Lambent floats.
His skin is titanium white. His shape is familiar - two arms, two legs, and a face tensed with concentration. Iridescent hair whips about him.
He listens. He listens, and Jupiter sings.
Oh! But the song is a violent one! Vibrato winds hurl ammonia crystals in razor-studded harmony. Hydrogen clouds surge in multicolored streams. Red and white and brown weave in turbulent tapestry. The percussive crash of ice crystals shattering against each other, torn apart by wind and driving rain.
Lambent flings his arms wide and lets it wash over him. Tumbling wildly through the rosy storm, catching lightning as it stabs at pearlescent skin. He whoops. He screams. He laughs. Jupiter laughs with him in deep rumbling thunder, a sonorous laugh ninety thousand miles wide.
A dark shape sweeps by, a shimmering bioluminescence among stormclouds. It’s a strange, pillowy thing about six feet across. Glimmering light refracts within the translucent depths.
A smile splits Lambent’s face; a meeting with a jovian jelly is a rare delight indeed.
The jelly sparkles and flickers in sympathetic joy. It twirls and dances between streaming eddies and swirling turbulence. It glitters in the face of driving rain.
Lambent tilts his arms and twirls like a top. He whoops again to the faraway jelly, and its answering glow is a pulsing green and pink. The creature splays wide, undulating like an enormous membranous pancake.
“Not yet,” Lambent screams against the storm. For the feel of it. For the sting of cold helium through a raw throat. For the electric jolt of adrenaline. The wind shifts, and static electricity fills the air.
The jelly twirls closer, bobbing in agreement. Streams of gold and crimson upend it, but it does not tumble away. The jelly lengthens top to bottom, arcing gracefully through hydrogen wavelets.
“Not yet.”
The storm gathers itself, spinning restlessly to and fro. The hairs on Lambent’s exposed arms rise with the energy and the wind. Faster and faster. The jelly slithers opposite him, circling the center of the storm. Closer. Faster. Electricity ripples between fingers, from limb to limb. Sparks jump across the turbulent flow. The pressure builds, the tide rises, the air thickens -
“Now!”
Thunder pulses. Lightning heralds his scream. The updraft starts with no other warning. Like a pellet in an airgun, Lambent shoots upwards. His stomach drops and his heart soars. He is a streak of lightning, a human bullet.
Helium bubbles pop. Ammonia crystals shatter against him, but still he moves. Lambent crashes through surface tension barrier after surface tension barrier. He curls into a ball and squeezes his eyes shut, spinning end over end as he ascends the layers of Jupiter. Focusing on the feel, the adrenaline, the fight of gravity against shearing winds.
Such speed! The sheer violent joy of being alive!
He slows gradually. The winds still and the air is thin here. The upper reaches of Jupiter are calm, cold and clear if you know to look in the right light spectrum. Lambent lands gently on a soft surface facedown.
He opens his eyes to dizzying blue sparkles and a soft glittering sheen. The jelly has not abandoned him. It had flattened into a wide disc and caught the ballistic humanoid. Lambent pats it in gratitude.
The jelly tucks its top into a dip perfect for reclining on. It twinkles red and pink in greeting.
Lambent gives it an answering smile. “Hey, buddy, was that fun?”
The jelly pulses gold in agreement.
They float together, looking at the rippling horizon, the confetti of stars above, the sweep of Jupiter’s single sparse ring. At the faintly glowing star, just brighter than the others, a dull red color.
Sol. Home, he muses. It had swallowed Earth millennia ago, expanding as it aged and consuming the inner system.
It hadn’t mattered, of course. Everything of value had long since left the planet. Those who had cared to stay watched the thunderous end of their billion-year cradle.
And then they’d left.
The galaxy beckoned. Swirling nebulae awaited. Scintillating star clusters and strange new worlds.
He’d gone too. Of course he had. But for some reason he’d returned.
Maybe nostalgia. Maybe some vague sorrow that he’d never experienced everything the dead Earth had to offer before it’d gone.
Doubtful.
Perhaps the longing everyone has for the golden days of their childhood. An old friend once said he’d dove for it, searching for the earth beneath the surface of the aged sun.
He chuckles. A funny fantasy. He almost wishes it’d been true.
But everyone knows the planet was torn apart before it even hit the plasma.
----------------------------------------
Lambent picks a more buoyant form. Touches down on Titan with pale golden toes, in a skin more suited for the thin atmosphere. The hydrocarbon lakes glisten with oily rainbows under the light of pale Saturn.
Calla is humanoid today, gleaming skin so dark it’s near purple, freckled with gold like stars against the void. Her eyes are the twinkle of stars through an atmosphere, laughing and dancing as she moves. Her limbs are liquid poetry. The arcs and curves she cut through space are pure mathematical perfection. Her hair, a probability cloud that follows in a hazy, weightless stream.
He sees this in an instant, catching glimpses of her among the water streams.
It’s a kind of dance today. She drifts lazily over rock and dune until he’s almost upon her. And then off!
A shocking burst of speed only slightly breaking physics. She zips to the horizon, winks, and dives into the oil.
He stretches shimmering gold legs and takes off after her, splashing through viscous black. He doesn’t want it on his skin, so it slides off as easily as lakewater off oiled paper.
She surfaces when he’s almost on her. “Hey!” she screeches. “No fair!”
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It isn’t. He always knows where she is.
They laugh, splashing through the iridescent waves, and he dives against her side. Brings her down. Inky black and a craze of rainbow. The gloop of impact. Her hands, shoving him playfully away. He laughs through the goo, because he loves it all.
She squirms free. That, too, isn’t fair. Calla is frictionless when she likes. As frictionless as the unreal.
He grabs for her, but she shimmies away. “I scoot!” she declares giggling, and scoots off through the muck of the shore. Scuttling on hands-and-butt like a silly Titanoid crab.
Lambent can’t follow for a moment. He’s wheezing with laughter. At the affronted look on her face. At the scoot. At the “no no no” giggling as she locomotes away.
When he does catch her Saturn is low in the sky, and the shimmering ring a wide band of blues and yellows twinkling in the planetset glow, teary-eyed with laughter. They catch their breath there on that shore.
“How's Jupiter?” she asks.
“I made a friend!” He summons the jelly - or a shimmering imaginary facsimile. Jovian jellies do not live well in the low gravity and strange chemistries of Titan. But Lambent remembers with perfect fidelity, so perfect he can imagine his strange friend here with them.
Calla is delighted. “Hello!” she chirps, earlier exhaustion forgotten. The jelly shimmers in greeting. “What’s it saying?” she turns to him.
Lambent laughs. “I’m not sure. It’s alien enough that I can remember it but I still can’t understand it. Isn’t that great?”
“If you don’t by now, you never will.”
Lambent lays back, basking in the evening glow. “Maybe that’s okay, for some things to be so strange you can never understand them.”
He perks up onto an elbow. “How's your project going?”
She grins. “Wanna see?”
----------------------------------------
They’re dancing.
They had danced, on old Earth. Nothing really lasts forever, nothing but Calla and Lambent and the other descendants of Humanity. He’d learned to waltz for her. She’d learned some horrid headbang thing for him.
Today, their dance has no name and no pattern. No set style but for what they like. There are no smushed toes. No missteps. They sweep across the crystalline floor of a near-frictionless ballroom. Calla’s project is a crystalline castle.
Some of it is diamond. The refracted starlight throws rainbow shimmers everywhere, turning the structure into a psychedelic swirl. Carefully carved minarets act as reflecting glass. Asteroids shimmer and ripple through swooping buttresses.
It’s lovely, Lambent thinks. Looking at her. Looking at the glorious eternity ahead of them. She smiles sunny, gloriously joyful in return.
It’s almost real.
He holds her against him and they look out the grand windows together.
“Where do you think I am now?” she wonders silently.
He knows she’s thinking it, because he knows her with perfect fidelity. So perfect that he can imagine her with him forever.
So perfect it’s like they’d never actually parted.
“Maybe Andromeda,” he guesses. “Big black hole there.”
She has a perfect-fidelity memory of him, too. She’d wanted to explore, and he had wanted to stay.
He wonders briefly if he’s still keeping her company out there in the beyond. Shakes his head. What a silly thought.
“You could have been there too,” she laughs in a voice like tinkling bells. “If you weren’t so intent on your old cemetery.”
He wonders too if the “real” Calla also used to needle him this badly. "Go on, then,” he grumbles.
“We both know I already have,” she skips backwards for a moment, and then yanks him into a warm, tight hug. “I wonder what you’re saying to me, out there.”
“Probably bothering you about Sol,” he squirms away. Puts a smile on his face, swallows something down. He’s not quite sure what.
She chases him and he skips back, ready for another game of tag. But suddenly, his heart’s not in it.
She catches him, tumbling end over end through the shining crystal. Refracted starshine glints off her body. He knows exactly how the starshine would glint off her body, and it does. The emulation’s just the same as the real.
He feels something tugging at his throat again, and again swallows it back down. Silly thoughts, like his silly nostalgia.
“Why so sad?” she asks.
“Not sad.”
They sit together on that cool, frictionless floor. He feels her head - the imagined simulacrum of her head - tilt against his shoulder. So perfectly visualized he can even feel it. Warm. The fluff of her hair. The smell of flowers.
Every flower in existence is gone, but Calla smells like them.
The weight of her head lifts for a moment. “Want to see something cool?”
“Yea-”
Crash! A horrible sound of shattering crystal from not far away.
Lambent starts. “What was that?”
Her eyes are topaz, brilliant, almost luminous. Her gaze is clear and there’s a small smile on her lips, both happy and sad, and for once he doesn’t know what emotion he’s emulating for her.
She grabs his hand tight. Grips it. Grips it between both palms.
Smash! Spider-web cracks crawl up the sides of the ballroom, as another tower collapses in on itself.
“Calla,” Lambent says. Her thoughts- he doesn’t understand them. He can feel something pricking at his eyelids, the same thing pulling her lips into that strange, sad smile.
Crack! An enormous line mars the perfect crystalline floor. Breaks in the rainbows that she’d spent centuries carefully positioning.
Still she is silent. “What have you done?” he begs.
Towers collapse, drifting away under no gravity. The glorious buttresses snap under their weight. The structure groans.
“Did you make this just to see it die?” The thought feels right somehow, but Lambent doesn’t know why.
Calla whispers something.
“What?” he asks, even though he knows. He knows and he doesn’t want to.
“It’s the end,” she says, no louder the second time than the first.
The gold on her skin moves, first slowly and then with greater speed. Speckles turn and twist as she moves. Like one transparent and filled with stars.
“I,” he tries, “We’re immortal, Calla. There’s no end, there’s never been an end.”
Light shimmers and shifts beneath her skin. “You’ll have to remember me the old way.”
“Don’t!” He lunges for her, but she burst suddenly, a searing golden blast that rips through the remainder of the crystal. Pulverizing what’s left of her beautiful creation, ending a thousand years of work and carving.
He floats unmoved by it all, looking horrified at the spot where she’d been.
Calla is gone.
“Calla,” he murmured. “Calla, what - why - ?”
Gone. Calla is gone.
He can’t remember why she’d done that. What she had been thinking.
Calla is gone.
Lambent sags. What is left? Shimmering debris sparkles around him. The air is gone. The world is gone. Calla is gone.
Numbly, he wonders how she was able to do that. An emulation in his own brain. She’d always been a genius, Calla is…
Gone. Calla is gone.
“Calla.” Her name is a flower on his lips. Her eyes, a hazy memory of shining topaz. Her voice, a gentle chime. Fuzzy. Everything is fuzzy. There’s no exactness. He can’t imagine what she’d do if she was here.
She’d, she’d destroyed her own emulation.
“Why?” he murmurs. But there’s nothing in the entire Sol system that can hear him.
He looks for a moment at far off Andromeda. At the sun, the star that had swallowed his home. At the distant horizons his people had wanted so badly.
He looks around, at his own strange vigil. At the sand that remained of their time together.
No. Not together. The remnants of a tower drifts through his fingertips.
She’d never been here to begin with. Only a memory.