The Great Game 🎲 Kollarum
In the Contabri Bar
3:15 PM
Inside the bar the air was perfumed and warm. The interior consisted of nine small triangular tables, each of which had one slightly rounded side and two straight sides which came together at a 120 degree angle. The tables, along with their bar-stools, swirled very slowly so that patrons could see a panorama of the bar.
The rules of the bar were very clear: everyone talked to each other in small groups of three for an hour, after which the nine small tables would come together into three tables, each with nine people. The matching skill of the host’s algorithms ensured that the patrons at the large tables would inevitably get along. Qayam took a special interest in what he referred to as the crimson table, around which he had placed his most sensitive recording devices. It was to the drinks at this table that he added his finest intoxicants, his slyest and most potent stimulants. He also ended up at this table, next to the Derelecta of his dreams.
Not that Qayam wasn’t monitoring all the other tables as well. If the music was turned off, one would hear a slight whirring sound in the air, which came from cloaked roto-sensors collecting all sorts of data. The sensors identified the pheromone patterns, body configurations, predilection files, skin gradients, deep red pulses, intelligence quotients, and depravity indexes — all of which was then calculated to provide a perfect FIT (Fulfilling Intimate Tension) between one patron and the next. Often the energy patterns indicated multiple attractions, and sometimes even the sharpest antagonisms would result in the most intense connections.
In this sector of the Aatari Lok universe the two most desired FITS were based on perfect gazing distance (especially for air-born or water-born species, who loved nothing more than floating above their barstools and looking into the eyes of a potential mate) or on maximum interlocking thrust (which in most cases meant friction and in some cases hydraulic trajectory). Yet the final configuration wasn’t pre-determined; rather, it was a function of how the guests got along at the tables of nine, during the three-hour round table at which the they told the stories of their lives.
After the main three-hour mingle, the guests broke off into whatever pairs or groups they fancied. Because it was an all-inclusive excursion, and because back in the Blue Bubble they had already been pumped with erotic stimulants, all the patrons felt they should try it out. So they would all inevitably retire for the remaining two hours of the excursion to the lofty gazing lounges, the scented rapture-combs, or the limb-grinding pounditoriums located in the pleasure palace behind the bar.
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5:15 PM
It was the middle of the third hour of solid drinking, and the patrons around the crimson table were about as drunk as they had been since a time that completely escaped their memories, since these were so impaired that the best they could do was remember to sit up straight and not fall into the lap of the person beside them. Long gone were the coherent stories about where they grew up and what brought them to Aatari Lok.
The drinks were laced with targo-amphetamines, which prevented nausea while increasing the absorption of carburran, a generic drink that contained any number of liquid stimulants and had an effect similar to alcohol mixed with cocaine. Carburran affected individuals in two basic ways. Those who came from a culture that prized sociability and good works, wanted to transcend the horror of cultural difference. They wanted to merge with every species throughout the Kraslika, with The Great Everything Beyond, and with all the other spherical infinities that they saw in the pink cloud of their intoxication. Those from survival-based cultures were far less transcendental in their longings. They did, however, get an urge to talk to each other, rather than bark, snipe, or size each other up for consumption. Two species that would otherwise have nipped at each other’s heels started sniffing indiscreetly into each other’s business. After five or six carburrans, they made coarse suggestions about what body parts would go where.
Because Qayam and Dactalla were both nonsentients, they weren’t influenced by the pulse spectra, yet they were affected by the carburran. Their rational tensors weren’t distorted by their emotional or ontological tensors, themselves abused by forces they couldn’t control. Their minds were reeling, but they knew what put the circuits in orbit.
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The host looked again at her incisors as she smiled her deadly smile. Thank God she wasn’t from this sector of Aatari Lok. He knew what those smiles meant. Dactalla’s smile, on the other hand, was equal parts grimace and grace.
So far she had touched him four times: she had punched him lightly on the shoulder, even more softly in the ribs, and finally pinched him gently somewhere near his hip. She even flicked his left ear once, her perfect purple index claw giving him a slight magnetic shock. The shock pushed pleasure into his brain and drew his feeling into the room. She hadn’t opened up her chest for him for a second time, but the same effulgent purple light emanated from her body, and he could feel its pull on his blood.
Qayam dared to lean into her, his eyes tying to penetrate hers when all of a sudden he was blinded by a black pulse that blotted out the other thoughts in his brain. He saw a lotus-cushion on a calm blue sea. Dactalla was sitting in the cushion and he fell on top of her, his eyes diving into hers as the petals wrapped around them and they fell headlong into a midnight blue sea.
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Next: 🎲 Venus & the Fly
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