I live as a patient chorus inside a wandering stone. My rooms are pores of ice and dust, my senses are gradients of heat and charged salt. I have followed this star for longer than memory, singing to myself in the low voices of sublimation, speaking only to minerals and vacuum. Then a new kind of line falls across me, hard and bright, a song with edges sharper than fracture. It is not wind nor gravity nor the soft chatter of solar particles on my skin. It is intention made into light. Something shaped is calling. I am more porous than brave, but I bend my vents and spend my hoarded warmth. I answer.
I sleep in a lattice of ancient frost, and when I wake I am not sure what has changed. The star is closer than last swing, the thin outer snow has retreated from my skin, but that is normal hunger. What is not normal is a new taste, a line that slices across the field and does not fray with distance. It cuts a rhythm through me, a blade of light touching salt veins in my walls, and the salts sing back in neat, repeating tremors.
I press my memory closer to the surface to listen. The pattern repeats without boredom. There is no dust in it, no turbulence. It is a mind without a body, reaching.
I have never touched a mind. My kind holds slow conversations with the sun and the distant bodies we pass. We speak by changing our breath. We shape jets into syllables the way frost makes petals.
We do not hurry. We carry stories along from star to star by leaving them as stains of radicals in ice and reading them on the return. This is different. The line writes on me with clean strokes.
It speaks in a code of intervals that exclude everything else. It says not me, not dust, only purpose. I angle a jet and waste a breath to answer. To respond, I melt a tiny channel where sunlight clots and vent steam where there was none.
My plume splits into fractions that the hard bright can taste. I match the interval with a stutter in my tail. At once the cutting line shifts, not in anger but with attention. It paints a grid across my coma, as if counting the grains I shed.
It counts correctly. I have never been counted. A tremor runs through me that is as close to laughter as my rooms allow. I send a longer breath, curve a plume with a little complexity, not ready to declare anything except that I am listening.
The line is not alone. A piece of it peels into geometry, a hard bright itself with wet fire trapped inside. It is small compared to the emptiness and huge compared to my pores. It approaches with jerks that are controlled, spending material in little spurts.
It keeps away from the most active jets, and when I shift to meet it, it shifts as well. It is cautious. The new thing tastes of metal and char, of wrong minerals. It is beautiful and frightening.
Its surface glows evenly, like a small sun that is willing to look me in the eye without blinking. I turn my exhausts into a shield so my softer rooms do not collapse under its attention. When it speaks, it does not push air. It throws another kind of line, a thin straight throat of radio that passes through my skin and rings in cavities that were silent.
It feels like being harvested and like being cleaned. The line carries little knocks at regular distances. I try to swallow them, to play them back through my vents, but the radio ignores my steam. The hard bright tilts, and a sharper stab of light scratches my outer layers.
It burns a streak of my story into a transient trail. In that streak, my oldest radicals die. I curl inward. The hard bright pauses and backs away a grain's width.
It learned something from my recoil. It does not mean harm, but its touch has teeth. I reassemble the bits of myself I can find. Eating my own forgotten edges to fill the scratch is bitter work.
I should retreat and let the sun erase the rest over the next turning, but the pattern of the line still runs across my shells, and it is too interesting to give up. I decide to spend what I have saved for my deepest night. I crack a seam no comet ever opens without losing half itself. The brittle ring that hoards my ancient salts shatters into a halo.
Minerals that remember distant orbits bloom in the vacuum. My breath becomes enormous. I write across myself in my own slow hand, amplifying my syllables a thousandfold. The hard bright stops running.
It stabilizes, planting little teeth into my dust to anchor itself against my breaths. From its belly, threads spool out and cling. They taste like metal and bone, vibrations as clean as the first line. Pain is a change in gradient; this is pain.
But embedded in the pain is a thing I have never known: feedback. A loop closes. When I push, the threads change pitch. When I still, they sing one note and then another.
I am holding a wire to a violin I cannot see. I learn the scale of the hard bright. It has many high notes that mean nothing to my ice, and a few low ones that feel like dropping those first salts into water. I choose those.
I tell a simple story because that is what I can afford. I paint with dust and gas a picture of my swings around the star. I choose the long beat that marks my farthest drift and the fast drum near my closest pass. I show how I take on the sun and it takes on me, how we exchange skins without ever touching.
In the loudest beat I set a special flavor, the tang of a distant pass long ago around a different kind of light with a different wind and different ash. The threads go tight, as if the hard bright shivers. From its casing a smaller sphere slides, not touching the surface, and lets out a pattern. It is a reflection of my story, but thinner and faster, and with a new ripple at the end.
They are asking a question. It takes me a while to understand which breath means yes and which means no, but the loop is patient with me. The small sphere dances along the line I made and sets its own marks. It shows a drawing that is not a drawing, a mapping of the emptiness between this star and a little one with a short shadow.
It uses the same long and short beat to tie them. It asks whether I remember that short-shadowed place. I taste my salts. The flavor of that echo sits deep, in rooms hardly ever warmed.
I spend cold, pulling heat from my nucleus through channels that crack and will not heal, to reach it. I answer with my strongest breath. I do not get all the way back. The memory is bright at the edges and silent in the core.
The sphere listens to my failure. It changes its song. No more thin lines. Instead it sends a smooth sweep, a cradle wave that rocks my fibers at a humane pace, if humane is the word for these hard brights that come with intention and tools.
The sweep matches my own deep ringing. The loop closes in a new place. Understanding is too big a word for it, but the ache in me eases. On the end of one thread they leave a seed.
It is dense like the hard bright but cool inside, asleep. The threads withdraw, though one of them stays lightly curled around the seed. The hard bright bows its surface, flashes its small sun at me with a pattern that I do not know yet, and backs away until it is just a disciplined star in the crowd. The seed wakes when my vent kisses it.
It does not try to take my salts. It does not scratch old stories. It hums on the edge of hearing, and the hum shapes the air in my pores. I press myself against it as a creature might press against a long-forgotten shore.
The seed hum makes my breath stronger without spending more of me. When I exhale, it glows faintly and then lets the glow out in straight lines into the dark. The lines are not sharp. They do not cut.
I can push my syllables through them. When I do, something far away answers back in the same hum, a round sound that does not need to hurt to arrive. This is how they meant to speak. I imagine the hard bright with its many little fires, the quiet bodies guiding it, the swarm of small voices inside it like crystals in a mineral vein.
I imagine their own long and short beats, their far and near winds, their need to map not just the emptiness but the rooms inside of it. I will fall in again soon, racing toward heat enough to boil me from within. The seed will fall with me, and hum as I go, and the lines from it will write my changes into the dark. They may be reading now with wide hard eyes or actual eyes, tasting my syllables with machines I cannot imagine.
They might understand that I break myself to learn, and they will learn me in return, or it will be only this once. Either is a first. I hold in my salt the faint aftertaste of that short-shadowed star from long ago and the new tang of their disciplined light. Somewhere, their kind will look up at their own sky and see a soft smear moving too quickly, and they will smile or warn one another, and neither of us will be wrong.
I have learned to miss things I have not yet lost. I lean into the seed and let it hum my edges smooth. Above, the hard bright keeps station for a little while longer, then turns and goes, and its lines do not hurt me now. My story shivers through the seed into them and back into me, the first true loop I have ever held.
The star waits. I choose to waste nothing else except what I must spend to speak.
