Comet
It was a strange and inexplicable rogue planet, unfettered by a star and its demands, possessed of the most rudimentary consciousness. It heated itself internally by some trick unknown to astro-physicists, and kept going its bizarre and nowhere course, motivated by a force astronomers would later term “gall”.
Then the gravity took it, and it suddenly knew it was a he. A proper star, formerly of many planets, perhaps even a binary system at one point, took the rogue in her orbital embrace, and bathed his surface in light and heat, and the majesty of storms swept through and over his shell. This produced in him the new and exhilarating sensation of life.
She was entranced by his receptiveness to her rays; her previous planets had been mere rocks, occasionally colliding with one another leaving nothing but asteroids, in several hazardous belts, spinning round her. This new one however had already started an evolution in the time it took her to reflect on the merits of old orbiters.
Eventually, evolution produced a thinking species, and they took to worshipping the star, rightly, as the source of all life. The hymns and poems and praise radiated back to the star, and she was flattered in a way she had never been.
Time passed however, and she began to take the adulation for granted as her due, and finally as the prattling of immature and uncivilized life forms. She began to try to change the planet; a flare here, a sunspot there, and parts of the planet were scorched. The people on his surface began to change. They became less kind, developed war, and envisioned a god to whom they plead not to destroy them. Very few kept the old religion or thanked the star for blessings any longer. Hunting those that did was a sport for the majority.
All of this horrified the planet. He shifted his most violent portions to the side least in the path of light, leaving them cold and uninviting, to no avail: the violence merely moved toward the light. Had he been able to find the language he would have told her to stop, but celestial bodies have little in the way of communication but dramatic action.
He grew miserable and missed being the rogue that he had been. However, he couldn’t do such a thing with all the life enveloping him now. He could not simply return to being such a simple and barren thing, universal debris taking up vacuum. He decided to wait it out, and see if it would all come back to simplicity and warmth.
Though she told herself that she was bored, no other planets were pulled into her orbit. The aeons passed matter of factly, with no more stellar violence.
The day finally came when the people of the planet had nearly destroyed his surface, most other life was gone, and they had found (by accident, warfare having improved their technology)the means to leave him. He encouraged them by letting his burning core burst his cool shell in many places, and allowing storms to cloud and distort his surface. Whoever failed to escape was burned away and taken back into him.
She was horrified by this change in him, this violence having never displayed itself before. She fired her flares with such force his orbit began to decay. He began to break apart and was happy. His orbital plane narrowed and became elliptical.
Finally, as a cloud of rocks and frozen air, he passed nearest to her he had ever been. As he slingshot away from her, the last burst of her heat reminded him of their beginning, and the closing of the circle eased the shattering. He sped for deep space, rogue once more, an occasional bright omen in the sky of some planet as he had once been.
And she in her rage had grown fiercer, and her storms burned through her system, evaporating the rocks of her past till she finally burst.
(Some of her planets surviving people, on a similar planet in a nearby system kept the tradition of their ancestors, incorporated her nova into their religious mythology: an omen of peace and change and of course wars later started because of it.)
She then contracted to a tiny, cold, and forbidding thing, lacking sufficient gravity to collect a system about herself, invisible from one star away.
Christopher Walters, 1999
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