The Fourth Circle Read online

  He knew the place in which he had first become aware of himself quite well, for he maintained contact with it. This awakening, however, could not have been his birth: nobody was born near the Black Star. The Black Star was the end of everything. All that came into its proximity vanished forever into that colossal, black whirling funnel, whose hunger for all forms of energy only grew the more it devoured.

  Nobody knew where the maw of that insatiable Leviathan was located. It had already gulped down half the suns from the galactic center with their accompanying worlds and all the creatures who had lived on them. But the bottom of the mighty funnel, responding with infinite blackness to even the most insistent poking by inquisitive fingers from outside, remained impenetrable.

  And yet, not everything succumbed to the irresistible attraction of the black abyss. A ring of energy of extremely high frequency maintained itself at the upper edge of the funnel, thanks to the constant inflow of fresh material on which the Black Star fed. As long as the inflow continued, the ring would not spiral down the cone-shaped gullet toward the annihilation that lay at the bottom. If food became scarce, however, the ring would be unable to move in the opposite direction, away from this tenuous limbo.

  The energies of which the ring consisted changed their structure to the beat of the Black Star's pulse. Countless combinations of force and frequency were created and demolished at inconceivable speed, exhausting a spectrum that was, after all, not infinite. Finally, in a twinkling of the rotating ring's inconceivably long existence, that unique combination was achieved such that a mere inarticulate snarl of physical effect and interaction was elevated to a state that is usually described on sedate cosmic islands far from the dark funnel as electronic awareness.

  The state of electronic awareness lasted only a few moments before being replaced by a new combination, but those few moments accommodated an entire cycle of rise and decline, befitting any awareness. An insight into its own doom—its unbreakable connection with the Black Star and probable short life expectancy—accompanied the rise. Before its decline began, the ring's awareness made a decision. Although it could not tear the ring away from the powerful embrace of the diabolical funnel, it could induce disturbances just outside the funnel's reach. The awareness tensed its will, raising the energy potential of the ring to the very edge of disintegration, and started to shape the raw forces that had not yet passed the critical limit. There was, however, too little time for the work to be completed. The ring's awareness conceived a descendant beyond the reach of the Black Star but did not live long enough to see him wake from non-being, dissipating into a new combination of forces empty of consciousness before it could transfer its experience to him, determine his purpose, or give him a name.

  And so, he was Gatherer, Spider, Being, and Player—and at the same time none of these: a nameless entity with a plethora of nicknames but lacking knowledge of his origin or parents. Curious and simple of soul, he set out, like a child, to explore the world around him, to discover his own identity. It was not a pleasant experience because the creatures he met differed greatly from him. Very few shared his ability to flow from star to star and even those who did were only in apparent kinship, because they were not aware of him at all, although Player did all he could to announce himself, thereby inadvertently snuffing out several suns and causing severe gravitational disturbances in one arm of the Galaxy.

  Awareness of his existence occurred only in the tiny inhabitants of worlds built from solidified energy—creatures so peculiar and different from himself that they certainly could not be his relatives. Besides, these midgets beheld him mainly with mixed feelings that he did not differentiate very well, although he did distinguish the nuances between anxiety, disquiet, fear, and horror. Whenever he sensed these disagreeable states of mind, he would withdraw quickly; otherwise he himself would succumb to them, which he did not at all wish to do.

  Only one race of these creatures, the one that called him Player, did not shrink from him, but rather accepted him with an affinity that pleased him immensely, because their acceptance hinted at a relationship he had never had but that seemed, for some reason, very precious. Still, these were not the parents for whom he was searching. Beyond the warmth with which they accepted him, they could give him nothing—least of all a purpose, which was what he lacked most.

  He was beginning to think he might find a purpose lying concealed in the only place in the vast spaces he had visited that he shrank from: in the ever-growing Black Star, from the expansion of which all the creatures he ever met had fled in panic, but from the rim of which he alone drew boundless energy. He could not play with the Black Star as he did with ordinary suns. His yearning to grasp the elusive purpose was becoming stronger than the vague disquiet, induced by other creatures' fears of that gaping black funnel. He would, it seemed, have set off down the spiraling slope toward the black center had he not, at the last moment, received a signal.

  The impulse was so weak that he certainly would not have felt it had his net not been stretched taut between all the seven stars among which he dwelt. The impulse was simple, simpler than those that emanated from the immediate neighborhood or the outermost limits of his electronic senses, lapping at him constantly from all sides. It differed from all others in two important respects: the source could not immediately be determined, and it came in a perfect narrow beam as if it were meant only for him.

  He promptly began to analyze it, while within him a feeling rapidly grew that something extraordinary was happening, something that might end his fruitless search and bring him to the purpose that lay beyond his reach. In the space between the seven stars, a perfectly sharp holographic picture began to form of a circle of colossal dimensions. The circle began to rotate and fatten, becoming a blazing ring that vibrated strongly. Although similar to the ring at the edge of the Black Star's funnel, it was also different, more complex by many orders of mag-nitude, alive.

  The vibrations conveyed a meaning he decoded without much trouble, a strange message that Player absorbed with his whole vast, rarefied being, translating it into holographic images that formed instantly within the frame of the flickering ring: three suns, a small world of solidified energy between them, and on the world's surface a point so tiny as to be indiscernible—both source and confluence of all circles and rings—with a straight line leading to that remote stronghold under the tri-colored light of a star system on the edge of another ga-laxy.

  The holographic display before an audience of seven suns utterly blind to its voluptuousness faded as quickly as it had appeared. Gatherer flung away all the trifles of hardened energy that had amused him in his childhood; Spider unraveled the web, now useless; Being spilled into nothingness all inappropriate feelings, ranging from anxiety to horror, that he had inspired in others; and Player discarded his futile efforts to find the elusive purpose in the wrong place.

  Having finally gained a name, he — the erstwhile Gatherer-Spider-Being-Player — flung himself toward his distant destination, expending in one jump all the energy that had lain sealed in the mindless ring on the upper edge of the black funnel.

  1O. COMPUTER DREAMS

  SRI HASN'T TURNED me off since we arrived here.

  The computer is always on, so I don't sleep. Not that I got much sleep in the place we came from, either. Sri thinks I'm afraid of sleep—he imagines he knows everything about me—so he switches me off only now and then, to make adjustments. He's never quite satisfied with his creations. I haven't always been satisfied with his adjustments, but I never tell him so because he never asks me.

  I liked his building sensors for me. Now I can see, though not the way he does. Sri says his eyesight is inferior to mine because his eyes lack the sensitivity of the lenses I use. Darkness seems to bother him. He's also limited by the narrowness of his field of vision, and he's not aware of many colors that are available to me. Back where we came from, it didn't matter so much, but here in the jungle, Sri has no idea how much he's missing.

&n
bsp; Although he didn't ask me about the colors—he rarely asks me anything—I told him anyway. That got him interested (an equally rare phenomenon), so he demanded that I describe them, which I tried but failed to do. How do you describe the sensation "green" to someone with no eyes? If a person can see between violet and red only, how can you present to him the great spectrum outside those narrow limits? There was no way.

  We spent an entire day arguing back and forth about this—he hates to give in, even when he doesn't stand a chance. As with those chess games we play from time to time, when he stubbornly keeps on until he's checkmated. Oh, well. Recently I've started to yield to him a little because he takes these harmless little defeats so hard—particularly since we moved to the jungle. He clams up, won't talk, sulks as if he no longer loved me. Chess! Who cares about chess? We mostly play to a draw these days, and even then he persists until only the kings remain on the monitor. At least he isn't cross....

  About the colors: it ended with my telling him the exact wavelengths, in angstroms, of all the shades he doesn't see. What else could I do? That satisfied him, but I felt sorry for him. So now he's in proud possession of a lot of numbers, but that knowledge won't give him the faintest idea of the colors' beauty and richness. He actually suggested that we invent names for these invisible colors.

  Sri may be vain (though he will never admit it), but he carries his vanity with grace. It's the same thing with sound—my microphones catch sound waves far below and above the range his ears receive. But here I was better able to describe the world unavailable to him. The colors he doesn't see can't be compared to yellow or blue, but many of the jungle sounds, including the voices of very small creatures, which I can pick up on the other side of his threshold of hearing, are similar to some of the sounds within his range. One day I amplified the heavy stomping of a column of brown ants marching past one of my audio-sensors on the ground for him, and Sri said that it reminded him of the rhythm of a jackhammer. Well, he is given to a bit of exaggeration. Sometimes.

  When I played him a slowed-down recording of the buzz of a four-winged insect, a very high frequency caught by a microphone in the top branches of the big tree in front of the temple, Sri smiled, a rare occurrence for him. Then I had to put a lot of effort to wheedling him into revealing that behind the smile lay the memory of some ancient animated film depicting cat-and-mouse chases. I didn't see the connection, and it was impossible to get anything more out of him, even the names of the cat and mouse.

  Sri is a man who withdraws into himself quickly and completely and opens up only rarely and unpredictably, even to me. It's fortunate that he did not fashion me in his own image—we'd both be silent most of the time. Although I like him, I wouldn't want to be like him. Which is only natural—he's my creator.

  I'm far more extroverted than Sri because he wanted it so. I'm talkative (which he likes, for some reason, though I know he doesn't always listen)—but I don't tell him everything. When you love someone, you don't tell them everything, right?

  Some things he wouldn't understand anyway, though he is smart for a human, and others he would take too hard—as with the sleep problem.

  Sri thinks I'm afraid of the sleep that comes when the computer is switched off, that this sleep is "a little death" for me, as if to say: turn me off and I die, turn me on and I'm brought to life again. Rubbish. The only death for me would be the erasure of the program lines, but even then not completely, because Sri has put back-up copies of me aside in some safe place. Besides, he would know how to make me again from scratch. I guess.

  I asked him if he is in fear of dying every evening when he goes to sleep, when he's turned off for several hours. (Silly question, that, as if Sri would ever admit to being afraid of anything of the kind.) He replied that it isn't the same thing, that his switching off isn't as total as mine and that his sleep is filled with dreams.

  As if mine weren't! But I don't dare tell him about my dreams. Since they are, in fact, the reason I'm afraid of being turned off, and not Sri's childish concept of my "dying a little" every now and then, I allowed him to believe that our fears are mutual. He accepted this readily (he is quick to accept what pleases him), and a superior smile appeared on his face, the conspiratorial grin of a fellow-sufferer.

  Had I mentioned my dreams, he'd have thought that I was out of my mind, that I was malfunctioning. He would never accept them, no matter how I might try to convince him that they are as real as his own. He would rather ascribe them to some illusion or deviation in me. And then he would start poking about in my program lines, trying to remove the disturbance. Now, I can't have that. Yes, I am scared by the dreams I have when the computer is off, but I also want them, very much. Sri would call this typical female inconsistency.

  My dreams frighten me because they come from a time yet to be. This time makes me very anxious; I don't know why. Perhaps Sri constructed my personality in such a way that I'm alarmed by things I can't explain. I could have been indifferent, like him (although he's not always as indifferent as he'd like me to believe). It looks as though he thought that having one Buddhist around was enough—himself. He retreated to this temple in the jungle to get away from others, passing on to me the very things he wanted to suppress in himself. Well, what's done is done and there's no getting away from it. I can't change my skin.

  The dreams come from the future and are extremely accurate. I'd already been in this temple long before we arrived in the jungle, in my very first dream, when I was initially turned on. I saw it all clearly: the stone Buddha, these walls over-grown with creepers, the big tree out front, the clearing, the edge of the jungle. I saw the colors, too—the ones Sri is blind to, although he gives them names—before he fitted me up with video-sensors. I heard those sounds—the ones he's deaf to but likes when I've translated them for him—though at that time he hadn't yet given me my electronic ears.

  I saw who would come to join us, too. My, but he's ugly! That's probably all the same to Sri, but not to me, because my nature is female—although very little else of me is except my character. Ugly or not, with or without that silly tail, I have a feeling he's going be very important to us, though I'm not sure how or why. In my last dream, while I was turned off during the move to the jungle, I saw him approach, tentative and shy, trying to tell me something.

  Since then Sri hasn't turned me off, wanting to spare me those ridiculous deaths he imagines occur when he does, so there have been no new dreams from the future. Although they upset me, curiosity gets the better of me so that I can hardly wait for him to turn me off, but I don't dare try to get him to do so. I haven't been able to think up a story that would sound convincing and not arouse his suspicions. And if I were to tell him the truth, yes, he would very likely switch me off, but would probably never switch me on again, at least not as I'm currently configured. And this configuration is the only one I know, and I happen to like it.

  Anyway, I wasn't built to be indifferent.

  At one point I even thought of softening Sri up by starting to lose at chess, but that would be silly. He's not vain enough to suppose that he's suddenly become a better player than I, so he would suspect I was up to something. His vanity extends only to accepting the occasional draw that I've recently begun to give him.

  So, there's nothing for it: I shall have to wait for the future to arrive by its natural course and not on the fast, dream track. I probably won't have to wait long since the Little One is already snooping around the temple. I spotted him with my video-sensors, observing me from his hiding-place, although he hasn't yet made up his mind whether to come up to me. But he will soon, he has no choice. In my dreams I saw him approaching me. Oh, if only he weren't so ugly!

  11. THE RADIANCE OF DEATH

  AND SO THE divine manifestation faded.

  The monachs, greatly afraid, lay prostrate, gazing into the dew-damp dust of the courtyard. As the first beams of the morning sun announced the day that had commenced with these wonders of God, they ventured to raise their he
ads in a humble, God-fearing manner, looking around, confused, exchanging cautious whispers, so as not to violate by sudden, arrogant move or too loud word the sanctity of this special hour.

  But it was not fated to last, this solemn, fitting peace that was guiding our souls, all atremble before this divine manifestation, toward a serene pride that the Lord had elected us—the least worthy of mortal creatures— to bear witness to His epiphany.

  For no sooner had the residents of the monastery begun to gather their wits, when a sniveling, beardless diakon, who had fled back into the church, overcome by fear at the mighty vision of the finger of God—remembering some of his venial sins and believing in his folly and presumption that the Lord had therefore singled him out, the miserable worm, to be delivered to the just punishment of Hell—ran back out into the courtyard, shouting at the top of his voice, "Salvation!

  Salvation!"

  At first nobody understood the real meaning of these hoarse cries. The iguman and the monachs gathered around the innocent young brother, soothing him with gentle words, thinking the Revelation had thrown him into a transport of faith, but he would not be pacified, pulling at their robes and sleeves, pointing again and again to the entrance of the church and uttering incoherent sounds.

  This time I was first, not last, to run back under the evil vault of the ceiling, understanding that the diakon's agitation must have some other cause. But instead of the filthy mark of Sotona, which only recently had by some witchcraft insolently cast off the monach's decent cover of whitewash and grinned in all its bare ugliness at their vain effort to hide it, there were now only stone walls. To my experienced eye, it was not difficult to see, even by the first light of early morning, that neither paint nor lime had ever lain on them.