The Fourth Circle

by Zoran Zivkovic

  The new visitors did not want to hurt anyone. Except for their rackety arrivals and departures, they were quiet and full of respect for the ancient holy objects.

  The only disturbance they made was brief, when their small black boxes flashed whitely in the darkness inside the temple. They did not stay long and often left presents, which undoubtedly had value in the world from which they came but meant nothing to monks in the heart of the jungle, beyond the influence of time.

  Then, all at once, time started to flow in the little shrine.

  2. THE HAUNTED CEILING

  DAMNED EVIL SPIRITS, may their seed be wiped out!

  To assail him now, out of season, when there is so much work to be done! The walls stand dry, waiting. This weather will not last, but still he does not stir.

  Withdrawn, wrapped up in himself, not a squeak out of him, something evil troubles him. He has eyes only for that, that thing of his up there, may it be accursed! The Unclean One, God forgive me, is after him; I see this, but I cannot help. The monachs notice it also, they look at us furtively; they suspect something, the long-robed ones, there is vrag's work here, they are remembering the stories that follow us. As soon as my back is turned, they murmur amongst themselves, whispering and shaking their heads. They think I do not see, but I see everything. I even see what they do when they think nobody is watching. Spawn of Sotona! I have been watching them all my life, the reprobates! Still, we make our living from them, so what do I care? It is not for me to pass judgment. There is One who will judge, and they will be the first to come before Him. Mine is to do my work. To look after the Master, to bring him food and materials, to be at his bidding, to mix the colors for him, prepare his brushes, put up the scaffolding, wash his shirts and small clothes, clean up after him, make his bed, and strive to please him, just so he may paint. But he has ceased to paint.

  The walls gape empty; soon it will be autumn. The iguman of the monastery is beginning to shake his head, but the Master cares not a jot. It was not like that before. I know him; I have spent almost half my life with him. He knew how to bend to his work, oh yes. To make everything sizzle. To use paints faster than I could make them. Clap your palms together, and there, the frescoes are finished.

  Beauty untold, that a man might just stand and look. How he can paint the Son of God and all the other saints! His Hrist is always different, the other brethren too, God forgive me, but Marya is always the same. He only saw her once, at the church fair while he was still apprenticed to the late Theophilus, may the earth lie lightly on him. I know, I was already with him by then, but he will not admit that it is she. But what's the harm? And he forgets nothing. What he sees once, what his eye captures, comes out of his hand, identical to the last hair. Sotona's gift, not God's, but let that be. Once he became known, everybody started calling for us. There is no monastery in these parts we have not painted. We traveled north, too, to the great rivers, and even the godless people asked for us, may the vrag wipe out their seed. Quick he is, and good, powerfully good. No better Master than he, but when he is painting, God save us, something takes hold of him, as if all the vrags of Hell were chasing him. He never gets tired. Sometimes he almost begins to foam at the mouth. Behind the pillars, the monachs hide, watching him covertly and crossing themselves. Easy for them to make the sign of the cross; it is not they who bear the brunt, but I. I used to bless myself too in the beginning, but a man becomes indifferent, hardened, with no time for making the sign of the cross.

  And then a moment comes when there is no work to be done, when the weather is not dry and the frescoes will not stick to the foundation, and he is another man. As good as gold. Does not make me do anything. Takes everything nice and easy. Is willing to do my work. Sees that I have grown old, so he even brings me my food. I tell him not to do that when others are looking, not to bring shame on us. He laughs at that, caring nothing for the bad opinion of others. We have long talks then. He can speak as well as he paints and is a joy to listen to. Not that I understand everything. Though about his watching people, I do. He likes to stand aside in some corner and watch, at gatherings and fairs, all the livelong day.

  Looks around at people, cattle, tents, green fields, and hills. Draws a figure or two in charcoal, but mostly commits them to memory. Later I recognize the peasants in the frescoes. Isus is that ragged boy selling a cow, God forgive me, or the fire-swallower outside his tent. His saints are mostly horse dealers or cattle drovers, God save us. Only Marya does not change; she too was a little peasant girl, dried up like a prune by now and snag-toothed I shouldn't wonder, but on the walls she does remain the same as then. And on so many! Nobody knows, so nobody complains about it. If the igumans knew, they would chase us to Hell itself. God knows, for He knows everything, but what's the harm? It does not bother Him. Or maybe He has begun to punish him for it now? May Heaven have mercy on us if that is so.

  There are other things beyond my understanding too. Come autumn, when the rain pours down without stopping, something gets into him, like sorrow, but different. He becomes pensive, discouraged, talks about evil spirits, small and green, who crawl into his head, troubling and tormenting him from inside, addling his brain. They insist that he must do something, I don't know what, he cannot explain, but he resists, albeit feebly, does not succumb to the vrags, damn them, who give him no peace, even in his sleep. In the night I see him turning and sweating, tossing in his bed, then with a yell he awakens and looks at me in bewilderment, does not recognize me, waves his arms around, drives me away from him, as if I myself were, God forbid, one of the goblins. But this runs its course and passes. The weather changes, snows fall, and the evil spirits run away. Seems they do not like whiteness. In it, their tracks might remain. No hiding this from the peasants at whose houses we spend the night, they see all, hear all. Later they catch me alone and question me in a roundabout sort of way, so as not to wrong the Master, but still afraid of a curse falling on their house, of the Archfiend who might befoul their hearth. And I say to them: it is nothing, the Master has a fever, so he raves like a child burning with illness, the air is not good for him here, or the water, who knows? They accept this, without grumbling, but I see they are relieved when we leave. They burn tamyan in the house and call the priest to expel the evil from their home.

  Through the priests, stories of evil spirits reached the monasteries, so the igumans summon us from time to time. But the Master can discourse, none better, and he turns all in our favor and the igumans even apologize to us in the end, though still they send the robed ones to spy on us while we sleep, to see if the vrags will appear. But there are no evil spirits while the Master is painting.

  Another kind of fever shakes him then, and he sleeps like the dead, God forgive me. The spirits will come only when he is idle, with the autumn.

  So it was until this summer. But now, for the first time, they are early. The vrags' spawn, may their seed be forever lost! They disturb him, but in a different way, not as before. No raving at night, nor awakening on fire. He stays silent all the time and speaks not one word, talks with no one. The walls call out to him, for this season is nearing its end, but he does not take up his work. But, no, that is not true, he is doing something. He commanded me to construct the scaffolding up to the vaulted ceiling and stretch canvas all around so that no one from below could see what he is doing. I ask why, when he never did any such thing before, but he says only, "Be quiet and do as I say." I do, and he closes himself in there, lets nobody peep in, not even me, comes down for the colors himself. And the colors are strange, such as he has never sought before, all of them bright: blue, scarlet, yellow.

  I itched to see what he is painting, how could I not? And the monachs pressed me, insisting on hearing it from me, as they could not from him. Now, I do not care for the robed ones, but then again, if the Unclean One has come at last to claim his own from the Master, as one day he surely will, and if in some way this should become known, then nothing can save me either; so maybe I had better go along w
ith the monachs, perhaps in that way I shall save myself. But it is not easy, for there is no opportunity. He has begun even to eat and sleep up there. And his sleep is light, startled by every rustling sound. Then, I think to myself, he is but human, he must relieve himself—though he can hold it for a long, long time. I know him, he can even go without eating, just in order to stay up there. And yet, tonight he came down. He thought there was nobody about; the robes were at prayer, and me he does not count. So I climbed up....

  3. SUNFLOWERS AND DECIMALS

  THE SHINING DISH of the radio telescope turned soundlessly above the empty landscape like a gigantic sunflower, following a distant stellar system, its slow, unerring advance across the arch of the sky reflecting the steady rotation of the small planet. The meager vegetation, which grew only in the remote equatorial belt, did not include sunflowers, so that a local observer would not have noticed the resemblance. That no longer mattered anyway, since not a single member of the race that built the complex antenna now remained on this small world.

  What had become of those architects of high technology—whether their species had died out, left the home planet, or perhaps evolved into a higher life form that had lost interest in the electronic toys of their childhood— the program controlling the great telescope neither knew nor cared. It had been set to function quite independently, not a difficult achievement in view of the simplicity of the task it performed.

  The telescope monitored radio signals from a trinary system toward which it was permanently directed, thanks to a particularly favorable position in the heavens of that distant cosmic archipelago and to the equally favorable tilt of the axis of the small planet, near the southern pole of which the complex was located. Nor did the program controlling the system know why it was focused on that almost invisible point in the sky, or why its creators had chosen this particular frequency over many others to monitor the weak radio signals arriving continuously in this now uninhabited world after a journey of eleven and a half light years.

  Nobody had thought it necessary to explain to the program why its constructors considered that one day it would receive a signal completely different from the natural background noise, which was all the telescope had registered from the day it was activated. Radio noise was particularly strong on this frequency, since it was also used by the most abundant element in the cosmos; the receiver had therefore to be extremely sensitive in order to distinguish the signal, hopelessly muffled amid the cacophony of the rest of the Universe, as emanating from the star system on which it eavesdropped. But the vanished architects would not have gone to the trouble of building this monument to high technology if they could not have assured the perfect sensitivity of the receiver.

  Sensitivity, however, was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the success of the enterprise. Equally important was durability. The constructors may not have known exactly when the expected signal would come, but they were somehow sure that it eventually would; why else would they have so confidently fixed the only such apparatus on the planet on that one celestial target?

  The waiting might come to an end very soon, or last for eons. In any case, the durability of the telescope complex had to be in accordance with the latter possibility. The vanished wizards of technology had bravely accepted the challenge of defying the second law of thermodynamics, endowing their radio ear with patience on a cosmic scale.

  They also gave it a matrix that would enable it to determine when the task was completed. The program compared all signals received with this matrix in order to detect a regularity that could not be the result of random natural processes. The designers of this program of eavesdropping on a faraway trinary—which in the sky of this small planet was part of an elaborate constellation irresistibly reminiscent of a cross to the inhabitants of another, almost equally distant cosmic island—knew precisely what to expect. They could have chosen many other matrixes just as capable of differentiating cosmic noise from the indications of intelligence, but of them all, they chose this one.

  All such matrixes are based on a universal mathematical sequence, easily expressed in binary code, such as, for instance, the progression of prime numbers, or any of the general physical constants. Although any one of these would undoubtedly point to the existence of a highly developed intelligence, the controlling program would have remained completely uninterested even if it had discovered one. The programmers were not interested in just any cosmic intelligence, no matter how developed; they wanted one in particular, and the matrix was so prepared.

  The sequence contained in the matrix reflected a basic mathematical ratio—that of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. However great or small these two quantities might be, the proportion of one to the other remains constant throughout the cosmos. Mathematicians in various worlds usually noticed this unique relationship early on and because it is a transcendental number, designated it by exotic symbols, among which π was one of the less inventive. The infinite decimal expansion of π induced the mathematics of a small percentage of societies in the cosmos to leave the safe harbor of rationality for the stormy seas of mysticism. While the cults and sects associated with the number π could not in consequence look forward to a technological future, they were not unduly concerned by this. The inhabitants of sturdy mathematical seaports, in the safe environment of developed science, did not know what it was that these navigators of troubled spiritual waters received in exchange (if anything), nor could they comprehend the total lack of concern of the mystics for the undeniable advantages and comforts of technological civilization.

  The main program of the telescope complex did not know why its creators favored the π matrix over all others that could have differentiated, with equal success, an intelligent signal from cosmic babble. Like other unknown facts about the vanished programmers, this preference failed to arouse its curiosity. Eager-ness to know was by no means one of the features with which it had been endowed.

  Although lacking curiosity, the program excelled in industriousness. Designed to be hardworking and thorough to a fault, from the moment it was activated, it amplified and converted weak radio signals on the selected frequency from the three-star system into binary sequence and compared it with its matrix.

  The matrix contained 3,418,801 decimals, a deliberate super-redundance. The probability that any natural process could produce by mere chance—on any frequency, over very long periods, anywhere in the Universe—a radio signal the binary expansion of which would equal π even to the twentieth place was virtually nil. But clearly the builders of the telescope complex cared for their project too much to leave anything to chance. The enormous speed of the computer in which the comparative matrix was stored allowed them this extravagance.

  The time that had elapsed meant nothing to the program, because it had no awareness of the past. Its vigil over the radio whispers arriving from eleven and a half light years away had nonetheless been a lengthy one, long even by the standards of the great chronometers of galactic rotation. During that vast interval, the signals received never corresponded to the comparative matrix beyond the second place. The program ignored these random coincidences, just as it would have ignored a signal that coincided with all except the very last of the 3,418,801

  decimals of π. What the program waited for with cosmic patience was perfect, total correspondence with the matrix.

  And when that finally occurred and there was no doubt it would—the in-terstellar eavesdropping program would feel neither relief nor triumph. With the perfect indifference with which it had waited for eons, the program would activate a new sub-routine. What would happen then, whether the new sub-routine would order the radio-telescope to be shut down for conservation until further notice or whether it would assign the complex a new duty, farsigh-tedly prepared by its vanished creators—of this the program had no knowledge.

  This ignorance, however, would not fill it with anxiety. Incapable of any emotion, from gladness to curiosity or fear, the program did not co
ncern itself with the uncertainties of the future.

  4. TURTLES AND RAMA

  IT WAS NEVER quite clear which of Srinavasa's loves was the older: that of religion or that of computers.

  He himself never separated the two. To him they were merely different aspects of the same devotion. One could not exist without the other, he would ar-gue. How could new, electronic worlds be built in the wonderland behind the screen without a profound perception of God and the example He offered? It was not a matter of good and evil—the god for whom he had opted was beyond such irrelevant categories—it was a matter of perfection. To plunge into the depths of computer programming represented a new, as yet unpaved, road leading to the achievement of perfection.

  Those who knew him only superficially were startled by his sudden decision to leave the great university where an eminent career awaited him in the Department of Computer Science, which was of good repute and known to have supplied major companies in the East for decades with the best gray matter available. Although the sums paid for this commodity were fabulous, the returns on the investment were, as a rule, many times greater. The world was already becoming one vast megacomputer.

  The few who had the opportunity to know Srinavasa more closely were surprised only because they had expected him to make the move earlier. His Buddhism, regarded with surprise or even ridicule in his early student days, soon came to be accepted, as respect grew for his skill with computers—a skill many tended to identify with wizardry—as part, perhaps the core, of his unusual personality.

  His devotion to Buddhism did not manifest itself externally, as was only fitting. Srinavasa's devotion manifested itself in a peculiar reserve, in a tendency to retreat into himself, in long spells of solitude, in a sometimes painful search for concentration. He would emerge from his meditations not only with the rewards of religion but also—in fact more frequently—with fundamentally new insight into computer science. This made him famous as the first "applied Buddhist," an appellation he just shrugged off.