Off Armageddon Reef (23 page)

Merlin sat once more in his chamber.

A humid, windless night pressed heavily against its window. Nimue Alban, born and raised in Old Earth's NorEurope, would have found that night uncomfortably warm, despite the season, but a PICA was unconcerned by such minor matters. Merlin was more struck by the moonless night's impenetrable blackness, which was still one of the most alien aspects of Safehold for the man whose mind had been Nimue Alban's. Nimue had been a child of a technological civilization, one of illumination, of light and energy that drove back the darkness and domed its cities in reflected cloud-glow on the darkest of nights. Tellesberg was well lit for a city of Safehold, but the only illumination on
this
planet came from the simple flames of burning wood or wax, of tallow or oil, far too feeble to drive out the night.

Like Tellesberg itself, Merlin's chamber was well lit by Safeholdian standards. It was illuminated not by candles, but by the fine, clear flame of lamps filled with kraken oil and equipped with the comparatively newfangled notion of polished reflectors, placed behind their chimneys to concentrate and direct their light. Despite that, the available light was scarcely sufficient for comfortable reading, especially of the intricate calligraphy in the hand-lettered volume on Merlin's desk. It could be done, and had been, by generations of Safehold-born humans, but not without a stiff penalty in eyestrain.

Merlin, however, had certain advantages. For one, his artificial eyes were immune to strain. They were also equipped with light-gathering technology, which made the room—and, indeed, the bottomless night outside it—daylight clear. He'd deleted the standard PICA ten-day countdown clock from his visual field, and there was nothing to distract him as he skimmed rapidly and steadily through the thick leather-bound copy of the
Holy Writ
of the Church of God Awaiting.

It was far from the first time he'd perused the
Writ
, yet he found the book continually fascinating, in the way a homicide detective might have been fascinated by the autobiography of a sadistic serial killer he'd known as a boyhood friend. There were many aspects of its moral teachings with which Merlin could not take issue, however badly he wanted to. Maruyama Chihiro had borrowed heavily from existing religions, and the core of his “
Writ
's” moral teachings would have been familiar to almost any Old Earth theologian. For the most part, Merlin reflected, that was undoubtedly inevitable, for a stable society required an underlying framework of rules and laws which those living within it accepted. Throughout human history, religion had been one of the primary wellsprings of that legitimacy, and it was that portion of the
Writ
which produced priests like Bishop Maikel.

But the religions from which Maruyama had lifted his core commandments and moral precepts had been the product of a genuine effort to understand, or at least conceptualize, God or whatever higher power their adherents had sought. The Church of God Awaiting's seminal scripture wasn't. It was a deliberate fraud, perpetrated upon its followers by individuals whose actions had directly contradicted the principles and beliefs of the religions in which so many of them had been raised. It was a lie, using the hunger within human beings which had driven them to seek God, by whatever name, or in whatever form, throughout the human race's entire history, not simply to control, but to program. To stifle any sense of inquiry which might threaten the fraudulent template Eric Langhorne and Adorée Bédard had manufactured to hammer any future human society into the pattern
they
had found good.

Merlin had to admit that, between them, Langhorne, Bédard, and Murayama had managed to kill quite a few birds with the single stone of the
Writ
. He turned back to the beginning of the volume and grimaced as he glanced once more at the table of contents.
The Book of Langhorne
,
The Book of Bédard
,
The Book of Pasquale
, the books of Sondheim, Truscott, Schueler, Jwo-jeng, Chihiro, Andropov, Hastings.

The list went on and on, each book attributed to one of the “archangels.” The
Writ
contained no gospels written by mere mortals. Such human-produced writings existed, in
The Commentaries
and
The Insights
, not to mention
The Testimonies
, which were also part of the Church of God Awaiting's central scripture and authority. But none of those merely human writings could compare to the legitimacy and centrality of the
Writ
, for unlike them,
its
every word had been handed down directly from the mouth of God through his immortal angels.

The
Writ
wasn't just an instrument of social control, either. True,
The Book of Langhorne
dealt with the “law of God” as taught by the Church of God Awaiting. Merlin had gagged mentally, more than once, as he waded through the love-cloaked half-truths and outright falsehoods from which Langhorne—or Murayama, writing for Langhorne, at any rate—had woven the straitjacket into which he'd laced the inhabitants of Safehold. And
The Book of Bédard
was at least as hard for Merlin to take, a masterpiece of psychology in the service of deception and mind control that rejoiced in the subtitle of “
The Book of Wisdom and Self-Knowledge
.”

But many of its other books were, in fact, a practical guide to terraforming and the colonization of an alien planet.

The Archangel Hastings' “book,” for example, was actually an atlas—a very
detailed
atlas of the entire planet, based upon the meticulous maps Shan-wei's crew had made at the time of its original terraforming. The maps in Merlin's copy of the
Writ
were on far too small a scale to be very useful, and quite a bit of distortion had crept in when the printer's engravings were made, but the master maps had been carefully preserved in the Temple. Indeed, those master maps were some of the Church's holiest artifacts. The advanced synthetics of their “paper” were fireproof, waterproof, about as tough as a five-millimeter sheet of hammered copper, and virtually immune to the effects of age—all of which, of course, amply proved their “miraculous” nature.

Almost equally importantly, however,
The Book of Hastings
required that copies of those maps be made available, to the public as well as the Church, in the cathedral of every bishop. Safeholdians knew
exactly
what the geography of their world looked like, which had been of enormous importance when they set about deciding where to plant additional enclaves, and the
Writ
's other books had given them a guide for how those enclaves were to be established.

It was a guide that deliberately falsified the basis for many of the lessons it taught and the religious laws it handed down, but it had provided the basic framework under which humanity had expanded from its initial enclaves on this planet.
The Book of Sondheim
dealt with agronomy and farming, including, especially, the necessary steps to prepare Safehold's soil for the essential terrestrial plants humanity required.
The Book of Truscott
did the same thing for animal husbandry—for native Safeholdian species, as well as imports from Earth.
The Book of Pasquale
contained “religious laws” to provide sanitation, good hygiene and diet, the treatment of wounds, and basic preventive medicine. Even
The Book of Bédard
, despite the purpose for which it had been written, contained quite a lot of sound psychological advice and insight, and the members of “her” order—like Bishop Maikel—had taken its precepts in very different directions from anything she might have intended. The order's successes in ministering to the mental and emotional needs of Safeholdian humanity were little short of amazing in many cases, and it was the Bédardites who administered the majority of the Church's charitable works.

Yet all of the
Writ
's directives were couched as religious laws, proper rituals and sacrifices to be performed by the devout.
The Book of Pasquale
's injunctions never mentioned germs or the scientific basis on which his “laws” rested, for example. And if a healer failed to wash his hands in one of the “holy waters,” properly prepared and blessed by a priest, before treating a wound, and that wound became septic, or before delivering a baby, and that mother died of childbed fever, then it was not infection or disease which was to blame, but sin.

And the maps of
The Book of Hastings
, which conclusively demonstrated that their world was a sphere, also explicitly taught Safeholdians the Ptolemaic theory of the universe…and turned gravity itself into yet another of the Archangel Langhorne's miraculous gifts to man, through God's grace. Indeed, Langhorne had created the world as a round ball at the center of the crystal spheres of the moon, sun, stars, and God's own Heaven expressly as a means to demonstrate to Man that God could accomplish anything He willed. After all, did it not require an act of divine will and power to keep people from falling off the bottom side of the world and crashing into the moon?

And so, in addition to providing the directions by which the original enclaves had followed the Archangel Langhorne's direction to be fruitful and multiply and inhabit the world God had given them, the
Writ
had aided powerfully in the systematic abortion of anything resembling the scientific method while simultaneously reinforcing the power of the Church as preceptor and governor of humanity.

Then there were
The Book of Jwo-jeng
and
The Book of Schueler
. Neither of them were as long as some of the others, but they went to the very heart of Langhorne's ultimate purpose here on Safehold. Jwo-jeng handed down the official descriptions and definitions of that technology which God found acceptable, and that which He rejected as unclean, or tainted, or reserved solely for His archangels and angels. And Schueler, whose “book” was both the shortest and the most horrifying of them all, defined the punishment to be visited upon those who violated the proscriptions of Langhorne and Jwo-jeng. The thought that anyone raised in the same society as Nimue Alban could have resurrected so many nightmares from the horrific closet of mankind's savagery to his own was enough to turn even Merlin's alloy and composites stomach. Schueler must have spent endless hours poring over the history texts to come up with such a detailed catalog of atrocities to be visited upon the “unbeliever” in “God's most holy Name.”

But the most fascinating—and infuriating—of all, in many ways, was
The Book of Chihiro
. The book which had been added later, after the close of the original copy of the
Writ
which had been stored in the computers in Nimue's cave.

It seemed apparent that Pei Kau-yung's vengeance for his wife and friends had eliminated almost all of Langhorne's leadership cadre. Indeed, from the sudden dearth of “angelic” visitations recorded in
The Testimonies
following his attack, it seemed likely he'd gotten a huge chunk of Langhorne's lower level personnel, as well. Unfortunately, Maruyama Chihiro hadn't been among the casualties, and he and his fellow survivors had managed to keep most of Langhorne's plan on track. The Archangel Chihiro, revered as the patron of personal protection and called the Guardian of Cities in the hagiography of the Church of God Awaiting, had been the official historian of God. He was the one who had recorded the miracle of Safehold's creation…and he was also the recorder of how Shan-wei, Dark Mother of Evil, had tainted the purity of that creation in the name of ambition and greed.

Murayama had tied it all together well, Merlin thought bitterly. Shan-wei, brightest of all the Archangel Langhorne's assistants, had viewed Safehold not as a work of God which she had been privileged to help bring into existence, but as the work of her own hands. And from that hubris, that twisted sense of her own self-worth and that vaunting pride, had flowed all of the evil in Safehold.

She had set herself against her rightful overlord, the Archangel Langhorne, and against God Himself, and she'd gathered to herself the Archangel Proctor, who had opened the seals on temptation and forbidden knowledge. The Archangel Sullivan, who had taught humanity gluttony and self-indulgence. The Archangel Grimaldi, whose twisted version of the healing teachings of the Archangel Truscott had been the father and mother of pestilence. The Archangel Stavrakis, who had preached the avarice of personal gain over the godly yielding to the Church of God Awaiting that first fruit of every harvest which was God's due. The Archangel Rodriguez, who had preached the arrogant, seductive lie that men were actually capable of setting their own fallible hands to the creation of the law under which they might live. The Archangel Ascher, Father of Lies, whose so-called history's twisted version of the true
Writ
had led those mortals foolish enough to believe anything Shan-wei said into equally dark damnation.

And, of course, the fallen archangel who was, in so many ways, the darkest of them all—the Archangel Kau-yung, Father of Destruction, Lord of Treachery, who had smitten the Archangel Langhorne and the Archangel Bédard, traitorously and without warning, after the grieving Langhorne had been compelled to unleash the
Rakurai
, the lightning bolt of God, upon Shan-wei and her fallen followers. Kau-yung, who had been the most trusted of all Langhorne's subordinates, the warrior charged with guarding all that Safehold stood for, who had turned to Shan-wei's evil. It was Kau-yung's monumental treachery, darker even then Shan-wei's original sin, which had so terribly wounded the perishable bodies of the Archangels Langhorne, Bédard, Pasquale, Sondheim, and their most loyal followers, those closest to God Himself, that they were forced to leave Safehold with their work unfinished.