LILY

Mark Tuello had not told Rachel Tapping about the source he'd enjoyed developing. The Mayday-lady. Lily.

Lily had been one of the 22 traded for Fred Waterford. With another martha, Lily had dragged an almost comatose 'friend' across the Rock River Bridge that night. That other martha, she had died on the transport bus on the way to Montréal. That meant that officially, Canada had only traded Fred for 21 marthas.

It had been strange for Mark, once he'd got to know Lily. What had been strange was Lily's reaction to the woman's death. Almost blasé. Mark guessed he'd been wrong assuming that those 22 had been 'friends'. The best he could piece together was that their contact with one another had been confined to that 'pen', located outside of, but still on the prison grounds. That pen had had 'hot-boxes' where the marthas had been stuffed for days-on-end, not conducive for meeting people or flowering friendships.

And with deaths. Probably enough to at some deep level make one blasé, which is perhaps not the right word.

Hot-boxing was a fairly effective torture, by all accounts. But to limit Lily to an 'aw shucks' reaction to death? If nothing else, it seemed to have desensitized Lily to one of her fellow, fleeing colleagues dying right in front of her. Tuello made a mental note never to learn how to do that.

Lily was a source of exceptional intel. The marthas in that outer-pen, they'd been the ones rounded up after Angel's Flight. As Lily had put it, the thing that put the brakes on more marthas' arrests, was the complaints coming from Commanders and their Wives. One Wife had burned herself doing her own ironing, subsequently a known-Mayday-martha was then quickly released and sent back to service.

Such was Gilead. Tuello was pained to think that those clowns had toppled The United States of America.

Of note, Tuello had been told of the martha named 'Beth', the one who it had been claimed had organized - with June Osborne - Angel's Flight. Lily had 'met' Beth, one of the conspirators who ran Mayday out of Commander Lawrence's basement. (Who in turn was a traitor Commander, who similarly had been rehabilitated due to his ….. his what?! His ability to blackmail his colleagues?)

Tuello never did find out what had happened to either Beth, or her martha-partner Sienna. He made a mental note to ask around in Little America. Little America's unofficial population was as large as ever.

A lot of the 'math' about Lily did not add up. It was hard to fathom that someone as diminutive as Lily could have survived that kind of torture for the length of time between Angel's Flight and Waterford's deportation. That kind of bad-math usually was a hint that someone like Lily could be a Gilead-plant. Sent north under refugee-auspices, but who was sending information back.

All the more reason to develop her! Lily's activities since were an open book to Tuello and the Consulate - not that she told Tuello everything. She'd also had had encounters with June Osborne and Moira Strand - this latest one had included Osborne's husband, Luke Bankole. Tuello had once floated the idea of Lily's suspicious bona fides to those three, and he was met with derision.

Lily kept most information about the border-Mayday camps to herself. Yet what little she said always squared with Canadian intelligence gathering about them. (One CSIS operative told Tuello, 'if they're handling anthrax and explosives to be sent south, then we want to know their supply chain!')

TAPPING IN A BAD MOOD

It usually worked the other way around. Usually Rachel Tapping bellowed for Tuello to come to her office - one of her more famous bellows had not used any electronics or communication media at all! She'd just yelled from her desk, through her heavy closed door, and down the hall.

This time? This time Tapping appeared at his door unannounced.

When Tuello looked up, he saw her. She'd been waiting for him to finally notice her.

"When did you know about this?" she accused with her angrily arms folded across her chest.

He managed, "When did I know about what?"

"The skirmish at the border, just south of the 45th, within sight of not one, but two border obelisks!"

"What skirmish?"

She stepped into his office, stood leaning at his desk with her hands on it, "Jesus, Mark. Do you know what's going on with those people or don't you?"

"Give me a minute," Tuello pleaded. He picked up his phone, dialed the number for Lily's cell. The announcement was one of no service. Damn, Lily had probably 'burned' her burner phone.

"Hang up, Mark!" Tapping ordered. You're not going to get anyone. "This one involves Osborne and Bankole. I've got people looking for Moira Strand. An agent has just come from their house, Rita Blue is there with Nichole - Rita knows nothing. All she knows is that Luke and June are overdue."

Tuello guessed, "is this just the Canadians with an unannounced closure of the Mayday camp? We don't get told everything."

"Mushrooms, Mark, mushrooms. I thought it was your job to prevent this sort of thing." Taking her hands off the desk, Rachel Tapping stood to her full height. "You have until noon to find out what the hell is going on, Mark. I'm not joking." At that she left his office, leaving his door open.

At least Tapping did not see the Toronto Police Service report on his desk. At least she didn't make mention of the topic.

The TPS had just told the Consulate, meaning Tuello, that various people were trying to file missing person's reports on Serena Joy Waterford. The police position was that being 'missing' was not by itself suspicious - especially with adults. People had a right to privacy, if indeed that was what the 'being missing' was all about. Absent foul play, the TPS would not even open a file.

But the detective would inform his pal, Mark Tuello. Especially about all things Gilead.

PIEIXOTO - 14th SYMPOSIUM

Thank you for gathering. We should get right to it.

Me, all I have for you this morning is that old, familiar cry to historical researchers. Those of us enmeshed in Gilead-history know the pain behind these words all too well:

"This is what we know until there are further finds."

I don't know about you, but that's what hooks me about history. Especially Gilead-history. Compared to the Roman Empire, compared to the British Empire past the Elizabethan expansion of the 16th Century - all those things, we are overloaded with timelines, intrigues, personalities, the building blocks of Empire, the decline and fall….. compared to those sub-disciplines of history, we actually know so little about Gilead.

Gilead is still a blank slate.

Here's a head's up for all you budding graduate students out there. There's a Masters Thesis or a Ph.D. thesis waiting to be written. Me, I'm too embedded in unearthing stuff to do with the Ardua Hall Holograph, as well as Witness Statements 369a and 369b - The Testaments - I have my hands full.

This new Ph.D. thesis? I'll tell you, no one would have thought of it at the 13th Symposium, much less the 12th or 11th.

So, 'this is what we know until further finds'!? The 'this' of this is not just how Gilead was perceived internationally 150-200 years ago, but how Gilead-sympathetic movements broke out in other countries. There's a thesis.

Canada. In our studies, Canada had only been seen as that shining 'North Star', the northern terminus of the underground femaleroad.

Now we have new findings. It is to be determined just how much of Gilead, in fact, infected civil life in the old Canada. Most certainly there is little - in fact some would say there is none - there is no historically credible source from within Canada which would admit to how entrenched Gilead may or may not have become in that country.

Me, if I'd presented this history contained in the Miller-Moss 5th folio, if I'd brought it to you two years ago, I'd have been laughed from the auditorium. If when Professor Knotley Wade and I had presented our findings about the Handmaids Tapes, to include an eroding Canada in all of it…..

…. you would have quite rightly pointed out that nothing in The Handmaids Tapes would support such speculation. The reliable sources about Gilead back then were so, so, so thin.

So. Where are we? We historians?

We're right where we almost always are. In suspended animation, until some further authoritative find shakes us up, blows the dust off of our entrenched theories and biases.

So, I'm winding this up. There may be more, I can almost guarantee it.