Nimue Alban leaned back in the comfortable chair and frowned. There was really no actual need for her to use the chair, just as there was no need—aside from purely "cosmetic" considerations—for her to breathe, but as she'd discovered the very first time she used a PICA, habits transcended such minor matters as simple physical fatigue. Although, she reflected with a wry smile, breathing the preservative nitrogen atmosphere with which Pei Kau-yung had filled the depot wouldn't have done a flesh-and-blood human much good.
She'd spent most of the last three local days sitting in this very chair, studying the data files Pei Kau-yung had left for her the hard way, because Elias Proctor's modifications to her software had inadvertently disabled her high-speed data interface. She was pretty sure Proctor hadn't realized he'd created the problem, and while she would have been confident enough about attempting to remedy it herself under other circumstances, she had no intention of fiddling around with it under these. If she screwed up, there was no one available to retrieve the error, and it would be the bitterest of ironies if, after all the sacrifices which had been made to put her here, she accidentally took herself permanently off-line.
In a way, having to wade through all the information the old-fashioned way had been something of a relief, really. Sitting there, reading the text, viewing the recorded messages and video instead of simply jacking into the interface, was almost like a concession to the biological humanity she'd lost forever. And it wasn't as if she were exactly in a tearing hurry to start making changes.
"Owl?" she said aloud.
"Yes, Lieutenant Commander?" a pleasant, almost naturally modulated tenor voice replied.
"I see here that Commodore Pei left us a ground-based surveillance system. Is it online?"
"Negative, Lieutenant Commander," Owl replied. That was all "he" said, and Nimue rolled her eyes.
"Why not?" she asked.
"Because I have not been instructed to bring it online, Lieutenant Commander."
Nimue shook her head. Owl—the name she'd assigned to the Ordoñes-Westinghouse-Lytton RAPIER tactical computer Pei Kau-yung had managed to "lose" for her—wasn't exactly the brightest crayon in the cybernetic box. The AI was highly competent in its own areas of expertise, but tactical computers had deliberately suppressed volitional levels and required higher levels of direct human command input. Owl wasn't precisely brimming with imagination or the ability—or desire—to anticipate questions or instructions. In theory, Owl's programming was heuristic, and something more closely resembling a personality ought to emerge eventually. On the other hand, Nimue had worked with a lot of RAPIERs, and none of them had ever impressed her as geniuses.
"What I meant to ask," she said now, "is whether or not there's any hardware problem which would prevent you from bringing the array up."
Again there was no response, and she pressed her lips rather firmly together.
"Is there any such hardware problem?" she amplified.
"Yes, Lieutenant Commander."
"What problem?" she demanded a bit more testily.
"The array in question is currently covered by approximately thirteen meters of ice and snow, Lieutenant Commander."
"Ah, now we're getting somewhere." Her sarcasm simply bounced off the AI's silence, and she sighed.
"Is it otherwise in operable condition?" she asked in a tone of deliberate patience.
"Affirmative, Lieutenant Commander."
"And can the ice and snow be removed or melted?"
"Affirmative, Lieutenant Commander."
"And you're connected to it by secure landline?"
"Affirmative, Lieutenant Commander."
"All right." Nimue nodded. "In that case, I want you to bring it up, passive systems only, and initiate a complete standard sky sweep for orbital infrastructure. And give me an estimate for time required to complete the sweep."
"Activating systems now, Lieutenant Commander. Time required to clear the array's receptors of ice and snow will be approximately thirty-one standard hours. Time required for a passive sweep after clearing receptors will be approximately forty-three standard hours, assuming favorable weather conditions. However, optical systems' efficiency may be degraded by unfavorable weather."
"Understood." Nimue's tight smile showed perfect white teeth. "What I'm looking for ought to be fairly easy to spot if it's really up there."
Owl didn't say anything else, and for just a moment Nimue tried to imagine what it must be like to be a genuine artificial intelligence rather than a human intelligence which had simply been marooned in a cybernetic matrix. She couldn't conceive of just sitting around indefinitely, patiently waiting for the next human command before doing anything.
She grimaced at the direction of her own thoughts. After all, she'd been sitting around doing absolutely nothing herself for the last eight standard centuries—almost nine Safeholdian centuries—counting all the years since Nimue Alban's biological death. Of course, it didn't seem that way to her. Not, at least, until she thought of all the people she'd never see again. Or the fact that while she'd slept the Gbaba had undoubtedly completed the destruction of the Terran Federation and all human life on every single one of its planets . . . including Old Earth.
A shiver ran through her, one which had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature of the "air" about her, and she shook her head hard.
That's enough of that, Nimue, she told herself firmly. You may be a PICA, but your personality's still the same. Which probably means you're entirely capable of driving yourself crackers if you dwell on that kind of crap.
She climbed out of the chair and clasped her hands behind her as she began to pace up and down. Aside from the fact that a PICA never experienced fatigue, it felt exactly the way it would have felt in the body nature had issued her, which was precisely how it was supposed to feel.
The polished-glass stone ceiling was a smoothly arched curve, almost four meters above the absolutely level, equally smooth floor at its highest point. She was in one of a dozen variously sized chambers which had been carved out underneath one of the planet Safehold's innumerable mountains during the terraforming process. This particular mountain—Mount Olympus, in what had become known as the Mountains of Light—was lousy with iron ore, and Commodore Pei and Shan-wei had thoughtfully tucked her hideaway under the densest concentration of ore they could find. She was barely forty meters above sea level, and Mount Olympus was almost a third again the height of Old Earth's Everest. There were twelve thousand meters of mountain piled on top of her, and that was more than enough to have made the tiny trickle of energy from the geothermal power tap keeping the depot's monitoring computers online completely undetectable after Langhorne and the main fleet had arrived.
She'd wandered through the rest of the complex, physically checking the various items she'd found on the equipment list stored in Owl's memory. Some of it seemed bizarre enough that she suspected that the Commodore and Shan-wei had added it simply because they could, not because they'd envisioned any compelling use for it, and exactly how they'd managed to drop some of it off of Langhorne's master lists was more than Nimue could imagine. The three armored personnel carriers, for example. And the pair of forward recon skimmers—not to mention the all-up assault shuttle, which was the size of an old pre-space jumbo jet. The small but capable fabrication unit in the cave complex's lowest (and largest) chamber made sense, and so, she supposed, did the well-stocked arms locker. Although exactly how Kau-yung had expected a single PICA to use two hundred assault rifles and two million rounds of ammunition all by herself was a bit of a puzzlement.
The fully equipped medical unit from the transport Remus was another puzzlement, given her cybernetic nature. It even had cryo-sleep and antigerone capability, and although she would have hesitated to use any of its drugs after eight centuries, even with cryonic storage, the nanotech portion of the therapies were still undoubtedly viable. Not that a PICA had any need for either of them, of course. She sometimes wondered if Kau-yung's and Shan-wei's emotions had insisted that they remember the flesh-and-blood Nimue Alban, rather than the being of alloys and composites which had replaced her. Whatever their reasoning had been, there was even a complete kitchen . . . despite the fact that a PICA had no particular need for food.
Other parts of the depot—which she'd found herself thinking of as Nimue's Cave—made a lot more sense. The library, for example. Kau-yung and Shan-wei had somehow managed to strip the library core out of the Romulus, as well, before the ship was discarded. They hadn't managed to pull the entire library computer, which was a pity in a lot of ways, since its AI, unlike Owl, had been specifically designed as an information processing and reference tool. Nimue wondered if that had been a size issue. The entire data core consisted of only three spheres of molecular circuitry, none larger than an Old Earth basketball, which could undoubtedly have been smuggled past others' eyes more easily than the entire computer system. But they'd still gotten the core down and connected it to Owl, which meant Nimue had access to the equivalent of a major Federation core world university's library system. That was undoubtedly going to be of enormous value down the road.
The hefty store of SNARCs—Self-Navigating Autonomous Reconnaissance and Communication platforms—were also going to be incredibly useful. The stealthy little fusion-powered robotic spies were only very slightly larger than Nimue herself, but they had decent AI capability, were capable of speeds of up to Mach 2 in atmosphere (they could manage considerably better than that outside it, of course), could stay airborne for months at a time, and could deploy recoverable, almost microscopic-sized remotes of their own. She had sixteen of them up at this very moment, hovering invisible to the eye, or to any more sophisticated sensors (had there been any), above major towns and cities.
For the moment, they were concentrating on recording the local languages and dialects. Without the PICA data interface, Nimue was going to have to learn the hard way to speak the considerably altered version of Standard English spoken by present-day Safeholdians. It looked as if the written language and grammar had stayed effectively frozen, but without any form of audio recording capability, the spoken form's pronunciation had shifted considerably . . . and not always in the same directions in all locations. Some of the dialects were so different now as to be almost separate tongues, despite the fact that virtually every word in them was spelled the same way.
Fortunately, she'd always been a fair hand with languages, and at least her present body didn't need sleep. Her human personality did need occasional down periods—she'd discovered that the first time she'd operated a PICA in autonomous mode—although the cybernetic "brain" in which that personality resided didn't. She didn't really know whether she was completely "shut down" during those periods, or if she was at some level of . . . standby readiness. Functionally, it was the equivalent of going to sleep and dreaming, although she needed no more than an hour of it every few days or so, and she suspected it was going to be rather more important to her in her present circumstances than it ever had been before. After all, no one had ever contemplated maintaining a PICA in autonomous mode indefinitely, which meant no one had any experience in doing that for more than ten days at a time.
Knack for language or not, it was going to take her a while to master the local version sufficiently for her to even consider attempting direct contact with any native Safeholdians. There was also the minor matter that she was female on a planet which had reverted, by and large, to an almost totally male-dominated culture.
There was something she could do about that, although she didn't really care for the thought particularly. But there was also the fact that almost all the skills she'd learned growing up in a society which took advanced technology for granted were going to be of limited utility in this one. She'd always been an enthusiastic sailor, when she had time, but only in relatively small craft, like her father's favorite ten-meter sloop. That might be useful, she supposed, but unlike some of her fellow military personnel, she'd never been particularly interested in survival courses, marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat training, blacksmithing, or the best way to manufacture lethal booby traps out of leftover ration tins and old rubber bands. True, Commodore Pei had gotten her interested in kendo several years before Operation Ark. She'd done fairly well at it, as a matter of fact, although she'd scarcely thought of herself as a mistress of the art. Still, that was about the only locally applicable skill she could think of, and she was none too sure just how useful even that one was going to prove.
Those were problems she was going to have to address eventually. In the meantime, however, she had plenty of other things to think about. Kau-yung's notes—almost a journal, really—had given her an insider's perspective on what Langhorne and Bédard had done to the colonists. With that advantage, she hadn't required any particular level of genius to begin discerning the consequences of their original meddling, despite her current imperfect understanding of the locals' conversations.
Safehold was unlike any other planet which had ever been inhabited by humans. Even the oldest of the Federation's colony worlds had been settled for less than two centuries when humanity first encountered the Gbaba. That had been long enough for the older colonies to develop strong local cultural templates, but all of those templates had begun from the frothy intermingling of all of Old Earth's cultural currents. There'd been enormously diverse elements bound up in all of them, and, of course, Old Earth herself had been the most diverse of all.
But whereas the cultures on all of those other planets had been created by blending different societies, belief structures, ideologies, philosophies, and worldviews into a pluralistic whole, Safehold had begun with an absolutely uniform culture. An artificially uniform culture. The human beings who made up that culture had all been programmed to believe exactly the same things, so the differences which existed here on Safehold were the consequences of eight standard centuries of evolution away from a central matrix, rather than towards one.
On top of that, there was the way Langhorne and Bédard had programmed the colonists into an absolute belief in the "religion" they'd manufactured. Nimue's library included the original text of the Safeholdian "Holy Writ" which Maruyama Chihiro, one of Langhorne's staffers, had composed, and she'd skimmed it with a sort of horrified fascination.
According to the Church of God Awaiting, God had created Safehold as a home where His children could live in simple harmony with one another, embracing a lifestyle uncomplicated by anything which might come between Him and them. Towards that end, He had selected archangels to help with the creation and perfection of their world, as well as to serve as mentors and guardians for His children. The greatest of the archangels (of course) had been the Archangel Langhorne, the patron of divine law and life, and the Archangel Bédard, the patron of wisdom and knowledge.
The version of the Church's scripture available to Nimue had almost certainly undergone significant revision following the events Commodore Pei had described in his final message. She had no way of knowing exactly what those revisions might have been until she could get her hands—or, rather, get one of her SNARCs' hands—on a more recent edition. But since the original version listed Pei Shan-wei as one of the archangels herself, the Archangel Langhorne's main assistant in bringing Safehold into existence in accordance with God's will, she was fairly sure that particular portion had seen some changes after Shan-wei's murder. Then there was the little matter of Kau-yung's intention to kill Langhorne and Bédard, as well. No doubt some judicious editing had been necessary to account for that, too.
But it was clear that the fundamentals, at least, of the plan Langhorne and Bédard had concocted had been put into effect. The Church of God Awaiting was a genuine universal, worldwide church. For all intents and purposes, the original colonists truly had been created in the instant they stepped onto Safehold's soil and the false memories implanted in them took effect. They hadn't simply believed Langhorne, Bédard, and the other members of the Operation Ark command crew were archangels; they'd known they were.
The fact that all of the original command crew would have continued access to the antigerone treatments had also been factored into Langhorne's original plan. The colonists had had those treatments themslves prior to leaving Old Earth, but in their new environment they would be unable to keep up the program of booster treatments. Since the command crew would be able to keep it up, they could expect total lifespans of as much as three centuries, and many of them had been as young as Nimue herself when they were assigned to the mission.
The original "Adams" and "Eves" would live far longer than any human who'd never received the base antigerone therapy, probably at least a century and a half, and the nanotech aspects of the original therapy would keep them disease-and infection-free. Given the colonists' average ages when Operation Ark was mounted, that would give them each at least a hundred and twenty years of fully adult life here on Safehold, more than enough to distinguish them from their shorter-lived descendants by giving them (Nimue made a moue of distaste) life spans of truly biblical proportions, coupled with immunity from disease. Yet the "angels" would live even longer, which meant the colonists, and the first five or six generations of their descendants, would have direct physical contact with "immortal" archangels.
The fact that literacy had been universal among the original colonists was yet another factor. The sheer mass of written, historically documentable firsthand accounts of their "creation" here on Safehold, of their later interaction with the archangels into whose care God had committed them, and of their enormously long lives must be overwhelming. Safehold's Church wasn't confined to the writings of a restricted number of theologians, or to a relatively small seminal holy writ. It had the journals, the letters, the inspired writings, of eight million people, all of whom had absolutely believed the accuracy of the events they'd set down.
No wonder Bédard felt so confident her theocratic matrix would hold, Nimue thought sourly. These poor bastards never had a chance.
And even if Kau-yung had succeeded in his plan to kill Langhorne and his senior followers, someone had clearly survived to take charge of the master plan. The Temple of God and City of Zion were evidence enough of that, she thought grimly, for neither had existed prior to Shan-wei's murder. And the Temple, especially, was the centerpiece of the physical proof of the Holy Writ's accuracy.
She hadn't dared to let her SNARCs operate too freely in or around Zion after she'd realized there were still at least a few low-powered energy sources somewhere under the Temple, and she'd decided against using them inside the Temple itself at all, despite the hole she knew that was going to make in her information-gathering net. Unfortunately, she had no idea what those energy sources might be, and no desire to find out the hard way. But she hadn't had to get very close to the Temple to appreciate its undeniable majesty and beauty. Or the fact that it would probably outlast most of the local mountain ranges.
It was ridiculous. She'd seen planetary-defense command bunkers which had been flimsier than the Temple, and she wondered which brilliant lunatic had decided to plate that silver dome in armorplast? It looked as if the plating was at least seven or eight centimeters thick, which meant it would have been sufficient to stop an old, pre-space forty-centimeter armor-piercing shell without a scratch. It seemed just a little excessive as a way to keep the dome and that ludicrous statue of Langhorne bright and shiny. On the other hand, the simple existence of the Temple, and the "miraculous" armorplast and other advanced materials which had gone into it—not to mention the fact that its interior appeared to be completely climate-controlled even now, which probably explained those power sources—"proved" archangels truly had once walked the surface of Safehold. Surely no mere mortal hands could have reared such a structure!
And yet, for all its size and majesty, the Temple was actually only a tiny part of the Church's power. Every single monarch on the planet was ruler "by the grace of God and the Archangel Langhorne," and it was the Church which extended—or denied—that legitimacy. In theory, the Church could depose any ruler, anywhere, any time it chose. In fact, the Church had always been very cautious about exercising that power, and had become even more so as the great kingdoms like Harchong and Siddarmark had arisen.
But the Church was still the mightiest, most powerful secular force on Safehold, in her own right. The Temple Lands were smaller than Harchong or Siddarmark, with a smaller population, but they were larger and more populous than almost any other Safeholdian realm. And not even the Church truly knew how much of the planet's total wealth it controlled. Every single person on Safehold was obligated by law to deliver a tithe of twenty percent of his income every single year. Secular rulers were responsible for collecting that tithe and delivering it to the Church; the Church then used it for charitable projects, the construction of yet more churches, and as capital for a profitable business lending funds back to the local princes and nobility at usurious rates. Plus, of course, the lives of incredible wealth and luxury it provided to its senior clergy.
It was a grotesquely top-heavy structure, one in which the absolutism of the Church's power was matched only by its faith in its own right to that power, and Nimue hated it.
And yet, despite all of that, a part of her had actually been tempted to simply stand back and do nothing. The entire purpose of Operation Ark had been to create a refuge for humanity without the betraying high-tech spoor which might draw Gbaba scout ships to it, and so far, at least, Langhorne's megalomaniacal concoction seemed to be doing just that. But another part of her was both horrified and outraged by the monstrous deception which had been practiced upon the Safeholdians. And, perhaps more to the point, what her SNARCs had already reported to her indicated that the façade was beginning to chip.
It doesn't look like anyone's challenging the basic theology—not yet, she thought. But the population's grown too large, and the Church has discovered the truth of that old saying about power corrupting. I wish I could get the SNARCs inside the Temple proper, but even without that, it's obvious this Council of Vicars is as corrupt and self-serving as any dictatorship in history. And even if it doesn't realize that itself, there have to be plenty of people outside the Council who do.
It's only a matter of time until some local Martin Luther or Jan Huss turns up to demand reforms, and once the central matrix begins to crack, who knows where it may go? Any Safehold Reformation's going to be incredibly messy and ugly, given the universality of the-Church and its monopoly on temporal power. And these people absolutely believe the archangels are still out there somewhere, watching over them. The believers will expect the "Archangel Langhorne" and his fellows to come back, come to the aid of the Church—or of the reformers. And when they don't, somebody's going to proclaim that they never really existed in the first place, despite all the "evidence," and that their entire religion has been a lie for almost a thousand local years. And when that happens . . .
She shuddered—a purely psychosomatic reaction, she knew—and her expression tightened.