Fairy Tales 🧚 The Soul Star
The Bind that Flies
Beyond Whose Bourn?
Güsfreude simply couldn’t accept it. What was the meaning of the Light if it couldn’t dispel the Dark? If Antonio was free to destroy the soul of Beatrice, and if he kept his god-forsaken necrometer trained on the Local Void, where would all the angels hide?
She knew that life was a one-way affair, time-wise that is. She saw no reason that the afterlife would be any different. There was no point in looking backward. There were plenty of space machines, yet there was as yet no such thing as a time machine. All that the beings in the Kraslika had in that regard was memory and hope for the future.
Beatrice was haunted by Hamlet’s description of the afterlife as a country beyond whose bourn no traveller returns. Yet what did Shakespeare really know, with his sixteenth-century confusion, his cloud-capped towers and the baseless fabric of his vision? His deepest characters ended up wading through rivers of blood, raging on heaths — Kill! Kill! Killl! Kill! — or accusing the gods of treating humans the way flies were treated by wanton boys. Europe’s God was a Beelzebub, a Lord of the Flies, Golding’s novel an update on the continuing saga of humanity’s reversion from order to chaos. Hamlet himself couldn’t tell a ghost from a demon. Güsfreude could see all around her that there was more than was dreamt of in Shakespeare’s philosophy, whatever that was.
She also heard rumours that there were exceptions to Hamlet’s rule about the country from whose bourn no traveller returns. There was Jesus, whose death was no mere murder, but represented the pain that God Himself went through because of His love for His creatures. There were thousands of bodhisattvas — souls who chose to help others rather than bask in fields of asphodel. And there was the fantasy of Dante, who imagined himself travelling down to Hell and back, determined to recount the horror he saw so that he could also convey the good: per trattar del ben ch'i' vi trovai, dirò de l'altre cose ch'i' v' ho scorte. Finally, there was the doctrine of reincarnation itself. Samsara. She had heard that it was a fact, and not just a myth or fantasy. She wondered if it was true that a soul can take a new form in another life.
She was convinced that leaving the Soul Star was the only way her soul could find peace, even though peace was offered to her on a golden platter, spinning with incandescent angels, no questions asked. Yet how could she extricate herself from the dense mass of infinite souls, and travel back to Earth?
From The Book of Fractals
III: Technology
ix. The Infinitesimal Energy of the Soul Star
After aeons of research, and over 8 million prototypes, we, the early mystic scientists of Vicino Prossimo, realized that every being, no matter how exalted or base, could be infracted in an infinitesimal form. We also perfected the design by which each being can be possessed of this fractal, spliced into their genetic coding, and by which they could, at the moment of their death, be capable of harnessing the subatomic energy within it.
Fitted like a bird with migrational instinct, the being could then beam itself to the Soul Star.
“Migration of the Bar-tailed Godwit Limosa lapponica.Bar-tailed Godwits have recently (March 2007) been shown to undertake the longest non-stop flight of any bird. Using satellite tracking, birds in New Zealand were tagged and tracked all the way to the Yellow Sea in China.” From Wikimedia Commons.
The bar-tailed godwit (photo by Dhaval Vargiya). “Its migration includes the longest known non-stop flight of any bird and also the longest journey without pausing to feed by any animal.” From Wikipedia.
The being could take this flight if it chose. For the Soul Star is not a belief or commandment. It requires no oath of allegiance. Rather, it is a refuge and resting place for those who want to live forever in peace and harmony. No being can be indoctrinated into it by religion, forced toward it by physics, or forced away from it by threats. It is simply the choice that we give all beings at the moment of their death.
Unlike the Demon Priests of Fallar, we believe that our science has nothing to do with essences or magic. To be fair, the Soul Star appears to be closer to a non-thing of spirit than a thing of matter: it emits almost no light and possesses almost no gravity. Though infinitely dense with energy and infractions, the Soul Star is almost weightless. We, the Seven Sages, designed it to take advantage of the law of the decreasing weight of infinitesimal infraction. Here, a fractal bearing space becomes infinitely dense the deeper one goes within it, yet in terms of mass and weight, the ever-smaller fractals weigh ever-closer to nothing. Just as a tiny photon can propel itself at the speed of light, so the finer levels of matter and weight yield incredible levels of energy. We have learned to harness these energy levels, aligning and directing them in controlled pulses. We can use the energy to do work, to defend ourselves, or to project ourselves from one corner of the Kraslika to the next.
What we accomplished in lightness and freedom from gravity, the Demon Priests of Fallar accomplished with weight. Using the complimentary law of increasing mass of infinitesimal infraction, Demon Priests have availed themselves with the same energy with which they can get work done, defend themselves, and travel quickly. They have also taken advantage of the the law of magnetized momentum, which works more effectively with higher fractal mass. This may well be the greatest challenge to the Vicinese Empire in the future, since it has given considerable power to their heavy, powerful, fast-travelling Swarms. Whether or not our invisible counterweights, or Hosts, can contain or counter the Swarms, is discussed in section IV: Hegemony.
Without going far into the subject matter of IV: Hegemony, one should note that lightness and freedom from gravity gives matter at least one major tactical advantage: it makes it very hard to detect. The Soul Star is so light that a piece of cotton fluff three centimetres distant from it will keep drifting in space. The piece of fluff will not get sucked in, will not fall with crushing speed toward any sort of event horizon. That sort of crushing weight and density would be the effect of a naturally-occurring black hole or imploded star, or of an artificially-created object like The Black Planet, which the Demon Priests constructed in the depths of the Fallixian Void. That is indeed a place of confinement, a place from which no traveller returns.
The law of the decreasing mass of infinitesimal infraction initially appears almost magical, and hence we use a quasi-magical vocabulary, referring to the fractal beings below the size of one yotta-nanometer as a soul. Yet a fractal is not a soul in the theological sense. Just as we use star to indicate extreme amounts of energy, so we use soul to indicate extreme value. None of us, after all, are afraid of metaphor.
Like a Photon
Güsfreude knew that the Soul Star wasn’t a prison. It had almost no weight, almost no gravity to pull her into its sphere. She was there of her own free will. Why would she be forced to remain?
Güsfreude thought of Earth’s sun and the quatuordecillion photons that escape from its surface every second. She thought of how a photon makes its way through the octillions upon octillions of like-minded sparks, up from the depths of a star. Then, after tens of thousands of years, the photon reaches the surface, at which point it breaks free from the crushing gravity of the sun.
How could such a tiny thing escape from the gravity of such a massive object?
The only way, she figured, was if it weighed almost nothing at all.
Then she thought about love and how much it weighed. Her love was bound like light to energy, like feelings to her thoughts. Like her feelings to her grand-daughter.
Güsfreude thought of Beatrice, and broke free from the incandescent light.
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