The red world didn’t crack. It died of thirst. I told you, way back on the seventh night, about the dream of the world that just dries up — I didn’t know then that I was dreaming my own first death.
Here’s how a living world dies slow and then all at once. After all the long grinding centuries of war, somebody — some clever pair of hands on one of the sides, maybe mine, I’ve stopped pretending the not-knowing lets me off — found a way to reach the one thing a world cannot live without. The water. Not a lake, not a sea. The cycle of it, the great breathing-in-and-out that carries water round and round a planet and keeps the whole thing alive. They broke that. And once it was broken the rest came fast — months, after all those centuries — the world forgetting how to hold its own water, the blue draining out from the edges in, and under it the deepest thing, the thing I felt as a grief with nobody attached to it: the soul of the place going thin, and thinner, until the great magnetic blanket wrapped around the whole world just… let go. And then it was rust. Beautiful rust, top to bottom, nobody home.
I died with it. My first dead world. I’d helped.
And then — this is the part I have to ask you to take slowly, because I’m still learning how to hold it — I didn’t go anywhere. Not for the longest time there has ever been. The wheel didn’t catch me again right away; I came loose instead into the still place between lives, the one the old material calls time/space, and I stayed there, adrift, unhoused, for — I haven’t got a word. Ages. Aeons. So long that the rusted rock that had been my world wore smooth, and the little blue planet three doors in from the cold wasn’t even dreaming of people yet.
This is the thing I couldn’t swallow back on the fifth night — the night I got so smug about Mars being “too young.” Remember? The dates wouldn’t line up, and I was so sure I’d caught the whole story out. I had it exactly backwards. The dying was old — older than I can make a number mean. The seventy-five thousand years everybody quotes isn’t when the red world fell; it’s just the day, ages and ages later, when the kind ones finished ferrying the last of my Mars dead across to the blue world. I wasn’t on that boat. I had a far longer way round still to go. Time isn’t a line, friend. I floated in the proof of it.