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PROLOGUE
The Circle.
He is here because of the Circle. 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 ought to, 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 different 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 irregularly spangled arching blackness. He has an inkling
that this 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, not quite.
His memories reach back to the moment when he started to walk towards 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 seen yet. (The Circle relies on a minimum of
three bases, no?) Now all three suns were hidden by the massive body of
the planet, 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
after-glow, but did not see any footprints behind him in the pliant dust,
though one segment of his mind told him they had to be there. This obvious
nesessity was overtaken by another, older one—the nesessity of the the
Circle, which 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. He also did not know
whether he would be the first there, or whether the others had already
arrived, but that 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? Reasonable, 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.
Darkness did not slow his pace, as the ground was perfectly flat all the
way to the distant range of hills rising somewhere behind the horizon. 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 was deliberately cleared for him, had he not
known that no path leads to the Circle. And yet, he could not dispel a
feeling that the terrain was just so, in order 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 he could possibly reach the Circle before
dawn, if it was situated behind the range of hills. He was not advancing
fast enough to outrun the third sun. Then he rejected even that thought.
It 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, whose muted sheen barely revealed the outline of the horizon
before him, were not only unfamiliar but for some other reason seemed
strange as well. Although he was aware of this strangeness ever since they
first lit up in the heavens, only now was his curiosity aroused. Perhaps
the proximity of the Circle was stirring the ability to wonder, which lies
at the root of all knowledge; as yet, however, it offered no answers.
The stars did not twinkle. Their radiance was steady and even, as if he
was watching them from space, as if, between his eyes and the stars, there
was 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 defence whatsoever against the vacuum, did not fill
him with panic; his faculty of wonder somewhat restored, he continued to
think about 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
whose complex equations allowed of departures such as an unprotected walk
across a planet without air.
Just for a moment he wondered why it was this comparison with a
cosmologist that struck him. Something 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, unattainability. Then his thoughts were directed again at
the unblinking stars.
Something did not fit. If this world was devoid of atmosphere, how was he
breathing? No answer, at least none that he was ready to accept. Among the
latter one was that he was not breathing, that in fact he had ceased to
breathe. But that would mean that he was dead. The notion of death brought
back the awareness of the Circle; in that awareness, there 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. Initially, 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: sea waves bouncing off the crumbling rocks of some savage shore.
That did not last long, either. The regularity of the rhythm of the waves
began to grow, increasing in complexity. Higher harmonies were heard,
variations of the basic tone in other registers, oblique motifs. This was
no longer a cacophony, a mere sum of random sounds forming a noise, but a
deliberate structure, a coherence of carefully chosen tones: music.
Deprived of memory, he could not recognize the melody, but it did awaken
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.
The tone, however, became distorted, expanded, built itself up into
heights, a few steps more and it had soared above the threshold of
hearing, into regions audible perhaps to other, more perfect ears, leaving
silence in its wake—a silence audible, tense, expectant, heralding the
Circle.
He recognized it now that he found himself on its perimeter. Contrary to
what he had half expected, there were no markings on the ground, no
visible structure at all. The gloomy landscape, under its layer of loose
resilient dust, stretched before him monotonously to the horizon in hushed
anticipation of the azure dawn. Now he knew for certain that he had
arrived.
His place was empty. He could not discern any others before he stepped
over the rim.
He held back for a moment, before taking that final step. This was not
hesitation caused by a sudden arousal of apprehension, but rather a
gathering, a focusing. He felt a sudden wild upsurge in the wells of
memory, the pressure of the mainstream of remembrance which might burst
out onto the surface at any moment now, flinging wide the gates of the
past.
Before this could happen, however, he understood it would bring him only
nonessential answers to equally nonessential questions. The purpose of the
Circle was still beyond his grasp, but now, standing on the edge, he
finally understood that he was not here for answers, but for new
questions: those that could only be asked when the Circle was closed—the
ones that mattered.
Stretching his hand over his shoulder, he drew the heavy brown cloth hood
over his head mechanically, unaware until that moment of its existence, or
of the robe which reached almost to his heels. He did not know why he did
so: it simply seemed the proper thing to do. The Circle did not require
humility, but then, this was no token of humility.
No other preparations were necessary. Although the third sun was not yet
touching the horizon behind his back, the landscape flushed dark blue with
a premonition of the coming dawn. There were no further reasons for
hesitation. In the distended silence, he stepped, filled with a strange
mixture of muted joy and melancholy, into the Circle.
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