The answer was near at hand; there was still the serpent whispering: For God doth know that in what day soever you eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as Gods. The old father of lies was clever at telling half-truths: How shall you know good and evil, until you have sampled a little? Taste and be as Gods. But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood among men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well.

Dom Paulo summoned the younger priest. It was very nearly time to go. And soon it would be a new year.

That was the year of the unprecedented torrent of rain of the desert, causing seed long dry to burst into bloom.

That was the year a vestige of civilization came to the nomads of the Plains, and even the people of Laredo began to murmur that it was possibly all for the best. Rome did not agree.

In that year a temporary agreement was formalized and broken between the states of Denver and Texarkana . It was the year that the Old Jew returned to his former vocation of Physician and Wanderer, the year that the monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz buried an abbot and bowed to a new one. There were bright hopes for tomorrow.

It was the year a king came riding out of the east, to subdue the land and own it. It was a year of Man.

It was unpleasantly hot beside the sunny trail that skirted the wooded hillside, and the heat had aggravated the Poet's thirst. After a long time he dizzily lifted his head from the ground and tried to look around. The melee had ended; things were fairly quiet now, except for the cavalry officer. The buzzards were even gliding down to land.

There were several dead refugees, one dead horse, and the dying cavalry officer who was pinned under the horse. At intervals, the cavalryman awoke and faintly screamed. Now he screamed for Mother, and again he screamed for a priest. At times he awoke to scream for his horse. His screaming disquieted the buzzards and further disgruntled the Poet, who was feeling peevish anyhow. He was a very dispirited Poet. He had never expected the world to act in a courteous, seemly, or even sensible manner, and the world had seldom done so; often he had taken heart in the consistency of its rudeness and stupidity. But never before had the world shot the Poet in the abdomen with a musket. This he found not heartening at all.

Even worse, he had not now the stupidity of the world to blame, but his own. The Poet himself had blundered. 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 have found 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 down him before ever climbed to his feet. The slaughter of refugees had continued. They had all ridden away in pursuit of other fugitives, leaving the dead behind.

He could hear his abdomen growl. The futility, alas, of trying to digest a rifle ball. He had done the useless deed, he decided finally, because of the part with the dull saber. If the officer had merely hacked the woman out of the saddle with one clean stroke, and ridden on, the Poet would have overlooked the dead. But to keep hacking and hacking that way—

He refused to think about it again. He thought of water.

“O God—O God—” the officer kept complaining.

“Next time, sharpen your cutlery” the Poet wheezed.

But there would be no next time.

The Poet could not remember ever fearing death, but he had often suspected Providence of plotting the worst for him as to the manner of dying when the time came to go. He had expected to rot away. Slowly and not very fragrantly. Some poetic insight had warned him that he would surely die a blubbering leprous lump, cravenly penitential but impenitent. Never had he anticipated anything so blunt and final as a bullet in the stomach, and with not even an audience at hand to hear his dying quips. The last thing they had heard him say when they shot him was: ‘Oof!' –his testament for posterity, Ooof! – a memorabile for you, Dominissime.

“Father? Father?” The officer moaned.

At least three clergymen lay dead among the refugees, and yet the officer was not now being so particular about specifying his denominational persuasions. Maybe I'll do, the Poet thought.

The officer was trying to reload when the Poet took the gun away from him. He seemed delirious, and kept trying to cross himself.

“Go ahead,” the Poet grunted, finding the knife.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…”

“Ego te absolvo, son,” said the Poet, and plunged the knife into his throat.

Afterward, he found the officer's canteen and drank a little. The water was hot from the sun, but it seemed delicious. He lay with his head pillowed on the officer's horse and waited for the shadow of the hill to creep over the road. Jesus, how it hurt! That last bit isn't going to be easy to explain, he thought, and me without my eyeball too. If there's really anything to explain. He looked at the dead cavalryman.

“Hot as hell down there, isn't it?” he whispered hoarsely.

The cavalryman 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 and 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 accordint to the plan of Nature. Their philosophers demonstrated by unaided reason alone that the Supreme Cathartes aura regans 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.

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 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 – an idiot screams his mindless anguish amidst 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.

Kyrie eleison.

Lucifer is fallen.

Christe eleison.

Lucifer is fallen,

Kyrie eleison, eleison imas.