Viscous Circle

by Piers Anthony

  She was incredulous. "No Band would invent!"

  He gave it up. Her faith was lovely, and was part of what made her lovely. Why should he seek to lessen it? "At any rate, I want to send no more Bands to oblivion—ah, anonymity in the Viscous Circle before their time."

  "Yes, that would be proper," she agreed. "But still you need not dream about those already gone. Your dreams cannot affect them."

  Here she was more sensible than he! Of course his dreams were useless, even as apology. "Yet still I feel remorse, for causing—"

  "You did not cause," she reminded him firmly. "Disbanding, even in extraordinary circumstance, is always an individual decision. They decided to go."

  "What about when the Kratch—"

  "It is better to disband than to suffer physical demolition by such a creature."

  So she considered even that case voluntary. To resign rather than be fired—whatever that alien notion meant. Charming naïveté! Yet the presence and persistence of her faith made his unfaith easier to bear. They turned about and made love, and it was wonderful.

  Yet even then Rondl wasn't satisfied. "We have never married," he said.

  She flashed humor. "You have used that term before. Alien creatures marry. Bands are able to associate amicably."

  "Proft understood it. He said—"

  "Proft is familiar with alien concepts, and may even forget they are alien. He surely knew what you meant, and spoke to that point without quibbling about the details." She was glowing more brightly now, enjoying herself.

  "Yet there should be some social commitment, acceptance in the vision of the community, a family situation to raise offspring—" Rondl paused, realizing. "You know the concept! You were going to marry your prior male friend! You're teasing me!"

  Her laughter radiated merrily. "How long I have wished to catch you just once in your own alien mesh of concepts! Of course I grasp marriage!"

  "Then marry me!" Rondl flashed, relieved.

  She glowed. "I will arrange this thing, if it pleases you." She was still shining out her satisfaction at having confused him about an unalien concept. Rondl realized he surely deserved it; he had been confusing her all along with alien concepts.

  She took him out into space and summoned another circle, and in that sublime viscosity of common thought Rondl and Cirl agreed to love one another as long as it was convenient and mutually satisfying to do so, and to see that their little Band was properly treated when it arrived.

  Afterward, individual Bands flashed to Rondl. "That was a pleasant gesture," an orange one said. "How nice to make your love public for all to appreciate. I think I shall do the same, one day."

  Most Bands, Rondl realized belatedly, kept marriage private between the two parties concerned. Since there were no records, it really did not matter who else knew about such agreements. So he had, after all, brought an alien tinge to this. But he was not dismayed.

  The training progressed. Rondl proceeded more carefully, with more gentle exercises and frequent dialogue to warn the recruits of the fierce emotions likely to be conjured from the depths of the Band nature. Gradually he built up some people and persuaded others to abandon the program, until he had a nucleus of very fit, tough Bands. But could they actually engage the enemy and survive?

  There was only one way to find out. The Solarians were advancing steadily, overrunning the outer satellites of Planet Band, and it was time to go meet them.

  He slept again, and dreamed again. This time his dream-troops, responsive to his instructions, took evasive action. A number survived the onslaught of the Solarian weapons. They ringed the enemy ship and tried to infiltrate it, to short out its electrical system. But again the hatch opened and the dread Solarian head-protuberance poked out. This time the detail was horrendously complete. The Monster had a translucent, lenslike, bubble-thing encircling the appendage, so that all its ghastly excrescences could be seen. Bits of living flesh projected on three sides, with the half-sunken, fluid-tumescent eyeballs set near one of these projections. Below was the mobile orifice, a gash that opened and closed at irregular intervals, the tooth-bones showing only partially as if the wound was not quite complete. The opposite side was covered by long-sprouting fur, vaguely like Band tendrils but far more extensive.

  The grotesque head swiveled on the flesh-clad neck and the orbs bore on Rondl. The orifice parted to show the animalistic teeth more fully. Each tooth erupted from moist pink tissue, like bleached bare rock from a slope of tinted clay. The creature exhaled in its obnoxious fashion, noisily pushing atmosphere out through the slit. And the noises said: "Ringer, you are one of us!"

  Somehow it seemed that Rondl was being drawn into the Monster, into its head: not past the emerging gas of its mouth-orifice, but directly into the solid lump above. This was a fate worse than disbanding! He fought and flashed desperately, as he had when caught on the spike of the Kratch—and woke again.

  It was getting worse. How much more of this could he take without disbanding? The Viscous Circle, illusion and all, was becoming a more viable alternative.

  "I think you will have to conquer the Monsters in the waking state," Cirl said wisely and sadly. "Then they will rest in your dreams."

  She had to be right. Rondl had many concepts of action and violence, but the prospect of encountering the Solarians directly horrified him. He was afraid—yet he had to do it. Otherwise they would destroy the entire Band society.

  Now the occasion arrived. Rondl and his company took up positions near the moon next in the path of the invaders, Moon Spare. "We shall wait for them to come close," he flashed. "Then we attack, as we have practiced." They were now able to tolerate such direct language.

  Yet his preparations seemed insufficient as the ship came close. Three Bands disbanded as the tension built. Rather than suffer further attrition before the action started, Rondl ordered his troops forward.

  The ship proceeded without reaction. No weapons appeared, no hate was broadcast. Rondl realized with relief and dismay that the ship had not even noticed them; or perhaps it considered them to be of no account. They flew right up to it without event.

  This was suspiciously easy. What about the projected "Hate! Hate!" and the burning lasers? Where were all the threats they had braced against? He began to fear this was merely another dream, though he was sure it wasn't. What could they do, except proceed? "Go on, Limn," he flashed to the yellow-white specialist in alien mechanics. Limn was the key to their thrust. If he could disable this ship—

  The ship was absolutely huge, many times the mass of the planetoid they had mock-attacked with such loss. Limn glided across its surface, following convenient lines. He found a vent where hot gases emerged—a stabilizing jet, Rondl knew without knowing how he knew—and slipped into it. Bands were not affected by heat of this level, though that could change if the ship started maneuvering more actively. At the moment the hulk was merely drifting, not wasting energy during its approach to the moon. Even Monsters had to be aware of energy consumption; they did not want to be stranded in deep space.

  Could Limn really short out the control system? They had studied models of alien ships provided by the Bellatrixians, but nothing like this had been attempted before. They had simply to wait for Limn to nullify the critical electric circuits so that the ship could not function. Then Blut would try to communicate with the Monsters, using a crude ON/OFF flash code the Monsters were supposed to understand, to get them to surrender. At the moment the whole thing seemed exceedingly doubtful. But very soon they would know.

  Suddenly the ship accelerated. Tremendously hot gases shot from its vents as it shoved forward. There was no sign of Limn. "I fear he was disbanded by the exhaust," Blut flashed. Bands understood about exhaust, because it was an attribute of the Kratch, who fired out collected space dust along with its own waste products. That was another distinguishing trait of Monsters of any type: they had waste products. This ship was reacting exactly as the similarly shaped Kratch would have.

&nbs
p; Then the moving ship looped about and came back. "Scatter!" Rondl flashed. "They have become aware of us!"

  Indeed they had. An object lofted out of the ship. The Bands fled along all available lines as the object flew to the spot where they had congregated. There it exploded violently, sending fragments and radiation outward. The effect resembled disbanding, only much exaggerated.

  The Bands were already distant from the detonation, but its power caught them anyway. Rondl was hurled off his line and through space.

  He fought to recover equilibrium. He found a line and brought himself to a halt, dizzy. How had the others fared? "Report presence," he flashed in spiraling circles, forming a sphere of query.

  Only a few responses came. Most of his party had been disbanded, not by the power of the explosion, but by the sheer malignance that alien attack evinced. In this respect the mock battle had been accurate; instead of "Hate! Hate!" it had been a missile. Blut was gone, and the other specialists he had depended on. Only blue Tembl and a few others survived.

  "I suspect we are not yet a match for the Monsters," Tembl said. Something about the way she flashed made him more aware than he had been that she was female.

  "Yet surely we disturbed them," Rondl replied, as though that were justification for the disaster. "Limn must have affected their system, alarming them so that they fought."

  "Yes, that does represent a certain progress," she agreed, drawing near. "Next time we must be able to stop such a detonation."

  Next time they would have to be much better prepared in every way, he realized. More than twenty Bands had been lost in this effort, accomplishing virtually nothing. All Rondl had succeeded in doing was to alert the Monsters that Bands were at least theoretically capable of attempting weakly to resist.

  The succeeding nightmare was worse. He had many more lives on his conscience, and these new ones had not by any means been voluntary. He had tried to protect his troops from Monster hate, and had failed.

  He and his companions charged the Solarian ship much as they had in reality; in fact for a while he confused the dream with reality. The ship looked more than ever like a tremendous Kratch, with a deadly spike and feeding aperture at the front, a filthy waste-products exhaust at the rear. They came up to it without difficulty, for it held them in contempt. This time they watched for the emergence of an explosive weapon. They had along a Band specialist in explosives; he thought he knew how to exert his magnetism to short out the electrical system of a bomb or shell to prevent it from activating.

  But again the hatch opened and the hateful head appeared. The turgid eyeballs squished about in their confinements. "You shall be ours!" the foul voice called.

  And suddenly Rondl was drawn into that hideous head, settling on it though it had no spike, down onto its revolting hairy surface, merging with its blubbery flesh. Rondl tried to disband, but was too late. He lacked the proper control in this dream state. His awareness penetrated the dreadful solid bone of it and expanded to embrace the grotesque organs, even the fluid-inflated eyeballs. Those orbs seemed almost to slosh as they slid about within the bony sockets of the skull. They were spheres with cubic housings, round pegs in square holes. About their only aspect of familiarity was the eyeball lens: it was small and physical and closed-in, but it did process light. Rondl oriented on that, striving to establish a bastion of sanity. Maybe he could still find a way to escape this horror.

  The Monster drew its head back into the ship. It was a male, whose bone and flesh appendages enabled him to stand on a support and reach up to haul closed the hatch cover. Gas hissed into the chamber, pressurizing it. The Monster's fluid-lubricated flesh-tissue orifice opened, and breath/air/waste gas shoved out noisily. "Ringers again," he said. "Blast 'em out of space."

  Machines functioned, hideously self-motivating. Radiation flared on vision screens. The group of pretty disks outside puffed into little clouds of dust. The Ringers were gone.

  "Like shooting clay pigeons," the Monster said, his bellows-body heaving in laughter.

  Rondl's horror became so great his whole consciousness shattered. For he, in the jellybrain of the Monster, had in effect participated in this murder. He stopped trying to orient, to retain sanity or even consciousness. He flew apart, disbanding—

  And woke. Cirl was hovering anxiously. "The worst one yet," Rondl flashed, almost afraid his communication would emerge as a blast of vibrating atmosphere. "I entered the body of a Monster. I saw my companions destroyed."

  "But only some were destroyed," Cirl reminded him, then quickly corrected herself. "Some disbanded. Bands cannot be destroyed; they can only be hastened to the Viscous Circle."

  "And if all the physical Bands disband, what will happen to the Viscous Circle?" he demanded, fastening on that rather than on the fading nightmare.

  "Why—there have to be some physical Bands, to provide hosts for pieces of the group aura," she said. "If all disbanded, the Circle would be without sources of new experience."

  "And so it would gradually stultify," Rondl pointed out. He no longer tried to debate the existence of the unbodied aura; it was easier to assume its validity for the sake of harmony and dialogue with Cirl. "So we must save the physical Bands from disbanding. Some of them, at least."

  "That's true," she agreed, realizing the broader ramifications of the situation. She had supported Rondl because she loved him; she had stayed clear of the actual training and combat. Now she seemed to be joining him intellectually as well as emotionally.

  "Only I keep failing, and these nightmares are threatening to finish me," he said. "I don't seem to be up to the job. I tried to disband myself. At least that finished the dream."

  "No Band is up to the job of battling Monsters," she said. "Maybe the dreams are a function of your uncertainty, which leads to errors in your actual attempts. If you could conquer obstacles in your sleep, maybe you could succeed better awake."

  "Maybe," he agreed uncertainly. Cirl loved to conjecture reasons for his failures, excusing him from responsibility, and many of these reasons seemed plausible. But this one was the opposite of her last one, in which she had thought conquest in his dreams would help the reality. "I suspect both dreams and failures are merely reflections of my incompetence, but since no one else is trying to save the Bands, I have to try whatever I can to become competent."

  "I will help you conquer your dreams," she decided. "I know you can succeed, if only you have the proper support."

  He was touched by her faith, but remained dubious. "No one but me can enter my dreams."

  "That's not true. I can go with you."

  She seemed to be serious. "How is that possible?"

  Now she seemed diffident. "There is a way."

  She had been like this when ready to make love. She was able to do but not to describe. "Show me how," he said, still not really believing.

  She oriented with her beam steadily toward his beam, in the love position. She used Sun Eclat, he Sun Dazzle, as always. Surely it was not love she intended, though. Rondl held steady, waiting for her move.

  "Sleep, Sleep, Sleep," she sent. He received this emotionally, not intellectually, for it was arriving backward, to the subjective side of his lens. Love was blind; so was this message. But he needed no sight to feel sleepy.

  He waited, and she drew closer, "Sleep, Sleep." He continued to respond, falling into the trance state verging on sleep; he could imagine no more pleasant mode for it. Cirl came all the way up to him and fastened her yellow circle to his green one. No wonder she had not been able to describe the action, for had this been love, it would have been prohibitively graphic. But it was instead sleep, of the most pleasant sort: embraced and enhanced by her.

  Rondl slept and dreamed—and now Cirl was with him. "You're here!" he flashed, astonished and gratified. "You are in my dream!"

  "Of course," she replied, unconcerned. "Two cannot make a viscous circle, but we can make a hint of it by merging emotionally." It was not the spirit circle she referred to this time,
but the physical one. "I will always be with you when you need me."

  But already the dream was carrying them on. They charged the Monster ship, and the hatch opened and the awful thing's head poked out. "Now you will be ours!" the Monster blasted with its heated atmosphere, and Rondl was drawn in.

  He tried to resist, and Cirl tried to hold him back, but the nightmare sequence was too strong for them both. Rondl and Cirl were drawn into the Monster.

  "Hang on!" Rondl flashed foolishly, more worried about her than about himself. "It is awful, but it can be survived!"

  As it turned out, Cirl bounced off the male head and landed in a female head. This was reasonable; male auras could only occupy male hosts, and female auras female hosts. Did that hold true in the Viscous Circle? How could the auras of both sexes be merged therein? He would have to ask Cirl, when they woke.

  Though he could no longer exchange flashes with Cirl, somehow Rondl remained in contact with her. In a dream this sort of thing could happen, fortunately.

  The Monster Rondl occupied peered at the flat view-screen. Rondl saw the image; even filtered through the unpleasant mechanism of watersac eyeballs, it was clear enough. "Ringers! Blast 'em!" This was as it had been in the last dream; either Monsters or dreams were not bothering with originality.

  "Ringers?" Cirl asked, perplexed. Since she could not flash in this form, communication between them did not make sense. But actually they were sleeping together, linked emotionally, and that translated into an intellectual linkage in the dream so that they could converse even when the dream suggested they could not. Dreams did not follow the normal rules of life, which was the wonderful and horrifying thing about them.

  "Ringers—that is the Monster name for Bands," Rondl explained. "I believe it evinces contempt."

  "Contempt?" This was another new concept for her.

  "Low esteem. Dislike. Monsters do not respect Bands."

  She had to laugh, her pulsating flashes manifest to him by the magic of reality beneath the dream images. "Nonrespect—from Monsters! Yes, now I perceive this Monster's thought. There are personality currents forging through this jellybrain. She does not care for aliens."