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disk on his fist, he tried flipping it with his thumb, as if it were a coin. Instead, it clattered to the floor and
rolled across it on its edge. When he sat up to retrieve it, he felt a not unpleasant wave of dizziness. He
plucked the disk from the floor. The mystery it represented gnawed at his peace of mind, like the wine
gnawed at his equilibrium. He wondered how many minds throughout history had been unbalanced by
drinking the stuff.
When he thought of history, he thought of the archives. And he thought of a woman he had seen several
months before on the promenade. He had learned she was a high-ranking archivist and she lived on this
Enclave level. He couldn't be sure, but he thought her name was Baptist or something.
Kane unsuccessfully swallowed a belch and eyed the disk, held between thumb and forefinger.
Yeah, Baptist or something.
Chapter Eight
Brigid Baptiste stepped out of the tiny shower stall and used a towel to dry her mounds of red-gold hair.
There was nothing she could do to keep it from reverting to its naturally curly state. Wearing it pinned up
all day tended to give her a headache, and once a co-worker had suggested she cut it short.
She had pretended to consider the notion, while privately scoffing at the unimaginative suggestion. Her
hair, as thick and as heavy as it might be, was her only legacy from her mother.
Rather than don the bodysuit with the small rainbow-striped insignia of the Historical Division on its
breast, she walked naked into her private cubicle adjoining the bedroom. The cubicle had once been a
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closet, but she had converted it into a crowded, miniature version of her work area in the division. There
was just enough space in the small box of a room for her desk, desktop display and a chair.
The computer was a cast-off DDC model, one that had been remanufactured several times. The older the
DDCs became, the less able they were to sustain their workloads. Brigid had picked this one up out of a
trash hatch and spent weeks repairing it.
Technically what she'd done was illegal, but archivists were allowed a certain leeway in the pursuit of
their professions. Besides, she was fairly certain the machine had been planted deliberately by a
Preservationist for her to find and salvage.
She sat down at the machine, turned it on and put on her badge of office, a pair of wire-framed,
rectangular-lensed spectacles. Unlike many archivists, the eyeglasses were not of historical importance to
her, but were a necessity. Years of inputting predark data and documents, reading screens and staring at
columns of tiny type had resulted in a minor vision problem.
Ville manufacturing hadn't gotten around to mass-producing contact lenses, and she doubted they ever
would. The barons frowned on them as expressions of human vanity, and therefore considered them
superfluous.
While the machine ticked through its warm-up sequence, Brigid closed her eyes and regulated her
breathing, focusing her mind on the documents she had seen that day.
Almost everyone who worked in one of the divisions kept secrets, whether they were infractions of the
law, unrealized ambitions or deviant sexual predilections. Brigid Baptiste's secret was more arcane than
petty crimes or manipulating the system for personal aggrandizement.
Her secret was the ability to produce eidetic images. Centuries ago, it had been called a photographic
memory. She could, after viewing an object or scanning a document, retain exceptionally vivid and
detailed visual memories.
When she was growing up, she feared she was a psi-mutie, but she later learned that the ability was
relatively common among children and usually disappeared by adolescence. It was supposedly very rare
among adults.
Brigid was one of the exceptions, and she often suspected her eidetic memory was the primary reason she
had been covertly contacted by the Preservationists. But there was no way they could have known of her
ability, except through information provided by her mother. Brigid hadn't seen her in thirteen years, yet
she found comforting the possibility that her mother was somehow associated with the Preservationists.
Now twenty-seven, Brigid had trained for ten years to be an archivist, and for the past six had worked as
one. Despite the common misconception, archivists were not bookish, bespectacled pedants. They were
primarily data-entry techs, albeit ones with high-security clearances. Midgrade senior archivists like
herself were editors.
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A vast amount of predark historical information had survived the nukecaust, particularly documents
stored in underground vaults. Tons of it, in fact, everything from novels to encyclopedias, to magazines
printed on coated stock that survived just about anything. Much more data was digitized, stored on
computer diskettes, usually government documents.
Even though she was a fairly senior archivist, she wasn't among the highest. Those in the upper echelons,
holding "X" clearances, were responsible for viewing, editing or suppressing the most-sensitive material.
Still, she had glimpsed enough to know there were bits and bytes of information that were still classified,
even all this time after the nuking.
Her primary duty wasn't to record predark history, but to revise, rewrite and often times completely
disguise it. The political causes leading to the nukecaust were well-known. They were major parts of the
dogma, the doctrine, the articles of faith, and they had to be accurately recorded for posterity.
Scheming, wicked Russkies had detonated a nuclear warhead in the basement of their embassy in
Washington, D.C., even while they negotiated for peace. American retaliation had been swift and total.
The world came very close to transforming into a smoldering, lifeless cinder spinning darkly in space.
People were responsible. Russians, Americans, Asians. People had put irresponsible individuals into
positions of responsibility, so ergo, the responsibility for the nukecaust was the responsibility of people.
Humanity as a whole.
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