each alcove had its archway, and from an iron hook imbedded in the keystone of each arch hung a heavy crucifix.
“Well, if he’s going to work in the alcove,” said Kornhoer, “we’ll just have to take the crucifix down and hang it there, temporarily. There’s no other—”
“Heathen!” hissed the librarian. “Pagan! Desecrator!” Armbruster raised trembling hands heavenward. “God help me, lest I tear him apart with these hands! Where will he stop? Take him away, away!” He turned his back on them, his hands still trembling aloft.
Dom Paulo himself had winced slightly at the inventor’s suggestion, but now he frowned sharply at the back of Brother Armbruster’s habit. He had never expected him to feign a meekness that was alien to Armbruster’s nature, but the aged monk’s querulous disposition had grown definitely worse.
“Brother Armbruster, turn around, please.”
The librarian turned.
“Now drop your hands, and speak more calmly when you—”
“But, Father Abbot, you heard what he—”
“Brother Armbruster, you will please get the shelf-ladder and remove that crucifix.”
The color left the librarian’s face. He stared speechless at Dam Paulo.
“This is not a church,” said the abbot. “The placement of images is optional. For the present, you will please take down the crucifix. It’s the only suitable place for the lamp, it seems. Later we may change it. Now I realize this whole thing has disturbed your library, and perhaps your digestion, but we hope it’s in the interests of progress. If it isn’t, then—”
“You’d make Our Lord move over to make room for prog—”
“Brother Armbruster!”
“Why don’t you just hang the witch-light around His neck?”
The abbot’s face went frigid. “I do not force your obedience, Brother. See me in my study after Compline.”
The librarian wilted. “I’ll get the ladder, Father Abbot,” he whispered, and shuffled unsteadily away.
Dom Paulo glanced up at the Christ of the rood in the archway. Do You mind? he wondered.
There was a knot in his stomach. He knew the knot would exact its price of him later. He left the basement before anyone could notice his discomfort. It was not good to let the community see how such trivial unpleasantness could overcome him these days.
The installation was completed the following day, but Dom Paulo remained in his study during the test. Twice he had been forced to warn Brother Armbruster privately, and then to rebuke him publicly during Chapter. And yet he felt more sympathy for the librarian’s stand than he did for Kornhoer’s. He sat slumped at his desk and waited for the news from the basement, feeling small concern for the test’s success or failure. He kept one hand tucked into the front of his habit. He patted his stomach as though trying to calm a hysterical child.
Internal cramping again. It seemed to come whenever unpleasantness threatened, and sometimes went away again when unpleasantness exploded into the open where he could wrestle with it. But now it was not going away.
He was being warned, and he knew it. Whether the warning came from an angel, from a demon, or from his own conscience, it told him to beware of himself and of some reality not yet faced.
What now? he wondered, permitting himself a silent belch and a silent Beg pardon toward the statue of Saint Leibowitz in the shrinelike niche in the corner of his study.
A fly was crawling along Saint Leibowitz’ nose. The eyes of the saint seemed to be looking crosseyed at the fly, urging the abbot to brush it away. The abbot had grown fond of the twenty-sixth century wood carving; its face wore a curious smile of a sort that made it rather unusual as a sacramental image. The smile was turned down at one corner; the eyebrows were pulled low in a faintly dubious frown, although there were laugh-wrinkles at the corners of the eyes. Because of the hangman’s rope over one shoulder, the saint’s expression often seemed puzzling. Possibly it resulted from slight irregularities in the grain of the wood, such irregularities dictating to the carver’s hand as that hand sought to bring out finer details than were possible with such wood. Dom Paulo was not certain whether the image had been growth-sculptured as a living tree before carving or not; sometimes the patient master-carvers of that period had begun with an oak or cedar sapling, and — by spending tedious years at pruning, barking, twisting, and tying living branches into desired positions — had tormented the growing wood into a striking dryad shape, arms folded or raised aloft, before cutting the mature tree for curing and carving. The resulting statue was unusually resistant to splitting or breaking, since most of the lines of the work followed the natural grain.
Dom Paulo often marveled that the wooden Leibowitz had also proved resistant to several centuries of his predecessors — marveled, because of the saint’s most peculiar smile. That little grin will ruin you someday, he warned the image… Surely, the saints must laugh in Heaven; the Psalmist says that God Himself shall chortle, but Abbot Malmeddy must have disapproved — God rest his soul. That solemn ass. How did you get by him, I wonder? You’re not sanctimonious enough for some. That smile — Who do I know that grins that way? I like it, but… Someday, another grim dog will sit in this chair. Cave canem. He’ll replace you with a plaster Leibowitz. Long-suffering. One who doesn’t look crosseyed at flies. Then you’ll be eaten by termites down in the storage room. To survive the Church’s slow sifting of the arts, you have to have a surface that can please a righteous simpleton; and yet you need a depth beneath that surface to please a discerning sage. The sifting is slow, but it gets a turn of the sifter-handle now and then — when some new prelate inspects his episcopal chambers and mutters, “Some of this garbage has got to go.” The sifter was usually full of dulcet pap. When the old pap was ground out, fresh pap was added. But what was not ground out was gold, and it lasted. If a church endured five centuries of priestly bad taste, occasional good taste had, by then, usually stripped away most of the transient tripe, had made it a place of majesty that overawed the would-be prettifiers.