Mars

Listen to the wisdom of the Old Ones:

The red world and the blue are brothers. They were born together in the seething maelstrom of dust and gas spinning out from the heart of the vast cloud that was to become Father Sun.

For uncountable time each world was engulfed in endless violence. Monsters roared down out of the sky, pounding the worlds mercilessly in a holocaust of terrible explosions. Under such awesome bombardment there could be no solid ground; the rocks themselves were liquid bubbling magma as the fiery rain from the sky went on and on, blotting out the radiance of the newly bright Father Sun with steaming clouds that covered each world from pole to pole.

Slowly, with the godlike patience of the stars themselves, slowly their surfaces cooled. Solid land took form, bare rock, hard and harsh and lifeless. Worse than the desert where The People live; much worse. There was no tree, no blade of grass, not even a drop of water.

Deep below their crusts both worlds were still liquid-hot with the energy of their violent creation. Water trapped beneath the ground boiled up, sweated from the depths like droplets beading a gourd in the heat of summer. The water evaporated into the thin film of atmosphere swaddling each newborn world. Cooling rain began to spatter onto the naked rocks, running into rivulets, streams, raging torrents that gouged the rocks out of their paths and tore huge gashes in the land.

On the bigger of the two worlds mighty oceans grew, filling deep rocky basins with water. The smaller world formed broad shallow lakes, but gradually they faded away into the thin, cold atmosphere or sank out of sight below the surface of the land.

Because of its glistening wide oceans the larger of the two worlds took on a deep blue tint. The smaller world slowly turned into a dusty, windblown desert as its waters sank into its ground. It turned rust-red.

Life arose on the blue world, first in the seas and later on dry land. Gigantic beasts roamed forests and marshes, only to disappear forever. At last The People came to the blue world—First Man and First Woman emerged, standing tall and proud in the bright sunlight. Their children multiplied. Some of them wondered about the world in which they lived and about the stars that dotted the night.

They turned their intelligent eyes to the red gleam in the sky that marked their brother world and wondered what it was. They watched it carefully, and the other stars too, and tried to understand the workings of the heavens.

To The People, the stars spoke of the endless cycles of the seasons, the time to plant, the time of the rains. The red world held no special fascination for them. They called it merely “Big Star.”

But to the Anglos, steeped in conquest and killing, whenever their pale eyes turned to the red gleam in the sky that marked their brother world they trembled with thoughts of blood and death. They named the red world after their god of war.

Mars.