The Soul Star ⭐️ Vicino Prossimo & the Local Void

The Hidden Star

According to legends, at the centre of the cosmos lies a fantastic Star of rare device. Some of these legends say that this Star contains the secret to immortality, so they call it the Soul Star. Yet only those on the Golden Hill have access to historical information about the Star — in a text written a million years ago by the Seven Fractal Sages of Vicino Prossimo. The account doesn’t, however, supply the Star’s location. As a result, even the elite Vicinese on the Golden Hill don’t know where it is.

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From The Book of Fractals: II. History

In their caves of ancient light, the early Fractal Sages saw that the Kraslika was only a speck inside a larger Infinity. They could still hear the reverberations of the drumbeat which created the Kraslika, the pulse of energy that permeated the ancient Deep, moving like lightning across the valleys of empty space.  

In time, those echoes fell silent. Yet even now, we, the Seven Sages, can hear the echoes. Exceptionally fine, these echoes have imploded into the finest dimensions of matter, the most intricate of fractals. These fractals can be found at the boundary between the Relative (that which changes; that which we know through our senses, instruments, and intellect) and the Absolute (that which has always been and has never been; that which we cannot know through our senses, instruments, or intellect).

As mortality advanced upon us, we created the Soul Star, so that the future Vicinese could retain the sacred knowledge and so that we could pursue the most infinitesimal and rarified of fractals. It is our hope that at some point we will merge into the finest wavelengths and pulses, arriving at last at the Beating Heart of God. We hope to hear once again the primal drumbeat that started our cosmos. Perhaps this beat will take us to new cosmoi, perhaps not. We remain optimistic.

To make sure that succeeding generations cannot disturb our work, we have placed the Soul Star deep in the centre of the universe, where nobody can find It.

Soon we will leave our homes in the ancient caves, leaving behind only this Book. We will journey to the Soul Star, where we have constructed a second Golden Hill overlooking a second lake of emerald waters. We have built apartments and leisure centres, tennis courts and gardens where blossom many an incense-bearing tree. Pleasure-domes overlook deep romantic chasms. Tennis courts and playgrounds dot the inner city. Golf courses and meandering rivers link the City to the sprawling megalopolis. May it be done on the Soul Star as is done on Vicino Prossimo. There are universities, cafes, night clubs, and fine restaurants. Overwhelmed by blind optimism, we refer to our resting place as the City of God.

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While the elite on the peaks of the Golden Hill aren’t given to angry outbursts, they are often heard to mutter under their breath, Why the hell didn’t they just tell us where it is!

Astronomers from all over the cosmos speculate that the Star is located deep in the Local Void, which lies next to the Virgo Supercluster of galaxies (within which the Milky Way and Andromeda are located). It’s very difficult to locate the general vicinity of the Star within the changing dimensions of the Void, which has a width of about 60 megaparsecs, or 200 million light-years. In addition, the Star is most likely shielded in some way from the prying eyes of cosmographers — and from the ravaging fangs of the Black Pulse.

Narrowing the Star down to the Local Void was a triumph, one claimed 850 years ago by the wizard nerds of Scientium Fluvius (a floating planet-island in the Pink Sea). The Fluvians asserted that when a being dies it gives off a slight energy signature, which has an indistinct trajectory. Today, the wizard nerds would bet their finest lichen slippers that the Soul Star couldn’t be anywhere near the edges of the Norma or Perseus superclusters, since those lay outside even the loosest of their triangulations. Instead, they maintain that it must lie somewhere between Lacerta, Andromeda, and the Milky Way. The closest AAA planet is Earth, which is also the closest habitable planet to the astronomical centre of the Kraslika.

The thing that most infuriated the Fluvian astronomers was that the only corroborating source of information about the Star’s location came from sources that were so ancient or so vague that they raised as many questions as they answered. In the most credible of these accounts, supplied 86 thousand years ago by the Neptic Dreamers of the Blue Sea, a thin purple spirit rose from dying bodies. They called this purple spirit a neptonymph, and surmised that it travelled forth in search of the First Blue Sea that lay in the blue depths of the Furthest Dream.

Using their most sensitive spectrographs, the Fluvians could see that these beams (or waves, or fields, or particles of indeterminate properties) moved in the general direction of the Local Void. Yet because the beams were diffuse and unstable, and because they vanished in a second or two after appearing, the astronomers could only speculate on their precise destination.

Other descriptions of the Soul Star were equally problematic. In one account, provided by shape-shifters from the Blue Dream, the Soul Star changed its form depending on who was attempting to locate it. They told the epic tale of one group of brave Dreamers who journeyed into the Local Void and were forced out again. According to the shape-shifters, the Dreamers lacked a belief in the Star and therefore the Star refused to show itself to them. According to another account — by the Mariachi Dreamers of Guamexila, a poor and crowded galaxy on the edges of Dreamland Prime — the inhabitants of the Star constructed a huge wall, skillfully converting the energy of the Dreamers into forms of invisible matter which the Dreamers were then unable to penetrate.

According to yet another account — by the poets of the Metaphoric Hoop, a supercluster in the bluest corner of the Blue Dream — the Star didn’t exist at all. It was just a figment of overheated imaginations. It was nothing but a dream, without so much as a capital D. This further confirmed the poets’ belief that everything was ultimately a metaphor and nothing was real. Unhelpfully, they added that only the metaphor of the star was real, and that only the starry dream itself held any value.

The astronomers of the Crimson Stalk were keen to study what humans said about Heaven and the afterlife, given that humans were a literate species who lived very close to the Local Void. Several human writers — such as Li Po, Khayyam, Dante, Spenser, and Shakespeare — claimed that Heaven was in the sky, and that love was the magic star that could guide humans to a better life. Spenser even proclaimed that he had the power to write someone into the stars: "let baser things devise / To die in dust, but you shall live by fame: / My verse your virtues rare shall eternize, / And in the heavens write your glorious name.”

Not surprisingly, these human writers became famous throughout the Kraslika. Shakespeare eventually achieved a fame that even his fellow human poets could only dream about, for the Pink Seamers wrote his name in actual stardust across the nebula of the Dreamy Pink Dream, much to Spenser’s dismay.

Shakespeare was also awarded the highest prize available, the Kraslikan Globe, a glittering emerald crystal that contains over a trillion fractal versions of the finest libraries in the Kraslika. It’s rumoured that in one of these libraries can be found a book containing God’s review of every book ever written, as well as His own definitive treatise, Existentialism & God. The Kraslikan Globe sits to this day in the Temple of Ishtara, in the magical Panophilian city of Prospera, with its cloud-capped towers, its gorgeous palaces, and its solemn temples.

Shakespeare was limited by the technology of his time, yet he nevertheless convinced his contemporaries to use a sextant to find the “the Star to every wandering bark, whose worth’s unknown although its height be taken.” The Crimson Stalkers were, however, at a loss to know how, so many years after Spanish galleons and great ruffled collars, it was possible to take its height. Human sextants were crude things, and only pointed in a general direction to things like brawls in port-side taverns.

The Stalkers also noted that the Ancient Greeks believed that famous people became constellations after they died. Yet upon a closer investigation, the Stalkers discovered that the Greeks also thought people could become trees. Later Greeks, influenced by the religion of the Hebrews, believed that one tree grew a fruit that contained a knowledge that doomed the entire human race to eternal suffering. Yet neither the Hebrews nor the Greeks supplied a shred of proof. To make matters worse, the Hebrew stories were borrowed from the Sumerians, who were a dismal lot and didn’t seem to believe that the soul existed in the first place.

None of these clues lead to the Soul Star, although humans continued to refer to groups of stars by how they appeared from Earth, thus juxtaposing the farthest and the closest stars. This made a complete mockery of astronomy, which for most of their history humans confused with astrology. As usual, humans saw themselves at the centre of it all.

Not that astrology wasn’t a noble field: it had been verified over and over that the structure of the stars had an enormous influence on life-forms. Yet looking at this structure from one point of view — that of Earth — completely distorted the data. How could there be a fixed relation between an imaginary configuration in the sky (seen from Earth) and the Earth itself when that configuration didn’t exist from other points of view?

And how could there be a fixed relation when the imaginary configuration was gradually shifting in its relation to the Earth? Someone born under the constellation of The Fish in Ancient Babylon would be swimming in the barrel of the Water-Bearer today. At least in this case it’d be a fish in water. Other imaginary figures ended up in barn-yard fights, ram horns interlocked with bull horns, crab claws in lion’s teeth. Yet still humans continued to use grandiose and confusing names for their constellations, such as the Great She-Bear, Horologium, Ophiucus, Telescopium, Canes Venatici, and Triangulum Australe. As with so much from Earth, what they produced was really only of use to them. Everything, that is, except for their poetry.

The Stalkers felt that the poet Dante Alighieri had a more coherent understanding of the universe: in three long poems, he showed how the afterlife contained three sections: Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. This intrigued the Stalkers, since the Local Void had vast filaments which divided the Void into three parts. The Stalkers called the third nearest the Crimson Stalk Heaven, the one closest to the Copper Tarn Purgatory, and the one closest to the Frozen Skiff Hell.

After conducting an extensive survey, the Stalkers found that many humans also believed that the soul rose from the body after death. It was then guided by a man called Jesus — or more specifically, by an obscure principle called karma-samsara — into celestial streams or into any number of worlds, including Earth. This account was very optimistic and appeared to be coloured by their rose-tinted glasses and their purple paint brushes. They were, after all, inhabitants of the Violet Hoop...

While the human accounts of the afterlife were fantastical, they did supply a motive or raison d’être for the energy signatures: if you were good you were beamed to the best third of the Local Void; if you were bad, you were beamed to the worst. The Stalkers tried to correlate the soul’s destination to moral information about individual humans, to see if good humans were beamed to Heaven, while evil humans were beamed to Hell.

Thousands of Crimson Stalkers spent their entire careers experimenting and speculating on this divine possibility of cause and effect. Yet ultimately it was all in vain, which they would have realized if only they had read Ecclesiastes. While their speculations were poetic, even sublime, the Stalkers were unable to isolate the exact vectors that the purple light beams took at the moment of death. To their horror, it seemed that good people and evil people were beamed indiscriminately to all corners of Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell. Even more troubling, in a fundamental sort of way, was that the Stalkers couldn’t find one iota of proof that the energy patterns were in fact souls, that these souls flew to a great Star that contained all souls, or that such a Star was anywhere to be found.

Sagastalk, the great agnostic philosopher from Stalkhome, summed up the situation in the famous aphorism: You don't have to believe in it for it to exist, and it doesn't have to exist because you believe in it.

The co-ordinates of the Soul Star were hard to locate, but the Crimson Stalkers were obstinate. They tried everything suggested by the human poets and priests. They climbed the highest mountains and ran through the widest fields. They spoke with the tongue of angels and imagined holding the hand of the Devil himself. They focused their finest high-powered lenses on the fleeing soul-beam, in an attempt to see the colours bleed into one. But still the astronomers couldn’t find what they were looking for.

The Void-dwellers of Ruumar (a giant lacuna in The Copper Tarn) argued that it would be a gross sacrilege for the Soul Star to take any form whatsoever. The Void itself must be the Star. Ataari mystics took this concept further, arguing that the star could be as small as a pea or as large as the Void itself, but that in either case it danced and spun so quickly that it only seemed as if it wasn’t there. The mystics spent considerable time and effort constructing a high-speed, large-lens camera to snap a photograph of the Star in a fraction of a nanosecond. Their aim was to gaze at the wonders of what they called Infinity in Frozen Time. Yet each time their camera zoomed in on the Local Void the lens froze, and all they saw was a violet film that pulsed into purple and then disappeared.

In the end, astronomers from all over the Kraslika were forced to conclude that the Soul Star eluded their grasp. It seemed to inspire different species to see it as a projection of their own obsessions. Yet the astronomers were true scientists. They weren’t going to let the dearth of facts stop them from finding what may or may not be the truth.

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Next: 🧚 Mirror, Mirror

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