The quiet is deep, heavy, the kind that won’t be bothered, the air stale, and when I brush my fingers across the passing spines, I can feel the damp. I Know the Council says books clutter our minds, make it difficult to cope with the masses of information piling up inside our heads. Even my father, who has few opinions on anything, agrees. “Do not look at your mother’s books, Samara,” he said to me when I was small. “And if you have, promise me you’ll cache them. Don’t read. Just cache … ” But surely the books don’t deserve such an agonizing death.
At the end of the balcony is the smooth rock floor at the bottom of the shaft, another locked door, and an empty booth where an attendant used to sit, usually an Archiva, guarding a room that was only for the Council. For the special books. I pause. There’s a sign above the door. “Knowing Is Our Weapon.”
I’m looking for a weapon. Against sickness. And today, I’m going to read the books. I want to find out if what Grandpapa Cyrus said could be true, and I don’t think any teacher is going to recite this kind of Knowing for me. I find the right key and put it into the lock. The hinges open smooth, and the lack of rust or noise makes me wary. I tiptoe down a tunnel cut straight through the thick wall of the shaft, and then I’m standing in a room I’ve never seen.
It’s tiny when compared with the Archives, books lined sparsely on shelves that hug four rectangular walls, another closed door directly opposite. But there’s no dust here. No rot. A brazier of biofuel burns in the center of a matted floor, throwing shadows against ten sets of reading tables with cloth-covered chairs. One of the chairs sits askew, a book open on the table, lamplight shining on the pages. As if someone has just stepped away. Only just pushed back the chair.
My lamp is shaking. I blow out the flame, the Council words that so devastated my family, that took our profession, running loud through my memory. “The books of the Archives are no longer a beneficial resource. The recitations of the learning room will be sufficient for acquiring information.” Clearly the Council does not believe its own rhetoric. But what would they do with someone who Knows this and shouldn’t?
I Know they have floggings Outside. I’ve seen the bloody post in the Bartering Square. But there’s nothing like that in the city. The Council waits for a twelfth year, for Judgment, when the gates are locked and sealed. Only then would they condemn the one who had stolen Knowing, and choose a needle from the smaller tray. Not a wellness injection. The injection that meant my eyes would never open again.
I should turn around. Now. But the pages of the open book flutter in the draft and my feet move until I am in front of it, running a finger along a thick, coarse page in the lamplight. This book is old. And then my gaze lands on a single word, upside down, in faded ink. “Forgetting.”
I spin the book around and let my eyes skim the pages, turning each with delicate care. I’m not reading. The text is sometimes difficult to understand. But I can study it later, in my bedchamber, in my memory. The important thing is to put as much of this book in my head as I can before someone comes back into this room. But it’s impossible not to catch meanings here and there, and I can see that this is a book of Canaan, the Cursed City. And the author is describing the effects of a sickness called the Forgetting.
A key scrapes in a lock. I turn the book the right way around and stumble back into the shadows, bumping into a corner of shelves, dropping to the floor behind a covered chair just as the door beyond the reading table opens. A new wedge of light cuts bright across the matting, very bright, and I resist the impulse to shrink back, to move. To breathe. Two slippers pause in the doorway.
Then the slippers come fast across the floor, silent on the matting, the black robe of Council swinging around the ankles. They stop beside the brazier, someone bends, and for one panicked moment I see Thorne Councilman through the legs of the chair, his face in silhouette, hair braids streaked with gray. I imagine what would happen if he glanced once to his left, and my stomach twists, pulse thudding in my chest.
But he doesn’t look to his left. Only drops the lid on the brazier. The room shadows thicken. I don’t think he can see me now. My tunic is dark. But there’s not a single thing to keep him from sitting in the chair I’m hiding behind. To keep him from taking a book from a shelf that is right above my head. I let out a silent breath, and then hold it again. Thorne straightens, moving with the same abrupt speed to the table with the book about Forgetting.
And my mind is processing, working in the background, like it was while my eyes scanned the ancient book, like it has been ever since the key turned in the lock. Words weave together, giving me their meanings. I read them from my memory, sentences jumping forward in my mind like suncrickets in the rain.
“The Forgetting is a disease of the mind, interrupting an individual’s ability to access information, effectively erasing memories and wiping personal information from conscious thought … Learned skills are often retained, while emotional connections are severed, only occasionally reinstated … Identity is lost … The onset of Forgetting is traumatic … symptoms of fear, panic, disorientation, and paranoia that can lead to unwarranted violence … The curse of the Forgetting does not respect age or social stature and is so deeply embedded in our city that it cannot be rooted out. Canaan, we have decided, is no longer safe for any person to live in.”
And that was all about the Forgetting. Nothing else.
I stare at our Head of Council, standing thoughtful, stroking his chin in the light of the lamp. I have read the book. I have been to the Outside and listened to the truth. And now I can see the lie. That we of the Knowing—the people of memory, the special, the privileged—that we who remember were the people who Forget. All of us. Not just the Outside, like Grandpapa Cyrus tried to tell me. And not just the fading sort of memory, either. The Forgetting erased our existence from our own minds. And this was the real reason we abandoned Canaan 379 years ago. Why we built this city of safety underground. Not to hide from the evils of a mythical Earth. It was to hide from the Forgetting. And now, the ones we have left Outside are beginning to Forget again. The Council Knows it, and so do I.
They cannot Know that I Know it.
Thorne leans forward, almost gently, and blows out the lamp. And I feel myself float, upward, with a curl of smoke …
… to the sun and the slope I am climbing. To sweat on my face, the glinting blue rock of the mountain peaks rising tall in my path. I look back. I’m high in the hills now, and there are specks on the plain, black dots in the nearly horizontal rays of the lowering sun. I double my speed.