SUN-CLOUD STEPHEN BAXTER TO HUMAN EYES, THE system would have been extraordinary: The single, giant Sun was so vast that its crim­son flesh would have embraced all of Sol’s scattered planets. Across its surface, glistening vacuoles swarmed, each larger than Sol itself. There was a planet. It was a all of rock no larger than a small asteroid. It skimmed the Sun’s immense photosphere, bathed in ruddy warmth. It was coated with air, a thick sea. The world-ocean teemed with life. Beyond the Sun’s dim glow, the sky was utterly dark. She rose to the Surface. Thick water slid smoothly from her carapace. She let her impeller-corpuscles dissociate briefly; they swam free of her main corpus in a fast, darting shoal, feeding eagerly, reveling in their brief liberty. She lifted optically sensitive corpuscles to the smoky sky. The Sun was a roof over the world, its surface pocked by huge dark pits. She was called Sun-Cloud: for, at her Coalescence, a cloud of brilliant white light had been observed, blos­soming over the Sun’s huge, scarred face. Sun-Cloud was seeking her sister, the one called Orange-Dawn. Sun-Cloud raised a lantern-corpuscle. The subord­inate creature soon tired and began sending quiet chemical-complaints through her corpus; but she ignored them and waited, patiently, as her sphere of lantern light rolled out, spreading like a liquid over the oleaginous Surface. The light moved slowly enough for a human eye to follow. Sun-Cloud’speoplewerenotlikehumans. Here,peopleassembledfromspecializedschoolsofcorpuscles:mentalizers,impellers,lanterns,structurals,others.Obeyingtheirownminiatureimperativesoflifeanddeath,individualcorpuscleswouldleavetheaggre­gatecorpusandreturntotheirfish-likeshoals,tofeed,breed,die.Butotherswouldjoin,andthepatternofthewholecouldpersist,foratime. Still,Sun-Cloud’slifespanwasfinite.Asthecycleofcorpusclerenewalworeon,herpatternwoulddegrade,mutate. Likemostsentientraces,Sun-Cloud’speoplesus­tainedcomfortingmythsofimmortality. And,likemostraces,therewasaminoritywhore­jectedsuchmyths. Sun-Cloud returned to the Ocean’s deep belly. The light here was complex and uncertain. Above Sun-Cloud the daylight was already dimming. And below her, from the Deep at the heart of the world, the glow of a billion lantern-corpuscles glimmered up, white and pure. Sun-Cloud watched as Cold-Current ascended toward her. They were going to discuss Sun-Cloud’s sister, Orange-Dawn. Orange-Dawn was a problem. Cold-Current was a lenticular assemblage of corpus­cles twice Sun-Cloud’s size, who nevertheless rose with an awesome unity. The ranks of impellers at Cold-Current’s rim churned at the thick waters of the Ocean, their small cilia vibrating so rapidly that they were blue-shifted. The Song suffused the waters around Sun-Cloud, as it always did; but as Cold-Current lifted away from the Deep the complex harmonics of the Song changed, subtly. Sun-Cloud, awed, shrank in on herself, her structural corpuscles pushing in toward their sisters at her swarm­ing core. Sun-Cloud knew that she herself contributed but little, a few minor overtones, to the rich assonance of the Song. How must it be to be so grand, so powerful, that one’s absence left the Song—the huge, world-girdling Song itself—audibly lacking in richness? Cold-Current hovered; a bank of optic-corpuscles swiveled, focusing on Sun-Cloud. “You know why I asked to meet you,” she said. “Orange-Dawn.” “Yes. Orange-Dawn. I am very disturbed, Sun-Cloud. Orange-Dawn is long overdue for Dissolution. And yet she persists; she prowls the rim of the Song, even the Surface, intact, obsessed. Even to the extent of injuring her corpuscles.” “I know that Orange-Dawn wants to see out another hundred Cycles,” Sun-Cloud said. “Orange-Dawn has theories. That in a hundred Cycles’ time—” “I know,” Cold-Current said. “She believes she has Coalesced with ancient wisdom. Somehow, in a hundred Cycles, the world will be transformed, and Orange-Dawn will be affirmed.” “But it’s impossible,” Sun-Cloud said. “I know that; Orange-Dawn must see that.” But Cold-Current said, absently: “But itmay be pos­sible, to postpone Dissolution so long.” Sun-Cloud, in­trigued, saw a tight, cubical pattern of corpuscles move through Cold-Current’s corpus; individual corpuscles swam to and fro, but the pattern persisted. “Possible,” Cold-Current said. “There is old wisdom. But such a thing would be—ugly. Discordant.” Perhaps that cubical pattern contained the fragment of old knowledge to which Cold-Current hinted. Cold-Current rotated grandly. “I want you to go and talk to her. Perhaps you can say something . . . . Nobody knows Orange-Dawn as well as you.” That was true. Orange-Dawn had helped Sun-Cloud in her earliest Coalescence, as Sun-Cloud struggled toward sentience. Orange-Dawn had hunted combinations of healthy corpuscles for her sister, helped her coax the corpuscles into an orderly shoal. Together the sisters had run across the Surface of the Ocean, their out-thrust op­tic corpuscles blue-tinged with their exhilarating veloc­ity . . . . Cold-Current began to sink back into the glimmering depths of the Ocean, her disciplined impellers beating resolutely. “You must help her, Sun-Cloud. You must help her put aside these foolish shards of knowledge and speculation, and learn to embrace true beauty . . . .” As Cold-Current faded from view, the light at the heart of the world brightened, as if in welcome, and the Song’s harmonies deepened joyously. Theworldwasveryold.Sun-Cloud’speoplewereveryold. Theyhadaccretedmanyfragmentsofknowledge,ofphilosophyandscience. Aperson,onDissolution,couldleavebehindfragmentsofinsight,ofwisdom,inthepartial,semi-sentientassembliescalledsub-corpora.Beforedissolvingintheirturnintothegeneralcorpuscleshoals,thesub-corporacouldbeabsorbedintoanewindividual,theknowledgesaved. Orperhapsnot. Iftheywerenotincorporatedquickly,theremnantsub-corporawouldbreakup.Theircomponentmentation­-corpuscleswoulddescend,andbecomelostintheanaer­obicDeepattheheartoftheworld. Sun-Cloud returned to the Surface of the Ocean. She saw that the Sun had almost set; a last sliver of crimson light spanned one horizon, which curved sharply. Above her the sky was clear and utterly black, desolately so. Her corpuscles transmitted their agitation to each other. She raised a lantern; cold light bloomed slowly across the sea’s oily meniscus. She roamed the Ocean, seeking Orange-Dawn. At last the creeping lantern light brought echoes of distant motion to her optic corpuscles: a small form thrashing at the Surface in lonely unhappiness. With a rare sense of urgency Sun-Cloud ordered her impeller-corpuscles into motion. It didn’t take long for her to accelerate to a significant fraction of lightspeed; the impellers groaned as they strained at relativity’s tangible barrier, and the image of the lonely one ahead was stained with blue shift. Wavelets lapped at her and air stroked her hide; she felt exhilarated by her velocity. She slowed. She called softly: “Orange-Dawn?” Listlessly Orange-Dawn raised optic corpuscles. Orange-Dawn was barely a quarter Sun-Cloud’s size. She was withered, her corpus depleted. Her corpuscles lay passively over each other, tiny mouths gaping with obvious hunger. “Do I shock you, Sun-Cloud?” Sun-Cloud sent small batches of corpuscles as probes into Orange-Dawn’s tattered carcass. “Orange-Dawn. Your corpuscles are suffering. Some of them are dying. Cold-Current is concerned for you—” “She sent you to summon me to my Dissolution.” Sun-Cloud said, “I don’t like to see you like this. You’re introducing a harshness into the Song.” “The Song, the damnable Song,” Orange-Dawn mut­tered. Moodily she began to spin in the water. The cor­puscles’ decay had so damaged her corpus’s circular symmetry that she whipped up frothy waves which lapped over her upper carapace, the squirming corpus­cles there. She poked optic corpuscles upwards, but the night sky was blind. “The Song drowns thought.” “What will happen in a hundred Cycles, Orange-Dawn?” Orange-Dawn thrashed at the water. “The data is partial . . . .” She focused wistful optic corpuscles on her sis­ter. “I don’t know. But it will be—” “What?” “Unimaginable.Wonderful .” Sun-Cloud wanted to understand. “Whatdata ?” “There are some extraordinary speculations, devel­oped in the past, still extant here and there . . . . Did you know, for instance, that the Cycle is actually a tide, raised in our Ocean-world during its passage around the Sun? It took many individuals a long time to observe, speculate, calculate, obtain that fragment of informa­tion. And yet we are prepared to throw it away, into the great bottomless well of the Song . . . . “I’ve tried to assemble some of this. It’s taken so long, and the fragments don’t fit more often than not, but—” “Integrate? Like a Song?” “Yes.” Orange-Dawn focused her optic corpuscles. “Yes Like a Song. But not the comforting mush they intone below. That’s a Song of death, Sun-Cloud. A Song to guide you into nonbeing.” Sun-Cloud shuddered; little groups of her corpuscles broke away, agitated. “We don’t die.” “Of course not.” Orange-Dawn rotated and drifted towards her. “Watch this,” she said. Quickly, she budded off a whole series of sub-corpora, each tiny body consisting of a few hundred corpuscles. Instantly the sub-corpora squirmed about the Surface, leaping and breaking the meniscus, blue-shifted as they pushed into lightspeed’s intangible membrane. Sun-Cloud felt uneasy. “Those sub-corpora are big enough to be semi-sentient, Orange-Dawn.” “But do you see?” said Orange-Dawn testily. “See what?” “Blueshift. The sub-corpora-see how, instinctively, they strain against the walls of the prison of lightspeed. Even in the moment of their Coalescing. Light imprisons us all. Light isolates us . . . .” Her words filtered through Sun-Cloud, jarring and strange, reinforced by bizarre chemical signals. “Why are you doing this, Orange-Dawn?” “Watch.” Now Orange-Dawn sent out a swarm of busy impeller-corpuscles; they prodded the independent sub-corpora back towards Orange-Dawn’s corpus. Sun-Cloud, uneasy, watched how the sub-corpora resisted their tiny Dissolutions, feebly. “See?” Orange-Dawn said. “See how they struggle against their immersion, in the overwhelming Ocean of my personality? See how they struggle tolive? ” Sun-Cloud’s own corpuscles sensed the suffering of their fellows, and shifted uneasily. She flooded her cir­culatory system with soothing chemicals. In her distress she felt a primal need for the Song. She sent sensor-corpuscles stretching into the Ocean beneath her, seek­ing out the comfort of its distant, endless surging; its harmony was borne through the Ocean to her by chem­ical traces. . . . But wouldshe struggle so, when it came time for her to Dissolve, in her turn, into the eternal wash of the Song? It was, she realized, a question she had never even framed before. Now, gathering her corpuscles closely around her, Orange-Dawn turned from Sun-Cloud, and began to beat across the Surface with a new determination. “You must come with me, Orange-Dawn,” Sun-Cloud warned. “No. I will see out my hundred Cycles.” “But you cannot . . . .”Unless , she found herself thinking,unlessCold-Currentisright.Unlessthereissomelostwaytoextendconsciousness . “If I submit to Dissolution, I will lose my sense of self, Sun-Cloud. My individuality. The corpus of knowl­edge and understanding I’ve spent so long assembling. What is that but death? What is the Song but a comfort, an anaesthetic illusion to hide that fact? . . .” “You are damaging the unity of the Song, Orange-Dawn. You are—discordant.” Orange-Dawn was receding now; she raised up a lit­tle batch of acoustic corpuscles. “Good!” she called. “I won’t be able to protect you!” cried Sun-Cloud. But she was gone. Sun-Cloud raised lantern-corpuscles, sending pulses of slow light out across the Ocean’s swelling surface. She called for her sister, until her corpuscles were exhausted. * * * Insomeways,Sun-Cloud’speopleresembledhumans. Sun-Cloud’scomponentcorpuscleswereofverydif­ferentancestry. Mentation-corpuscles—theneuronlikecreaturesthatcarriedconsciousnessintinypacketsofmolecules—wereanancient,anaerobicrace.Theothermainclass,theimpellersandstructure-corpuscles,wereoxygenbreath­ers:fastermoving,morevigorous. Humanmusclesusuallyburnedglucoseaerobically,usingsugarsfromtheair.Butduringstrenuousactivity,themuscleswouldfermentglucoseintheanaerobicwayevolvedbytheearliestbacteria.Thushumanbodies,too,boreechoesoftheearliestbiosphereofEarth. But,unlikeahumanbody,Sun-Cloud’scorpuswasmodular. Despitetheirantiqueenmity,thetwophylawithinSun-Cloudwouldcooperate,intheinterestsofthehighercreatureinwhichtheywereincorporated. UntilSun-Cloudweakened. A mass of corpora, sub-corpora, and shoals of trained impeller-corpuscles rose from the Deep in a great ring. Not five Cycles had passed since Sun-Cloud’s failed attempt to bring Orange-Dawn home. Now they had come for Orange-Dawn. Sun-Cloud found her sister at the center of the hunt. She was shrunken, already fragmented, her corpuscles pulsing with fear. “I don’t want to die, Sun-Cloud.” Anguish for her sister stabbed at Sun-Cloud. She sent soothing chemical half words soaking through the Ocean. “Come with me,” she said gently. Exhausted, Orange-Dawn allowed herself to be enfolded in Sun-Cloud’s chemical caresses. Commingled, the sisters sank into the Ocean. Their ovoid bodies twisted slowly into the depths; light shells from curious individuals washed over them as they passed. The light faded rapidly as they descended. Soon there were few free sub-corpora; and of the people they saw most were linked by corpuscle streams with at least one other, and often in groups of three, four, or more. The Song was a distant, strengthening pulse from the heart of the Ocean beneath them. Now Cold-Current rose up to meet them, huge and intimidating, her complex hide pulsing with lantern-corpuscles. The rim of her slowly rotating corpus became diffuse, blurred, as her corpuscles swam tentatively toward Orange-Dawn. Cold-Current murmured, “You are old, yet very young, Orange-Dawn. Your unhappiness is caused by ignorance. There is no other Ocean. Only this one. There is no change and never has been. These facts are part of what we are. That’s why your speculations are damaging you. “You have to forget your dreams, Orange-Dawn . . . .” Orange-Dawn hardened, drawing her corpuscles into a tight little fortress. But Cold-Current was strong, and she forced compact biochemical packets into Orange-Dawn’s corpus. Sun-Cloud, huddling close, picked up remote chemical echoes of the messages Cold-Current offered. . . .HeartheSong , Cold-Current’s corpuscles called.OpenuptotheSong . Their bodies joined, her impeller-corpuscles herding Orange-Dawn tightly, Cold-Current began to guide Orange-Dawn deeper into the lattice of mingled persons. Sun-Cloud followed, struggling to stay close to her sister. Orange-Dawn’s pain suffused the waters around her with clouds of chemicals; Sun-Cloud suffered for her and with her. As they descended, individuals became less and less distinct, and free corpuscles swam through the lattice’s closing gaps. At last they were falling through a sea of corpuscles which, with endless intelligent grace, swam over and around each other. Sun-Cloud’s structurals and impellers felt enfeebled here, in this choking water; the effort of forcing her way downwards seemed to multiply. Perhaps this was like Dissolution, she thought. At last there was only one entity, a complex of min­gled bodies that filled the Ocean. The living lattice vi­brated with the Song, which boomed around them, joyous and vibrant. “The Deep,” Cold-Current whispered to Orange-Dawn. “The Song. Now you will join this, Orange-Dawn. Uncountable billions of minds, endless thoughts straddling the world eternally. The Song will sustain your soul, after Dissolution, merged with everyone who has ever lived. You’ll never be alone again—” Suddenly, at the last, Orange-Dawn resisted. “No! I could not bear it. I could not bear—” She was struggling. Jagged images filled Sun-Cloud’s mind, of being crushed, swamped, stultified. Immediately a host of sub-corpora and corpuscles, jagged masses of them, hurled themselves into Orange-Dawn’s corpus. Sun-Cloud heard a single, agonized, chemical scream, which echoed through the water. And then the structure of the corpus was broken up. Corpuscles, many of them wounded, came hailing out of the cloud of Dissolution; some of them spiraled away into the darkness, and others rained down towards the glowing Deep. Sub-corpora formed, almost at random, and wriggled through the water. They were semi-sentient: bewildered and broken images of Orange-Dawn. Sun-Cloud could only watch. Loss stabbed at her; her grief was violent. Cold-Current was huge, complex, brilliantly illumi­nated. “It is over. It is better,” she said. Sun-Cloud’s anger surged. “How can you say that? She’sdead . She died in fear and agony.” “No. She’ll live forever, through the Song. As will we all.” “Show me what you know,” Sun-Cloud said sav­agely. “Show me how Orange-Dawn might have extended her life, through another ninety Cycles.” “It is artificial. Discordant. It is not appropriate—” “Show me!” With huge reluctance, Cold-Current budded a tight, compact sub-corpora. It bore the cubical pattern Sun-Cloud had observed earlier. “Knowledge is dangerous,” Cold-Current said sadly. “It makes us unstable. That is the moral of Orange-Dawn’s story. You must not—” Sun-Cloud hurled herself at the pattern, and forcibly integrated it into her own corpus. Then—following im­pulses she barely recognized—she rose upwards, away from the bright-glowing Deep. She passed through the cloud of Orange-Dawn’s cor­puscles, and called to them. The Song boomed from the Deep, massive, alluring, stultifying; and Cold-Current’s huge form glistened as she called her. Sun-Cloud ignored it all. She ascended towards the Surface, as rapidly as she could. Orange-Dawn’s fragmentary sub-corpora fol­lowed her, bewildered, uncertain. TheplaceSun-CloudcalledtheDeepwasananaerobicenvironment.Onlymentation-corpusclescouldsurvivehere.Theylayovereachotherincomplex,pulsingswarms,withneuralenergyflickeringdesultorilybetweenthem. TheSongwasacomplex,evolvingsound-structure,maintainedbythedenseshoalsofmentation-corpuscleswhichinhabitedtheheartoftheworld,andwithgracenotesaddedbytheCoalescedindividualsofthehigher,oxygen-richlayersoftheOcean. Attheendoftheirlives,thementationstructuresofbillionsofindividualshaddissolvedintotheDeep’scor­puscleshoals.TheSong,theybelieved,wasaformofimmortality. Embracingthisidea,mostpeoplewelcomedDissolu­tion.Othersrejectedit. Sun-Cloud gathered around her central corpus the cu­bical pattern of Cold-Current, and Orange-Dawn’s sad remnants, integrating them crudely. She grew huge, bloated, powerful. And now, as she broke the thick Surface of the Ocean, she made ready. She wondered briefly if she had gone mad. Perhaps Orange-Dawn had infected her. But if it were so, let it be. She must know the answer to Orange-Dawn’s questions for herself, before she sub­mitted to—as she saw it now, as if through her sister’s perception—the sinister embrace of the Song. She enfolded Cold-Current’s compact data pattern, and let its new wisdom flow through her . . . . Ofcourse.Itissimple. She began to forge forward, across the Ocean. A bow wave built up before her, thick and resisting. But she assembled her impellers and drove through it. At last the wave became a shock, sharp-edged, traveling through the water as a crest. And now, quickly, she began to sense the resistance of lightspeed’s soft membrane. The water turned softly blue before her, and when she looked back, the world was stained red. At length she passed into daylight. The day seemed short. She continued to gather her pace. Determined, she abandoned that which she did not need: lantern-corpuscles, manipulators, even some mentation-components: any excess mass which her impellers need not drag with her. A bow, of speed-scattered light, began to coalesce around her. The daynight cycle was passing so quickly now it was flickering. And she could sense the Cycles themselves, the grand, slow heaving of the Ocean as her world tracked around its Sun. The light ahead of her passed beyond blue and into a milky invisibility, while behind her a dark spot gath­ered in the redness and reached out to embrace half the world. Time-dilated, she forged across the Surface of her Ocean and into the future; and ninety-five Cycles wore away around her. * * * Light’scrawlwasembedded,asubtlescalinglaw,ineveryforcegoverningthestructureofSun-Cloud’sworld. TheSunwasmuchlargerthanSol—tenthousandtimesmoreso—forthefusionfiresatitsheartweremuchlessvigorousthanSol’s.AndSun-Cloud’sworldwasathousandtimessmallerthanEarth,fortheelectrostaticanddegeneracypressures,whichresistedgravitationalcollapse,weregreatlyweaker. LightspeeddominatedSun-Cloud’sstructure,too.Ifshehadbeenasingleentity,completeandentire,itwouldhavetakentoolongforlight—oranyothersignal—tocrawlthroughherstructure.Soshewasacompositecreature;hermindwasbrokendownintomodulesofthought,speculation,andawareness.Shewasacreatureofparallelprocessing,scatteredoverathousandfragilecorpuscles. AndSun-Cloud’sbodywasconstrainedtobesmallenoughthathergravitationalpotentialcouldnotfracturetheflimsymolecularbondsthatheldhercorpustogether. Sun-Cloud,forgingacrosstheSurfaceofherOcean,wasjusttwomillimetersacross. At last, a new light erupted in the bow that embraced her world. With an effort, she slowed. The light-bow expanded rapidly, as if the world were unfolding back into its proper morphology. She allowed some of her impeller-corpuscles to run free, and she saw their tiny wakes run­ning across the Surface, determined, red-shifted. Now that her monumental effort was done she was exhausted, depleted, her impellers dead, lost, or dying; unless new impellers joined her, she would scarcely be able to move again. Ninety-fiveCycles. Everybody she had known—Cold-Current and the rest—all of them must be gone, now, absorbed into the Song’s unending pulse. It remained only for her to learn what mystery awaited, here in the remoteness of the future, and then she could Dissolve into the Song herself. . . . From the darkling sky, the new light washed over her. Her optic corpuscles swiveled upwards. She cried out. Sun-Cloud felt her world shrink beneath her from infinity to a frail mote; the Song decayed from the thoughts of a god to the crooning of a damaged sub-corpus. Above her, utterly silently—and for the first time in all history—the stars were coming out. Tohumaneyes,theskiesofthiscosmoswouldhaveseemedstrangeindeed: Thestarsspawnedfromgasclouds,hugeandcold.Hundredsofthemformedinacluster,companionstoSun-Cloud’sSun.Heatcreptfromeachembryonicstar,dispersingtheremnantwispsofthebirthingcloud. Ittookfivebillionhumanyearsforthelighttocrossthegulfbetweenthestars. Andatlast—andasonespeculativethinkeramongSun-Cloud’speoplehadpredicted,longago—thescat­teredlightofthoseremoteSunswashedoveranunremarkableworld,whichorbitedalittleabovethepho­tosphereoftheircompanion. . . . The stars were immense globes, glowing red and white, jostling in a complex sky; and sheets and lanes of gas writhed between them. Orange-Dawn had been right. Thiswas wonderful, beyond her imagining—but crushing, terrifying. Pain tore at her. Jagged molecules flooded her sys­tem; her corpuscles broke apart, and began at last their ancestral war. She struggled to retain her core of rationality, just a little longer. Exhausted, she hastily assembled sub-corpora, and loaded packets of information into them, pale images of the astonishing sky. She sent them hail­ing down into the Ocean, into the Deep, into the belly of the Song itself. Soon a new voice would join the Song: a merger of her own and Orange-Dawn’s. And it would sing of Suns, countless, beyond imagining. Everything would be different now. She fell, gladly, into the warm emptiness of Disso­lution.