The Fourth Circle (7 page)

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.

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 heads 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.

This was a new miracle, no less than all the foregoing ones, but these had so blunted my capabilities for amazement that I spent only a few moments staring at
the blank ceiling, no longer denied. I went back out into the courtyard, leaving behind the brethren who had rushed into the church to cross themselves and re-joice at yet another sign of salvation. Salvation, yes, for them, but not for my Master. What hope is there for servants, when their masters lose the battle? The inflexible finger of God had driven the dreaded Sotona back into the excrement of the underworld, and my Master was left alone to account to both of them.