Fairy Tales 🧚 The Soul Star
The Bind that Flies
🧚
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 sky, 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 we have in that regard is memory and hope for the future. And when we die, the memory dies. Or so she thought.
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.
As she twirled like a dervish in empty space, Güsfreude could see all around her that there was more than was dreamt of in Hamlet’s philosophy, whatever that was.
Perhaps there were exceptions to Hamlet’s rule about the country from whose bourn no traveller returns. For instance, the Buddhists talked about bodhisattvas, souls who chose to help others rather than bask in fields of infinite bliss. And there was Dante, who says that he travelled to the afterlife and back again. He said that in order to write about the Heaven he saw, he must also write about the Hell: 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, believed by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, and a wide assortment of global idealists. Samsara. Beatrice wondered if it was true that a soul can take a new form in another life.
She fervently hoped so, because she desperately wanted to save her granddaughter, who was the only person in the entire province of Alberta who understood her. She was convinced that getting back to Eden Valley and Black Diamond was the only way her soul could find peace — even if she knew that she would have to confront the Devil himself there, and even if she knew that she could find peace here in the ether, spinning with incandescent angels, no questions asked. Yet how could she get back to Earth?
Slowly, she moved, from what seemed like a spaceless dimension, into space. She was propelled by a force that wasn’t her own, but which seemed like it could be her own, so aligned was it with her will to travel back to Earth.
Below her she saw the planet. It was green and blue, and seemed to contain (she thought, like Alice speculating on the world down under) everything in the universe. Yet it was also clearly Earth. Everything went dark again and after several minutes of floating downward, feeling only the weight of gravity and seeing nothing else, she found herself drifting onto the peak of a mountain. She knew it because she used to see it from her cabin on the slopes of Eden Valley.
From the peak, she saw an old man sitting by the side of a green lake. Algotodo was sitting there, yet he imagined that he was floating in the mist, which was set aglitter by the moon. This reminded him of a poem from the Tang Dynasty:
Before my bed there is bright moonlight / So that it seems like frost on the ground. Lifting my head, I watch the bright moon, / Lowering my head, I dream that I'm home.
Beatrice was accustomed to strange visions produced by the resin of the gandleflower, so she took it all in stride. She cleared her throat and the man turned his head to look at her. She said, “I’m happy to float here if necessary, but I was hoping to get back to Black Diamond, to protect my dear granddaughter.”
“Yes, yes, welcome Güsfreude! Excuse my distracted state. I understand your situation. Your Beatrice has fallen into the clutches of a Fallarian demon.”
Güsfreude knew that Antonio was a demon, but it scared her nonetheless to hear it spoken out loud. And especially by this formidable stranger, who seemed to her more enigmatic than Alice’s caterpillar, and wiser than Solomon. And what on earth was a Fallarian?
She asked timidly, “Is it possible to grant my request?”
“Yes, indeed, my dear Beatrice, it’s more than possible. It’s necessary.”
“Necessary? To whom?”
“To you. You look puzzled, so allow me to explain. After death, the soul travels to where you are now, in the city of Algodad, on the planet of Algoritmo, also known as the City of God.”
Güsfreude gulped, but didn’t know what to say.
“Yet some souls have business that they simply can’t leave unfinished. They’d rather languish in Purgatory than ascend to Heaven if it means leaving this business undone. I call these people souls of the mist. These souls don’t descend through the atmosphere of Algoritmo like everyone else, that is, like a rocket through the atmosphere. Instead, they float down like mist from the air. They hover over Teardrop Lake until I can look into their case, and until I take their case to the Great Spirit of the Lake.”
“I’ve looked into your case, and it’s full of merit. Don’t worry, you’ll get to deal with Antonio, who I don’t need to warn you about. He’s the most dangerous person you’ve ever met. Whatever you do with him, you’ll be doing the rest of us a great service.”
“But before you begin your journey, I should tell you about the mechanics behind your journey. You’ll need to know how it is that you’re able to fly. You’ll need to know how to postpone your life on this heavenly planet, so that you can follow the path of the bodhisattvas.”
Güsfreude still looked vaguely terrified, so Algotodo asked if she’d rather get on her way. She responded, “No, no, please continue. It’s alot to take in, but I need to know what all this means, and where all this comes from.”
“It all started more than a million years ago in the Vicinese universe. The Seven Sages of the capital city, Vicino Prossimo, figured out how every living being could be reproduced — or infracted — in an infinitesimal form.”
Although Algotodo wasn’t sure that Güsfreude wanted all the details, she was now listening closely. She seemed to want to know what exactly she had stumbled upon.
“The Seven Sages perfected the design by which each being can be possessed of a fractal of themselves, spliced into their genetic coding. By means of this fractal they could, at the moment of their death, harness the subatomic energy within it.”
“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 . “Its migration includes the longest known non-stop flight of any bird and also the longest journey without pausing to feed by any animal.” (Photo by Dhaval Vargiya, from Wikipedia).
“Fitted like a bird with migrational instinct, this being could then beam itself to the planet of Algoritmo, which I believe your Antonio might have called the Soul Star. Of course he would have called it that damned star. But this planet is only damnation if you can’t tolerate tolerance, that is, if you can’t tolerate regulations and rules which ensure tolerance.”
“At the moment of death, each being is free to take this flight if it choses. Algoritmo isn’t a belief or commandment. It requires no oath of allegiance. It’s neither Church nor State. Rather, it’s a refuge, a 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’s simply the choice that we give all beings at the moment of their death. The option is oblivion — or some sort of afterlife that remains entirely speculative, untested. The option is a country on a map drawn by someone who has never travelled there.”
“Unlike the Demon Priests of Fallar Discordia (who resemble Antonio in more ways than one) the Seven Sages believed that science has nothing to do with essences or magic. To be fair, the Algoritmo is 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.”
Algotodo had been staring into the lake as he spoke, yet then looked up at Beatrice to see if she was really interested in what he was saying. Most people wanted to know how to get somewhere but didn’t really want to know all about the vehicle.
Beatrice intuited his concern, and pre-empted his words: “Please, continue. I’m in fact very interested in the design of the universe. Very few of my countrymen are, yet I spend half my time arguing with the ghost of Dante.”
“In this case, you’ll find welcome company on Algoritmo. I’ll make sure to introduce you to the poet myself. Once, that is, you’ve made your journey. You can tell him in person, per trattar del mal ch'i' vi trovai, dirò de l'altre cose ch'i' v' ho scorte. But since you are so much more than just kind in your indulgence, I’ll continue.”
“By infracting bodies and planets, we discovered the law of the decreasing weight of infinitesimal infraction. According to this law, a fractal 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 this energy, aligning and directing it 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 accomplish in lightness and freedom from gravity, the Demon Priests of Fallar accomplish with weight. Using the complimentary law of increasing mass of infinitesimal infraction, Demon Priests avail themselves of the same type of energy. In addition, they take advantage of the the law of magnetized momentum, which works more effectively with greater mass. This may well be the greatest challenge to the Vicinese Empire in the future, since the Fallarians have given considerable gravitational power to their heavy, powerful, fast-travelling Swarms. Whether or not our invisible counterweights, or Hosts, can counter the Swarms, we’re not yet sure. Fearing the worst, however, the Vicinese have made alliances with a great number of Swarms.”
“Lightness and freedom from gravity gives matter at least one major tactical advantage: it makes it very hard to detect. Algoritmo 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 Star, 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.”
“But the journey you are about to take isn’t metaphorical. You must literally travel to the heart of the sun. From there you will come back down to Eden Valley. You’ll then be prepared to confront the likes of Antonio, once your diamond heart is compressed in the furnace of the sun.”
🧚
Algotodo closed his eyes and went into deep meditation. After about ten minutes, he opened his eyes and looked into the mist. He saw the sparkling bits of water and light dancing on the fringes of ether.
Fra Sole, the Great Spirit of the lake, assented to her release, and offered no hindrance to her flight.
🧚
Beatrice was now in the centre of the sun. The heat was so intense that it burnt away everything that she thought. The pressure was so intense that it crushed every doubt she ever had.
Beneath the concepts of heat and gravity lay the concept of sorrow and fear. She would be the light that Antonio smothered. She would, somehow, set Beatrice free.
Güsfreude thought of Earth’s sun and the sextillion photons that escape from its surface every second. She thought of how a photon makes its way through all those like-minded sparks, up from the depths of a star. After 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 thoughts. Like her feelings to her granddaughter.
Güsfreude thought of Beatrice, and broke free from the blinding light.
🧚
Next: 🧚 The Monster in the Manor
Contents - Characters - Glossary: A-F∙G-Z - Maps - Storylines