The Great Game 🎲 The planet of Kollarum
The Bright and Swirling Sky
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Farenn stepped up to the podium and looked out at the 33,000 faces in the crowd. He had been confident, and had known what he was going to say, for the last 25 years. Yet in the last 25 minutes he began to feel that everything he knew might not quite be right.
He had been optimistic about the cosmos. He had hoped, and had fervently believed, that he could get the Grand Council to approve the Baulian takeover of the Virgo Super Cluster. He had hoped that the Council could use the Baulians as a neutral guardian, and thereby sidestep the eternal deadlock between the Vicinese and the Fallarians.
He had hoped that Earth could become a sort of United Worlds of the Cosmos, a place of conference, and a base of understanding from which the 13 universes could learn to get along. Earth might also become a field base to find the location of the Soul Star, which was rumoured to exist not far from Earth in the Local Void. After four hundred years of personal research into the Star, Farenn believed that it lay at the heart of everything: creation and destruction, eternal life, perhaps even God. And yet, still, no one had ever verified its existence.
For the last several decades Farenn had been so confident in his argument that the takeover of Earth would be a positive thing, even for Earth. It could turn all of Earth’s problems into solutions, and it could slowly allow humans to get used to the idea that they were only one of a trillion civilizations in the depths of outer space. He knew it would blow their minds, but better a short sharp shock than a slow and agonizing awakening. Better to make them realize — before they blew themselves to smithereens — that their internal battles were unnecessary. They were far better off banding together, because the cosmos was a far more dangerous place than they could ever imagine.
But were the Baulians really the ones to make the humans understand all this? 25 minutes ago he had thought so. But that was before he was accosted by a strange visitor from the Copper Tarn universe, only minutes before he was about to take the podium. Tarnar had been hiding on earth, drinking in the Sicilian sun and pretending to be a professor in the city of Palermo. Tarnar had drunk in the beauty and the drama of that world – and also the alienation, the anguish, and the crushing doubt that humans knew, simply because they couldn’t know who they were, or even where they were, in what were to them the vast unknown stretches of the cosmos.
This strange Sicilian alien made Farenn worry about the Plan he was about to present. It was a Plan that he had thought, perhaps wrongly, would do three things: it would help earth adapt to its real place in the cosmos, it would encourage peace between the Vicinese and the Fallarians, and it would establish an inter-civilizational base from which everyone could look for the Soul Star.
Farenn cleared his throat, and looked up into the bright sky of Kollarum, swirling with blue and green currents above the heads of the gathered 33,000. He looked down at his shaking notes, and then straight into the centre of his audience, and began.
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Next: ⭐️ Algoritmo
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