pleased with you. That’s enough for today, I think. We’re off to a good start.”
There was a question bothering Jonas. “Sir,” he said, “the Chief Elder told me – she told everyone – and you told me, too, that it would be painful. So I was a little scared. But it didn’t hurt at all. I really enjoyed it.” He looked quizzically at the old man.
The man sighed. “I started you with memories of pleasure. My previous failure gave me the wisdom to do that.” He took a few deep breaths. “Jonas,” he said, “it will be painful. But it need not be painful yet.”
“I’m brave. I really am.” Jonas sat up a little straighter.
The old man looked at him for a moment. He smiled. “I can see that,” he said. “Well, since you asked the question – I think I have enough energy for one more transmission.
“Lie down once more. This will be the last today.”
Jonas obeyed cheerfully. He closed his eyes, waiting, and felt the hands again; then he felt the warmth again, the sunshine again, coming from the sky of this other consciousness that was so new to him. This time, as he lay basking in the wonderful warmth, he felt the passage of time. His real self was aware that it was only a minute or two; but his other, memory-receiving self felt hours pass in the sun. His skin began to sting. Restlessly he moved one arm, bending it, and felt a sharp pain in the crease of his inner arm at the elbow.
“Ouch,” he said loudly, and shifted on the bed. “Owwww,” he said, wincing at the shift, and even moving his mouth to speak made his face hurt.
He knew there was a word, but the pain kept him from grasping it.
Then it ended. He opened his eyes, wincing with discomfort. “It hurt,” he told the man, “and I couldn’t get the word for it.”
“It was sunburn,” the old man told him.
“It hurt a lot,” Jonas said, “but I’m glad you gave it to me. It was interesting. And now I understand better, what it meant, that there would be pain.”
The man didn’t respond. He sat silently for a second. Finally he said, “Get up, now. It’s time for you to go home.”
They both walked to the centre of the room. Jonas put his tunic back on. “Goodbye, sir,” he said. “Thank you for my first day.”
The old man nodded to him. He looked drained, and a little sad.
“Sir?” Jonas said shyly.
“Yes? Do you have a question?”
“It’s just that I don’t know your name. I thought you were the Receiver, but you say that now I’m the Receiver. So I don’t know what to call you.”
The man had sat back down in the comfortable upholstered chair. He moved his shoulders around as if to ease away an aching sensation. He seemed terribly weary.
“Call me the Giver,” he told Jonas.
“YOU SLEPT SOUNDLY, Jonas?” his mother asked at the morning meal. “No dreams?”
Jonas simply smiled and nodded, not ready to lie, not willing to tell the truth. “I slept very soundly,” he said.
“I wish this one would,” his father said, leaning down from his chair to touch Gabriel’s waving fist. The basket was on the floor beside him; in its corner, beside Gabriel’s head, the stuffed hippo sat staring with its blank eyes.
“So do I,” Mother said, rolling her eyes. “He’s so fretful at night.”
Jonas had not heard the newchild during the night because as always, he had slept soundly. But it was not true that he had no dreams.
Again and again, as he slept, he had slid down that snow-covered hill. Always, in the dream, it seemed as if there were a destination: a something – he could not grasp what – that lay beyond the place where the thickness of snow brought the sledge to a stop.
He was left, upon awakening, with the feeling that he wanted, even somehow needed, to reach the something that waited in the distance. The feeling that it was good. That it was welcoming. That it was significant.
But he did not know how to get there.
He tried to shed the leftover dream, gathering his schoolwork and preparing for the day.
School seemed a little different today. The classes were the same: language and communications; commerce and industry; science and technology; civil procedures and government. But during the breaks for recreation periods and the midday meal, the other new Twelves were abuzz with descriptions of their first day of training. All of them talked at once, interrupting each other, hastily making the required apology for interrupting, then forgetting again in the excitement of describing the new experiences.
Jonas listened. He was very aware of his own admonition not to discuss his training. But it would have been impossible anyway. There was no way to describe to his friends what he had experienced there in the Annexe room. How could you describe a sledge without describing a hill and snow; and how could you describe a hill and snow to someone who had never felt height or wind or that feathery, magical cold?
Even trained for years as they all had been in precision of language, what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine?
So it was easy for Jonas to be still and to listen.
After school hours he rode again beside Fiona to the House of the Old.
“I looked for you yesterday,” she told him, “so we could ride home together. Your bike was still there, and I waited for a little while. But it was getting late, so I went on home.”
“I apologise for making you wait,” Jonas said.
“I accept your apology,” she replied automatically.
“I stayed a little longer than I expected,” Jonas explained.
She pedalled forward silently, and he knew that she expected him to tell her why. She expected him to describe his first day of training. But to ask would have fallen into the category of rudeness.
“You’ve been doing so many volunteer hours with the Old,” Jonas said, changing the subject. “There won’t be much that you don’t already know.”
“Oh, there’s lots to learn,” Fiona replied. “There’s administrative work, and the dietary rules, and punishment for disobedience – did you know that they use a discipline wand on the Old, the same as for small children? And there’s occupational therapy, and recreational activities, and medications, and—”
They reached the building and braked their bikes.
“I really think I’ll like it better than school,” Fiona confessed.
“Me too,” Jonas agreed, wheeling his bike into its place.
She waited for a second, as if, again, she expected him to go on. Then she looked at her watch, waved, and hurried towards the entrance.
Jonas stood for a moment beside his bike, startled. It had happened again: the thing that he thought of now as “seeing beyond”. This time it had been Fiona who had undergone that fleeting indescribable change. As he looked up and towards her going through the door, it happened; she changed. Actually, Jonas thought, trying to recreate it in his mind, it wasn’t Fiona in her entirety. It seemed to be just her hair. And just for that flickering instant.
He ran through it in his mind. It was clearly beginning to happen more often. First, the apple a few weeks before. The next time had been the faces in the audience at the Auditorium,