David Weber - How firm a foundation

Which was where the concept for the “accumulator” had come from.

Waterwheels, as Howsmyn had pointed out in his patent and vetting applications, were inherently inefficient in several ways. The most obvious, of course, was that there wasn’t always a handy waterfall where you wanted one. Holding ponds could be built, just as he’d done here at Delthak, but there were limits on the head of pressure one could build up using ponds, and water flows could fluctuate at the most inconvenient times. So it had occurred to him that if he could accumulate enough water, it might be possible to build his own waterfall, one that was located where he needed it and didn’t fluctuate unpredictably. And if he was going to do that, he might as well come up with a more efficient design to use that artificial waterfall’s power, as well.

In many ways, vetting the application in Wylsynn’s role as Intendant had been simple and straightforward. Nothing in the Proscriptions of Jwo-jeng forbade any of Howsmyn’s proposals. They all fell within the Archangel’s trinity of acceptable power: wind, water, and muscle. True, nothing in the Writ seemed ever to have contemplated something on the scale Howsmyn had in mind, but that was scarcely a valid reason to deny him an attestation of approval. And wearing his hat as the Director of Patents, rather than his priest’s cap, Wylsynn had been more than pleased to grant Howsmyn the patent he’d requested.

And tomorrow morning I’ll inspect one of them with my own eyes, he reflected now. I hope I don’t fall into it!

His lips twitched in an almost-smile. He was quite a good swimmer, yet the thought of just how much water a structure the size of the accumulator might hold was daunting. He’d seen the numbers-Dr. Mahklyn at the Royal College had calculated them for him-but they’d been only figures on a piece of paper then. Now he was looking at the reality of a “cistern” fifty feet tall and thirty-five feet on a side, all raised an additional thirty feet into the air. According to Mahklyn, it held close to half a million gallons of water. That was a number Wylsynn couldn’t even have thought of before the introduction of the Arabic numerals which were themselves barely five years old. Yet all that water, and all the immense pressure it generated, was concentrated on a single pipe at the bottom of the accumulator-a single pipe almost wide enough for a man-well, a tall boy, at least-to stand in that delivered the accumulator’s outflow not to a waterwheel but to something Howsmyn had dubbed a “turbine.”

Another new innovation, Wylsynn thought, but still well within the Proscriptions. Jwo-jeng never said a wheel was the only way to generate water power, and we’ve been using windmills forever. Which is all one of his “turbines” really is, when all’s said; it’s just driven by water instead of wind.

Locating it inside the pipe, however, allowed the “turbine” to use the full force of all the water rushing through the pipe under all that pressure. Not only that, but the accumulator’s design meant the pressure reaching the turbine was constant. And while it took a half-dozen conventional waterwheels just to pump enough water to keep each accumulator supplied, the outflow from the turbine was routed back to the holding ponds supplying and driving the waterwheels, which allowed much of it to be recirculated and reused. Now if Howsmyn’s plans to pump water from the lake proved workable (as most of his plans seemed to do), his supply of water-and power-would be assured effectively year-round.

He’s got his canals completed now, too, the priest reflected. Now that he can barge iron ore and coal directly all the way from his mines up in the Hanth Mountains he can actually use all of that power. Archangels only know what that’s going to mean for his productivity!

It was a sobering thought, and the fresh increases in Delthak’s output were undoubtedly going to make Ehdwyrd Howsmyn even wealthier. More importantly, they were going to be crucial to the Empire of Charis’ ability to survive under the relentless onslaught of the Church of God Awaiting.

No, not the Church, Paityr, Wylsynn reminded himself yet again. It’s the Group of Four, that murderous bastard Clyntahn and the rest. They’re the ones trying to destroy Charis and anyone else who dares to challenge their perversion of everything Mother Church is supposed to stand for!

It was true. He knew it was true. And yet it was growing harder for him to make that separation as he watched everyone in the Church’s hierarchy meekly bend the knee to the Group of Four, accepting Clyntahn’s atrocities, his twisting of everything the Office of Inquisition was supposed to be and stand for. It was easy enough to understand the fear behind that acceptance. What had happened to his own father, his uncle, and their friends among the vicarate who’d dared to reject Clyntahn’s obscene version of Mother Church was a terrible warning of what would happen to anyone foolish enough to oppose him now.

Yet how had he ever come to hold the Grand Inquisitor’s office in the first place? How could Mother Church have been so blind, so foolish-so stupid and lost to her responsibility to God Himself-as to entrust Zhaspahr Clyntahn with that position? And where had the other vicars been when Clyntahn had Samyl and Hauwerd Wylsynn and the other members of their circle of reformers slaughtered? When he’d applied the Punishment of Schueler to vicars of Mother Church not for any error of doctrine, not any act of heresy, but for having the audacity to oppose him? None of the other vicars could have believed the Inquisition’s preposterous allegations against their Reformist fellows, yet not one voice had been raised in protest. Not one, when Langhorne himself had charged Mother Church’s priests to die for what they knew was true and right if that proved necessary.

He closed his eyes, listening to the shriek of the blast furnaces, feeling the disciplined energy and power pulsing around him, gathering itself to resist Clyntahn and the other men in far distant Zion who supported him, and felt the doubt gnawing at his certainty once again. Not at his faith in God. Nothing could ever touch that, he thought. But his faith in Mother Church. His faith in Mother Church’s fitness as the guardian of God’s plan and message to His children.

There were men fighting to resist the Group of Four’s corruption, yet they’d been forced to do it outside Mother Church-in despite of Mother Church-and in the process they were taking God’s message into other waters, subtly reshaping its direction and scope. Were they right to do that? Wylsynn’s own heart cried out to move in the same directions, to broaden the scope of God’s love in the same ways, but was he right to do that? Or had they all fallen prey to Shan-wei? Was the Mother of Deception using the Reformists’ own better natures, their own yearning to understand God, to lead them into opposition to God? Into believing God must be wise enough to think the same way they did rather than accepting that no mortal mind was great enough to grasp the mind of God? That it was not their job to lecture God but rather to hear His voice and obey it, whether or not it accorded with their own desires and prejudices? Their own limited understanding of all He saw and had ordained?

And how much of his own yearning to embrace that reshaped direction stemmed from his own searing anger? From the rage he couldn’t suppress, however hard he tried, when he thought about Clyntahn and the mockery he’d made of the Inquisition? From his fury at the vicars who’d stood idly by and watched it happen? Who even now acquiesced by their silence in every atrocity Clyntahn proclaimed in the name of his own twisted image of Mother Church, the Archangels, and God Himself?