Chapter 3: Cirl

Rondl discovered that Bands also slept, and dreamed, and that during such periods of comparative quiescence their energy needs diminished. He had a greater reserve than he had thought -- or at least a longer period over which stored energy could sustain his survival. His dreams had offered him a period of comfort, for in them he had found a line extending straight up to the nearest planetoid belt, far from any atmospheric storm. In this system each planet had its rings of debris, and each sun had its planetoid belts; there was a great deal of fragmentary matter.

He woke when another Band approached. The tempest continued, and water and air lashed the beach, whipping the sea into monsterish animation. It was easy to imagine that this was the result of the submerged wrath of a super Trugd, though of course he knew better. At any rate, this was no weather to be aloft in. The other Band was trying to achieve elevation, and failing, as Rondl had failed. The light was poor, but the Band's flashing cry of despair came across clearly as the creature plunged at last into the sea.

Rondl launched himself into the air. The background magnetism was irregular here, making his flight erratic. But he found a line and followed it into the water where the other had fallen.

He was fortunate. The line passed beneath the region where the Band was floundering. Rondl placed himself in position, then caught the other in a magnetic clasp, exactly as red Malr had done for him. Then he used his small tendrils to maintain the hold while he shifted his magnetism to propulsion and rode the line back to the surface, bearing his burden.

The tempest was diminishing at last; it now seemed safe to remain airborne. Rondl released the Band, then rotated to flash to it. "Are you well?""Why did you have to interfere?" the Band flashed angrily. Rondl realized with a start that it was female; there was a characteristic signature that showed the sex unmistakably. A bright yellow, youthful Band. "I was about to disband!"

"You wanted to disband?" Rondl asked, amazed. "To suicide?"

"Suicide?" she asked blankly. "This storm interferes with communicatory light; I do not grasp your meaning."

Indeed, he had not expressed it well. This was another concept largely foreign to the Band intellect. Plants and animals lacked sufficiently defined auras, so when their physical forms succumbed, they died. But Bands were not supposed to die, so could not suicide. Or so Bands believed. Rondl found he did not believe. So still the tantalizing oddities came, though he could not fathom their source. "Disbanding," he said. "I cannot believe any person would choose to disband."

"You are a male," she retorted with a savage flash.

"Oh -- a romantic entanglement? I apologize for whatever the oaf did."

"Oaf?"

"Negative male."

"You regret the action of another male?"

"He was surely a very misguided individual to wrong a female as attractive as you." For she was indeed attractive; her personal magnetism had literally drawn him in. He was not clear on what qualities made a Band female pleasant to male perception, apart from raw attractive power, but she seemed to have these too.

She spun out a bright flash of mirth. "You are a strange one!" Her color seemed to intensify. "Do you really like me?"

"Yes," he replied, surprised. "But this is not to be regarded seriously; I do not know you."

"You like me without knowing me?" Now she seemed intrigued, rather than confused.

"Would I like you less if I knew you better?"

"Another did."

"Did like you less -- or know you better?"

"Yes."

Yes to both, she seemed to mean. "I am not the same as that other." He paused. "At least I do not think I am. I do not know him, and I do not remember me."

"Do not remember him, you mean."

"Do not remember me. Before I came here. I -- "

"You don't remember! How can you come out here to the place of private thinking if you don't remember your problem?"

"That is my problem. I do not know who I am, other than my name. I seem to have amnesia."

"You poor creature. Yet I think I would exchange my situation for yours.

I don't want to remember."

"Let's trade!" he flashed.

She radiated mirth again, her color and light making her seem like a little sun. "You want to obtain cause to disband? You must have been strange indeed before you lost your memory."

"That's what I fear. I keep having inappropriate images, but I can't trace their derivation. I came out here and almost got consumed by a Trugd.

Now I am lost; I don't know the way out of this region."

"I will show you the way out," she said. "Let us introduce ourselves."

"All I know is my name: Rondl."

"I am Cirl. I am -- you don't really want my history, do you? It's not very interesting."

"It is bound to be more interesting than mine."

"Let's just find our way out of here," she decided. She led the way up the line, forging through the dissipating storm with confidence. Rondl followed, glad he had saved her. He would have done it anyway, but this was an excellent benefit: a quick route out.

Still, they needed to converse while traveling, because a noncommunicating Band was difficult to perceive accurately at any distance.

The body of an individual became part of the background scenery; a ring visible but not obvious. A communicating Band, in contrast, compelled attention; all Bands were hypersensitive to incoming speech beams, and could receive them from a wider angle than they could transmit them. Rondl had seen Cirl when she flashed in despair as she plunged into the water. It was the difference between an inert object and an animated one. So now, in the diminishing but still-powerful tempest, they could lose track of each other if they did not each augment their visibilities by talking.

"I am interested in your history," he flashed. "Tell me how you came to the point of disbanding."

"Well, I didn't really come to that point," she replied. "I thought I would fly through the dangerous region, and if the Viscous Circle wished to take me, it would. And it did -- except you interfered."

"I apologize," Rondl said contritely. "I just needed someone to lead me out. Otherwise I might have been disbanded myself, and I was not eager for that to happen."

Again she evinced mirth, knowing he had had a more socially conscious motive than that. "Maybe the Circle intended to have us meet, and this was how it happened. I no longer feel like putting the issue of disbanding to the test.""I don't really understand disbanding," Rondl said. "That seems to be part of my amnesia. Oh, I know it relates to death, but not exactly. What is the Viscous Circle, and why should it guide us?"

"You must have suffered extreme damage!" she exclaimed. "Everyone knows about that!"

"Everyone but me. Cirl, I really need some information."

"I suppose you do. But we are coming clear of the tempest region, so there won't be time."

No time? She intended to depart, then. Rondl found he preferred a longer contact, since she was the first person he had had more than incidental contact with. And she was attractive; perhaps that influenced him more than it should have.

"Of course I would not want to occupy your time," he flashed cautiously.

"Yet if you were willing to delay a little, to explain a few things to me -- "

"Are you ridiculing me?" she demanded. She expressed the concept awkwardly, because the Bands had no convenient term. Bands did not ridicule each other or any other Being. So what she actually said was more like "Are you generating a humorous conjecture or misunderstanding of which I might be the object?" But Rondl understood her meaning perfectly; his mind was evidently more at home with the concept than was hers.

"No such thing!" he protested. "You are the first Band I have conversed with more than momentarily, and I enjoy your company, and I fear I sought to prevail on you more than I should have. I apologize -- "

"For enjoying my company?"

"Not for that. But -- "

"Rondl, I'm pleased. My former male friend, whom I thought to marry, informed me I was too communicative. He said I flashed so much his lens was getting hot. I thought you would have similar objection."

"How can a magnetic lens get hot?" But actually he understood the image.

It would take a great deal of intense light to heat a Band to discomfort; her male friend had been indulging in hyperbole, in humorous exaggeration. Only Cirl had found it unfunny. Apparently she did talk a lot -- but for a person like himself, with gaps in memory that were sure to prove awkward, such a companion could be comfortable. Who would notice his lacunae, if he seldom had to fit in a flash?

"He said it," she insisted. "It was this sort of analogy that brought me to the region of tempests."

No single facetious remark should have done that. This one must have been part of an intensifying pattern that had shaded from humor to rejection.

That male friend had been practicing sarcasm -- another obscure concept -- on Cirl, making her suffer. Rondl didn't like that. For one thing, it showed that Bands could be less pleasant than they believed was possible for their kind.

They were not, after all, perfect. Rondl's sympathy was with Cirl, the victim of un-Band behavior. "See if you can heat up my lens," he suggested.

"You requested it," she said, flashing brightly in the reflected light of a wall. They were now safely out of the dangerous area; she had certainly known the route out. "But if you really want untrammeled reception, fly high and downlight from me, and I'll summarize it all. We'll use the light of Eclat." Eclat was slightly brighter than Dazzle, so was the preferred origin.

Rondl flew high and downlight. Cirl placed herself in line, ceased her rotation, and focused her beam on him. Now there was no interruption at all to the flow of communication, and it came across rich with nuance and deep with feeling. Cirl had a lovely mode of expression; it was a delight to receive it.

And the wealth of minor details she included, not really relevant to the main meaning, nevertheless provided him with an improving notion of Band culture and practice. Some concepts triggered little memories of his own, helping him flesh out his awareness of self. In fact, this was in certain respects the self-revelation he had sought when he entered the tempest region. He had just not known how to go about it.

"The physical form of the Band is merely a housing for the individual aura, or section of aura," she said didactically. "When a Band is created, part of the species spirit is taken to animate him for the time he exists apart. He gathers experience all his life, and when at last he disbands his aura-fragment returns to the great soul-mass, the Viscous Circle, and he merges with it and contributes his amassed experience to it. For the species soul has no physical component; it cannot acquire experience directly. Only indirectly, by allowing portions of itself to break off -- to animate separate hosts, existing apart from one another and the Circle during the gathering of experience -- and then to return with their burden of knowledge as an offering to the whole. Our entire physical existence is merely that process of assimilation, our mission for the group soul. We have no better purpose than to learn all we can, for that knowledge is all that we are capable of carrying with us to the Viscous Circle. Our only wrong-ness, our only error, is the failure to garner the best experience we are able: that which will enrich the soul."She paused to make sure Rondl was assimilating all this. He slid up the sunbeam to flash to her. "I am receiving."

"Did I heat up your lens?"

"You warmed it pleasantly."

Her magnetism intensified momentarily with pleasure. "Does it make sense to you, the Viscous Circle?"

"Seems like Nirvana," he flashed.

"Like what?"

He seemed to have produced another alien concept. "Like an ideal reunion after disbanding."

"Oh, yes, that's it!" She resumed her broadcast position and he slid back downbeam. "When I was rejected by the Band I loved, I no longer wanted to gain new experience, but wasn't sure I had amassed enough to be worthy of return to the Soul, the great Circle. So I did not disband, exactly; I flew into the region of tempests. If the Viscous Circle wanted me, it would let me disband then; if not, it would arrange to leave me in fragmentary state, doomed to live separately for some time longer. Yet when it seemed the Circle was indeed ready to take me, I suffered uncertainty and was afraid. Somehow I wanted to cling to substance, unpleasant as it was. I fell -- and you are conversant with the rest."

Somehow, as she flashed, Rondl absorbed the larger concept. There was a gigantic and beautiful imagery associated with the Nirvana soul. The Viscous Circle as Cirl envisioned it was a tremendous swirl of color, perhaps as big as the universe, turning quickly at the center, slowly at the fringe, so that its internal structure was constantly charging while its external torus shape remained constant. Of course it was shaped like a Band; the gods of all creatures resembled those who believed in them -- except that this god was not rigid, but fluid, viscous -- beautifully so. From it tiny sparks of consciousness radiated, as though flung out by centrifugal force: the individual flakes of aura, to animate living, solid Bands. To it other sparks, or embers, returned, gratefully: the tired lives of disbanded individuals, heavy with their burdens of experience and the rigors of separate existence.

She paused again. Rondl shifted around so that he could reestablish the dialogue, using the light from Dazzle. "No, my lens is not heating uncomfortably," he informed her before she asked. "I take pleasure in receiving your beam."

"I take pleasure in your pleasure," she returned. "I do love to communicate."

"And you do it well."

She seemed almost to glow with her own light.

"So you believe there is no death," he continued after a moment. "Merely the release of individual auras to the Viscous Circle."

"Of course. Don't you?"

Rondl considered. "No, I don't. I don't know why, since I have no basis for belief or disbelief, but I find I can't believe in a nonphysical consciousness. It has to be a myth. But I admit it is a pretty concept."

"It is reality!" she flashed, dismayed by his doubt. "Everyone knows!

How could you ever disband if you did not believe in the Viscous Circle?"

How indeed! Rondl certainly did not want to disband. "How can consciousness exist without physical substance?" he flashed. "There can be no organization, no mind. Death to the body must mean dissipation of the aura it houses, the soul. It cannot be otherwise."

"You poor creature!" she returned. "How horrible to be thus deluded!"

She felt sorry for his disbelief! "I'm not sure which of us has the delusion -- "

"I must labor ever so much to get you well again!" she flashed warmly.

Rondl realized that it was pointless to argue further. "As you wish."

"Of course I wish! How lonely your life must be! And no wonder you feared to let me disband. You thought I was erring!"

That was it exactly. "At any rate, there is much to be appreciated in the physical existence. We must live for the present -- me because I know there is no other life, you because you believe you are amassing information for the eventual benefit of your Viscous Circle."

"I must make you see the error of your nonbelief!" she insisted. "It is mooted that those who disbelieve are not welcomed back to the Viscous Circle, and that is a fate too horrible to be contemplated. I must reason with you, show you -- "

"You are welcome to try," Rondl agreed, beginning to appreciate a quality in her that might have annoyed her former male friend. She had to have a concept her way. "If you can spare the time."

"You saved me from disbanding. Surely the Viscous Circle arranged this.

My time is yours."

Rondl was not sure of the logic, but was amenable. Cirl remained, after all, a very esthetic figure of a torus. He still needed help figuring out this society and recovering his balky memory. So if she wanted to make a project of him, good enough. "Our time is each other's."

"And I didn't heat your lens?"

That remained a sensitive subject for her, understandably! "You can't heat it enough to make me uncomfortable."

She paused, and Rondl feared he had overdone his reassurance, making it possible to apply a negative interpretation. But in a moment she came around to the favorable aspect, and flashed an affirmative. It was all right -- but he would have to be careful.

First she took him on a tour of the premises. Before, Rondl had only a vague notion where things were; now the picture became much more detailed. The Bands did not reside on land, but did need a number of planetary structures.

There was the physical plant: a tube running through a volcanic mountain, where the internal heat vaporized the metallic substances that made up the Band body. Each flying pass through this tunnel enabled a Band to concentrate a layer of alloy about himself. Many of the Bands flying through here were young ones who needed to flesh themselves out to adult mass. They were adult diameter, but not adult thickness. This acquisition had to be effected gradually, for each condensed layer was merely inert metal until properly assimilated by the magnetic forces of the Band. Many hundreds of passes, spaced across years, were required to complete the process. Other Bands attracted to the tunnel were gravid females, who needed extra matter to build up an entire extra ring segment. When it was substantial enough and imbued with the proper magnetic patterns, it would split off: a new Band. Still others were old individuals who had suffered demetalization and thus needed restoration. A few were injured Bands, concentrating on particular cracks or abrasions; one had lost a small segment of his torus and was laboring to re-form the missing link. For creation and maintenance of the physical host, this tunnel was essential.

Then there was the line generator. Some magnetic lines extended far from the planet, right on out to the moons and on to other planetary systems. The lines, Cirl happily explained in much detail, had originally been natural, emanating from the intensely metallic core of the home planet, but as the Bands achieved civilized status, they constructed line generators and organized the lines for greater convenience. There was no longer anything very natural about the lines; they extended from star to star, and even to the systems of other sapient species.

"Other Spheres?" Rondl flashed, surprised.

"Spheres?" She was perplexed.

He had run afoul of another confusing term. "Aren't Galactic sapients organized into Spheres of influence and colonization and trade, that are highly civilized at their centers and regress inevitably toward their edges?"

"I don't know. We Bands aren't. We just exist where we belong."

"There is no Sphere Band?" But he was already aware there wasn't.

"Of course not. What would we want with something like that? We already have the Viscous Circle."

Rondl rotated uncertainly. "I'm not sure. I suppose I thought that since other species -- "

"How do you even know of Spheres? Are you remembering?"

"No. There just seem to be these concepts that flash out. Strange ones that don't attach to much of anything we know. Like alien Spheres. I know they exist, and I think I know something more about them, but I can't evoke the information when I want to. Only by accident. I wish I could explain it."

"You must have been to such Spheres in your former life, so they became part of your vocabulary."

"That must be it," he agreed dubiously.

"Do you know, your past identity becomes an intriguing riddle. I'd love to solve it."

She was questing for reassurance of his interest again. Cirl needed a lot of that. He was happy to play the game. "I would love to have it solved.

It is my dominant concern. But are you certain you can spare the time? You have a separate life -- "

"That would have ended this phase, except for your interference."

"I apologize for -- "

"Oh, stifle your flash! You know I didn't really want to go. Not yet.

You just helped me make up my mind."

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.