Then the first telescopes gave us a closer look, and we saw the little orange disk, with its white poles and dark patches spreading and shrinking as the long seasons passed. Yes, for thousands of years Mars was a sacred power in human affairs and its color made it a dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart. So perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight on the tongue – Nirgal, Mangala, Auqàkuh, Harmakhis – they sound as if they were even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before. It seemed to be saying something with all that. Now everybody knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how for all the generations of prehistory it was one of the chief lights in the sky, because of its redness and fluctuating intensity, and the way it stalled in its wandering course through the stars, and sometimes even reversed direction. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had. There were no witnesses – except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history. But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. That’s not to say that nothing had ever happened.

Red mars robinson