Hell's Foundations Quiver: Chapter Ten

.IX.
Nimue’s Cave,
Mountains of Light,
The Temple Lands.

 

    “Owl and I have completed our analysis.”

    Nahrmahn Baytz’s holographic eyes tracked around the faces of the other members of the small group assembled — physically or electronically — at the table in Nimue’s Cave. Actually, only Merlin, Aivah, and Sandaria Ghatfryd were physicallypresent, but this time Owl had generated full holographic images of all of the attendees rather than simply projecting them onto the contact lenses of those scattered elsewhere around the planet.

    “As the Sisters of Saint Kohdy had speculated,” Nahrmahn continued, this time looking at Aivah and Sandaria, “the reason he decided to write in Spanish — in Español — was his concern over how far outside the bounds of accepted doctrine and theology his speculations might fall. Even the portions he recorded in English have given us considerable additional insight into what actually happened following the ‘Rakurai’ strike on the Alexandria Enclave, though.”

    “Insight not already present in Saint Zherneau’s journal?” Maikel Staynair asked, his sinewy hands folded on the table in front of him. Actually, they were folded on his desk in far-off Manchyr, where it was almost midnight.

    “Quite a lot, really.” Nahrmahn shrugged. “Jeremiah Knowles and his friends were hidden away in Tellesberg, Maikel. They had access only to whatever information reached what was basically a very small town at the back end of nowhere. That limited what they could really know about what was happening elsewhere, and their orders from Shan-wei to keep their heads down came into play, as well. There wouldn’t’ve been much the four of them could’ve accomplished, cut off from Alexandria and isolated half a world away from all the rest of the colonists, even if they hadn’t had Shan-wei’s instructions to lie low, survive, and plan for the future. So in many ways, Saint Zherneau’s perspective on the War Against the Fallen was as much that of an outsider as anyone else on Safehold had. Cody Cortazar, on the other hand, was right in the midst of that war. He saw a lot more of it, and from a considerably different perspective.”

    Staynair nodded slowly and thoughtfully.

    “Thank you,” he said. “I wasn’t challenging your interpretation. I only wanted to be sure I understood the context.”

    “With all due respect, Your Eminence,” Sandaria’s expression was as dry as her tone, “I think ‘context’ is something we could all use at this point.”

    Several of the others chuckled, and Merlin smiled. Sandaria might continue to nourish reservation over the inner circle’s version of the archangels, but her sojourn here in Nimue’s Cave had soothed those reservations sharpest edges. And she’d obviously gotten over her initial discomfort at holding long conversations with people who weren’t physically present . . . or happened to be dead.

    She’d been skittish about Owl when Merlin and Nimue explained that his hologram was that of an individual who’d never physically existed outside the effectively “magical,” confines of a computer. Still, that had been easier for her to process than the idea that the individuals she knew as Merlin and Nimue were actually a pair of machines, both of which contained the memories of a young woman — the same young woman — who’d died almost a thousand Safeholdian years before her own birth. She’d known — or been introduced to, at least — both Merlin and Nimue before that truth had been shared with her, however, and she related to them as the discrete and separate individuals they’d become in a way which pushed the fact of Nimue Alban’s physical death back below the level of conscious awareness.

    She couldn’t do that with Nahrmahn Baytz. She knewhe’d died, and he had no more of a physical body than Owl did. It had taken her many days to get past the idea that she was talking to a ghost whenever she and Nahrmahn spoke. In fact, for the first five-day after her arrival in the cave she’d avoided speaking to him whenever possible. She’d preferred to address any comments or requests to Owl and let the AI refer them to Nahrmahn if that turned out to be necessary.

    Maybe the fact that she’s so much more comfortable with him now is a good sign, Merlin thought. I think her mind and her worldview have been . . . stretched in ways she still hasn’t recognized yet. I sure as hellhope so, anyway.

    “Context is certainly critical in understanding what’s actually been said, Sister,” Maikel agreed. “And I suspect Saint Kohdy had a . . . unique perspective, to put it mildly.”

    “I think we could all agree with that,” Nahrmahn said. “Actually, I found some of what he said even more interesting because of what it implies about the way in which the colonists’ memories were reprogrammed.”

    “What do you mean?” Cayleb’s eyes narrowed intently.

    “Well, from the English portions of his diary, it was obvious that at least some of his memories were . . . rearranged a second time when he became a seijin. The references to his waking up in ‘the sacred sickbay’ and the lack of clarity of his earlier memories made that pretty clear. At first, we assumed they were unclear because they were newmemories, like the ones Bédard implanted in all the colonists. But after a close reading and analysis, Owl and I came to the conclusion that that’s not really what happened. Instead of new, fabricated memories, it appears the memories we thought Bédard had completely eradicated hadn’t actually been destroyed. There are some passages which appear to contain references to at least partial memories of Old Earth. I suspect —” Nahrmahn looked at Sandaria again “— that those references are one reason the Sisters interpreted his later comments to indicate that the colonists’ souls had been somewhere else before they awakened here on Safehold. They describe a world very, very different from Safehold, at any rate. For example, there’s the one on page ninety which certainly seems to be a memory of a video call. He never actually calls it a communicator or a com — he uses the term keitai, which is apparently the word the Order of Chihiro used when it issued coms to the newly created seijins— but Owl and I agree that has to be what he was talking about. His memory simply wasn’t clear enough to describe it fully.”

    “I remember the passage you’re talking about,” Sandaria said. “You mean the one where he’s writing about his wife’s ghost, don’t you?”

    “Exactly.” Nahrmahn nodded. “From the way he describes seeing her ‘as if in a mirror that lived and spoke’ it’s obvious he wasn’t speaking to her face-to-face, and the only thing we could think of to explain it was a videoconference of some sort. We also checked the original passenger manifests, and we found Cody Cortazar and his wife Sandra listed as colonists in the Zion Enclave. According to Shan-wei’s documentation, however, Sandra was killed less than three years after the colonists were awakened.”

    “Killed? How?” Nimue’s hologram asked.

    “By a slash lizard, but Kohdy apparently didn’t remember any of the details of her death. In fact, there are several places where he comments on gaps in his own memories of Safehold, and he had no personal memory of the events immediately surrounding the Alexandria strike.”

    “Do you think those memories were deliberately suppressed?” Domynyk Staynair asked.

    “No.” Nahrmahn shrugged. “I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t see any reason for them to have done it on purpose. I think — and Owl agrees — that it was probably an unintended side effect of their effort to selectively undo some of the memory suppression they’d done when they turned him into an Adam.”

    “I noticed his early references to how readily he learned to control the ‘hikousen’they provided him with,” Merlin said, “but I don’t recall any place where he actually called it an ‘air car.’”

    Nahrmahn snorted, since Merlin — like Nynian Rychtyr (or any PICA) — had perfect recall.

    “You don’t recall it because he didn’t do it,” the plump little Emeraldian said. “He always referred to it as either a hikousenor simply ‘my vessel.’ You’re right about how quickly he learned to handle it, though, and the same was true of a lot of the small high-tech items the ‘Archangels’ supplied to him. The med kit, the com, the low-light vision gear, and quite a few others, for example. It looks to us as if the command crew decided it would be simpler and faster — and probably more impressively ‘miraculous’ — for their seijinsto simply ‘have’ whatever skills they needed without having to be taught. There could have been several ways to go about that — all the Adams and Eves still had their NEAT implants — but it looks like the one they opted for was to go back into their seijincandidates’ memories and . . . reactivate those skills without any conscious recollection of where they came from or how they’d first been acquired.”

    “Well that was arrogant of them,” Nimue murmured. All eyes turned to her, and she shrugged and looked across the table at Merlin. “Remember what Aunt Aeronwen said about disturbing deliberately suppressed memories?”

    Merlin frowned for a moment, then nodded.

    “You mean when she and Dad got into that knockdown, drag-out fight over the morality of suppressing traumatic memories?”

    “Yes.” Nimue returned her attention to the others. “Aunt Aeronwen was my — our, I suppose” her lips quirked a smile “— father’s older sister. She was a psychiatrist, and like a lot of psychiatrists, most of her practice dealt with patients suffering from post-traumatic shock and the crushing depressive effect of how badly the war was going. The technology Operation Ark used to suppress the colonists’ memories of Old Earth was basically an application of therapies available to practicing psychiatrists, and I remember Aunt Aeronwen was very adamant that the proper noun was ‘suppress,’ not ‘ erase’ when she and Dad got into their fight. Dad thought it was immoral to steal someone’s memories, even if they’d asked you to do it. Aunt Aeronwen thought he was full of crap, but in the course of the . . . discussion, she pointed out that it was impossible to truly erase a memory. All she could do was to suppress it and, in particularly serious cases, supplantit with a different, less traumatic memory.

    “She was willing to concede that the supplanting was liable to abuse, but she was adamant that the suppression itself was entirely moral if the clinician thought it would be the most effective way to deal with the trauma and the patient agreed after a thorough explanation of the procedure. And she also pointed out that the original memory was always in there somewhere. A therapist could recall it if there was some reason to do that later, so you could hardly call it ‘stealing,’ in her opinion. For that matter, it was standard practice for most psychiatrists to make a complete personality record that could be permanently stored and recalled at need as easily as uploading memories of a PICA’s experiences to its organic original.

    “What I’m thinking about right now, though, was that she pointed out that one reason for supplanting suppressed memories with manufactured ones was to prevent the patient from probing at a ‘blank spot’ in her recollections. And the reason for doing thatwas that if she poked at it too long and hard it was entirely possible for her to undo the original suppressing. Aunt Aeronwen would’ve been as horrified as Shan-wei and the Commodore over what Langhorne and Bédard did to the colonists, but if she’dbeen part of the command crew that signed off on it, she never would’ve gone in and poked those suppressed memories hard enough to bring them to the surface. Not unless she intended to restore the patient’s original memories in their entirety, at any rate.”

    “I remember the conversation,” Merlin said after a moment, eyes focused on something only he and Nimue could see, and smiled faintly. “Too bad Aunt Aeronwen wasn’tpart of the command crew; she’d’ve put a knife in Langhorne’s ribs the instant he came up with his brainstorm! But I take your point.”

    His opened his eyes fully and refocused on the present.

    “What Nimue’s getting at is that if they started reactivating selected memories — or, at least, the memories of selected skills — they ran the risk of turning othermemories back on, as well. And if they did, then ‘ SeijinKohdy’ may very well not have been the only seijinwhose diary contained references to things no Adam or Eve was supposed to remember.”

    “That might explain why Owl and I couldn’t find a single original copy of a diary or journal written by a seijinin any of the library catalogs we were able to check,” Nahrmahn said thoughtfully. “If the Church — or the command crew’s survivors, at any rate — realized the seijinswere having unexplained flashes of ‘false memory,’ censoring them after the fact would make a lot of sense.”

    “And God only knows what mucking around in all those implanted and suppressed ones might’ve done,” Nimue said, nodding slowly. “Especially to memories of actual events that occurred relatively soon after the colonists woke up here on Safehold. That could very well be why he didn’t remember the details of his wife’s death.”

    “If suppressed memories aren’t genuinely erased forever, why couldn’t Shan-wei bring back Jeremiah Knowles pre-Safehold memories?” Rahzhyr Mahklyn asked.

    “She didn’t have access to the stored memories — assuming Bédard ever bothered to make one,” Nimue pointed out before Merlin could speak. “And from the records the Commodore left, I don’t think they had a trained psychiatrist among the conspirators.”

    “That would’ve been critical to the problem?”

    “Fairly critical, yes,” Merlin said. “Without the proper equipment, or at least a trained psychiatrist to spend yearsworking with regressive hypnosis, you’d get a hodgepodge of new, artificial memories and the old, genuine ones with no way to differentiate between them. It would be the equivalent of inducing an especially nasty disassociative memory disorder in the patient. From Khody’s journal, it seems pretty clear he experienced at least a mild version of that despite the ‘archangels’ having had someone at least capable of turning the memories and skills they wanted back on again. That’s one of the reasons Nimue said it was a damned arrogant thing for them to have done.”

    “This is all very interesting,” Sharleyan said, “but is it really relevant to the contents of his diary?”

    “In a way,” Nahrmahn said. “You see, we found him in the original passenger lists, along with a description of what he did before Operation Ark. It seems that before he became SeijinKohdy, and before he became a simple Adam named Cody Cortazar, he was Sergeant MajorCody Cortazar, Terran Federation Marine Corps, and he’d spent the better part of fifteen years as an unarmed and close combat instructor. He’d been first runner-up in the Fleet moarte subitacompetition twice and a championship fencer.” He smiled crookedly as Nimue and Merlin both sat up straight, eyebrows rising in unison. “I think they might have been after more than his ability to fly an air car when they started poking around in Sergeant Major Cortazar’s ‘lost’ memories.”

    “I believe you could safely assume that was the case,” Merlin said dryly.

    “That’s what we thought, too.” Nahrmahn nodded. “But one thing we’re very sure of from having read the Spanish portions of his diary is that no one meant for him to remember his native language. It seems to’ve come back to him gradually, and he comments on his decision to keep that a secret.”

    “Because he was already considering the possibility that the ‘Archangels’ had lied to him?” Rahzhyr Mahklyn asked.

    “No, it was more as if he was was afraid this strange, unnatural language might have been somehow implanted in his mind by Shan-wei and the Fallen. Or, at least, that his fellow seijinsand the Archangels would thinkthat was what had happened, at any rate.”

    “What about the ‘demons’?” Sharleyan asked, her expression intent. “Where did theycome from?”

    “ SeijinKohdy’s diary puts a rather different face on the histories of the War Against the Fallen,” Nahrmahn told her. “You can see the same basic events in both accounts, but he fills in a lot of background that’s quite different from the ones in the Writor The Testimonies.

 

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    “For one thing, there were a lot more of the ‘Fallen’ than the Writ suggests. According to Kohdy, they weren’t so much a faction of the command crew as they were the Navy and Marine personnel who’d served as the planetary police force under Commodore Pei once their warships had been discarded. He specifically refers to them as ‘the Angels who looked to Kau-yung before his Fall,’ at least. We can’t tell how many of them there were, but Owl and I both believe there were more than the Writ ever admitted.

    “For another thing, they had more technological resources than we thought they had. There are all those references to ‘servitors’ in the Writ and The Testimonies, but it wasn’t until we started reading the diary that we realized the Fallen were actually building additional ‘servitors’ for much of the war. Obviously, that meant they’d possessed a deeper manufacturing base than we’d assumed; one they must’ve spent some time hiding away in the mountains, a lot like the Commodore and Shan-wei hid Nimue’s Cave.”

    “Why didn’t the Commodore mention that in my — our — briefing?” Nimue asked.

    “Probably because he didn’t know about it,” Nahrmahn said. “The Writ implies that the War Against the Fallen started immediately after the Alexandria strike — that the Fallen were found out by Schueler and Chihiro at the same time Kau-yung killed Langhorne and the others. In other words, the War Against the Fallen was essentially a seamless continuation of a conflict that began with the destruction of Alexandria. But according to Kohdy, it didn’t begin for at least two years after Armageddon Reef.”

    “The Sisters have always known that.” Sandaria’s eyes were intent, her expression deeply interested. “Saint Kohdy told us that much before he shifted to Español.”

    “Yes, he did.” Nahrmahn nodded. “But according to the ‘demon’ who kicked Kohdy’s arse without killing him, someone inside the command crew — someone Schueler and Chihiro trusted —diverted that capacity to the ‘Fallen’ from either the Zion Enclave or from Hamilcar itself only after the Alexandria strike.”

    Cayleb’s lips pursed in a silent whistle, and Paityr Wylsynn’s hologram leaned forward in his chair.

    “Did Kohdy have any idea who that someone was, Your Highness?”

    “No. In fact, it could have been almost anyone. It’s clear from his diary that one thing the Writ didn’t exaggerate was the the extent of Chihiro’s authority after Langhorne and Bédard died, and he’d obviously put an iron lock on any advanced technology. But by the time the War Against the Fallen flared up, the people opposed to him had access to enough capability to build those servitors of theirs and keep on fighting for over six years. That suggests some of them, at least, must’ve gotten their hands on industrial modules almost as capable as Commodore Pei and Shan-wei left for Nimue, and they could have come from only one source.

    “That came as a nasty surprise to Chihiro and his associates. In fact, sort of reading between the lines of Kohdy’s diary, it sounds as if the Fallen probably would’ve won if one of Chihiro’s supporters hadn’t stumbled across some sort of evidence that a storm was brewing before they were ready to strike. Kohdy —” Nahrmahn met Paityr’s eyes levelly “— was pretty sure it was Schueler.”

    Father Paityr’s jaw tightened. No one said anything else for several seconds, then Nahrmahn cleared his nonexistent throat.

    “Anyway, the references in the Writ— and in Kohdy’s diary — to ‘fastnesses in the Mountains of Desolation’ suggest the Fallen had been preparing for some time. Once the fighting began, however, any small industrial modules they’d managed to hide away in the mountains were enormously outclassed, because Hamilcar hadn’t yet been disposed of. According to the English portion of Kohdy’s diary, that was because Chihiro had been wise enough to be on the lookout for any of Shan-wei’s sympathizers who might’ve managed to hide among their unfallen fellows. According to the Spanish portion, however, Kohdy had started to suspect that Chihiro and his closest supporters had retained Hamilcar— although Kohdy didn’t know what Hamilcar truly was; he refers to it throughout as ‘the Dawn Star’ — out of his own ambition to replace and supplant Langhorne completely.”

    “Excuse me?” Paityr sat back, his expression perplexed.

    “We already knew from Aivah and Sandaria that the ‘demon’ who defeated Kohdy had suggested Langhorne might not’ve been the one who ordered the strike on Alexandria in the first place. There’s no way to tell whether that was true, and Kohdy’s diary doesn’t tell us everything that was passing through his own mind. He was clearly unwilling to record some of his thoughts and doubts even in Spanish, so it’s possible he’d actually found evidence one way or the other and simply not written it down. But from several of his comments, some oblique enough it took Owl’s analysis to tease them out of the underbrush, he’d come around — slowly and unwillingly — to the belief that Chihiro was . . . significantly modifying Langhorne’s original plan. That’s the reason he went to Schueler.”

    “What did he expect Schueler to do about it?” Paityr Wylsynn’s voice was calm, but there was something in his eyes, something almost desperate. Nahrmahn Baytz recognized that something and shook his head sadly.

    “He didn’t write that down, Paityr. All he said was ‘I must go to the one Archangel whose zeal has never faltered, who has always been in the forefront of the seijins fighting the Fallen. He has a will of iron, and I have served him faithfully from the beginning. He will not flinch before any test, and if I cannot trust him to tell me the truth, then I can trust no one.’”

    “And he returned home from that meeting dead.” This time Paityr’s voice was harsh and flat. “So much for being able to trust him!”

    “We don’t know what happened, Paityr,” Nimue said softly. He looked at her, his expression bleak, and she shrugged. “All we know is that he was killed. We don’t know how, or by whom. All we really know at this point, I think, is why. And the why is that he’d become a threat to Chihiro, whether he was right about Chihiro’s diversion from Langhorne’s original intentions or not.”

    “That much definitely seems to be true,” Nahrmahn agreed, drawing Paityr’s attention back to him. “Another thing the diary does is explain how the struggle lasted as long as it did. For example, the Writ’s always admitted that many of the Adams and Eves went over to the side of the Fallen. From what Kohdy says, a smaller percentage of them joined the rebellion actively than the Writ suggests, but that was still a significant number, and even more seem to have been willing to lend it their passive support. That’s one of the Writ’s explanations for why the war lasted so long . . . and also one of the justifications for the way the Inquisition’s authority was increased afterward.

    “In addition, the Fallen had apparently made hiding from Chihiro’s sensors a high priority, and from some of the actions Khody describes, they obviously had SNARC capability of their own. They must’ve had some way to block or jam — or evade, at least — the other side’s SNARCs, as well. They were very well hidden, and they only came out of hiding to launch guerrilla strikes against the ‘Archangels.’ Apparently the Adams and Eves who supported them hid them in the towns and villages between strikes, and their own industrial nodes were hellishly hard to find.

    “Chihiro’s people knew which members of the command crew had disappeared and gone over to the other side, but just finding them was extremely difficult, and that was largely where the seijins came in. They were the mortal interface between the Archangels and the rest of Safehold, equipped with special abilities and powers — like Kohdy’s sword and the night vision gear which let a seijin see in complete darkness — and they served the faithful communities in a lot of ways. They were forest rangers, militia organizers, teachers, explorers, search and rescue personnel, policemen . . . It was a long list, and they did their jobs so well that their service won them those communities’ trust and loyalty. It also put them in the best position to do their real job — spot the Fallen hiding among the villagers and townsfolk and form strike forces once a group of the Fallen or their sympathizers had been located.

    “That’s what Kohdy was doing when the ‘demon’ captured him and then let him go, and the experience shook him badly. The ‘demon’ in question was actually the mayor of the town in which he lived, and he had Kohdy dead to rights. More than that, Kohdy had known him for over two years. They’d been friends, and when his friend told him he was on the wrong side and provided evidence to support the allegation, it shook Kohdy’s faith. Badly.”

    “Badly enough to send him to Schueler for an answer or reassurance,” Merlin murmured.

    “Exactly.” Nahrmahn nodded heavily. “There’s a lot more detail in here than I’ve summarized. I wish he’d been a little more specific about some of the evidence that convinced him his friend the mayor might have told him the truth, but that’s the basic thrust of it. Owl’s translated the entire Spanish section into English, and we’ve got hard copies of it for those poor souls among us who can’t read the electronic version directly.”

    Merlin surprised himself with a chuckle as Nahrmahn elevated his nose with an audible sniff, and the atmosphere around the table lightened perceptibly. Then Nahrmahn looked directly at Sandaria.

    “I think you should read it,” he said quietly, almost gently. “Kohdy never knew the full truth, but this is the diary of a good man, someone who truly believed in what he was doing and only wanted to help other people. You might see some of your own journey in his, and I think you owe it to him, as well as to yourself, to fully meet the man behind the stories.”

    Sandaria looked back at him for a moment, then inhaled deeply.

    “I think you’re right, Your Highness,” she said, equally quietly.