Free A Mighty Fortress by David Weber Page B

The “Adams” and “Eves” who’d written those testimonies had told the absolute truth, as far as they knew it. Of course, they hadn’t known their memories had been altered during their long cryonic journey (she still had trouble understanding how that bit had worked) from a doomed planet called Earth to their new home. They hadn’t known the “Archangels” who’d appeared to them in human form as God’s messengers and deputies had actually been members of the colonizing expedition’s command crew.
    And they hadn’t known the “Archangel Langhorne” and the “Archangel Bédard” had deliberately and cold- bloodedly murdered Dr. Pei Shan- wei and everyone else who’d disagreed with Langhorne’s plan to lock Safehold into a pre- technical civilization forever.
    So it wasn’t a bit surprising that their totally accurate accounts of what they had seen and experienced, thought and felt, after awakening here on Safehold should be so damnably consistent and convincing. Worse, there were literally millions of them . . . and not one of them disputed the Church’s official version.
    Well, maybe one of them did, she reminded herself, thinking of the journal of Saint Zherneau. It wasn’t part of the official Testimonies, and there was no question in her mind what the Inquisition would do, if it should ever discover that journal’s existence. But Saint Zherneau—Jeremiah Knowles—had also been an Adam, and his version of events didn’t agree with the Writ, The Testimonies, or Mother Church herself. Of course, that was because he’d been part of Pei Shan- wei’s Alexandria Enclave. He’d known the truth about Safehold, about the genocidal Gbaba who had destroyed something called the Terran Federation and driven this last remnant of the human race into hiding. He’d known what was supposed to happen here on Safehold—known the mission planners had never intended for all memory of the Gbaba to be lost. That they’d recognized that sooner or later mankind and the Gbaba would meet again, and that while it was essential for humanity to temporarily abandon technology while it hid among the trackless stars, it was just as essential for that technology to reemerge once more in the fullness of time.
    And it was for knowing that truth—for refusing to abandon that truth—that Pei Shan- wei and every other living soul in the Alexandria Enclave had been slaughtered by Langhorne’s rakurai — the cataclysmic kinetic bombardment which had transformed Alexandria into the officially damned and accursed Armageddon Reef.
    But Knowles, his wife, and his brother- in- law and sister- in- law had survived, hidden away in a tiny colony settlement called Tellesberg which would one day become the capital of the Kingdom of Charis. They’d written their own testimony, their history of what had really happened, and hidden it, hoping that when it was rediscovered, centuries later, someone would be willing to recognize the truth when he finally saw it.
    Someone had been, and the Brethren of Saint Zherneau had guarded that knowledge for over four hundred years, passing it on, nurturing it in secret, working by gradual degrees to undermine the crushing political and spiritual tyranny of the “Church” Langhorne and Bédard had created. There’d never been many of them, and they’d always had to be insanely cautious, yet they’d never given up.
    The fact that they’d believed Knowles’ journal when they read it still awed Sharleyan, in many ways. The intellectual and spiritual integrity it had taken to accept that lone voice of dissent was staggering, whenever she thought about it. She hoped she would have been able to do the same thing, yet deep inside, she doubted it. Put her faith in a single voice of protest, however passionate, rather than the massed testimony of eight million other Adams and Eves? Accept the word of someone who’d died almost seven hundred years before Sharleyan’s own birth, rather than the word of the