The Great Game 🎲 Planet Kollarum
The Orb
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In his suite overlooking the city of Kollarum, Talfar shut the curtains and sat down in front of his coffee table. Floating six inches above the wood was a translucent ellipsoid, commonly (and mistakenly) referred to as an orb or a fractal orb. The points and lines within the orb were a miniature version of the cosmos.
The fractal orb was the most advanced personal computer in the 13 universes of the Kraslika. Powered by its own tiny subatomic engine, the orb could be as large as a football stadium or as small as a marble you put in your pocket. What mattered wasn’t its size, but rather the owner’s history with it: what the owner had asked of it and what data, networks, and algorithms the owner had integrated into its functioning. This was why it was called a personal computer. The most popular brand of orb was elliptoid in shape and called the watermelon.
Every fractal orb was impossible to hack. You’d need an exact copy of the owner’s body to do that. But if you could hack it, it could tell you everything about its owner, and everything about all the secrets he kept to himself. Well, to himself and to the orb, which was in effect another part of his self. It was an expanded, geo-spatial part that held all the things the owner was liable to forget. It also held his most arcane, hidden, and improbable speculations. It held the permutations of how his dreams might work out, and it held nightmare scenarios of what would happen if they didn’t.
In just one hour from now Talfar would go up to the Grand Plaza, where people from the thirteen universes mingled and set their agendas in motion. The ground floor of the Plaza was a wide-open space, surrounded 280 degrees by windows that were twenty stories high. These windows looked down over the ski slope, and looked out into the famous kaleidoscopic sky of Kollarum, with its swirling bright blues and greens.
The ground floor of the Plaza formed the base of The Apex, which was the top 20 floors of the Matterhorn Conference Centre. On any level you could go back and forth between the Forum and the Plaza. Like the floors above it, the ground floor had cafes, lounges, restaurants, convenience shops, and small meeting rooms.
The Apex was the largest and most important meeting ground in the entire cosmos. It was the site of all the great historic pacts, treaties, and memoranda that had been negotiated and signed over the last million years. The Apex had done more to keep the Kraslika peaceful than any other place. In this sense, it was considered the ultimate political power-point in the cosmos. A symbol of democracy, fair commerce, free expression, individual rights, and peaceful resolution of conflict. Some even put the Apex on their national logos and dollar bills, as a symbol of the almighty unifying power that sees — and oversees — everything:
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Talfar and Farenn were scheduled to give the opening speeches for both weeks of the Infinite Distance Conference. The first week, titled Lingua Franca, was on establishing a common language for the Kraslika. The second week, titled Protectorate, was on the Baulian conquest of the Milky Way. Talfar and Farenn were the chief representatives of the Vicinese Union and the Fallarian Dominion. Although the two had been friends for 250 years, they never so much as said hello to each other in a deserted corridor. As they say, the walls have ears. The two of them only communicated when both were completely alone, and only when there were at least ten encryption walls between them and the rest of the cosmos. If ever the Vicinese Golden Council or the Fallarian Condensation of the Demon Priests found out that their top diplomats were in league with each other, their careers and their freedom would come to an abrupt end.
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Talfar needed the room dark and quiet, so that he could focus on the subtle lines and shades in his fractal orb. He was trying to see a big picture view of the problem, yet also some of the subtler influences at play. He saw the Vicinese Empire of the Purple Pulse at one end, and the equally powerful Fallarian Empire of the Black Pulse at the other. He saw the universe clusters between: Dolcezza, The Great Triangle, The Grey Phantom, and Nebulast.
Every part of the Kraslika was miniaturized in the near-infinite density of the fractal orb. Putting one’s finger on a current of the orb one could get quick facts, maps, photos, videos, personal stories, works of art, and whatever other historical or cultural information you were looking for. Yet you could also press longer and harder, pressing yourself into the more subtle and creative dynamics of the machine.
For instance, your finger might touch on Coleridge’s poem, “Kubla Khan.” You might read the poem and then press on a part of it so that the orb would supply context and related ideas. You might also make a slight downward movement with your finger on the lines, “mid this tumult Kubla heard from far / Ancestral voices prophesying war!” The downward movement tells the orb that you want to go deeper, avoiding the obvious, into stranger territory, perhaps to follow a tangent that would be suggested by your previous experience with the orb. You increase the pressure, telling the orb that you want to explore something new, and in a fraction of a second you find yourself high in the mountains of the Karakoram.
The orb has floated up from the table and now surrounds your entire head. Looking down from the peaks, you see an epic battle of some sort. it could be the five Pandavas moving in formation against the hundred Kauravas. Or Alexander crossing the Indus. Or Babar descending into Rajasthan. Or Kublai Khan and Ariq Böke, together, through the force of their common enmity, reducing the capital city of Karakoram to dust. Or it could be the French army firing their canons at the citadel in Madras, while six British warships sail south from Calcutta.
The orb knows it isn’t the specific battle that interests you, but rather the more general meaning of war. The orb rotates, turning your back on the scene below. You’re now following a river upstream to its source, into the chasms and then deep underground. Seconds after hearing the mingled melodies of a dulcimer, you fall into a subterranean sea throbbing with ancient life. Washing up on the shore of the sea, you look up into the wet sky that gave birth to the oceans. You reach out your hand to touch a cloud, and a fork of lightning stretches from the shore to a faraway planet, where someone is waiting in a coffee shop in a crowded city. Looking out at the lightning on the grey streets, she waits for you to answer her call.
The fractal orb is, as Coleridge might have said, “a miracle of rare device.”
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The fractal orb could process energy signatures from the outside, even those that had no known source. Signatures were projected as colourful lines, dots, and clouds crisscrossing the orb or surfacing on its edges. Given the mysterious nature of some of these signatures, the information you got from the orb was only as insightful as what you asked it, what databanks you drew from, and what algorithms you activated. Like any communications system, you only got from it what you were shrewd enough to get.
Talfar looked toward the centre, the Midbelt, which was comprised of the Great Triangle and the Grey Phantom universe clusters.
It was in one of these clusters, or between the two, that the Soul Star was said to exist. He asked out loud, “How are we supposed to find a star that is only said to exist?” The Grey Phantom dimmed and disappeared, leaving the Great Triangle, which expanded to fit the orb’s egg-like shape. Then the Green Buzz and the Orange Hoop universes dissolved, leaving only the Violet Hoop, which expanded to fit the size of the orb.
Among the trillion galaxies of the Violet Hoop, one on the very edge floated to the centre, then to the surface: the Milky Way. This galaxy expanded and its periphery dissolved. A solar system with eight planets floated to the surface. The sun disappeared and a green and blue planet consumed the surface of the orb. Talfar knew that it was, once again, Earth.
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So much seemed to be happening around Earth, that strange little planet, whose inhabitants were so ignorant of the cosmos and yet so much like it. As an educated Vicinese, Talfar knew that the species and languages of Earth reflected those of the Kraslika. He knew the degree to which 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 cosmos. A Vicinese schoolboy spoke an Italian that was more pure than that of Dante, and an Elkbalam lady of the night slunk through the crowded 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? And how to explain that even the most backward human poets and mystics seemed to know about the Star’s existence? Yet every time you looked into their proofs you found nothing but fantasy.
Talfar knew the orb couldn’t show him the location of the Soul Star, and he worried the Star may be put in danger by the advance of the Baulian Empire. He wondered if it was wise to let the Baulians take over the Virgo Supercluster. The Baulians were an advanced species from the Orange Hoop, yet not advanced enough to see 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.
(It had been impossible for the Council to come to an agreed limit in the depth that a species could go into the subatomic realm. Most species couldn’t go any deeper than one meter to the power of minus 50. The Vicinese and Fallarians however were rumoured to go as deep at 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.
From the British Museum (photo by RYC).
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Worried about where all of this was heading, Talfar looked down at the glowing orb, and recited three verses from The Book of Fractals:
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. 200 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, 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 disappeared. 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. It was 240 years ago, and they’d just 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 now Farenn had gone back 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 discreet 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 really 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 a 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 there’s more than just matter, however perfectly arranged?”
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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Talfar recited 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.”
All 3 from Wikimedia: 1. “Ganymede, the water bearer.c. 1440-1450 Book of Hours, the Fastolf Master, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 2. New millennium astrological chart. 3. The green bean galaxy J2240 lies in the constellation of Aquarius.