The Archivist

By Barbara Brodman

Barbara Brodman began writing this book nearly a half century ago and abandoned it to some far corner of her heart and mind until a confluence of life experiences and advancements in science made it viable as a work of science fiction. Incorporated herein are decades of research and teaching in disciplines as diverse as literature, art, and almost every area of the social sciences. However, it was not a lifetime of teaching and research that motivated this book as much as a desire to leave behind a fictionalized memoir of a family lineage the author feared would die with her passing. It also pays homage to the fine art of storytelling that has all but disappeared from modern culture, and it encourages a closer evaluation of concepts of love and family born of free thinking, not of fear.
The novel spans some thousand years of human development, beginning at a time not too distant from our own. It begins when a group of scientists, faced with the possibility of impending extinction of the human species at human hands, decides to take action. After decades of discussion and research, they conclude that the only solution is to eradicate all males of the species and to design a blueprint for a female-comprised new world order that accords to nature the preeminent position it lost under male domination.
In this new world order, politics and religion are abandoned as basic institutions of society, and consensus rules. Knowledge of a world previous to the new world order is possessed by only one woman, the Archivist. It is she who is the most respected of women, though she wields no power outside of the world of books.
When she wanders too far outside the walls of the Great Library, to which she is bound from birth, things go awry, and the impossible occurs. Her quiet life of books and solitary research becomes a life of adventure and subterfuge, love and loss; until, once again, she must face choices made by the ancestors who created her world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781663249616

Book preview

ENORA

CHAPTER 1

If one looked very carefully on that evening of September 12, 2543, she would see, perched upon a hill overlooking the quaint town of Overlake, the darkening outline of an old and very dead maple tree. If she looked more carefully, the observer would see that the tree was not alone; that it appeared to be wrapped in the arms of a young woman. But, of course, given that she would view such a discovery as an intrusion on another’s privacy, the observer would turn away, willing the scene out of her mind and memory. It would never occur to her that the young woman whose moment of private communion with nature she had inadvertently violated was to become, in just a few hours, the most revered woman on Earth.

The young woman’s name is Enora Flynn, and in a few hours, at precisely midnight, she will lose everything she has known and been for the first twenty years of her life. Enora Flynn will disappear, and a new Archivist will be born.

In the training she received since childhood, they told her that her position as Archivist was based on care. It would lead her to an understanding of the interconnectedness of all things, they assured her; and it was that knowledge—not the forbidden knowledge through which she would come to that understanding—that she would, somehow, pass on to all alive today and to posterity. If truth be told, their admonitions sounded like a bunch of ducks quacking to the young trainee.

On this day, all she felt was an overwhelming desire to run away.

But she stayed, and, at midnight, after a short flight to the southeast, Enora was presiding over the grandest fireworks display the world had seen in fifty years. Liberty City, the largest and most advanced city on earth, presented this display to its citizens and to the thousands of visitors it now hosted in honor of their new Archivist.

It was but a fortnight ago that the previous, and much beloved, Archivist announced her retirement, thereby confirming that Enora was ready to succeed her. In so doing, she dashed any hopes that Enora might have had that this day would never come. By any standards, even her own, Enora had been a model student. It was obvious to her mentor that Enora had an exceptional love of reading and research. For five years now the aging Archivist had trained and observed the young woman who was to be her successor. In retrospect, though the girl had been quite wild and uncooperative at first, her job was made easy by the girl’s sharp wit and eventual acceptance of the life that awaited her.

Indeed, the young woman who stood on the balcony that day was a quite different one from the rebellious girl who presented herself at the Grand Library ready for battle against a system she perceived to have enslaved her against her will. This woman was quiet, contemplative, and nothing short of beautiful. She wore a refined yet somehow provocative flowing gown of soft gray and white silk. She wore no jewelry or accessories of any kind, as they would have detracted from the elegant simplicity of both her clothing and the occasion. She didn’t need them. Her flowing dark red hair was more than enough adornment.

From the ceremonial balcony of the world’s capital building, Enora stoically accepted the adoration of a global population of which the thousands of women gathered below her were representatives. To those who watched her with adoration she appeared to be fully focused on the transfixed crowd before her. None knew that her thoughts were elsewhere.

CHAPTER 2

Blessed by birth they called it.

It was the mantra that formed Enora’s earliest memories and took on various corporeal images throughout the first two decades of her life. As a young child those words were accepted unquestioningly as justification for a life of over-indulgence and loving care from a bevy of women who served as both mothers and teachers.

During those years, the teachings she received on a daily basis, often subliminally, meant little to her. She would regurgitate words of wisdom, and they would be transformed into the fulfilment of a desire—like a toy or a new dress or a playmate with whom to share her treasures and her time.

But most of the time, she preferred to be alone. Or, at least, away from human company.

There was a small attic under the eaves of the house in which she spent her formative years, accessible only by a three-foot-high wooden door. It was a space too small to accommodate adults, and it was here that she lived with her imaginary friend—her best friend—and traveled to places forbidden to one less blessed than her. Her imaginary friend was a small and highly intelligent mouse named, you guessed it, Mousey.

Together, they had books in their attic and an old travel trunk from way before her birth that was filled with the most magical of clothes and shoes and jewelry from times about which no mention was now possible. Those times were out of memory and forgotten forever. Except here.

Here she would don the magnificent garb that would miraculously transform her from the solitary child she was to the princess she would become, if only in her mind.

Reverently, she began the process of donning the magically metallic dress contained in the old trunk and the very high, spiked-heeled shoes that accompanied it. The dress itself was a shimmering, light blue affair, with tight fitting bodice and long sleeves. On Enora, it was nearly ankle-length; though on the adult woman who originally wore it, it would have reached only to mid-thigh, focusing attention not only on her striking legs but on the magnificent shoes made of the tiniest silver straps that appeared to serve mainly as a means of keeping their wearer from floating away to some ethereal world of the fey.

To complete the outfit, Enora donned a tiny hat of metallic silver fabric decorated with a tastefully flamboyant splash of gray and sky-blue feathers, below which was attached a short veil of the lightest gray blue. With her crown thus attached to her flowing red mane, Enora was transported to another world. (Though, in reality, she couldn’t move in her magical shoes without promptly, and in a very unprincess-like manner, falling flat on her face).

Thus, she would remain in the magical world of her imagination until she heard voices calling her back to reality.

After placing Mousey in charge of guarding their secret realm, she would creep from the attic to soon be discovered in some nearby room, dutifully engaged in doing, well, nothing.

At least until she received her first bicycle.

CHAPTER 3

They told her, over and over again, that the blessing bestowed on her by birth was that she would become the sole guardian of forbidden past knowledge and that she would create a memory of the times in which she lived. She would then pass that memory on to the blessed woman who would, one day, assume her place; or so they told her.

Blessed…blessed…blessed. She wasn’t sure what that word meant; but she knew that it had nothing to do with escapes into her attic fantasies nor with her actual escapes from the community from which she was forbidden to leave unaccompanied.

Imprisoning her mind was, of course, impossible, no matter how hard they tried. However, keeping her inside of a gilded cage proved equally impossible.

The small but very cozy house in which she and her two mothers lived was only one of a community of cottages surrounded by woods and fields that made up her home. It was secure, nurturing, and receptive to her every need. Everyone there loved her and endured her not uncommon breaches in polite behavior with equanimity.

She was a bit of a brat if truth be told. She was known to break milk bottles delivered to neighbors’ doors for no reason other than out of boredom. She threw rocks through neighbors’ windows for the same reason. And she once pushed her neighbors’ visiting niece out of a tree she had forced the girl to climb in one of the satiny dresses she always wore because Enora thought her to be too girlie.

Yes, she was a handful. But she always received the forgiveness due one so blessed.

It was within this context that she dared to seek out an escape route to the world outside her community. She had escaped her mothers’ gaze many times in the past, but only once had she gone beyond the few cottages within her sector of the community. She was told often that danger lurked outside her sector and that the most fearful of those dangers was the tall electric fence that surrounded the entire community and kept it safe from an otherwise dangerous and devastated world.

Her first escape took her to a neighboring sector where she immediately reached out to a group of girls her age and, quite naturally, assumed the privileged role of leadership that had always been hers at home. When the girls, who were unaware of the status she would one-day weald, turned on her, she sought a solution to her predicament in her world of fantasy (she lied, in other words).

I’m so sorry, she said. I’m acting weird because I am so upset that my grandmother just died.

Unfortunately, her ruse did not work. Instead, the girls mocked her false tragedy and threw her into a deep hole they had dug for just such a purpose. They then told her that the hole was a spiders’ nest and that she would soon come face to face with one of her worst fears. Her screams were so loud that her mothers heard it and came running. The sadistic girl pack was disciplined by their mothers, who were informed of Enora’s identity and were soundly chastised as less than perfect mothers (a piece of irony that was lost on no one but, perhaps, Enora herself).

The experience left its mark on Enora. It would be years before she brought her arachnophobia under control. In addition, she took the whole affair as proof that she was safest when she was alone. She began to spend more and more time in her attic with her best (imaginary) friend.

Mousey didn’t have much to say, but she listened to Enora with rapt attention and always found her juvenile schemes and insights captivating. It was one of these schemes that developed, with Mousey’s encouragement, into her escape not just from her sector but from the community.

Enora had a hard time overcoming the shame she felt at her reaction to the spider ordeal. Goaded by that shame, she determined to do something so bold that no one, especially the Sadistic Girl Gang, could accuse her of cowardice again.

She would escape from her district, travel to the fearful electric fence, and devise a way to circumvent it and strike out into the dreaded world outside the confines of the community. As an antidote to the fear that she could not escape on her own, she brought Mousey with her.

As it turned out, getting to her destination wasn’t much of an adventure. She reached the fence in little over twenty minutes and without any opposition to her quest. Once there, however, she didn’t know what to do. It had been intimated that touching the fence would result in one’s death; though, to be honest, no one had directly said that to her.

Mousey wasn’t helping either. She had sent her friend to test out the fearful thing, and Mousey had simply skittered under the fence without touching the electric wire.

Out of total frustration, Enora decided to take matters into her own hands. She was six now and she knew that rubber soles were a grounding agent. She was wearing rubber boots with thick rubber soles and decided that they would shield her from the worst effects of her bravery. With a trembling, mittened hand, she reached out and grabbed the nearest fence wire. The shock she felt made her jump in alarm, but the pain was more psychosomatic than real. For some reason even she didn’t understand, she then bent down and touched the fence with her tongue. It was winter, by the way, and her tongue immediately stuck to the fence. From that extraordinary position, it was impossible for Enora to produce a scream for help loud enough to attract her mothers or other members of the community from which she had so successfully escaped. And she was freezing.

Left with no other choice, she ripped her tongue from the wire, the cold—at least partially—ameliorating the pain that would return with a vengeance once she returned to the safety and warmth of the haven from which she had earlier fled.

She had a heck of a time coming up with an excuse for her bloody, swollen tongue, though she had just long enough a reprieve, given that speaking clearly for the first day or so was impossible, to convince her mothers that she had fallen and severely bitten her tongue while attempting to climb the fence that surrounded her community.

As it turned out, the pain was worth it. Her mothers concluded that they could no longer confine her to such a small space and presented her with a gift that would change her young life.

On her seventh birthday, she emerged from their small house to find her mothers holding a magnificent silver and red bicycle, which, within a remarkably short time—and the addition of several new scars—she learned to ride proficiently enough to strike out into the world beyond her community.

That new mobility would over the next few years enable her to find a new best friend and a world view that would sustain her for the rest of her life.

CHAPTER 4

Enora had always been drawn to death. Not in a morbid way, nor a joyous way. It was just there, a part of life, Life’s companion as it were. The small house she had grown up in was on a long, straight rural road that served as a racetrack straightaway for local drivers. There was no shortage of roadkill, and she spent hours of each day walking that road or riding her bike long hours rescuing little furry dead friends. To her mothers’ horror, she brought most of them home before ceremoniously burying them or not so ceremoniously skinning them and tanning their hides. And it wasn’t just dead animals in which she found comfort and companionship. For the next seven years, her two best friends—besides Mousey, of course— were trees. The first was a Box Elder in the side yard of the small house her mothers bought when she was a toddler. She was three years old; and even before she visited her new house and room, she set to purveying the natural world in which it had been placed by human hands. As if by magic she was drawn to the Box Elder first, where she discovered a small red wagon cradled in its limbs. Her screams of joy drew her mothers to the scene of her attempting to climb the formidable tree to retrieve the welcome gift it held out to her. One of her mothers retrieved it for her, and until she turned fifteen, she spent much of her secluded life climbing and cuddled in the branches of her dear friend and confidant.

Her other best friend came a bit later, after she became bicycle born. Not unexpectedly, it was a dead tree. A distinction she later realized meant little to her. It was located a decent bike ride from her house, on a beautiful hilltop from which it overlooked and dominated one of the best views in the area. She visited and shared her secrets regularly with the tree until, on her fifteenth birthday, her mothers moved her to a new home, adjacent to the massive library where she would be educated and trained by the reigning Archivist, whose place she would someday take.

Though the Box Elder succumbed to a lightning strike not long after she and her mothers moved closer to the library, she continued to visit and confide in her dear, dead tree until well after she assumed her role as Archivist. The long and often exhausting journeys she undertook to see her friend were the singular antidote she had to the tedium of her new life

These were difficult times for her. In truth, she had never been integrated into any group of girlfriends. She interacted fairly well with most of her neighbors and schoolmates, but the knowledge that she would someday take her place as the new Archivist made any intimacy with her peers impossible.

Now she was a teenager, condemned to isolation or long hours spent with a woman who, though kind and often understanding, was charged, above all, with preparing her replacement for the responsibilities that would soon be hers.

As a teenager, she found that her imaginary friends—her best friend, Mousey, and the beloved tooth fairies who lived in her music box and often sang her to sleep—began to gradually, and with great love, fade away. In their place, she found herself drawn more and more into the solace and escape she derived from books.

She was not without the company of girls her own age, though; at least when she was free of her daily lessons. She was often surrounded by girl friends, who both she and they recognized as being attendants more than anything, despite their genuine attempts to obscure that fact. At first, she interacted freely and often happily with these girls; but gradually they slipped away into some corner of her mind that allowed her to interact with them mechanically while her true reality became that presented to her in the books of the library.

As her twentieth birthday approached, she realized, without wanting to, that she was, indeed, becoming that for which she was born.

In her last visit to her beloved, dead tree before her coronation, she had begged for Nature to take this burden from her; to allow her to be just an ordinary girl.

She did not need her tree’s unspoken words to tell her that her destiny lay elsewhere.

CHAPTER 5

The books that Enora read during her training period as Archivist may be considered primers of sorts. At least, that was how the outgoing Archivists viewed them. They were books designed to introduce the young Archivist to a general overview of human history, as compiled by those who preceded her, without painting a picture that she might find so upsetting as to induce her to share it with one of her mothers or attendant friends.

They were, if we are to be accurate, a fabrication so deficient in historical verisimilitude that they might better be described as a pack of lies.

Of course, some disciplines, such as math, technology, and engineering, needed little redaction. However, most of the knowledge she gained in other areas of study was condensed and redacted, literally, to death, leaving it devoid of any factual or artistic content.

Nonetheless, when Enora assumed her solitary role as Archivist, she possessed enough of a vision of humanity’s past errors and accomplishments to shield her, if minimally, from the shock that would come from being the first to learn a truth to which none of her predecessors had been introduced.

It was but a fortnight ago that the previous and much beloved Archivist announced her retirement thereby confirming her belief that Enora was now ready to succeed her. Of course, in so doing she dashed any hopes that Enora may have had that this day would never come. By any standards, even her own, Enora had been a model student. It was obvious to her teacher and mentor that Enora had an exceptional love for reading and research. For five years the aging Archivist had trained and observed the young woman who was to be her successor. In retrospect, though the girl was quite wild at first, her job had been made easy by the girl’s sharp wit and eventual acceptance of the life that awaited her.

It was with acceptance that Enora stood on the balcony now, encased in elegant simplicity and appearing intently focused on the adoring crowd before her. None knew that her thoughts were elsewhere.

In reality, on the night of her coronation, Enora knew only that she had become eleventh in a line of women who had, for all practical purposes, vanished from public life upon assumption of their role as Archivist.

ELENORE

CHAPTER 1

My dear one,

Allow me to introduce myself. I am your grandmother, though some ten generations removed; and it is I who, if you are reading this, created you and the position you hold. Though there have been some ten Archivists before you, it is to you that falls the fate of opening this letter— or better said, memoir— for the first time. I have committed one heinous act for which I was labeled a monster. I pray that I do not bring that fate upon you as well.

I should warn you that I may ramble at times. It is only to be expected of someone who has lived with such grief for so many years. The one hundred and twelve years that I will ungratefully achieve in three days comes with the freedom of knowing that, with this memoir completed, I can pass the future of humanity on to you. I believe, in my heart, that you live; and I believe, and pray, that the course you choose after reading this letter will be the right one.

CHAPTER 2

My son died in my arms, you know. He was middle-aged by that time, but to me he would always be my baby. My only child. My life. But he was middle-aged, no baby; and the only concession I had demanded for serving as executioner of half the human race was that my son be admitted to the group of scientists and scholars who had committed themselves to carrying out a deed that, though monstrous on some level, was the only possible salvation for the human species. Wayland knew that he would die, and the only assurance I could give him was that I loved him more than anything in this world and that he would not be forgotten.

Am I a monster? Perhaps.

And perhaps it is possible to do bad for the sake of doing good.

There was a time when I would have said, uncategorically, that this could never be true. I was the child of a great war after all; and, as a committed antiwar activist, I adhered to the belief that those who went to war and committed atrocities against innocent men, women, and children should be held guilty of those crimes. I believed then that there was no gray area when it came to violating certain natural laws, one of which was preserving the sanctity of life for all living things. And yet, violate that sanctity I most assuredly did. Whether I did so as a monster or as a saint is somewhat irrelevant in my mind. What I did, what we