The Great Game 🎲 Kollarum
The Professor from Palermo
Farenn stood there, coffee in hand, looking out the gigantic window of the Grand Plaza, 235 floors above the city of Kollarum. He was thinking about how momentous this day was going to be. The Baulians were in fact clueless about the value of the land they were about to conquer. Yet their very cluelessness made them the perfect custodians. At least that was what he intended to argue in front of the 33,000 members of the Grand Council.
Farenn was thinking that the Council’s decision might change the course of Kraslikan history when a professor of political science walked up to him. He was a short bald man, and Farenn recalled having seen him briefly at two previous Council Assemblies. They had never formally met, yet Farenn could tell that this man was not at home in his own skin. When he met him previously Farenn was so charged up by convivial atmosphere and lively debate that he didn’t focus on whatever was bothering his colleague. Even now he had the same anguished look about him and the same intense strain in his eyes. It was if he was contending perpetually with the chaos of existence itself. It clearly took alot out of the man just to approach Farenn.
The first thing that surprised Farenn was that he didn’t tap the ensign on his chest to activate his translator. Farenn wondered if he’d mastered Fallarian, which was not an easy task. But then the man asked him, in perfect English, if he could join him for a moment. Still shaking from nervousness, the man offered his hand. “My name is Tarnar Kent. I’m a professor of politics and philology from the Copper Tarn. I’m very honoured to finally make your acquaintance.”
Tarner blurted out that he had spent the last three decades in the Milky Way Galaxy, on planet Earth, on the island of Sicily. “It’s beautiful there, as we all know.” Tarnar waved off this beauty with his hand, eager to get to his point before Farenn was due on the podium. He had about twenty minutes to make the famous diplomat see what was going on. “Rome has more history in a square kilometre than most planets have. While hardly any tourists go there, the old city of Syracuse is a crucible of culture and smooth marble. Palermo is a historic blend of Carthage, Athens, Normandy, and Rome. But the Baulians don’t care about any of that, contrary to what they say.”
Farenn was a bit surprised by the abrupt shift to the Baulians, and he wasn’t sure what this connection meant. Farenn asked, also in perfect English, “What exactly about human culture are you interested in? Haven’t the Baulians swore to preserve the cultures they control?"
Tarnar responded, “My interest lies in the preservation of every human culture, from trendy California slang to the dying dialects of the forests and hills. My fear is that the Baulian takeover will destroy almost all of these cultures, and replace them with a phoney multicultural patina, spread widely over the real cultures, which constitute a palimpsest beneath. An increasingly thin palimpsest, one that will eventually disappear. The Baulians will save the planet from environmental destruction, but they’ll also eradicate any cultural riches that stand in their way. They won’t hoard these riches; they’ll eradicate them. Whole languages will disappear every month, all under the guise of intercultural understanding, streamlined knowledge, and efficient communication.”
Farenn had heard these arguments before, yet he didn’t interrupt his nervous companion. Besides, there was something in Tarnar’s look that reminded Farenn of Qayam, his old Aatari friend. He couldn’t quite say what it was. On the surface, he saw in Tarnar’s flickering eyes a deep instability, whereas the first thing he noticed about Qayam was his steadiness. At first sight he had pegged Qayam for a security agent, commando, or spy. Tarnar on the other hand was shorter and less muscular, and he lacked Qayam’s sureness of manner. Tarnar seemed more like the agents Farenn knew on Fallar Discordia, the ones who dug information like gold in a mine, and hoarded it like misers in a locked den. Yet unlike those Discordian agents, Tarnar’s good will and intelligence was apparent. This, Farenn realized, was what reminded him of Qayam. In Farenn’s opinion, there was nothing as valuable as a combination of good will and intelligence. So he let him go on, curious where all this would lead.
“What people don’t understand is that the disappearance of these things is monstrous. And by monstrous I mean that it destroys the thing that is least monstrous in the thirteen universes. We may have beauty and technology beyond the wildest imagination of human beings. But one thing we don’t have is a monopoly on the power of emotion.”
Farenn looked at him questioningly, yet Tarnar turned his eyes away, and looked out the window. It was as if he was trying to make a connection to that little planet so far away, as if he was about to describe something indescribably alien. His voice too sounded distant. “In the realm of emotion, humans are like gods. Most species in the Kraslika react from instinct and from programming, and from duty, and from the thousands of signals we get from all over the spectrum. But humans ... humans have a core that’s unique. It’s all their own. It’s true that only a tiny percent of them can feel the spectra we feel, but very little of that spectra has to do with the finest of feelings, which revolve in complex patterns around emotional notions such as love, hate, and empathy. Oh, we feel these no doubt, but humans feel them to a degree of anguish and ecstasy that very few of us have experienced.”
Tarner turned from the city view and looked straight at Farenn. “And to the Baulians, these feelings are pretty much unnecessary.”
Farenn stood still, giving no sign that he was in a hurry to get to the auditorium. So Tarnar attempted to give him a deeper understanding of the problem. “What we call love, humans call responsibility, or interest. What humans call love is extremely complicated, and ranges from the depths — and I mean the absolute depths — of despair, to the rapture of complete happiness. These experiences of happiness and love are so deeply engrained in them that it doesn’t matter whether they’re positive or negative. Of course it matters to the humans experiencing these things, but it doesn’t matter in terms of the depth and in terms of the fact that they all experience them. The human who doesn’t experience them is considered a sociopath. We would call them a Baulian.”
“Much of human history we interpret as barbarism. Especially when they kill in the name of vague concepts like freedom and God. It takes decades for aliens to understand what they call love of God. To most of us God is an abstract thing, an Ideal that no one’s seen. Yet their love of God is so deep and so powerful that they will literally walk into a bonfire for it. This isn’t the type of fire the deluded robot of a soldier walks into. No, it’s the fire of their own passion. They would rather end the only life they know than let others live without their concept of this love.”
“Humans may be blind creatures in all kinds of ways, yet their greatest blindness shows their greatest love. For only when humans die do those around them realize how deeply they loved them, how stupidly they threw away the moments they had together, and how the universe is such a dark place without them. Their emotion is poetic, even exquisite, yet it’s also very real. It’s something that very few of us know much about. This is perhaps why we’re drawn to the tragedies of Shakespeare, to Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and Hamlet. We know that what Shakespeare’s writing about is full of deep pain, and yet we try to grasp it anyway. It harrows our souls and yet we strive to get at its meaning. How can we gauge the loss of this type of culture? It isn’t just art or philosophy. It lies at the very core of being. How do we gauge the loss of hundreds of cultures, all predicated on the same experience of emotion?”
Neither of them was expecting an answer to this question. Tarnar shuffled his feet, in a moment of pure angst, and looked down at the floor. He looked out the window, down at the ski chute and out over the city, scintillating in its shifting colours that mirrored the marvels of the sky. Then Tarner turned away from the view, using the same hand gesture he used earlier to brush aside the beauty of Syracuse and Rome. He looked up again at Farenn, this time with as much ardour as anguish in his eyes. While Farenn was gauging the emotional state of his colleague, and wondering if too much emotion might not be such a great thing after all, Tarnar was about to take the largest leap of faith he’d ever taken.
Responding to Tarnar’s fears, Farenn said, “Yes, I’ve been following this for some time now. Very closely. The Pax Baulixia isn’t turning out to be quite as harmless as we hoped.”
Tarnar held up his hand as if to stop his colleague. He then looked straight into Farenn’s eyes. “Are you familiar with Rablanar, the Fractal Mystic?”
“Yes,” Farenn answered slowly.
“I believe that a Fallarian Demon Priest…” and he paused, looked around him again, and said, “…Knifestream, is in league with three Baulian Fractal Masters, all of whom have laboured to keep Rablanar’s theories from the public.”
Farenn didn’t know what to say to this. If this were true, it would open a crevice that could never be sounded. If Knifestream could manipulate the Baulians, the centre of power in the cosmos would shift drastically. Farenn asked his new colleague, whose eyes were bloodshot and rimmed in black circles, “How do you know this?”
“I’ve visited Rablanar and met with his friends. They meet in a bar in Queen’s, in New York City. Why do you think he’s moved to Upper State New York?” In an attempt to lighten the conversation somewhat, Tarnar added, “Not for the fishing, that’s for sure.”
Farenn looked at his watch and was glad to see that he still had 20 minutes before he needed to address the Grand Council. He motioned to Tarnar to join him at a secluded table, out of earshot of those standing at the coffee stands and mini bars.
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