The Great Game 🎲 Lactar27
Zadar & Qualini
The Swarm saw the orange beams coming from outer space, and immediately wrapped Zadar and Qualini in its magnetic casing. The Swarm angled its ferridium thrusters, and blasted to the nord pole of Lactar27.
As a pack, the Swarm obeyed its collective instinct, although lab drones called it the electromagnetic vector that built up between their irradiated shields. The lab drones didn’t understand the distinction between structural analysis of matter and creative function or awareness created from matter. They equated the two, and reduced the latter to the former. The crimsects who constituted the Swarm had a word for such thinking: reductionality, which they defined as the inability to see how an effect could be greater than the cause. The crimsects pitied such mechanical thinking, and only swarmed toward those who saw that something could be more than the sum of its parts. The opposite of reductionality was expansivity, which the crimsects prized above all else.
The only gravity-bound being on all of Lactar27 who completely understood expansivity was the Zadar the Heretic. His masterpiece, They Murder to Dissect, was like a Bible to the adoring crimsects of the Swarm.
Qualini the Librarian was even more smitten with Zadar. Her five eyes hardly ever strayed from the Heretic in his dark purple robes. Zadar was the oddest, most intriguing male she had ever seen. He was passionate about the strangest things, and yet he would always spend more time asking about her private life than about the files she plugged him into. These files were mostly restricted, and some were written in Lactari languages that thad long since disappeared. Zadar had endless curiosity, and Qualini had an endless need to satisfy his curiosity.
It was during one of these research sessions that Zadar slipped in the question, “Can I join you for dinner sometime?" This started a series of dinners, which always began with abstract conversation. They discussed things like the recent file she plugged him into, or the transition three hundred years ago from feelscript to soundscript. Yet their conversations soon became personal. She couldn’t believe the places he’d been, and longed to go with him. She wondered what life would be like in other solar systems. She especially wondered what life would be like away from her mom and dad, who treated her like a baby even though she had already reached the adult age of 133. She had packed two suitcases for the day she would leave their tyranny behind.
He approved of her reluctance to let her parents define her, yet he was surprised at the way she let them run her life. As if to justify her passivity, she said, “I’m a librarian. It’s in my nature.” Then he would leave that debate behind and stare instead into her rotating eyes, one on each point of her pyramid-shaped head. The pyramid rotated slowly, so that he saw green, blue, orange, then crimson, swirling slowly yet leaving streaks of colour that blended with the next colour. Sometimes the pyramid stopped on crimson, which was a clear sign of her attraction. Her apex eye, which was always in view, was the clearest, most luminescent amethyst he had ever seen.
He also expressed his admiration at the speed with which she worked the library infofiler with her upper tentacles, which ran in nervous patterns up and down the tablecloth that draped onto her lap. Underneath the table their lower tentacles slid up and down, up higher and down lower, until the waiter asked if they wanted desert.
In an attempt to lower his heartbeat, Zadar asked Qualini to chant “The Sailor Scales,” a poem in Ancient Lactari. Her mouth and shiny blue teeth were like a rare instrument that Zadar could listen to for hours.
By the old blue sea the trouble comes, by the cold blue dream the pounding drums. Over clear blue skies the sailer cries, into LactarOne the spirit flies. The one who dreamed became the dreaming sea, of clear blue waters that never ran dry, from the blinding storm, from the orange hail, from the endless tears in the sailor’s eye.
The poem filled Zadar with a sense of tragic longing, an emptiness so profound that the only thing he could think to do was to wrap himself in the hidden surfaces of her silky folds, there where her inner senses met her neatly-catalogued store of ancient wisdom and poetry.
The look in his eyes made Qualini turn dine-out to dine-in, so that she could take him back to her room and tell him everything he wanted to know.
A by-product of having Zadar over for dinner was that he met her parents, who constantly nagged her about everything under the two suns. By dint of tradition and a natural inclination to serve, Qualini acquiesced to their nagging, and silently went off to do whatever she pleased. Yet it pleased her even more to see that Zadar stood up to them. He said the things she was afraid to say.
She remembered (with a shiver that gripped her retinae and sent them circling) the first and only time he came over for dinner. As soon as they sat down, her parents made a big point of telling her that she ought to be more serious, signalling to their guest that this was the only conversation that would be permitted at their dinner table.
Her parents assumed that he, in light of his 278 years, would naturally take their side. Perhaps he would even be willing to make them an offer to marry their daughter. They were anxious to get rid of her, and they could use the money. They had even considered the option of a drive-by wedding, where the highest bidder could swoop her away and they could finally convert her bedroom into a luxurious spa.
Qualini’s parents became even more insistent and specific: their daughter must get a higher-paying job, stop taking night courses, draw up a family plan, and find a professional who didn’t share her pathetic interest in poetry and fiction. They were convinced that Zadar would be one of these professionals, given his greater years, his grave stature, and the fine purple robes he wore.
Instead, Zadar calmly suggested that Qualini shouldn’t stop taking night-courses. Looking the parents square in their apex eyes, he asked, “Who can ever get enough knowledge? Jobs are necessary, yet sometimes they signal the moment we stop learning and start applying what we’ve learned. Qualini is an exceptionally intelligent girl. A beautiful and intelligent girl.” Zadar had the temerity to lay one of his tentacles directly on her shoulder and give it a gentle squeeze. The parents turned indigo with anger. Zadar continued, “Why not let her wait, let her learn as much as she can? Why not let her start applying her knowledge once she’s learned to the fullest extent of her capabilities?”
The parents were outraged at his betrayal. “Give us one example of a successful Lactari who didn’t study Business, Accounting, Law, or Medicine.” They then repeated the monotonous maxim they repeated every day at the breakfast table: “The daily litre of milk comes from a monetary notion, Not from the poet’s dream of a milky ocean.”
Zadar responded, “There are more things in heaven and Lactar than are dreamt of in your economy. Why, somewhere, there may even be a galaxy of milk, or a galaxy within each drop of milk. There may be worlds within a grain of sand. Some day we may hold Infinity in the grooves of our tentacles. But how can we find out if we don’t dream beyond what we already know? The one who dreamed became the dreaming sea. The sea that saw dreamed both you and me.”
This reference to an old poem infuriated Qualini’s parents. It made them want to kill their guest on the spot. And perhaps their daughter too, for being such a wretched failure. The parents couldn’t stand the sight of their daughter and the purple-gowned intruder, so they ordered the pair of them out of their home. The father tossed Qualini’s suitcases onto the pavement. The mother slammed the door, and screamed at her husband, “An ocean of dreamers! Let them find out what the world is really like! Let them drown like the idiots they are!”
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And yet Zadar was right: there was a galaxy of milk and there were worlds within a grain of sand.
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With a nervous smile, Qualini followed Zadar down the street and across town. There, in a garret overlooking the Pink River, she unpacked her suitcases and slid into his bed. The bases of their pyramids came together, while their supple tentacles flowed around them, wrapping them into a tight octahedron.
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Next: 🎲 The Swarm
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