It was six minutes to midnight when the Chief Elder awoke from a dreamless sleep and sat bolt upright on her cot. Her face, which only a few hours before had been lined with cares and perplexities, now glowed with new confidence and certitude; in the moment between sleep and waking, a light had kindled itself in her mind, and she suddenly knew exactly what she had to do.

Without a moment's hesitation, she rose to her feet, slipped on her shoes and her robe of office, and walked briskly out the door of her dwelling, into the corridor that connected the living areas of all the various Elders. A Furnisher named Joshua, who had been working late laying a new carpet in the corridor (the old one having been badly stained that afternoon when the third reminder had startled a junior Elder into dropping her lunch), rose and greeted her respectfully as she passed, but she was too preoccupied with her new inspiration even to notice him. (When she found out about this later, she was quick to apologize to him; it was one thing to be consumed by a matter of the utmost importance, and quite another to treat someone else discourteously.)

It was wonderful, she felt, how clear and simple it all was. She might have understood it weeks before, if only she had been able to see beyond the preconceptions her training had left her with about decency and right conduct. Not, indeed, that those preconceptions were wrong in all cases, or even in most, but… well, there were times when certain things simply had to be done, however horrible they might appear to the uncomprehending Community. And she was the Chief Elder; if such things had to be done, it was right that she, herself, should do them.

She eased open the front door of the living-area complex, careful not to wake any of her colleagues, and stepped out into the street. The lamps had all been switched off nearly an hour before, but somehow this didn't bother her; it was as though there was a great white beacon above her head, lighting her way even in the pitch-black darkness of the Community's night. And, anyway, her path was straight enough.

With a resolute, unerring step, she strode down the street, toward the small brick building where the Speakers worked.

Katharine was also awake, though not for any reason she understood or appreciated. Maybe it was excitement at having discovered something new about the reminders, or dissatisfaction at having been unable to be more help to Ophelia – or, perhaps more likely, both things mixed together. In any case, despite her best efforts, she had found herself unable, once evening fell, to sleep for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch before waking up even less rested than before. By midnight, this circadian see-saw had put the little Seven into a dreary stupor, in which all the solid things about her seemed to be only half-real; the blanket she was wrapped in, the pillow under her head, might have been mere garments worn by some sort of mysterious object-selves, which she could no more perceive or imagine than she could her own restless mind.

The exception, of course, was the comfort object in her arms. That might also have had a hidden self, for all she knew, but, if it did, she was sure it was a friendly and familiar self, which would never want to harm her and would always be glad to do her good. Why she was so sure of this, she didn't bother to wonder; if she had, she might have concluded that it was because she had valued her comfort object for itself and not just for its utility to her, and so come one step closer to consciously grasping, as she already instinctively understood, the great principle of Amor Vincit Omnia.

Her mind went back to her insight of the afternoon, and she wondered idly whether there was a word that ended with the same sound as zebra. She went through the alphabet letter by letter, swapping the Z with every other consonant in turn, but came up empty; not only were none of the results real words, but most of them sounded too silly to ever be real words. What Hatchery Assistant, having invented a new tool to aid the breeding of salmon, would have so little respect for it as to call it a beebra?

There were one or two results, though, that were fairly pleasing. In particular, she liked how the word sounded with an L in front of it. "Libra," she whispered into the plush equid's ear. "Libra the Zebra. Do you like that? Maybe that can be your name from now on, and then there can be a reminder about you." She giggled, and started to chant in a sing-song voice,

I know a zebra;
His name is Libra;
He doesn't have a shadow.
I'm sure that Libra
Is the best zebra
In all of Eldorado.

She was under no illusions that this little doggerel was of reminder caliber, or even made sense or scanned properly (emphasizing the in the fifth line was cheating, she knew, but she was too sleepy to think of anything better). Nevertheless, she was exquisitely delighted with it, as fledgling artists so often are with their first crude forays, and she repeated it half a dozen times to herself and the newly christened Libra before getting tired and settling down to try and sleep again. It seemed that this time would be the charm; her eyelids drooped shut of their own accord, the tension ebbed out of her muscles, and her thoughts began to unravel into the pleasant aimlessness of…

ATTENTION. THIS IS A REMINDER.

Instantly, Katharine was wide-awake. So was almost every other resident of the Community; the Chief Elder's voice could be very rousing when she wanted it to be.

At first, Katharine couldn't believe it really was the Chief Elder. It seemed the very definition of impossibility: trees didn't fly, comfort objects didn't talk, and Chief Elders didn't proclaim reminders. But there was no mistaking that rich, vibrant alto, with its lingering sibilants and textbook-precise vowels, as it declaimed with stately rapture:

From the dark woods that breathe of fallen showers,
Harnessed with level rays in golden reins,
The zebras draw the dawn across the plains…

Katharine was so startled that she nearly choked on her own saliva. It wasn't just that she had been imagining a reminder about zebras not two minutes before; she wasn't so naïve as not to know a coincidence when she saw one. What got her was that each comfort object was unique; hers was the only zebra in the Community, just as her brother's was the only pterodactyl. So here was one of the reminders that from the beginning had spoken to her as to nobody else in the Community, speaking of something of which the Community's only specimen was sure to be physically in her arms at the abnormal time it was delivered. Short of literally using her name, the sender couldn't have made it clearer: this was her reminder.

She pressed Libra closer to her, and focused all the attention her weary brain could muster on the words coming out of the speaker. Whatever it was that she was supposed to be reminded of, it wasn't going to be lost through her drowsy inattention – not if she had anything to say about it.

…Wading knee-deep among the scarlet flowers.
The sunlight, zithering their flanks with fire,
Flashes between the shadows as they pass
Barred with electric tremors through the grass
Like wind along the gold strings of a lyre.

Katherine's head began to ache with the effort of her concentration, and frustrated tears came into her eyes. So many words whose meanings she couldn't begin to guess – and, unlike the first three reminders, there was no sense of a story being told, which meant something whether or not she understood the details. This reminder was more like a picture – and it was a picture she could barely see; how was she supposed to get whatever reminding was meant for her out of that?

Into the flushed air snorting rosy plumes
That smoulder round their feet in drifting fumes…

And yet, there was something – not so much in the words themselves, but in the sound of them on the speaker's tongue. All the L and R sounds, rolling and flowing like water in the river, did make a sort of picture all on their own; at least, they suggested a way of feeling that more or less determined what kind of picture they could make. It was a feeling of – Katherine groped for a word; not just peace, not just intense happiness, but both at once… serenity, maybe? She wasn't sure that was quite right, but it was close.

And the odd thing was that such words in the reminder as she did understand didn't seem to her to have very serene meanings. What could be serene about fire? And even electricity… of course it made nice things happen, lights at night and warmth on cold days and so on, but "electric tremors through the grass" sounded more dangerous than anything. Danger and frightfulness in the words, but peace and delight in the sound – and yet it was beautiful: how could that be, if she was right that sense was part of beauty?

Had Ophelia been the hearer, she would likely have grown infuriated with this paradox, and been unable to get any farther. But Katharine's more receptive spirit saw her through: instead of trying to force her intuitions into a shape congenial to her understanding, she only waited hopefully for the final revelation that would reconcile both.

…With dove-like voices call the distant fillies,
While round the herds the stallion wheels his flight…

And here it came. Katharine didn't know how she knew – she had no prior knowledge of the sonnet form, nothing to tell her that the reminder had only two lines to go – but something in the sound of the speaker's voice told her that the wheeling stallion, whatever he was, bore with him the removal of the barrier between her mind and whatever the reminder wished her to recall. She squeezed Libra tightly, stretched herself expectantly forward, and…

…Engine of beauty volted with delight…

"Oh!"

…To roll his mare among the trampled lilies.

After that one involuntary gasp, the silence in Katharine's bedroom, and in her soul, was profound. Even the muffled, rather uncouth noises that began, after a while, to emerge from the adjacent room where her parents slept, scarcely seemed to disturb it; it may be doubted whether an airplane landing directly outside her dwelling would have done so. Her hearing, and all her senses, were turned inward, focused wholly on the new-found land that the reminder's penultimate line had somehow unveiled to her.

It had been only a glimpse, instantaneous and fugitive; in the ordinary course of things, her memory of it would already have been fading into a dreamlike blur. But the course of things was very far from ordinary, and, as the minutes passed, the vision continued crisp and clear before her mind's eye, every stripe and hoofbeat of it spurning all the corruptions of time. She didn't know when it had been real, or where; there was no background to the vision, no ground or sky or trees – nothing but the beast itself.

The beast itself… she felt her chest tighten painfully, and realized that she had forgotten to breathe for very wonder. She had never dreamed, never imagined… she would never let anyone touch Libra again, he was a sacred thing… and yet he was nothing, nothing, next to the vivid majesty of the reality… but that wasn't true, he had been a true enough effigy for the reminder to work through her love of him… to make her able to hear… engine of beauty…

She wriggled beneath her covers, and let out a piteous little whimper that never reached her ears. Something inside her… it wasn't exactly pain, at least not the kind that medicine could relieve, but she didn't know of anything else to call it. It was as though, having seen true beauty even for an instant with her own eyes, now the need to express it, to proliferate it, to do it justice and help it to fill the world, had become an essential part of her, and would, unassuaged, cause her the same sort of anguish as if she failed to eat or sleep. And she wasn't sorry, and she wouldn't have it taken away again for anything – but what could she do about it? She was acutely aware that her silly jingle of a moment before was no kind of adequate response to beauty; probably it didn't even qualify as beautiful itself, and certainly it wasn't in the same league as the vivid sleekness, the dazzling contrast of dark and light, the power and swiftness and joy and terror that had pranced unbidden into her heart. If that was the best she could do, she had to learn to do better – but who was there in the Community who could teach her? Or how could she learn on her own, with nothing to study except her own memories? It would take years, and she didn't have years; she would starve long before that, or become comatose or delirious, or whatever happened to people who failed to feed this new appetite she had.

She moaned softly. "Why did the Elders have to give you to me, Libra?" she whispered into the plush zebra's ear. "If you'd been Jerome's comfort object, or Ophelia's or anybody else's, I'm sure you wouldn't have caused nearly this much trouble."

Then the glory of his prototype flooded back into the forefront of her mind, and she smiled and kissed the fuzzy little simulacrum's forehead. "But I'm glad you weren't," she said. "I'm glad you're mine, and I'm glad the reminder was mine, and I'll never let anyone take either of you away. Until December, I guess," she added with a frown, as the thought of her imminent Ceremony of Eight intruded upon her ardor. "Do you think they'd make an exception if I told them how important you are? They can always make a new zebra, can't they?"

Libra, naturally, offered no comment as to whether they could or couldn't, and Katharine brooded on the matter for a while longer; then the Sehnsucht of the zebra-glimpse surged within her again, and she brooded for a while more on how to cope with that; then she reflected on the specific voice that had conducted her to that glimpse, and brooded on the whole question of why the Chief Elder had started proclaiming reminders, and how that was going to affect the day-to-day life of the Community. And, somewhere in the midst of all that brooding, she finally drifted off into a relatively sound sleep – and, if the dreams that rived it were filled with wild and unsettling elements, trampling hooves and unbridled whinnies and the desperation of one set impossible tasks, still they were a good deal more tranquil than the dreams of most of her fellow Community members that night.