The Soul Star ⭐️ Vicino Lontano & The Soul Star
The Crazy Diamond
Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
(Pink Floyd, from Wish You Were Here, 1975)
A Stellar Debate
Outside the Great Dome of the capital city, Vicino Concordia, no one understands the mysteries behind the smooth operation of the Vicinese Union. Waves of benign direction emanate from the Dome, which float over the Emerald Sea. The great spirits in the Dome, the Anunnaki, confer on a level that’s impossible for the average citizen to fathom. The only beings capable of grasping their occult messages live on the Golden Hill — members of the Bright Council, Magnet Dreamers, worldstalkers, etc. The Bright Council meet whenever the Anunnaki have something to communicate or whenever one of the other high councils need their advice. The Council interpret the messages of the Anunnaki, compare the content of these messages with other information coming in from other councils (who also met on the Golden Hill), and then send action items to the Universal Parliament. Waves of assent or dissent reverberate back through the Council and into the Dome.
The city of Vicino Concordia is an enormous executive mechanism, humming with think-tanks, special committees, and the innumerable departments of its 83 universities. The capital is hard-wired into the planet, with its 46 major cities and its 25 trillion inhabitants. From there, the benign directives of Dome and Hill emanate into the enormous galaxy of Vicino Lontano, which is 870 kiloparsecs wide. By comparison, the Milky Way is 30 kiloparsecs wide.
The closer the Vicinese get to the capital, the closer they seem to get to Truth. The further they go from the capital, the more Truth seems like a nebulous thing. In the nectar bars and ganga cafés of Vicino Concordia the students are always on the edge of some great discovery. They spend their time guessing at the murky politics of the Universal Parliament, the insight of the Bright Council, and the end-game of the mystic figures in the Dome. The Anunnaki, what in the White Pulse could they be up to? Are they even Vicinese?
In the galaxy of Vicino Lontano it’s considered rude, even naïve, to question openly, as if you aren’t smart enough to figure it out for yourself. As if you don’t already know. In their grad seminars they talk in circles, using vague language that they hop would convey depth and obscure their confusion. The professors aren’t much help, since they always seem to be hiding something behind the things they say. And because the Annunaki never show their faces, the power of Truth seems to multiply the more it’s implicated in mystery.
In the other galaxies of The Purple Pulse, philosophers speculate at great distance on how it is that everything seems to come together. They hear stories about the great power that emanates from the Dome in the capital. They hear rumours of a Star that pulses in synchrony with the Dome. It’s said that this Star pulses into every corner of the thirteen known universes. But what this pulse is remains a mystery to them. Children ask what it all means, and their parents reply with a twinkle in their eye, “It’s a mystery, isn’t it?”
In the nordbelt universes — the Panophilia, the Blue Dream, and the Pink Sea — the rumours splinter and are refracted by the lenses of the inhabitants. To the Panophilese, the Star is everywhere. Scientists might try to locate it and explain it, yet the most respected caste, the Mysticanians, refuse to even speculate. In the Blue Dream many see the Star as a metaphor. It’s a possibility, an ideal that inspires citizens to (as Dreamers put it) reach for the stars. But by and large the practical inhabitants go about their research with logic and precision. If it does exist, they’ll find out what it’s made of, and what it required of the citizenry. If it doesn’t exist, they’ll require a clear rationale for why it ought to. In the Pink Sea, the Sea Creatures use the reasoning they call floating and sliding, which means that everything you think is sliding into all the meanings that each word you think invites you to entertain. Since the words never end, the entertainment never ends, and you never can claim to arrive anywhere at all. It’s all a floating, sliding affair, and you may as well get used to it.
In general, from what astronomers gather, no one knows if the Soul Star exists or not. All we have are ancient accounts, contradictory speculations, and iffy astronomical data leading inconclusively to a possibility.
The wizard nerds of Scientium Fluvius (from a floating planet-island in the Pink Sea) claim to have traced individual energy trajectories that occur after the death of any type of living being. According to their studies — which have been meticulously monitored by the Intergalactic Science Council, but which the Pink Sea Creatures say is full of holes — after the body dies it emits an energy signal that’s generally wave-like, yet also exhibits characteristics of magnetism, light, and dark matter. Sometimes this signal quickly becomes imperceptible, slipping away in nanoseconds like a dark grey shadow off their spectrometers. At other times it appears as a distorted frequency for several seconds before it slides away from any known spectra. The Sea Creatures like the idea of its sliding, as if we might some day slid out of this life and into something else. What that something else is they speculate far and wide, but refuse to tie down to any set of parameters. Instead, they leave the something elses floating, and measure the drafts and currents over time. When pressed for conclusions, the Pink Sea Creatures insist that they’re unable to track the signal for more than three seconds. They conclude that perhaps it slips into an alternate dimension, or perhaps it implodes into infinitely small fractals that are floating somewhere in space.
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From The Book of Fractals, II: History
The Soul Star rotates slowly, like a diamond sphere lit from within.
We, the Seven, gave it neither visible colour nor noticeable weight. It is tiny, almost invisible. It will rotate for as long as the Kraslika lasts, ever more densely compressed by the number of beings infracted in its infinite heart.
Silently, slowly, in time and beyond time, the Soul Star rotates in the void of intergalactic night.
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The astronomers of Scientium Fluvius further observe that these trajectories often take the form of extremely faint lines of dark purple light. Most of the time this light bounces and zigzags without any discernible pattern. The mystic philosophers of Teravidium suggest that these trajectories aren’t random, but correspond to otherworldly topographies through which the soul-beam is travelling en route to its spiritual home. The Fluvians frown at this interpretation, since there’s no consistent pattern to these afterlife peregrinations. Some even note, drily, that if souls are in fact on some sort of afterlife pilgrimage, the pilgrims don’t seem to know where the shrine is. The mystic philosophers consider this sarcastic note inappropriate, especially since 7% of the afterlife energy signals clearly move in the direction of the Local Void, which is about 200 million light years wide, and can be found in The Violet Hoop.
Prolixitar, a High Mathematician of Infinitar Prossimara (a university planet in the universe of The Crimson Stalk) advocates regional problem solving. He argues that in order to understand the Soul Star one needs to understand the logic of the universe in which it’s located: The Violet Hoop. He is fond of citing the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, who in addition to deriving calculus philosophized on the relation of the abyss to the soul. Pascal argued that the only thing capable of filling the infinite abyss of our erratic and meaningless lives is the meaningful infinity of an immutable God: ce gouffre infini ne peut être rempli que par un objet infini et immuable, c’est-à-dire que par Dieu même.
Reductivas, a staunch opponent of anything Prolixitar wrote, wondered how it made sense to use a philosopher from a backward universe to explain the Soul Star, which clearly came from a Higher realm, and was just using The Violet Hoop as a place to hide. The inhabitants of The Violet Hoop are so backward that they can’t even detect the basic frequency of the advanced universes: the micro-nanometre. Alien species were zooming in and out of their galaxies all the time, right under their noses. How could the inhabitants of a universe like that even begin to understand the Soul Star?
Reductivas also got down to specifics. While he could appreciate Pascal’s logic up to a point (perhaps Pascal was in fact a plant from Ataari Lok?) he objected that for Pascal’s scenario to work, the soul of humans had to be infinitely deep. Otherwise how could the container hold the contents? How could a limited soul, however empty, know an Infinite God? Reductivas then submitted 14 thousand pieces of evidence demonstrating that the vaunted profundities of the human soul were only convincing to humans. The mathematician cross-referenced the human claims about their eternal souls with human actions, at which point the Allied Council of Intergalactic Deductionists (ACID) saw what base nonsense the humans were puffing up with bursts of hot air. Prolixitar came to a different conclusion, however, about the possibility of an Infinitari High Mathematician sounding these depths.
According to the astronomers of The Metaphorical Cone (a galaxy in the universe of Ataari Lok), the best metaphor for the Soul Star is a diamond — which in their galaxy shares the same properties as it does in ours, except that in the gravitational fields of The Central Cone the crystals continually shift according to the declinations of their suns and galaxies and according to the densities of their dark matter moons. The Coneheads suggest that the Soul Star is like a diamond, compressed, orderly, and beautiful. It shines in infinite ways, depending on the way one sees it. On Metaphora Prime, they see it according to the positions of the crystals on the dark sides of its seven dark moons.
The poets of The Metaphoric Hoop (a supercluster in the Blue Dream) are quick to explain that the reason to use a metaphor in the first place is to get a critical distance from what one presumes to know. They insist that the Soul Star probably wasn’t even a star. They conced that we nevertheless need to think of it as a metaphorical star, at least until we die and then see it (or don’t see it) for ourselves. The philosophers of the Crimson Stalk concur, and add the following ruba’iyat by the poet Omar Khayyam:
Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate / I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate, / And many Knots unravel'd by the Road; / But not the Knot of Human Death and Fate.
There was a Door to which I found no Key: / There was a Veil past which I could not see: / Some little Talk awhile of ME and THEE / There seem'd - and then no more of THEE and ME.
Hubble’s Barred and Booming Spiral Galaxy. UGC 6093 is something known as a barred spiral galaxy — it has beautiful arms that swirl outwards from a bar slicing through the galaxy’s center. From NASA Hubble images at https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/multimedia/index.html.
The theologians of Ruumar and Arabissimi (both solar systems in The Panophilia universe) are a more optimistic group. They quietly meditate on the possibility that the Soul Star is literally a compressed diamond, fractalled with all the things, spaces, angles, and spiritual entities in the cosmos. Dancing in swirling patterns to mimic the glistening stars, they chant that within the Soul Star lies all the experiences of every species from every galaxy that has ever existed. To them, it’s literally an expensive, gorgeous, exciting, luxuriant diamond, compressed with Infinity itself.
But the Star is in fact not a star.
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From The Book of Fractals, II: History
The first beings to organize space and give it meaning were the early Vicinese. After aeons of research, Vicinese science perfected the design of the infinite self-regenerating algorithmic fractal. At last we created the Soul Star.
Although our creation isn’t technically a star, we take the star as our guiding metaphor. A great star gives light to the universe. It creates life with its soft, powerful energy. When it dies, it implodes and takes back the energy it once gave.
The Soul Star gives life meaning because it confounds Death, which was once the Great Leveller of all things, rendering absurd all our attempts to understand and to exist. Like a black hole, the Soul Star takes back the energy of life. Like an active sun, it gives life back again. The beat of its pulse is life. The space between pulses is death.
The Soul Star is a tiny point of interstellar dust located in the near total darkness of your local void. In its infinite depths, the Soul Star contains the beauties of every single world in the thirteen known universes.
We who designed it gave it neither visible colour nor noticeable weight. It is tiny, almost invisible. It will rotate until the end of the Kraslika, ever more densely compressed by the number of beings infracted in its infinite heart.
Silently, slowly, in time and never beyond time, the Soul Star rotates in the void of intergalactic night.
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Next: 🎲 The Condensation of Demon Saints
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