“Your hands are ice,” he whispered, and leaned forward to kiss a bare spot just below her throat, and somehow she was certain that he understood. It was a preconscious understanding, but it was there. And still he bent over her.
Of course the general had been intellectually convinced that it was entirely a figure of speech.
The toxin’s work was quickly done. A bacterial toxin, swiftly lethal to the non-immunized, slowly lethal to Marya who could pass it out in her milk as it formed. The general slept for half an hour and woke up with a raging fever. She sat by the window and watched him die. He tried to shout, but his throat was constricted. He got out of bed, took two steps, and fell. He tried to crawl toward the door. He fell flat again. His face was crimson.
The telephone rang.
Someone knocked at the door.
The ringing stopped and the knocking went away. She watched him breathe. He tried to speak, but she turned her back to him and looked out the window at the shell-pocked countryside. Russia, Nikolai, and even the Ami sergeant who had wanted to go home, it was for them that she listened to his gasping. She lit one of his American cigarets and found it very enjoyable. The phone was ringing furiously again. It kept on ringing.
The gasping stopped. Someone was hammering on the door and shouting. She stood enjoying the cigaret and watching the crows flocking in a newly planted field. The earth was rich and black here, the same soil she had tossed at the Ami sergeant. It belonged to her, this soil. Soon she would belong to it. With Nikolai, and maybe the Ami sergeant.
The door crashed loose from its hinges. Three Blue Shirts burst in and stopped. They looked at the body on the floor. They looked at Marya.
“What has happened here?”
The Russian girl laughed. Their expressions were quite comical. One of them raised his gun. He pulled the trigger six times.
“Come… Nikki Andreyevich… come…”
One of them went over and nudged her with his boot, but she was already dead. She had beaten them. She had beaten them all.
The American newspapers printed the truth. They said that General MacAmsward had died of poisoned milk. But that was all they said. The whole truth was only sung in Russian legend for the next one thousand years.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Miller was born in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Educated at the University of Tennessee and the University of Texas, he worked as an engineer. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Corps as a radioman and tail gunner, flying more than fifty bombing missions over Italy. He took part in the bombing of the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino, which proved a traumatic experience for him. Joe Haldeman reported that Miller “has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for 30 years before it had a name,” and that Miller displayed a photograph he had taken of Ron Kovic prominently in his living room.
After the war, Miller converted to Catholicism. He married Anna Louise Becker in 1945, and they had four children. He lived with science-fiction writer Judith Merril in 1953.
Between 1951 and 1957, Miller published over three dozen science fiction short stories, winning a Hugo Award in 1955 for the story “The Darfsteller”. He also wrote scripts for the television show Captain Video in 1953. Late in the 1950s, Miller assembled a novel from three closely related novellas he had published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1955, 1956 and 1957. The novel, entitled A Canticle for Leibowitz, was published in 1959.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic (post-holocaust) novel revolving around the canonisation of Saint Leibowitz and is considered a masterpiece of the genre. It won the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel. The novel is also a powerful meditation on the cycles of world history and Roman Catholicism as a force of stability during history’s dark times.
After the success of A Canticle For Leibowitz, Miller never published another new novel or story in his lifetime, although several compilations of Miller’s earlier stories were issued in the 1960s and 70s. As well, a radio adaptation of A Canticle for Leibowitz was produced by WHA Radio and NPR in 1981 and is available on CD.
In Miller’s later years, he became a recluse, avoiding contact with nearly everyone, including family members; he never allowed his literary agent, Don Congdon, to meet him. According to science fiction writer Terry Bisson, Miller struggled with depression during his later years, but had managed to nearly complete a 600-page manuscript for the sequel to Canticle before taking his own life with a gun in January 1996, shortly after his wife’s death. The sequel, titled Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, was completed by Bisson and published in 1997.
