The Great Game 🎲 Vicinto Prossimo
The Water Damsel
~ 260 years ago ~
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The Vision 1
Talfar remembered it with crystal clarity, even though it was 260 years ago. He was only 50 years old when he first saw her along a patch of pavement blessed by the morning sun. She was dancing along the sidewalk, across the street from their ground-floor kitchen window.
Thalphemera was a water damsel from the nearby district of Romagna. Her skin was golden and her eyes were bright. In his heart, Talfar reworked the words of the universal Bard: “O, she doth teach the sunshine to shine bright!”
Thalphemera’s torso was blocked by the flower-boxes lining his family’s front window. Yet he could see that her neck and shoulders were as smooth and fine as her calves. A diamond anklet sparkled brightly in the sun.
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The Drug
Somatherin, the hormone of infatuation, hit Talfar’s system like a ferridian brick. Somatherin. The drug-dealers of Fallar Discordia would do anything to get their claws on this hormone. They used it as a precursor to manufacture their strongest amphetamines: diathamine, roketamine, and concatamine.
Somatherin would have given Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov the courage to cope with what he dared to do. It would have riled his hormones and buried his conscience, allowing him to climb the stairs, grip the ax firmly in his hand, and kill the innocent old lady. His hand wouldn’t have shook, and his mind wouldn’t have wavered.
Nor would he have had second thoughts, or third thoughts, or an endless chain of thoughts circling ever-backward to his culpability, torturing him every step of the way — like that scoundrel Macbeth, who tortured himself with notions of crime and punishment even before he killed Duncan in his sleep:
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly. If the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence and catch
With [Duncan’s death] success; [if only] this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
[Then] here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague th’ inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends th’ ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips.
Somatherin would have banished all those thoughts. The sweet drug would have allowed Macbeth to raise his dagger without qualm, and to sleep peacefully for the remainder of the night. He wouldn’t have heard the guilty voice within him crying out Sleep no more. Macbeth hath murdered sleep.
Somatherin would have allowed Raskolnikov to kill the pawnbroker, steal her trinkets, and walk out into the bright street as if nothing had happened. As if the universe didn’t object. Consequences and the life to come are nonsense when you ride high on the current of somatherin in every vein, and when you rest deep in the calm pool of somatherin in every muscle and cell.
Later that night, when the first dose had worn off, Raskolnikov would drink a second dose, to grant him the oblivion of forgetting what he’d done. And the next morning he’d take a third dose, and the next evening a fourth. And so on, until the drug told him how to get more.
Testosterone, by comparison, was like shandy served to children in a country pub.
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The Vision 2
The somatherin coursed though Talfar’s body when he saw Thalphemera dancing along the sidewalk. She seemed as if in another world, doing makeshift pirouettes, as she waltzed from her family’s apartment in Romagna to the university in Vicino Concentrica. She wore a light green taffesca dress, frilled like the flowers that lined the balconies of the honeycomb apartment across the street.
Like most of the apartments in Vicino Concentrica, this one climbed into the sky eighty floors above the street. But the light at mid-morning came directly from the oost, and this allowed a great swath of golden sunshine to sweep down the narrow street. Each window-box and balcony was lit up, so that the full lushness of the greenery and flowers could be seen. The plants at his parent’s kitchen window were lime green and magenta, violet and orange, turquoise and orchid.
To Talfar, the water damsel appeared to be dancing naked along the street, her mid-section hidden by the bursts of dragon-lily and heavenly blue morning glory in the flower-boxes. All he could see of her clothing was a thin green strap on her left shoulder, and the leather strap of a purse or handbag. Her golden ponytail sparkled in the sun.
As Fate would have it, there was a gap between the last flower-box and the edge of their window. It was exactly in this gap that Thalphemera stood framed, stooping momentarily to get a drink at the crystal fountain across the street. No pedestrians walked by. No ragged band of school kids obscured his view. No slow-moving grandmother with a caddy packed with groceries got in the way. It was as if time had stopped.
Thalphemera undid her ponytail and shook her hair in the sun. Talfar was mesmerized by the waterfall of her golden hair.
Throw your precious gifts into the air
Watch them fall down (when you were young)
As she stooped down she swept the golden hair away from her forehead with a movement so graceful that the only thing more beautiful could be the eyes that she uncovered as she bent down to drink from the fountain, twisting her neck down and sideways. It seemed to him that she was looking at him as he was looking at her. She saw the flower boxes and the widow and peered into the eyes that peered into hers.
Her eyes were crystal blue, like the water from some faraway paradise of blue waters.
A colour-enhanced detail from https://chickypea.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/travel_italy_capri1.jpg, taken in the Blue Grotto, Capri.
It was at this moment that Talfar felt that the Cosmos and its Grand Design were one.
Thalphemera brought the strands of her hair back together, bound them with a purple hair band that glistened with tiny silver threads, and skipped out of the frame.
Lift up your feet and put them on the ground
You used to walk upon (when you were young)
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Prime Rhythm
It was the first day of Prime Rhythm, the first year of university. It was a crucial time in life, when the 50 year-olds began to see the world as it was, rather than as a reflection of their own needs and desires.
When Talfar saw Thalphemera he realized that there was a whole world out there that he didn’t have a clue about. But he also had another thought, which he knew would clash with the primerhythmic doctrine of zero ego: he wanted her all to himself.
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In the auditorium, the professor was warning the students against the evils of egocentric perception. The professor told them that the aim of first year university was to blow your mind in so many directions that you’d realize (hopefully in time for exams) that the universe was excruciatingly vast and that everything you thought you knew about it was like a little blue glass bead.
The little glass bead lay between two rocks on a mountain range a hundred times the size of the Golden Hill, which was 6 kilometres high and 6 kilometres wide. The professor added, “It’s nevertheless crucial to cling to the self, to the zero that you really are. Accept this zero, and don’t let the fact that you’re completely insignificant get in the way of doing great things to advance the realization of your soul, which has no weight, no numerical value, no real meaning. Indeed, the soul and the self are very similar, except that the self is a little something while the soul is a great nothing.”
“The self is but a slim blue light vibrating haphazardly in a cocoon of translucent silicon. Your aspirations must always be larger than your ego, which is but the starting point. Point zero, nothing to be proud of. But with the help of a Vicinese education, you’ll start to understand what surrounds your tiny self. By hard work and dedication, you’ll increase your inner light year by year, decade by decade, until one day you’ll become a star.”
“The star and the bead are one. The tint of the bead will be the tint of the star. The frequency will be the same. It will pulse the same unique frequency that has always determined who you are. The star doesn’t even need to have a name, because it has the same tint, the same identity as the little bead that you were when you set out on the path from your home to these hallowed halls of learning. And yet, even without a name, your star will shine, projecting its light from the heights of Vicino Prossimo to the depths of Fallar Discordia.”
“It doesn’t matter who you are. Give up that fruitless search. What matters is that you nurture your inner light, the tint which makes you special. Project this light into the dark!”
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The Vision 3
Talfar had been completely befuddled ever since he saw the water damsel in the sunlight. He couldn’t seem to find the right clothing. Then he couldn’t find his classroom. Then, when he found the classroom, he couldn’t see an empty seat. Finally he saw an empty seat halfway down the lecture hall and in the middle of the row. Excusing himself as he bumped into a dozen sets of young knees, he got to the empty seat and got out his notebook. After writing down “completely insignificant,” he looked up briefly to get a glimpse of the student sitting next to him. She was looking straight at him.
Shake your hair girl with your ponytail
Takes me right back (when you were young)
Her eyes were crystalline blue, the stuff of poems, the cause of the bitten apple and the launching of a thousand ships. When she winked at him, her green eye-shadow glistened in the morning light streaming through the stain-glass window behind the professor’s lectern. Talfar realized that this was the same young woman who had danced down the street and made him so nervous that he didn’t know if he should wear a jacket, a t-shirt, or just cover himself in an inky cloak and pretend he didn’t exist.
But then the somatherin kicked in. This time, it was the deep calm, the still sweetness in every muscle and cell. It was the latent bliss at the still point of the turning world.
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A Golden Line
Talfar gathered very little from the lecture that morning. He couldn’t stop thinking about the heavenly nymph right beside him. He knew he was in a lecture-hall, yet all he could focus on was his peripheral vision. It was a focus that had no focus.
The professor had been talking for about 45 minutes and Talfar hardly understood a thing. All he could think about was the water damsel walking down the street, her golden hair gleaming in his mind. He heard the professor talking about a bead and a star and how everything was supposed to merge. Which just made him think of the dancing girl from Romagna.
He didn’t dare look at her, but kept his eyes straight ahead or looking down. Nevertheless, in his peripheral vision he could see that her skin was golden and she wore diaphanous leggings that made her bare legs seem to sparkle. It was as if there was an energy field or shimmering mist floating around her legs. Because he didn’t look any higher, her body seemed to float above her naked legs.
When the bell rang, he imagined that she would start like a minnow and swim up the stairs and out the door. He was far too nervous to talk to her, so he pretended to rearrange things in his backpack, after which he looked up to see if she had left the auditorium. She was staring point-blank at him. Her body was as still as the stone base of the fountain across the street from their breakfast window.
Thalphemera thought, Why don’t these guys just seize the day? So she said to him, “Would you like to go for a coffee?” She leaned toward him, letting the thin green strap of her dress slip slightly from her shoulder. She was reaching into her handbag to put her notes away. Inside the bag he saw the book that she always carried with her.
The book was Imitar’s Rabbit Hole, a 200-page analysis of the infinitesimal, that is, of the infinite number of points that lay within the smallest point. Thalphemera always keep the book with her, even though she could read it anytime on her tablet. But there was something about the weight of his words that required an actual book.
Thalphemera understood Imitar’s theories, yet there was no way for her to practically realize what they meant. If she could only enter into the infinitesimal in the same way a computer-generated exercise allowed her to go between two very closely connected points. If she could only see a universe between those points. If she could only then find some world in that universe and zoom in on a habitable planet, and then land on a sunny beach, and then look down between her toes and find two grains of sand, and then look between those grains and find another universe between them. This sort of mental exercise was purely mental. Or it was only on a screen.
The great Vicinese sage Algotodo had scattered these thoughts throughout the Kraslika a million years ago. He had written them down in his Book of Fractals. So there was nothing extraordinary about her thinking these thoughts. They were a million years old. Anybody could think them. But Imitar pushed Algotodo’s thoughts further than anyone else, adding to them the most recent developments in fractology. Imitar made her want to know, Is all of this just a thought exercise, or can a person live at these depths? Is everything Algotodo says about “infinity within a grain of sand” just poetry?
Talfar saw the book, and saw right away that they had a million things to talk about. None of the other students were carrying books. The lecture was very specifically an introduction, and only at the end of it, after the students decided that they were willing to do the work the course required, would anybody buy an actual text. And there was no way that a first-year course would include Imitar’s Rabbit Hole. It may have been taught in special graduate seminars, but only in the second decade of study.
Seeing that very specific thin golden line of letters along the spine of her book, Talfar had a surge of confidence. Only a few minutes ago he felt like sticking his head in his backpack because he didn’t have the guts to look up in her direction. And if he had mustered the courage to look up and say something, what would he have said? But with this one golden line in common, he looked into those deep blue crystalline eyes. Seizing the moment, he said, “I see you’re reading Imitar.”
“I can’t stop reading him!”
“It’s so hard to find anyone our age who has even heard of him. They’re all watching the dryad dramas. They’re all worried about whether Sarfin will marry Tanfarum, or whether the Two Worlds will go to war. Will their families, so different, ever get along?”
Thalphemera laughed. “I know! It’s so refreshing to read Imitar. His drama isn’t just about dryads, but about dryads and Ferrixians, Blue Dreamers and Skystalkers. And about a million leagues of different things.”
Talfar added, “In a sense he’s just a trouble maker. I mean, we’ve got everything we need, and then he comes along and tells us that we don’t even know what we’re missing.”
“But isn’t that what makes life worth living? I mean, where’s the joy if the movement upward is halted because you think you’ve got everything you always wanted. Isn’t it better to wonder if you might be exaggerating what you’ve already got? Isn’t it better to think that the joy in moving upward has no ending? In any case, it’s not like he’s taking anything away.”
Talfar looked up to the webbed and sparkled ceiling, with its thousands of tiny lights that cast a violet glow into every corner of the auditorium. Then he looked down, beneath the seats, next to her handbag, at her slim ankle that sparkled with its diamond chain. What, he wondered, could be better than to meet someone who wanted to explore the infinite? And her infinity didn’t seem to be all golden bubbles and sunlight. It seemed to have room for the Kraslika as it was outside the bright auditoriums of the Vicinese Federation.
He took a leap of faith, hoping that she would understand his problems with what the professor had called infinite perfection. “But then Imitar goes on to say that there’s something that makes all these worlds cohere. How can he know this if every world we look into suggests that there’s more worlds that we can’t see? If we can’t see them, even if they inspire us, doesn’t it suggest that there may also be worlds, and perhaps even dimensions, that don’t mesh with our own? Perhaps there are infinite stretches filled with worlds of discord and pain.”
She paused, as if in pain herself. Fallar Discordia, the mere name of the Fallarian Dominion made her shudder. But then a calm surge welled up inside her, beyond crests and troughs, like a tide moving upward to meet his disturbing thoughts. “Yes. Yes. I have the same problem. How can we live in a world of fantasy, however wonderful the drama?”
This seemed the moment to put on pause their discussion. Neither of them wanted to lose sight of the room they were in, or the way they responded to each other’s body language, or the energy their talk generated between them.
“Shall we go for that coffee?” he asked, although both of them had already started rising from their seats.
As they walked up the stairs, they realized that the 5,000 seat auditorium was completely empty. The lights were as bright as ever, as if expecting to illuminate some brilliant exposé or speech. Thalphemera noted playfully, “I’m guessing this would be our audience if we just gave that little talk!”
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Next: 🎲 The Orb
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