The Great Game 🎲 Kollarum
The Professor from Palermo
Farenn stood there, coffee in hand, looking out the gigantic window of the Grand Plaza, 235 floors above the city of Kollarum. He was thinking about how momentous this day was going to be. The Baulians were in fact clueless about the value of the land they were about to conquer. Yet their very cluelessness made them the perfect custodians. At least that was what he intended to argue in front of the 33,000 members of the Grand Council.
Farenn was thinking that the Council’s decision might change the course of Kraslikan history when a professor of political science walked up to him. He was a short nervous man, and Farenn recalled having seen him briefly at two previous Council Assemblies. They had never formally met, yet Farenn could tell that this man was not at home in his own skin. When he ran into him previously, Farenn was so charged up by convivial atmosphere and lively debate that he didn’t focus on whatever was bothering his colleague. Even now the short man had the same anguished look about him and the same intense strain in his eyes. It was if he was contending perpetually with the chaos of existence itself. It clearly took alot out of him just to approach Farenn.
The first thing that surprised Farenn was that the man didn’t tap the ensign on his chest to activate his translator. Farenn wondered if he’d mastered Fallarian, which was not an easy task. But then the man asked him in perfect English if he could join him for a moment. Still shaking from nervousness, the man offered his hand. “My name is Tarnar Kent. I’m a professor of politics and philology from the Copper Tarn. I’m very honoured to finally make your acquaintance.”
Tarnar quickly told Farenn he’d spent the last three decades on planet Earth, on the island of Sicily. “It’s beautiful there, as we all know.” Tarnar waved off this beauty with his hand, eager to get to his point before Farenn was due on the podium. He had about twenty-five minutes to make the famous diplomat see what was going on. But he didn’t want to come off as a maniac, so he laboured to put his discourse into a coherent frame.
“Rome has more history in a square kilometre than most planets have. While hardly any tourists go there, the old city of Syracuse is a crucible of culture and smooth marble. Palermo is a historic blend of Carthage, Athens, Normandy, and Rome. But the Baulians don’t care about any of that, contrary to what they say.”
Farenn was a bit surprised by the abrupt shift to the Baulians, and he wasn’t sure what this connection meant. Farenn asked, also in perfect English, “What exactly about human culture are you interested in? Haven’t the Baulians swore to preserve the cultures they control?"
Tarnar responded, “My interest lies in the preservation of every human culture, from trendy California slang to the dying dialects of the forests and hills. My fear is that the Baulian takeover will destroy almost all of these cultures, and replace them with a multicultural patina, spread widely over the real cultures, which constitute a palimpsest beneath. An increasingly thin palimpsest, one that will eventually disappear.”
“The Baulians will save the planet from environmental destruction, but they’ll also eradicate any cultural riches that stand in their way. They won’t hoard these riches; they’ll eradicate them. Whole languages will disappear every month, all under the guise of intercultural understanding, streamlined knowledge, and efficient communication.”
Farenn had heard these arguments before, yet he didn’t interrupt his nervous companion. Besides, there was something in Tarnar’s look that reminded Farenn of Qayam, his old Aatari friend. He couldn’t quite say what it was. On the surface, he saw in Tarnar’s flickering eyes a deep instability, whereas the first thing he noticed about Qayam was his steadiness. At first sight he had pegged Qayam for a security agent, commando, or spy. Tarnar on the other hand was shorter and less muscular, and he lacked Qayam’s sureness of manner. Tarnar seemed more like the agents Farenn knew on Fallar Discordia, the ones who dug information like gold in a mine, and hoarded it like misers in a locked den. Yet unlike those Discordian agents, Tarnar’s good will and intelligence was apparent. This, Farenn realized, was what reminded him of Qayam. In Farenn’s opinion, there was nothing as valuable as a combination of good will and intelligence. So he let him go on, curious where all this would lead.
“What people don’t understand is that the disappearance of these things is monstrous. And by monstrous I mean that it destroys the thing that is least monstrous in the thirteen universes. We may have beauty and technology beyond the wildest imagination of human beings. But one thing we don’t have is a monopoly on the power and the glory, the agony and the ecstasy of emotion.”
Farenn looked at him questioningly, yet Tarnar turned his eyes away, and looked out the window. He wasn’t embarrassed by his use of worn human phrases like the power and the glory, which he knew Farenn would easily pick up. Instead, he was trying to make a connection to that little planet so far away, so that he’d be able to describe something indescribably alien. His voice too sounded distant.
“In the realm of emotion, humans are like gods. Most species in the Kraslika react from instinct and from programming, and from duty, and from the thousands of signals we get from all over the spectra. But humans ... humans have a core that’s unique. It’s all their own. It’s true that they only process 60% of the spectra, but very little of that other 40% has to do with the finest of feelings, which revolve in complex patterns around emotional and intellectual notions of love, hate, and empathy. Oh, we feel these emotions no doubt, but humans feel them to a degree of anguish and ecstasy that very few of us have experienced. Perhaps it’s because they’re closed off from about 40% of the spectra that their focus on the finer emotions are that much stronger.”
Tarner turned from the city view and looked straight at Farenn. “And to the Baulians, these feelings are pretty much unnecessary.”
Farenn stood still, giving no sign that he was in a hurry to get to the auditorium. They still had 22 minutes. So Tarnar attempted to give him a deeper understanding of the problem.
“What we call love, humans call responsibility, or interest. What humans call love is extremely complicated, and ranges from the depths — and I mean the absolute depths — of despair, to the rapture of ineffable happiness. These experiences of happiness and love are so deeply engrained in them that it doesn’t matter whether they’re positive or negative. Of course it matters to the humans experiencing these things, but it doesn’t matter in terms of the depth and in terms of the fact that they all experience them. The human who doesn’t experience them is considered a sociopath. We would call them a Baulian.”
“All the great empires have more or less defined sensibilities and identities. The Vicinese are abstract and light, always looking for the balance and the resting place. The Fallarians are concrete and dark, always looking to upset the balance and fly away. Humans are a mix of light and dark, often a confused interpenetration of the two, with an infinite number of greys from one end of the spectrum to the next. Out of the continuous struggle between the two extremes, they imbibe the deepest combinations of both. Usually the human personality is an interplay along the line of greys, but some humans have completely opposite sensibilities within them — like a dark purple right next to a bright orange — and this is both a blessing and a curse.”
“Most species in the Kraslika have an innate sense of when to stop along the line. For instance, if a Vicinese is deep purple by nature, he’ll get to light blue and start to turn back, because he knows what colour his nature is. He knows that if he goes too far from it, he’ll lose all safety. With Fallarians, going beyond all safety is their nature, and so it doesn’t bother them. Staying still for longer than thirty seconds is what bothers them. Only the greatest of Fallarian masters dare to go to Ladakh and meditate with the monks on those lonely temples on those barren peaks.”
“But with humans it bothers them to stay too still or fly too fast. They know they came from a certain place at a certain time, and it haunts them when they fly too far. Yet if they stay too close they start to fidget and wonder what it’d be like to be somewhere else, or to be someone else.”
Farenn knew about the human range of emotion, but couldn’t see wha the problem was. So he asked his colleague, “Won’t we do them a favour by calming them down, and by answering some of the questions torture them? Besides, isn’t the unpredictability of their obsessions dangerous? On several occasions they almost wiped themselves from the face of their own planet!”
Tarnar answered, “Yes, to a Vicinese that makes sense. And to a Fallarian it’s better to let them fly, to leave the safety nets behind. Yet what no one seems to appreciate is that they’d be better off if we did neither. I’m not sure that our reading, and our evaluation, of human nature is the right one.”
“Much of human history we interpret as barbarism. Especially when they kill in the name of vague concepts like freedom and God. It takes decades for aliens to understand what they call love of God. To most of us God is an abstract thing, an Ideal that no one’s seen. Yet their love of God is so deep and so powerful that they will literally walk into a bonfire for it. This isn’t the type of fire the deluded robot of a soldier walks into. No, it’s the fire of their own passion. They would rather end the only life they know than let others live without their concept of this love.”
“Humans may be blind creatures in all kinds of ways, yet their greatest blindness shows their greatest love. For instance, it’s only when humans die that those around them realize how deeply they loved them, how stupidly they threw away the moments they had together, and how the universe is such a dark place without them. Their emotion is poetic, even exquisite, yet it’s also very real. It’s something that very few of us know much about. This is perhaps why we’re drawn to the tragedies of Shakespeare, to Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and Hamlet. Shakespeare writes about unfathomably deep pain, and yet we try to grasp it anyway. It harrows our souls and yet we strive to get at its meaning. How can we gauge the loss of a culture that gives us such a challenge? And it isn’t just in their art or philosophy. It lies at the very core of their being. How do we gauge the loss of hundreds of cultures, all predicated on the same unstable mix of light and dark, certainty and uncertainty, emotion and intellect?”
“I know that you are due on the podium soon, but please indulge me a few minutes more. Where will we ever find a species so in between, so all over the map, so flippant and yet so earnest, as to fit the description of Alexander Pope:
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus’d;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!”
Both men knew that there was only about 15 minutes before Farenn would stand in front of 33,000 dignitaries, leaders, and diplomats. Yet Tarnar spoke each word of Pope’s poem carefully, without rushing. And Farenn felt no need to hurry him on.
When Tarnar finished, the two men remained in silence for about 30 seconds, just looking at each other. Tarnar shuffled his feet, in a moment of pure angst, and looked down at the floor. He looked out the window, down at the ski chute and out over the city, scintillating in its shifting colours that mirrored the marvels of the sky.
Tarnar then turned away from the view, using the same hand gesture he used earlier to brush aside the beauty of Syracuse and Rome. He looked up again at Farenn, this time with as much ardour as anguish in his eyes. While Farenn was gauging the emotional state of his colleague, and wondering if too much emotion might not be such a great thing after all, Tarnar was about to take the greatest leap of faith he’d ever taken.
Responding to Tarnar’s fears, Farenn said, “Yes, I’ve been following this for some time now. Very closely. The Pax Baulixia isn’t turning out to be quite as harmless as we hoped.”
Tarnar held up his hand as if to stop his colleague. He then looked straight into Farenn’s eyes. “Are you familiar with Rablanar, the Fractal Mystic?”
“Yes,” Farenn answered slowly.
“I believe that a Fallarian Demon Priest…” and he paused, looked around him again, and said, “…Knifestream, is in league with three Baulian Fractal Masters, all of whom have laboured to keep Rablanar’s theories from the public.”
Farenn didn’t know what to say to this. If this were true, it would open a crevice that could never be sounded. If Knifestream could manipulate the Baulians, the centre of power in the cosmos would shift drastically. Farenn asked his new colleague, whose eyes were bloodshot and rimmed in black circles, “How do you know this?”
“I’ve visited Rablanar and met with his friends. They meet in a bar in Queen’s, in New York City. Why do you think he’s moved to Upper State New York?” In an attempt to lighten the conversation somewhat, Tarnar added, “Not for the fishing, that’s for sure.”
Farenn looked at his watch and was glad to see that he still had ten minutes before he needed to address the Grand Council. He motioned to Tarnar to join him at a secluded table, out of earshot of those standing at the coffee stands and mini bars.
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