The Great Game: Two 🎲 Vicino Prossimo
ii. Golden Letters
— 250 Years Ago —
Talfar gathered very little from the lecture that morning. All he thought about was the young woman sitting right next to him. He knew he was in a lecture-hall, yet all he could focus on was his peripheral vision. He didn’t dare look up at her, but kept his eyes straight ahead. He could tell that her skin was a lively green and that she wore a diaphanous set of leggings that made her seem like a mermaid off the port bow. Because he couldn’t allow himself to look directly at her, her head seemed to float somewhere up above her shimmering legs. He remembered a flash of her face as he sat down, fifty minutes ago: she had black hair and aquamarine eyes. Her skin was smooth and she wore make-up that sparkled slightly.
When the bell rang, he thought she’d 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 his breakfast window.
Thalphemera was tired of the way young men couldn’t seem to fully enter into the moment, and seize the day. So she just said to him, “Would you like to go for a caffè?” She spoke to him as if she were completely at ease, as if she had no intention of tripping him up, making him look like a fool, testing him on what he didn’t remember from the class, or playing any of the hundred mind-games that were played from the Golden Hill of Vicino Prossimo to the Black Gulf of Fallar Prime.
But she also knew that a little tension would get his attention. So she leaned toward him, letting the diaphanous top of her blouse slip slightly onto her shoulder blade, and reached into her backpack. Slowly, but with the golden lettering of its spine still facing upward, she put away the book that she always carried with her. It was Imitar’s Rabbit Hole, a 200-page exploration on the infinitesimal beneath the smallest point. She didn’t know why she always wanted to keep the book with her, especially since she could get all of his writings on her portable at any time. But there was something about the weight of the volume, the weight of his words, that required an actual substance.
Thalphemera understood Imitar’s theories and believed them completely, and yet there was no way for her to fully 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 and see the universe between those points, and 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 look between those grains and find a billion universes between them. This sort of mental exercise was purely mental or only on a screen.
The great sage Algotodo had scattered these thoughts throughout the Kraslika a million years ago. And certainly, there was nothing extraordinary about her, she thought, because anybody could think those exact same thoughts. But Imitar pushed Algotodo’s thoughts further than anyone else, and he added to them the most recent advancements in fractology. He made her desperately want to know, Is all of this just a thought exercise, or can a person live at these depths? And if so, where do these thoughts lead?
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 be seen with 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 and green crystalline eyes. Grasping 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 roots, so different, ever mesh?”
Thalphemera couldn’t have agreed more. “I know! Everything is alright in the pheromone universe as long as Tanfarum is doing what Sarfin wants, and as long as Sarfin is doing what the politicos want: to tame the Fallarian beast and usher in the New Dawn. It’s the same old fantasy. It’s so refreshing to read Imitar. It’s as if he’s writing a drama that isn’t just about dryads, but about dryads and Anubi and Abraxi and every other conceivable combination. He blows up the whole concept of roots.” She looked at him shyly, and added, “Or lets them grow in water, but the water goes on for leagues and leagues.”
Talfar liked this analogy. “And the leagues turn into worlds, and galaxies, with watery intergalactic currents between them. But in some ways 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, even more? I mean, where’s the joy in reaching a certain level of civilization if you stop there, 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, where her slim ankle entered her lichen-brush moccasins. What, he wondered, could be better than to meet someone who wanted to explore the infinite? But he wondered if her infinity was all golden bubbles and sunlight, or if it had 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 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 so smoothly with our own? Perhaps there are even infinite stretches filled with worlds of pain.”
She paused, as if in pain herself. 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, lest it become so earnest or so elevated that they no longer took note of the room they were in, or the way they seemed to respond to each other’s body language, or the energy that their talk had generated between them.
“Shall we go for that caffè?” he asked, although both of them had already moved their elbows to their arm-rests.
As they walked up the stairs, they couldn’t help but notice 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. She noted playfully, “I’m guessing this would be our audience if we just gave that little talk!”
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Next: ✏️ J. Alfred
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