What we dream of

The day that all of humanity was asked the question was in many ways like any other, the Earth turning under the gaze of the Sun, our sublunary motions going around as they had done for millennia beyond conscious count.

One fact was different. In the preceding months, astronomers announced and then updated daily the news about the discovery of an interstellar object passing through our solar system. This discovery struggled to emerge from the back pages and bottom halves of the hour broadcasts, the squabbles and daydreams of human activity grasping more attention than a rock that wasn’t going to hit us, no matter how alien it might be. Telescopes and radar dishes tracked it. We were told that it would come no closer than five million miles to Earth, and all the talk about where it might have come from and what it was made of became just so much science that too many couldn’t be bothered with.

Then closest approach came, and no day since has allowed the same empty gyre.

The sky on that day was a clear blue across the dome of the heavens — where I live, not everywhere, I must remind myself — and to my fanciful mind, the absence of concealing clouds feels right as I look back.

The Sun washes out other bodies in the universe, and without my own telescope, I couldn’t have seen the object in its transit through the solar system in any case…