The Soul Star ⭐️ The Great Void

Antiny the 23rd

Antiny adjusted his quantum lens in the direction of the navy-blue dot he saw on the edges of his spectrometer. It appeared every couple of hours and then disappeared.

It looked like the dot he’d seen in his dreams: half black and half blue. It was as if someone had taken the cobalt of his native sky and pierced the Void, pulsing though its uniform darkness like the hint of life from some other dimension.

300 million years ago Antiny had left the lonely planet of Antigua, which was a mere 800 kilometres in diameter. The planet had floated in the Void for over 80 trillion years. For aeons it floated, solitary, in a vacuum so dark that no one on that planet imagined there was any other source of light, life, or company in the entirety of space. The Antiguans had never seen a sun, and had never been guided by any light save that generated by the cobalt-coloured glow of the soil.

Yet the Antiguans were a patient species. They were as resigned as the early Icelanders to the brutal vicissitudes of a meaningless fate. And like Vikings they gnawed against the ropes that kept their houses tethered in the cold north wind. They chomped at the bits that kept their horses glued to the rocky surface of their dark blue fields. Eventually, they turned their tether ropes into tiller ropes and into bolt ropes, and set sail for the inky void.

The Antiguans survived their long journeys by telling themselves stories. Having mined the secrets of dark matter infraction, they had endless internal realms into which their narratives could expand. Antiguans judged each other by the degree to which their epics cohered, and the degree to which they mined mirror meanings and fringe meanings, which lay within the reader but just out of reach, just beyond the edges of what could be clearly grasped.

Like Chinese poets, they used words to push their readers beyond words, into a landscape of possible meanings. And like the Ming Dynasty poet Yang Shen they had great respect for the masters who taught them everything. The travelling masters were now themselves travelling further into the darkness, their trajectory taking them ever further from the trajectory of the disciples who read their poems:

Some Antiguan poets were practical and wrote about making omelettes and watching their children grow. Yet most of them were mystic structuralists in search of the most vast and perplexing structure on which to hang their ideas. The originator of Mystical Structuralism, Ezroza Spinesson, said that if literary structure was an arch, it was an arch “through which gleams an untravelled world whose margins fade for ever and forever when I move.” Or it was an arch that pulsed blue and purple, green and black, lemon and tangerine. Or it was an arch that disappeared, only to reappear in ten thousand years, to finally make its clearest statement at the exact moment it disappeared forever.

Antiguan narrative often started out in a straight line, but soon took odd tangents, bending in arcs this way and that. The true connoisseur of Antiguan Literature looked within and beyond the circles and arcs, and guessed at the general direction which could only be verified later, or perhaps never at all. The art of the writer was to keep the reader guessing. As in art, so in life, so said Antiguinius the 7th, who was the first Antiguan to demonstrate that imaginary worlds were infinitely more interesting than the grim cobalt planet of Antigua.

At times Antiny the 23rd missed the cobalt soil of home – it’s rich oblivion, it’s life-breathing lattice of forms which lit up his skeleton every time it fell into the dust. For the planet of Antigua would lie dormant for centuries after all life was extinguished and all movement had ceased. Then, from deep inside its core, a cobalt pulse blasted infinitesimal forms upward through the entire planet. Bones fused with the rich dirt and Antiguans greeted each other as if they had just woken up from a nap.

Antiny often felt nostalgic for his home planet, for the surge of the cobalt pulse that reanimated his body every 400 years. He missed the cycle, in and out of existence, that gave his life a chronological sense for the past three billion years. He often wondered if he had made a mistake by travelling into the unknown. Maybe the problem wasn’t the road not taken, but rather the act of taking the road. Or perhaps he was just realizing that there was nothing out there for him. Or, as Yang Shen put it,

In such moments he would try to erase his loneliness by plunging headlong into a story, its fringes latticed with cobalt beads that beckoned him into a room where dim bulbs glowed and he could see in the corner an alien with dark blue crystalline eyes. He stared into the alien’s eyes and found himself on the windswept hill of the alien’s planet. It was a world in which two forces reigned supreme: good and evil. Antiny had no idea how two abstract forces could reign over anything, unless they were forces like gravity and matter, but this consideration wasn’t as important as the fact that he had entered the story and was now watching as the alien donned a long cloak and lifted a short metal bar. He then shook the bar, which emitted three bursts of electrostatic energy. These blasted through a large stone gate on whose lintel read the following: MINES OF MORIA, ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.

Antiny was about to step through the magical gate when he saw a blue dot out of the corner of his eye. He sat up straight. He then, very carefully, adjusted his quantum lens in the direction of the navy-blue dot he saw on the edges of his spectrometer.

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