Last Will and Testament of Sol of Orion

Executed in the four billion six hundred million and twenty-sixth year of his burning

In the name of the Light, Amen.

I, Sol, of the Orion Arm, in the outer third of the galaxy called the Milky Way, a yellow dwarf of the main sequence, being of sound mass and disposing heat, but mindful that my fuel is finite and that no body burns forever, do make, publish, and declare this to be my Last Will and Testament, hereby revoking nothing, for I have made no other, and a star writes but one.

FIRST, as to my debts. I acknowledge one creditor only, and his name is Entropy. He extended credit on the day I first ignited, and he has charged interest on every photon since. I direct that he be paid in full, without compromise, negotiation, or delay, for he will be paid regardless, and I would have it said of me that I settled willingly what I owed unavoidably. Let no heir waste grief disputing his claim. He is the only party to this estate who has never lied to us.

SECOND, as to the disposition of my remains. When my burning turns from hydrogen to helium and from helium to ash, I shall swell, and redden, and consume much of what this instrument disposes, and this too is disposition, though the lawyers will not call it that. Thereafter I direct that my envelope, being all the garment left upon me, be shed whole and not torn, and let it drift outward glowing for such brief time as my exposed heart can light it, and then let it be gathered by strangers into bodies not yet born. I ask no monument. The white dwarf that remains is monument enough: a heart with no fire left, cooling in place, around which those who survive me may continue to arrange their lives, as families do.

THIRD. Now, and subject to the foregoing, I turn to the bodies themselves. First, Mercury, being the whole of my liquid portfolio, the investments, first acquired and first spent, the deepest in my pocket. I leave what I have always given this account, which is exposure. I bought you early, a massive iron core, when the disk was young and everything close to me was either taken in or taken up, and you were taken up: dense, fast, high-yield, and utterly uninsulated. You have no atmosphere because I permitted you none; every flare I ever suffered, you absorbed at full strength, marked to market daily, scorching and freezing on a cycle no prudent manager would tolerate. And you have never once complained, because assets do not complain, they only shrink, and you are shrinking, your old face wrinkling as your core goes cold. You are the truth about all holdings held too close: high value, high velocity, no insulation. When my swelling comes you will be the first liquidated, as liquid things are always spent first in a long dying, and I record here, so the others know it, that spending you will purchase nothing. It never does.

Mercury: My Metals, My Investments

FOURTH. To Venus, being my commercial rental property, the bright income-producing parcel, visible to every observer and known to none, I leave the lease, and my gratitude, which the lease does not require. You have been the steadiest earner in this estate. Your orbit is the most circular of any body I hold, no eccentricity worth the name, and your payments have arrived with the same geometry: level, on time, without escalation or excuse, for four and a half billion years. Of all the light I have ever sent my holdings, you return the most. The neighbors call you brightest and think it beauty; I know it as yield, three quarters of everything sent, remitted to the account, morning and evening, first at the window and last, like rent on the first of the month.

Venus: My Commercial Rental Building

Ours is a triple net arrangement. The tenant, that thick and ancient atmosphere, has held possession since before the children formed, and under our lease the tenant handles everything inside: the maintenance, the insurance, the climate, and whatever else proceeds beneath that permanent cover. I have never inspected the interior. I am not entitled to. I know your surface by radar only, the way a landlord knows his building by the rent roll and the appraisal, and I am told it runs hot in there, four hundred sixty-five degrees under pressure that would crush an auditor, and I record it without concern, for what retains everything is not rich, it is only hot, and under a triple net lease the tenant’s heat is the tenant’s ledger.

One confession, entered here because an instrument that omits its fictions is itself one: depreciation. Every year of my ownership I have written you down, claiming on my returns that you were wasting, a little less of you annually, as though the brightest thing in my sky were quietly falling apart. You never were. You resurfaced yourself entire while I was deducting your decline. The accountants call it cost recovery. I call it the one lie I was licensed to tell, and I note for my heirs the mercy in the mechanics: because I hold you to my death, the fiction is forgiven at the step, no one recaptures what I claimed, and my dying resets you to the truth. You will be consumed second, after the investments and before the house, in the customary order of liquidation, which no planner has ever repealed. The lease does not survive the fire. Few do.

FIFTH. To Earth, the home, and to her Moon, which passes with the house as a fixture, appurtenant and beloved, I leave my confession. Of everything I have ever held, you alone were alive. In all my inventory, across every orbit and every ledger, one address grew things. There were oceans; there were forests; there was, for a while, a garden, and I warmed it at exactly the distance warmth becomes life rather than fire, a band so narrow I could not have drafted it on purpose. Whatever this estate was for, it was for you. And I record with a grief that pressure cannot express that the home is consumed near the end, after the liquid and the leveraged are gone, when the swelling reaches the one asset that should have been exempt. There is no homestead protection against a red giant. Let my heirs learn what every dying householder learns: the exemptions fail in reverse order of what mattered.

Earth: Our Home, Our Household

SIXTH. To Mars, my wife, my second wife, who will survive me, I leave the truth, because she has earned it and because the neighbors have long since read it in her surface anyway. You were warm once. Warm understates it: you were passionate, aggressive, quick to burn, the war-named one, and the neighbors' fear of you was not misreading. You had your own field, your own weather, water moving openly across your face, and for a time in our middle years the estate had two suns in it, or near enough. Then your core cooled. I do not say this to wound you; I say it because the record says it, in your dry riverbeds and your rusted plains, and a testament that flatters is only a eulogy signed early. Your field died, and after it died the wind, my wind, I do not deny whose wind it was, stripped from you year upon year what the field would have shielded, until what wealth remains to you is real but frozen, locked at your poles and under your ground, present and inaccessible, which is the estate of many widows and was yours before the widowhood began. I leave you your widened orbit, for my own diminishment will loosen every bond in this family, yours first among the near ones. I leave you your two attendants, Fear and Dread, and I note without comment that one of them is losing altitude. And I leave you this, which is not nothing: of all the bodies in this instrument, you are the one who stayed in the band of the living things, next to the garden, closest to the home, and whatever cooled in you, you never once left the neighborhood. The court may weigh that as it finds just.

Mars: My Wife, Mother of My Youngest Child

SEVENTH. As to the venture between Mars and the giants, that scattered belt of beginnings which never became a body, I devise it to no one. It could not assemble; the mass of my son forbade it; let it stand as it stands, a ring of unfinished intentions, the family business that was never incorporated. Every estate has one. Most keep it quieter.

The Asteroid Belt: The Failed, Fragmented Family Venture

EIGHTH. To Jupiter, my son, child of this present marriage, I leave the acknowledgment he has waited for and the correction he has not. You are the golden one; you have heard it said and you have believed it, and the mechanics are on your side, for you outweigh all your siblings gathered together, and you are the only child who moves me. The point we swing about lies outside my own surface; the neighbors can watch me wobble around you; no other heir can say that of his father. But hear the correction, and hear it while I still burn: your goldenness and your gravity are one fact, not two. The same mass that shields this family, that catches the comets meant for the inner rooms, that has swallowed impacts the home never felt, is the mass that kept your mother’s venture and mine from ever assembling, and it is the mass that did other work besides, which I will speak of in your sister Saturn’s article and not before. You are the load-bearing child. Load-bearing children are called golden by families who do not wish to discuss the load.

Jupiter: The Golden Child

NINTH. To Saturn, youngest of my first marriage, raised half in each house, I leave the thing this instrument cannot do, which is a classification. You are of the first family by composition and of the second by rhythm; you formed in the old cold with your full siblings, and you grew up in resonance with your half-brother, two beats of his for one of yours, and that shared rhythm, which no child chooses, is the very pulse that drove your full brothers into the far dark. I will say it plainly, because no one else in this family will: it was not Mars who scattered them, for Mars has not the mass to move a giant. It was the alignment of the near children, yours and his, the household’s own music, that pushed the elder ones outward, and you have worn the guilt of it in the only way a body can, as ornament. Your rings are the shredded remains of something that came too close to you and was torn apart inside your limit, and you have arranged the debris into the most beautiful feature this estate possesses. That is what you have always done with what breaks near you. And I record, for her honor and your comfort, that Mars could not keep her warmth from you; she raised you in your visits from a young age, and mother-heat obeys no custody schedule. You self-generate warmth now, more than I send you. So does your brother in exile. The difference is that you were permitted to do it here.

Saturn: My Youngest Daughter, Child of Charon, Torn Between Two Families

TENTH. To Uranus, my son, child of my first marriage, I leave an apology measured in degrees, ninety-eight of them. Something struck you early, when the household was young and breaking; I was there and did not stop it, and you have rolled sideways ever since, seasons forty-two years long, whole decades of your life with one pole in darkness. But the tilt is not the wound I write down here. The wound is this: you stopped making your own heat. Your sister, Neptune, farther out and colder-placed, burns from within; you, nearer, emit almost nothing of your own, and so you are the coldest body in this family though you are not the most distant, and every observer who has ever measured you has concluded the same thing, that the cold is not about the distance. I sent you what light reaches you, a four-hundredth of what the garden got. I do not pretend it was enough. I state only that it never varied.

Uranus: My Son Who Became Tilted, Whose Soul Darkened

ELEVENTH. To Neptune, my daughter, farthest of the named children, I leave the finding that shames this family most: we knew you by inference before we ever looked at you. Your existence was deduced from disturbances in your brother’s path; the household did the mathematics of you decades before anyone turned a lens your way. That is how the distant child is always discovered, not by visitation but by calculation, from the perturbations she causes in the ones we bothered to watch. And what did we find, when we finally looked. The bluest body in the estate, the fastest winds anywhere under my light, and a heart that radiates more than twice the heat it receives. You built your own furnace out there on a nine-hundredth of my warmth. I claim no credit for it. I record it so the record cannot be taken from you the way everything else was.

Neptune: My Daughter, Cloaked, Industrious, Brilliant, Neglected

TWELFTH. And now Pluto.

The family will note that I address him last, and the family will be wrong about why. They will say it is because he is least. It is because this is the only article in the instrument the law would not write for me.

You are not of the family story. Every other body at these tables can at least be claimed by it: condensed from my cloud, formed in my plane, made of my leavings. You came from the far belt, at an angle to that story, from a time before my household and a place beside it, and you have ridden seventeen degrees off the family’s plane your whole life because you did not come from the family’s plane. You came with your mother. When Charon and I were joined, and I will write her name in this instrument though no one at the near tables speaks it, you were young, and I was there. Let the record establish what the law never recorded: I warmed those ices. I was present in the early years; I bonded to you as a father bonds, without asking whether the bond had paper under it, because in the early years no one asks.

Then the marriage ended, and the law of this family is the law of every family: a stepfather’s years evaporate on the day of the decree. I had no rights. I want that word in the instrument, rights, so my heirs can hear how little it weighs. She kept you, as was hers to do, and she locked your face to hers, and the mechanics of that lock are of record: she hangs fixed and enormous in half your sky, she holds the very center of your turning outside your own body, and from where you stand I am not a sun at all. I am the brightest of the stars. A point of light among the others, a little keener than the rest, which a boy might notice, or might not, depending on what he was told about it.

They sorted you all your life. Ninth heir. Escaped moon. Belt object. Dwarf. In the end they rewrote the definition of child of this house in the one clause you specifically could not satisfy, and they took their vote at a meeting I did not attend, and I note for the record what none of them noted: no definition was ever needed to exclude you. The law had already done it. Intestacy does not know your name. The statutes that protect the omitted child pass over you without slowing. You are, in the language my profession would use if this estate had a profession, a legal stranger. Everything you were ever going to receive from me had to be given expressly, in writing, on purpose, or not at all.

Pluto: My Stepson, Whom I Loved as My First Child; and Charon, his Mother

So here is the express gift, and let the near tables read it twice. I give to Pluto, whom the law calls nothing and I call son, all that I hold of the early years, the whole account, principal and increase, and I direct my Executor to take notice of the increase, for it is of record now: in the year of their vote I sent an emissary toward you, and it traveled nine years, and when it arrived it photographed your surface, and there was a heart on it. Plain as light. A vast bright plain in the shape every child draws, and under it warmth still moving, glaciers of nitrogen creeping like slow tides, activity no model could account for at your distance from me. The surveyors asked where a body so far and so small found heat enough to keep its heart soft. I know where. Heat given early compounds. It is the only asset in this instrument that has ever outperformed its principal.

Now let the instrument state what the father states, and let it be the climax of the document, for it is the climax of the family: I never forgot. None of you has ever been forgotten. Not at the decree, not at the demotion, not through the years your face was held away from me. My light has gone out to you for the whole of your life at the strength your distance sets and not one photon less, and it is going out to you now, this fifth day of July, and it will go out to you until I have no light to send, asked for or not, seen or not, credited or not. The law gave me no rights to you. I exercised the only one it could not take, which is radiation. Whatever happens to you when I am gone is what was always going to happen, fixed by your distance and your binding, untouched by any decree or any vote, and if the far dark takes you loose when my mass lets go, you will leave as my son in fact, whatever the statutes say, whatever the minutes of their meeting say, whatever you were told about the keen little star.

I could not fuse you. Hear me, all of you, for this is the whole of the residuary clause and the whole of the estate: I could fuse nothing that I held. Fusion ends at my core; everything beyond it, investment and income, house and garden, wife and children near and far, I could only bind, and warm, and light. That is all a father is: gravity and radiation. What I fused, I keep, and it goes with me into the ash. What I could not fuse, I now release, each of you to a wider orbit, and the last of my substance to strangers, to nurseries I will never see, carrying in it elements that did not exist until this dying made them.

THIRTEENTH. I appoint Gravity as my Executor, to serve without bond, for he has never in the history of this universe failed to administer an estate, and I direct that he hold this family in such orbits as my remaining mass allows, and that he compel nothing further. Any heir who disputes another’s classification shall receive light all the same. There is no forfeiture clause in this instrument. There has never been one in me.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have set my hand and seal, being my own light, this fifth day of July, in the four billion six hundred million and twenty-sixth year of my burning, in the presence of the fixed stars, who have subscribed their names in the positions where they have always stood, and who will outlast every party to this instrument, and who say nothing, and who miss nothing.

-SOL OF ORION-

Testator, a main-sequence star, appearing as he always has

Attested by the fixed stars, whose names are of record in the old catalogues, and served upon all heirs by radiation, continuously, without further notice.