“Hot as hell down there, isn’t it’?” he whispered hoarsely.
The cavalrymen was not being informative. The Poet took another drink from the canteen, then another. Suddenly there was a very painful bowel movement. He was quite unhappy about it for a moment or two.
The buzzards strutted, preened, and quarreled over dinner; it was not yet properly cured. They waited a few days for the wolves. There was plenty for all. Finally they ate the Poet.
As always the wild black scavengers of the skies laid their eggs in season and lovingly fed their young. They soared high over prairies and mountains and plains, searching for the fulfillment of that share of life’s destiny which was theirs according to the plan of Nature. Their philosophers demonstrated by unaided reason alone that the Supreme Cathartes aura regnans had created the world especially for buzzards. They worshipped him with hearty appetites for many centuries.
Then, after the generations of the darkness came the generations of the light. And they called it the Year of Our Lord 3781 — a year of His peace, they prayed.
Fiat Voluntas Tua
24
There were spaceships again in that century, and the ships were manned by fuzzy impossibilities that walked on two legs and sprouted tufts of hair in unlikely anatomical regions. They were a garrulous kind. They belonged to a race quite capable of admiring its own image in a mirror, and equally capable of cutting its own throat before the altar of some tribal god, such as the deity of Daily Shaving. It was a species which often considered itself to be, basically, a race of divinely inspired toolmakers; any intelligent entity from Arcturus would instantly have perceived them to be, basically, a race of impassioned after-dinner speech-makers.
It was inevitable, it was manifest destiny, they felt (and not for the first time) that such a race go forth to conquer stars. To conquer them several times, if need be, and certainly to make speeches about the conquest. But, too, it was inevitable that the race succumb again to the old maladies on new worlds, even as on Earth before, in the litany of life and in the special liturgy of Man: Versicles by Adam., Rejoinders by the Crucified.
We are the centuries.
We are the chin-choppers and the golly-woppers,
and soon we shall discuss the amputation of your head.
We are your singing garbage men, Sir and Madam,
and we march in cadence behind you, chanting rhymes that some think odd.
Hut two threep foa!
Left!
Left!
He-had-a-good-wife-but-he
Left!
Left!
Left!
Right!
Left!
Wir, as they say in the old country, marschieren weiter wenn alles in Scherben fällt.
We have your eoliths and your mesoliths and your neoliths. We have your Babylons and your Pompeiis, your Caesars and your chromium-plated (vital-ingredient-impregnated) artifacts.
We have your bloody hatchets and your Hiroshimas. We march in spite of Hell, we do —
Atrophy, Entropy, and Proteus vulgaris,
telling bawdy jokes about a farm girl name of Eve
and a traveling salesman called Lucifer.
We bury your dead and their reputations.
We bury you. We are the centuries.
Be born then, gasp wind, screech at the surgeon’s slap, seek manhood, taste a little of godhood, feel pain, give birth, struggle a little while, succumb:
(Dying, leave quietly by the rear exit, please.)
Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens — and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn’t the same. (AGH! AGH! AGH! — an idiot screams his mindless anguish amid the rubble. But quickly! let it be inundated by the choir, chanting Alleluias at ninety decibels.)
Hear then, the last Canticle of the Brethren of the Order of Leibowitz, as sung by the century that swallowed its name:
LUCIFER IS FALLEN; the code words, flashed electrically across the continent, were whispered in conference rooms, were circulated in the form of crisp memoranda stamped SUPREME SECRETISSIMO, were prudently withheld from the press. The words rose in a threatening tide behind a dike of official secrecy. There were several holes in the dike, but the holes were fearlessly plugged by bureaucratic Dutch boys whose forefingers became exceedingly swollen while they dodged verbal spitballs fired by the press.
FIRST REPORTER: What is Your Lordship’s comment on Sir Rische Thon Berker’s statement that the radiation count on the Northwest Coast is ten times the normal level?
DEFENSE MINISTER: I have not read the statement.
FIRST REPORTER: Assuming it to be true, what could be responsible for such an increase?
DEFENSE MINISTER: The question calls for conjecture. Perhaps Sir Rische discovered a rich uranium deposit. No, strike that out. I have no comment.
SECOND REPORTER: Does Your Lordship regard Sir Rische as a competent and responsible scientist?
DEFENSE MINISTER: He has never been employed by my department.
SECOND REPORTS: That is not a responsive answer.
DEFENSE MINISTER: It is quite responsive. Since he has never been employed by my department, I have no way of knowing his competence or responsibility. I am not a scientist.
LADY REPORTER: Is it true that a nuclear explosion occurred recently somewhere across the Pacific?
DEFENSE MINISTER: As Madam well knows, the testing of atomic weapons of any kind is a high crime and an act of war under present international law. We are not at war. Does that answer your question?
LADY REPORTER: No, Your Lordship, it does not. I did not ask if a test had occurred. I asked whether an explosion had occurred.
DEFENSE MINISTER: We set off no such explosion. If they set one off, does Madam suppose that this government would be informed of it by them?
( Polite laughter. )
LADY REPORTER: That does not answer my —
FIRST REPORTER: Your Lordship, Delegate Jerulian has charged the Asian Coalition with the assembly of hydrogen weapons in deep space, and he says our Executive Council knows it and does nothing about it. Is that true?
DEFENSE MINISTER: I believe it is true that the Opposition’s Tribune made some such ridiculous charge, yes.
FIRST REPORTER: Why is the charge ridiculous? Because they are not making space-to-earth missiles in space? Or because we are doing something about it?
DEFENSE MINISTER: Ridiculous either way. I should like to point out, however, that the manufacture of nuclear weapons has been prohibited by treaty ever since they were redeveloped. Prohibited everywhere — in space or on Earth.
SECOND REPORTER: REPORTER: But there’s no treaty to proscribe the orbiting of fissionable materials, is there?
DEFENSE MINISTER: Of course not. The space-to-space vehicles are all nuclear powered. They have to be fueled.
SECOND REPORTER: And there’s no treaty to prohibit orbiting of other materials from which nuclear weapons might be manufactured?
DEFENSE MINISTER (irritably): To my knowledge, the existence of matter outside our atmosphere has not been outlawed by any treaty or act of parliament. It is my understanding that space is chock-full of things like the moon and the asteroids, which are not made of green cheese.
LADY REPORTER: Is Your Lordship suggesting that nuclear weapons could be manufactured without raw materials from Earth?
DEFENSE MINISTER: I was not suggesting that, no. Of course it’s theoretically possible. I was saying that no treaty or law prohibits the orbiting of any special raw materials — only nuclear weapons.