Sunny Cloud

A CLOUD KISSES THE SUN

Poul Anderson wrote a short story titled 'Kyrie', whose emotional ending makes it one of the most memorable ones I've ever read.  In it, the crew of a spaceship includes a rather asocial young woman whose gift of telepathy enables her to stay in constant mental contact with an alien creature accompanying the ship.

Named Lucifer, the creature is an intelligent plasma cloud, indigenous to space, with a surprisingly humanlike mind.  Eloise, the girl, and Lucifer are not just fellow explorers -- they have fallen in love with each other.  Since their radically different natures made it impossible for them to ever physically express their love, I suppose theirs could be considered the purest, most platonic of love affairs.

At the climax of the story [HERE BE A SPOILER] the ship is in danger of being destroyed by the gravitational pull of a collapsed star -- a black hole -- and in order to save his beloved Eloise, Lucifer sacrifices himself by letting himself be pulled into it.  But as Lucifer approaches the event horizon of the black hole, the time dilation effect approaches infinity, and the agonized mental scream Lucifer emits as he is killed is drawn out to an infinite length -- which Eloise will forever continue to hear in her mind.

That tragic romance has found a real-life echo -- very Wagnerian, albeit one that is less unbearably sad, I think, and even paradoxically life-affirming -- in these images of a curiously lifelike cloud which, against all good sense, embraces certain destruction in order to experience one moment of unimaginable glory -- one magnificent, indescribably beautiful, fatal kiss that lasted forever, is lasting still, and will outlast us all.