It is remotely possible. But, on the whole, I incline to the view that our holograph is authentic. Certainly it is a fact that someone within Ardua Hall supplied the crucial microdot to the two half-sister fugitives from Gilead whose journey we will examine next. They themselves claim that this personage was Aunt Lydia: why not take them at their word?
Unless, of course, the girls’ story of “Aunt Lydia” is itself a misdirection, intended to protect the identity of the real Mayday double agent in the case of any treachery stemming from within Mayday. There is always that option. In our profession, one mysterious box, when opened, so often conceals another.
This leads us to a pair of documents that are almost certainly authentic. These are labelled as transcriptions of witness testimonies from two young women who, from their own accounts, discovered through the Bloodlines Genealogical Archives kept by the Aunts that they were half-sisters. The speaker who identifies herself as “Agnes Jemima” purports to have grown up inside Gilead. The one styling herself as “Nicole” appears to have been some eight or nine years younger. In her testimony she describes how she learned from two Mayday agents that she was smuggled out of Gilead as an infant.
“Nicole” might seem too young, in years but also in experience, to have been assigned to the hazardous mission the two of them appear to have carried out so successfully, but she was no younger than many involved in resistance operations and spywork over the course of the centuries. Some historians have even argued that persons of that age are especially suitable for such escapades, as the young are idealistic, have an underdeveloped sense of their own mortality, and are afflicted with an exaggerated thirst for justice.
The mission described is thought to have been instrumental in initiating the final collapse of Gilead, since the material smuggled out by the younger sister—a microdot embedded in a scarified tattoo, which I must say is a novel method of information delivery (laughter)—revealed a great many discreditable personal secrets pertaining to various high-level officials. Especially noteworthy is a handful of plots devised by Commanders to eliminate other Commanders.
The release of this information touched off the so-called Ba’al Purge that thinned the ranks of the elite class, weakened the regime, and instigated a military putsch as well as a popular revolt. The civil strife and chaos that resulted enabled a campaign of sabotage coordinated by the Mayday Resistance and a series of successful attacks from within certain parts of the former United States, such as the Missouri hill country, the areas in and around Chicago and Detroit, Utah—resentful of the massacre of Mormons that had taken place there—the Republic of Texas, Alaska, and most parts of the West Coast. But that is another story—one that is still being pieced together by military historians.
* * *
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My focus will be on the witness testimonies themselves, recorded and transcribed most likely for the use of the Mayday Resistance movement. These documents were located in the library of the Innu University in Sheshatshiu, Labrador. No one had discovered them earlier—possibly because the file was not labelled clearly, being entitled “Annals of the Nellie J. Banks: Two Adventurers.” Anyone glancing at that group of signifiers would have thought this was an account of ancient liquor smuggling, the Nellie J. Banks having been a famous rum-running schooner of the early twentieth century.
It was not until Mia Smith, one of our graduate students in search of a thesis topic, opened the file that the true nature of its contents became apparent. When she passed the material along to me for evaluation, I was very excited by it, since first-hand narratives from Gilead are vanishingly rare—especially any concerning the lives of girls and women. It is hard for those deprived of literacy to leave such records.
But we historians have learned to interrogate our own first assumptions. Was this double-bladed narrative a clever fake? A team of our graduate students set out to follow the route described by the supposed witnesses—first plotting their probable course on maps both terrestrial and marine, then travelling this route themselves in hopes of uncovering any extant clues. Maddeningly, the texts themselves are not dated. I trust that if you yourselves are ever involved in an escapade such as this, you will be more helpful to future historians and will include the month and year. (Laughter.)
After a number of dead ends and a rat-plagued night spent