The Fourth Circle by Zoran Zivkovic, Mary Popović Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Although he didn't ask me about the colors—he rarely asks me