Viscous Circle (6 page)

Her belief in the Band afterlife was imperfect, evidently, despite her protestations. Maybe in trying to convince him she was also shoring up her own belief, much as a Band shored up his physical substance by passing through the volcanic tunnel. "Still, there is little hope of resolving this matter quickly. You would be obliged to spend a lot of time with me."

"Does that disturb you?" Her yellow dimmed; she had been rebuffed before. "I would not want to impose."

Rondl had to think seriously and quickly. Cirl had volunteered to stay close to him indefinitely. Was this what he wanted? He really had very little basis to decide what he desired. He realized he might be making a mistake, but decided to go with his subjective impression. "I would be delighted. I seem to have no purpose, alone, and I enjoy receiving your flashes."

She was as delighted upon reassurance as only uncertain individuals could be. "Then I will help you. I think the Viscous Circle dictated this to be. It brought us together. You need someone with memory to assist you; I need someone who needs my help."

That covered the situation succinctly. Rondl made a circular flash of agreement. And wondered, a trifle guiltily, whether he would have felt the same if Cirl had not been a physically esthetic, magnetically attractive, socially winsome young female. After all, he had not been interested in further help from any of the males who had checked on him.

Did it matter? Maybe it was best to accept her explanation: the Viscous Circle had willed it.

 

 

 

Chapter 4:

Quest

 

 

"First we must see if others have news of you, or notions how best to proceed," Cirl decided. "I will convoke a circle."

"A circle?"

"Not a true viscous circle, for there is only one, and that exists only in the spirit life. But we do have a physical approximation. I will show you." She set off on a high line, going out into space, and Rondl followed.

The surface of the planet fell away below. The network of mountains, valleys, plains, seas, and walls shifted in perspective, and the reflected beams of light spread farther apart, making communication less convenient. The atmosphere thinned, making travel easier; too great a velocity in thick air led to heating that at its extreme could begin to melt the body structure and cause discomfort. Bands had little use for air, other than as a medium for the support of vaporized metals in the condensation chamber. The resources of the planet were vital to certain stages of life, but awkward at other stages.

Space was exhilarating. Rondl was amazed that Bands could fly through it so readily, and again wondered why he should react that way. Bands had always flown through space, needing only the lines for energy and the ambient microscopic metallic dust particles or gas molecules for reaction mass.

Time passed, for interplanetary distances were great. This was a jaunt only out to near space, well within the orbit of the nearest moon, called Fair, but the thinning atmosphere kept progress slow. In deep space, Rondl realized, Bands could accelerate to half the velocity of light, provided they had good lines to ride.

Vision improved out here, too. Rondl could now see the more distant moons of Glow, Spare, and Dinge, though two were well around the planet. They reflected light like massed Bands, and were of pretty colors, though at this range he could not make out individual features of their surfaces. Moon Fair was bright and golden, a little like Cirl; Moon Glow was reddish, with a softer effulgence; Spare was a cold blue; Dinge, a drab brown.

There were planetoids too, particularly in sections of the orbits of the moons, helping define these orbits as rings. It was as though a given moon complete with its delineated orbit was a Band, monstrous but familiar, and Rondl liked that. There was a certain harmony to this form; the circle was obviously the fundamental shape of nature, manifesting in diverse ways. And of course there was the real ring of smaller particles, prettifying the planetary environment within the orbit of the nearest moon. That ring was less evident now, because they were too close to it; they could see right through its flat surface.

Rondl caught the correct angle on the light of Sun Dazzle and flashed a message to Cirl: "You are the color of Moon Fair."

He had sought to flatter her. He succeeded beyond expectation. She went into a continuous flash of gratification. Females, he recalled from his anonymous wellspring of odd information, liked to be foolishly praised. But he had better be careful, because if he flattered her any more than he had just done, she might fall off the line and spin out of control. He wondered again what kind of a male it had taken to cast her off. Rondl rather enjoyed this byplay, and he liked Cirl well.

But how could he afford to like her? He had no memory of his past associations. Suppose he were married to another Band? This species, he realized now, was monogamous; individuals associated intimately with only one partner at a time. Other species in the Galaxy were different, some having several sexes, or group matings, or—

But, frustratingly, the moment he realized he was gaining information that might be relevant to his past associations, the memory faded out.

Cirl slowed, and Rondl positioned himself to take advantage of the two suns again for regular intercommunication. "Now the summoning," she announced. "It will take a while for them to arrive, but if we made a circle closer to the planet it would disrupt traffic, and that would be unsocial."

To be unsocial was unthinkable in Band culture. Cirl's comments were constantly evoking additional background knowledge from Rondl's mind. That was useful in itself, though more was needed.

Now Cirl broadcast a bright call: "CIRCLE—CIRCLE—CIRCLE—CIRCLE!" the words flashed out in a sphere that expanded at lightspeed as she rotated and revolved. Apparently this was a general summons to anyone receiving. She continued it for some time.

Then responses came—"Joining!" "Joining!"—flashes from different directions, some from such distance that no Bands were visible. Rondl wondered just how far a meaningful flash could be read, and realized as he thought of it that there really was no limit. A tightly focused flash traveled as far as light could go; only the interference of dust and gas in space abated it, making it gradually less intelligible. There had been some instances of messages received between two stellar systems, though there the problem was one of alignment rather than clarity, since—but the memory faded. Still, he realized, communication was no problem at all inside a moon system; it was necessary only to intercept a number of Bands in the vicinity, and Cirl had evidently blanketed the region sufficiently to gain the desired responses.

"But what is to happen?" Rondl asked while they waited. He remained bothered by his seemingly wide background knowledge of things that was nevertheless rent by gaping gaps wherever his interest was most specific. Why should he know about alien Spheres and not about Band circles? But of course this was what they were trying to find out.

"A circle is best experienced," Cirl told him. "It can't really be explained."

In due course the other Bands arrived. They were orange and gray and violet and all other colors, male and female, young and old: a complete assortment. But all were the same diameter, and very nearly the same thickness. The magnetic and optic properties of ring and lens required this particular size, so that all Bands could interact effectively. They were standardized in this respect; age and sex made no difference. They flashed greetings to the group at large; it was evident that most of them had not met the others before, but all found each other agreeable.

What would happen, Rondl wondered, if Cirl's former male friend should appear? Presumably nothing; their relationship had been sundered.

When Cirl deemed their number sufficient, she organized the circle. "Rondl, take your place downlight from me, on a suitable line," she directed, positioning herself flatface to Sun Eclat. "The others will fall in."

"But what will this accomplish?" he asked.

"You will discover." For once she was not being overly communicative.

So Rondl took his place, stabilizing himself as Cirl did, unrotating, so that his stationary lens received her full beam. She moved him out a certain distance, then had him hold position. It took a certain amount of coordination to align both beam and line, but they did it.

A gray Band fell in downlight from him, and others farther along, each taking pains to be the correct distance away. The communication was all one-way, with Cirl's flashes passing through a kind of tube formed in space by the growing sequence of stationary Bands. Some of them were unable to remain on a magnetic line and must have been in some discomfort, but they were governed by the necessary position in the formation and did not complain.

Now, under Cirl's direction, the line of Bands began to curve. As it curved, so did the magnetic line, which was distorted by the pull of the line of Bands. Rondl angled himself slightly, so that Cirl's focused beam angled to the side. The next Band moved over to continue intercepting the beam, and the following Bands moved over farther. The tube kept curving until at last it closed on Cirl, completing the circle. It resembled yet another Band: a living ring. Several magnetic lines intersected it, each bending through part of the arc, then breaking free to continue its natural route. The formation began spinning slowly, so that each Band had his turn taking in energy from a line, then hanging on between lines. As the circle spun faster, the interception of lines became more regular, so that all participants had a comfortably sufficient supply of energy.

Now, abruptly, the single-person stream of communication Rondl had been receiving from Cirl expanded in amount and intensity and quality and variety, becoming a group-communication circuit. Perhaps a hundred Bands were contributing their inputs—but it was no cacophonous jumble, but rather a supremely unified whole of many components. A hundred individual threads, as it were, had been fused into a single massive cable.

And almost as he thought of that, fashioning a mental image of a multithreaded twined cable, his thought came back to him, modified by the input of all the other Bands. Suddenly the cable brightened, becoming amazingly lifelike, and each thread was a separate color, and the colors merged in the curving distance like flashes of light, making the whole wonderfully artistic.

But it was the extraordinarily enhanced meaning that almost overwhelmed Rondl. It was as though his thought was magnified a hundredfold in power, clarity, and depth. For his communicative flashes were assimilated and modified by those of each other Band in the circle. What was valid was multiply enhanced; what was suspect was reduced or eliminated. There was a constant flow, the result of many minor corrections. This was the true viscosity, the remarkable yet consistent motion of comprehension. It was a marvelous experience.

Now Cirl's thought circulated. "I convoked this circle for my friend Rondl, who cannot remember himself, and who suffers strange images like this one of some physical connection of threads. Where does he come from? What is his history? How should we proceed to return his history to him? He has odd flashes of information, yet is ignorant of much of what we take for granted. Does anyone know of him, as he was before his amnesia?"

The massed thought concentrated on Rondl, who felt embarrassed by the cynosure. It was as if every level of his being was being scrutinized simultaneously, as if he were a cable that was being unraveled to its component threads. Many darts of query came at him, each tugging at a particular thread, suggesting identities that faded as the proposed match-ups failed. Very soon it was concluded: no one knew Rondl's non-amnesiac self.

Then came a rapid survey of his informational oddities and lapses. A hundred beam-thoughts pried at his situation. It was like being interrogated by computer.

Computer! For a moment the viscosity thickened and stalled. That was exactly the kind of oddity they were cataloging! What was a computer?

"It is a big electronic machine with millions of informational bits that can be coded for rapid access, many circuits that respond to certain directives—"

Machine? The circle was having trouble with this concept also.

"A device that performs a task. A complex tool. Instead of—" But Rondl found himself confused by their confusion. Suddenly it seemed preposterous that he should be describing a thing no other Band knew about. Where could such information have come from? How could it be valid? What did he know about such an alien construction?

Alien construction. Alien. The circle oriented on this. Had Rondl associated with alien creatures? Had he come from the farthest-reaching lines, the ones that extended all the way to the Spheres of other sapient creatures?

They pierced him with investigatory needles. The massed experience of this randomly assembled group was considerable; some of them had traveled to other Spheres. They clarified that such travel was no casual matter; it required many years, the significant fraction of a lifetime, to reach even the nearest alien Sphere. Rondl was not physically old enough to have made such a trip. Soon the circle concluded that Rondl had indeed had some experience with aliens, but had not actually traveled beyond System Band. That meant that the only aliens he could have encountered were those of the local enclave, the hoppers of Sphere Bellatrix.

They explored this in greater detail. The alien colony maintained in System Band by the Bellatrixians interacted only minimally with the natives. The aliens were huge greenish things with leg projections that propelled them in leaps across the surface of a moon or planet. They were largely nonmagnetic, unable to endure in off-planet space in their natural state. They had to wear special suits to contain the atmosphere they constantly bathed in, the gases passing in and out of bodily orifices. It was understood that the aliens would disband if this process of ventilation was ever interrupted, so devoted to it were they. The Bellatrixians could not traverse the lines alone. Apparently their gross physical features were necessary to enable them to host auras non-magnetically. They functioned, in their fashion—but what a horror it would be to be captive in such a host!