Empire from the Ashes

Chapter Eighteen

Israel's captain was in a grumpy mood.

It wasn't anyone's fault, but Israel's crew were bright, competent, confident... and young. And, as bright, confident people are wont to do, they'd underestimated their task—which made their lack of progress enormously irritating. Still, Sean told himself with determined cheer, for people who'd found out they were approaching a populated world only in the last half hour of their flight they weren't doing all that badly. And Sandy had said she and Harry had some good news for a change.

He lay back in the captain's couch, studying the image from one of the stealthed remotes. They'd decided to rely on old-fashioned, line-of-sight radio, something an Imperial scan system probably wouldn't even think to look for, rather than more readily detected fold coms to operate their remotes. That limited their operating radius, but it gave them enough reach for a fair sampling, and Sean watched a kneeling row of villagers weed their way across a field of some sort of tuber and wondered how whatever they were tending tasted.

He glanced up as Tamman arrived, completing their gathering, then turned his gaze to Sandy. She and Harriet relied heavily on Brashan's hard-headed pragmatism to shoot down their wilder hypotheses and upon Tamman to build and maintain their surveillance systems, but the major burden of analysis was theirs, and Sean was delighted to leave them to it.

"Okay, Sandy," he said now. "You've got the floor."

She rubbed the tip of her nose for a moment, then cleared her throat.

"Let's start with the good news: we finally have a language program of sorts." Sean sat up straighter, and she smiled. "As I say, that's the good news. The bad news is that without a proper philologist, we've had to fall back on a 'trial and error' approach, with predictably crude results.

"It helps that they're literate and use movable type, but it would've helped more if the old alphabet had survived. Out of forty-one characters, we've found three that might be derived from Universal; the rest look like somebody tried to transcribe Old Norse into cuneiform. Working at night, we've managed to scan several printed books through our remotes, but they didn't do us much good until about six weeks ago when Harry found this."

The display changed to a recorded view looking down from some high vantage point on a circle of children. A bearded man in a robe of blue and gold stood at its center, holding up a picture of one of the native's odd, bipedal saddle beasts to point at a line of jagged-edged characters beneath it.

"This," Sandy resumed after a moment, "is a class in one of those temples of theirs. Apparently the Church believes in universal literacy, and Tam built a teeny-tiny remote for Harry to land on top of a beam so we could eavesdrop. It was maddening for the first month or so, but we set up a value substitution program in the linguistics section of Israel's comp cent, and things started coming together early last week."

Sean nodded, glad something had finally worked as he'd hoped it might. English was the common tongue of the Imperium and seemed likely to remain so. Its flexibility, concision, and adaptability were certainly vastly preferable to Universal! Age had ossified the language of the Fourth Imperium and Empire, and, given the availability of younger, more versatile Terran languages, the Fifth Imperium had no particular desire to speak it.

Yet all Fourth Empire computers spoke only Universal, at least until they could be reprogrammed. Worse, in some cases—like Mother's hardwired constitutional functions—they couldn't be reprogrammed, so all Battle Fleet personnel had to speak Universal whether they wanted to or not.

Cohanna's Bio-Sciences Ministry had met that need with a dedicated implant, and with the enormous "piggy-back" storage molycircs made possible, Battle Fleet had decided to give its personnel all major Terran languages. That made sense in view of their diversity—and also meant each of Israel's crewmen had a built-in "translating" software package. True, none of the languages in their implants' memories were quite this foreign, but if Israel's computers could cobble up a local dictionary...

"As I say, it's still patchy, but we ought to be able to make a stab at understanding what someone says. It's going to be another matter if we try to talk back, though. So far Harry and I have identified seven distinct dialects and what may be one minor language, and there's no way we could mingle with the locals without a lot more work."

"How much more?" Tamman asked.

"I can't say, Tam—not for certain—but I'd estimate another month of input. At the moment, we can read about forty percent of the printed material we collect, and the percentage is expanding, but that's a far cry from understanding the spoken language, much less conversing coherently. And we need more than simple coherency, unless we want to scare the natives to death."

"Umph." Sean frowned at the frozen image of the teacher. He'd hoped for better, but even while he'd hoped, he'd known it was unreasonable.

"In the meantime, one of our 'borrowed' books—an atlas—has given us a running start on figuring out the geopolitics of the planet, which, by the way, the natives call 'Pardal.' We can't find the name in any of Israel's admittedly limited records, so I suspect it's locally evolved.

"As near as we can tell, this is what Pardal currently looks like." The display changed to a map of Pardal's five continents and numerous island chains. The biggest inhabited continent reminded Sean of an old-fashioned, air-foil aircraft, flying northeast towards the polar ice cap with a second, smaller land mass providing its tail assembly. "We made enough photomaps on the way in to know the atlas maps aren't perfectly scaled, and we still can't read all of its commentary, but it appears Pardal is split into hundreds of feudal territories." Scarlet boundary lines flashed as she spoke. "At the moment, we're located just inside the eastern border of this one, which is called, as nearly as I can translate it, the Kingdom of Cherist.

"Now, North Hylar—" she indicated the fuselage and wings of the "aircraft" "—seems to be the wealthiest and most heavily populated land mass. The 'countries' are larger and seem to contain more internal subdivisions, which suggests they may be older. It looks to us like there's been a longer period of absorption and consolidation here, and that conclusion may be supported by the fact that our ground site is, indeed, underneath North Hylar's largest city." A red cursor flashed approximately dead center in North Hylar.

"South Hylar, connected to North Hylar by this isthmus down here, is less densely populated, probably because it doesn't have much in the way of rivers—aside from this one big one out of the southern mountains—but that's a guess. As you can see, the other two populated continents, Herdaana and Ishar, are located across a fairly wide body of water—the Seldan Sea—to the west of the Hylars. These other two continents to the east are uninhabited. As far as we can tell, the Pardalians don't even realize they exist, and from the aerial maps, they seem to have less human-compatible vegetation. Looks like they were never terraformed—which, in turn, suggests they never were inhabited, even before the bio-weapon.

"Of the settled continents, both Hylars are extremely mountainous, and Ishar's on the desert side. Herdaana's much flatter and seems to be the bread basket of Pardal, and a lot of the territories in Herdaana and Ishar alike have Hylaran names prefixed by 'gyhar,' or 'new,' which probably means they were colonized—or conquered—by North Hylar. It may or may not imply a continuing relationship between those territories and their 'mother countries' back home. Some evidence suggests that; other evidence, particularly the small size and apparent competition between the Herdaana states, suggests otherwise, but we simply can't read the atlas well enough to know, and the entire continent's out of range of our remotes."

She paused, brow wrinkled in frustration, then shrugged.

"All right, that's the political structure, but there's a catch, because despite all these nominally independent feudal states, the entire planet seems to be one huge theocracy. That surprised us, given Pardal's primitive technology. I'd have thought simple communication delays would do in any planet-wide institution, but that was before we figured out what this is."

The display changed to a tall, gantry-like structure with two massive, pivoted arms, and she shook her head almost admiringly.

"That, gentlemen, is a semaphore tower. They've got chains of them across most of the planet. Not all; they'd need ships to reach Herdaana and Ishar, and given the mountains on the isthmus, they probably send over-water couriers to South Hylar, too. It's a daylight-only system, but it still means they can send messages a whole lot faster than we'd suspected."

"Ingenious," Sean murmured.

"Exactly. Obviously we're still guessing, but it looks like the Church deliberately keeps political power decentralized, and control of the communications net would give them a heck of a tactical edge. I'd say they push it to the max; when the Church says jump, it's a good bet the local prince only asks how high. In addition to the semaphore towers, every town—and most of the villages—in range of our remotes contains at least one Church complex. Some larger towns have dozens, and they do a lot of business. Our reading class is only a tiny part of it.

"More to the point, our power-source city is where the semaphore chains converge—the Pardalian equivalent of the Vatican. In fact, the entire city is simply called 'The Temple,' and as far as we can tell, it's ruled by the high priest as both secular and temporal lord. Interestingly enough, the title of said high priest appears to be eurokat a'demostano." Sean looked up sharply, and she nodded. "Even allowing for several millennia of erosion, that sounds too much like eurokath adthad diamostanu to be a coincidence."

" 'Port Admiral,' " Sean translated softly, frowning at the city's light dot. "You think the Church is tied directly to the quarantine system?"

"Probably," Harriet answered for Sandy. "The Temple's site certainly suggests it, especially given this 'port admiral' priestly title. And if they have, in fact, preserved any access to the computer running the system, it'd have to be purely vocal; there can't be anyone out there with neural feeds. If they're running it on some sort of rote basis, that might explain why the system seemed so slow and clumsy when it attacked us; they literally didn't know what they were doing. On the other hand, if they do have voice access, think what it might mean for a religion. It'd be like the very voice of God."

"Which might help explain the Church's authority," Sean mused aloud.

"Exactly," Sandy said, "though we've turned up a few suggestions that the Church's current political power is a relatively recent innovation. And it might also explain how they could have contact with high-tech without realizing it was technology. It isn't a machine; it's 'God.' "

"Which," Tamman observed sourly, "doesn't help us out at all, Sean. Not in terms of getting hold of the computer, I mean. If it's their holy of holies, access is going to be limited, I'd think—unless we want to shoot our way into neural feed range, anyway."

"We're a long way from crossing that bridge yet, Tam. Anyway, I'd prefer to do a personal recon on the ground before we make any plans."

"Perhaps," Brashan said, "but I fear you'll have a problem there." He changed the display image to a closeup from one of their approach opticals. "Observe a typical citizen of the Temple."

"Oy vey!" Sean sighed, and Sandy laughed at his disgusted tone. The image was far from clear, but the individual in it was perhaps a hundred and fifty centimeters tall, red-haired and blue-eyed—the complete antithesis of any of Israel's human crew.

"Indeed," Brashan replied. "Obviously, I could never pass as anything other than an alien, but I fear the same is true of all of you in the Temple."

"Not necessarily," Sandy said, and Sean brightened as the image changed again. This time the man standing before him had dark hair. His eyes were brown, not the black of the old Imperial Race—or of Sean or Harriet, for that matter—but the newcomer stood just over a hundred seventy centimeters, far short of Sean's own towering height but getting closer.

"This," Sandy continued, "is a citizen of something called the Princedom of Malagor. It's one of the bigger national units—a bit larger, in fact, than the Kingdom of Aris, which contains the Temple—and it's just over the Cherist border from us. We've been watching it through our remotes, and I'd say the Malagorans are an independent sort. Malagor's very mountainous, even for North Hylar, and these seem to be typical, stiff-necked mountaineers, without a lot of nobles. Their hereditary ruler's limited to the title of 'prince,' and I'd guess there's a lot of local government, but that doesn't make them stay-at-homes. There's an historical maps section in our atlas, and there've been lots of battles in the Duchy of Keldark, which lies between Malagor and Aris. It looks like Malagor and Aris were probably political rivals and Aris came out on top because of the Temple."

"Not so good," Sean muttered. "If there's a tradition of hostility, trying to pass as Malagorans wouldn't exactly get us a red carpet in Aris."

"Perhaps not," Brashan said, "but consider: the Temple is the center of a world religion."

"Oho! Pilgrims!"

"Maybe, but let's not get carried away, Sean," Sandy cautioned. "Remember all of this is still guesswork."

"Understood. Can you bring your map back up?"

Sandy obliged, and Sean frowned as he stared at it. Israel lay hidden in the spine of the westernmost of North Hylar's major mountain ranges, while Aris lay to the east of an even higher range. Malagor occupied a rough, tumbled plateau between the two before they merged to form the craggy spine of the isthmus into South Hylar.

"I wish we had a line of sight to run remotes into the Temple," he muttered.

"Perhaps," Brashan replied. "On the other hand, our position puts the mountains between us and any surveillance systems the Temple might boast."

"True, true." Sean shook himself. "All right, Sandy. It looks to me like you guys are doing good. I'm impressed. But—"

"But what've we done for you lately?" She smiled, and he grinned back.

"More or less. We need to refine your data a lot before we poke our noses out. Would it help if we took a stealthed cutter over closer to the Temple and ran some additional remotes in on it?"

"Maybe." Sandy considered, then shook her head. "Nope, not yet. We're already pulling in more data than we can integrate, and I'd rather not risk running afoul of any on-site detection systems until we know more."

"Makes sense to me," Sean agreed. "That about it for now, then?"

"I'm afraid so. We've spotted a Church library in one of the towns just west of here, and Tam and I are going to run in a couple of remotes tonight. Harry and I may be able to develop something out of that."

Father Stomald kilted his blue robe above his knees and waded out into the icy holding pond to examine the new waterwheel. Folmak Folmakson, the millwright, fidgeted while he waited, and Stomald frowned. A priest must be eternally vigilant this close to the Valley of the Damned, especially with the Trial so recently past and the strange shooting star to remind him of his duties. At moments like this he was unhappily aware of his own youth, but, he reminded himself, a man need not be aged to hear God in his heart.

He sloshed up onto the bank of the millrace and peered down at the wheel. To be sure, it did look odd. Stomald had never heard of a wheel driven by water which fell from above rather than turning submerged paddles, but he could see several advantages. For one thing, it required much less water, and that meant it could run for far more of the year in drier regions. Lack of rain was seldom a problem in Malagor, but the new design's efficiency meant more wheels could be run with the same water supply even here.

He frowned again, listening to the creak of the wheel while he applied the Test. It was a particularly important task here, for Malagor's artisans had always been notoriously restive under Mother Church's injunctions, even since the Schismatic Wars. Indeed, he sometimes suspected they'd grown still more so since then... and he knew many of them still harbored dreams of Malagoran independence. Within the last six five-days alone, he'd heard no less than four people whistling the forbidden tune to "Malagor the Free," and he was deeply concerned over how he ought to respond to it. Yet he was relieved to note that this wheel, at least, didn't seem to violate any of the Tenets. It was powered by water and required the creation of no new tools or processes. It might be suspiciously innovative, but Stomald could see no demonic influence. It was still a water wheel, and those had been in use forever.

He banished his frown and replaced it with a properly meditative expression as he splashed back towards his anxious audience. He could, he decided, pronounce on this without bothering Bishop Frenaur, and that was a distinct relief. Like most senior prelates, the bishop was unhappy at being called away from the Temple for anything other than his twice-a-year pastoral visitation. Stomald didn't like to think how he might react if some village under-priest, especially a native-born Malagoran, suggested a special conclave was required, and the fact that Folmak hadn't introduced a single new technique gave him an out.

Which, Stomald thought a bit guiltily, might be fortunate in more ways than one. The new catechism suggested Mother Church was entering one of her more dogmatic periods, and some of the Inquisition's recent actions boded ill for Stomald's stubborn countrymen. Bishop Frenaur just might have felt compelled to make an example of Folmak.

He stepped out of the water, trying to hide an unpriestly shiver, and Folmak shifted from foot to foot, almost wringing his hands. The millwright was twice Stomald's age and more, and it struck the priest—not for the first time—how absurd it was for someone older than his own father to look at him so appealingly. He scolded himself—again, not for the first time—for the thought. Folmak wasn't looking to Stomald Gerakson for guidance; he was looking to Father Stomald of Cragsend, and Father Stomald spoke not from the authority of his own years but with that of Mother Church Herself.

"Very well, Folmak, I've looked at it," the young priest said. He paused, unable to resist the ignoble desire to cloak his pronouncement in mystery a moment longer, then smiled. "As far as I can tell, your contraption satisfies all the Tenets. If you'll walk to the vicarage with me, I'll fill out the Attestation right now."

A huge grin transfigured the millwright's bearded face. Stomald permitted himself to grin back, then clapped Folmak on one brawny shoulder, and the unsullied joy of serving his flock made him look even younger.

"In fact," he chuckled, "I believe I've a small cask of Sister Yurid's winter ale left, and it strikes me that this might be an appropriate moment to broach it. Don't you think so?"

This time Sandy's eyes actually sparkled. Harriet seemed almost as excited, and Sandy started talking even before the others were all seated.

"People," she said, "we still haven't figured out how Pardal lost its tech base in the first place, but at least we know now why it hasn't built another one! We spent several hours in the Church library night before last, reading the books into memory through the remotes. We didn't have time to do any content scans then, but it turns out one of our finds is a book on Church doctrine and a couple of others are Church histories. For whatever reason, the Church has anathematized technology."

"Wait a minute," Sean said. "I considered that, but it doesn't hold up. Not for forty-five thousand years, anyway."

"Why not?"

"Just think about it for a minute. Let's say that at some point in the past—some pretty long ago point, judging from what's left of the Imperial ruins—the Church did proscribe technology. I can think of a few scenarios which might lead to that, like Harry's original suggestion that they dusted themselves out or whipped up a bio-weapon all their own. Either of those could have killed off most of the techies, and I suppose the destruction could have created an anti-technical revulsion that resulted in a 'religious' anti-tech stance. Certainly something caused them to lose their original alphabet, their original language, science—all of it—and that sounds more like systematic suppression than simple damage to the tech base.

"But having done that, the Church wouldn't even know what technology was by the time it got a few thousand years down the road. How could they prevent it from reemerging in a homegrown variety? Without some term of reference to know what constituted 'high tech,' how could they recognize it to snuff it when it turned up again?"

"Fair enough," Sandy agreed, "but you don't have the full picture. First, they didn't completely lose Universal. We thought they had, but that was before we hit the Church documents. They're written in something called the 'Holy Tongue,' using an alphabet restricted to the priesthood, and for all intents and purposes the Holy Tongue is a corrupted version of Universal.

"Second, the Church is definitely connected to the quarantine system. There are several references in here to 'the Voice of God'; in fact, their whole liturgical year is set up around what has to be the quarantine system's central computer—there are festivals called 'Fire Test,' 'Plot Test,' 'High Fire Test,' and the like. There are also references to something called 'Holy Servitors' that I'd guess are maintenance mechs from the shipyard, since they appear mysteriously to tend the inner shrine. There's no sign these people understand what's really going on, but they seem to recognize that the system's purpose is to protect their world from contamination, though they've turned it into a religious matter. The Voice is part of God's plan to protect them from demons, and it not only 'proves' God's existence but their own rectitude. If they weren't doing what God wants, His Voice would tell them so, right?

"Third, way back whenever, the Church set up a definition of what constitutes acceptable technology. In essence, Pardalians are forbidden anything but muscle, wind, or water power, so they don't have to know what high tech is; they've set up preconditions which preclude its existence.

"There's more to it than that—there's a whole, complicated evaluating procedure called the Test of Mother Church. Bear in mind that we're talking about something written in this debased version of Universal rather than the vulgar tongue, so we can make lots more sense of it. Apparently the Test consists of applying a number of Tenets which consider whether or not any new development violates the power restrictions or requires new tools, new procedures, or new knowledge. If it does, it's right out."

"Hold it." It was Tamman's turn to object. "These people have gunpowder, and that doesn't rely on muscles, wind, or water!"

"No," Harriet agreed, "but Earth certainly had gunpowder before it got beyond waterwheels and windmills, and the Church occasionally—very occasionally—grants dispensations through a system of special Conclaves. It takes a long time to work through, but it means advances aren't entirely impossible. We've found several dispensations scattered over the last six hundred local years—almost a thousand Terran years—and most of them seem to be fairly pragmatic things like kitchen-sink chemistry and pretty darn empirical medicine and agriculture. We're still groping in the dark, but it looks like there've been some 'progressive' periods—which, unfortunately, seem to provoke backlash periods of extreme conservatism. The key thing, though, is that the Church is continually on the lookout to suppress anything that even looks like the scientific method, and without that there's no systematic basis for technological innovation."

"And people put up with it?" Tamman shook his head. "I find that hard to accept."

"That's because of your own cultural baggage," Sandy said. "You come from a technical society and you accept technology as good, or at least inevitable; these people have the opposite orientation. And remember that the Church knows God is on its side; they have proof of it several times a year when the Voice speaks. Not only that," her excited voice turned grimmer, "but their version of the Inquisition has some pretty grisly punishments for anybody who dares to fool around with forbidden knowledge."

"Inquisition?" Sean looked up. "I don't like the sound of that."

"Me neither," Harriet said. "I had to stop after the first little bit, but Sandy and Brashan waded through the whole ghastly thing." She shuddered. "Even the little I read is going to give me nightmares for a week."

"Me, too," Sandy murmured. Her bright eyes were briefly haunted, and she brooded down at the deck for a long, silent moment. Then she shook herself. "Like a lot of intolerant religions, their Inquisition stacks the deck. First, they're only doing it to 'save souls,' including that of the 'heretic' in question, and they've picked up on the theory of the mortification of the flesh to 'expiate' sins. That means they're actually helping the people they murder. Worse, they're never wrong. Their religious law enshrines the use of torture during questioning, which means the accused always confess, even knowing how they'll be put to death, and—" she looked up and met Sean's gaze "—the actual executions are even worse. Pour décourager les autres, I suppose."

"Brrrr." Sean's lips twisted in revulsion. "I suppose any 'church' that packs that kind of whammy probably could keep the peasants in line."

"Especially with the advantage of a whole secret language. They can promote universal literacy in the vulgar tongue and still have most of the advantages of a priestly monopoly on education. And they've got a pretty big carrot to go with their stick. The Church collects a tithe—looks like somewhere around twelve percent—from every soul on the planet. A lot of that loot gets used to build temples, commission religious art, and so forth, but a big chunk is loaned out to secular rulers at something like thirty percent, and another goes into charitable works. You see? They've got their creditor nobles on a string, and the poor look to them for relief when times get bad. Sean, they've got this planet sewed up three ways to Sunday!"

"Damn. And they're the ones sitting on top of the quarantine ground station!" Sean shook his head in disgust.

"They sure are," Harriet sighed.

"Yes, they are," Sandy agreed, "but remember that we're still putting the whole picture together. We've just filled in a big piece, and discovering this 'Holy Tongue' gives us a Rosetta Stone of sorts for the vulgar languages, as well, but there's a lot we haven't even begun on. For instance, there's something called 'The Valley of the Damned' that sounds interesting to me."

" 'Valley of the Damned'?" Sean repeated. "What sort of valley?"

"We don't know yet, but it's utterly proscribed. There may be other, similar sites, but this is the only one we've found so far. It's up in the mountains of northern Malagor, outside the reach of our remotes. Anyone who goes in is eternally damned for consorting with demons. If they come back out again, they have to be ritualistically—and hideously—killed. It looks to me like the preliminaries probably take at least a couple of days, and then they burn the poor bastards alive," she finished grimly.

"It sounds," Sean mused, "like whatever's in there must represent a mighty serious threat to the Church's neat little social structure. Or they think it does, anyway." He frowned, and then his eyes began to gleam. "Just where, exactly, did you say this valley is?"