o-o-o Safehold and all within belongs to the Weber of David. o-o-o
I was in heaven. We were sailing the briny deep, and it was so fun! The crew thought I was completely cracked, but that was better than them thinking I was on the take with their wages.I thought I had never been on a ship like Krakenbait before, but that I had been on the ocean. It was in trying to piece together how that worked that I made a breakthrough.
I knew my name. I knew my wife's name. I knew that, whatever Father Broun thought, I had never heard of the Church of God Awaiting before I woke up in a cave in the Mountains of Light. I knew that I was from Earth, not Safehold. The breakthrough came when I had spent some time sitting on the bowsprit, enjoying the feeling of the ship crashing through the waves. Walking back to my poky little cabin, I felt shivery and cold, and a word came to mind."Cryonics."A passing sailor looked at me oddly, then dismissed me and went on about his work. I holed up in my cabin, changed out of my wet gear, and thought on that word.
I - Cal - had known that one day I would die; and I didn't want to die. I wanted to see everything. I wanted to know how history came out; and not believing in re-incarnation or the soul, if I was to make it to the far future, make it to the stars, I had to do it physically.
It was like a life insurance policy, except the beneficiary was...myself. I had signed up to be frozen when I was on the point of death, or had just died. Apparently, from my physical appearance in my late twenties, that had come a lot sooner than I had from that key realisation, so much had name was Cal - short for Calvin, yes like the cartoon boy. That's why I always shortened it; I didn't like the association with either a cartoon strip or a Protestant theologian. That disappointed my parents a bit, but what can you do?
I was an adoptive citizen of London, greatest city on Earth, though I had always retained a fondness for Sheffield where I was raised.
I had gone through usual childish phases and teenage misadventures, but always done alright in school. It had taken me years to work out what to do with my life; fortunately my degree in Computer Science had been appropriate. I had worked on the interface between programmers and management, doing enough coding to count as a developer while mostly translating each party's needs into language the other could understand; then started teaching other people to do the in my degree I had met Miranda; she was younger than me, but better established. London born and bred, she'd been in work right from age 16. It was a loss to academia, she was so sharp she could cut you in half and worked all hours. I had befriended her as a dutiful bit of networking to help me find a job, then gradually drifted closer and closer. She had proposed shortly before we moved in together; even her one concession to propriety was untraditional.I had never persuaded her to sign up for cryonics; I think she was happy with one life, she didn't feel a need to keep her body around in hopes of coming back one day.
We hadn't managed to have children, though we had been trying. Before I died I had banked some sperm so it could be used in fertility treatment - IVF. I wondered if she had gone ahead and had children after I died; if she had ever re-married? There was no way to know, but I thought she would have had my child, then eventually found someone new. Living alone had never suited her well. I hoped she had been happy.I spent several days just remembering things about 'Randa. I had loved her to bits, and I was coming to terms with the fact that whatever had happened she was almost certainly long dead. I couldn't see the technology having developed to get to another world in less than several centuries, and people had clearly been on Safehold for hundreds of years more. The pangs of loss kept hitting me sporadically over days, but I guess I had already suspected that she was lost, from the moment I first remembered her.
I got back to business; my professional skills were irrelevant on this world, but I almost certainly had knowledge that I could use. I had lived in an industrial society, had some scientific training, read some history; I had done three years of military training at university. I should be able to leverage some combination of that into a living, right?It was bittersweet, spending my spare time reminiscing about what I had lost, but that was easier than trying to figure out a whole world.
On what I had seen so far, there was a big population. A whole lot of people, enough to easily support mid-Victorian technology - steam, railways and telegraphs. And yet thanks to the proscriptions of bloody Jwo-Jeng, what we had instead was a bastardised mixture of semaphore with galleys, very early cannon, and canals...with a world government in the form of the Church of God Awaiting; a world government that had real teeth, with pre-prepared Fifth Columnists in every nation amongst the truly faithful, a country of its own in the Temple Lands, and a traditional power to do everything up to and including choose monarchs elsewhere.
This was a Church with power the most megalomaniac Popes could only dream of; and thinking of that made me realise something:
It was only a matter of time before Safehold saw its own Reformation. If the experience of Europe was anything to go by, the key difference between successful reformers and crushed heretics was whether or not they had a secure base. Lutherans had Saxony from the very earliest days, and that let them avoid the fate of the Hussites or the Cathars.
I was never a religious man; I wouldn't go so far as to say I had hated religion, but the religion of my life was very mild and consensual. The Church of England, of old vicars who ran the village fete, of fundraisers to repair the church roof, and occasional blasts against governments which cut benefits. The Church of God Awaiting was a very different beast, not least because it was clearly based on a lie. I knew for a fact that I had been born on another world, thus proving their Creation myth false just by existing. I could not be a friend of the Church of God Awaiting, not in good conscience. And I could never tell the truth about myself and have a hope of the Church letting me survive.
Well then, to misquote Wilde's last words about wallpaper - either the Church would go or I would.
I had to be realistic though - there were too many true believers. The Church wouldn't be gone short of eradicating all its followers. So I wasn't trying to destroy it completely, because I didn't want to turn into a genocide.
So my real goal was to break the Church's social dominance - a Safehold with secular governments would be favourite. How did I get from here to there, though?
I could see two basic options: the direct route, and the...less direct...route. The less direct was scientific - do whatever I could to foster free inquiry and research, and hope that as that developed some of the Church's lies would come to light. Little things like realising it wasn't a curse from Pasquale that made sailors who failed to eat their vegetables get scurvy, simply a defect in human DNA; that other "curses" were micro-organisms just doing their thing; that sort of business.
The second option was to foster schism and heresy within the Church. A Church in crisis, a Church split in two or more parts, would lack moral authority and the ability to enforce the Proscriptions. Secular rulers would take their sides based on faith, and personal advantage, and local rivalries. It would probably get bloody, it was highly risky for me personally - but it would show quicker results. I was tempted towards the second option, just because it might show real, tangible benefits in my lifetime.
It was hard to keep up with my work as a purser while plotting how to turn the world upside down, but I soon realised that I didn't have enough information. Any more would have to wait for arrival in Charis. It wouldn't be many more days, then I could start on the mission of the rest of my life.
o-o-o Comments, questions, rotten tomatoes? o-o-o