The Great Game 🎲 The Aatari planet of Kollarum

The Star to Every Wandering Bark

~ the present ~

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So much was happening around Earth, that strange little planet, whose inhabitants were so ignorant of the cosmos and yet so much like it. Talfar knew the degree to which the species and languages of Earth reflected those of the Kraslika. He knew that the dominant humanoid forms of Earth mirrored those of the cosmos. He also knew that the diverse life-forms on Earth mirrored those of the thirteen universes. A Vicinese schoolboy spoke an Italian that was more pure than that of Dante. An Elkbalam lady of the night slunk through the deserted back alleys like a jaguar in the Amazon.

Earth was also the closest inhabited planet to the legendary Soul Star, which was rumoured to drift somewhere in the Local Void of the Virgo Super Cluster. How to explain Earth’s proximity to the elusive Star? Yet even more mysterious, how to explain that even the most primitive human poets and mystics seemed to know about the Star’s existence?

… it is an ever-fixèd mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although its height be taken.

Yet every time Talfar looked into human descriptions of the Soul Star, he found nothing but fantasy. Shakespeare’s star to every wandering bark was probably not a Love Star or some magical star. It was almost certainly the Pole Star, known for ages as Polaris, Alpha Ursae Minoris, al-Judayy, and Dhruva. It only signified a fixed location because it was seen from the northern hemisphere of Shakespeare’s tiny planet. Every trajectory line northward from Earth had been calculated and scrutinized, yet none of them led to a Soul Star.

Did this mean that humanity’s prettiest dream — of a final Love that harmonizes all things, of an Age of Aquarius in which the stars themselves usher in a New Golden Age — is only a fantasy, only a rare and beautiful hope seen from one particular angle?

Despite these disappointments, the legend of the Soul Star persisted. Astronomers had verified again and again that after a person died there was some sort of trajectory toward the Local Void. Some energy pattern that no one could capture, identify, or scan in any way, except for its initial trace. The myth of the Soul Star was unstoppable because the trajectory, the thin line that was almost unseeable, was irrefutable. And for hundreds of thousands of years astronomers asked, Why did the line vibrate when a giant star imploded or a star wall shifted trillions of gigaparsecs away?

Talfar knew the orb couldn’t show him the location of the Soul Star. And even though he didn’t know what the Star really meant, he worried that it might be put in danger by the advance of the Baulian Empire. The Matterhorn Conference at which he and Farenn were to speak in less than an hour had this as its central question: Was it wise to let the Baulians take over the Virgo Supercluster, given that it contained the Local Void and the Milky Way?

The Baulians were an advanced species from the Orange Hoop, yet not advanced enough to see that there was life beyond the three universes in the Great Triangle. The Baulians understood how to infract one space into a smaller space, but they didn’t understand how deep infraction could go. They operated on a superficial level, while the advanced species — the Vicinese, Fallarians, Tarnese, Green Buzzards, Blue Dreamers, and Aatari — operated at the deeper levels. Most of these species couldn’t go any deeper than one meter to the power of minus 50, although the Vicinese and Fallarians were known to go as deep as minus 60.

The question Talfar couldn’t answer was, Should the Virgo Supercluster come under the umbrella of the benevolent yet clueless Pax Baulixia? Perhaps the Council ought to stop the Baulian advance. Yet if it did that, Virgo would become a feeding ground. The Harrowers of the Yellow Sky would streak through the air and strangle every passing bird to find out what it knew about the Soul Star. The Green Buzzards would track down every living thing, until even jaguars were afraid of their own tracks. And the Fallarians would eat the Baulians alive, like a million piranhas in a swimming pool of a hundred pink dolphins. Even his own Vicinese, with all their lofty ideals, couldn’t be trusted to behave. He knew that they said one thing and did another.

So it was perhaps better to let the Baulians maintain the status quo. Having no awareness of the greater cosmos, at least the Baulians could be considered neutral in regard to the two powers that really mattered: the Fallarians and the Vicinese. These were like two cosmic dragons, taking centre stage in every dispute that mattered. Other conflicts occurred between the two poles of their power, yet these were like fractal decorations. The centre of attention was always the two dragons.

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Worried about where all of this was heading, Talfar looked down at the glowing orb. He brought up to its surface several verses from The Book of Fractals, the ancient book of wisdom written by the early Vicinese sage Algotodo:

When looking at a fractal orb, leave your self behind. See contour and colour, tension and contortion. Let these become a unified piece of your understanding, a fractal in the flowing stream of your mind.

The orb is a mirror up to Nature. It is a vision of life itself, miniaturized so that its wholeness can be seen and understood in one vision. And in this vision is a sound. Better yet, a melody.

Shine the white light of understanding on the fractal orb. See how your tint lies within it, dancing or stumbling, distorted or clear. See how your tint adds richness to it, or drains it of its colour. Don’t shy away from self-knowledge. The only knowledge that can harm you is the one that’s hidden from you. Let your thoughts sway to the music.

Looking into the orb, Earth disappeared and the Kraslika reasserted itself. Talfar saw a dark blue planet implode and he saw a thin cobalt line extend outward from Fallar Discordia. He knew that this blue planet was Tarry Doom, the birthplace of his Aatari friend Qayam. It was a slave-planet in the Ataari Lok universe, a historical embarrassment on par with Auschwitz. Forking this way and that, the cobalt line eventually went straight into the pink heart of Baulis Prime. The cobalt line then continued to the edge of the orb, where it came into contact with a navy blue line that emerged from outside the orb. Talfar had never seen a line emerge from outside the orb before. He had never even heard of such a thing.

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The navy blue line confounded him. It also made him think of his first love, Thalphemera. 100 years ago she left Vicino Prossimo to discover the source of the energy signatures that traversed the Kraslika, from one end to the next. These navy blue and indigo streaks and pulses were more powerful, more densely infracted than any of the orange beams, cobalt tracers, or violet streaks that habitually crisscrossed the cosmos. The navy lines were within the Kraslika, yet they didn’t seem to come from the Kraslika. And yet there was no evidence of their coming from outside the Kraslika. They appeared on the Golden Hill on Vicino Prossimo and then disappeared from the Black Diamond on Fallar Prime. The navy pulses appeared to move the star walls between, and they seemed to affect much of what happened within organic matter everywhere in the cosmos. Some physicists called them monad blasts, because once they blasted into the Kraslika they seemed to be everywhere at once. Thalphemera said that it didn’t matter where her quest took her, she would find out where these pulses came from.

Talfar strained his eyes trying to see where in the Kraslika Thalphemera might had gone. Was she in the orb at all? Amid all the lines and bleeps, fantastic tangents, explosions and implosions he didn’t see where she could possibly be. And if she was somewhere in the Kraslika, why hadn’t she contacted him?

No where among the bright or smouldering worlds could he see her crystal blue eyes or hear the sound of her crystal-clear voice. Switching the orb off, it shrank from the size of a watermelon to the size of a soy bean. Then a bright grain of sand. Then it appeared to disappear. In fact, it nestled behind Talfar’s right ear.

All he could think about was Thalphemera.

I would do anything for you
I would climb mountains
I would swim all the oceans blue

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Talfar remembered her standing beneath a fountain that descended from the Golden Hill, her ponytail swinging in the light. The Golden Palace of the Doge towered above them, with its intricate latticework, mixed with the green tendrils of the minifir trees.

140 years ago they said a tearful goodbye to Farenn, who had lived under their cover for a decade, telling them things they could hardly believe, and showing them a way of being, of laughing and thriving, no matter what. But then Farenn returned to Fallar Discordia, and it was just the two of them again. But they couldn’t stop thinking about him. It seemed that he was a part of their psyches, that far-off Fallarian part that had been severed from their Vicinese selves over the last three billion years.

As a Fallarian, Farenn would have trouble getting through the checkpoints of the Vicinese Federation, and back to the Middle Belt. The Vicinese authorities had reason to be afraid of him, if only they knew who he was. But Farenn was careful, and the only people who knew his identity over the past decade were Talfar and Thalphemera. He may have had wings, but he knew how to hide them. He may have had claws, but he knew how to retract them. And he may have been tough, even ruthless in his own way, but they knew what was inside him. What they learned from their alien friend would keep them curious for centuries, and would direct the course of their lives. He was the darkest yet most luminescent man they’d ever met.

Thalphemera took Talfar’s hand in hers. They looked up at the solid, reassuring Golden Palace. They couldn’t help worrying that Farenn may not have made it through the checkpoints alive. They walked around the Golden Hill and along the glittering water. They walked two or three kilometres in complete silence. They walked out onto a lonely jetty, and stared for an hour at the gentle waves of the Purple Sea.

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Talfar also remembered saying goodbye to Thalphemera 40 years later. They were sitting on the deck of a long-distance freighter that was taking them into the soodern half of the Kraslika. Talfar and Thalphemera were both 100 years old, and had spent half of their lives together. In those green years they’d learned much about the universe and about each other. Now it was time for them to see what life was like outside the peaceful bubble of Vicino Prossimo and the galaxies of the Federation. They had taken holidays, but they had never lived abroad. And they had never ventured beyond the soodern edges of the Blue Dream and the Pink Sea.

As they drifted by the galaxies of the Violet Hoop, they saw something glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. Thalphemera turned to Talfar and asked, “Do you think that in all these worlds, there’s such a thing as an eternal soul?”

Earlier that week they’d hired a ship to take them slowly through the Local Void, in search of the elusive Soul Star. It was like looking for a whale in an ocean where the largest mammal was a dolphin. Like everyone else who travelled into that nothingness, they found nothing but empty space. She asked again, “Do you think think we’ll exist, beyond this matter? If we lose contact, will we ever meet again?”

Talfar couldn’t answer her question. She would have been disappointed if he even tried. Instead, he slid his fingers into hers. Together, they watched the far-away fireworks. They saw what appeared to be a supernova. It shook the sky like foil, gathering into a great golden sheet that lit up the dark. Their hearts felt like gold to airy thinness beat.

And then they thought about tomorrow, when the freighter would reach the perimeter of the Yellow Sky and they would go their separate ways.

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Shake your head girl / With your ponytail / Takes me right back / When you were young / Threw your precious gifts / Into the air / Watched them fall down / When you were young / Lift up your feet / And put them on the ground / You used to walk upon / When you were young

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Talfar brought up another verse from The Book of Fractals:

Shine a white beam on the orb’s colourful world, a microcosm in time, then let the beam continue on its path. A white line travelling in space across more fractals in time, through them, around them, across the Stream of Time itself into the Open Field.

He stared for a minute into an intense current of light. Emerging from the depths he saw the image of a fish flying up from a dark body of water. Then the fish disappeared, and all he saw was the water. From within the fractal he heard a sound emerging. It was a song from Earth: “The Age of Aquarius, Let the Sun Shine In.”

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Next: 💍 The Actress

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