The Fourth Circle Read online

  Srinavasa's self-sufficiency left little room for close relationships with others.

  No one could boast of being his friend, though many, attracted by his odd personality or a vain desire to be seen with him, had tried to approach him. No one knew of any attachments to women, but this aroused no suspicion in a world no longer judgmental of non-heterosexual forms of love. Some female students did claim that Srinavasa's eyes lingered on them longer than total disinterest would dictate. Some even tried the game of seduction, for the challenge or to prove their skill, but they soon gave up, not because of any intentional coldness on his part (they knew how to deal with that) but rather because of his ignorance of the ancient rules of the game. "Like flirting with a computer!" one said, summing up the joint experience of them all.

  One male member of the university staff, who misinterpreted Srinavasa's imperviousness to women, fared similarly. Unlike the students, this man took defeat badly. For a time he publicly boasted of success, but nobody believed him; Srinavasa simply did not fit into such a scheme of things. The would-be seducer eventually fell into a deep depression, from which he emerged only when the object of his lust quit the University and he could seek consolation in reviving old flames.

  And yet, Srinavasa was not entirely without emotional connection. When he decided to retire to a small Buddhist temple deep in the jungle, he faced a dilemma that had to be resolved. Two miniature turtles, prizes won as a boy at some piffling computer competition, had now became a burden which threatened to crush him: he could take them with him or leave them behind. Winning had been easy, but if he had had the smallest inkling of the prize to be awarded, he would gladly have accepted second place. At first he did not know what to do with them, but gradually grew accustomed to the slow rhythms of their monotonous life, to the small obligations they imposed on him, to their unobtrusive presence. For him, breaking a habit was always more difficult than forming one.

  That the turtles never recognized him, that they responded to him as they did to any of the infrequent guests who came to his apartment to play with them briefly, bothered him not at all.

  Though one-sided, this relationship with the turtles had become important to him, an odd compensation for his lack of closeness with other people. He knew that if he took them along, he would have to keep them in a small glass tank, for in a jungle environment full of predators they would make inexperienced, easy prey. He could not stop thinking about their slow, inexorable agony inside the tank if something were to happen to him. The thought of his own death disturbed him less than the possibility of the turtles dying of hunger and thirst, trapped in their glass cage. So he took them to a pet shop in the nearby town and made a gift of them to the owner. The turtles took this change of environment complacently, with the same indifference they exhibited toward everything else. As he walked out of the shop, the Buddhist in him envied their superior unconcern for the outside world, while another, more suppressed part of himself briefly regretted that his affection should go unreturned even at the moment of parting.

  As he drove back to the campus, that same part of himself confronted the full extent of the loneliness awaiting him in the temple in the jungle and forced him to ask himself certain questions, which for some reason he had never given any thought to. Before they became uppermost, however, an idea swam up from the rational part of his mind, driving them away at once. He would not be alone in the temple. Of course! He would take Rama with him.

  5. A PACT WITH HELL

  SO I CLIMBED up and saw....

  Oh, Sotona, spawn of Hell, may God's wrath destroy you, may you be cursed forever!

  What have you done to him? To make the Master your obedient slave, to lead him to such blasphemy, merely for your own gratification? And in the temple of God, where there is place only for His most holy Son and Marya the Blessed Virgin and the other saints, whose names your leprous mouth is not fit to utter!

  That he should paint these scenes of Hell, desecrate these hallowed walls with your diabolical excrement, defile with the filth of the underworld the Lord's consecrated house?

  This can remain hidden no longer. Even had I time and opportunity, I could not whitewash over the images of the Devil's kingdom covering the vaulted ceiling, not without being seen. The long-robed ones, damned may they be, are already prowling like beasts on the trail of blood, and soon they will discover this spectacle, inspired by all the evil spirits of Hell. And when the iguman learns that the Unclean One has come in person to dwell in his monastery thence to mock the Almighty to His face....

  I dare not even think about it, for there is no help for us. Not for him, and not for me, his innocent servant. Innocent—yes, but everyone will think me guilty.

  Almost half my life I have been his helper, now let you prove that the vrag's shadow has not fallen on you too! Who will recall that he did not let me even mix the paints for this satanic desecration, that this is the first time I laid eyes on it—better I had been struck blind than to see this....

  Not even the images of hell that so terrified me as a small child that I've feared them all my adult life come nigh to this image, that he, in the Devil's power, has painted on the ceiling of God's temple! The imagination of a true believer cannot conceive of this desolation of Hades, infinite, devoid of God's creatures, devoid of plants and beasts, devoid of people who are a joy in God's sight. Only grayness, and endless death, and no sign of the Savior anywhere.

  And amidst this unearthly horror, such as the world has never seen, not even before the Creation, there is yet a sign, the mark of Sotona, the circle of the Unclean—just where the blessed cross ought to be! Oh, wretch that I am! What is my sin that I must suffer so? He, the Master, at least knows why he will be punished. His talent, powerful and monstrous, as I suspected from the first, was not from God. Maybe that suspicion is my only guilt. God surely cannot love those whose ability resembles His own. He allots talent, but in moderation, so that the gifted do not become proud or think they can rival Him. And where that boundary is crossed, the gift is no longer God's, but the Devil's. In his abominable unending war with the Almighty, Sotona, the fallen angel, often reaches out to snatch human souls, to tear them from God's blessed bosom, that he may gloat over their eternal torment in the dark pits of Hades.

  His hellish cunning wins over vain, weak, human souls with unnatural gifts, so that they surrender to him gladly to satisfy their presumptuous desires, their hunger for glory. So too my Master, may God deliver him from his sin, must have thus promised his soul to the Unclean in exchange for the skill of a great painter.

  For who in all Christendom can compare with him? Who else has painted so many of God's churches and monasteries with such scenes of wonder and holi-ness?

  Although this sin of his is great, has he not, in the next world if not in this, merited forgiveness, having dedicated his talent to the glory and name of God?

  And this is not all. I myself have witnessed how hard he took this pact with the Unclean, how he fought the evil spirits when they came to torment and remind him of the promise he gave their master.

  But his struggle was in vain, for in the end, the vrag always comes for his due.

  And so he comes now, in the place least fitting—as well he knows, may he be cursed to the end of time—to settle his dread balance with the Master's works, painted to the glory of God. Leading him to paint, instead of elysian fields of immortelle and basil, a waste of Hades, drear and dismal; instead of the dear cross, the vrag's circle, the throne of Sotona; and there where one sun stood since time began, like the shining eye of the Lord bestowing light and life, three suns, of dismal colors, infected and infernal, like three rotting teeth of Sotona, to satisfy his creditor and torturer.

  May the Almighty have mercy on his afflicted soul, and on my guiltless one....

  6. THE GREAT JOURNEY

  AT LAST, THE call to the Gathering was heard again.

  Three spheres were resting motionless on the top of a low hill, waiting for the other six,
scattered about the valley, in order to set off together, since only thus did the tribe move. A wind, sprung from some remote Round, bowed the supple blue blades of rochum, clothing them in swollen pollen dust and filling the in-terspaces with a myriad scents gathered on its long, winding voyage.

  Some scents were familiar to the spheres because they originated in their own Round, in the valley: the rank stench of sopirah, the mild refreshing fragrance of the thorny kootar, the rare precious breath of the hidden shimpra. From the swollen stems of the sopirah oozed a dense milky sap, good for healing wounds caused by reckless rolling over the bare, rocky slopes with their sparse covering of rochum. It alleviated other ailments too, including the aches brought on by autumn swellings. The reddish, friable bark of the kootar was used to stimulate convulsions during the spring triunions; but cautiously, because an overdose would produce a frenzy, a storm of passion, after which bursting would inevitably follow. Shimpra was the rarest, hidden in the most inaccessible crannies; all spheres, whatever else they might be doing hunted it because the sharp-tasting shimpra seeds, dried and rendered milder by rootlets of the ubiquitous rochum, opened the portals to the Great Journey. And the Great Journey took the spheres on wondrous expeditions to the other side, from which many of them never returned.

  The wind abounded in other odors, less familiar and less pungent because of the distance from which they came. Some were hot and bitter, others velvety or cloying. There were also fickle, changeable scents that came and went, leaving a feeling of unattainability and insubstantiality in their wake. The spheres did not know which herbs produced these whiffs of other Rounds beyond the boundaries of the valley.

  The boundaries were crossed only at the time of the Gathering, but the last Gathering had taken place in far-off times, countless cycles ago. The knowledge of it had long since faded from the collective memory of the tribe, so that none of its nine members could now rely on the experience of their predecessors to interpret the messages borne from afar on the odor-laden wind. From time immemorial, the tribe had had nine members. If a careless sphere burst in the spring at the climax of triune mating, succumbing to a kootar-induced state of uncontrollable rapture, or if another, high on shimpra, embarked on the Great Journey never to return, then the autumn swellings brought not only the regeneration of withered members of the tribe, but also the appearance of new ones to replace those lost, for each yearly cycle in the valley had to commence with nine spheres.

  Why nine, the spheres did not know. Numbers and their complex inter-relations did not concern this world of plant, scent, and wind, nor did they feel their lack. Quite simply, there were nine, just as there might have been three, or nine times nine. A sphere less or more—it was all the same, the valley had ample herbage for all: nourishing lomus, its yellow sporadically breaking up the ubiquitous blue of rochum; faintly-scented mirrana, the slightly acidic juices of which refreshed and invigorated; the brittle and very hot hoon, the stocky bushes of which were the only thing taller than the spheres; soft, speckled ameya from which was woven the night quarters and nests for triune matings; oolg, thin-leaved vorona, and silky pigeya the delicate summer fleece of which tended to stick to the rough bodies of the spheres like a decoration; gorola, and the olam that flowers for just one night in a cycle.... An endless diversity of plants, a planet-sized empire of herbs.

  Apart from herbs, the Great Journey, and the Gathering, little else mattered to the spheres.

  Since Gatherings occurred very seldom, they aroused neither curiosity nor impatience, only a vague awareness of the necessity to respond when the call came. But the Great Journey occurred at least once in each cycle, bringing with it strange experiences, fascinating and puzzling those members of the tribe who were unlucky in their hunt for shimpra or not brave enough to venture on a journey from which they might not return.

  The tales of the returnees, related in the series of soundless images in which the spheres communicated, told of curious things in distant Rounds that were truly alien: often without scent-dispersing winds, largely without herbs, even the blue rochum, primogenitor of all plants, and completely without tribes of spheres....

  Instead, the shared images spoke of swaying liquid expanses like endless fields of green mirrana juice; of sputtering hills, angry like hot-tasting hoon; of barren valleys where nothing ever grew, silted over with a dry powder similar to minute oolg seeds; of places where all the plants had been uprooted and replaced by unnaturally regular forms, though not as perfect as spheres. On no Great Journey did they ever encounter other spheres. The returnees brought back confusing images filled with different beings: malformed creatures who never rolled, although they did move, some much faster, through or above the varied terrain of other Rounds, creatures without any base or support of herbage, moving within the wind or above it. These other beings seemed indifferent to odors or deprived of the sense of them, although smells rose around them, mainly noxious and noisome vapors, with hardly a beneficial fragrance.

  Nor did they exchange mute images, but communicated in other ways, by sound, light, or touch, in a weird jumble of languages that the spheres could not penetrate.

  Some of the shimpra travelers opted not to return from the Great Journey, to stay in alien surroundings devoid of herbs and fragrant winds, without the tribe.

  What drove them to do this the spheres who had not taken the Great Journey could not understand, and this mystery set them to constantly hunting for shimpra in the hope of finding the answer on some new Great Journey. For the vanished spheres might be stuck in some fetid alien environment, longing to come home but for some reason unable to do so without the help of the tribe. Or perhaps they had finally found the Last Valley, where there was neither bursting nor swelling, where all the spheres who ever existed made up one great tribe, a place without boundaries, beyond all number, where all wind-borne scents could be easily recognized—all, that is, except the smell of shimpra, unneeded there since no one would ever set off on a Great Journey again.

  Suddenly, in the last few cycles, the images the returnees brought back from their Great Journeys had all began to look alike. They depicted the same alien Round, with a soft dusty carpet instead of herbage and a strange, tense wind redolent of odors neither pestilent nor mild, but simply different—and unsettling.

  And yet the gloomy space shown in the recent images was not entirely alien: for the first time on a Great Journey, other spheres appeared. There were only three, very large but unequal in size, high above the wind, where surely no spheres should have been.

  The three could not roll at such height, but rather floated over the dreary environment, dipping at regular intervals behind its edge, later to emerge anew from the opposite side, flooding the great valley with the colors of rochum, lomus, and kootar. The cycle was quite brief, lasting just one day, while triunion and the subsequent swelling must have taken place somewhere in the dark beyond the boundaries.

  The spheres were alert for soundless images from their remote, unknown kin, but no communication came. The three large spheres not only sent nothing but also did not receive any of the images transmitted by travelers eager for an answer. And yet, this alien place brimmed with images, but of such a nature that the travelers—and those who received their tales—could make nothing of them.

  The images showed the primal shape of all spheres—the circle. They came in all sizes and colors, interlocking circles, circles which shrank and expanded, grew out from each other or cancelled each other out. All this produced a drowsy, opiate effect, similar to that produced by the slender leaves of vorona, used to soothe the turmoil that followed triune mating.

  Only a traveler on the most recent Great Journey managed to discover the source of the sleep-inducing images of many colored changing circles, which had previously seemed to come from all directions in the Round of the three great spheres. The source was also a circle, inscribed in the dusty ground—a large, glittering circle the gentle color of rochum and smelling softly of ameya, with a rim absolute
ly impenetrable.

  The last shimpra-traveler, straining to make out what lay on the other side of the dazzling rim, source of the soporific alien images, had barely escaped being marooned in the spacious valley of the three spheres. The harder he tried, the faster the circles in the images whirled and fused, impelling him toward a sleep from which he knew there was no awakening. Although powerfully attracted to this sleep, which promised a bliss more complete than any offered by herbs, he tore himself away at the last moment, returning to relate in the silent language of images the most unusual of all the Great Journeys.

  The spheres gladly received the returnee's gift, one filling them with strange forebodings but offering irresistible challenge, too. Although they had always searched for shimpra, the spheres now devoted themselves entirely to doing so.

  They were impatient, full of desire that one of them should embark on another Great Journey as soon as possible, in the hope of penetrating farther, across the rim of the circle into the center of the dreamlike images. Everything else now seemed insignificant by comparison.

  Not quite everything, because no sooner had the spheres spread out over the valley, pushing aside the tall blades of rochum in the shade of which the small, stunted shimpra might hide, when a call rang out, a call that had not been heard for countless cycles, to which the tribe had to respond instantly: the call to a Gathering. The search for shimpra, however urgent, was abandoned at once.

  The three spheres that arrived first at the summit of the hill from which the rush to the Gathering always began waited motionless for the remaining six, whose search had taken them deeper into the valley, to join them. When the tribe finished assembling, they drew up in circular formation and rolled toward the distant boundary of the Round, down the bare slope of the rise, then across the thick carpet of rochum and lomus, which did not long retain the imprint of their passing.