You already know how this ends. I told you back on the seventh night, before I understood I was telling you my own confession. One world cracks open like an egg.
This is that world. This is the egg.
On the clever world we had learned the one trick I haven’t told you yet — the worst thing those grasping hands ever made. We learned to reach down past the dirt and the rock, all the way into the part of a planet that’s alive, the living core of it, and to lay our hands on that heart. Both sides learned it. And once both sides can touch the heart of the world, the world is already over; it’s just a question of which frightened genius does it first. And I’ve sat with this a long time, and I have to be honest with you about the worst part, the thing I’d give anything not to know: it wasn’t only an accident. Underneath all the strategy there was something that wanted it. A little black seed of let it all end, then — present from way back, from the very start, riding under the cleverness the entire time. The material, when somebody finally asked, said as much: that the suicidal notion was there at the inception of it. I felt it. I carried a grain of it myself.
So the heart of the world was touched the wrong way one last time, and the second planet I’d come to save came apart, and everybody on it died in a single breath, me included — and here is the thing I have to put down even though it costs me to write it:
in the half-second it happened, some buried, ruined part of me was proud. Proud we’d done something that big. That’s the rot at the dead center of the whole story. That’s what “consciously unloving” finally turns into if you feed it long enough. Not hate. Pride. Pride big enough to be glad at the end of a world.
What’s left of that place is a belt of broken rock, going round your sun to this day. People look at it through telescopes. I used to live there. I helped break it. I’m so sorry. I still don’t know who I’m saying it to.