Jupiter rages.

It froths and boils and howls and shrieks. Lightning arcs from the poles, shattering through the irregular crystal formations torn from the depths. Currents crash, warring for control over the flow of the world.

Lambent dives. He dives down to the heart of it, past polyp colonies and armored cruciform fliers, through a world that shifts from gas to solid without any stable transition points. He dives.

A shape snakes beside him. Lambent does not understand the jellies of this place. Perhaps he never will. They have strange senses beyond the scope of other pre-singularity creatures, or else coincidence has brought him his skydiving friend once more.

The jelly has lengthened to eellike proportions. It slithers gracefully through the turbulence and neatly dodges the bursts of Jovian lightning. But it is slow, too slow, its glitter fading quickly.

It pulses infrared, just once. Pauses. Wanting to come with, unable to follow. It has aged, Lambent sees. Nothing lasts forever.

He leaves it at the depth it can tolerate. It shimmers slightly, exhausted, and folds itself into an oblate sphere to circle patiently. He spares it no further glance. Where he goes it cannot follow; this is as it has always been.

The stuff of Jupiter is opaque here. It grows thick and hot and luminescent, the Jovian core steeped in the energy of a thousand thousand tons of planet above. Lambent swims until he is weightless. The very center point of the planet, no world beneath him. He curls into a ball, roiling tight.

Jupiter rages. It burns with injustice. It simmers in fury, a million square kilometers of heat packed tight, of screaming winds.

The planet screams, and Lambent screams with it. In his fury, fountains of gas erupt from the world. Pressurized formations shudder and quake, grinding crystalline fragments into the hydrogen sea above.

As swiftly as the storm comes, it passes. Lambent drifts, feeling nothing, being nothing.

He stays there for some time, and the jelly does not come when at last he ascends.

----------------------------------------

He knows when she enters the system. They always know each other, within a few light-minutes. Otherwise, in this wide universe, how could they ever meet again?

Boudicca is gold-eyed and covered with rippling luminous swirls that shimmer across iridescent inky skin. They meet in Lambent’s guest rooms overlooking watery Pluto.

Oversized Charon floats dreamily overhead, creamy-white and near the right size. Pluto had surprised him, when the sun expanded. It melted just right.

Millenia ago he had worked hard on the Plutonian atmosphere. A field about the planet keeps the air thick and boosts the meager dull-red sunlight to a warm yellow. The atmosphere, he’s tweaked until it shines the right shade of blue. Lay back in the warm sun, close your eyes, ignore the faint ammonia scent…

The guest house is an ethereal structure hovering above the waves. Glass-bottomed pools and polished white edged in copper. He’s no architect, so it’s a strangely proportioned thing, but it’s filled with warm ivory colors and thick shaggy carpet and soft pillows and clean lines.

They lounge in the low gravity. They lounge on pale cushions in the Plutonian summer, with a circular table between them done in some approximation of wood or wicker. He didn’t bother to differentiate when he made it.

He remembers a warm mint tea from old Earth, and shares this with her. The sunlight filter gives a kick of warmth, and they relax in that bone-deep contentment to the sound of distant crashing waves, enjoying the aroma of perfectly-emulated extinct tea.

“I traveled for maybe four million years,” she tells him. “Hard to tell in deep space.”

He stretches. Folds pale arms behind his head. “Tell me about it.”

She does. She shares memories of core-diving stars, of gently-rippling red grass under butterscotch skies, of massive ice crystals jutting from harsh landscapes of eternal cold. Of skiing on frozen clouds and surfing cryovolcanoes and carving beautiful, lonely statues into stone.

It’s almost like living it.

In turn he introduces her to the Jovian jellies he’d befriended over the years. Shows her the sulfur rivers of Venus and the lakes of Mercury, before the sun had consumed them. Brings in all the visitors that had come back to Sol - though there are few.

“You’re a committee,” she exclaims, delighted. “Dinner parties every night.”

“It’s good not to get lonely,” he smiles.

“Where’s Calla these days? Did you finally get bored with her?”

It’s an innocent question asked in an innocent way. She meant nothing by it, and what she describes is hardly uncommon. He sips. Swallows. Looks at his hands.

She understands instantly. “You can’t just bring her back?”

He shakes his head mutely and she sets her imaginary tea down.

“Lam.”

The methane breeze ruffles fluttering lacy curtains; the air here is dead. Like the sea. There is no life in it.

Boudicca does not leave him to his musings. She folds gold-and-black striped hands and sits forward insistently. “Lam, she left.”

“I know,” he says roughly.

“You made her stay.”

“I didn’t.”

Boudicca exhales. She doesn't even need to breathe. A long, hissing stream escapes her teeth. “She left. And you imagined that she stayed. Lam, come on, what did she want?”

Lambent thinks about this for a moment. The wind is cold, a horrible carbon monoxide mixture. It cuts to the bone. “No,” he decides. “She wanted to stay, too. She left because she knew that I’d remember her, and she left remembering me.”

“What did she want?”

“She - she wanted to build. She’s an artist. And to, to be with me.” Lambent snaps his wrists irritably. “She wanted to…”

Boudicca nods with infuriating patience. “What’s she built?”

“Wh-?”

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Lambent’s throat closes. He swallows methanol air.

They sit for a while under false sunlight. The curtain flutters. It had fluttered over Calla, she’d designed the pattern.

No, she hadn’t.

“Did,” Boudicca pauses, “did you imagine her happy?”

“She was.” He knows in his heart she was. Knew her inside and out. “She…”

Then she wasn’t Calla. The idea slams into his brain like an asteroid. Calla didn’t find death beautiful. She would never have made something only to watch it shatter. She would never have stayed.

He pushes past that. She would never have been content, had she stayed. And somewhere in the wide universe, the real thing. Perfect. Un-glitched with whatever suicide flaw his bad copy had had.

“Where’d she go?” he asks desperately.

Boudicca frowns. “West spiral arm of Andromeda? I met her a couple billion years ago. You want to find her? She’s probably not still there.”

“Find her, yes.” He bounces to his feet. He tugs at the imperfect curtain, made by a glitched copy. “Mine must have been broken. Wrong. I was so careful with the emulation, but maybe my subconscious affected the imagination. Or maybe there was a gravitational anomaly, we were leaving the galactic plane then. Or maybe radiation, or-”

“Lam.”

He flutters into the air, light as a curtain, sweet as the breeze. “She was wrong. If I find her I can make her anew. Or-” ideas flood into his brain, a burst of light bright as his false Calla when she went. “Or maybe the mistake was emulating her at all! Have we really resolved the data compression? It shouldn’t have been possible to begin with, according to classical information theory.”

“Lam.”

He hops into the air, laughing. “We could travel. The whole universe, like she’d wanted. See everything. Make whatever beautiful things she wants. Oh, I would. I would, for her.”

“Lam.” He feels a gentle hand on his shoulder.

He comes down from it for a moment. Feet touch the shaggy white rug. “What?”

She looks like she wants to say something. Like she’s struggling with it. Opens her mouth. Closes it.

Instead she says, “Say goodbye to it all. The Sol system won’t be alive by the time you’re done looking.”

----------------------------------------

They surf Pluto.

There’s something about the interaction of the sea and the low gravity and the artificially thickened atmosphere. Pluto has high, thin waves stretching immeasurably towards the sky. Especially when Charon hovers overhead.

Lambent is lightweight, optimized for surfing. Short, with a nice low center of gravity.

Boudicca is imperious, tall and perfectly balanced. Her board is an extension of her feet, and thin membranes form a sail between impossibly long arms. The two immortals arc together gracefully to and fro, trails of froth in their wake.

Pluto is a calmer planet than Jupiter. Her wavelets are mere ripples to the fury of the gas-giant king. The atmospheric shield traps enough heat that it’s warm, hot to contrast the froth and spray.

“So why’d you come?” Lambent asks.

There’s no need to shout over the spray; Boudicca can hear with perfect fidelity. But he does it anyway. Savors the salts and the alcohol spray ruffling his hair.

“Can’t visit the place I was born?” She doesn’t shout back.

“Dicca.”

She laughs. It’s lower than Calla’s, huskier, and the thought tears a hole in his heart for a moment. Before it’s washed away by the rush of foam.

“I’ve been making a study of death.”

He laughs. Vibrant against the sun and sky. “Really.”

Boudicca doesn’t respond for a bit. She stops surfing. Just hovers. Drifts above the sea, and settles cross-legged on her board. Her arms fold back inwards, until they’re humanoid once more. She drifts gently after him in the low-gravity, legs dangling over the side of the board.

“I’ve been a god, Lam. I’ve built civilizations up. I’ve crushed them.”

Lambent frowns. “Crushed them?”

He floats up to join her, hovering gently above the waves on a shining board of his own.

Boudicca’s skin ripples with unease. “It’s not uncommon for us.”

He frowns. “That’s horrible.”

“Yes. But it’s not uncommon.”

He looks down over the edge of his board. The sea is a glassy green-black, rushing upwards in swells and crashing back down.

“Everything happens to us eventually,” Boudicca says after a while. “Every mood. Every whim. That’s what infinity means.”

“I never-”

“You had her.” She wraps her arms around herself. “And now you don’t.”

Charon passes. It’s not visible anymore, but he can feel the gravity of it shifting over the horizon. Can see the miniscule pull it has on the water level. The tide passes. Death’s ferryman floats away.

“You were talking about dying,” he tries.

“We don’t.” She laughs humorlessly. “Die, I mean.”

“I, I guess not.”

“What’s that mean to you?”

He thinks for a bit. “We were a people of ruin and pain and war. Now we don’t have to be afraid or hurt.”

She drifts to face him. Leans forward. “You’re not hurt?”

He grins. “Not now that I’m going to find Calla.”

She doesn’t react. “We were a people of ruin and pain and sacrifice and love and honor and bravery in the face of horror.”

Lambent laughs uncertainly. “We’re not… we’re not defined by our deaths, Dicca.”

“Of course not. Can’t die well. We don’t die at all.”

“Doesn’t mean we can’t love or sacrifice.”

She laughs bitterly. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as forever, after all. It’s just one day, and then the next, and then the next, and the next.”

“That sounds horrible.”

She grunts a hopeless little grunt, wraps her arms even tighter around her middle. She looks small. Worn-out. Tired.

Lambent doesn’t understand this. He’s not sure he can. An eternity of fun had never lessened the experience for him. Centuries of skiing just made him want to ski more. He did the entire Himalayan range, Olympus Mons. The peaks of Europa. He’s skied uphill on slopes made of diamond. That was always what forever had meant to him. He can’t imagine losing interest in the things that bring him joy. Surely there’s a way out for her.

He starts to ask. Boudicca could give him a taste of traveling together, truly together. Maybe they’ll find Calla. And the three of them could discover what it means to live well, in a way that makes everyone happy.

“Come wi-”

“I came to destroy the sun,” she interrupts.

The invitation dies in his throat. “What?”

“I’m going to destroy it.”

“Wh-” He flounders. Nearly falls off his board. “Why? What? The hell you will!”

She sets her teeth. Tightens her hands around her chest. “You’re going to stay and stop me? What about her?”

Lambent flings his arms wide. "What about her? You can't just kill the sun!"

Her eyes soften. "By the time you're done looking for her it'd have long died anyway."

“That doesn't - that's not -" He sputters for a moment, incoherent. "Dicca, why?”

She shifts. Shoulders hunch. Something seems wrong.

He takes a breath. Takes another, moves past the incredulous shock. And suddenly he sees her, really sees her. He knows her enough to see the thoughts swirling above her shoulder blades, the reasons tensing at her arms.

Boudicca isn't dying, but she's approaching something like it. What better gravesite? What better legacy than apocalyptic fire? What better mark on the universe? Why, indeed?

Because maybe she’d feel something. Because it matters- very little, to be sure, but more than any other dying star. As a strike against a humanity that failed her. Because it ate the Earth, which had abandoned them all. Because nobody had ever visited, and nobody would ever care.

She doesn’t say any of this. Instead she looks at him with wounded golden eyes.

But when she speaks, it sounds more defeated than angry. “Because I can.”