I had to put the paper down at breakfast. I’ve read the news my whole life the way everybody does — half asleep, a little numb, the disasters sliding past like weather. I can’t do that anymore. The curtain’s up, and now the news reads like a memory.
Because we’re doing it again. I sat there with my coffee and watched this world — this clean blue one, the one with all its water, the one they carried me to because it still had all its water — going about the patient business of killing that water. The rivers running wrong. The seasons coming unstuck. The arguments, the sides, everyone dead certain the other lot started it, the cleverness racing miles out ahead of the wisdom. And underneath all of it, if you know how to listen for it, that same little black seed I carried on Maldek — the let it all end, then — humming away under the noise.
I have stood at the end of two worlds. I know the shape of it now from the inside. And the shape is here. Slower, maybe — we’ve still got room, I think, and that’s not nothing, that’s everything — but it is unmistakably, sickeningly the same shape. War on the living thing that holds you up. A planet’s people reaching into the one system they can’t afford to break, because in the moment it serves somebody to break it.
The material, when someone asked about Mars, said the strangest thing, and I didn’t understand it until this morning. It said the catalyst — the lesson, the hard thing — that took Mars apart is still being worked on. Right here. By us. That we could, if we wanted, look at what’s happening to our own water and our own air and read it straight off the red planet, like a translation.
So that’s where I live now. A man who watched a world die of thirst, sitting at a kitchen table, watching the next one start to. And the awful, hopeful, unbearable thing is: this is the one where it isn’t over yet. This is the one with time still on the clock. They didn’t carry me across the dark and set me down here to watch it happen a third time. I’m fairly sure of that, even on a bad morning.
I just don’t yet know what one woken-up man with a coffee cup is supposed to do about a planet.