The Fourth Circle Read Online Free PDF Page A

alien Round, with a soft dusty carpet instead of herbage and a strange, tense wind redolent of odors neither pestilent nor mild, but simply different—and unsettling.
    And yet the gloomy space shown in the recent images was not entirely alien: for the first time on a Great Journey, other spheres appeared. There were only three, very large but unequal in size, high above the wind, where surely no spheres should have been.
    The three could not roll at such height, but rather floated over the dreary environment, dipping at regular intervals behind its edge, later to emerge anew from the opposite side, flooding the great valley with the colors of rochum, lomus, and kootar. The cycle was quite brief, lasting just one day, while triunion and the subsequent swelling must have taken place somewhere in the dark beyond the boundaries.
    The spheres were alert for soundless images from their remote, unknown kin, but no communication came. The three large spheres not only sent nothing but
also did not receive any of the images transmitted by travelers eager for an answer. And yet, this alien place brimmed with images, but of such a nature that the travelers—and those who received their tales—could make nothing of them.
    The images showed the primal shape of all spheres—the circle. They came in all sizes and colors, interlocking circles, circles which shrank and expanded, grew out from each other or cancelled each other out. All this produced a drowsy, opiate effect, similar to that produced by the slender leaves of vorona, used to soothe the turmoil that followed triune mating.
    Only a traveler on the most recent Great Journey managed to discover the source of the sleep-inducing images of many colored changing circles, which had previously seemed to come from all directions in the Round of the three great spheres. The source was also a circle, inscribed in the dusty ground—a large, glittering circle the gentle color of rochum and smelling softly of ameya, with a rim absolutely impenetrable.
    The last shimpra-traveler, straining to make out what lay on the other side of the dazzling rim, source of the soporific alien images, had barely escaped being marooned in the spacious valley of the three spheres. The harder he tried, the faster the circles in the images whirled and fused, impelling him toward a sleep from which he knew there was no awakening. Although powerfully attracted to this sleep, which promised a bliss more complete than any offered by herbs, he tore himself away at the last moment, returning to relate in the silent language of images the most unusual of all the Great Journeys.
    The spheres gladly received the returnee's gift, one filling them with strange forebodings but offering irresistible challenge, too. Although they had always searched for shimpra, the spheres now devoted themselves entirely to doing so.
    They were impatient, full of desire that one of them should embark on another Great Journey as soon as possible, in the hope of penetrating farther, across the rim of the circle into the center of the dreamlike images. Everything else now seemed insignificant by comparison.
    Not quite everything, because no sooner had the spheres spread out over the valley, pushing aside the tall blades of rochum in the shade of which the small, stunted shimpra might hide, when a call rang out, a call that had not been heard for countless cycles, to which the tribe had to respond instantly: the call to a Gathering. The search for shimpra, however urgent, was abandoned at once.
    The three spheres that arrived first at the summit of the hill from which the rush to the Gathering always began waited motionless for the remaining six, whose search had taken them deeper into the valley, to join them. When the tribe finished assembling, they drew up in circular formation and rolled toward the
distant boundary of the Round, down the bare slope of the rise, then across the thick carpet of rochum and lomus, which did not long retain the