Free The Fourth Circle by Zoran Zivkovic, Mary Popović Page B

nothing...inappropriate...has happened between us. We have drawn closer, it's true, but only in our desire to communicate, trying to find a common language. What possible harm could there be in that? And it's important, because the Little One has a message to convey to me. I know this from my dreams. If I could only dream a little more, everything would be so much easier, but Sri still refuses to switch me off. He really is not an easy person.
    Little One and I work with a cause-and-effect system. He presses a key on my keyboard—he likes that very much: males, in general, are fond of touching things—and I immediately show him a picture on the screen and watch his reaction. He does not always react as one would expect; in fact he seldom does. For instance, when he pressed "B," I displayed a large, ripe banana, but that didn't get him very excited, probably because fruit is varied and plentiful in the surrounding jungle, so that the Little One has likely never known hunger. All the same, I think he associates that key with something pleasant or good. When he wants to express agreement, he presses B for Banana—affirmative.
    The only exceptional thing about this is how he always manages to locate the right key on a keyboard that has almost a hundred keys. I haven't been able to find out how he does it. We can discount the possibility of his being able to tell one letter from another. That would be too complex a geometric abstraction for his primitive level. Perhaps he remembers the location of each key without attending to what is on them, but that's also unlikely. I don't know. In any case, he's naturally intelligent. If he were a man, he wouldn't fall far short of Sri in that respect. But I really must avoid making these comparisons. God forbid that I should blurt out any of this in front of Sri. He'd get really mad—quite appropriate for a true Buddhist.
    When the Little One pressed "T" I showed him a tiger and expected him to at least flinch, if not recoil from the screen, but to my complete surprise, he only giggled, revealing a row of yellow teeth set in broad gums, and clapped his long, hairy hands, as if he had seen something cheerful or funny. Tigers are natural enemies of monkeys; there are quite a few in this part of jungle, so the Little One must have seen at least one. I myself have registered their movements through
my perimeter sensors on three occasions already in the short time we've been at the temple.
    The tigers kept their distance, though, put off by the constantly burning lights inside the building and by the humming of the electric generator, so that Sri was safe from them as well as from other large beasts. If they'd come to within a distance I judged dangerous, I would have been prepared to put them to flight. It's really wonderful how a few small loudspeakers placed in the bushes and trees can, with the right sounds, bewilder these huge felines feared by the entire jungle, turning them into terrified, harmless animals. This method also proved effective in driving away the Little One's relatives, who are far less dangerous but more numerous and intrusive, attracted to the temple by the very thing that repels the tigers.
    Since I hadn't yet put it to use, the Little One had no idea that this sonic defense worked on tigers, and so his joy at seeing the large head of the striped cat on the monitor remains unexplained. I tried to induce what I thought would be a correct reaction by animating the picture, showing it with gaping jaws practically filling the screen, while making the temple ring with a menacing, synthetic roar that struck fear into the hearts of a multitude of beasties who reside in the nooks and crannies, but this only amused the Little One even more. Finally I resigned myself to failure, concluding with some resentment that males are utterly illogical creatures. And so the key with the letter "T" has remained in our vocabulary as the symbol for "funny."
    This animation of the tiger and