"Walter M. Miller - The Lost Masters - Volume 01" - читать интересную книгу автора (Miller Walter M)

scan those stories, and mail a copy to [email protected].

For a good summary of Miller's works, see
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/8/samuelson8art.htm.

The stories are presented here in alphabetical order, and were scanned from original sources
whenever possible. When available, the original artwork is included.

I scanned and proofed these stories because I have been a Miller fan ever since I read A Canticle for
Leibowitz. When I started looking for other works by him, I found a few easilyтАжand then the supply
dried up. It took almost five years for me to find copies of everything he has written, and it was expensive
both in time and money. Many of these stories were never re-printed, and because of tangled copyrights,
probably never will be.
That's a shame, but it isn't enough reason to let his stories die, so here they are.

Novels
The novel "The Reluctant Traitor" is usually included as a novella in bibliographies of Miller's work,
but its' length qualifies it (barely) as a novel, so is included as such here.


A Canticle For Leibowitz

Fiat Homo

1


B
rother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for
the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young noviceтАЩs Lenten fast in the desert.
Never before had Brother Francis actually seen a pilgrim with girded loins, but that this one was the
bona fide article he was convinced as soon as he had recovered from the spine-chilling effect of the
pilgrimтАЩs advent on the far horizon, as a wiggling iota of black caught in a shimmering haze of heat.
Legless, but wearing a tiny head, the iota materialized out of the mirror glaze on the broken roadway and
seemed more to writhe than to walk into view, causing Brother Francis to clutch the crucifix of his rosary
and mutter an Ave or two. The iota suggested a tiny apparition spawned by the heat demons who
tortured the land at high noon, when any creature capable of motion on the desert (except the buzzards
and a few monastic hermits such as Francis) lay motionless in its burrow or hid beneath a rock from the
ferocity of the sun. Only a thing monstrous, a thing preternatural, or a thing with addled wits would hike
purposefully down the trail at noon this way. Brother Francis added a hasty prayer to Saint Raul the
Cyclopean, patron of the misborn, for protection against the SaintтАЩs unhappy prot├йg├йs. (For who did not
then know that there were monsters in the earth in those days? That which was born alive was, by the
law of the Church and the law of Nature, suffered to live, and helped to maturity if possible, by those
who had begotten it. The law was not always obeyed, but it was obeyed with sufficient frequency to
sustain a scattered population of adult monsters, who often chose the remotest of deserted lands for their
wanderings, where they prowled by night around the fires of prairie travelers.) But at last the iota
squirmed its way out of the heat risers and into clear air, where it manifestly became a distant pilgrim;
Brother Francis released the crucifix with a small Amen.
The pilgrim was a spindly old fellow with a staff, a basket hat, a brushy beard, and a waterskin
slung over one shoulder. He was chewing and spitting with too much relish to be an apparition, and he