Sonnenblumen (short story)

Sonnenblumen was the eigth story in 10,000 Dawns to cross over with the Doctor Who universe. Written by Tyche McPhee Letts and featured in How to Survive the Winter, it was subsequently reprinted in Making Spirits Bright.

Summary
Watched unseen by another intelligence, a human whose native universe was destroyed in a great catastrophe visits the snow-covered home of their counterpart in another Dawn. Stepping into their counterpart's house, the only difference they notice is that one of the books on their other self's shelf is Massacre on the Orient Express, instead of Murder on the Orient Express. Hearing a loud noise, they look to the window just in time to see — or rather, not see — an Invisible Inferno materialising, causing a wave of heat to melt the snow across the street. This was expected, however, and Coloth, riding his birdhemoth Rich, circle the malignant void and use a device to expel it back into outer space. After the Inferno is dealt with, the human walks back out of the house, pocketing the Agatha Christie book — unaware that the intelligence who's watching them as "jumped into the paper" to "follow [them] out".

Coloth and Rich are the ones who rescued the human, along with a "city block"'s worth of people, from their native Earth just before the "sudden heat death of the universe", finding them a new home in Spiral, an artificial reality which serves as the headquarters of a multiversal organisation. The pair come from "some strange reality" beyond the 10,000 Dawns, but, while they were visiting this multiverse, the birdhemoth accidentally caused some kind of catastrophe by flapping its mighty wings, causing the plague of Invisible Infernos to appear; they've been trying to make up for it by battling the Infernos wherever they appear, and rescuing as many people as possible.

While other survivors of the human's world have turned to stranger hobbies, they have chosen to tend a garden in Spiral, filled with many kinds of flower — specifically asking Kinan Jans to relax the utopian qualities of this reality around the garden so that tending it can provide an actual challenge and therefore an actual distraction. There, they spend most of their time, musing on the seasonlessness of Spiral, with no distinction between winter and summer, and also reading through Massacre on the Orient Express, which leads them to existential musings about the ontological difference between the Agatha Christie who wrote it, and the Agatha Christie of their own world.

Eventually, however, the gardener notices something peculiar, which Coloth finds peculiar too: the sunflowers in their garden are ignoring Spiral's sun, turning in a completely different direction. Coloth deduces that they may be pointing at the latest Invisible Inferno he's been tracking. Coloth draws out the essence of each of the sunflowers, including the being who's been watching the gardener from the start and had become one of them — transferring them to smaller sunflowers that he makes sprout from his own body. Flying on Rich's back across the gallery of doorways which lead from Spiral to all ten thousand Dawns, they soon identify the precise doorways Coloth's "floral skin" is now pointing to — a Dawn a few doors down from Dawn 7000.

There, they find a dead Earth with cities whose streets have become frozen rivers of slowly-melted glass, loomed over by an "incomplete sun", which Coloth can feel the sunflowers yearning to join. He lets the motes of light within each sunflower leave him, flying up into the empty sun and giving it visible substance as a ball of fire once again. The being of light who's followed the gardener from the house, however, does not ascend just yet, and, taking the place of their reflection on the street paved with glass, they show them their memories to explain them what happened.

In this world, as a purely natural phenomenon, the electricity making up the mind within human brains survived the death of the organic body in the form of a "being of light", all of whom ascended to meld into the Sun. Eventually, however, there was an "unforeseeable Galaxy Accident", the "rogue wave of dimensional pressure" (created by Rich's wingbeat) shattering the Sun between its constituent light and heat; the beings of light were scattered, powerless and non-physical, across the Dawns, and the Invisible Infernos were their counterparts of invisible heat, trying to rejoin with their missing halves and then meld back into the Sun.

After finishing its story, the being of light begins to say goodbye — but the gardener disagrees. Seeing the being as still being their garden, albeit "metamorphosed", they believe it is still their responsibility, and, relishing the challenge, the gardener looks out upon the ruined Earth — onto which ash is now falling down like snow as a result of the ball of fire burning bright once again overhead — intent on rebuilding it.

Characters

 * Being of light
 * Gardener
 * Coloth
 * Rich