So last night Lara calls me and wakes me up and tells me to go up onto the roof of my apartment building and look at Mars. “It’s the best look you’re going to get for three hundred years,” she says.

I’m skeptical. I have lousy color vision, and planets all look the same to me. But I pull on some clothes and go upstairs and look southeast and MAN-SLAYING ARES; ARES THE SHIELD-PIERCER; ARES, SACKER OF TOWNS; ARES, INSATIABLE IN WAR it’s the brightest thing in the sky and it’s redder than a harvest moon.

Figure 1. Artist’s impression of Mars

Naturally I spent the rest of the night fitfully dreaming that I was a teenage colonist on an imperfectly terraformed Mars, being treated like an untouchable by the aristocractic third- and fourth-generation colonists; and waking up gasping, convinced that my lungs were atrophying like those of Manue in Walter Miller’s “Crucifixus Etiam” / “The Sower Does Not Reap”.

But it was worth it.