The Great Game 🎲 Vicinto Prossimo
Prime Rhythm
~ 150 years ago ~
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It was the first day of Prime Rhythm, which was the name the Vicinese gave to the first year of university. It was a crucial moment: 50 year-olds were entering adulthood, having completed the Primo Quinto, the First Fifth of their lives. In the Secondo Quinto they would learn to see the cosmos as it was.
When Talfar saw Thalphemera he realized that there was a world out there that he hadn’t experienced. Of course, he knew that in principle the world was out there. Yet he was so happy, and had been kept so busy as a child and adolescent, that he didn’t really feel the reality of anything outside his own orbit. But this morning he had seen a brave new world of tangerine trees, deep crystal waters, and kaleidoscope eyes.
This brought up within him a worrying thought, a thought which clashed with the doctrine he had learned over the last fity years: the Doctrine of Zero Ego. One was supposed to let go of one’s desires so that the schooling of the State could direct you to what you really wanted, which was to strive for the common good. Yet he didn’t want the common good; he wanted the girl with kaleidoscope eyes all to himself!
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In the auditorium, the professor was warning the students against the evils of egocentric perception. The professor told them that the aim of first year university was to blow their minds in so many directions that they’d realize (hopefully in time for exams) that the universe was excruciatingly vast and that everything they thought they knew about it was like a little blue glass bead.
The little glass bead lay between two rocks on a mountain range a hundred times the size of the Golden Hill, which was 6 kilometres high and 6 kilometres wide. The professor added, “It’s nevertheless crucial to cling to the self, to the zero that you really are. Accept this zero, and don’t let the fact that you’re completely insignificant get in the way of doing great things to advance the realization of your soul, which has no weight, no numerical value, no real meaning. Indeed, the soul and the self are very similar, except that the self is a little something while the soul is a great nothing.”
“The self is but a slim blue light vibrating haphazardly in a cocoon of translucent silicon. Your aspirations must always be larger than your ego, which is but the starting point. Point Zero, nothing to be proud of. But with the help of a Vicinese education, you’ll start to understand what surrounds your tiny self. By hard work and dedication, you’ll increase your inner light year by year, decade by decade, until one day you’ll become a star.”
“The star and the bead are one. The tint of the bead will be the tint of the star. The frequency will be the same. It will pulse the same unique frequency that has always determined who you are. The star doesn’t even need to have a name, because it has the same tint, the same identity as the little bead that you were when you set out on the path from your home to these hallowed halls of learning. And yet, even without a name, your star will shine, projecting its light from the heights of Vicino Prossimo to the depths of Fallar Discordia.”
“It doesn’t matter who you are. Give up that ridiculous search. What matters is that you nurture your inner light, the tint which makes you special. Project this light into the dark!”
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Talfar had been completely befuddled ever since he saw the water damsel in the sunlight. He couldn’t seem to find the right clothing. Then he couldn’t find his classroom. Then, when he found the classroom, he couldn’t see an empty seat. Finally he saw an empty seat halfway down the lecture hall and in the middle of the row. Excusing himself as he bumped into a dozen sets of young knees, he got to the empty seat and got out his notebook. After writing down “completely insignificant,” he looked up briefly to get a glimpse of the student sitting next to him. She was looking straight at him.
Shake your hair girl with your ponytail
Takes me right back, when you were young
Her eyes were crystalline blue, the stuff of poems, the cause of the bitten apple and the launching of a thousand ships. When she winked at him, her green eye-shadow glistened in the morning light streaming through the stain-glass window behind the professor’s lectern. She was the same young woman who had danced down the street and made him so nervous that he didn’t know if he should wear a jacket, a t-shirt, or just cover himself in an inky cloak and pretend he didn’t exist.
But then the somatherin kicked in again. This time, it was a deep calm, a still sweetness in every muscle and cell. It was the latent bliss at the still point of the turning world.
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Talfar gathered very little from the lecture. He couldn’t stop thinking about the heavenly nymph right beside him. He knew he was in a lecture-hall, yet all he could focus on was his peripheral vision. It was a focus that had no focus.
The professor had been talking for about 45 minutes and Talfar hardly understood a thing. All he could think about was the water damsel walking down the street, her golden hair swaying above the water fountain, dangling right next to him, almost caressing his shoulder. He heard the professor talking about a bead and a star and how everything was supposed to merge. Which just made him think of the dancing girl from Romagna.
He didn’t dare look at her, but kept his eyes straight ahead. Still, in his peripheral vision he could see that her skin was golden and she wore diaphanous leggings that made her bare legs seem to sparkle. It was as if there was an energy field or shimmering mist floating around her golden thighs. Because he didn’t dare look directly at her, her body seemed to float above her naked legs.
When the bell rang, he imagined that she would start like a minnow and swim up the stairs and out the door. He was far too nervous to talk to her, so he pretended to rearrange things in his backpack, after which he looked up to see if she had left the auditorium. She was staring point-blank at him. Her body was as still as the stone base of the fountain across the street from their breakfast window.
Thalphemera thought, Why don’t these guys just seize the day? So she said to him, “Would you like to go for a coffee?” She leaned toward him, letting the thin green strap of her dress slip slightly from her shoulder. She was reaching into her handbag to put her notes away. Inside her bag he saw the book with golden letters along its spine, the spine he would recognize anywhere.
The book was Imitar’s Rabbit Hole, a 200-page analysis of the infinite number of points that lie within the smallest point. Thalphemera always keep the book with her, even though she could read it anytime on her tablet. But there was something about the weight of his words that required an actual book.
Thalphemera understood Imitar’s theories, yet there was no way for her to practically realize what they meant. If she could only enter into the infinitesimal in the same way a computer-generated exercise allowed her to go between two very closely connected points. If she could only see a universe between those points, and from there find some world in that universe and zoom in on a habitable planet, and then land on a sunny beach, and then look down to see two grains of sand, and then look between those grains and find another universe between them. This sort of mental exercise was purely mental. Only on a page or screen.
The great Vicinese sage Algotodo had scattered these thoughts throughout the Kraslika a million years ago. He had written them down in his Book of Fractals. So there was nothing extraordinary about her thinking these thoughts. They were a million years old. Anybody could think them. But Imitar pushed Algotodo’s thoughts further than anyone else, adding to them the most recent developments in fractology. Imitar made her want to know, Is all of this just a thought exercise, or can a person live at these depths? Is everything Algotodo says about “infinity within a grain of sand” just poetry?
Talfar saw the book, and saw right away that they had a million things to talk about. None of the other students were carrying books. The lecture that day was very specifically an introduction, and only at the end of it, after the students decided that they were willing to do the work the course required, would anybody buy an actual text. And there was no way that a first-year course would include Imitar’s Rabbit Hole. It may have been taught in a graduate seminar, but only in the second decade of study.
Seeing that very specific thin golden line of letters along the spine of her book, Talfar had a surge of confidence. Only a few minutes ago he felt like sticking his head in his backpack because he didn’t have the guts to look up in her direction. And if he had mustered the courage to look up and say something, what would he have said? But with this one golden line in common, he looked into those deep blue crystalline eyes. Seizing the moment, he said, “I see you’re reading Imitar.”
“I can’t stop reading him!”
“I don’t know anyone our age who’s even heard of him. They’re all watching the dryad dramas. They’re all worried about whether Sarfin will marry Tanfarum, or whether the Two Families will go to war. Will their worlds, so different, ever get along?”
Thalphemera laughed. “I know! Imitar isn’t just about dryads, but also Ferrixians, Blue Dreamers, and Skystalkers. About a million different things.”
“But isn’t he just a trouble maker? I mean, we’ve got everything we need. Then he comes along and tells us that we don’t even know what we’re missing.”
“Perhaps we’re exaggerating what we’ve got. In any case, he’s not taking anything away.”
Talfar looked up to the webbed and sparkled ceiling, with its thousands of tiny lights that cast a violet glow into every corner of the auditorium. Then he looked down, beneath the seats, next to her handbag. He was looking for that golden line of letters but all he saw was her slim ankle. It sparkled with a golden chain.
What, he wondered, could be better than to meet someone who liked reading Imitar? And what could be better than meeting someone who looked like her?
Physically, she was all golden bubbles and sunlight. But mentally, her feet seemed like they were on the ground. Like him, she wondered what was outside the bright auditorium, beyond the abstract talk of stars and beads.
He took a leap of faith, hoping that she would understand his problems with what the professor had called the infinite perfection of the Vicinese dream. “Imitar says that there’s something that makes all the worlds cohere. How can he know this if every world we look into suggests that there’s more worlds than we can see? If we can’t see them, even if they inspire us, doesn’t it suggest that there may also be worlds, perhaps even entire dimensions, that don’t mesh with our own? Perhaps there are galaxies filled with worlds of discord and pain.”
She paused, as if in pain herself. The words discord and pain reminded her of Fallar Discordia. The mere thought of the Fallarian Dominion made her shudder. Everything sood of the Midbelt seemed like an ocean of madness and fire. But was it really?
A calmness welled up inside her, beyond crests and troughs, like a tide moving upward to meet his disturbing thoughts. Talfar said, “I have the same problem. How can we live in a world of fantasy without really knowing the meaning of pain? This morning I was reading “Ode to a Nightingale.” In it the poet paints the most beautiful image of escape, and longs to cease upon the midnight with no pain. How can there be such beauty in all of this?
Thalphemera recited,
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
This seemed the moment to put on pause their discussion. Neither of them wanted to lose sight of the room they were in, the way they responded to each other’s words, or the energy their talk generated between them.
“Shall we go for that coffee?” he asked, although both of them had already started rising from their seats.
As they walked up the stairs, they realized that the 5,000 seat auditorium was completely empty. The lights were as bright as ever, as if expecting to illuminate some brilliant theory. Thalphemera noted playfully, “I’m guessing this would be our audience if we performed that dialogue for the class!”
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