A sun. A tempest of nuclear fire. The inferno fills the vision: one cannot look away. Yet why would she want to?
It is enchanting. Hypnotising. The flow of fire, a shifting ocean, spiraling through a sphere, leaping with elemental unthinking joy. The consuming light is heavily dulled for observation through the screen, allowing the conflagration to reach Leslie’s eyes as a ruddy red radiance, instead of the full fury of ruinous fusion. Reflected in both her glasses and her eyes, the sun spawns cosmic duplicates. She narrows her eyes; brings her blunt up to her mouth. Breaths in the smoke deeply, and sighs, letting it out in a cloud that is instantly sucked into the air filtration system.
Leslie prefers not to blink. She adores the hellfire, licking her lips as equations and nuclear collisions and insane Feynmann diagrams arrange themselves in her drug-addled brain. She giggles softly.
Behind her, curled up beneath a blanket, her associate yawns; stretches. She is a spectacular sight to him, framed by the silent nuclear apocalypse seething beyond. Naked she stands, pale skin transformed into curved topography of glowing crimson. Her hair is untied, and hangs to the small of her back. She leans heavily on her left leg, posing with one hand gripping her blunt between two fingers, the elbow supported by the crook of the opposite arm. In that crook, she holds her walking stick loosely.
“Leslie…?” he slurs, stretching.
She turns, and the smile on her face rises a centimetre or two. “Hello Logan.”
“Yeah. Like… like… Abigail Addis.”
“The action star?” her Northern accent makes Leslie sound even more amused, her faint laughter playing havoc in sunlight.
“Yeah. I dunno…” Logan laughs as well.
Leslie returns her vision to the star. A flare leaps out of the blaze, spinning, dancing, so happy to be alive. She takes another drag.
“You wait,” says Logan, “we calculated it to end in about eighty-nine minutes.”
“It really is… spectacular.”
“Pass me the dope, will you?”
Leslie walks slowly backwards, keeping her eyes on the viewing screen. She slips down next to Logan; holds the joint between his lips while he inhales. She giggles and plants a kiss on his cheek.
The observation room they have taken up residence has no illumination, but for the red star that dominates the far wall. The ceiling is low, made of a black carbon fibre. . Barely anything is visible, just a haze of shadow that allows her focus to remain entirely on the scarlet inferno. The vague shapes of a conference table, chairs, walls; she entirely misses them.
Leslie puts her head in her lover’s lap, so that she may uphold an acceptable degree of intimacy with Logan, while maintaining her dedication to her adopted pagan idol. She takes off her spectacles, place them on the closest of the pillows the pair brought. Her carved walking stick she throws out of the way. It clatters on the tessellation of heated tiles that composes a floor in a place where the concepts of up and down have limited meaning.
This star seems immortal; its light, even inhibited by the smartglass, could be blinding. It’s only science that promises an imminent demise. Leslie sighs. Somehow, the thought comforts her and contents her no end.
“You know, we’re going to have to unlock the door at some point, Leslie. This isn’t a ship for sex, this is for the advancement of human understanding.”
Leslie just makes a faint murmur in response, patting Logan on the head.
Logan laughs, and strokes her dark locks, playing with her hair. If she had been at home, this would be the point where Leslie would have dozed off, but she doesn’t feel tired. She feels far too alive, a wave of utter contentment. She cannot close her eyes.
The two lie for a while, enjoying the sun and each other’s presence.
“I’ve completed my PhD,” says Leslie, her voice clear and bold. “My thesis on the mathematical modeling of tachyon particles across higher dimensions was very well received by the Academy, or so I’m told. We’ll have the ceremony once we get back.”
“Oh my god, that’s fantastic! Congratulations!”
Leslie hides her grin in the blankets and shrugs.
“We all knew you would do it though, I mean, there was never any doubt…”
“And now you have a career of teaching ahead of you.”
“Oh shit, so I do. Is that compulsory?”
“Well, it is on Minerva. To some extent, anyway”
“You know how I feel about… urgh, students. Minervans.”
“You were a student once.”
“I was never a Minervan.”
Leslie inhales some more dope; notices her reefer has gone out. She sighs and throws it away. It lands some feet away, blackened ashes and pungent herbs congealing on the floor.
“If you’ve finished your PhD, why did you come on this cruise? ” asks Logan casually, “This was a research vessel for me and Biyu. Everyone else is just Odessia poking its fat face into everything. And I know you’re not here for them.”
“Oh, it was for you.” Leslie smiles lazily.
“My god, that is so sweet.” Logan leans down; kisses; retracts. Then he leans in, kisses becoming hungry. He moves down Leslie’s sharp jaw line, and nuzzles her neck. Leslie moans.
As she does so, there is an insurgence on the surface of the sun. A revolution, an anarchistic flare of blazing flames, extinguished in violence by the airless void. Leslie cannot look away, even as her lover bites exotically at her throat. The instinct of fear, of the awe we feel when we are witness to natures gods, quickly becomes deeply sexual in Leslie’s drug-addled mind. Her face turned from Logan’s incessant gnawing, Leslie’s pupils dilate, becoming so large that they drown the colour of her iris. The instinct to contract the visual field when seeing the brightest lights seems to be muzzled, corrupted.
The mighty eye of fire is the only thing Leslie can see. The only thing that matters.
She grasps one of Logan’s animalistic groping hands, guides it down to her moist cunt.
Their coitus is long, but unimaginative. Logan is a considerate lover, but Leslie is not. She goes hard, and bluntly, without passion. By their side, the elemental unthinking intelligence of the sun rages. They finish with a sigh, and Logan sits back, quietly unsatisfied. Leslie turns in her seat of sex and indulgence, and stares yet again at the sun. She puts her glasses back on.
“Oh…” she sighs sensually.
She stares into the fire, transfixed, while Logan slowly drops into post-coital slumber, snoring softly. Leslie waits a good twenty minutes until he has passed into oblivion.
“Computer,” she whispers into the invisible wrist mounted microphone on her rig, “Observation room eight. Turn the opacity of the window to minimum.”
The ship is equipped with a silent computer; such is the ego of Captain Barrowman, that he can only bear one omnipotent voice onboard. The ships mechanisms comply without complaint or assent.
Filters on the nanoscale dissolve, and the star turns from a dull maroon punctuated with enormous black sunspots to a piercing red just above damaging. Swirling prominences become more distinct and become blurred with previously invisible fire, oceans of Hadean flames that climb out of the sun and dance like demons. It is now abundantly clear how close they are to the supergiant; they orbit just outside the pestilent atmosphere. It is all so near. Leslie feels like she’s falling… she wants to fall. Spiral into the tormented firestorm.
She looks at you, eyes twinkling behind glass. Slowly puts a finger to her lips in the universal sign for quiet.
“Don’t worry about him,” she whispers, jolting a thumb at the prone Logan, “he’s yesterdays news. This, on the other hand…” she gestures at the dying sun.
She sighs, and sits back, leaning against her lover. He grunts, but remains asleep.
Leslie giggles softly. Her laugh is something quite unique; in parts harsh and in others melodic; all parts wild. She tends not to use it.
“Maybe, in another universe where I didn’t enter the fields of science, I would have been a pyromaniac,” she murmurs, a chuckle in her throat.
“But even you can’t deny its beauty. One of the largest and most powerful things known to man. After three billion years of energy and life beyond our puny comprehension. On the brink of demise. Cataclysm.”
She locks eyes with you again. Her glasses are grimy; she uses her nearby discarded shirt to wipe the lenses. The fabric is emblazed with the logo of an obscure band, a pomegranate impaled with whaling harpoons. This is her explanation face: animated, relentless, and solemn.
“This is a star we call Montague 9. It’s about three billion years old. An oldie. Now, the principles of a sun are simple. Hydrogen isotopes collide at massive velocities, which allows them to smash together, form helium. Easy. All a fusion reaction needs is a bit of energy to get it going, and then it supplies itself with all the stimulus it needs. But sooner or later, the hydrogen runs out.
“Then the sun is outta fuel. It starts to die. And there’s a point, which we’ve found with the specimen there, where the energy Montague is making is not providing enough force to counteract its own gravity. The whole thing starts to collapse in on itself. The weakest force in the universe, so often overcome… oh it wants revenge. Nothing left to stop it. The star collapses under its own weight.”
Right on cue, the stars surface bursts into activity, but it seems weaker than the last conflagrations, inhibited. It is the desperate spit and scowl of a dying boar. Leslie snaps her head round as the flash of fusion catches her peripheral vision. She looks back at you, cheery sadism intricately woven into her face.
“But of course… the star is massive, so the core collapses long before the rest of it does. All that matter, packed into tight spaces, gets hotter, denser. Everything coming together with all that force: it’s just Newton’s Third Law. Action and reaction.”
Leslie smacks her palms together in a clap that seems deafening in the stuffy silence of the observation room. Logan turns his head in his sleep behind her, but Leslie doesn’t notice, so absorbed into the story is she.
“So the universe kicks back. A shockwave, compresses the star’s atmosphere, then tears the fucker apart. A gory and spectacular end. Star’s blood. Everywhere. Everywhen.”
The star seems almost to tremble, as though it too is listening to Leslie’s psychedelic sermon. This process started a good four hours ago, the final countdown has already started. Immense, stubborn, too stupid to accept it’s fate, Montague clings to Leslie’s relentless descriptions.
“We are seeing the slow and agonising formation of a neutron star. The matter of that massive, packed into a sphere just 25 kilometres wide. All that remains of this monster. A deep pit in the fabric of the universe, darling.
“It’s all just first year university cosmology.” Leslie shrugs dismissively. “We worked all this shit out hundreds of years ago, and fascinating people like Logan have just been figuring out classifications and stuff. Me… I’m more interested in something a bit more… fundamental.”
Leslie lets out a bark of feral laughter. Too loudly.
Logan awakens with a yawn.
“Who were you talking to?” he murmurs groggily.
The cosmologist groans; sits up. He clicks his neck, and sniffs air stifled with sex and cannabis.
“Jesus, a bit bright, isn’t it? Computer, turn up opacity a good few units.”
Leslie bites her lip, but says nothing. The drugs are wearing off.
The two sit slightly apart on their blanket, estranged in that way people often are after casual hedonism.
“Oi, get up lovebirds.” A new voice breaks the silence, snarky and accented with the upper-class American colonies; Bliss and Pandora. Biyu has taken hold of the onboard mike system. “You won’t want to miss this. It’s the end. Motherfucking D-Day. Computer, open the solar sails, quickly. We’ll be riding the shockwave from here to Salome.” The scientist cackles, and then shuts off the intercom.
The star is falling apart. Fire. The blood of the cosmos. Detonation. Armageddon. It’s killing time.
The supernova rips at the very edge of the brain, the cacophony of colours, of blinding haze and vacancy. The universe seems to split, to bleed a great arc of vitality. Magnified in Leslie’s keen mind, elements rich and poor snap into existence in the spontaneous ignition, like the act of a thoughtless god. The ship trembles, groans. The edges of the window glow with radiation, with raw energy. Though the ship is being thrown forward by this chaotic onslaught, the multicoloured rivulets of matter still seem to stream around them in a soundless psychedelic torrent, an illustrious odyssey of energy and power.
“It really is beautiful,” admits Logan, glancing at her. The reflection of the lunatic light turns the glass in her spectacles into opaque circles of unnerving ever-changing glow, a thousand colours and hues. Lust and trepidation conflict within him.
“Yes…” answers Leslie in a voice that originates from very far off, “It’s far more beautiful than we’ll ever be.”
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