The Great Game 🎲 Fallar Discordia

Into the Battered Cliffs

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Looking more carefully at the cryptogram she sent, Cagnazzo saw that Dactalla’s liaison with Qayam the Aatari security agent had born orchards of fruit. At long last. It had taken decades, yet finally she had established herself as an innocuous travel agent, and seduced Qayam. She had lowered his guard to the point where she found herself unsupervised for three hours in his apartment, opening the files on his personal computer.

Dactalla included in her cryptogram detailed notes on how she got Qayam to let down his guard. She listed the sexual enticements she offered — starting with the minzin coat that fell down her slim legs, and the black satin shift that was so thin that Qayam could see her nipples and pubic hair. She described, somewhat ambiguously, the way she used her mouth and hands, to the point he couldn’t tell which was which. She also listed the drugs she used to put Aatari Lok’s top security agent firmly in Fairly Land for four straight hours.

Cagnazzo imagined her in action, as if she were at a card table in a Bond film. She was the icy-hearted yet welcoming Kseniya Onatopp. She was on a deep-cover mission to bring down that goodie two-shoes, that dandy James Bond, together with that almighty bin of toffee-nosed snots, MI6.

But why did Dactalla have to send him so much unnecessary information about what she did in the bedroom? He didn’t give a damn about that! Why didn’t she just file it in a separate report, in an appendix, or in the fucking end notes? Instead, she put the infernal details in point form in the footnotes, directly below the files copied from Qayam’s computer.

- drugs took effect - threw him on bed - jerked his cock a dozen times - got his attention - placed cuffs on hands and ankles - scraped my nails along —

Cagnazzo couldn’t bear the footnotes, and forced his eyes to the top of the screen.

The files were invaluable: they contained specific information about criminals, and also about the methods Qayam used to track them. The files laid bare how agents from Aatari Prime surveilled the trillion galaxies of the Aatari Lok universe. Much of their surveillance occurred on the Ataari planet of Kollarum, the most famous tourist resort and conference centre in the entire cosmos. Dactalla’s files also laid bare the manner in which Aatari agents communicated with their lawyers, judges, and politicians, and, even more astonishingly, how they communicated with their counterparts in the Vicinese Federation.

Cagnazzo was beside himself with glee. This was the information he needed to infiltrate the Blue Dream Alliance, the coalition of six universes dominated by the Vicinese Federation.

By worming his way into Aatari Lok, Cagnazzo planned to bypass the three universes in the Dolcezza, all of which were firmly controlled by the Vicinese. This would allow him to do two things. First, this would allow him to infiltrate the Vicinese intelligence network. He had already gone some way to this goal by seducing the wife of Giorgio Obrion, the Director of the Vicinese White Guard. Second, this would allow him to establish an operational spy network in Aatari Lok. This would give him a base to infiltrate the Violet Hoop, which was home to Earth and the elusive Soul Star.

According to legend, the Soul Star lay somewhere in the Local Void of the Virgo Supercluster. Rumoured to lie at the centre of everything, it was the heavenly place to which souls travelled after their bodies died. Yet figuring out the exact “centre of everything” was difficult, given that galaxy walls and universes shifted constantly. It was even more difficult to calculate the trajectory of souls at the moment of their death, given that their trajectory was only measurable for a second or two.

Cagnazzo had spent centuries trying to measure this trajectory. 200 years ago he built a death laboratory on the planet of Tarry Doom (also called Tarry Dot). His hope was that by triggering a series of mass extinctions, he might detect a stronger and more accurate trajectory signal. From there, he hoped to capture the energy of this signal, and direct it where he pleased. Yet his lab was blown up by what he called the enemies of science. These were the same idiots who were obsessed with Earth and its potential to be a Gateway to Heaven. These Idiots pointed out that Earth was, as primitive Earthlings once said, at the centre of the universe. Yet these idiots were as clueless as the primitives who once insisted that the Earth was flat.

Of course Earth was at the spatial centre of the universe. Yet for how long? The Vicinese planted their Soul Star in the centre, yet the Fallarians created their own Black Star, the densest black hole in the cosmos — a stellar counterpart indeed! For centuries Cagnazzo had been working on a technology that could magnify the Black Star’s density. In Time, he hoped to see the Star become so dense that the other twelve universes of the Kraslika would revolve around the Black Pulse.

He saw the Kraslika twirling like a fiery comet with the Black Star at its centre, rocketing through outer space to who knows where. At the dusty tail of this whipping fireball was the Vicinese Federation, flailing and flying apart into the dark embers of the cosmos. Or, better yet, the Vicinese and all their poetic nonsense would be flung off the Congo-line of burning universes and crash into some dense field of intergalactic tar. Reduced to the scattered nothings of the comet’s tail, the Vicinese would land in an inky Cloud of Unknowing. They would spend decades, perhaps centuries in this backwater of science and superstition, where the gentlemen wore black stockings and looked up into the sky to see if there could possibly be life beyond their tiny planet.

The idiots would no doubt respond with the same old song about the mystic connection between Earth and the cosmos, about the mystic crystal revelation that would one day bring all races together as One. Cagnazzo couldn’t think of anything worse.

So what if human poets wrote about a heavenly star whose worth’s unknown although its height be taken? So what if their planet mirrored the cosmos in strange ways? He didn’t care that the Vicinese and Fallarian word manipulare was the same in Italian, or that the German word Hölle was the same word that the Vicinese and Fallarians used for Hell. Humans were pre-fractal idiots. Its height be taken — what a laugh! Humans couldn’t even measure the size of their own universe! Cagnazzo couldn’t care less about word origins. And he couldn’t care even less about poetry.

But one thing he did care about was getting control of the Soul Star. And this for four reasons:

🔺 First, he wanted to control it and point its dense energy at his enemies. And by enemies, he included the Ferridian Priests who didn’t follow his orders — backstabbers like Graffiacane and Draghignazzo. Then, he wanted to suck it into the Ferridian Black Star in order to ignite the engine which would propel the entire Kraslika across the heavens like a burning comet.

🔺 Second, he wanted to deactivate that part of the Soul Star which allowed his enemies to find a place to hide. Why should they be granted an eternal refuge, forever beyond his grasp? What was all this nonsense about Grace and Reconciliation?

🔺 This second reason brought up a third, which sprang from the worst of his fears, from what he wanted most to avoid: succumbing to the pull of the Soul Star himself. What if he too, at the moment of his death, was overpowered and sucked into its angelic vortex? What if he too was left forever sitting on some cloud, harp in hand, talking about his feelings to a stupid cherub? He could see it already: the brainless child yanked him by the throat, while his fellow idiots taught everyone to bounce on clouds as if they were trampolines.

If he took control of the Soul Star he could teach the little numbskulls how to behave in the presence of their betters. He might even teach them how to ride one of his four white stallions with black eyes. Better to whip them with your riding crop, he thought to himself, than to allow them to stick their noisome violins in your finely-tuned ear.

Cagnazzo believed that it was better to seize the Soul Star now, while he still had Time in his hands,. Better that than to languish forever in his slow-chapped power.

🔺 His fourth reason was something of an alternative plan: perhaps he could refit the Star for a different purpose. If the Star could be used to store souls for eternity, it could be used to make those souls do his bidding for eternity. Why fling all of existence across the heavens if you could make the heavens your slave? Better to reign in heaven than fly endlessly through eternal darkness. While he liked the scenario of flinging the Vicinese into a field of intergalactic tar, he knew it would be more satisfying to control them forever, and then watch them fume with eternal frustration.

He could see it all: Time’s wingèd chariot hurried near, and yonder all before them lay deserts of vast eternity. There, on those arid plains, the old gods Shamash and Helios worked 12 hours a day doing his bidding in dark back alleys, digging canals and uncovering secrets, constructing ziggurats and threatening the justices of the peace. No longer would they get to hold the reins of their precious sun-chariots.

Instead, they would be demoted from charioteer to steed. They would spend their days weeping hot tears onto their trampled reins.

Like a king in a soliloquy, Cagnazzo concluded his feverish dream: “Thus, though we cannot make our sun / stand still, yet we will make him run.”

The only drawback he could see in all this was that it rhymed.

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Next: 🎲 Degrees of Darkness

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