The Fourth Circle Read Online Free Page B

spheres.
    Why nine, the spheres did not know. Numbers and their complex inter-relations did not concern this world of plant, scent, and wind, nor did they feel their lack. Quite simply, there were nine, just as there might have been three, or nine times nine. A sphere less or more—it was all the same, the valley had ample herbage for all: nourishing lomus, its yellow sporadically breaking up the ubiquitous blue of rochum; faintly-scented mirrana, the slightly acidic juices of which refreshed and invigorated; the brittle and very hot hoon, the stocky bushes of which were the only thing taller than the spheres; soft, speckled ameya from which was woven the night quarters and nests for triune matings; oolg, thin-leaved vorona, and silky pigeya the delicate summer fleece of which tended to stick to the rough bodies of the spheres like a decoration; gorola, and the olam that flowers for just one night in a cycle.... An endless diversity of plants, a planet-sized empire of herbs.
    Apart from herbs, the Great Journey, and the Gathering, little else mattered to the spheres.
    Since Gatherings occurred very seldom, they aroused neither curiosity nor impatience, only a vague awareness of the necessity to respond when the call came. But the Great Journey occurred at least once in each cycle, bringing with it strange experiences, fascinating and puzzling those members of the tribe who were unlucky in their hunt for shimpra or not brave enough to venture on a journey from which they might not return.
    The tales of the returnees, related in the series of soundless images in which the spheres communicated, told of curious things in distant Rounds that were truly alien: often without scent-dispersing winds, largely without herbs, even the blue rochum, primogenitor of all plants, and completely without tribes of spheres....
    Instead, the shared images spoke of swaying liquid expanses like endless fields of green mirrana juice; of sputtering hills, angry like hot-tasting hoon; of barren valleys where nothing ever grew, silted over with a dry powder similar to minute oolg seeds; of places where all the plants had been uprooted and replaced by unnaturally regular forms, though not as perfect as spheres.
On no Great Journey did they ever encounter other spheres. The returnees brought back confusing images filled with different beings: malformed creatures who never rolled, although they did move, some much faster, through or above the varied terrain of other Rounds, creatures without any base or support of herbage, moving within the wind or above it. These other beings seemed indifferent to odors or deprived of the sense of them, although smells rose around them, mainly noxious and noisome vapors, with hardly a beneficial fragrance.
    Nor did they exchange mute images, but communicated in other ways, by sound, light, or touch, in a weird jumble of languages that the spheres could not penetrate.
    Some of the shimpra travelers opted not to return from the Great Journey, to stay in alien surroundings devoid of herbs and fragrant winds, without the tribe.
    What drove them to do this the spheres who had not taken the Great Journey could not understand, and this mystery set them to constantly hunting for shimpra in the hope of finding the answer on some new Great Journey. For the vanished spheres might be stuck in some fetid alien environment, longing to come home but for some reason unable to do so without the help of the tribe. Or perhaps they had finally found the Last Valley, where there was neither bursting nor swelling, where all the spheres who ever existed made up one great tribe, a place without boundaries, beyond all number, where all wind-borne scents could be easily recognized—all, that is, except the smell of shimpra, unneeded there since no one would ever set off on a Great Journey again.
    Suddenly, in the last few cycles, the images the returnees brought back from their Great Journeys had all began to look alike. They depicted the same