The first world I went down into — the very first, the head of the whole long fall — wasn’t the broken rock you’re picturing. I have to keep saying that to myself, because even I forget it: it was alive. Red, yes, but green and blue under the red, with water that moved and weather that changed its mind and people, real people, with faces and families and clever, clever hands.
That’s the first thing I noticed, settling into a life there behind new eyes, still trailing the gold I was already forgetting: the hands. Everybody had them — these marvelous grasping hands, a thumb that could meet every finger, hands that could make anything. And they did. Tools and music and cities. I remember thinking: what a gift. What a thing the Maker did, handing out hands like these.
I know now what else hands like that are for. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Because here’s what worlds with hands like that do. They build, and then they build something to guard what they built, and then they build something to take what the other fellow built, and the gift that could make anything starts making weapons, and nobody can ever quite say when the line got crossed. It’s slow. That’s the thing about how the red world went — it wasn’t a bang, it was generations. The air a little browner each lifetime, the rivers a little meaner, every side dead certain the other side started it.
And I was in it. Not above it, not watching from a ship — in it, with one of those clever pairs of hands, taking my own people’s side because they were mine and the others were the others, telling myself it was survival, just survival, you do what you have to do to keep your own alive. I wasn’t proud yet. Pride came later, on the next world. On this one I was only complicit, which is its own quiet kind of ruin — going along, keeping my head down, oiling the machine a little every day and calling it getting by.
I’d come to lift these people toward the light. Instead I took up the work and joined the war, and somewhere in there the gold went out of me like a tide going down a beach — so slow you’d swear the water wasn’t moving at all.