The Great Game 🎲 Lactar27
The Swarm
After they made love, they unwrapped themselves, unlocking the pentahedron so that they saw the room again with their slowly rotating eyes. Lounging with her tentacles partly overlapping his, Qualini recited a poem she had read the other day: “Love is blind, occult like the eye on fire / At the apex of the pyramid in a cloud of desire.” Zadar responded with another couplet: “And yet love also cleanses every bit / so we see life as it is, infinite.” He added, clearly wanting to move the conversation somewhere else, “According to the crimsects, there really is infinity in a grain of sand.”
“Crimsects?”
Zadar then told her that all this poetry wasn’t just an abstract fantasy. Her parents were wrong about the oceans of milk. He motioned to the corner of the room, where a purr became a buzz. A swarm of tiny golden lights rose upward and hovered several feet above them on the bed. He told her about the Swarm and the things that it had told him. And the places it had taken him.
At first she was alarmed, thinking he must be crazy. But she’d never seen such a swarm of lights before. The tiny golden lights seemed to be hovering at bay, waiting for Zadar to speak. It started to dawn on her that this idea of the Swarm made sense of his strange requests for files about old languages, UFO sightings, and mystical poems about subatomic physics. At work, she had became increasingly worried, since every request she made to the larger data banks was logged, and more and more of his requested files were denied. The authorities would, sooner or later, start asking questions. Yet she also hoped that he was some sort of secret agent, and that whatever he was involved in might take her away from her frustrating life with her parents. It never occurred to her that he was doing research on alien life that he had actually contacted.
Zadar explained that each crimsect in the Swarm had it’s own little spinning world. Inside it there were tables and chairs, mountains and fields. There were elections, news releases, lovers killing each other, bridges with locks all over them, and pastry chefs. Yet at no time did any member of these miniature worlds suspect that their daily dramas were anywhere near as important as the greater drama that had taken them from one sector of the cosmos to the next. The Swarm also told him that Lactar’s universe lies within a cosmos of 13 universes.
Qualini learned that the term Swarm applied to individual Swarms (which each held about a thousand galaxies) and also to the Union of Swarms (which comprised about 700 thousand Swarms).
Individual crimsects were always aware of what was happening in their Swarm, and every crimsect was free to go wherever it wanted. It could leave at any time. Yet it also had a deep evolutionary instinct to survive. Having first evolved on the Fallarian planet of Zeitfueur, the crimsects were experts at survival. Of course, if an unstoppable force was about to destroy it, the Swarm would scatter. But it always came back together.
The only exception to this was when one Swarm encountered another. This was like one galaxy colliding with another. One might imagine that this would result in nothing but crashes and explosions. But just as solar systems are surrounded by so much empty space that collisions are exceptionally rare, so one Swarm passed through another without incident. Of course, Swarm members were entirely free to join another Swarm. Coercion on this point was unheard of.
Of course, very few of them ever left. Why would they? All their friends, and all their family, were in the Swarm they’d known all their lives. There were, of course, some adventurous souls, and these they called ambassadors and were always treated with the greatest respect. They were considered one of the small but powerful links that joined one Swarm to the next.
Crimsects always respected any communal decision made by the Swarm. If you suggested that a group of crimsects might reject a majority decision, a crimsect would think you’re insane. It would go against the Constitution of the United Swarm, the guiding principle of the Union of the 700 Thousand. This Union worked on the lowest level of the governance, on every middle level, and on the highest. The opening line of their Constitution was the following:We the crimsects of the Swarm, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Swarm.
The Swarm had one very strict rule: crimsects that left the Swarm and enlarged their size could never return to the Swarm, even if they made themselves smaller than the smallest grain of sand on the largest beach. The reason behind this was that if a crimsect enlarged itself, it was no longer equal in proportion or power to the Swarm from which it came. And the crimsects valued equality above all else — partly because it had proved a successful mode of operating, and partly because it had been a necessity for their survival.
The first crimsects evolved on the planet of Fallar Feroxia, which was also inhabited by a paranoid and brutal race: the Putinari Ferox. In order to survive, crimsects needed to cooperate with each other, and they soon developed a posture that was strictly defensive. Yet when they huddled together into Swarms for collective security, the Putinari Ferox assumed they were amassing for an assault. The Swarm also learned to communicate with each other without being intercepted by the Putinari, which only made the situation worse.
It was almost impossible for Swarms to make any sort of forward movement, or even any sort of lateral movement, without the Putinari interpreting it as if it were an advance toward their Central Command. So the Swarm developed backward movements, evasive procedures, and even invisibility cloaks, so that the Putinari wouldn’t misunderstand their innocent movements. The Putinari of course interpreted this as a further escalation in their scheming subterfuge. Even when the Swarm were hardly visible, just a scintilla of tiny golden lights in the far background, the Putinari sent out a squadron to eliminate them.
When the wind blew, the tar-like smoke cleared from around the Putinari. Sometimes this allowed them to see a glittering tinkle of lights converging over the head of some inferior species like the Mericones or Francipians. The Putinari were disgusted by what they called the halo of Tinkerbells above the chosen angels. They despised their goody-two-shoe, ruby-slipper-clicking, fairy-dust-wand-waving shenanigans. They dispatched a cluster of agents to poison or silence the miscreants.
As a result of this early development, the Swarm were almost impossible to get hold of, communicate with, or understand. To this day they remain impenetrable, secret, and an almost complete mystery to the inhabitants of the worlds through which they travelled, forever searching out freedom and open skies. The Swarm didn’t mean to be mysterious, but the Putinari Ferox required it. In other words, it was all their fault.
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Zadar emphasized how lucky he was to have been chosen by the Swarm, for they warned him of a terrible Force that was about to shatter their world. Qualini took all of this in stride, reminding herself that there are more worlds than are dreamt of in any philosophy. She thought about this Doom as a myth or a fantasy — until, that is, she saw the orange beams dancing on the horizon, biting into the Lactari soil, and leaving huge dust-clouds in their wake.
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When the Swarm reached the north pole of Lactar27, it unwrapped itself from the godlike Zadar and his goddess Qualini. It hovered above them, anxious to see if Zadar had anything in mind. The millions of crimsect parliaments had already debated the best place to go, but they were also in awe of the god who was so singular in his being and who understood them as if he were one of them. They therefore waited to hear what Zadar had to say.
Zadar had brooded about this invasion of orange thugs for years, and it had finally come. He had tried to warn the Lactari in a series of blunt declarations to the highest military councils. Yet the Lactari in power saw him as a paranoid heretic. They only listened to him because his father was the mayor of Lactar1. The authorities argued that because they couldn’t find any meaningful pattern in the energy streams they intercepted, there must no be pattern. The only Lactari who was at all interested in hearing what Zadar had to say was Glontar the Rebel, yet unfortunately Glontar didn’t have the family connections Zadar enjoyed.
Both Glontar and Zadar went to the library at which she worked. She realized that the two had a great deal in common, and had arranged a meeting. Unfortunately, however, the day before this meeting Glontar heard a knock on his door. The secret police entered and took him to an asylum for the politically insane. Glontar wasn’t allowed access to Zadar’s speeches to the houses of parliament, and he never heard about his warnings to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The doctors gave Glontar strange drugs and he died ranting and raving, strapped to his bed.
Zadar’s warnings were suppressed, and Zadar was sent for two months to a rehabilitation camp in the scorching Desert of Notari. All copies of his book, They Murder to Dissect, were brought to the desert, piled high into a mass, and lit on fire with a slight spark of stone against stone. The parliament issued a joint statement assuring the population that everything was as it should be, and that the Lactari lived in the best and the safest of all possible worlds.
Zadar promised to reform, so they allowed to return to his normal life. He began writing poetry and speculating about the nature of the universe. When the officials heard that he had taken to writing poetry, they forgot all about him.
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At times the crimsects wondered if Zadar really believed what they told him. He seemed to believe them, but he had spent his entire life among what the crimsects had to admit were in fact idiots. How could Zadar possibly process what they told him about aliens who looked like giant hornets and flying scorpions, beings of crystal lattice, and invisible pulses? In a wave that traversed the Swarm, they thought, Perhaps it’s time he saw for himself.
The Swarm saw the orange beams coming from outer space, wrapped Zadar and Qualini in its magnetic casing, angled its cromelium thrusters, and blasted up from the north pole of Lactar27.
After waiting ten minutes, the Swarm blasted with its two inhabitants into the atmosphere. It travelled across the Middle Void to the adjacent universe of Aatari Lok, to the planet of Kollarum.
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