Authors: Zoran Živković,Mary Popović
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Fantasy, #Fantasy Fiction, #Literary, #Comics & Graphic Novels, #Visionary & Metaphysical
The Fourth Circle
The Fourth Circle
THE
FOURTH
CIRCLE
ZORAN ŽIVKOVIC
THE MINISTRY OF WHIMSY PRESS TAL—
LAHASSEE, FLORIDA 2.004
MINISTRY OF WHIMSY PRESS
Ministry Editorial Offices:
POB 4248
Tallahassee, FL 32.315
USA mini-
Ministry of Whimsy Press is an imprint of: Night
Shade Books: 3623 SWBaird Street Portland, OR
Copyright © 2004 Zoran Zivkovic Translated from the Serbian by Mary Popovic
Cover Art Copyright © 2004 K. J. Bishop Cover Design by Garry Nurrish Interior Design by Juha Lindroos Editor: John Klima
([email protected])
Set in Sabon
ABOUT THE MINISTRY OF WHIMSY
Founded in 1984 by Jeff VanderMeer, the Ministry of Whimsy takes its name from the ironic double-speak of Orwell's novel. The Ministry is committed to promoting high quality fantastical, surreal, and experimental literature. In 1997, the Ministry published the Philip K. Dick Award-winning
The Troika.
In more recent years, its flagship anthology series,
Leviathan,
has won the World Fantasy Award, and been a finalist for the Philip K.
Dick Award, and the British Fantasy Award.
Trade Hardcover ISBN: 1-892389-65-7 Limited
Edition
ISBN:
1-892389-66-5
Contents
CIRCLE THE FIRST
2. THE HAUNTED CEILING
12
4. TURTLES AND RAMA 20
5.
A PACT WITH HELL
23
10.
COMPUTER DREAMS
41
12.
STAR SONG
49
CIRCLE THE SECOND
2. HEAVENLY ASCENSION
62
3.
NOLI TANGERE. ..
66
5.
NUDITY DIVINE
75
7.
NIGHTMARE
84
10.
BIRTH
98
11.
A DREAM ASTONISHING
103
12.
CASABLANCA
106
CIRCLE THE THIRD
121
127
2. INTO THE KINGDOM OF THE UNDERWORLD
131
3. SHERLOCK HOLMES'S LAST CASE (I): THE LETTER
146
6. SHERLOCK HOLMES'S LAST CASE (2): GHOST
163
9. SHERLOCK HOLMES'S LAST CASE (3): MORPHINE
180
12. SHERLOCK HOLMES'S LAST CASE (4): FLAMES
188
EPILOGUE
192
1. VISITOR
197
2. THE BOOK
294
3. VANISHED
211
216
5. LIGHT
235 AFTERWORD
Despite some superficial resemblances, the universe of the Circles is not the universe we know. By analogy, none of its inhabitants should ever be confused with those of our own, even when they happen to bear names we may find familiar. In particular, those known to their contemporaries as Archimedes of Syracuse, Ludolf van Ceulen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Nikola Tesla, and Stephen Hawking are in no way to be confused with such of their analogues as may be known to us, for they are different in motivation and cast of mind: analogues, not avatars.
THE CIRCLE.
He is here because of the Circle. The Circle is the only thing that matters, the only thing that makes sense. Other questions, which flash occasionally into his mind, fail to even make him wonder.
They should, though, for nothing is as it ought to be.
Not this ground he walks on...dry, dusty, sterile, yet yielding underfoot like a thick carpet of grass, responding with unexpected and inexplicable elasticity to his strangely altered weight, although he cannot make out whether he is now heavier or lighter. No matter, he will get the answers upon reaching the Circle, if the questions retain any importance by then.
In the background, the night sky creates alien arabesques. Wrong stars form wrong constellations. Strangely, this does not unsettle him, nor does his vague awareness that for some reason he ought to be unsettled before this vista of irre-gularly spangled, arching blackness. He has an inkling that his sangfroid is connected to things he used to do, in some other place, in a different time, but the necessity of the Circle has almost severed him from his own past.
Almost, though not quite.
His memories reach back to the moment when he started to walk toward the Circle. Two suns were lying low in an orange sky: one large, the color of dying coals; the other very small, but fiercely bright. The little sun stood very close above the great one, so that at the moment of sunset, they looked like two connected spheres plunging into an ocean of dust.
He knew, though he could not explain how, that the system had a third member also, one he had not yet seen. (The Circle relies on a minimum of three bases, does it not?) The massive body of the planet hid all three suns now, but the third one would soon emerge from the opposite side, behind his back, and he had to get to the Circle by then.
He turned around once, while the horizon was still awash in the pink afterglow, but saw no footprints behind him in the pliant dust, though one segment of his mind told him they had to be there. This obvious necessity was overtaken by another, older one—the necessity of the Circle, the necessity that
said that everybody must arrive at the Circle in his or her own way, without following any previous trail.
He did not know what the Circle looked like, but that did not worry him unduly. He would recognize it as soon as he saw it. Nor did he know whether he would be the first there, or whether the others had already arrived. It did not matter. First or last, it was all the same—only together could they close the Circle.
Whenever he started to think about this, in the darkness softened by the monotonous glow of alien constellations, new abysses of ignorance yawned around him. But this did not deter him from his forced march forward, nor did it disturb him much.
How many of them would there be? Three, like the number of suns in this system? A reasonable assumption, but the Circle could be based on seven points too. Or on nine. Which number stood above all others, creating the basis and a sufficient condition for the Circle? Perhaps One? No, nobody could close the Circle alone. In any case, he would soon learn.
Since the ground was perfectly flat all the way to the distant range of hills rising somewhere behind the horizon, darkness did not slow his pace. He could not see it, but he knew the range was there, just as he knew about the third sun.
There were no rocks to trip him up, nor crevasses to fall into. He might have thought that the ground had been deliberately cleared for him, had he not known that no path leads to the Circle. And yet, he could not dispel the feeling that the terrain was just so, to make this walk easier for him. He sensed the influence of a purpose behind it but could not fathom it.
For a moment he wondered how, if it were situated behind the range of hills, he could possibly reach the Circle before dawn. He was not advancing fast enough to outrun the third sun. Then he rejected even that thought. The Circle had to be closed before the blue light of that sun splashed over the edge of the world behind his back. Therefore, he would arrive there soon.
Low stars, the muted sheen of which barely revealed the outline of the horizon before him, seemed strange, and not only because they were unfamiliar. Although he had been aware of this strangeness since they first lit up in the heavens, only now did it arouse his curiosity. Perhaps the proximity of the Circle was stirring the propensity to wonder, which lies at the root of all knowledge; as yet, however, he could find no answers.
The stars did not twinkle. Their radiance was steady and even, as if he were watching them from space, as if, between his eyes and the stars, there were no ocean of air with alterations and turbulence to produce a fitful sparkling in those faraway suns.
Maybe indeed there was no ocean. The idea that he was walking in an airless world, with no defense whatsoever against the vacuum, did not fill him with panic. His faculty of wonder somewhat restored, he continued to consider it in a detached sort of way, as if the issue did not relate to him personally, as if he were only an idle cosmologist, building in a free flight of demiurgic imagination some new, odd model of a universe the complex equations of which allowed such departures as an unprotected walk across a planet without air.
Just for a moment he wondered why this comparison of himself with a cosmologist had struck him. A fragment of thought tried to burrow upwards from the sealed-off memory into his consciousness but was soon extinguished in the depths far below the surface, leaving him with a dull feeling of non-fulfillment and unattainability. Then his thoughts were directed again at the unblinking stars.
Something did not fit. If this world were devoid of atmosphere, how could he be breathing? He had no answer, at least none that he was ready to accept. He could not accept that he was not breathing, that in fact he had ceased to breathe, for that would mean that he was dead. The notion of death brought back the awareness of the Circle, and in that awareness was no room for endings. The Circle was always a beginning, never an end. Even when you reached the end of it, you had in fact arrived at a new beginning.
There was another thing that did not conform to the obvious lack of atmosphere. Sounds were reaching his ears. At first he thought he was hearing the rustle of wind, a filtered echo of gales in the upper strata of this nonexistent air. Then the whooshing softened and became more monotonous. Many strides later, he recognized in it an unmistakable rhythm, that of sea waves bouncing off the crumbling rocks of some savage shore.
The perception of that sound did not last long, either. The regularity of the rhythm of the waves began to grow, and the sound became more complex.
Higher harmonies, variations of the basic tone in other registers, oblique motifs.
No longer a cacophony, a mere sum of random noise, the sound became a deliberate structure, a coherence of carefully chosen tones: music.
Deprived of memory, he could not recognize the melody, and yet it awakened something in him, something close to delight but more restrained. Perhaps the reason was to be found in the circularity of the main theme. A rondo was quite appropriate for this place and time, a tonal background for his approach to the Circle.