I meet some aliens from a world not too far away--near a ringed world, Saturn or a colder one. The aliens' home isn't a regular out there--it's either an interstellar wanderer or in a cometary orbit.

It's a conscious being, too.

Though the wanderer's far from our sun, a beam of energy relayed from Mercury tracks it and sustains its life--its sentience at least.

This alien world's done some things I disapprove of. But it tells me it soon must die: the beam will be cut off by a large, approaching object.

It's considered every possibility, but there's no safe way to prevent it. The masses involved are just too big.

So the world passes into shadow, the beam fails, and the world-soul dies. Though I disapproved of it, now I mourn. It died nobly: didn't try the desperate, dangerous measures it could have. They wouldn't have worked, but if it had tried to blast the interloper out of the way, splintered comets might've sprayed every planet in the solar system like nuclear buckshot.

So I bury my quarrel with this world: it died well.

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