The Great Game 🎲 Meliflorium, The Pink Sea
On Meliflorium
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Bright honeycombs of homelike Yuletide their midnight dreams
each honey bee beneath the glowing moon
each memory shared by one and all
all the time remote as distant stars
and near as when drunk in a bar
she kneeds your fingers into hers
muzzle to muzzle beneath the purple moon
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No two days on the planet Meliflorium were the same. Perhaps this was because the cloud-sheets that wrapped the planet shifted several degrees every day. There were seven layers of cloud-sheet, each with its own scale of frequency and each with its own trajectory into the nordernmost sector of the Pink Sea. Each sheet shifted between three and five degrees per day, following an axis that was determined by the distance and density of Meliflorium’s 86 moons and by the rhythm of the nearby pink and crystal stars.
The days all started out the same, but they all ended differently. Then, during the night, the inhabitants folded their variegated dreams into one another’s bat-like ears and somehow, through the magic of the Golden Honeybook, got back on the same page. Yet by evening the next night, no one was reading the same book. They were flying into each other’s rooms and out into the vast pink ether of the Vayliform Galaxy.
Even the 83 Head Librarians couldn’t keep track of who was reading what. By 3:00 AM they were just finishing the most recent stories about bookworms eating through their pages when the books in their silky palms disintegrated into dust. By 11:00 AM the next morning the Meliflorians were back on the same page and adding chapters to the sagas of their lives. By noon, some Meliflorians were singing in harmony in choirs while others were humming in synchrony in what were euphemistically called the Brothels of Zillium.
Ywaxla sniffed over coffee, “You sure seem to have enjoyed yourself last night.”
Xaylaw refused to take this in the way it was intended, and slyly countered, “If ever we get old, let us make a pact to dive together into the Rune of Chawl.”
Y knew of X’s desire to be ruined in the darkest corner of their home planet, a place where the elegant courtiers never dared to set their glittering wings. By comparison, the Brothels of Zillium were positively Franciscan. With his imagery established, X pushed his luck: “While you were circling somewhere on the Magenta Rim, no doubt conducting some sort of noble study (he knew she had a thing for the Magellans, with their fine silver pockets), I was learning about the Crimsects of the Fallar Dominion.”
“Crimsects?”
“For them there is no Law of Return. They are the freest entities I have ever seen.”
“Are they free or just selfish? Are they just out to free themselves, or do they have some greater goal of Freedom?”
“What’s greater than living? And what’s greater than living freely? They do just what they like, and some of them like to pursue the greater goal of Freedom.”
“And the others? What do they pursue?”
“The Crimsects don’t keep track. While anything may be written into law, and subsequently unwritten, it’s forbidden by their very nature to judge the motives of other Crimsects.”
“And what about other species? Are they just expected to go along with the arbitrary lawlessness of these Crimsects, whatever they are?”
“They are billions of buzzing worlds, swarming in apparent anarchy, each one always reading, dancing and interacting with the next. A sort of democratic anarchist swarm of worlds, so small, so dense, so close together and yet so far apart that they seem like a moving field of glittery mist. In the pink dusk, they disappear altogether, but in bright noon they’re like a swarm of hornets or locusts. They have an energy field so potent, so resilient, and so fast that even the Thulian Guard avoid them, only wishing them a swift passage to some other galaxy.”
“So, what, you just marvelled at their existence, and listened to the storybook of their fate?”
“They have no concept of fate. They have no Law of Return. They do, however, have a knack for what they call finding the dreams of others. They can read others as if from inside, and from there they suggest a course of action that you may have never known that you so desperately needed.”
“And I’m guessing that they read that what you need is a nightbrawl with a transexual Dalixian, then a Fuscian Flush with a Trilixian, and to top it all off, the House Special with a quartet of Zillians, each with their own specialities of discovery.”
X had to admit: that sounded pleasant. But no, Y missed the point. “I imagine that in the silver pockets, where everyone is so intent on floating free of material constraint, the pleasures of others must seem like brothel fantasies. The Crimsects are used to being misunderstood. Because they’re so hard to understand, and because their power is so disproportionate to anything we know, they’re often taken for criminals. Or they’re seen as a sect of some monstrous horde, like locusts plunging downward on the golden field, demons cloaked in malicious flight, law-breakers of the holy code. Hence Crim-sects. But really, they don’t seem to mean any harm. Also, they were able to tell me something about myself that I didn’t already know, but should have known for decades.”
“Which was what? That you must fly away with them? Leave the life we’ve made for ourselves, as if the mellifluous freedoms of The Meliform weren’t enough? Sell your soul to their meandering, meaningless flight?”
“Together. They told me that together we might travel with them to the windswept planet of Kollarum. They offered to take us across the Southern Gap, to make contact with the host of some bar, in the universe of Aatari Lok. They said that this host knows things about intoxicants that almost no one else knows, and that he brings together people you could only otherwise dream to meet. What you can learn there can only be understood by participating in the bar-room ritual he has devised.”
Y thought of the seven circling sheets of ruby cloud, and the heaven to which they returned each morning, sipping coffee with X, marvelling at how their nocturnal peregrinations always brought them back together.
Y would follow the Law of Return by returning to X. She then asked when they’d leave and what she ought to bring.
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Next: 🧚 Prester John
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