I don’t want to change.

You don’t want to stop loving Mars.

Yes. No.

You will never stop loving Mars. After metamorphosis the rock still exists. It’s usually harder than the parent rock, yes? You will always love Mars. Your task becomes seeing the Mars that always endures, under thick or thin, hot or cold, wet or dry. Those are ephemeral, but Mars endures. These floods happened before, isn’t it true?

Yes.

Mars’s own water. All these volatiles are Mars’s own volatiles.

Except the nitrogen from Titan.

Yes yes. You sound like Sax.

Come on.

You two are more alike than you think. And all we volatiles are Mars’s own.

But the destruction of the surface. It’s wrecked. Everything’s changed.

That’s areology. Or the areophany.

It’s destruction. We should have tried living here as it was.

But we didn’t. And so now being red means working to keep conditions as much like the primal conditions as possible, within the framework of the areophany— the project of biosphere creation that allows humans the freedom of the surface, below a certain altitude. That’s all being a Red can mean now. And there are a lot of Reds like that. I think you worry that if you ever change in even the slightest degree, then that will be the end of redness everywhere. But redness is bigger than you. You helped start it and define it, but you were never the only one. If you had been no one would ever have listened to you.

They didn’t!

Some did. Many did. Redness will go on no matter what you do. You could retire, you could become someone entirely different, you could become lime green, and redness would always go on. It might even become something more red than you ever imagined.

I’ve imagined it as red as it can get.

All those alternatives. We’ll live one of them and then go on. The process of coadaptation with this planet will go on for thousands of years. But here we are now. At every moment you should ask, what now is lacking? and work at some acceptance of your current reality. This is sanity, this is life. You have to imagine your life from here on out.

I can’t. I’ve tried and I can’t.