"A Canticle for Leibowitz" Fan Illustrations

"Brother Fingo brushed back his hood and chortled while the novice and Malicia fenced for position. Fingo was undoubtedly the ugliest man alive, and when he laughed, the vast display of pink gums and huge teeth of assorted colors added little to his charm; he was a sport, but the sport could scarcely be called monstrous; it was a rather common hereditary pattern in the Minnesota country from whence he came; it produced baldness and a very uneven distribution of melanin, so that the gangling monk's hide was a patchwork of beef-liver and chocolate splashes on an albino background."

-Walter M MIller Jr

"The idea came to Brother Francis in an unexpected flash.

"May I use the time," he blurted, "to make a copy of the Leibowitz blueprint I found?" "

-Walter M MIller Jr

""I made it myself. Please, sir, it took me fifteen years. It's nothing to you. Please– you wouldn't take fifteen years of a man's life– for no reason?" "Fifteen years?" The robber threw back his head and howled with laughter. "You spent fifteen years making that?" 

"Oh, but– " Francis was suddenly silent. His eyes swung toward the robber's stubby forefinger. The finger was tapping the original blueprint. "That took you fifteen years? And it's almost ugly beside the other." He slapped his paunch and between guffaws kept pointing at the relic. "Ha! Fifteen years! So that's what you do way out there! Why? What is the dark ghost-image good for? Fifteen years to make that! Ho ho! What a woman's work!""

-Walter M MIller Jr

"After a while he entered the forested area. The buzzards were busy at the remains of a man. The wanderer chased the birds away with his cudgel and inspected the human remnants. Significant portions were missing. There was an arrow through the skull, protruding at the back of the neck. The old man looked nervously around at the brush. There was no one in sight, but there were plenty of footprints in the vicinity of the trail. It was not safe to stay. Safe or not, the job had to be done. The old wanderer found a place where the earth was soft enough for digging with hands and stick."

-Walter M MIller Jr

"It was late the following morning when the expected party of horsemen appeared out of the east. From the top of the wall Dom Paulo blinked and squinted across the hot and dry terrain, trying to focus myopic eyes on the distance. Dust from the horses' hooves was drifting away to the north. The party had stopped for a parley.

"I seem to be seeing twenty or thirty of them," the abbot complained, rubbing his eyes in annoyance. "Are there

really so many?"

"Approximately," said Gault.

"How will we ever take care of them all?"

"I don't think we'll be taking care of the ones with the

wolfskins, m'Lord Abbot," the younger priest said stiffly.

"Wolf skins?"

"Nomads, m'Lord."

"Man the walls! Close the gates! Let down the shield!

Break out the– "

"Wait, they're not all nomads, Domne."

"Oh?" Dom Paulo turned to peer again."

-Walter M MIller Jr

"The old hermit stood at the edge of the mesa and watched the approach of the dust speck across the desert. The hermit munched, muttered words and chuckled silently into the wind. His withered hide was burned the color of old leather by the sun, and his brushy beard was stained yellow about the chin. He wore a basket hat and a loincloth of rough homespun that resembled burlap-- his only clothing except for sandals and a goatskin water bag."

-Walter M MIller Jr

"He had been minding his own business and bothering no one when he noticed the party of refugees galloping toward the hill from the east with a cavalry troop in close pursuit. To avoid the affray, he had hidden himself behind some scrub that grew from the lip of the embankment flanking the trail, a vantage point from which he could have seen the whole spectacle without being seen. It was not the Poet's fight. He cared nothing whatever for the political and religious tastes of either the refugees or the cavalry troop. If slaughter had been fated, fate could havefound no less disinterested a witness than the Poet. Whence, then, the blind impulse? The impulse had sent him leaping from the embankment to tackle the cavalry officer in the saddle and stab the fellow three times with his own belt-knife before the two of them toppled to the ground. He could not understand why he had done it. Nothing had been accomplished. The officer's men had shot him down before he ever climbed to his feet. The slaughter of refugees had continued. They had all ridden away then in pursuit of other fugitives, leaving the dead behind."

-Walter M MIller Jr

""The latest death toll estimate," the announcer continued, "on this ninth day after the destruction of the capital, gives two million, eight hundred thousand dead. More than half of this figure is from the population of the city proper. The rest is an estimate based on the percentage of the population in the fringe and fallout areas known to have received critical doses of radiation. Experts predict that the estimate will rise as more radiation cases are reported."

-Walter M MIller Jr

"The two-headed woman and her six-legged dog waited with an empty vegetable basket by the new gate; the woman crooned softly to the dog. Four of the dog's legs were healthy legs, but an extra pair dangled uselessly at its sides. As for the woman, one head was as useless as the extra legs of the dog. It was a small head, a cherubic head, but it never opened its eyes. It gave no evidence of sharing in her breathing or her understanding. It lolled uselessly on one shoulder, blind, deaf, mute, and only vegetatively alive. Perhaps it lacked a brain, for it showed no sign of independent consciousness or personality."

-Walter M MIller Jr

"They sang as they lifted the children into the ship. They sang old space chanteys and helped the children up the ladder one at a time and into the hands of the sisters. They sang heartily to dispel the fright of the little ones. When the horizon erupted, the singing stopped. The passed the last child into the ship. The horizon came alive with flashes as the monks mounted the ladder. The horizons became a red glow."

-Walter M MIller Jr