by James Axler
Grant glanced toward Olivia, standing there with her back to him, head bowed, shoulders slumped by the weight of an inconsolable misery. He remembered how he had left her place a few minutes later and, unable to sleep, prowled the promenades of all four levels, seeking a way to escape his own grief. He had considered barging in on Kane, but then he would have been obliged to explain his presence at 300 a.m., and he simply didn't have the words.
At dawn, he and the squad made the Pit sweep. They found six pregnant women cowering in a cellar, and at Salvo's terse "Flashblast this slaghole," they opened up with Sin Eaters on full auto. Grant had kept his eyes closed when he fired, praying he didn't hit any of them but knowing he had.
Shuddering, Grant faced Sindri again. In a dead voice, he said, "I don't like it here."
Sindri hopped down from the window. "You and me both. Let's go someplace else."
Brigid winced as the brush caught in a snarl and pulled her scalp. "Ouch, Mom! Are you trying to snatch me bald or what?"
Moira Baptiste chuckled, patting the top of her daughter's head. "If you paid a little more attention to your appearance, brushing your hair wouldn't be like hacking through a jungle."
Brigid sighed in irritation. "I ought to just cut it all off. It's a pain putting it up every day before I go to training."
Moira ran the brush through her daughter's red-gold mane with long, even strokes. "You could, but I.think you'd regret it."
"Why? Having it pinned up for twelve hours gives me headaches. And besides" Brigid's words trailed off.
"Besides what?"
Quietly Brigid said, "It draws attention to me. Some of the men there give me funny looks. Not ha-ha funny, either."
The brush paused in midstroke. Tensely Moira asked, "Is Lakesh one of the men?"
Brigid was startled into laughing. Turning in her chair, she looked up into the slightly weathered beauty of her mother's face. Though her eyes were hazel, her hair was identical to Brigid's own, both in color and texture.
"Him? C'mon, Mom! He looks like he's eighty years old. Besides, he's the senior archivist. He hardly ever comes to the training sessions, except to give a lecture now and then."
The expression of relief on her mother's face was so pronounced that Brigid was mystified. "Why'd you ask about him?"
A smile creased Moira's lips, but it wasn't her characteristic smile, which lit up and transformed a pretty face into something heart-achingly beautiful. It was forced, stitched on.
"No reason." Gently she turned her daughter's head and began brushing again. Very softly she asked, "Is your talent serving you in your studies?"
Brigid knew what she meant. "Talent" was their private euphemism for her ability to produce eidetic images. The talent had first manifested itself when Brigid wasn't much older than an infant, and her mother had carefully coached her not to mention it to anyone.
Imitating her mother's quiet tone, she answered, "Yes."
No more was said. Her mother finished brushing her hair, then began pinning it up for her. "You know," she said casually, "you're really going to have to get into the habit of doing this yourself."
"Why?"
"You can't expect me to be your personal stylist forever." Moira's voice held a teasing lilt. "You'll rise up the ranks in your division and be on your own."
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."
She input steadily for over half an hour. She raised her arms above her head, arching her back to work out the kinks in her shoulders. S
he tried to keep her mind empty, visualizing nothing but the rest of the document
The bedroom door swung open, and her head swiv-eled toward it so quickly she felt a twinge of tendon pain. Immediately, almost instinctively, she swept her hand across the keyboard, hitting the Escape button, clearing the screen of its data.
She stared at a dark-haired, clean-shaved man in a long black overcoat. Though she couldn't see it, she almost felt the bore of his Sin Eater trained on her naked body.
Sindri waved his hand and walking stick dismissive-ly. "No, no, I don't need to see this. Mr. Kane retains quite vivid memories of your first meeting. Move further up the line."
Gray mist enfolded her bedroom, swallowing up her, Kane and her computer. When it cleared, she sat staring across Lakesh's desk in his small, sparsely furnished office. Grant, Domi and Kane were there, too, listening to the old man's reedy voice.
"They were called many things over many centuriesangels, demons, visitors, E.T.'s, saucer people, grays. Whatever they actually are, what they are called, even where they come from is unimportant at this juncture. The sinister thread linking all of humankind's darkest hours leads back to a nonhuman presence that has conspired to control us through political chaos, staged wars, famines, plagues and 'natural' disasters. It is a conspiracy that continues to this day, aided and abetted by willing human allies...."
"Good," whispered Sindri in exultation. "Good. Take a forward baby step, Miss Brigid. We're almost done."
She took the step and stood staring at a wall con-structed of glass panes. Behind it she saw a deeply recessed room, dimly lit by a red light strip.
A shape shifted in the ruddy gloom, and for a fraction of a microsecond, she glimpsed a long, pale head and a high, hairless cranium. Then a fog seemed to whirl inside the recessed chamber, blotting the face from view. Then the mist cleared and two eyes flamed out of the blood-hued murk. The eyes were frighten-ingly huge, tip-tilted like a cat's, completely black with no pupil or iris.
A thready nonvoice said, We are old. When your race was wild and bloody and young, we were already ancient. Your tribe has passed, and we are invincible. All of the achievements of man are dust they are forgotten .
We stand, we know, we are. We stalked above man ere we raised him from the ape. Long was the earth ours, and now we have reclaimed it. We shall still reign when man is reduced to the ape again. We stand, we know, we are.
Sindri tugged her away from the glass wall and the fathomless eyes. "Thank you, Miss Brigid," he said kindly. "This has been an ordeal for you. Now I can proceed. You may sleep now."
The memories dimmed and faded out of Brigid's mind like smoke wraiths, and she slipped gratefully into a warm sepia sea.
Chapter 20
Blackness not as deep as death acquired colors, muted and dim. Brigid felt her body again as she bobbed out of the sepia sea into the world of three dimensions and physicality.
As consciousness came slowly back, she was aware of mechanical sounds, electric motors whirring and humming. She tried to stir, but she was restrained by several hard and flat bindings pressing against her arms and legs. When she attempted to lift her head, she felt a tight pressure against her forehead.
She managed to open her eyes, forcing the lids apart a micromillimeter at a time. Objects, shapes and shadows swam mistily around her. Figures scuttled to, and fro across her limited range of vision. She heard a murmur of voices, metallic clinkings and clackings.
Though she couldn't turn her head, Brigid shifted her gaze to her right. A naked man lay flat on his back on a padded table only a few feet away. He seemed to be deeply asleep, unaware of the arrangement of canvas straps that stretched across his forehead, his chest, his arms and legs.
She squinted, trying to reason out why the long-limbed, hard-muscled man looked so familiar. Then she recognized the dark tousled hair and the profile and realized it was Kane. She had never seen him naked before, and somehow she felt a certain satisfaction in this. Her gaze traveled down his body. It stopped at his pelvis, and her eyes narrowed, then widened.
What appeared to be a bowl of black rubber rested upside down over his groin. A flexible hose extended from a sleeve socket in the center of the bowl and snaked up to a small, glass-walled box hanging from a metal armature. As she watched through blurred eyes, a short stream of milky fluid squirted from the end of the hose, splashing the transparent inner walls of the box.
A piping voice wafted from the shadows. "We've got a strong flow now. More than adequate volume."
A deeper voice responded, "Good. Disconnect him and prepare Grant."
The voice rang a responsive chord in Brigid, but the lethargy in her body and mind prevented her from attaching a name and face to it. Still, the sound of it sent cold chills over her flesh.
Twisting her head, she looked down at herself. She was as naked as Kane, restrained by the same arrangement of straps. The only difference was the position of her legs. They were widely spread, the ankles clamped tightly at the corners of the table. A length of hose lay coiled between them, its nether end attached to a machine mounted on a tripod. The hose had a bulbous, blunt tip.
A wave of fear flooded her and tore a cry from her lips. Sindri's face suddenly appeared at her left shoulder, his smile warm and comforting.
"Dearest Miss Brigid," he said quietly, "I should've taken extra measures with you. You drank the least amount of the wine, and I subjected you to more neocortex stimulation. Of course you would revive first. My apologies."
Brigid jerked against the restraints. In a high, aspirated half sob, she demanded, "What are you doing?"
"Proceeding, Miss Brigid. Elle, if you please..."
Harp strings thrummed and vibrated. Her eyelids fluttered. She struggled to keep them open, fought not to be soothed.
Sindri stroked the side of her face. "Sleep," he crooned. "Sleep."
Brigid's eyes closed, but when she felt a distant, probing pressure, she managed to wrench them open again. They filled with tears of terror and outrage when she saw Sindri very carefully manipulating the tip of the hose between her legs.
Brigid drew in a lungful of air, ready to expel it in a scream. But lulled by the harp song, she allowed herself to sink again into the warm sea of oblivion.
Chapter 21
Kane opened his mouth and tried to yawn, failed and closed it again. His head ached dully, as if he had clogged sinuses. He heard a faint rising-and-falling throb in his ears, and he thought it might be the crash of surf on a distant, rocky beach. But the sound was too steady, too overlaid with a pulsing, mechanical rhythm to be natural.
He felt something soft and yielding beneath his naked shoulders and backside. He shivered and opened his eyes. He lay on his back on a narrow bed, covered with a thin blanket. Staring upward at a blank, domed ceiling, he wondered with a degree of detachment why he felt so groggy. It was as if he had been asleep for a long time, but he didn't feel rested. His slumber had been a chaotic jumble of busy dreams.
Levering himself to a sitting position, he blinked at his surroundings. They didn't go away, so he knew he wasn't dreaming. There wasn't a great deal to see. The room was a small ellipse, like the inside of an eggshell balanced on the broad end. A single overhead light strip provided the illumination. He saw his environmental suit hanging from a hook beside a thin, dark rectangular line spanning half of the facing wall. A small square metal plate studded with two buttons was mounted beneath it.
On the opposite wall, he saw a round hatchway with irislike segments nestled within a thick metal frame.
Slowly Kane swung his legs over the side of the bed, his bare feet recoiling briefly from the cold, hard floor. He remembered sitting at Sindri's table with the dawning realization that the combination of wine and harp song was pushing him into the placid depths of sleep.
He stood up, and the floor heaved beneath him for a moment, then steadied. He took a careful forward step, noting the gravity seemed normal, as did the air. He flexed his leg muscles, lifting
and lowering himself on his heels, then he winced at the stinging, slight burning sensation in the vicinity of his groin.
Looking down at himself, Kane gently touched his genitals. His testicles were sore, almost as if they had been roughly squeezed, and his penis felt very sensitive. It was irritated, with reddened marks of chafing on it.
A gauzy scrap of a dream ghosted through his mind, but it was too insubstantial to grasp and it flitted away before he could examine it.
He probed at the knife wound on his ribs, but when his fingers didn't touch the film of liquid bandage, he uttered a wordless exclamation of surprise. The layer of artificial skin was gone, and of the slash, only a pink line remained, looking like an almost healed scratch. The shallow puncture wound on his right shoulder was merely a pink, irregularly shaped dot.
His knee showed the fading yellow blotch of an old bruise. He worked it back and forth, pleased but disturbed there was no corresponding pain or stiffness. As he had already suspected, the demonstration of the harp's powers had healed his injuries.
Running a hand over his jawline, he felt a bristly growth. He had shaved just yesterday morning, only an hour before climbing into the Cerberus jump chamber. The hair sprouting from his cheeks and chin felt like two days' worth of beard.
Kane didn't devote much thought to it. The longer he stood, the more he experienced hunger pains and a fierce thirst. Taking the environmental suit off the hook, he quickly slipped into it, zipping up the seals and pulling on the boots. He contemplated leaving off the gloves but decided not to risk losing them.
After he dressed, he paced around the small room, seeing no control buttons or knobs on the hatch frame. He yelled, "Hey!"
His voice echoed hollowly. There was no answer.
"Hey! Sindri!"
Again there was no response. For lack of anything else to do, he went to the rectangular shutter, placed his finger on the top button, turned his back, closed his eyes and pressed it. He immediately rested his finger on the second button, ready to push it if undiluted, blinding sunlight cascaded in. He heard the whir of tiny motors as the shutter lifted. What little change he could detect in the light level through his eyelids was minute, so he cautiously slitted them open.