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

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.)