The stars blur in prismatic patterns, shifting crazily as rainbows on the void. They flutter, shift, tighten, brighten, contract. Every shade of light, blinding against an infinite deepness.
Lambent is a tachyon stream flooding across the cosmos at several times the speed of light. Even at such a breathtaking rate, it will take millennia to reach Andromeda, and he dare not fly faster. Drink too deep of the relativistic world past c and you may never return.
Even at such a pace everything is still. Peaceful. There is no violence to his passing, as there would be in an atmosphere. The prismatic haze of each faraway star passes at a ponderous rate. There is no air here to disturb, no matter, nearly no radiation at all. The abyss between galaxies is serene and unchanging.
In such a state Lambent cannot really think. He cannot emulate. Thoughts take years to fizzle across his mind, such as it is. He is a quantum haze watching a psychedelic lightshow a million years long.
In this place he is content to drift, mind near emptied. If he had a face he would have smiled dreamily. He could spend eternity like this, watching the universe flow backwards from one end to the other.
But then he remembers Calla. The way she smiles. It’s hard to summon up much memory of her at all, but he knows how he feels when she smiles. How she nuzzles up to his chest. How silly she can get.
He wants to smile even more, with his non-face. That’s true happiness. He could spend eternity with her, just listening to the sound of her laugh. Maybe they could fly together. Drift too far past the speed of light, float in the cosmic light, and never return. Just the two of them.
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He comes back to himself in the western spiral arm of Andromeda, filled once more with human impatience and human frustrations.
The first system he searches is a tiny bright-yellow star so achingly familiar that he feels sure she has been there. No signs of life, no self-replicating structures, not even a stray bacterium. Fifteen planets, some quite large, and plenty of moons.
He takes a break to float on polymerous mats on the fourth world. Banishes the irritation and the impatience, purges the anger from his mind.
On a whim he summons - not Boudicca; his feelings are mixed after what she did to Sol. Not Calla, she’s gone. A few other friends come to mind. Instead he brings to mind the jelly, hovering serenely beside him.
“You don't seem like you’re capable of annoyance, my friend,” he tells it.
It glitters serenely, flattening down into a wide disc and settling in on the mat beside him.
He tilts his head back. “Didn’t think we’d find her right away, no. That would be a thing, wouldn’t it? Finding her in the first system we looked.”
It shifts. He can sense some level of… well he can sense that it knows what his concerns are. The jelly understands hope and loss.
“Sorry about your planet,” he says.
It glitters blue for a moment in loss. And then red. It’s expressing something. Lambent squints, trying to bridge the gap. Unease - no. Maybe some sort of resolve.
“Your people lived, maybe they’ll find a way to persist.” But that’s not quite it.
It shifts down the spectrum and wobbles its upper surface. Lambent hikes himself up on one elbow, thinking. Brow furrowed. “I could’ve stopped it?” he tries.
There’s an odd satisfaction from the jelly. He hasn’t quite gotten it, but close enough. “I could have stopped it,” he repeats.
Then he lays back. “I don’t know. Maybe right then, sure. We can’t kill each other, and we can’t die. She’d have gotten it eventually.”
The jelly scrunches back up, luminescence dimmed. Hesitating. And then reaches out with a pseudopod and gently pokes Lambent in the forehead.
He pokes it back. “Boop.” And then flops back down, polymerous mat undulating with the motion. “Sorry. I am.” He sighs, lets out a long, long, long breath. More than any lung capacity he’d ever had. Ends it by hissing through his teeth.
“Wish we could split up.”
The jelly shimmies in a small circle. He laughs. “I don’t know what that means.”
The sky above beckons. It’s murky, a weird ink-purple color from down here, with streaks of brown condensate churning through the mix. “Back to it, I guess.”
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She’s not in that system. She’s not in the next or the next or any of the adjacent ones to the next, and Lambent knew, he knew that this wouldn’t be a fast search, but there’s so many stars, they’re all so far apart, and the human mind wasn’t really built with the patience to do something with no hint of success for eternity.
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World after world. Some breathtaking, most of them rocky, airless places filled with noxious chemicals and desolate skies. He takes a break to ski down an uninspired slope under low gravity, but it’s really not doing anything for him.
After that the breaks get longer and more frequent. He moves slower, he skips gas giants altogether, reasoning after a while that nothing she’d built inside one would last.
He’s floating lazily through the sky of a bleak frozen rock when he realizes that even if she’d been here he won’t notice. “What is the point” he wails in despair.
The jelly doesn’t respond. It’s been distant with him lately, and he’s starting to suspect that it’s on purpose.
“And you,” he lights on a monolithic outcropping. “What’s eating you?”
The jelly ignores him, tendrils curled up. Glittering an indifferent green.
The winds that sweep this place are cold and cruel. They cut right down to the bone. Lambent’s booted feet crunch through crystalized nitrogen and jagged exotic ice formations. The wind tears at his pale hair and sand-blasts him with sleet.
The jelly hovers nearby indifferently. He doesn’t know if it cared about him, if it ever cared about him. Certainly it’s too alien to care about Calla. He’s been dragging it along on this stupid intergalactic needle-chase, and it’s tolerated him in its own serene manner.
“There’s nobody else I cared to talk to, or else they’d be here instead of you,” he tells it. “They’d be telling me that this is stupid. That you can’t find one person in the universe. Should have gone with. Stupid.” He smacks a fist against the rocky cliff face. “Stupid.”
The jelly glimmers sullenly. It drifts lower, closer to the ice and rock. The top of it begins to frost over; that’s definitely on purpose. As a figment of his imagination, it’s completely indifferent to temperature.
“You’re here just as long as I am, and I’m here forever,” he snaps at it. “Could have been traveling the galaxy with Calla. Could have stayed together. It’s not fair!”
A burst of heat and light explodes out from him. The ground hisses and flashes to steam. He sinks down the side of the cliff face, into the slush and muck and sediment.
“Can’t do this,” he mumbles into his arm. “Can’t keep going forever.” He looks helplessly at the sky.
He can. He knows he can. That’s the worst part. He has eternity. There’s no problem that can’t be solved by throwing yourself at it forever and ever. Lambent hasn’t faced the impossible since before he became more than human.
“Can’t stop,” he moans. He wants to. He wants to, but if he lets go now, what does he have left?
“There’s always you,” he mumbles spitefully. The jelly draws closer and raises a single tendril. It hesitates, fluttering infrared for a moment. It shivers for a moment, glowing a steady green. It’s concentrating? Determined?
It boops him on the forehead once more, and he sees it. For a moment. A shared memory, a young little jelly, still pink around the edges. Cautious in its approach. Curious. Afraid.
He’d left it behind. In a way they both had.
Lambent screws up his eyes again. Grabs the jelly about its bulk and buries his face in an imagined membrane. Gold glitters through his eyelids, and he can sense some weird analogue to satisfaction from it. Hope. And maybe loss, too.
“You know,” he presses his face into it. “You lost someone, too.”
It curls around him, envelops him. He can tell this isn’t something it really understands - jellies probably didn’t touch each other much. But it’s copying him, it’s trying to bridge the communication gap. He shivers, and it shivers with him.
The wind howls. Nitrogen snow pelts them together, and he grips his friend. The sun goes down, a distant pinprick in the day-starred sky. And still he sits there.
He’s not sure what to do next. Back to it, probably. He can’t quite bring himself to, but it’s cold and he’s stiff and he doesn’t want to sit here forever.
The jelly pulls back. It’s glittering pink and yellow, and the sight fills him with an awful melancholy. Calla would have loved meeting it. She would have-
It boops him on the face again, and he grunts. Not quite in surprise. He doesn’t really feel capable of feeling anything just now. There’s no image, no shared memory, and he gets the sense that it’s not trying for one.
The jelly bops him again. “Hey,” he tells it dully. “Knock it off.”
It’s glittering brighter, a vibrant gold-flecked pink, shimmering light moving just beneath the surface. It bops him one last time.
“Hey,” he says, “what?”
It takes off, floating upwards, undulating with some kind of incomprehensible jelly emotion. Rises into the air, a few hundred feet away from the rocky monolith they’ve been sitting on.
“What?” he asks again. Gets to his feet. He’s been letting the temperature rise in his immediate vicinity. When he rises he’s knee-deep in nitrogen slush.
It undulates, flashes red for a moment. And then blue.
“Okay, are you good?” he asks. Floats after it into the howling winds. “Something else is wrong? I’m sorry for the-”
It boops him again, shoves him backwards. “Are you… playing?”
It spins up, and when it impacts him the force twists him around. “Come on, buddy. What’s going-”
Then he sees it.
“-on,” Lambent finishes quietly. He takes a moment to digest the sight.
Howling winds and snow had covered the rocky outcropping in a millennium of frozen media, but his tantrum had boiled away the nitrogen and carbon dioxide, had melted the cliff face down to rock layers, shining marbled white.
The monolith is humanoid. A hundred miles tall, hands outstretched, smiling. Weathered and worn, but unmistakably, incontrovertibly him.
He swallows and the visage blurs until he blinks a few times. His carved face is smiling. Carefree. There’s a softness to him that he doesn’t remember when he looks at his own reflection. He can’t remember the last time he smiled.
He lets out a wordless sound. Something like a sigh, something like a laugh. Something like a sob. The jelly glitters gold and green beside him. Triumphant.
“Alright,” he croaks. “Let’s go.”