The planet that lies ahead of it is blue green and bright, glowing with points of artificial light. The seedpod has passed it a dozen times before, but this time, ah. This time, there is debris in the air around it, artificial structures and satellites scattered through low orbit. This time, radio signals flutter and flash through the air. Something deep within the seedpod—something less organic than the seedpod itself, something less casually grown than the comet that protects it—sparks and flares to life, recording those signals, picking them quickly to pieces, like a centipede slicing up its prey with the ends of its razored legs.

The signals are good. The signs are good. The comet, which has flown past the planet so many times before, shudders, orbit suddenly adjusting from within rather than from without. It tilts, bending toward the gravitational field. It shakes, spinning wildly, shedding chunks of ice in all directions.

It is not a large comet. Not the sort of thing that attracts admirers or ends epochs. Only a few astronomers on the planet below notice its odd behavior. They take pictures, excited to capture a comet breaking up so close to the atmosphere; they notify their friends that something exciting is going on. They don’t think any more of it. Why should they? Comets die all the time. The sky is a living thing, a void filled with points of slow, deliberate vitality.

The comet spins one last time and plunges below the orbital horizon. Gravity takes over, greedily grabbing for the projectile, like a child snatching the first pieces of candy out of a broken piñata. The last of the ice is ripped away. The surface of the seedpod bulges and contracts, exposed to the elements for the first time since it was nestled in its icy nursery.

The skin, a deep, pitted purple the texture of fruit leather, begins to crack. Gravity continues to pull. The skin splits, a seam running from one end of the seedpod to the other. And then, with no further ceremony or incentive, it falls away entirely, scattering seeds in its wake.

They are surprisingly small, these interstellar wanderers, each about the size of a withered apple or a squirrel’s skull. They are wrinkled like walnuts, labyrinthine in their folds and channels. They fall, surrounded by bright coronas of fire as the friction of their descent ignites the thickening air around them, burning away the top layers of their protective skins.