The Great Game 🎲 The planet of Kollarum

Kollarum Nights

With the second cup of coffee flowing through his veins, Farenn felt refreshed and alive. Last night he went to sleep early, with the scent of cedar drifting across his brain and with blue and green of the Kollaran sky swirling above him. He dreamed he was flying above a forest and through banks of blue clouds. Strange birds spoke to him of other worlds. He heard a far-off chirping, melodious and enticing, a far-off chiming that got louder as he coursed over a galactic ocean in a big ship, and through the clouds of a rolling sky toward a planet where he was going to meet many new friends. These friends were also listening to this chiming, this invitation to rise from their beds and walk into their misty showers. There, the warm pulses woke up every cell in their bodies, and made their minds coherent enough to put on some clothes and go eat breakfast.

Take-out coffee in hand, Farenn walked toward the giant windows that dominated the Grand Plaza, which was adjacent to the auditorium, both of which were on the top twenty floors of the Matterhorn Conference Centre. Above him was the roiling colourful sky, and below him was a white ski-hill dotted with trees. The hill was on one side of the mountainous building, which housed about 250,000 guests, 235 floors above ground and 235 floors beneath. In Kollarum it was difficult to say where exactly the ground floor was, since the entire planet was covered with subterranean shopping arcades, sports complexes, sky-pools, sunken gardens, conference centres, office towers, and multi-level cafes.

In the distance Farenn saw an enormous steel-grey nightclub, its eighty circular stories still throbbing at 8:30 in the morning. The line of throbbing started as a black line on the tenth floor. It became deep purple on the twentieth floor, and then from there to crimson, candy red, hot pink, and yellow. Finally, it exploded into psychedelic blue and green on the top floor, merging into the colours of the Kollarum sky.

Farenn had been coming to Grand Council assemblies for the last 230 years. His favourite thing about them was the interaction with different people from all over the Kraslika. This diversity was no surprise, since Kollarum was located in the Aatari Lok universe, which was near the centre of the Kraslika:

Farenn was from the Fallarian Dominion, yet he was more social and less stubborn than many Fallarians. He loved to be challenged in the morning by scholars and diplomats, as they revved up with spiked coffee, and he loved to arrive at compromise solutions in the late afternoon, as they wound down with martinis the colour of the Kollaran sky. This winding down usually took place in the three-story lounge located next to the coffee shops and restaurants which were sprinkled on the lower floors of the Grand Plaza. The lounge was called Smart as a Whip.

The martinis they served in the lounge were full of vitamins, anti-oxidants, fruit concentrates, and cocanol, which was a legal mix of cocamine and vodzilla. Habitual drinkers of the lounge martinis were called martinets (or martinettes). These habitués looked like everyone else, except that they were more regular in their lounge attendance. Sometimes they would even leave important meetings early, in order to keep their word to other habitués that they would be there the moment the shakers were first shaken.

Another sign of a martinet was that somewhere on their persons, usually in a back pocket or a holster of some sort, you could see the end of a stick or rod, which was connected to strips of leather or a chain of some sort. If, after sufficient quantities of cocanol, a martinette flicked you gently with one of these little whips, it meant that you were invited to follow her into a private pod above the lounge. These pods were little circular huts, located on the fourth and fifth floors of the Grand Plaza. They were within walled-off zones and had names like Garden of Eden, Jungle Vine, River Clearing, or Oasis Mirage. Within these zones, the paths from pod to pod were strictly monitored, yet the rules of conduct were lax.

Once you were in one of these pods, you never knew quite what to expect — a Vicinese scholar reading some ancient text, a mutant from the Frozen Skiff inviting you to play strip poker, an angry Crimson Stalker haranguing you because you used the wrong pronoun, or a Fallixian minx taking her clothes off and making love to you on the floor. Because the Fallarian minxes made up 77% of the martinet population, it was usually the latter.

Yet this wasn’t some quick romp in the hay. Instead, the martinets followed the ancient mating customs. The Fallarian minx, for instance, turned on eery floating music, then took out her whip and danced around you, lightly whipping herself and you (the goal apparently was to whip both partners at once). She danced over to a dial on the wall, and turned it to her preferred level of pod transparency (which was generally more than you were comfortable with). This seemed to excite the minx, as she twirled and whipped and hummed, all the while taking you down with her onto the floor and into a position where you were on top of her.

Or him, it was impossible to predict. Monomorphism was common in the Fallarian minx. Also, the name that minxes gave to a post-aperativo rendez-vous was The Lying Game. But by that time you’d drank so much cocanol that you were starting to get a taste for the eery music and the light splashing of the whip, dipped in the tingling gels that all minxes carried in their sacthels.

Like the swinger in Cot’s Primavera, you had imagined that you were in control. But were you really? And did it matter if you weren’t?

Farenn had always dismissed the rumour that some minxes were secret agents. Yet in his later years, when he had lost interest in the minxes with their whips and gels, he wondered if they might have been gathering information all along.

Another thing you could predict about the Fallarian minx was that part-way into making love (about the time she was putting her hands down your pants, so that she too could verify what she was dealing with), she would turn off all the lights in the pod. Then slowly her body started glowing, from the inside. You looked down and saw that her breasts were aglitter. Her heart was open, and you saw currents of energy flowing this way and that. Fluorescent chemicals crept into your lungs.

She bit your ear with her fangs, pressing her memories of dark alleys and vineyards into your brain until you were there, in the ruthless cities and on the narrow ridges, under the dark purple Fallarian sky, riding the wind with your powerful wings.

🎲

Often, Farenn didn’t get back to his room till late the next morning, with just enough time for a quick shower and a change of clothes.

Last night, however, he made sure to avoid minxes of any kind, and got to bed early. He also gave himself ample time after breakfast to collect his thoughts. This wasn’t going to be an ordinary day. For today he was going to make the presentation he’d been working on for decades.

He was going to argue that the Grand Council should allow the Baulians to take over the Virgo Super Cluster. The two great powers in the Kraslika, the Vicinese and the Fallarian, had been tussling over the Super Cluster for centuries, each one packing the place to the gills with their spies and proto-colonists. But the competition had intensified to the point where conflict was inevitable. Inevitable, that is, if the Grand Council didn’t find a way to neutralize the situation. Farenn saw this as the only peaceful way forward, and the Grand Council was the only political body that both the Vicinese and the Fallarians would obey.

Farenn was a Fallarian, yet this didn’t mean he was biased in the matter: like all Fallarians, he seldom agreed with his fellow Fallarians. He preferred the advantages of competition over the drawbacks of collaboration. He couldn’t be swayed by arguments that were based on cultural or philosophical principles, but only by what made sense to him. And while it made sense for many Fallarians to put their profit before principle, Farenn put his principle before profit. And his principle was to get along, to make sure everyone was free to agree or disagree, and to make sure that everyone could do what they wanted, as long as it didn’t stop others from doing the same.

In this, Farenn differed from the Fallarian Demon Priests, who coveted power for its own sake, and for what it could do for them. Most delegates of the Grand Council knew that Farenn wasn’t like them, even though he was able to talk to them, even make them bow to his logic at times. For this reason, he was respected by diplomats and political strategists throughout the Kraslika. Yet this respect hadn’t rubbed off on the Demon Priests, who were a constant source of worry for Farenn. At times he wondered if he was still alive because they still found him useful.

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Next: 🎲 The Professor from Palermo

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