The Great Game 🎲 Lactar8

On Lactar8

Lady Madonna

On Lactar8, astronomers finally found a way to extract the energy patterns whizzing all around them in the Spiral Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Yet they still couldn’t make sense of the data. Some of it was so dense that they had to recalibrate their sub-angstrom meters to make sure that the energy patterns hadn’t in some way played havoc with the meters themselves. Once they identified the patterns, they couldn’t get inside them. Or the lines dissolved into mist.

What the scientists identified wasn’t very interesting to the Cultists of the Hive. They said the chaotic patterns simply confirmed that the universe wasn't, unfortunately, a mirror of their majestic minds. It was only interesting to those parts of the Lactari brain that cared for such things as vectors, density, wavelengths, and rocks. 

It was late in the third quarter of the afternoon when Kalströnw8 saw two stray images emerge as if by magic from an orange streak of energy. He could hardly believe his five eyes. The first image was of a two armed, one-headed creature sucking the appendage of a larger, similar creature. Both had two eyes and were staring directly at K.

The air around them was yellowish-brown, and contained square and circular modulations that seemed to be trapping (or protecting) the creatures within a double force-field. Outside the first layer of the force-field were little heads looking in toward them. These tiny, insect-like heads were perhaps monitoring them. Or perhaps they were obeying orders that the creatures sent through the force-field. Or perhaps the little heads were staging an attack. In any case, the two big creatures didn’t seem to worry about the tiny heads. Perhaps they could just swat them if they needed to.

The second image was similar, yet the two creatures seemed to be communicating with each other.

Both creatures had circles projecting from their heads, perhaps indicating rotors and the ability to fly. Perhaps the circles were antennae. The small creature had a grid within his antenna, perhaps used for navigation. In the background K could see their home planet. It had pointy towers, big rocks, and a blue atmosphere.

The images resembled each other, yet they were probably from different planets: one contained a golden atmosphere of magnetic force-fields, while the other had wide open spaces in which creatures might fly about freely.

K had never seen anything like this. He did a scan-match with the database of imaginary images projected from the Cult Hive. He suspected that the strange images were just two of their crazy fantasies.

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The Cultists of Lacter27

From the 81 crystal hanging villages in the ether of Lactar27, the Hive had projected almost everything that was possible to project. At first, K couldn’t make any sense of their psychedelic fantasies. They had projected a 64-armed Queen who impregnated currents of energy with deep pulsing algorithms of purple mist. This Queen lived at the end of space and pointed her finger at the beginning of a different space. They had also projected a heavenly King who could defy the laws of gravity, and a two-eyed Smoke Demon called Rannabalis who could suck the life-fluid from a Lactari with the mere rumble of its throat. Yet none of these threw any light on the tranquil images he saw on his screen.

One projection that caught K’s attention was by Zadar the Heretic, who existed on the fringes of the Hive, and was considered by LactarQuorum to be dangerously unorthodox. At times Zadar refused to synch his four brains, which resulted in all sorts of mad artistry. Zadar’s projection went like this:

On the burning plains of Aridzona, the Rebel dared to look up into the fiery sky. He knew it was forbidden. He feared that in the next moment the Sun, who everyone called Master, would burn through the cromelium that protected his head. But he didn’t care. He’d had enough of the threats of the Elders. Each time the old geezers lectured him about the Primal Spark and the Evil One who tried to snuff it out, the crimsects buzzing within the cromelium hardened. The crimsects didn’t, like other fluorescent swarms, fly off to another host. Instead, their shells hardened and they increased their magnetic repulsion, creating a yellow crome force-field that dimmed the blinding light that came from above. The force-field was a translucent halo hovering above his head.

For most of his 230 years K had ignored the lurid fantasies of the Cult. Yet perhaps they too had seen strange visions of other worlds. Wanting to know more, he went to the local library and hooked himself up to the librarian, a blue-tentacled Lactolect named Qualini. K had often gone to her, sometimes inventing things to research, just to be connected to her. This time was different: he really wanted to know the things he asked her. She could feel the difference.

Qualini took K’s thoughts deep into ancestral memories, myths, and languages he couldn’t decode. She possessed a poetic intensity that many materialistic Lactari ignored or disdained. To K, the way she handled data was like an aphrodisiac. He could almost measure time by how her tentacles swayed. And he wondered how many things the bright container in her lower belt of floating sensors might contain.

Qualini the Librarian showed K that the stories of the Cult were interconnected. She shuffled and then funnelled them into rhythmic sequences down her spinal cord and her communication tentacle, and into his. Pulse by pulse, K saw that the two-eyed Smoke Demon Rannabalis spawned the spore communities that ruled, from one mutation to the next, the entire domain of Electrochemistry.

Qualini held back a pulse for eight seconds, confirming that he was ready. When she let it go, he saw that the spores were reading the thoughts of the Cultists who projected them. The spores punished the Cultists with jolts of electrochemical mist whenever they attempted to see through the smoke that Rannabalis used to cover his tracks.

Then everything went black. This could have been because the spores were hiding their operations behind an inky cloak, or because Qualini had unhooked herself and was serving another customer.

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K tried in vain to match the Cultist stories to the extralactarian images. Apart from the Smoke Demon, K had never heard of a being with only two eyes. Such a creature would be ridiculous, even impossible. How could it protect itself if it didn’t have eyes facing in all directions? It was an axiom among the Lactari that A line was suicide, a triangle was helpless, but a pyramid could look after itself. A pentahedron with a square base and a great eye at the top was the pinnacle of evolution. This also happened to be the exact form of a Lactari.

The two things that distinguished the Lactari from other pentahedrons were its extremely flexible spinal cord and its powerful tentacles. The spinal cord was connected to its great eye, ran through the pyramid of its body to its base and to its other eyes. The spinal cord was also connected at the centre of its base to eight tentacles.

The tentacles could collapse into the pyramidal body, and were made of powerful yet supple biomass. In love-making, they wrapped around the body, leaving the base free to clamp onto its mate. The tentacles then relaxed and interpenetrated the tentacles of the other. The spinal cords fused, making an electric connection from one great eye to the next. They called this the two-eyed beast. This was the only two-eyed scenario that made any sense to K.

K also wondered how the images got to Lactar. His best guess was that a stray energy stream got through the Sea of Stars, was picked up by an orange streak, and hurled in the general direction of Lactar. If only he knew what orange streaks were! If only he could decipher what was inside the brightly-coloured lines! Perhaps then he could figure out how the two images emerged. As it was, it was as if they came from no where.

The next day K went back to the library to learn what the Cultists said about the Sea of Stars and what lay behind it.

Several hundred years ago the Cultists formed a Grand Council that floated in deep meditation for forty days. During this “Great Floatation,” the Council prophesied a messianic Super-Lactari they called Orala, who was born deep within the Sea of Stars. Some Lactari believed the Council intuited the existence of Orala, while others believed that the Council prophesied Orala’s existence. Some heretics, influenced by the writings of Zadar, argued that Orala was merely a figment of their collective imaginations.

The Council predicted that Orala would surface from deep within the Sea of Stars to protect their cluster of planets from the ravaging menace of Rannabalis. Orala would turn the Spiral Arm into a slingshot, and hurl the 53 planets of Lactar to safety. The force of Orala would be so great that the 53 planets would fly between all the known stars, to the purple end of space, There, the Lactari would come face to face with Lactana, Supreme Goddess of the Infinite Worlds. 

The Council wisely concluded their prophecies here. Still, freedom of expression was a vaunted concept in Lactar, and no one could stop Zadar the Heretic from adding new chapters to what had for centuries been considered the Final Revelation.

In his most cryptic work, Beyond Evil and Good, Zadar dared to out-prophesy the Grand Council. Given the outlandish claims Zadar made, it was impossible to tell if he was mocking the Council or if he was agreeing with them. Yet even such an agreement was interpreted by the Council (who were very difficult to please) as a form of mockery, for it was as if they had done all the legwork of setting up the plot and the mysteries, and now he waltzed in to reveal the meaning.

Prophesying even further into the future, Zadar dared to prophesy what Lactana would tell the gathered Lactari:

Fear not, little ones. I bring not a sword, but a chalice filled with water in its deepest, purest state, brimming with sparkling depths and new forms of life. This water comes from the planet Errerrath. The planet is a spherical blue delight. It consists of water temples perched on jagged cliffs, all surrounded by deep troughs. It contains infinite refractions of water and light!

In the decades to come, this source of all Beauty and Power will be found, on the Other Side of the Sea of Stars. Unfortunately, however, most Lactari won’t be there to see it. They will be destroyed in a hail of orange beams. The great trees of Lactar27 will fall, but within one of the trunks two Lactari will survive, to repopulate the world again.

K looked again at the background of the second image, where the creature’s antenna appeared to circle from the top to the bottom of the sky. He had assumed that the grey-blue background was composed of the same elements throughout, perhaps with some clouds or a land-bridge between. But now he wondered if the grey-blue sky in the upper left corner of the square might be different from the grey-blue part immediately below it. Was this the watery Heaven Zadar described in his visions?

According to Zadar, Lactana told the gathered Lactari that good and evil were one. She said that while she was herself a metaphorical being, her words could nevertheless pacify the Smoky Beast within them that had haunted their dreams since they rose from the swamps of Lactar3 and lifted their frail cones with the hydraulic pressure of their primordial cylinders. Zadar projected images of radiant circles surrounding Lactana, and lactomorphic angels dancing in the ether.

The rings around Lactana reminded K of the rings above the heads of the large and small two-eyed beings.

Zadar’s visions became increasingly difficult to follow. He asserted that the universe was a series of ever-larger and ever-smaller worlds. He claimed that the Lactari inhabited a series of interlocking middle worlds, and that they would eventually see that everything they saw in these worlds was like a tiny reflection of a pretty pattern in a tiny mirror. They stared into that mirror and thought it the prettiest thing in the cosmos. They dreamed about Orala and Lactana, but mistook dream for prophecy, fiction for fact. One day soon a giant wind from another world would put ripples in the mirror, then shatter it into a million pieces.

Zadar assured them that despite the inevitable cataclysm, lactomorphic angels would continue to dance unseen all around them — the same angels that even now danced in the ether in which the Cultists in their 81 villages hung collectively, nimble beings of light and sweet water hanging from the strong branches of the langar trees. Together, everything that was, and everything that would ever be, would be united in the misty regions beneath the bright purple sky temples of an ancient capital. Only the Moment existed. There was no need to go anywhere else. Nothing mattered, in any case.

At the end of Beyond Evil and Good, Zadar added somewhat mysteriously, “All that is now, all that is gone, all that's to come, and everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.”

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The Cultists of Lactar27 were revolted by the confusing and blasphemous words of Zadar the Heretic. And when they saw him in a hanging garden talking his infernal rubbish to some credulous fool, they felt like throwing him over the edge into the Great Swamp below. Failing that, they would exercise their considerable political power and make sure that he and his writings were sent to the fiery planes of Aridzona.

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K didn’t know what to make of it all. Zadar also philosophized about the probabilities of telekinesis and lactomorphism, and the conundrum of worlds within worlds. Yet to K, none of this was as difficult to decipher as the two images of the one-headed two-eyed creatures.

The two extralactarian images haunted K’s dreams until he died in a fit of ecstasy ten years later, yelling out something about the Mother of God. 

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Next: 🔮 Dinner Guests from Baulis Prime

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