The Circle and the Dot - E. C. Nemeth (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📗

I don’t understand what I should do.”
“You need neither to understand nor to do. You simply need to know that you are. There is no other need, remember?”
“All I want is to be with you, forever – nothing else. I don’t care if I never understand or do anything. I just want you always by my side. You are my need.” Dot answered what his heart told him to say. He wondered, not without some apprehension, how Camarilla would respond.
“Oh, my love! That motivation is your best guide. That is exactly what I desire as well – and it is our fate.”
“Then tell me how to proceed, keeping in mind my highest desire which is to be with you always and starting as soon as possible.”
“Stop causing yourself such unnecessary suffering, Dot. Open your heart as well as your senses. See what is there and all around. Feel what fuels the substance of this reality. Above all, be. Be what you know. The rest will follow, it has no choice. So it has been written.”
Camarilla shone with increased brilliance as she spoke. Her pure white light bathed and soothed Dot’s mind. He reached for her again but she remained beyond the range of his advances. She seemed to be taunting him, using herself as the bait.
“Why do you toy with me?” he asked.
“Dot! My love! I would never!” she rushed to him, fervently. They moved into the equivalent of a tight embrace. Dot tumbled around her form and Camarilla ardently rose up to meet him, turning in sync with him.
“I only want you to perform your required task so you can hurry back to me. You cannot do that without us first being separated. That is why I say that the sooner you go the sooner we can be together again and forever.”
They held tight to one another for a long while and Dot was hoping that somehow it would never end. But all too soon they released each other and Camarilla began receding along the great universal timeline, seeking its other end.
“Wait!” called Dot, to no avail.
“I am the circle!” he yelled at Camarilla’s rapidly receding form.
“As I am the dot,” came her faint reply.
“We are one,” he whispered to himself, missing her already.
“I would advise against that Dot. The intricacies of the skein of life can easily confuse the uninitiated. You might become lost forever in its twists and turns. There are eddies of time there that loop back upon themselves, where a person can get caught in a finite timeline of infinite duration.”
“Yes. Like the snake swallowing its own head…” Dot recalled from the information he had gained while viewing the individual timelines.
“A very good analogy. One that I would not have expected from you.” Death took a step toward Dot … and fell headlong to the ground because his foot had caught on the hem of his robe again.
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” muttered Dot. He willed the old man’s robe to shorten and it did.
Death slowly gathered himself together and stood up. He straightened his robe and rubbed a sore spot on his elbow caused by the fall. He felt some change in his garment and looked down to see that it was shorter by several inches. At first he thought maybe the robe was hitched up by the fall and he tugged at it, trying to pull it back down to where it was supposed to be. Then he looked to Dot questioningly.
“Did you…”
“Yes. I shortened your robe. Now you will not trip over it anymore.”
“How?” Death shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, deciding not to pursue the topic. He recollected his thoughts then asked, “Did you somehow already go and explore the skein of life?”
“Yes. I have been and returned.”
“I thought I had just now felt the same disturbance that brought me here to investigate in the first place. But I only felt it after you returned. Incredible…”
“I have observed the many individual strands of the universal timeline and followed them to their conclusion. I have experienced the sum total of all things that were, are and will be. I have learned many things.”
“What?!” Death, with his intimate knowledge of time, could not accept such a statement as truth. Dot had to be mistaken. “That’s patently impossible! If what you say is true then it should have taken you an infinity of time to relive every individual timeline.”
“Nevertheless,” verified Dot.
“Did you review your own timeline? Do you know the circumstances of your own death?”
“Oddly, my timeline is not represented there. There was absolutely no mention of me. Nor of Camarilla”
“Camarilla?” asked Death.
Just then a booming thunderclap shook the ground. They looked up in time to see a figure hurtling towards them atop of a thunderbolt. The figure was dressed in old style battle dress. His helmet and boots both had small working wings that were now spread wide. The strange warrior leapt off the bolt of lightening just before it slammed into the ground between Death and Dot. The ground split apart and shards of flying rock hurtled past the pair but not one single piece struck either of them. The wings on the figure’s helmet and boots flapped madly as the warrior slowly came to rest a few steps away from the other two.
Before either could speak, the figure threw his giant war hammer at a large boulder some distance away. The boulder exploded into dust. Then the war hammer returned in a graceful arc. The warrior caught it easily.
“Release Zeus this instant or face the consequences,” demanded the fearsome supernatural soldier.
“Nice display. Really attention grabbing,” stated Death calmly, “Dot, let me introduce you to –”
“Thor. The god of thunder – and of war.”
“Release me at once. I mean release Zeus.”
“Not long on brains though,” added Death.
“Obey! Or face me in battle!”
“Alright, already,” and Death made a small motion but Zeus remained frozen. Death made a silly face then focused harder upon his task. He made several passes with his hands and muttered something under his breath. Still Zeus did not move.
“Hmm. Seems I can’t reset this region’s timeline.” Death reached up to his headgear and swiveled a small arm that held a display in front of his right eye. He pulled up the sleeve of his robe to reveal a device with rows of tiny buttons on it strapped to his left forearm. He tapped at the buttons.
“Now, Death. Quit stalling,” threatened Thor.
“Hold your horses. Odd,” Death muttered to himself, peering intently into his display piece, “There has been a strange convergence of energy channels and timelines in this area. Hold on,” Death tapped the keyboard on his wrist some more, “Oh, now I see the problem.”
“What?” asked Dot.
“The nexus is shifting because the center of the universe is suddenly in flux.”
“You had better not be trying to trick me,” stated Thor, “Beware! I will attack first and ask questions later.”
“Shut up, fool! This is serious,” gestured Death, his scythe suddenly appearing in his hand for added effect.
“What is this nexus?” asked Dot.
“The nexus is the source of reality. It undergirds the finite realm.”
“The realm of manifest phenomena,” put in Dot, indicating he understood.
“Yes. It serves as energy conduits for the many forms that populate reality. They rely in turn on the absolute position of the center of the universe. Since that center, which is you, is in motion, so too are they. And while they are in motion reality cannot be manifest.”
“Yes. If the reference point is in transit the required precision of reality is compromised,” agreed Dot, “I will visit the nexus to see if there is anything I can do,” so saying he disappeared.
Except for Dot it looked as though Thor and all that surrounded the war god was what had disappeared.
Dot found himself in unfamiliar surroundings again. Slowly, as Dot sent his senses out to explore, the scene around him began to coalesce in his awareness. Except there was at first nothing to see. Instead, a powerful emotion began to stir in his heart and a warm feeling of peace and serenity washed over him, calming him. This place seemed to exude a sense of bliss and some larger truth of an intrinsic emotion. Dot immediately knew that this emotion was a basic pillar of reality but for the moment he could not give it a name. On the tail end of that realization came thoughts of Camarilla, unbidden. They made Dot recognize the source of the emotion filling this place as love. But it was a love so pure that it seemed to be an infinite homogenous sheet without the usual reservations imposed on it by judgements or expectations. Love suffused this dimension like light suffused the material realm. With that revelation established the scene about him came into sharper relief and details became evident.
He stood at a point of divergence. The divergence radiated lines of force outward in a curving arc. Their trajectories continued to diverge as the lines curved tightly back upon themselves, altering their original course until they were travelling in exactly the opposite direction. At that precise point the lines burst into a frozen wave of multi-hued beams.
For a moment Dot could not discern any further details. Then he became aware that the standing wave of color was caused by the convergence of two fields of force. One emanated from where he stood; the other was coming from a point directly under him and some distance away. The rainbow of light was caused by the clash of impossibilities, where the two fields of divergence converged. To Dot the swatch of color represented the resolution of the impossible.

Transition #3

That’s when Dot felt the familiar tug and turmoil of the onset of yet another transcendence of his understandings. He mentally readied himself for what he could not even imagine.
As Dot’s awareness expanded his view expanded as well. Now he saw that the swath of light at the point where the two fields converged was arbitrary in color and that it was in fact pure white.
Dot’s senses finally encompassed the entire experience and he saw the whole scene from a new perspective. The arbitrary color was the result of the two arbitrary poles acting as the source for each of the fields. The arbitrary nature of the two sources led directly to the infinite possibility of colors. Those colors, in turn, were in fact frozen self-contained portions of reality. The changing color indicated the movement through time of the entire finite realm.
Taken as a whole, the point where the fields converged was a circle of pure white light. Dot marveled at its beauty.
“The master has outdone even himself this time,” he declared.
“Yes, my love. And we have orchestrated its evolution with exacting precision, according to the master’s original design parameters,” Camarilla responded.
“I don’t remember any of that.”
“Of course you do. It just hasn’t happened yet from your perspective.
“We stand at the place of choice and of free will, where the possibilities are endless. This is the union of how and why, where they transmute into what and who. This is where debts come due and must be paid in full, yet where credit is given in abundant measure. Here, in this very place, creation continues, as it always has.
“Behold! The nexus! The balance, the source of reality and of illusion,” finished Camarilla.
Dot stood looking out and in at Camarilla simultaneously. This realization suddenly hit home with him. In that moment he knew his time was almost upon him and that there remained very little left for him to do.
“You are the most radiant