And after that they had a little hobby. Really it was remarkable how varied the colors of the Odessa sunsets were, affecting sky, sea, the whitewashed walls of the town; endless variation. Much more variation than there were names. The poverty of language in this area was a constant surprise to Sax. Even the poverty of the color chart. The eye could perceive perhaps ten million different shades, he read; the color handbook he was referring to had 1,266 samples in it; and only a very small fraction of these had names. So most evenings they held up their forearms, and tried different colors against the sky, and found a patch that matched fairly well, and it was a nondescript; no name. They made up names: 2 October the 11th Orange, Aphelion Purple, Lemon Leaf, Almost Green, Arkady’s Beard; Maya could go on forever, she was really good at it. Then sometimes they would find a named patch matching the sky (for a moment, anyway) and they would learn the real meaning of a new word, which Sax found satisfying. But in that stretch between red and blue, English had surprisingly little to offer; the language just was not equipped for Mars. One evening in the dusk, after a mauvish sunset, they went through the chart methodically, just to see: purple, magenta, lilac, amaranth, aubergine, mauve, amethyst, plum, violaceous, violet, heliotrope, clematis, lavender, indigo, hyacinth, ultramarine— and then they were into the many words for the blues. There were many, many blues. But for the red-blue span that was it, except for the many modulations of the list, royal violet, lavender gray, and so on.

One evening the sky was clear, and after the sun had gone down behind the Hellespontus Mountains, but was still illuminating the air over the sea, it turned a very familiar rusty brown orange; Maya seized his arm in her clawlike grip, “That’s Martian orange, look, that’s the color of the planet from space, what we saw from the Ares! Look! Quick, what color is that, what color is that?”

They looked through the charts, arms held up before them. “Paprika red.” “Tomato red.” “Oxide red, now that should be right; it’s oxygen’s affinity for iron makes that color after all.”

“But it’s way too dark, look.”

“True.”

“Brownish red.”

“Reddish brown.”

Cinnamon, raw sienna, Persian orange, sunburn, camel, rust brown, Sahara, chrome orange . . . they began to laugh. Nothing was quite right. “We’ll call it Martian orange,” Maya decided.

“Fine. But look how many more names there are for these colors than there are for the purples, why is that?”