The Fourth Circle

  The Fourth Circle

  THE

  FOURTH

  CIRCLE

  ZORAN ŽIVKOVIC

  THE MINISTRY OF WHIMSY PRESS TAL—

  LAHASSEE, FLORIDA 2.004

  MINISTRY OF WHIMSY PRESS

  www.ministryofwhimsy.com

  Ministry Editorial Offices:

  POB 4248

  Tallahassee, FL 32.315 USA mini-

  stryofwhimsy@yahoo.com

  Ministry of Whimsy Press is an imprint of: Night

  Shade Books: 3623 SWBaird Street Portland, OR

  97219 www.nightshadebooks.com

  Copyright © 2004 Zoran Zivkovic Translated from the Serbian by Mary Popovic

  Cover Art Copyright © 2004 K. J. Bishop Cover Design by Garry Nurrish Interior Design by Juha Lindroos Editor: John Klima (spiltmilkpress@aol.com)

  Set in Sabon

  ABOUT THE MINISTRY OF WHIMSY

  Founded in 1984 by Jeff VanderMeer, the Ministry of Whimsy takes its name from the ironic double-speak of Orwell's novel. The Ministry is committed to promoting high quality fantastical, surreal, and experimental literature. In 1997, the Ministry published the Philip K. Dick Award-winning The Troika. In more recent years, its flagship anthology series, Leviathan, has won the World Fantasy Award, and been a finalist for the Philip K.

  Dick Award, and the British Fantasy Award.

  Trade Hardcover ISBN: 1-892389-65-7 Limited

  Edition

  ISBN:

  1-892389-66-5 Contents

  PROLOGUE 5

  CIRCLE THE FIRST

  1. TEMPLE AND TIME 9

  2. THE HAUNTED CEILING 12

  3. SUNFLOWERS AND DECIMALS 16

  4. TURTLES AND RAMA 20

  5. A PACT WITH HELL 23

  6. THE GREAT JOURNEY 25

  7. THE SUN IN THE HOUSE 30

  8. THE FINGER OF GOD 33

  9. DESCENDANT OF THE RING 37

  10. COMPUTER DREAMS 41

  11. THE RADIANCE OF DEATH 45

  12. STAR SONG 49

  CIRCLE THE SECOND

  1. THE GAME OF ASSOCIATIONS 55

  2. HEAVENLY ASCENSION 62

  3. NOLI TANGERE. .. 66

  4. UNWANTED PREGNANCY 71

  5. NUDITY DIVINE 75

  6. THE PURCHASE OF A SOUL 79

  7. NIGHTMARE 84

  8. DELIGHT ENTRANCING 89

  9. BREAKING ON THE WHEEL 93

  10. BIRTH 98

  11. A DREAM ASTONISHING 103

  12. CASABLANCA 106 CIRCLE THE THIRD

  121

  1. A GUEST IN THE TEMPLE

  127 2. INTO THE KINGDOM OF THE UNDERWORLD

  131

  3. SHERLOCK HOLMES'S LAST CASE (I): THE LETTER

  137 4. CHEESE AND A TOGA

  142 5. EXECUTIONER

  146 6. SHERLOCK HOLMES'S LAST CASE (2): GHOST

  152 7. MATTRESS AND FEAR

  156 8. BLACK CRUCIFIXION

  163 9. SHERLOCK HOLMES'S LAST CASE (3): MORPHINE

  169 10. GAMBLER AND RAKE

  176 11. THE FRUIT OF SIN

  180 12. SHERLOCK HOLMES'S LAST CASE (4): FLAMES

  188 EPILOGUE

  CIRCLE THE FOURTH

  192 1. VISITOR

  197 2. THE BOOK

  294 3. VANISHED

  211

  4. THE LAST CHAPTER

  216 5. LIGHT

  235 AFTERWORD

  Despite some superficial resemblances, the universe of the Circles is not the universe we know. By analogy, none of its inhabitants should ever be confused with those of our own, even when they happen to bear names we may find familiar. In particular, those known to their contemporaries as Archimedes of Syracuse, Ludolf van Ceulen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Nikola Tesla, and Stephen Hawking are in no way to be confused with such of their analogues as may be known to us, for they are different in motivation and cast of mind: analogues, not avatars.

  Prologue

  THE CIRCLE.

  He is here because of the Circle. The Circle is the only thing that matters, the only thing that makes sense. Other questions, which flash occasionally into his mind, fail to even make him wonder.

  They should, though, for nothing is as it ought to be.

  Not this ground he walks on...dry, dusty, sterile, yet yielding underfoot like a thick carpet of grass, responding with unexpected and inexplicable elasticity to his strangely altered weight, although he cannot make out whether he is now heavier or lighter. No matter, he will get the answers upon reaching the Circle, if the questions retain any importance by then.

  In the background, the night sky creates alien arabesques. Wrong stars form wrong constellations. Strangely, this does not unsettle him, nor does his vague awareness that for some reason he ought to be unsettled before this vista of irre-gularly spangled, arching blackness. He has an inkling that his sangfroid is connected to things he used to do, in some other place, in a different time, but the necessity of the Circle has almost severed him from his own past.

  Almost, though not quite.

  His memories reach back to the moment when he started to walk toward the Circle. Two suns were lying low in an orange sky: one large, the color of dying coals; the other very small, but fiercely bright. The little sun stood very close above the great one, so that at the moment of sunset, they looked like two connected spheres plunging into an ocean of dust.

  He knew, though he could not explain how, that the system had a third member also, one he had not yet seen. (The Circle relies on a minimum of three bases, does it not?) The massive body of the planet hid all three suns now, but the third one would soon emerge from the opposite side, behind his back, and he had to get to the Circle by then.

  He turned around once, while the horizon was still awash in the pink afterglow, but saw no footprints behind him in the pliant dust, though one segment of his mind told him they had to be there. This obvious necessity was overtaken by another, older one—the necessity of the Circle, the necessity that said that everybody must arrive at the Circle in his or her own way, without following any previous trail.

  He did not know what the Circle looked like, but that did not worry him unduly. He would recognize it as soon as he saw it. Nor did he know whether he would be the first there, or whether the others had already arrived. It did not matter. First or last, it was all the same—only together could they close the Circle.

  Whenever he started to think about this, in the darkness softened by the monotonous glow of alien constellations, new abysses of ignorance yawned around him. But this did not deter him from his forced march forward, nor did it disturb him much.

  How many of them would there be? Three, like the number of suns in this system? A reasonable assumption, but the Circle could be based on seven points too. Or on nine. Which number stood above all others, creating the basis and a sufficient condition for the Circle? Perhaps One? No, nobody could close the Circle alone. In any case, he would soon learn.

  Since the ground was perfectly flat all the way to the distant range of hills rising somewhere behind the horizon, darkness did not slow his pace. He could not see it, but he knew the range was there, just as he knew about the third sun.

  There were no rocks to trip him up, nor crevasses to fall into. He might have thought that the ground had been deliberately cleared for him, had he not known that no path leads to the Circle. And yet, he could not dispel the feeling that the terrain was just so, to make this walk easier for him. He sensed the influence of a purpose behind it but could not fathom it.

  For a moment he wondered how, if it were situated behind the range of hills, he could possibly reach the Circle before dawn. He was not advancing fast enough to outrun the third sun. Then he rejected even that tho
ught. The Circle had to be closed before the blue light of that sun splashed over the edge of the world behind his back. Therefore, he would arrive there soon.

  Low stars, the muted sheen of which barely revealed the outline of the horizon before him, seemed strange, and not only because they were unfamiliar. Although he had been aware of this strangeness since they first lit up in the heavens, only now did it arouse his curiosity. Perhaps the proximity of the Circle was stirring the propensity to wonder, which lies at the root of all knowledge; as yet, however, he could find no answers.

  The stars did not twinkle. Their radiance was steady and even, as if he were watching them from space, as if, between his eyes and the stars, there were no ocean of air with alterations and turbulence to produce a fitful sparkling in those faraway suns. Maybe indeed there was no ocean. The idea that he was walking in an airless world, with no defense whatsoever against the vacuum, did not fill him with panic. His faculty of wonder somewhat restored, he continued to consider it in a detached sort of way, as if the issue did not relate to him personally, as if he were only an idle cosmologist, building in a free flight of demiurgic imagination some new, odd model of a universe the complex equations of which allowed such departures as an unprotected walk across a planet without air.

  Just for a moment he wondered why this comparison of himself with a cosmologist had struck him. A fragment of thought tried to burrow upwards from the sealed-off memory into his consciousness but was soon extinguished in the depths far below the surface, leaving him with a dull feeling of non-fulfillment and unattainability. Then his thoughts were directed again at the unblinking stars.

  Something did not fit. If this world were devoid of atmosphere, how could he be breathing? He had no answer, at least none that he was ready to accept. He could not accept that he was not breathing, that in fact he had ceased to breathe, for that would mean that he was dead. The notion of death brought back the awareness of the Circle, and in that awareness was no room for endings. The Circle was always a beginning, never an end. Even when you reached the end of it, you had in fact arrived at a new beginning.

  There was another thing that did not conform to the obvious lack of atmosphere. Sounds were reaching his ears. At first he thought he was hearing the rustle of wind, a filtered echo of gales in the upper strata of this nonexistent air. Then the whooshing softened and became more monotonous. Many strides later, he recognized in it an unmistakable rhythm, that of sea waves bouncing off the crumbling rocks of some savage shore.

  The perception of that sound did not last long, either. The regularity of the rhythm of the waves began to grow, and the sound became more complex.

  Higher harmonies, variations of the basic tone in other registers, oblique motifs.

  No longer a cacophony, a mere sum of random noise, the sound became a deliberate structure, a coherence of carefully chosen tones: music. Deprived of memory, he could not recognize the melody, and yet it awakened something in him, something close to delight but more restrained. Perhaps the reason was to be found in the circularity of the main theme. A rondo was quite appropriate for this place and time, a tonal background for his approach to the Circle.

  The sound, however, became distorted, expanded, built itself up into heights, and in a few steps more had soared above the threshold of hearing, into regions audible perhaps to other, more perfect ears. Silence followed in its wake—tense, expectant: heralding the Circle.

  He recognized the Circle now that he found himself on its perimeter. Contrary to what he had half-expected, there were no markings on the ground, no visible structure at all. The gloomy landscape, under its layer of loose resilient dust, stretched monotonously before him to the horizon in hushed anticipation of the azure dawn. He knew that he had arrived.

  His place was empty. He could not discern any others before he stepped past the rim.

  He held back for a moment before taking that final step. This was no hesitation caused by a sudden arousal of apprehension, but rather a gathering, a focusing. He felt a sudden wild upsurge in the wells of memory, the pressure of the mainstream of remembrance that might burst out onto the surface at any moment now, flinging wide the gates of the past. He understood that the final step would bring him only nonessential answers to nonessential questions. The purpose of the Circle continued to lie beyond his grasp, but now, standing on the edge, he finally understood that he was here to learn not answers, but new questions: questions that could only be asked when the Circle was closed—questions that mattered.

  Stretching his hand over his shoulder, he drew the heavy brown cloth hood over his head mechanically, unaware until that moment of its existence, or of the robe, which reached almost to his heels. He did not know why he did so: it simply seemed the proper thing to do. The Circle did not require humility, but then covering his head was no token of humility.

  No other preparations were necessary. Although the third sun had not yet touched the horizon behind his back, the landscape flushed dark blue with a premonition of the coming dawn. There were no further reasons for hesitation. In the distended silence, filled with a strange mixture of muted joy and melancholy, he stepped into the Circle.

  CIRCLE THE FIRST

  1. TEMPLE AND TIME

  ENVELOPED IN THE morning sounds of the surrounding jungle, the little temple was awash with the moist air of a late monsoon. The sounds were those of birth and death, sounds from which only an uninitiated newcomer might extract some bizarre beauty. The temple, however, was as indifferent to life and death as it was to beauty. It had stood there for more than a thousand years, a mute, un-caring witness to countless cycles in the rise and fall of the living substance amidst which it loitered like an intruder. The millennium had only slightly dented its initial shapeliness, chipping at the edges, filling its pores with small plants the roots of which were doing the work of deconstruction, infinitely slowly but inexorably, achieving an effect opposite to that of the gentle flow of a river, which takes rough stones and polishes them to rounded pebbles.

  The unconcerned attitude of the temple to the world around it perfectly suited the deity it housed. The large statue of Buddha, taking up most of the central space, watched the jungle with unblinking stone eyes that had long since passed the threshold of Nirvana.

  Somewhere deep in the mists of bygone time, this particular shrine, though among the smallest of the many temples the area boasted, for a while drew a teeming river of pilgrims, rushing to show their respect to the oldest founder of a great religion of mankind.

  But eternal tranquility, stretching over the vast plains that lay beyond the often impassable ravines of human passion and vanity, required suffering. In other places, suffering consisted of different trials: climbing endless stairways—high enough to drive even the most determined over the brink of desperation—or taking bizarre vows, in some cases lasting for decades.

  Here, to reach the heart of the subcontinent, the impassable jungle full of lurking dangers, known and unknown, had to be traversed. For many, the arduousness of the achievement offered a guarantee that the journey would be successful; hence the great attraction of this small shrine. But since disproportio-nately few returned from the journey and since the tales they wove mostly concerned the terrible fate of other less fortunate pilgrims and made no mention of Nirvana, the ancient wisdom of survival came to prevail over the luxurious wish for metaphysical elevation. There were fewer daring travelers, and then still fewer, until finally only true devotees remained, monks fanatically indifferent both to suffering and courage, whose lives were given to the unswerving search for the ultimate goal.

  It was a small temple, so it could provide permanent shelter to only a few Buddhist priests. In the millennium gone by, two monks had usually resided here. They gladly accepted the meager charity and abundant dangers of the ev-er-hostile jungle, so as to achieve untrammeled solitude in which they could give themselves up to meditation.

  The outside world only rarely upset this fragile tranquility. Fifty years or mor
e might elapse without the shrine seeing a single visitor, and when visitors finally did come, they usually came to replace aged or already dead predecessors.

  The newcomers were neither encouraged nor discouraged by others' experiences on the ascent to Nirvana. In the spirit of the basic tenet of their religion, they accepted everything with impassivity, preoccupied only by the quest for the Way.

  Only in the last few decades of the temple's first millennium did the world beyond the vast sea of trees start to announce itself more perceptibly. First came white wispy signs at very high altitudes in the sky, slender writings trailed by minute pencils, the meaning of which the monks could not quite fathom. Then whole groups of visitors began arriving in strange, noisy vehicles, which though not pulled by any animal, somehow drove a path through the jungle. Sometimes they floated down from the sky in squat, egg-shaped vessels with no wings, but with four long arms growing out of the head flailing madly around. Then in the small clearing before the temple, leaves and dust as well as panic-stricken birds, scared out of the trees by the vast metal birds of prey, would fly wildly in all directions.

  These travelers differed from the marauding bands on missions of plunder that had reached the shrine several times in the past. Because the treasures of the temple were worthless in worldly terms—lacking the giant gold-plated statues of Buddha kept in larger temples to the south—the raiders, enraged by the futility of their efforts, would vent their anger by killing and destroying. Unlike the monks, who, however indifferent to the world and bound to their faith, were not immune to the lethal strokes of a sword or knife (nor to other blows less lethal but more painful, calculated to make the agony last as long as possible), the statue of Buddha remained steadfast, as it should, mocking with immense calmness the angry looters' inability to do it harm, even when they broke off two massive toes from the foot and a hefty piece of the nose. Indeed, a falling chunk of the left nostril killed one robber and permanently crippled two others.