Off Armageddon Reef (5 page)

He tried to tell himself that that was only because of the weariness almost sixty standard years—almost sixty-five
local
years—of watching the two of them in operation had made inevitable. Unfortunately, he couldn't quite shake the thought that the people who'd selected Eric Langhorne as the colony's chief administrator and Dr. Adorée Bédard as its chief psychologist had known exactly what they were doing. After all, the survival of the human race—at any cost—was far more important than any minor abridgments of basic human rights.

“—and we implore you, once again,” the slender, silver-haired woman standing in the center of the breezy hearing room said, “to consider how vital it is that as the human culture on this planet grows and matures, it
remembers
the Gbaba. That it understands
why
we came here, why we renounced advanced technology.”

Kau-yung regarded her with stony brown eyes. She didn't even look in his direction, and he felt one or two of the Councillors glancing at him with what they fondly imagined was hidden sympathy. Or, in some cases, concealed amusement.

“We've heard all of these arguments before, Dr. Pei,” Eric Langhorne said. “We understand the point you're raising. But I'm afraid that nothing you've said is likely to change our established policy.”

“Administrator,” Pei Shan-wei said, “your ‘established policy' overlooks the fact that mankind has always been a toolmaker and a problem solver. Eventually, those qualities are going to surface here on Safehold. When they do, without an institutional memory of what happened to the Federation, our descendants aren't going to know about the dangers waiting for them out there.”

“That particular concern is based on a faulty understanding of the societal matrix we're creating here, Dr. Pei,” Adorée Bédard said. “I assure you, with the safeguards we've put in place, the inhabitants of Safehold will be safely insulated against the sort of technological advancement which might attract the Gbaba's attention. Unless, of course”—the psychiatrist's eyes narrowed—“there's some outside stimulus to violate the parameters of our matrix.”

“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.