The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

for only one night. So you could hear just one sort of sound. The wheel can send out thousands of different sounds. How can static electricity do that?’

‘Is it true?’

Her heart jumped to her throat again, and she felt a mysterious shadow following her closely. She quickly forgot her father’s words. She did not feel scared this time, and decided to stay in the temple.

The wheel cried again on a dismal night. This time it was not a ghost cry, but the sound of a man. Then it became the zigzag of vehicles, then the roaring of machines in a factory. After a while, a string of explosions were heard.

For several consecutive nights, she heard many different sounds.

One night it was a piece of music, but the tune was strange, of a kind she had never heard before.

She felt joy mixed with a bit of fear. One month passed.

The lamas saw it with equanimity. And they explained no more to her.

The day she left Doji lamasery, she carried back with her a bag of tapes.

*

Three months later she returned to Doji lamasery, with her father and one of her father’s postgraduate students.

It was the sounds she had recorded that made her father serious, and he decided to look for himself.

‘Now I realize that the sounds truly were unusual. Can it really be static electricity? Anyhow, it is worth studying,’ he said.

Upon arriving at Doji lamasery, father and the student walked around the wheels of Samsara six times, but they saw nothing strange. The three of them stayed that night at the lamasery. At midnight, the wheel cried again.

Her father and his student put on clothes and rushed out, seeing that the wheel was quivering slightly, and its body was covered with a circle of red light. The sound came out of the body of the wheel. Her father raised his head toward the sky and discovered that it had turned red and all the stars had gathered together, listening to the sound with fixed attention.

The sound of the wheel changed tune, from happiness to grief. Then there were a lot of sounds her father had never heard before.

Suddenly he felt that something was behind him. He turned and saw it was a lama. The lama’s face was indigo and hung with a tricky, secret smile.

Father ran back to the temple. Seeing his daughter sit on the bed in safety, he felt relieved. However, the girl herself was uneasy.

The next day her father told the student, ‘It was monstrous. I thought it was a magic tape recorder. Maybe it was not a product of nature.’

‘Tape recorder…’

‘Yes, a bizarre tape recorder left by human history. Maybe it had something to do with an extinct civilization. It contains some strange sounds of ancient times.’

‘But, does not a universe hide inside the wheel?’ The postgraduate student suddenly shouted out.

‘A universe?’ Father was startled. Young people always had different ideas, he thought.

‘That is what I believe. Inside the wheel there is a universe, the same as the one we are living in.’

For many years people had been searching for a mini universe but the attempts had all failed. However, the student was still obsessed with the notion.

Father’s face lost colour, and he shook his head again and again.

‘Impossible, impossible!’

‘That was what I strongly felt last night. A sound seemed to have been emitted by a circumvolving black hole, and another seemed to have been created by a dropping asteroid. And there were more sounds, reminding me of the explosion of a supernova and the birth of a galaxy,’ said the student, with a trembling voice.

Father thought it over and admitted the possibility. However, he was reluctant to believe the conclusion. He was a stubborn academician who held that there was only one universe.

‘Are you my student?’ he said. ‘How dare you talk about things this way! I am ashamed for you.’

The student realized that he had spoken too much and violated the dignity of his teacher. He apologized for his abruptness; however, he refused to take back his words.

For several days they were lethargic. There was a dead silence between her father and his student. Nevertheless, the snowy mountains behind the lamasery turned ever more brilliant and graceful.

Only his daughter felt that the student got it right. He did raise a wonderful hypothesis, she thought.

When on Mars the young man often visited her home. The student usually launched a dispute with her father on the unexplainable universe. When the two men’s faces turned red owing to the quarrel, she sat aside quietly, listening to and watching them with a curious expression. How lovely the men were.

Now she anticipated that the student could take her to the mini universe in the wheel, and that it would be the most exciting journey of her life.

She’d always take the student’s side. It was the side of unorthodoxy.

‘The universe is trapped in the wheel. It can neither move nor evolve, and it cannot be observed with eyes or telescopes. It can only give out some poor sounds to tell about its past and attract passers-by’s attention. How innocent it is. It does not even know that the era outside of the wheel is against its own,’ she said, red-eyed.

‘How do you know that it cannot move or evolve? How do you know that it needs our pity? Maybe the truth is the other way around,’ said the boy, looking at the girl with a tender expression.

Being aware that his daughter might like the bothersome student, her father felt unhappy.

His sight became ferocious when it fixed on the wheel. He began to regard it as a tumour growing on the planet, and it was threatening the order and intellect of the human world.

He should cut it off.

One day he told the lama that he would carry the wheel to Mars for the purpose of scientific research.

His daughter and the student were shocked upon hearing the request.

‘Professor, you cannot do that. The Wheel of Samsara only belongs to the lamasery,