Off Armageddon Reef

by David Weber

  "I don't doubt that you can—that you have already—created an anti-technology mind-set on an individual and a societal level," Shan-wei replied. Her own voice was level, but it didn't take someone with Bédard's psychological training to hear the distaste and personal antipathy under its surface. "I simply believe that whatever you can accomplish right now, whatever curbs and safeguards you can impose at this moment, five hundred years from now, or a thousand, there's going to come a moment when those safeguards fail."

  "They won't," Bédard said flatly. Then she made herself sit back a bit from the table and smile. "I realize psychology isn't your field, Doctor. And I also realize one of your doctorates is in history. Because it is, you're quite rightly aware of the frenetic pace at which technology has advanced in the modern era. Certainly, on the basis of humanity's history on Old Earth, especially during the last five or six centuries, it would appear the 'innovation bug' is hardwired into the human psyche. It isn't, however. There are examples from our own history of lengthy, very static periods. In particular, I draw your attention to the thousands of years of the Egyptian empire, during which significant innovation basically didn't happen. What we've done here, on Safehold, is to re-create that same basic mind-set, and we've also installed certain . . . institutional and physical checks to maintain that mind-set."

  "The degree to which the Egyptians—and the rest of the Mediterranean cultures—were anti-innovation has been considerably overstated," Shan-wei said coolly. "Moreover, Egypt was only a tiny segment of the total world population of its day, and other parts of that total population most definitely were innovative. And despite the effort to impose a permanent theocratic curb on—"

  "Dr. Pei," Langhorne interrupted, "I'm afraid this entire discussion is pointless. The colony's policy has been thoroughly debated and approved by the Administrative Council. It represents the consensus of that Council, and also that of myself, as Chief Administrator, and Dr. Bédard, as Chief Psychologist. It will be adhered to . . . by everyone. Is that clear?"

  It must have been hard for Shan-wei not to even look in his direction, Kau-yung thought. But she didn't. For fifty-seven years the two of them had lived apart, divided by their bitter public disagreement over the colony's future. Kau-yung was one of the Moderates—the group that might not agree with everything Langhorne and Bédard had done, but which fervently supported the ban on anything which might lead to the reemergence of advanced technology. Kau-yung himself had occasionally voiced concern over the degree to which Bédard had adjusted the originally proposed psych templates for the colonists, but he'd always supported Langhorne's basic reasons for modifying them. Which was why he remained the colony's senior military officer despite his estranged wife's position as the leader of the faction whose opponents had labeled them "Techies."

  "With all due respect, Administrator Langhorne," Shan-wei said, "I don't believe your policy does represent a true consensus. I was a member of the Council myself, if you will recall, as were six of my colleagues on the present Alexandria Board. All of us opposed your policy when you first proposed it."

  Which, Kau-yung thought, split the vote eight-to-seven, two short of the supermajority you needed under the colonial charter to modify the templates, didn't it, Eric? Of course, you'd already gone ahead and done it, which left you with a teeny-tiny problem. That's why Shan-wei and the others found themselves arbitrarily removed from the Council, wasn't it?

  "That's true," Langhorne said coldly. "However, none of you are current members of the Council, and the present Council membership unanimously endorses this policy. And whatever other ancient history you might wish to bring up, I repeat that the policy will stand, and it will be enforced throughout the entire colony. Which includes your so-called Alexandria Enclave."

  "And if we choose not to abide by it?" Shan-wei's voice was soft, but spines stiffened throughout the hearing room. Despite the decades of increasingly acrimonious debate, it was the first time any of the Techies had publicly suggested the possibility of active resistance.

  "That would be . . . unwise of you," Langhorne said after a moment, glancing sidelong at Kau-yung. "To date, this has been simply a matter of public debate of policy issues. Now that the policy has been set, however, active noncompliance becomes treason. And I warn you, Dr. Pei, that when the stakes are the survival or extinction of the human race, we're prepared to take whatever measures seem necessary to suppress treason."

  "I see."

  Pei Shan-wei's head turned as she slowly swept all of the seated Councillors with icy brown eyes so dark they were almost black. They looked even darker today, Kau-yung thought, and her expression was bleak.

  "I'll report the outcome of this meeting to the rest of the Board, Administrator," she said finally, her voice an icicle. "I'll also inform them that we are required to comply with your 'official policy' under threat of physical coercion. I'm sure the Board will have a response for you as soon as possible."

  She turned and walked out of the hearing room without a single backward glance.

  * * *

  Pei Kau-yung sat in another chair, this one on a dock extending into the enormous, dark blue waters of Lake Pei. A fishing pole had been set into the holding bracket beside his chair, but there was no bait on the hook. It was simply a convenient prop to help keep people away.

  We knew it could come to this, or something like it, he told himself. Kau-zhi, Shan-wei, Nimue, me, Proctor—we all knew, from the moment Langhorne was chosen instead of Halversen. And now it has.

  There were times when, antigerone treatments or not, he felt every single day of his hundred and ninety standard years.

  He tipped farther back in his chair, looking up through the darkening blue of approaching evening, and saw the slowly moving silver star of the orbiting starship—TFNS Hamilcar, the final surviving unit of the forty-six mammoth ships which had delivered the colony to Kau-zhi.

  The gargantuan task of transporting millions of colonists to a new home world would have been impossible without the massive employment of advanced technologies. That had been a given, and yet it had almost certainly been the betraying emissions of that same technology which had led to the discovery and destruction of the only other colony fleet to break through the Gbaba blockade. So Operation Ark's planners had done two things differently.

  First, Operation Ark's mission plan had required the colony fleet to remain in hyper for a minimum of ten years before even beginning to search for a new home world. That had carried it literally thousands of light-years from the Federation, far enough that it should take even the Gbaba scouting fleet centuries to sweep the thicket of stars in which it had lost itself.

  Second, the colony had been provided with not one, but two complete terraforming fleets. One had been detached and assigned to the preparation of Safehold, while the other remained in close company with the transports, hiding far from Kau-zhi, as a backup. If the Gbaba had detected the ships actually laboring upon Safehold, they would undoubtedly have been destroyed, but their destruction would not have led the Gbaba to the rest of the fleet, which would then have voyaged onward for another ten years, on a totally random vector, before once more searching for a new home.

  Hamilcar had been with that hidden fleet, the flagship of Operation Ark's civilian administration, and she'd been retained this long because the basic plan for Operation Ark had always envisioned a requirement for at least some technological presence until the colony was fully established. The enormous transport, half again the size of the Federation's largest dreadnought, was at minimal power levels, with every one of her multiply redundant stealth systems operating at all times. A Gbaba scout ship could have been in orbit with her without detecting her unless it closed to within two or three hundred kilometers.

  Even so, and despite her enormous value as administrative center, orbiting observatory, and emergency industrial module, her time was running out. That was what had prompted the confrontation between Shan-wei and Langhorne and Bédard this afternoon.
The Safehold colonial enclaves had been up and running for almost sixty standard years, and Langhorne and his Council had decided it was finally time to dispose of all the expedition's remaining technology. Or almost all of it, at any rate.

  Hamilcar's sister ships were already long gone. They'd been discarded as quickly as possible, by the simple expedient of dropping them into the star system's central fusion furnace once their cargoes had been landed. Not that those cargoes had been used exactly as Mission Control had originally envisioned . . . thanks to Bédard's modifications to the psych templates.

  A deep, fundamental part of Pei Kau-yung had felt a shudder of dismay when Mission Control first briefed him and his brother on everything involved in Operation Ark. Not even the fact that every one of the cryogenically suspended colonists had been a fully informed volunteer had been enough to overcome his historical memory of his own ancestors' efforts at "thought control." And yet he'd been forced to concede that there was an element of logic behind the decision to implant every colonist with what amounted to the detailed memory of a completely false life.

  It almost certainly would have proved impossible to convince eight million citizens of a highly developed technological civilization to renounce all advanced technology when it came down to it. No matter how willing they all were before they set out for their new home, no matter how fit, young, and physically vigorous they might be, the reality of a muscle-powered culture's harsh demands would have convinced at least some of them to change their minds. So Mission Control had decided to preclude that possibility by providing them with memories which no longer included advanced technology.

  It hadn't been an easy task, even for the Federation's tech base, but however much Kau-yung might despise Adorée Bédard, he had to admit the woman's technical brilliance. The colonists had been stacked like cordwood in their cryo capsules—as many as half a million of them aboard a single ship, in the case of really large transports, like Hamilcar—and they'd spent the entire ten-year voyage with their minds being steadily reprogrammed.

  Then they'd stayed in cryo for another eight standard years, safely tucked away in hiding, while the far less numerous active mission team personnel located their new home world and the alpha terraforming crew prepared it for them.

  The world they'd named Safehold was a bit smaller than Old Earth. Kau-zhi was considerably cooler than Sol, and although Safehold orbited closer to it, the planet had a noticeably lower average temperature than Old Earth. Its axial tilt was a bit more pronounced, as well, which gave it somewhat greater seasonal shifts as a result. It also had a higher proportion of land area, but that land was broken up into numerous smallish, mountainous continents and large islands, and that helped to moderate the planetary climate at least a little.

  Despite its marginally smaller size, Safehold was also a bit more dense than mankind's original home world. As a result, its gravity was very nearly the same as the one in which the human race had initially evolved. Its days were longer, but its years were shorter—only a bit more than three hundred and one local days each—and the colonists had divided it into only ten months, each of six five-day weeks. The local calendar still felt odd to Kau-yung (he supposed it made sense, but he missed January and December, damn it!), and he'd had more trouble than he expected adjusting to the long days, but overall, it was one of the more pleasant planets mankind had settled upon.

  Despite all of its positive points, there'd been a few drawbacks, of course. There always were. In this case, the native predators—especially the aquatic ones—presented exceptional challenges, and the ecosystem in general had proved rather less accommodating than usual to the necessary terrestrial plant and animal strains required to fit the planet for human habitation. Fortunately, among the units assigned to each terraforming task group, Mission Control had included a highly capable bio-support ship whose geneticists were able to make the necessary alterations to adapt terrestrial life to Safehold.

  Despite that, those terrestrial life-forms remained interlopers. The genetic modifications had helped, but they couldn't completely cure the problem, and for the first few years, the success of Safehold's terraforming had hung in the balance.

  That had been when Langhorne and Bédard needed Shan-wei, Kau-yung thought bitterly. She'd headed the terraforming teams, and it was her leadership which had carried the task through to success. She and her people, watched over by Kau-yung's flagship, TFNS Gulliver, had battled the planet into submission while most of the colony fleet had waited, motionless, holding station in the depths of interstellar space, light-years from the nearest star.

  Those had been heady days, Kau-yung admitted to himself. Days when he'd felt he and Shan-wei and their crews were genuinely forging ahead, although that confidence had been shadowed by the constant fear that a Gbaba scout ship might happen by while they hung in orbit around the planet. They'd known the odds were overwhelmingly in their favor, yet they'd been too agonizingly aware of the stakes for which they played to take any comfort from odds, despite all the precautions Mission Planning had built in. But they'd still had that sense of purpose, of wresting survival from the jaws of destruction, and he remembered their huge sense of triumph on the day they realized they'd finally turned the corner and sent word to Hamilcar that Safehold was ready for its new inhabitants.

  And that was the point at which they'd discovered how Bédard had "modified" the sleeping colonists' psychological templates. No doubt she'd thought it was a vast improvement when Langhorne initially suggested it, but Kau-yung and Shan-wei had been horrified.

  The sleeping colonists had volunteered to have false memories of a false life implanted. They hadn't volunteered to be programmed to believe Operation Ark's command staff were gods.

  It wasn't the only change Langhorne had made, of course. He and Bédard had done their systematic best to preclude the possibility of any reemergence of advanced technology on Safehold. They'd deliberately abandoned the metric system, which Kau-yung suspected had represented a personal prejudice on Langhorne's part. But they'd also eliminated any memory of Arabic numerals, or algebra, in a move calculated to emasculate any development of advanced mathematics, just as they had eliminated any reference to the scientific method and reinstituted a Ptolemaic theory of the universe. They'd systematically destroyed the tools of scientific inquiry, then concocted their religion as a means of ensuring that it never reemerged once more, and nothing could have been better calculated to outrage someone with Shan-wei's passionate belief in freedom of the individual and of thought.

  Unfortunately, it had been too late to do anything about it. Shan-wei and her allies on the Administrative Council had tried, but they'd quickly discovered that Langhorne was prepared for their resistance. He'd organized his own clique, with judicious transfers and replacements among the main fleet's command personnel, while Shan-Wei and Kau-yung were safely out of the way, and those changes had been enough to defeat Shan-wei's best efforts.

  Which was why Kau-yung and Shan-wei had had their very public falling out. It had been the only way they could think of to organize some sort of open resistance to Langhorne's policies while simultaneously retaining a presence in the heart of the colony's official command structure. Shan-wei's reputation, her leadership of the minority bloc on the Administrative Council, would have made it impossible for anyone to believe she supported the Administrator. And so their roles had been established for them, and they'd drifted further and further apart, settled into deeper and deeper estrangement.

  And all for nothing, in the end. He'd given up the woman he loved, both of them had given up the children they might yet have reared, sacrificed fifty-seven years of their lives to a public pretense of anger and violent disagreement, for nothing.

  Shan-wei and the other "Techies"—just under thirty percent of the original Operation Ark command crew—had retired to Safehold's southernmost continent. They'd built their own enclave, their "Alexandria Enclave," taking the name deliberately from the famous library at Alexandria
, and rigorously adhered to the original mission orders where technology was concerned.

  And, even more unforgivably from the perspective of Langhorne and Bédard's new plans, they'd refused to destroy their libraries. They'd insisted on preserving the true history of the human race, and especially of the war against the Gbaba.

  That's what really sticks in your craw, isn't it, Eric? Kau-yung thought. You know there's no risk of the Gbaba detecting the sort of preelectric "technology" Shan-wei still has up and running at Alexandria. Hell, any one of the air cars you're still willing to allow your command staff personnel to use as their "angelic chariots" radiates a bigger, stronger signal than everything at Alexandria combined! You may say that any indigenous technology—even the memory of that sort of tech—represents the threat of touching off more advanced, more readily detectable development, but that's not what really bothers you. You've decided you like being a god, so you can't tolerate any heretical scripture, can you?

  Kau-yung didn't know how Langhorne would respond to Shan-wei's threat of open defiance. Despite his own position as Safehold's military commander, he knew he wasn't completely trusted by the Administrator and the sycophants on Langhorne's Administrative Council. He wasn't one of them, despite his long-standing estrangement from Shan-wei, and too many of them seemed to have come to believe they truly were the deities Bédard had programmed the colonists to think they were.