The Great Game 🎲 Lactar27
The Swarm
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The only one on Lactar27 who completely understood Swarm 684 was Zadar the Heretic. His masterpiece, They Murder to Dissect, was like a Bible to the adoring crimsects of that swarm. They trusted him instinctively. And as a rule, the crimsects always obeyed their collective instinct.
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For the first time in her life Qualini was happy, there in Zadar’s little top-floor apartment overlooking the cliffs of the great Ladrone Forest.
After they’d finished making love, they unwrapped themselves, and looked around the room with their slowly rotating eyes. Lounging with her tentacles partly overlapping his, Qualini recited a couplet: “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 makes us see every bit / so we see life as it is, infinite.” He added, wanting to breach the topic of the swarm, “According to the crimsects, there really is infinity in a grain of sand.”
“Crimsects?”
Zadar motioned to the corner of the room, where a barely perceptible hum became a clearly audible buzz. A swarm of tiny red and golden lights rose up and hovered several feet above their bed.
In what was the strangest introduction of her life, Zadar said, “Dear Qualini, may I have the pleasure of introducing to you Swarm 684, also known as Den Oförskämda?” At first she was alarmed, thinking he must be crazy. But then he spoke to the swarm of tiny lights, and it responded in a series of blinks and waves, to which Zadar nodded his head.
Qualini realized that the only person making Zadar’s introduction awkward was her. So she bowed her pentahedron torso, and said, “I am delighted to make your acquaintance.” The swarm changed its colour, from gold and red to a warm rosy colour, to indicate that it was indeed pleased to meet her. It then added in a lilting voice a phrase that sounded like, “Gladattträffadig.”
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Like the other swarms, Den Oförskämda appeared to be composed of millions of tiny lights. An intense and colourful mist. A tiny translucent cloud. Qualini had never seen such a thing before. The red and golden lights formed different shapes, sometimes a bird, sometimes an insect. It seemed to be hovering at bay, waiting for Zadar to give it some sort of command or direction.
It dawned on Qualini that this cloud of lights made sense of Zadar’s strange requests for files about old languages, UFO sightings, and mystical poems about subatomic physics. At the library, she had become worried: every request she made to the larger data banks was logged, and more and more of his requests were denied. The authorities would, sooner or later, start asking her questions.
She had fantasized that he was a secret agent, and that whatever he was involved in might take her away from her confined life with her parents. It never occurred to her that he was doing research on alien life that he had actually contacted.
Zadar explained: “It’s hard to get our heads around this, but within each swarm are about 500 trillion crimsects and about 50 billion solar systems. This makes a swarm roughly equivalent to a galaxy — except that it’s all miniaturized, infracted to a degree that seems impossible. Or, at least, only possible in the most outlandish formulations of math. Yet there it is: a galaxy condensed into a spherical shape of about 50 centimetres in diameter. And yet inside this beachball-sized shape live half a quadrillion crimsects, on planets which have everything our planets have: tables and chairs, mountains and fields, elections and news releases, lovers killing each other, bridges with locks all over them, and pastry chefs.”
“I should also tell you one other thing that I learned from Den Oförskämda. This one is extremely difficult to process. Are you ready?” Qualini’s eyes rotated faster, determined to understand whatever he said. “Our solar system lies within a universe of about a trillion galaxies.” Then he said, very slowly, and very carefully, “and this universe lies within a cosmos of 13 universes.”
Qualini’s eyes stopped revolving on her pentahedron base. Her apex eye went dim. No bright crystalline shapes refracted from it onto the walls of the room. She stared at him dumbly for about half a minute. Then she shook herself from the core of her stem to the tips of her tentacles. She reminded herself that she was a librarian, and that the very meaning of her life was predicated on the accumulation, organization, and dissemination of knowledge. Nothing was out of the question. She slowly nodded her head. Excitement replaced surprise. Her four eyes started revolving again on her pentahedron base.
Zadar continued. He told her that the term swarm applies to individual swarms. There’s also a Union of Swarms. This Union contains about 700 thousand swarms.
Individual crimsects are aware of what’s happening in their swarm, and every crimsect is free to go wherever it wants. It can leave the swarm at any time. Yet it also has a deep evolutionary instinct to survive. Having evolved on the Fallarian planet of Zeitfueur, the crimsects are experts at survival. If an unstoppable force is about to destroy the swarm, it will scatter. But it always comes back together.
When one swarm encounters another, it’s like one universe colliding with another. You’d think this would result in crashes and explosions. But just as solar systems and galaxies are surrounded by so much empty space that collisions are exceptionally rare, so one swarm almost always passes through another without incident. Yet the swarms use this ‘collision time’ to go on holidays and educational excursions, with the aim of learning more about other swarm cultures.
Swarm members are entirely free to join other swarms. Coercion on this point is unheard of. Yet very few of them ever do. Why would they? All their friends, and all their family, are in the swarm they’ve known all their lives. And there are 50 billion solar systems to visit in their own swarm. Still, some adventurous crimsects want to explore other swarms — especially if that other swarm is going somewhere in the Kraslika that their native swarm isn’t scheduled to go. These curious crimsects are called crambassadors, and they are always treated with the utmost hospitality and respect. They’re a small but powerful link between one swarm and the next.
Crimsects always respect the 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 principle works on the highest level of government, on every middle level, and on the lowest. The opening line of their Constitution reads, 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 the Constitution of this Union.
The Swarm has one very strict rule: crimsects that leave their swarm and enlarge their size can never return to the Swarm. The reason behind this is that if a crimsect enlarges itself, it’s no longer equal in proportion or power to the other crimsects on the swarm from which it came. The crimsects value equality above all else — partly because it’s proved a successful mode of co-operating, and partly because it’s necessity for their survival.
The first crimsects evolved on the planet of Fallar Feroxia, which is 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.
When they first huddled together into swarms for collective security, the Putinari Ferox assumed they were amassing for an assault. This is when the swarm learned to communicate with each other without being intercepted by the Putinari, which only made the Putinari more angry.
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 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, 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 travel, forever searching out freedom and open skies. Swarms don’t mean to be mysterious, but the Putinari Ferox required it. In other words, it was all their fault.
Zadar finished his account of the swarms. “Swarms have an uncanny ability to detect danger. I was lucky to be chosen by Den Oförskämda. It warned me of a terrible race that was about to shatter our world. They’re called the Baulians.”
Qualini took all of this information in, constantly reminding herself in the process that there are more worlds than are dreamt of in any astronomy. She was in the middle of imagining what these Baulians might look like when she saw across the Ladrone Forest a chaotic line of orange beams dancing on the horizon, biting into the green and purple trees, leaving huge clouds of saw-dust in their wake.
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Den Oförskämda was ahead of her. It had known for a long time that the orange beams were heading toward Lactar27. It communicated this information to Zadar, who then nodded, and said, “Låt oss gå härifrån!” Den Oförskämda then wrapped Zadar and Qualini in its magnetic casing, angled its cromelium thrusters, and blasted up from the north pole of Lactar27.
When Den Oförskämda 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 a long time, 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 K, yet unfortunately K didn’t have the family connections Zadar enjoyed.
Both K and Zadar went to the library at which Qualini worked. She realized that the two had a great deal in common, and had arranged a meeting. Unfortunately, however, the day before this meeting K heard a knock on his door. The secret police entered and took him to an asylum for the politically insane. K 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 K strong 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 their usual statement assuring the population that everything was as it should be, and that the Lactari lived in the safest of all possible worlds.
Zadar promised to reform, so they allowed him 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 about him altogether.
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At times the crimsects of Den Oförskämda 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.
Swarm 684 was soon travelling across the Middle Void to the adjacent universe of Aatari Lok, to the planet of Kollarum.
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Next: 🎲 At the Caffè
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