The Sunborn
“—Marcel Proust 1.
LONG WAVELENGTHS ON THE LARGEST SCALE, Julia reflected, the solar system was a spheroid cloud of debris. She looked at the big flatscreen display of an iceteroid they were passing, gleaming dully in the dim radiance of the ever-more-distant sun.
The whole vast volume behind their ship, the High Flyer, was filigreed with bands and shells of flying shrapnel. Beyond Neptune, big ice fragments coasted in the Kuiper belt. At any moment a pair could smash together, or just clip each other, getting thrown into long ellipses, deep wobbly orbits. And this negligible-looking little blob of primordial gray ice and dust right here could, like the rest of the solar system’s slow leftovers, now and then make a sharp hook by skimming near another piece of scrap and in a few years slam into a blundering planet. Earth’s dinosaur-killer could have come from right around here.
Julia shivered, not from the cold outside.
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