[NOTE: This one may not be as funny as some - but I have hopes that the forthcoming treatments of the Greens and the Reds will make up for it.]

EGWENE: Sit down, daughter! Tell me, how does your Ajah justify its existence?

BROWN [scribbling in a notebook as she walks into the office; finally looks up vaguely]: I beg your pardon, mother? You said something?

EGWENE [sighing]: Yes, I asked you to explain what purpose your Ajah serves . . . but first, what is so fascinating that it demanded more of your attention than did your Amyrlin?

BROWN: Oh, I was just tidying up a few formulae for my next book! My working title for the manuscript is, "Gauging Your Social Status Among Your Fellow Aes Sedai To Within A Tenth Of A Point!"

EGWENE [closing her eyes for a moment]: How DOES one do that?

BROWN [eagerly]: I'll use my own case as an example, Mother. I spent six years as a novice - that's worth 4.4 points - and five more as an Accepted, which is worth 9.2 points, and I have worn the shawl for 138 years, which is worth 27.6 points (the operation for that statistic is very simple; one simply divides the number of years by five), and my strength in the power is in the seventieth percentile, meaning less than 3 Sisters in every 10 are stronger than I am, so that's worth 11.4 points. Also I am a Sitter in the Hall, which is worth a flat 20 points, and within the past two years I have served as the Head of a mission involving at least 5 other Sisters, which means an extra 3.7 points, and the mission was successful, which gives me another 3.3 points (serving as Head of a mission which FAILED, on the other hand, would remove 1.8 points), and I was affiliated with the Salidar contingent of Aes Sedai after the split in the Tower, which has been worth about 7.4 points ever since we were triumphant in reuniting the Tower under your leadership and getting rid of Elaida (if I had been an Elaida supporter, I would have lost 10.8 points when she was defeated, and if I had been a neutral who refused to commit myself until one side had already gained the advantage, I would have lost 3 points in the end, on account of being suspected of a certain weakness of character, but not been viewed with as much suspicion by your supporters as an ex-Elaida-supporter would be). I was the fifth Sister of seven to be called in here, which means I lose 1.5 points for the moment, but on the other hand, the Blue Sister was taken out under armed guard, so if I leave this office under my own power instead of under arrest, the contrast between the two of us will raise my prestige again by 2.2 points.

[Egwene clears her throat, and the Brown hurries it up a little . . .]

BROWN: Well, I have about 28.4 points accumulated from various other little victories - social, political, scholarly, or what-have-you, and when we put it all together . . . [she scribbles numbers and adds them hastily] my current rating is 113.9! 116.1 if I avoid the fate of the Blue representative. What did she do, by the way? It affects her score, you understand.

EGWENE: Never you mind. Let's move back to the main topic: the achievements of your own Ajah.

BROWN: Ah! We dedicate ourselves to scholarly pursuits, the gathering of new knowledge and the retrieving of old knowledge, that sort of thing.

EGWENE: Yes . . . I am aware that most of the books in the Tower Library were either written by, or at least gathered by, the Brown Ajah. Although I confess I don't quite understand why it requires the efforts of so many Aes Sedai to do such things, when any literate clerk could seek out books just as well as you can. Channeling is scarcely relevant to the tasks of a researcher or librarian.

BROWN: Trust people who aren't Aes Sedai to do our research for us? To track down books about ter'angreal, and Portal Stones, and ancient Talents, and other things? To translate them from the Old Tongue properly? To share the information with us, and to recognize what is worth studying and what is pure trash? Absurd!

EGWENE: You raise a point about the need for experts to examine documents relating to channeling techniques, at least . . . but tell me: when a Brown Sister uncovers something in her studies, how much trouble does she take to publicize it?

BROWN [shrugging]: She writes a report, which is properly catalogued in the Library for future reference.

EGWENE [slowly, as if tasting the words]: Catalogued. The way Corianin Nedeal's notes on the use of a dreaming ter'angreal were catalogued, and then gathered dust, unnoticed, for four hundred years or so before Verin Sedai happened to uncover them?

BROWN [wincing]: We can't read EVERYTHING, Mother. If anyone else had wanted to study Corianin's notes, they could have done so.

EGWENE: And Verin apparently found, studied, and destroyed the ONLY COPY of her research. Why weren't duplicates made, for safety?

BROWN: Well, mother, I'm afraid all the sisters who were serving in the Library in Corianin's time are long dead, so we may never know . . .

EGWENE: How many copies of NEW documents do you make?

BROWN: Er . . . if anyone asks for a copy, one can be provided . . .

EGWENE: And if no one asks?

BROWN: We're so busy in the Library . . . we can't be expected to copy EVERYTHING!

EGWENE: No? I've decided to do exactly that. I want at least 1000 copies of EVERY volume in the Library to be printed up over the next year or so. I'm setting up great Schools in the capitol cities of 16 nations (plus one right here in Tar Valon), and twenty copies of every volume or scroll will serve as the nucleus of the Great Library of each School. That accounts for 340 copies . . . the rest will be donated to the great libraries already existing in various parts of the world - royal palaces and the like - as well as endowing a library at Rhuidean, and another on Tremalking, for the edification of our dear friends, the Wise Ones and the Windfinders. Leftovers will be stored in various places until we find a use for them.

BROWN [gaping]: A thousand copies of EVERYTHING, mother?

EGWENE: I've instructed the Keeper to hire an army of woodcutters to start chopping down as much of Haddon Mirk as we will require, and to ship the lumber to Tear where the printing will be done year round. Nobody lives in Haddon Mirk anyway, so what difference does it make? [Her voice grows warmer] Of course, it will require real experts to get each new library properly catalogued so that teachers and students of the Schools can find any text they need without searching through a hundred other bookcases before they hit the right one . . . perhaps making sure everything is sorted in alphabetical order by the author's last name?

BROWN [Getting a dreamy look as she ponders the task of sorting out all those libraries]: Actually, that was the system used when our own Library was first built here in Tar Valon, mother, but it has serious shortcomings. All the books by "Author Unknown" end up lumped together in the A section, for instance, no matter what the subject matter. Research into the oldest writings has revealed that in the Age of Legends, or perhaps even the Age before that, there were at least two popular systems which tried to group books together by SUBJECT, rather than simply by Author. One was called . . . the Du'ee Des'imal, I believe, and the other was the Lai Brariov Kong'res.

EGWENE: Really? Which system was adopted for our own Library here?

BROWN: Neither, of course! We never could agree on which was better, and besides, our Library already HAD a system! We set up a card file to cross-index things, of course, but that was the best we could do.

EGWENE [rubbing her aching head again]: Daughter, you mean to say that for over three thousand years you (meaning the Brown Ajah as an entity) have known we had an inefficient system of organization in our Library, and that better alternatives were available, but that you never did anything about it?

BROWN: Er . . . that's about right, Mother. But we can fix it now! We could categorize half the libraries according to one system, and half according to the other, and see which worked better! Or perhaps split eacn individual library into two sections, one for each system, and see which one people found preferable in doing their research! Or even . . .

EGWENE [hastily]: You are EXCUSED, daughter! Send in the Green Sister next, will you?

[NOTES on things referred to, or assumed, in this conversation:

1) Numeric values for various aspects of one's social standing among the Aes Sedai were invented by me from thin air. If you try to calculate the relative standings of Jordan's AS characters based on my numbers, you'll go nuts. Of course, the rest of us might not notice the difference if you did, but I figured I ought to warn you :)

2) I really don't know if Randlanders make their paper from trees yet, or if they still use earlier recipes that weren't dependent upon heavy-duty lumbering, but I assumed they use trees for the sake of argument :)

3) On the subject of conflicting systems of classifying books and documents: The main library of the University of Florida in Gainesville, where two of my sisters are currently enrolled, has archives of magazines - decades' worth of them, in some cases, bound in volumes - on the second floor. Half of them are organized in the Lai Brariov Kong'res system and half in the Du'ee Des'imal system. It has tens of thousands of books on the third and fourth floors. The third floor (I think) has all its books sorted according to the Du'ee Des'imal approach, and the fourth has them sorted according to the Lai Brariov Kong'res system. Meaning that if you want to examine and compare all available editions of the Complete Works of Shakespeare (for instance), half will be on one floor and half will be on the other. I have visited that library several times, and I STILL can't believe they couldn't decide on one system or the other, and then stick to it, in the forty years or more that this campus library has existed. I merely applied the idea to this imaginary conversation :)]

Raina's Hold / Raina's Library / Other People's Humour / Renovating the White Tower