At that same moment, in a locked cellar beneath the Committee Hall, the Chief Elder shut a large book that lay before her on a desk, rubbed her eyes, and leaned back with a sigh. She wondered whether the Receiver suspected where she had gone in such a hurry from his Annex; indeed, she wondered whether he even could suspect – whether he knew, or guessed, that such a place even existed.
Certainly she herself hadn't known, on that morning nine and a half years before when the Council had met to elect her to her post. It had only been later that evening, when her predecessor – wise old Guido, who had served four full terms as Chief Elder with only one unscheduled release – had taken her by the hand and shown her the hidden door in her new office, that she had learned about the Cellar of Archives.
"Only the Chief Elder may enter this place," Guido had said, leading her down the narrow steps and switching on the light. "It was bequeathed to us by the founders of the Community, in case any of their successors should ever need to know the principles by which they brought about our way of life. Inside these books –" he indicated the dusty shelves of weathered yet imposing volumes that the light had revealed "– are all the formulae of the life we live: how to make Sameness and keep it, how to maintain the memories of the Receiver, and a hundred lesser crafts without which we could never be the Community we are."
Marilee – she hadn't yet come to think of herself as the Chief Elder – had gazed wide-eyed upon this treasure-trove of lore. "But… why keep such a thing hidden?" she had said. "If all this is so important, shouldn't it be public knowledge?"
Guido had smiled at that – one of his soft, sad smiles that made him seem even older than he was. "Would you really want that, Chief Elder?" he had said. "The whole Community to have the memory of the distant past always before its eyes? Surely, we've experienced enough these past few months to know how much unhappiness that would bring."
Marilee flushed, recalling the disastrous failure of the recent Receiver-in-training, and Guido nodded. "No, the first Elders were wise to arrange things this way," he said. "The Community is much better off when its people live and think as though there were only us, only now. And," he added, with a mock sternness in his tone that his twinkling eyes belied, "if I ever hear, young lady, of your acting on any other theory, I'll come back from Elsewhere and give you a good smack with the discipline wand."
Marilee had laughed and promised to be good, and the two of them had re-ascended the stairs and shut the door behind them; Guido had gone off to prepare for his long-delayed release the next day, and the Chief Elder had addressed herself to the practical duties of her new position. For nine and a half years, she had scarcely thought of the Cellar of Archives again – until the Receiver of Memory had said the word.
Memories – that was the key. The Receiver had only proposed it as a suggestion, but surely it had to be right; what else, when one came to think of it, could the reminders be akin to, if not to the Receiver's memories? And therefore she had come to the Cellar, to consult the ancient text labeled Universal Equality Protocols, Vol. 5: Trans-Generational Mnemonic Localization Procedure.
This had turned out to be a rather more laborious process than she had expected. The Community founders' way of speaking, or at least of writing, had evidently been very different from that of the Community itself; where she had been trained from childhood to say clear and simple things in a clear and simple manner, the men and women who had made her world seemed to have been burdened with an esoteric wisdom that could only be expressed in the most outlandishly mysterious terms. She had spent the whole afternoon soldiering through page after page of such phrases as "restructuration of gestalt nodal interfaces", and finding, as often as not, that even the dictionary she'd brought down with her couldn't shed light on their meanings. It was small wonder that she was tired.
All the same, she thought she had more of a glimmering now of how memories worked than she had had that morning. It was hard to put into words, but the impression she had acquired was one of time as a real, active force in the Community's existence. Hitherto, she had always thought of time merely as a minor detail of life: feelings were shared in the evening, Ceremonies were held in December, and so forth. But it seemed, if she had understood the Protocols correctly, that time was much more than this – that there were ways in which the past, simply by existing, could leave an indelible mark on all that came after it. She thought of the river that flowed past the Community, and how, if one threw a large enough stone into it, the whole current downstream from that point might be ever so faintly disturbed; time, it seemed, was something like that.
And that, evidently, was why there was a Receiver of Memory. In order for people to live decently, the current of life (so to speak) had to be perfectly smooth; if life were agitated into turbulence at any point, then the people living at that point would have to expend all their energies just to endure it, and would have no strength left to truly live. But the "rocks" that had been thrown into time in the past – the memories, in fact – couldn't be simply removed; that would mean changing the past, which would only agitate the river of time even more. (If it were even possible; the text didn't quite make that point clear.) What had to be done, therefore, was to channel the disturbing influences so that all their effects converged on one point – a single human mind, which would bear on the Community's behalf all the chaos of the unregenerate past, and which was noble enough to convert its sufferings into a special kind of wisdom.
The Chief Elder shuddered momentarily as the concept sank in. Perhaps she had thought too hardly of Jonas, and even of the previous Receiver-in-training; perhaps the weakness that had made them forsake the Community for Elsewhere had been simply the natural human reaction to a burden so immense. But then she dismissed that thought, and concentrated on the real issue that had brought her to the Cellar.
Reminders – memory-dreams. If memories were abiding disturbances in time, what could memory-dreams be? –Well, what was the difference between an ordinary memory and an ordinary dream? Obviously, a memory was an impression left in the mind by something that had really happened; when she remembered becoming a Twelve and being assigned the job of Committee Aide, it was because she had really had that experience. Whereas dreams were impressions, not from things that had happened, but from things that the dreamer desired or feared, or felt strongly about in some other way. (She thought of her own dream, the night that the first reminder had been broadcast – and then she decided that perhaps she wouldn't, after all.)
Maybe, then, the reminders were also disturbances from the past, but ones that were caused by past feelings rather than past facts. Maybe… she groped for the idea… maybe people themselves, besides being facts, were something else as well – or maybe they were two different kinds of facts at once, a fact of memory and also a fact of dream. And the dream-part of them, unlike the memory-part, couldn't always be disturbed by the past – which made sense, in its way, since dreams by their nature were so much less predictable than memories were. So long as the fact was a fact, it could be remembered – but a feeling could only be dreamt when… well, when the dreamer was feeling it, she supposed.
Except that didn't make sense here, did it? How could Charlotte, that morning, have been feeling tired of a meteor's flame? Even assuming that that meant something, how could any member of the Community have experienced such a feeling, let alone one as well-adjusted as Charlotte was? –Or was Charlotte not the dreamer herself, but only the mouthpiece of someone else's dream? Whose? How?
The Chief Elder sighed heavily. She had imagined, when she came down, that the Archives' description of memories would make everything luminously clear: where the reminders came from, how she and the other Elders ought to deal with them… and instead she found herself with nothing but a mass of unverifiable speculations that got wilder by the minute. It was time for her to admit defeat – to go up out of the Cellar, get something to eat (her stomach had already rumbled several times now), and face the realities of her and her Community's predicament.
"You don't mean we're just going to sit back and let it happen a third time?" Tomas demanded incredulously.
The Chief Elder sighed, and moved a few salmon flakes about on her plate with her fork. "What other choice do we have, Tomas?" she said. "Neither my sources of knowledge nor the Receiver's can tell us why this is happening, and we haven't learned enough about it to form a theory on our own. What can we do except wait and see what happens next? I know we can't post an Elder in every Speaker's station, but we should be able to still find a way to keep an eye on them; I think there's a way to use computers to record images…"
"Chief Elder," said Tomas plaintively, "that simply isn't good enough. Our whole purpose as Elders is to keep the people of the Community safe and happy; if we can't do that, we might as well all resign tomorrow."
"I agree," said the Chief Elder. "But I don't believe that things are that hopeless yet. For all the distress they've caused, the reminders haven't actually hurt anyone yet – no, not even Charlotte," she added gently, seeing Tomas's look of shock. "She may have some unusual feelings about her experience, but she isn't applying for release, or questioning the authority of the Committee, or even intending to break any rules. So long as no-one in the Community is any worse off than she is, I don't see why we should fear that our understanding of the reminders will come too late."
Tomas could find nothing to reply to this, but it still didn't sit well with him. "Well… shouldn't we at least make some sort of announcement to the Community?" he said. "Reassure them that the matter's under control, and there's no need for them to be afraid?"
"Certainly not," said the Chief Elder sharply. "Everything isn't under control, Tomas. A new reminder could come at any time, and to make the people think otherwise would be a lie. All we could say is that we're doing our best, and why should they need to be told that? As their Elders, what else could we do?"
Tomas nodded reluctantly. "Yes, I suppose that's right," he said. "But still…"
He trailed off and shrugged helplessly, and the Chief Elder smiled sympathetically. "I know, Tomas," she said. "You want to tuck all the people of the Community safely in their beds, and then go out and have the reminders permanently stopped before they get up tomorrow morning. So do I. But we can't do that yet, and we mustn't stop acting like responsible Elders just because that frustrates us so." She reached out and pressed his hand. "Have faith in the Community, Tomas. If we stay worthy of it, it will stay worthy of itself."
Tomas muttered an inarticulate assent. "So that's it, then?" he said. "We just wait and see?"
"We wait," the Chief Elder agreed. "And we see."
And, eight days later, they did.