Brigid stood up, automatically smoothing the green bodysuit with the rainbow-colored insignia of the Historical Division on the left breast. “That won’t be for a long time, Mom.”
Moira smiled again. “Time is a relative thing. Now, off with you.”
Brigid saw moisture glisten in the comers of her mother’s eyes. She turned quickly, averting her face, swiftly leaving the room. Brigid started after her, heart thudding in her chest in sudden alarm…but something blocked her way.
Sindri was blocking her movement with his walking stick. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he said in weary exasperation, “Again with the banalities. None of you are cooperating. I’m not interested in any of your past melodramatic moments.”
Brigid stopped, remembering how when she had returned home that day, over thirteen years ago, her mother was gone. No note, no message, only a framed photograph of her.
Brigid had made no inquiries. People vanished from the villes all the time, as if they had never existed. Asking about it only drew attention.
She looked down at Sindri. “You weren’t really specific, you know.”
“It’s difficult to be so with the unconscious,” Sindri retorted defensively. “I had hoped with your orderly mind, I could learn what I wanted without prompting.”
“What do you want?”
“Show me, Miss Brigid, those few things you wanted to know that weren’t meant to be known.”
Brigid felt the surge of memory, felt it stimulate one nerve after another, sliding up and around in her head….
She sat at her workstation in the Historical Division, inserted a computer disk into her machine and opened it up. The message flashing onto the monitor screen stunned her into momentary immobility. In that numbed moment, she read
Greetings, fellow scholar. We are the Preservationists. You have distinguished yourself as a seeker and collector of knowledge. Only those deemed most worthy of preserving the hidden history of humanity are selected to join us. We will contact you again very soon.
Then the message faded from the screen, as if it had a preset time-limit program. She remembered how the message had terrified her, yet enthralled her at the same time. Weeks passed before she was contacted a second time, and that message was just as brief, promising to contact her again in the near future. In the weeks that followed, more messages appeared on her screen.
She slowly understood that the Preservationists had intentionally sought her out. Archivists like herself, the Preservationists were scattered throughout the villes, devoted to preserving not just past knowledge, but to piecing together the unrevised history of not only the predark, but also the postholocaust world.
One morning, she found an unfamiliar disk in her work area, and when she opened it, the message said simply “Read only in private.”
Shortly thereafter, she had found, retrieved and repaired a cast-off DDC. She slid in the disk and read the data it contained. It contained the journal of a woman named Dr. Mildred Wyeth, a specialist in cryogenics who had entered a hospital in late 2000 for minor surgery. An allergic reaction to the anesthetic left her in a coma, so to save her life, the predark white-coats had her cryonically frozen.
She was revived over a century later and she joined a band of warrior survivalists led by Ryan Cawdor. Though the journal contained recollections of adventures and wanderings, it dealt in the main with Dr. Wy-eth’s observations, speculations and theories about the environmental conditions of postnukecaust America.
She also delved deeply into the Totality Concept and her fears and suspicions that the minds behind it were somehow, some way, directly responsible for the nuke-caust and the horrors of the Deathlands.
Brigid hadn’t known how much of the Wyeth Codex to believe or disbelieve, but she was never the same again. Thus began her secret association with the Preservationists.
“The light of understanding begins to pierce my benighted brain,” drawled Sindri with a grin, leaning an elbow on her computer console. “Your assignment was to memorize any documents at variance with ville doctrine, put them in cogent form and pass them on. SeditionI like that. Move ahead now, Miss Brigid. Show me more.”
A flow of memories swept her up and along. She sat at her machine, tapping the keys. She had just come from the shower and sat at it naked. She began entering the data she had glimpsed on a Department of Defense document, bearing the date of April 30, 1994. Since she had merely glanced at it, no one would suspect her memory retained almost every word and punctuation mark of the document entitled “Possible Origin of Magistrate DivisionSource DoD Document, Dated 4/30/94.”