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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 spe-cific, 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
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James Axler - Parallax Red 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 Preserva-tionists. You have
distinguished yourself as a seeker and collector of knowledge. Only those
deemed most worthy of preserving the hidden his-tory 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
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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 re-paired 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 cryo-genics who had entered a hospital in late
2000 for mi-nor 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
adven-tures 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 Pres-ervationists.
"The light of understanding begins to pierce my be-nighted brain," drawled
Sindri with
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James Axler - Parallax Red a grin, leaning an elbow on her computer console.
"Your assignment was to memorize any documents at variance with ville
doc-trine, put them in cogent form and pass them on. Se-dition I 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 Division Source: 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. She tried to keep her
mind empty, visualizing nothing but the rest of the docu-ment
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 fur-ther up
the line."
Gray mist enfolded her bedroom, swallowing up her, Kane and her computer. When
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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 centu-ries angels, 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 junc-ture. 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 frac-tion of a microsecond, she
glimpsed a long, pale head and a high, hairless cranium. Then a fog seemed to
whirl inside the
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James Axler - Parallax Red 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 for-gotten
.
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 shad-ows swam mistily around her. Figures scuttled to, and
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