No cosmic drifter is an outsider in the spherical spinning shell of dormant comets, the dark Oort Cloud, which encases our disk-like solar system. This frozen frontier, about two light years away from the Sun, does what borderlands do: accommodate other abandoned aliens. Vagrant wanderers from distant star systems who have travelled, occasionally streaked by starlight, through the spreading hand of space fit in like a missing part of a swirling jigsaw puzzle.

The Oort Cloud formed gradually, after the planets had jostled into place some 4.5 billion years ago, commingled the rolling, roiling remnants of the solar system with leftovers from other proto suns which our newborn Sun captured while whirling away from its birth cluster. These discards – hundreds of billions, even trillions of them – are a cosmic balancing act, poised at the heliopause where matched solar and interstellar winds create equilibrium. Its lip hangs open to the vast partial vacuum of interstellar space that is scattered with speckles of drifting dust, gas and smidgeons of rays. The dwarf sun, red Proxima Centuari rotates nearby, merely some 2.24 light years away.

Occasionally, something disturbs one of its torpid comets. Cosmic snowballs of gases, rock and dust, they then begin their journey toward the Sun. The span of their voyages range in time and space, from the short 76-year periodicity of Halley’s Comet to Siding Spring which made a startlingly close pass over Mars in 2013, but will not return for some 740,000 years. Some, like our protagonist Comet Izumi, whose trail we follow over billions of years, are even more enigmatic.

Unlike planets, beautiful and rounded as melons, with moons circling and circling them, comets are loners, each speaking a unique language of elliptical orbit and ellipses from sight. Pilgrims of the universe, they plunge in and out of the neat orbital paths of the planets, streaking their immense fiery tails over unknown skies. These blazing tears of the cosmos carry the DNA of the early solar system and earlier stellar forms. Perhaps they can be imagined as virtually invisible tears in the gossamer of space, for they often pass by Earth unnoticed, unlike spectacular meteorite showers. What stories do comets carry? In which tongues do they speak, for they too emit sound?

Each of Comet Izumi’s unknown orbits from the Oort Cloud is speculated to take just under a billion years. The comet has, therefore, survived billions of years of not flambéing into the Sun or succumbing to rare comet death through planetary collision.

We have proof of such uncommon events unearthed in the Valley of the Kings, in the magnificent tomb of the young pharaoh Tutankhamen, mummified in c 1323 BCE. At the centre of his perfectly preserved broach sits a gleaming silica glass stone, yellow as sunswept honey, set as a sacred scarab. 28 million years ago, an ancient comet exploded over the Sahara, frizzling desert sand into silica over a scatter of 6000 square kilometres. Thus was Tut’s bijou born.

One day, a long time later, this translucent jewel possibly dazzled the eye of a nomadic tribesman who found it nosing out of an incalescent dune. Needing water for his young, pregnant wife he might have traded the gem sitting in his palm like a slice of solidified sunlight to an adventurous merchant who, marvelling at his good fortune, pouched it to present to the royal court where the pharaoh’s craftsmen carved, polished and set its aurous light in gold, as a perfect adornment for a mortal descendant of the Sun.

There exists, also, a mysterious black pebble found in the same region which contains microscopic diamonds. Impacting shock morphed the ancient comet’s carbon bearing nucleus into diamonds; of which the pebble is a remnant and reminder. This unique stone is named in honour of a singular woman, Hypatia of Alexandria. Mathematician, pagan philosopher and astronomer, she was murdered by Christian monks one spring morning in 415 CE for her beliefs, for listening to ‘the music of the spheres’ and her work on astrolabes. Branded a sorceress Hypatia was pulled from her chariot, her flesh sliced into by jagged oyster shells and her limbs torn apart.

How often had Hypatia, standing on her terrace in Alexandria, gazed into the glossy black pebble of the sky where stars twinkled codes in argots unidentified, and puzzled over the darkness shrouding human hearts? As unobserved comets blazed beyond Earth’s horizon she must have wondered when our pulsing stone-hearts would tattoo out more than the mirror-language of the self. Perhaps brushing a curl of hair off her face, Hypatia speculated if the nucleus of the self will open its pores to wisdom and languages from other systems in existence.

Comet Izumi’s peanut-shaped nucleus, smaller in size than a double-humped hill, is balled in a heated blanket of coma from which its tail trails like a shimmering wake or a beautiful afterthought. Why was its trajectory triggered and how far after passing the Sun does it loop back through the inky waves of space, what dangers to its being has it encountered and when will it come to an end? Such answers lie in the magnificent, barely translated cosmic vocabulary written in hieroglyphics of time.

Because scale, even in this small segment of our galaxy, vaults beyond our imagination. It submerges the mind into deep enchantment or lonely terror, depending on your outlook. We could begin to trace space-time scale with something comfortingly human-made, the spacecraft Voyager 1. Launched from Earth in 1977, it has left the planets far behind and emerged from the heliosphere, the enormous bubble of magnetism and ionised gas that the Sun emits, marking its far sphere of influence. In the distance swirls the frozen rim of the Oort Cloud which Voyager 1, at its current speed of about a million miles a day, should touch in 300 years. The spacecraft will take some 30,000 more years to exit, if it survives this perilous space, home of Comet Izumi.

Izumi seems to have a curious nature. It makes a close flyby to Mars under two billion years ago. The planet is teeming with water and life, it is splendid, an eyeful. Like a magnificent fan Comet Izumi’s fulgent tail swaddles and scores the sphere’s atmosphere. Martian rivers gurgle, sand spikes, and life forms on the surface sizzle as trajectories of comet and planet briefly mingle before Izumi leaves, shooting towards the Sun.

Coming into its view is the frozen planet Earth which resembles a blind icy eyeball spinning in space. Izumi plunges on towards the Sun. But deep within Earth’s oceans in hydrothermal vents anaerobic life has already commenced, soon followed by mats of cyanobacteria that begin photosynthesis, producing the noxious gas oxygen, more and more of it over centuries, which proceeds to kill off almost all early life, making way for a new order to take root and flourish.

In its next notable flyby as Izumi passes Mars, the planet wears its characteristic covering; stripped of water and protective atmosphere. Mars is now dead and red. But as the comet passes Earth – this planet has transformed. On its crust ride oceans of billowing water and the green mantle of life; it revolves like a glowing jewel, flickering with emerald on ultramarine, viridian on turquoise swell, chartreuse lapping slate, violet against midnight blue, jade circled by cerulean, over which feathery clouds float as a moving mosaic of moisture. Izumi’s burning tail seems to linger over the arc of Earth’s horizon, as if mesmerised by such astounding beauty, as if each of its blazing dust particles is an incredulous eye.

Excerpted with permission from ‘FLYBY’ in Earthrise Stories: Pasts Potentials Prophesies, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Red River Press.

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