The Great Game 🎲 Vicinto Prossimo
The Water Damsel
~ 250 years ago ~
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— Bryan Ferry, “If There is Something”
Talfar remembered it with crystal clarity, even though it was 250 years ago. He was only 50 years old when he first saw her along a patch of pavement that was blessed with the full morning sun. She was a water damsel from the nearby district of Romagna. Her skin was golden and her eyes were bright. Her figure was blocked by the row of flower-boxes at their kitchen window, yet he could see that her neck and shoulders were as smooth and fine as her slim calves. He could also see a sparkling diamond anklet that shone brightly in the sun.
Somatherin, the hormone of infatuation, hit his system like a ferridian brick. Somatherin. The drug-dealers of Fallar Discordia would do anything to get their claws on this hormone, which they used as a model for their strongest amphetamines: diathamine, roketamine, and concatamine. Somatherin was like spiked Russian vodka, drunk by Raskolnikov so that he might do what he dared to do, and then so that he might forget what he’d done. Testosterone, by comparison, was like shandy served to children in a country pub.
The somatherin coursed though Talfar’s body when he saw Thalphemera dancing across the street from their ground-floor kitchen window. She seemed as if in another world, doing makeshift pirouettes, as she waltzed from her family’s apartment in Romagna to the university in Vicino Concentrica. She wore a light green taffesca dress, frilled like the flowers that lined the balconies of the honeycomb apartment across the street.
Like most of the apartments in Vicino Concentrica, this one climbed into the sky eighty floors above the street. But the light at mid-morning came directly from the oost, and this allowed a great swath of golden sunshine to sweep down the narrow street. Each window-box and balcony was lit up, so that the full lushness of the greenery and flowers could be seen. The plants at his parent’s kitchen window were lime green and magenta, violet and orange, turquoise and orchid.
To Talfar, the water damsel appeared to be dancing naked along the street, her mid-section hidden by bursts of dragon-lily and heavenly blue morning glory in the flower-boxes. All he could see of her clothing was a thin green strap on her left shoulder. On the far shoulder was a green strap and the leather strap of a purse or handbag. Her golden ponytail sparkled in the sun.
As Fate would have it, there was a gap between the last flower-box and the edge of their window. It was exactly in this gap that Thalphemera stood framed, stooping momentarily to get a drink at the crystal fountain across the street. No pedestrians walked by. No ragged band of school kids obscured his view. No slow-moving grandmother with a caddy packed with groceries got in the way. It was as if time had stopped.
Thalphemera undid her ponytail and shook her hair in the sun. Talfar was mesmerized by the waterfall of her golden hair. As she stooped down she swept the golden hair away from her forehead with a movement so graceful that the only thing more beautiful could be the eyes that she uncovered as she bent down and twisted her head in his direction so that she could drink from the fountain. Her eyes were crystal blue, like the water from some faraway paradise of blue waters.
A colour-enhanced detail from https://chickypea.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/travel_italy_capri1.jpg, taken in the Blue Grotto, Capri.
It was at this moment that Talfar felt that the Cosmos and its Grand Design were one. And then Thalphemera brought the strands back together, bound them with an aquamarine hair band glistening with tiny silver threads, and skipped out of the frame.
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It was the first day of Prime Rhythm, the first year of university. It was a crucial time in life, when the young adult of 50 finally started to see the world as it was, rather than as a reflection of his own needs and desires. When Talfar saw Thalphemera he realized that there was a whole world out there that he didn’t have a clue about. But he also had another thought, which he knew would clash with the primerhythmic Doctrine of Zero Ego: he wanted her all to himself.
In his first Psychology class, the professor was attempting to impress upon the young minds the evils of egocentric perception. The professor told them that the aim of first year university was to blow your mind in so many directions that you’d realize (hopefully in time for exams) that the universe was excruciatingly vast and that everything you thought you knew about it was like a little blue glass bead.
The little glass bead lay between two rocks on a mountain range a hundred times the size of the Golden Hill (which was 6 kilometres high and 6 kilometres wide). The professor added, “It’s nevertheless very important to cling onto the self, to the Zero that you really are. Accept this Zero, and don’t let the fact that you’re completely insignificant get in the way of doing great things to advance the realization of your soul, which has no weight, no numerical value, no real meaning. Indeed, the soul and the self are very similar, except that the self is a little something while the soul is a great nothing.”
“The self is but a slim blue light vibrating haphazardly in a cocoon of translucent silicon. Your aspirations must always be larger than your ego, which is but the starting point. Point zero, nothing to be proud of. But with the help of the vast systems of Vicinese education and administration, you’ll start to understand what surrounds your tiny self. By hard work and dedication, you’ll increase your inner light year by year, decade by decade, until one day you will become a star.”
“Yet the star and the bead are one. The tint of the bead will be the tint of the star. The frequency will be the same. It will pulse the same unique frequency that has always determined who you are. The star doesn’t even need to have a name, because it has the same tint, the same identity as the little bead that you were when you set out on the path from your home to these hallowed halls of learning. And yet, even without a name, your star will shine, projecting its light from the heights of the Golden Hill to the depths of Fallar Discordia. It doesn’t matter who you are — give up that fruitless search — what matters is that you nurture your inner light, the tint which makes you special. Project this light into the dark!”
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Talfar had been befuddled all morning. He couldn’t seem to find the right clothing. Then he couldn’t find his classroom. Then, when he found the classroom, he couldn’t see an empty seat. Finally he saw an empty seat halfway down the lecture hall and in the middle of the row. By the time he got to the seat and got out his notebook and started to write down “completely insignificant” he couldn’t help noticing that the student next to him was looking straight at him.
Her eyes were crystalline blue and when she winked at him, her green eye-shadow glistened in the morning light that was coming in through the stain-glass windows behind the professor. Talfar realized that this was the same young woman who had danced down the street and made him so nervous that he didn’t know if he should wear a jacket, a t-shirt, or just cover himself in black rags and pretend he didn’t exist.
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Talfar gathered very little from the lecture that morning. He couldn’t stop thinking about the heavenly nymph right beside him. He knew he was in a lecture-hall, yet all he could focus on was his peripheral vision. It was a focus that had no focus. The professor had been talking for about 45 minutes and Talfar hardly understood a thing. All he could really see was her walking down the street, her golden hair gleaming in his mind. He heard the professor talking about a bead and a star and how everything was supposed to merge. Which just made him think of the dancing girl from Romagna.
He didn’t dare look at her, but kept his eyes straight ahead. Nevertheless, in his peripheral vision he could see that her skin was golden and she wore diaphanous leggings that made her legs seem sparkling yet bare. It was as if there was an energy field or shimmering mist floating around her legs. Because he didn’t look directly at her, her torso and head seemed to float somewhere above her naked legs. He remembered a flash of her face as he sat down: she had golden hair and crystal blue eyes. Her skin was smooth and she wore make-up that sparkled.
When the bell rang, he thought she’d start like a minnow and swim up the stairs and out the door. He was far too nervous to talk to her, so he pretended to rearrange things in his backpack, after which he looked up to see if she had left the auditorium. She was staring point-blank at him. Her body was as still as the stone base of the fountain across the street from his breakfast window.
Thalphemera thought, Why don’t these guys just seize the day? So she just said to him, “Would you like to go for a coffee?” What’s with all these head-games, these stupid gender rituals that people enact everywhere, from the Golden Hill of Vicino Prossimo to the Black Gulf of Fallar Prime?
She leaned toward him, letting the thin green strap of her dress slip slightly from her shoulder, and reached into her handbag. Slowly, but with the golden lettering of its spine still facing upward, she put away the book that she always carried with her. It was Imitar’s Rabbit Hole, a 200-page analysis of the infinitesimal, that is, of the infinite number of points that lay within the smallest point. She didn’t know why she always wanted to keep the book with her, especially since she could get it anytime on her tablet. But there was something about the weight of the volume, the weight of his words, that required an actual book.
Thalphemera understood Imitar’s theories and believed them completely, and yet there was no way for her to fully realize what they meant. If she could only enter into the infinitesimal in the same way a computer-generated exercise allowed her to go between two very closely connected points and see a universe between those points. If she could only then find some world in that universe and zoom in on a habitable planet, and then land on a sunny beach, and then look down between her toes and find two grains of sand, and then look between those grains and find another universe between them. This sort of mental exercise was purely mental or only on a screen.
The great sage Algotodo had scattered these thoughts throughout the Kraslika a million years ago. He had written them down in his Book of Fractals. So there was nothing extraordinary about her thinking these thoughts. They were a million years old. Anybody could think them. But Imitar pushed Algotodo’s thoughts further than anyone else, adding to them the most recent developments in fractology. Imitar made her want to know, Is all of this just a thought exercise, or can a person live at these depths? Is everything Algotodo says about “infinity within a grain of sand” just poetry? Is the Soul Star real or is it just a symbol?
Talfar saw the book, and saw right away that they had a million things to talk about. None of the other students were carrying books. The lecture was very specifically an introduction, and only at the end of it, after the students decided that they were willing to do the work the course required, would anybody be seen with an actual text. And there was no way that a first-year course would include Imitar’s Rabbit Hole. It may have been taught in special graduate seminars, but only in the second decade of study.
Seeing that very specific thin golden line of letters along the spine of her book, Talfar had a surge of confidence. Only a few minutes ago he felt like sticking his head in his backpack because he didn’t have the guts to look up in her direction. And if he had mustered the courage to look up and say something, what would he have said? But with this one golden line in common, he looked into those deep blue crystalline eyes. Grasping the moment, he said, “I see you’re reading Imitar.”
“I can’t stop reading him!”
“It’s so hard to find anyone our age who has even heard of him. They’re all watching the dryad dramas. They’re all worried about whether Sarfin will marry Tanfarum, or whether the Two Worlds will go to war. Will their families, so different, ever get along?”
Thalphemera laughed. “I know! It’s so refreshing to read Imitar. His drama isn’t just about dryads, but about dryads and Ferrixians, Blue Dreamers and Skystalkers. And about a million leagues of different things.”
Talfar added, “And the leagues turn into infinite galaxies, with watery intergalactic currents between them. In a sense he’s just a trouble maker. I mean, we’ve got everything we need, and then he comes along and tells us that we don’t even know what we’re missing.”
“But isn’t that what makes life worth living, even more? I mean, where’s the joy in reaching a certain level of civilization if you stop there, if the movement upward is halted because you think you’ve got everything you always wanted. Isn’t it better to wonder if you might be exaggerating what you’ve already got? Isn’t it better to think that the joy in moving upward has no ending? In any case, it’s not like he’s taking anything away.”
Talfar looked up to the webbed and sparkled ceiling, with its thousands of tiny lights that cast a violet glow into every corner of the auditorium. Then he looked down, beneath the seats, next to her handbag, at her slim ankle that sparkled with its diamond chain. What, he wondered, could be better than to meet someone who wanted to explore the infinite? But he wondered if her infinity was all golden bubbles and sunlight, or if it had room for the Kraslika as it was outside the bright auditoriums of the Vicinese Federation.
He took a leap of faith, hoping that she would understand his problems with infinite perfection. “But then Imitar goes on to say that there’s something that makes all these worlds cohere. How can he know this if every world we look into suggests that there’s more worlds that we can’t see? If we can’t see them, even if they inspire us, doesn’t it suggest that there may also be worlds, and perhaps even dimensions, that don’t mesh so smoothly with our own? Perhaps there are even infinite stretches filled with worlds of pain.”
She paused, as if in pain herself. But then a calm surge welled up inside her, beyond crests and troughs, like a tide moving upward to meet his disturbing thoughts. “Yes. Yes. I have the same problem. How can we live in a world of fantasy, however wonderful the drama?”
This seemed the moment to put on pause their discussion. Neither of them wanted to lose sight of the room they were in, or the way they responded to each other’s body language, or the energy that their talk had generated between them.
“Shall we go for that coffee?” he asked, although both of them had already started rising from their seats.
As they walked up the stairs, they couldn’t help but notice that the 5,000 seat auditorium was completely empty. The lights were as bright as ever, as if expecting to illuminate some brilliant exposé or speech. She noted playfully, “I’m guessing this would be our audience if we just gave that little talk!”
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Next: 🎲 The Orb
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