How Firm a Foundation

by David Weber

  “Of course you have my permission … not that I imagine there’s much I could do to stop you,” Wylsynn replied with a half smile. Then his expression sobered once more. “Just as I’m reasonably confident that if it turns out you were … ill-advised to tell me the truth about the Church and the Archangels, there wouldn’t be much I could do to stop you from correcting your error.”

  The silence was sudden and intense, lingering until Wylsynn himself broke it with a small, dry chuckle.

  “I’m an inquisitor, a Schuelerite,” he said. “Surely you didn’t imagine I could hear what you’ve told me and not recognize what you’d have to do if you thought I might betray you? I’m sure all of you—especially you, Your Eminence—would deeply regret the necessity, but I’m also sure you’d do it. And if you’re telling me the truth, which I believe you are, you’d have no choice.”

  “I hope you won’t be offended by this, Father, but at this particular moment you remind me rather strongly of Prince Nahrmahn,” Merlin said.

  “Yes, I’m sure it would’ve occurred to the Prince, as well,” Wylsynn said thoughtfully.

  “And to his wife, too,” Cayleb said. “I think she’s just as smart as he is, and she hasn’t lived with him that long without recognizing necessity when she sees it.”

  “All I can tell you is that at this moment I feel no inclination to betray your confidence, Your Majesty.” Wylsynn shrugged. “Obviously, I’m still in something of a state of shock. I don’t know how I’m going to feel about it tomorrow, or the next day. I will promise this, however. Archbishop Maikel’s always extended me his trust, and I won’t abuse that now. With your permission, Your Eminence, I request permission to withdraw to Saint Zherneau’s again for the next five-day or so. I truly do need to spend some time in meditation and thought, for obvious reasons.” He grimaced. “But I’d also like the opportunity to examine Saint Zherneau’s journal for myself, and to spend some additional time speaking with Father Zhon and the rest of the Brethren who’ve grappled with the same issues rather longer than I have. That should keep me out of the public eye while I do some grappling of my own, which will also spare you the necessity of returning me to the genteel confinement I enjoyed immediately after Archbishop Erayk’s departure for the Temple.”

  “It was never my intention to lock you up while you considered all the implications, Father,” Staynair said.

  “With all due respect, Your Eminence, it should have been,” Wylsynn said bluntly. “You’ve taken chances enough letting a convinced and believing Schuelerite so close to you and to the levers of power here in the Empire. Until you know—until we all know, including myself—which direction the disillusioned Schuelerite is going to go, you really can’t afford to take any more chances. The amount of damage I could do to your cause with a few careless words, far less if I choose to lash out in my anger—and I am angry, Your Eminence; never doubt it—would be incalculable.”

  “I’m afraid he has a point, Maikel,” Cayleb said. “I have to admit I’m a lot happier with the notion of a voluntary … let’s call it ‘seclusion’ instead of ‘confinement’ on his part than I’d be with the notion of clapping him into a cell somewhere, but he does have a point.”

  “Very well, my son,” Staynair said heavily.

  “And I’m sure those ‘remotes’ of yours will keep an eye on me as well, Seijin Merlin,” Wylsynn said wryly.

  “But not when you’re closeted with Father Zhon or any of the others, Father,” Merlin murmured, and the young priest laughed.

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” he said. Then his expression sobered once more.

  “You asked whether there might be another Key, or its equivalent, and I said I thought not. I still think that’s probably the case. And if it is, then presumably you don’t have to worry about someone deliberately awakening whatever might lie under the Temple. But there’s a reason I said your comment about having been dead for ‘almost a thousand years’ was ironic, Merlin.”

  “And that reason was?” Merlin asked slowly.

  “Because according to the ‘Vision of Schueler,’” Wylsynn said softly, “the Archangels themselves will return a thousand years after the Creation to be sure Mother Church continues to serve the true plan of God.”

  * * *

  Merlin blinked as his memory finished replaying the conversation, and the same chill ran through him once again.

  He’d always been afraid of those power sources under the Temple. He’d thought he wanted nothing more than to discover the truth about them. Now he realized the reality might be even worse than he’d allowed himself to imagine.

  The Archangels will return, he thought. What the hell does that mean? Were those lunatics crazy enough to put a batch of “Archangels” into cryo under there? Were they actually willing to trust the cryo systems to keep them going that long? And even if they were, could the systems stand up for that many years?

  So far as he knew, no one had ever used the cryo suspension systems for a period greater than thirty or forty years. Theoretically, they were supposed to be good for up to a century and a half. But nine centuries?

  But maybe that’s not what it is after all. Maybe it is an AI. It could be that they didn’t trust an AI to run continuously but were willing to let it come up periodically. Only if that’s the case, why wait a thousand years before it makes its first check? Unless the “Vision of Schueler” is lying and whatever it is has actually been popping up for a look every fifty or sixty years, I suppose. Except that it’s pretty evident the vicarate’s been departing from the image of the Church laid down in the Holy Writ for at least two or three hundred years, so if there’s an AI down there that’s supposed to be making midcourse adjustments, why’s it kept its mouth shut? Unless it’s broken, and that doesn’t seem likely, given how many of the Temple’s other systems still seem to be up and running. I can’t imagine they’d’ve built the place without making certain something as critical as a monitoring AI would be the last thing to go down, not the first!

  He grimaced, then froze as another thought struck him.

  I’m the only PICA Commodore Pei and the others had access to, an icy mental voice said. But what if I’m not the only PICA that came to Safehold after all? What if that’s what’s down there? The only reason I’m capable of long-term operation is because Doctor Proctor hacked my basic software. It’s possible they could have brought along—hell, even built after they got here, despite Langhorne’s anti-technology lunacy!—a PICA or two of their own. And if they didn’t have Proctor’s fine touch on the software, their PICAs could be limited to the “legal” ten days of autonomous operation before their personalities and memories automatically dump. So maybe, if that’s the case, it would make sense for them to only spin up once every thousand years or so. They get up, spend a day or two looking around, and if everything’s humming along, they go back into shutdown immediately. For that matter, they could have multiple PICAs stashed down there in the cellar. One of them wakes up and looks around, and if there’s a problem, he’s got reinforcements he can call up. Hell, for that matter if they did have more than one PICA down there and it was keyed to the same person, could he bootstrap himself back and forth between them to get around the ten-day limit?!

  He didn’t know the answer to his own question. Under the Federation’s restrictions on Personality Integrated Cybernetic Avatars, each PICA had been unique to the human being who owned it. It had been physically impossible for anyone else to operate it, and just as it had been illegal for a PICA to operate for more than ten days in autonomous mode, it had been illegal for an individual even to operate, far less own, more than a single PICA, except under strenuously controlled circumstances which usually had to do with high-risk industrial processes or something similar. So far as he was aware, no one had ever attempted to simply shuttle someone’s memories and personality back and forth between a pair of identical PICAs keyed to the same owner/operator. He had no idea how the software’s built-in restrictions would reac
t to that, but it was certainly possible it would represent a lower-risk solution than Proctor’s hack of his own software. Assuming one had access to multiple PICAs, of course.

  And didn’t that lead to an interesting speculation?

  “Owl?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant Commander Alban?” the distant AI replied.

  “Could we use the fabrication unit in the cave to build another PICA?”

  “That question requires refinement, Lieutenant Commander Alban.”

  “What?” Merlin blinked at the unexpected response. “What sort of ‘refinement’? List the difficulties.”

  “Theoretically, the fabrication unit could construct a PICA,” the AI said. “It would deplete certain critical elements below the minimum inventory level specified in my core programming, which would require human override authorization. In addition, however, it would require data not available to me.”

  “What sort of data are we talking about?”

  “I do not have detailed schematics or design data on PICAs.”

  “You don’t?” Merlin’s eyebrows rose in surprise.

  “No, Lieutenant Commander Alban,” Owl replied, and Merlin reminded himself not to swear when the AI stopped there, obviously satisfied with its response.

  “Why not?” he asked after a moment.

  “Because it was never entered into my database.”

  Merlin began reciting the names of the Federation’s presidents to himself. Obviously it had never been entered into Owl’s database. Of course, that wasn’t the “why” he’d had in mind when he posed the question!

  “Why was it never entered into your database?” he asked finally. “And if you don’t have a definitive answer, speculate.”

  “I do not have a definitive answer, Lieutenant Commander Alban. However, I would speculate that it was never entered because the construction of PICAs was a highly specialized enterprise attended by a great many legal restrictions and security regulations and procedures. It would not be something that would be found in a general database. Certainly it would not be part of a tactical computer’s database, nor, apparently, part of the library database downloaded from Romulus.”

  “Damn. That does make sense,” Merlin muttered.

  Owl, predictably, made no reply.

  Merlin grimaced, but he was actually just as happy to be left to his thoughts for the moment.

  The possibility of building additional PICAs had never occurred to him before. On the other hand, if he could, and if the additional PICAs’ software duplicated his own, he could create clones of himself, which would be hugely helpful. Not only would it allow him to be in more than one place simultaneously, it would give him the advantage of redundancy if one of him inadvertently did something to which some high-tech watchdog system might take exception.

  And if Wylsynn’s right about something “returning” in a thousand years, I may just need all the reinforcements I can get, he thought grimly. This is the year 895, but they’ve numbered their “Years of God” from the end of “Shan-wei’s Rebellion,” from the time the Church of God turned into the Church of God Awaiting. The Day of Creation was seventy years—Standard Years, not Safeholdian ones—before that. And that makes this year 979 since the Creation. Which means we’ve got twenty years, give or take, before whatever’s going to happen happens.

  Twenty years might sound like a lot, but not when it was all the time they had to break not simply the Church of God Awaiting’s political supremacy but also its stranglehold on Safehold’s religious and technological life. They’d been working on it for five years already, and all they’d really managed so far was to stave off defeat. Well, they’d begun gnawing away at the Proscriptions of Jwo-jeng—slowly and very, very cautiously—but they certainly hadn’t found a way to take the war to the Church and the Group of Four on the mainland! And even if they managed that, simply defeating the Group of Four militarily wasn’t going to miraculously undo ten centuries’ belief in the Holy Writ and the Archangels. That fight was going to take far longer … and it was likely to involve even more bloodshed than the current conflict.

  Perhaps still worse, if there was something—“Archangel,” AI, or PICA—waiting to “wake up” under the Temple, he had to assume any technological advancement beyond the simple steam engines which still hadn’t attracted the bombardment system’s attention to the Castaway Islands was going to be noticed by its sensors and reported to the Temple. At which point it was entirely possible the wake-up’s schedule might be rather drastically revised.

  “Owl, could analysis of this PICA give you the data you’d require to build additional ones?”

  “Probability of success would approach unity assuming a complete analysis of software and hardware,” the AI replied.

  “And would such an analysis constitute a risk to this PICA’s continued operation?”

  “Preliminary analysis indicates a sixty-five to seventy percent probability it would be rendered permanently inoperable,” Owl said calmly.

  “Why?”

  “Most probable cause would be failure of the unit’s software. There is a significant probability that the necessary analysis would trigger a reboot, which would wipe the unit’s current memory and personality.”

  “What if it were possible to reload the memory and personality from another source?”

  “In that case the probability of rendering the current unit inoperable would drop to approximately twenty-eight percent.”

  “Still that high?” Merlin frowned. “Why?”

  “In the event of a reboot, standard protocols would reinstall original program and system defaults, Lieutenant Commander. The software alteration which permits this unit’s indefinite operation lies far outside those defaults and would be eliminated in such an eventuality, thus restoring the ten-day limitation on autonomous operation.”

  Merlin grimaced. That made sense, he supposed, and twenty-eight percent was still unacceptably high. Under the current circumstances, at least. But if circumstances changed.…

  “Do you have the capability out of existing resources to build both a Class II VR and a recording unit?” he asked.

  “Affirmative, Lieutenant Commander Alban.”

  “In that case, get started on both of them immediately. I assume you can run up the recording unit first?”

  “Affirmative, Lieutenant Commander Alban.”

  “Then send it out to me as soon as it’s finished.” He grimaced again. “I might as well get myself recorded as soon as possible.”

  “Acknowledged, Lieutenant Commander Alban.”

  JUNE,

  YEAR OF GOD 895

  .I.

  Siddar City, Republic of Siddarmark

  “Don’t be such a greedy guts!” Byrk Raimahn scolded as the wyvern swooped down and snatched the morsel of fresh bread from his fingers. “There’s plenty if you just behave yourselves!”

  The triumphant wyvern only whistled smugly at him and flapped its way back up onto the green-budded branch of the apple tree from which it had launched its pounce. It seemed remarkably unmoved by his appeal to its better nature, Byrk reflected, and tore another piece from the loaf. He shredded it into smaller pieces, scattering them across the flagstone terrace for the less aggressive of his winged diners, then picked up a wedge of sharp cheddar cheese from the plate beside the bowl of grapes. He leaned back in his rattan chair, propping his heels on the matching chair which faced him on the other side of the table, and nibbled as he enjoyed the cool northern sunlight.

  It wasn’t much like home, he thought, gazing out across the sparkling waters of North Bedard Bay. The locals (a label which he still had trouble applying to himself) usually called it simply North Bay, to distinguish it from the even larger Bedard Bay to the south. This far north of the equator, the seasons stood on their heads and even late spring and early summer were almost uncomfortably cool to his Charisian blood. Trees were much later to leaf, flowers were later to bloom (and less colorful when they did), and ocean water was f
ar too cold for a Charisian boy to swim in. Besides, he missed Tellesberg’s livelier waterfront, sharper-edged theaters, and heady, bustling air of intellectual ferment.

  Of course, that intellectual ferment was the main reason he was sitting here on his grandfather’s Siddar City terrace feeding bread to greedy wyverns and squabbling seagulls. It wasn’t like—

  “So, here you are!” a familiar voice said, and he looked over his shoulder, then rose with a smile of welcome for the silver-haired, plump but distinguished-looking woman who’d just stepped out of the mansion’s side door behind him.

  “I wasn’t exactly hiding, Grandmother,” he pointed out. “In fact, if you’d opened a window and listened, I’m sure you could have tracked me down without any trouble at all.”

  He pulled one of the chairs away from the table with one hand while the other gestured at the guitar lying in its open case on the bench beside him.

  “For that matter, if you’d only looked out the window, the fleeing birds and the small creatures running for the shrubbery with their paws over their ears would have pinpointed me for you.”

  “Oh, nonsense, Byrk!” She laughed, patting him on the cheek before she seated herself in the proffered chair. “Your playing’s not that bad.”

  “Just not that bad?” he teased, raising one eyebrow at her. “Is that another way of saying it’s almost that bad?”

  “No, that’s what your grandfather would call it if he were here,” Sahmantha Raimahn replied. “And he’d mean just as little of it as I would. Go ahead and play something for me now, Byrk.”

  “Well, if you insist,” he said in a long-suffering tone.

  She made a face at him, and he laughed as he picked the guitar back up. He thought for a moment, picking random notes as he considered, then struck the opening chord of “The Way of the Widow-Maker,” one of the very first ballads he’d learned to play sitting on Sahmantha’s lap. The sad, rich notes spilled across the terrace while the sunlight struck chestnut highlights in his brown hair and the wind ruffled that hair, sighed in the branches of the ornamental fruit trees, and sent the shrubbery’s sprays of blossoms flickering in light and shadow.