Sundance -Tarazed Chronicles-

Cuidad del Sol, Nueva España

3429 T.C.

A gust of wind through the great curved window awakened Rosa shortly before her alarm clock would have chimed and earned itself a kick for its trouble.  She sat bolt upright from where she had slumped over her desk and tried to remember what it was she was doing the previous night that had so exhausted her.  Puzzled, she looked down at the screen, still active and displaying twisting animations of chromosomal DNA, amino acid chains, and statistical analyses of gene markers in the Canopian population.

She yawned and leaned back in her chair, stretching.  She remembered: she had been analyzing variations of certain DNA sequences she and her family possessed and tracing the evolution of those traits back through Canopian history, through the cloning program that made great use of the genetic material of her grandparents, mother, and aunts.  However, strangely, she saw a variety of genetic markers that should have persisted through the Canopian genetic engineering and high rate of mutation that simply did not exist in any living Canopians.

As though her unscheduled sleep had been nothing more than a pause to take a deep breath, she dived into the databases again, bringing up menu after menu and activating statistical analysis programs and genetic library parsers and data queries to various libraries of cross-references within the Canopian network.  As she did this, she slipped herself gently into a trance and let the complex, interconnected media play in front of her eyes and directly into parts of her mind that she had set aside for such calculations.

She was interrupted by a flashing white line of vertical text—in an angular font that slashed the round Canopian alphabet to knife edges—that suddenly appeared and bounced up and down on the left side of the screen several times before wandering uninvited over to a section of the screen that displayed incoming news and communications.

Warning: cloudbreak predicted in Ciudad del Sol district.

Her concentration faltered and then broke completely.  She sat staring at the screen for a long time, absorbing but not processing the information she had been studying, then suddenly reached out and ran her long, delicate fingers over the screen to freeze her workstate.

She stood up and went over to her bed, a disc-shaped sheet of strong, satiny material suspended within a frame.  She laid down on the flexible surface, sinking in slightly.  The wind coming in the window was warm on her skin.  The brilliant light of an overcast Canopian day was soothing, relaxing on her eyes.  She breathed a long, slow, sensual breath.  She tried to remember what she had dreamed when she fell asleep at her desk, but could not.

That she had fallen asleep at all was unusual.  Something in her strange neurological structure gave her the ability to go days without sleep with no ill effects, and rarely was it necessary for her to sleep so much as an hour at a time.  When she did sleep, she entered a lucid dream state and worked or played as she desired, with an intensity independent of time; she could get weeks of contemplation on a complex problem in on one cat nap.  She had trained herself in biofeedback during a long, two-hour nap several years previously, studying her nerves and how they interacted with her body and what she could do with them.  She had even, somewhat recently, run a mental simulation on how the immortality virus would interact with her biochemistry and neurology and knew, to some degree, what her parents experienced.

She had not had a blind dream since childhood, and she found it disturbing.

Rosa breathed diffuse cloudlight in and spread it through her body, bringing herself into a state of deep relaxation.  Her mind freed itself of all thought, returning to bare awareness.  She watched her body's responses as she relaxed; her breath grew deep and so slow to be almost imperceptible.  She felt and made note of the feeling of the bed under her skin and the way it moved as she breathed.  She wiggled her toes to feel the slight friction of the soft surface under her legs, then did the same with her fingers.  She squeezed her hands into fists, feeling the knotting tension of muscles in her forearms, then relaxed them.

Her gold eyes opened; the light from the window shined into her eyes and sent rainbow sparkles through her tears.  She breathed again, and the slight motion made the sparkles dance like stars against the background of her vision.  She looked up at her reflection in the mirrored surface of the ceiling and walls: body darkly tanned from her exposure to alien suns and the brilliant illumination she usually used in her quarters, naked on the silver bed.  Numbers flowed past her mind; angles, diagrams, phi and pi and other constants drawing lazy measuring tapes around her body, explaining her form mathematically.  Then, deeper, showing her the cells in her body and how the numbers arose from within her physical structure, from her genetic code, from the interaction with the equations of gravity—which she saw as a line of vertical text emerging from the ground—from the chemical signatures of the melanin in her skin playing with the blackbody equations pouring from the sun, filtering through the deep Canopian cloud layer...

Rosa took another deep breath and the equations vanished into her body.  Her muscles coiled under her skin and she watched as she pulled herself into a sitting position, and then extended the motion until she touched her toes.  She sat in this position for awhile, letting her muscles relax into it, then bent her knees and ankles beneath her until she was coiled like a spring.  She pressed her fingertips into the surface of the bed and dug in, feeling the resistance and measuring it.

She exploded into motion, force against gravity, intention versus stasis.  Her legs uncoiled and she pressed with her hands in the same motion, bouncing off the bed; her hands then snapped up over her head as she rocketed toward the ceiling, caught it, reversed, flew to the floor, coiling again as she did so.  She caught the floor on her feet but her motion was forward; she rolled in a somersault, uncoiled again, came to a stop effortlessly, standing in star pose before the window, looking down at the gris platform under the city.  There was not a soul in sight: the clouds were about to break.

The clouds were about to break.

Rosa made a decision and started acting on it before she could stop to second-guess it.

She went to the replicator and her fingers flew on its console, typing a sequence of commands with such rapid-fire speed that she had finished the order before her hand even came to rest.  A moment later, the replicator snarled an electromagnetic oath and an object crackled into existence inside.  Rosa opened the door and pulled out the small device: a spray applicator.

She checked the settings on the device and found that, indeed, it was properly loaded.  She began to spray the contents over her skin, starting with her feet and carefully applying it to every part of her.  Gleaming golden liquid seeped into her skin, apparently disappearing.  When she got to her face she paused, and continued more slowly.  She forced herself not to cringe as she sprayed the liquid into her eyes.  She finished the process and threw the device back into the replicator to be recycled—it was devoured with another snarling crackle and the replicator did not even thank her—and walked over to her workbench and picked up a neatly-folded bundle of reflective silver clothing.

She put on the short vest, leaving it unfastened in the front and letting the open sides hang over her breasts.  The sari she wrapped around her hips and then around her torso, draping over her shoulders and hanging over the front of her body.  She touched a small surface on the sari and its consistency changed from liquid flowing to a somewhat stiffer weave that held itself in place but still conformed to her body.  It tightened around her body but remained flowing around her legs.

She grabbed a vivid green scarf from the stool in front of the workbench and left her quarters.

Rosa entered the central core of the building and walked a few steps around the circular corridor to the nearest of the doors in the inner shaft of the cylindrical tower.  As the door opened, a platform rose from ground level to meet her floor, which was second from the top of the two-hundred-meter residential tower at the center of Ciudad del Sol, the City of the Sun.  She was on leave awaiting assignment after completing the examinations after her first year of duty with the Canopian Navy.  Right now, the Navy and the Space Force were arguing over her: she had taken on a dual commission—one of only three officers so far in the thirteen-year history of the two fleets—and fully expected to bounce between ships for a few years while each of the fleets attempted to demonstrate how much they valued her and would just love to give her a better assignment than the other.  Her ultimate intention was to command a semi-autonomous explorer ship that served both fleets, but she suspected it would be a few years before this happened, despite her demonstrated prowess at any possible aspect of command.

How disconcerted the Navy had been when she had refused and assignment—refused, the nerve of a mere cadet!—to go on an advanced tactical training mission and rattle some sabres at the Sulafi.  She had responded, politely, that she had adequately studied the tactical scenarios that she would be practicing—and demonstrated so by soundly humiliating several members of the Admiralty in advanced tactical simulations—and she would better serve the Navy in another role, and she would be happy to accept any assignment that was mutually beneficial.

In the meantime, she waited on Nueva España until the admiralties bickered themselves into some sort of truce and asked her to go somewhere useful.

Rosa fell with the platform to the bottom of the tower, where a young man was standing at the building's hydraulic controls near the door to the outside.  “Bad weather coming.  I was just about to retract the building just in case el Sol wants to go crazy on us during the cloudbreak.  You don't want to go outside,” he said.

Rosa smiled and thanked him, then walked past him and stepped into the daylight, ignoring his protests.

The heat of the day wrapped around her like a blanket and the ashy Canopian air seemed charged with electricity.  That was not unlikely; during sunstorms the atmosphere had a tendency to lightly ionize; though lightning discharges equalized the charge, the air often felt itchy, like static electricity under the skin.  Rosa watched as the liquid crystal sunblock she was wearing darkened somewhat, polarizing the light that penetrated her skin.  The majority of the light was reflected off as scatters of rainbow diffraction patterns that shifted and swirled with her movements.  She watched those for awhile, entranced, and then started walking.

Normally the gris would repel her magnetic shoes and she would float along on the surface of the city, but today she was barefoot and the gris was warm under her feet.  She walked briskly southwestward toward the edge of the circular gris platform that surrounded the city.  Before her, the shimmering gold waves of a moneda field—one of the few native Canopian surface plants—was blinding and she squinted until the polarizers in her eyes shifted into a more reflective phase to compensate.  It took her only two or three minutes to reach the edge of the platform, and then she hopped down to the ground two meters below.

The Canopian surface was hard, glazed rock melted somewhat glassy by repeated sunstorms.  The rock was warm on her feet, smooth like tile and mostly flat.  The ground rippled, with small waves of raised or lowered terrain.  Rosa's feet found the gentle slopes easy, and there were no pebbles or sharp protrusions to speak of.

She walked slowly around the edge of the moneda field.  It was a great circular array of small, gold leaves resembling thin, polished coins.  She resisted the urge to pick one and bite into the burning-hot leaf.  Even walking in the field would burn her feet after awhile: the chemicals that acted like terrestrial capsaicin were highly concentrated in the leaves.

The clouds did, indeed, seem somewhat thinner than usual, and to the west a great sheet of heavy, low stratus was blowing rapidly northward.  Above, complex, heavy cumulus clouds were writhing in strange patterns that would almost make sense if one stared at them long enough.  Rosa stared as she walked: the combining, shredding, reorganizing clumps of heavy clouds—searing white at the tops and pale gray on the dark undersides—were hypnotic.  And the sheets of stratus carried over the whole of the planet from the deep oceans by the powerful storm belt winds were, indeed, somewhat thinner...

As Rosa watched, a searing white sunbeam poured through a break in the clouds some kilometers upwind.

She ran in its direction, leaving the city and the field behind her.  She headed for a small hill of raised, blistered golden earth and rock that stuck out of the flat plain two kilometers beyond the moneda fields surrounding the city.

The wind shifted a few degrees northward and it was warmer now, and had the slightest scent of ash.  Rosa climbed the hill and stood on top of it, looking out over the plain.  Her gaze took in the city: a cluster of mirror-bright towers.  Some of them were retracting into the gris platform.  Rosa found this somewhat disconcerting, but she turned away from the city and looked into the sky.

It was blazing with light.

When a sunbeam passing through the highest level of the atmosphere shined against the lower clouds, the reflections against the layers of stratus created new sunbeams that were nearly as bright as those found on Earth and certainly brighter than Tarazed.  Rosa's gaze traced the reflections, the dazzling sparks of projecting bits of cloud sticking into sunbeams and erupting into miniature suns, the dance of the clouds sliding against and through each other, each layer a curtain through which the ghostly gray of penetrating light shimmered in waves.  Entranced, Rosa knelt on the hard-packed ground, raising her hands into the air, gazing up at the sky.

“So beautiful,” she said softly, watching the clouds dance with the light.

Dance, she thought.  I must dance.  With the light.

She got to her feet.

Rosa danced.

The wind picked up and her body flew on it.  Her sari flapped in the wind and her arms mimicked its wavelike motion.  She gazed at the faintly visible orb of Canopus, ghostly but still visible even through the layers of clouds, and turned her eyes away.  The light was too bright for her to look straight into, so she danced her love for it.  Her body flowed through the warm air like a cloud, swirling and weaving and drawing complex forms to mirror the breaking of the clouds and the revelation of the light.

The cloudbreak to the west expanded and the clouds closer to the white horizon were breaking up, revealing gaps and eventually more of Canopus's searing blue, cloudless sky.  Rosa laughed and spun in a frenetic explosion of energy, daring the sun to come closer and shine on her.  The scent of ash in the air was strong now.  The wind was picking up: hot, constant now, blowing her long, golden hair back in a comet behind her as she danced and invited the light closer to herself.  She cast aside her sari and reveled in the heat of the air on her skin.

In her spinning dance she noticed that all the buildings in the city had retracted.  She laughed again, dancing a salute to the reflection of the light off the shiny silver roofs of the buildings, silver discs in the darker gris.

She slowed in her dance and let herself slip into meditation.  Her body moved on its own now, free, watched rather than controlled.  Visions of gravity and muscular contraction and vectors of her limbs' inertia danced through her mind like golden equations on a computer screen.

She pulled an invisible stylus out of the air around her and started dancing with it, touching it to the equations and correcting them.  The stylus became visible in her mind as a wand of light, drawing white brilliance from the sun and pulling it down to the equations.  The equations flipped around and numerals and terms dissolved into the light; new ones flowed from the pen.  In response, her body moved according to the new values in the equation, and her movements became more flowing and greater in scope.  She threw her pen into the sky and it turned into a comet, then flashed away into the sun.

She watched her body's movements and the environment's interactions with it with a quiet joy.  Chemical descriptions of the sunblock crystals, of her sweat and blood and tissues, took the place of the simpler physics of her motion.  She was deep in a trance now, and the sunlight was the only external thing she was aware of.  The light shined into chemical symbols and diagrams, then took the shape of the blazing white linings around the thinning clouds.  She gasped as a twisting cloud became two strands of helical molecules connected by strands.  The molecules spun around each other like staircases; the strands lit up white and gold and green and red, new equations dancing in her vision.

The clouds broke less than a kilometer away; she watched the sudden bloom of blazing light reflecting from the glazed, dried ground.

Her arms twined over her head, released; her fingers traced the vision of the DNA strands, her eyes widening as she understood them.  Her vision expanded to encompass other DNA sequences, some chromosomal, some mitochondrial, all branching out from the first strand that filled her sight and reflected dazzling highlights as it turned gold.

She felt it, now, the golden DNA directing the construction of her body—every part of herself constantly created anew every instant—and the function of her mind, of her thoughts, of the very vision blazing around her, surrounding her, waves of sunlight shining through the rungs of the double helical molecule, alternating blackness and white-cut-rainbow on her crystal-protected skin.  The commands of adenine resonating with thymine, cytosine dancing with guanine, of the amino acids chaining into vast complex molecules that created beautiful, living forms.  Suddenly she saw the immortality virus her mother and father carried within their blood, dancing as a beautiful sun-bright complex of light, equations, and atoms.

Rosa cried out with shock as she realized why, despite having been carried in her mother's womb and sharing her lifeblood with her, the immortality virus had never passed to her.  Light blazed white along the endless ladders of DNA through the molecules of her cells that were resonating with her dance, and she felt the light entering her body through the ground as her mind reeled, spinning out of control now from astonishment.

The clouds broke over her.  Rosa spun into fire and light so brilliant white it was not even white, but every color; her eyes, shrouded now by the liquid crystal, saw blazing sparkles of every color of the rainbow.  The rainbows expanded to fill the visions of the DNA strands, the equations, the chain of power extending up her legs.  She danced with the energy, her legs kicking, rebalancing her mass, finding her center and then dancing it along the streams of vision.  The fire grew brighter still, expanded, as her hands grabbed the vision of the DNA and the immortality virus—no virus, she saw at last—and move them.  Her hands closed around empty space, around light, around pure fire that blazed and blazed and blazed as Canopus filled the sky with white fire.

The energy blasted through her legs and up into her belly; she felt her muscles knot and ripple and deep within her, her own body became the source of fire, answering the sun.  She danced madly, spinning, reaching for the sun in ecstasy, her head thrown back and her eyes wide open and staring into the white sky; her mouth open and her breath coming in ragged gasps, in soft cries of joy.  She pulled herself off the ground, the DNA a ladder into the sky, pulling the vision of the immortality into herself and reattaching its complex atoms in new arrangements, tying them into the equations and sequences of her own being.

Contact.  Fire.  Completion.  She screamed as the fire blazed into her skin, as though she were bathed in it.  It reached inside, overwhelming the growing fire within her; she was a lump of coal sinking into the great waves and currents of the sun itself.  Her body became glass now; she could see everything within it; her fires were embraced by the sunlight and amplified a millionfold.

The ecstasy took over her awareness; the orgasm that had started within her belly now was a sun itself, boiling; the muscles of her sex spasmed and it was a supernova, and her consciousness became the bubble of cast-off matter on the wavefront of ecstasy.  There was a scream, somewhere—hers, she supposed—and it went on and on; her physical body fell away, burned out, a pebble of carbon lost in the infinite fire of a star.  Still the orgasm continued, dancing on its own, following equations and forms that were meaningless to her.

Everything had become meaningless to her, everything except the sun which had swallowed her, and the sun that she became.

She knew, distantly, of her body collapsing in convulsions on the hard-packed, hot ground; she was dimly in touch with it and knew that it was changing, its cells spasming in powerful motion far more significant than the explosive reactions within her nerves and muscles, her spine, the pleasure centers of her brain.  She let go of her body entirely; the ecstasy carried her consciousness in expanding shockwaves, outward, beyond Nueva España, beyond the tiny specks of the system's various ships and stations and commerce, into the infinite darkness where stars were dancing, and the light within her was seized, irresistibly, by Light, and she danced along the spiraling energies pulling her into Infinity, into Eternity, no longer noticing whether she was screaming, or weeping, or laughing...