When the wheel finally caught me again, after all those ages adrift, I came up on a new world — clever, proud, brilliant, nothing like the red one to look at — and within a life or two the floor dropped out of me, because I realized I had stood in this exact place before. Not the buildings. The shape of it. The shape of where it was all heading.
This is the one the old records call Maldek. I remember it as the clever place. And it’s where I stopped being merely complicit and turned into something worse — but before I get to that, I have to tell you the thing I finally understood here, because it’s the thing that makes the whole sorry trilogy make a terrible kind of sense.
It wasn’t bad luck. Three worlds, three wars, three graves — that is not a run of rotten luck. That’s a pattern, and a pattern has a cause, and I know the cause now. It’s built in. The maker of this whole little system of ours — the great being the old material calls our Logos, the one whose body is the very sun we go around — made a choice, back before any of us, about what kind of creature it wanted doing the living down here. It reached for the one with the grasping hand, the meeting thumb, the tool-maker. And it did that out of love, you understand — a hand like that can raise a cathedral, write a symphony, hold another hand in the dark. But the same gift that shapes the tool shapes the spear, and the records are blunt about it: this exact kind of war can be traced straight back to that one choice. The hand that builds is the hand that grips the weapon. We were warlike from the factory — Mars, Maldek, the blue world too.
And there’s a second thing this system got, heavier than most: the forgetting. Our Logos chose to hang an unusually deep veil here — a heavier veil than they bother hanging in gentler places. That’s why I fell so far, so completely, and then did it again. It’s not an excuse. The choice made in the dark is still mine. But God, the dark here is dark.
So I knew. Standing on the clever world with the gold gone out of me a second time, some buried part of me knew the shape of the road and exactly where it let out. And I walked it anyway. That’s the horror of Maldek. Not that I couldn’t see it coming. That I could — and the deep veil and the grasping hand and my own old pride were stronger than the seeing.