IMMIGRATION REQUESTS
Let’s say you wish to migrate from the Fifth to the Seventh Ring. You begin by approaching one of nine towers. Iron gates rise above you—imposing, silent, unassailable. Beside the gates, you see a clay pit, and beside this pit, iron boxes stacked in loose piles. You take one up and begin to pack it with clay. You draw the surface smooth with a silver rod, creating a flat plane. Into this you press your hand, five fingers splayed, the knuckle creases mapping finely. Using the rod, you inscribe a 7 into the palm. You inspect your work before resting the box on the edge of a slotted chute. The box falls away with a shoosh. Your fate has now been altered as it may never be again. Citizens can migrate between rings only twice. You will never know who or what has received your message.
THE CIRCULAR CITY
What is known, or generally agreed to be known, is that the City was laid out in a series of concentric rings. Its innermost ring was the one in which the greatest number of laws, regulations, and prohibitions were observed. In the outermost, the Ninth, perfect anarchy prevailed. In between, moving outward from center, gradations of law diminished by degree.
SOURCES
Two categories of tablature: one created by inscription and the other with spherical omnis. Until recently, two spherical omnis were known to be preserved—both badly damaged. I discovered a third. Although it was lost, I can attest that it was unrivaled in its completeness. The third omni was roughly the size of a bowling ball, made of alabaster, and covered in intaglio circular script. This script, a variation of Old Akkadian cuneiform, was composed entirely of short lines, like a lowercase letter L. These lines are differentiated by slant, energy, curl, depth, adjacency, and density.
We believe the manner of an omni’s usage was this: someone would cast it into a prepared area of clay. As it rolled to a stop it would leave a comet of embossed text in its wake. At the tangent points where the sphere lifted away from the clay, distorted impressions flared into indecipherability.
In the Third Ring, omnis were cast into the perimeter walls. Over time, this practice enveloped the citizens in a city-scale cipher. Because there is no place where this constellation of castings could be said properly to begin, meanings must have unspooled in many directions at once. Any given narrative would crash into a fizzing overabundance of potential continuances, modifications, and alternatives; each cast attenuating the meanings of those around it. We call this effect turbulence. In the end, no matter how clearly a reading begins, turbulence takes over.
IMMIGRATION PROCEDURE
The day after your request, you approach the same gate. Each of your actions has the hyperrealism of something rehearsed repeatedly in your imagination. You reach your arm through a small portal beside the chute. The outside sun and inside shade vivisect your arm: the cool of the future, the heat of the past. You feel the clay impression fitted against your hand. After this, the gate is raised. You listen to the strain of rope but can detect no signs of an operator: no drawn breath, no groan of effort. Two girls watch you from the street. They, too, are listening. The rising gate exposes an empty chamber. On its floor is a black corn-silk sack. You take it up, pull it over your head, and draw the cord snugly around your neck. A great metallic clanging and scraping surrounds you. The floor begins to tremble. You hold still as though holding still might be a means of protection. A pause. Silence. Dampness. Coolness falls through you. Then the clamor begins again: clacking and whirring and squealing. This continues as the entire sequence of sensations is repeated in reverse. You feel the push of the floor as you ascend. Finally, you remove the bag from your head, and when the gate lifts, as it does for only enough time for you to cross the threshold, you have been transported to the Seventh Ring.
REGULATING PRINCIPLES
ERRORS
Substantial fragments of City literature have survived. The most famous is the epic of two lovers, Shahen and Elqosh. Elqosh is the son of a tailor. Shahen is the daughter of a farmer. Elqosh arrives to take the father’s measurements in order to make him a robe. As he holds a measuring string, he looks into the courtyard beyond where he sees Shahen, cutting the throat of a goat. Elqosh goes home “feeling neither hunger nor thirst, dreaming awake for three days.” When describable thoughts return, he wishes that he “could be a goat, if only she were the one to place a fatal hand on my brow, if only she were the one to eat of my body.” The story’s tropes have remained in vogue for four thousand years. Elqosh wins Shahen’s love by weaving her a scarf with the material meant for her father’s robe. He has extracted pigment from lapis lazuli, spun thread from pure silver ingot, created filaments so fine that it seemed to be made of wisps of air. Shahen’s father—furious, imposing, inflexible—forbids the lovers from seeing each other. Planning an elopement from the Fifth Ring to the Second, they press their hands into the clay at two separate towers. The following day, they enter the respective chambers. And yet, when the gates lift, Shahen has arrived at the Eighth Ring instead of the Second. Elqosh, wracked with grief, believes that he has been misled and abandoned. He laments:
She has hurled fire into my bones,
She has spread a net for my feet,
She has turned me back,
And made me desolate all my days and nights long.
After despair, hope: Elqosh considers that some terrible accident has occurred. Perhaps the father has intervened. But if the cause is innocent—then how much worse, he wails, to be sundered from his faithful lover? A dreadful choice faces him: wherever he travels next, he will remain forever. And if he leaves—what if, at the same time, she is traveling to where he is now? For four days he walks between the towers seeking news of arrivals. His lamentations fill sixty-seven stanzas of one hundred and eighty lines. And so we leave him—in the agony of tested faith, just as Orpheus, just as Lot, just as Naram-Sin.
The narrative takes up with Shahen next, just as she arrives in the Eighth Ring. She steps out from the chamber and surveys a pandemonium of gore. Around the tower doors piles of hacked-away arms rise above the height of her head. Is this the mutilation to which all arrivals are treated? she wonders. And there the final fragments of text break away, leaving the two lovers separated by six walls for all time:
And her face became as empty as silence
As she surveyed the … [illegible]
… [illegible] the arms were bodiless
And the stars recited a dark spell
Interpretations vary widely. Some, such as Professor Palamountain, suppose the story may even be true. Migration mix-ups would undoubtedly have been grave affairs. The old and the frail would have slim chances in the outer rings. A multitude of identical fragments of the tale have been recovered. Given this, some believe it may have been used as encouragement to children to write legibly, lest their immigration requests be misread. The many duplications have thus been explained as copybooks produced by students practicing their letters.
ORIGINS
In a triumphal stele at Simurrum dating to 2300 BC, it is recorded that Sargon of Akkad built a city “so perfect that it might administer itself in absolute harmony.” Until recently, Sumerian scholars assumed this to be mythic hyperbole. But a ninth-century manuscript, recovered from the wrappings of a pachyderm mummy in Anatolia, mentions that north of Nineveh was a city “like a single block of stone, unapproachable to all, so completely defended that it had no exterior gates.” We read that outside the walls, the City was guarded by the ghosts of leopards. Dr. Helsmuth recently suggested that both these references are to the Circular City and that they establish Sargon, who took the leopard as his emblem, as its founder.
A younger sibling, Sargon was not expected to accede to the throne. While his older brother was trained in the princely arts—hunting, commanding, lying—Sargon was educated in the lowly arts—history, architecture, and poetry. Then his brother, Prince Ubil-Eshtar, was eaten by a she-lion. Sargon acceded. His chronicles, inscribed on triumphal columns in Elam and Hurria, delineate his subsequent accomplishments:
I conquered the great city of Purulumzu where I burnt the inhabitants alive. The remnants I took as captives. I burned the four strong capitals of Ehli-Teshub, King of Alzu, [and] the six resistant cities of Amadanu. Captives [and] property I carried off. Ehli-Teshub took fright before my terrifying radiance.
Sargon, the first literate Assyrian ruler, became one of history’s greatest boasters. Certainly, he was unrivaled in the imaginativeness of his cruelty. After defeating an uprising among the Mari, he forbade them to bathe for the rest of their lives so that “everywhere they go, their treachery will fumigate them.” The Marhashians, Zabshalians, Awanites, and Scythians he destroyed outright. “Their men I pulled to pieces. Their children I cast into burning cradles. Their women I left bellyless.” At the 3.5–4-meter depth of Amadanu, an entire subterranean strata reflects an absence of building. A generation disappeared even from dust—the stones and bricks of their houses had been used to extend Sargon’s Akkadian palaces.
By the time the Zwabians rebelled, Sargan seemed to have become bored with victory. Rather than cut a limb from each of the surviving men, Sargon commanded that they should simply cease using their right legs. Why should he waste his swordsmen’s efforts? With mere words he delivered a thousand mutilations. Zwabians hopped about, each man keeping his right leg perpetually bound in a splint. Limited in movement, overwhelmed with shame, they were slowly finished off entirely by the raids of their predacious neighbors.
On the Anshanites, Sargon imposed a levy of two thousand living crocodiles. He required this tribute to be delivered to his palace in Akkad. The usual horrors were intimated (“your wives I will . . . your mothers I will . . .”) should his desire go unfulfilled. For three centuries, until the Anshanite city fell to the Gutians, their chronicles dwell on the outrageous suffering Sargon’s levy exacted. It was not merely a matter of crossing the Zagros Mountains to reach the crocodile-infested waters of the Karun and Karkkeh—it was the near impossibility of keeping this amphibious stock alive. To do so, the Anshanites, who had previously farmed little more than vegetables, had to obtain an enormous quantity of livestock for feed. To this end, they went to war with their neighbors, the Nerwa. After acquiring the Nerwian goat herds, they created immense holding areas. For irrigation, they drew water from the Zumtepi River, some sixty kilometers west. The entire economy, topography, and society of the Anshanites was soon realigned around crocodile care. After a year, a delegation of six hundred Anshanite soldiers dragged their horrible tribute across the alluvial plains to Akkad.
The suffering incurred on this expedition is described on a frieze of the Temple of Ur: “Crossing the Zagros mountaintops, they wailed while the stars wept fire.”
Could a ruler of such a fiendish malevolence have founded the Circular City? Sargon’s otherworldliness does make him a fitting candidate. And his training as an architect adds plausibility. But of which one does not know, one cannot speak.
MEASUREMENT
Citizens of the City used unusual standards of measurement. Prefiguring the medieval Italians, they marked hours as one-twelfth the time between sundowns. Accordingly, the measurement of their days underwent seasonal expansion and contraction. Years were reckoned not by number but by event—a drought, an eclipse, a royal birth. An observer’s emotional state could also modify temporal units, such that a minute of mourning might be expressed with the same unit as an hour of play. We have lost the ability to notate, and perhaps to feel, the two hundred and fourteen different “qualities” with which the City’s citizens modified their measurements.
THE CENTRAL TOWER
In frescos recovered in the Palace of L. K., in the Fifth Ring, an old man looks out from the parapet of a tower. While he is rendered in the detailed, intricate line work that characterizes the pictorial style of the Fifth Ring, the tower is represented by an abstract rectangle of solid gold. Whether this was meant to indicate the tower’s true materiality or to symbolize its sanctity, we cannot know. No trace of the structure remains.
Likewise, we cannot say whether the old man in the fresco is meant to represent a specific individual, the presence of people generally, or a godhead. Those who accept Dr. Helsmuth’s theories suppose it is a depiction of Sargon surveying his project. This is dubious. The facial features are distinctly dissimilar to those in the bronze bust recovered at Nineveh. Still, toward the end of Sargon’s royal chronicles, a peculiar line gives pause: “As an old man, Sargon began to become a god.”
HANDS
To lose one’s left hand was to lose the ability to make immigration requests—rendering inter-ring travel impossible. In the Sixth Ring, cutting off the left hand was a punishment for criminality. In the Second Ring, burning off one’s own left hand was considered the height of holiness.
BONES
In the epic of Shahen and Elqosh, we find a vivid description of the Second Ring. As Elqosh seeks out news of arrivals, he observes a world in which the ground, the buildings, and the perimeter walls are white. Mysterious figures in silver robes rake and sift a substance Elqosh soon discovers to be human bones. Naked youngsters mill these fragments into dust. This dust is then used to manufacture the mortar that coats every visible surface. Heavy deposits of calcium phosphate and lime throughout the Second Ring would seem to support the story’s veracity. To us, as to Elqosh, the origins of such a bounteous supply of bones remains a mystery.
Perhaps they originated in the central tower. Not having any ground in which to bury their dead, citizens of the tower may have resorted to throwing them over the parapet. But if so, what happened to the flesh and meat of those bodies? A grisly possibility looms: perhaps, having no open land on which to cultivate grain, residents of the central tower ate each other—throwing only the bones over the tower wall.
ECONOMY
Systems of economy, trade, and valuation are poorly documented. It seems that the inner rings bartered but did not circulate money. In the middle rings, currency was composed of pearls of salt formed through an artful distillation of human sweat. The Ninth Ring, being lawless, had no monetary system whatsoever.
AFFINITIES
Plato’s writings suggest an awareness of the Circular City, which would have been half a millennium into its obsolescence by the time of his birth. Still, there are curious symmetries in Plato’s vision for a city of perfect justice, as described in the Republic. In Plato’s scheme, ignorance separates three component classes—the producers, the rulers, and the warriors—each knowing only what is needed for its ends. In like manner, the Circular City has at its center a tower that may have been populated by an administrative class (the rulers). The middle ringers did most of the cultivating (the producers). And in the outer rings, protecting the City from invasion, were the warriors. An additional correlation stands out. In the Third Ring, a mere two notes were allowed to musicians, and laws stipulated that singers vocalize so quietly that only the singer might hear herself. Does this not echo Plato’s banishment of music from the republic? Plato, who feared that music might stir unjust passions, made an exception only for the lute. Lute music being too enervated to corrupt anyone’s soul.
RIVALRY
In the Fifth Ring, it was averred that those from the Sixth Ring smell like anus. And in the Sixth Ring, they said, “What of it? Those in the Fifth Ring smell like feces.” The inhabitants of both rings were great tamers of pigeons. Flocks from the Fifth were dispatched to gather grain from the Sixth. Flocks from the Sixth were trained to fly inward. On both sides of the wall, a variety of techniques were used to protect against and pilfer from their neighbors. Those in the Sixth Ring, for instance, perfected attacks in which waves of pigeons, dosed with a diuretic, would issue tempests of excretions to drive away guardians of gardens and crops.
GEOMETRY OF THE OUTER RINGS
The narrowness of the outer rings made agriculture impracticable. There was too little open land for tract farming, and the height of the perimeter walls immersed what clear land there was in shadow. Dr. Ashraf has demonstrated that the Ninth Ring would receive as little as thirty minutes of direct light daily. This gloom was made even more disagreeable because the stone walls, being so close together, trapped humidity. Dr. Ashraf has put forward that those in the outer rings may have cultivated fungus, there being few other conceivable food supplies.
VICE
The Seventh Ring functioned as something of a red light zone for the inner rings. Middle ringers augmented the Seventh Ring’s supply of brothel clients, as well as, although more discretely, brothel workers. Several scandal tablets tell the story of a certain Fifth Ring M, which seems to have become lore.
The story goes that for thirty-seven years, M worked as a gardener, maintaining himself in the chastest poverty. Then, at the age of seventy-six, he migrated from the Sixth Ring to the Seventh. A contractual tablet recovered from “The Open Secret” pleasure house itemizes his new daily routine. Each morning would begin with a bath of rose water. After being patted dry with a clean linen cloth, he ate a breakfast of peeled grapes. M would then make a selection from some twenty pleasure mates and pass his day in a specially commissioned bed, large enough, as his contract states, “to hold no fewer than seven people.” After this, M saw to his mental stimulation. Erotic theater performances were written and staged for him. He seems to have enjoyed the privilege of inserting himself into these productions at whim. If, for instance, he wished to assume the role of a randy Elqosh at the moment of reunion with Shahen, he could. A bill for a single such performance includes twelve actors, two goats, a gem-encrusted crown, and gilt set pieces representing the central tower. For all these services, he was charged a monthly fee of twelve thousand quial, which could be collected only twice before he had absorbed all the pleasure his earthly coil could sustain. Overwhelmed with satisfaction, he expired “on his gigantic bed, surrounded by his favorites.”
That was the story circulated in the Seventh Ring. In the Sixth Ring, it diverged: far from enjoying his final years, M was condemned to death by pleasure. By this account, the gardener annoyed his peers by continually preaching abstinence and poverty, chastity and restraint. Sick of hearing these pious sermons, his compatriots send him, against his will, to the Seventh Ring, to serve a sentence specially designed to destroy his vaunted soul.
COLLAPSE
It is unclear why the City began to decline. Some conjecture that the Administrators, having completed whatever obscure purpose led them to maintain the City for three and a half centuries, simply left. Perhaps they fell victim to plague. Perhaps inbreeding brought them to genetic ruin. Some have suggested, on the basis of evidence I find deficient, that the scheme collapsed because of mice. According to this theory, mice entered the food stores where they reproduced unmolested, as the City hosted no natural predators. In a single winter, an unchecked population of six mice could have achieved numbers so exponentially vast as to be capable of consuming virtually all the food stores the middle rings depended on. As the citizenry descended into starvation, the Administrators fled, leaving the City to collapse.
THE EXPANDED CITY
Some argue that the Circular City did not collapse. Instead, the Ninth Ring expanded. This explains the large gaps in the outermost wall. By battering their way out, Ninth Ringers perfected their anarchy. It is the world we live in: the world of famine and skyscrapers, communes and barricades, opera houses, floating cities, and high-speed trains. It is the world of carbonated soda, deep-sea mining, cluster bombs and burning books. It is the world of sports stadiums and lunar landers, of vegetarianism and rivers of sewage. The world of men with trembling hands who might do something that they themselves would never have imagined or planned or believed. The world of caged leopards and corroded gears and translucent creatures floating in the dark measureless depths, singing in bursts of inborn light. If this is true and the Ninth Ring is our world, then the Circular City never ended, but merely fulfilled itself. As Sargon’s royal chronicles have it, “as an old man Sargon began to become a god. The past met him where he bid it, and his future became everywhere at once.”
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