And we have been looking backward, in this quiet Martian age. Documentaries abound on the Mars Underground. Our readers delight to bohemian tales of the unparalleled creativity of the Tharsis Uplift. Bar bands maul the old revolutionary songs. Pilgrimages to the Viking Museum at Utopia and the Shrine of the Relic on Olympus even rival ticket sales at Alien Face and its sister parks. For the first time since independence, Founders' names top the list for newborns: delivery rooms from Zubrino to Stanistan are filled with Margaritas and Pennys, Franks and Sams. Hardly a Shabaltana or a Harry to be found, these days.

Yet few parents really expect our children's lives to be as titanic as their namesakes. We Martians have become too parochial, too complacent, to excel. Our arts have become like our children's names, three-times-removed echoes of former glory. Every first-rate performance of the Lowelliad could be buried five times over in Alien Face themepark snowglobes. The Jovian moons have long since eclipsed our world as the center of science and innovation. Harmless utopians and Hawaiian-shirted Terran retirees are all that Mars is famous for these days.

And, of course, our fatuous and corrupt politicians. But of that, little more need be said.

How different things were in 2003 (TS), the last time Earth and Mars approached so closely. Then there was no Terran Opposition: no eyes, human or robotic, gazed up from our soil to the sight we greet each evening.

On Earth, the Martian Opposition was no fearsome political movement, but a mild astronomical curiosity. The New York Times marked the event in an editorial that was lovely fluff, alongside a paean to a neighborhood sports team, reserving the weight of meaning for the day's history-in-the-making. The blue world had no time for Mars: it was struggling with the growing Crisis, the fetal kicking of the coming imperium.

Our Founders' fortunes were again on the wane, at the nadir of another fifteen-year cycle tied to performance of the Terran technological economy. Some had been around since Viking, two cycles ago. Many famous names had come to the cause with the formation of the Mars Underground during the previous conjunction of prosperity and Martian enthusiasm.

The current cycle had peaked several years before, the one marked by Mars Pathfinder and the founding of the Mars Society (this author proudly claims membership in the Spawn of the Martian Revolution, having inherited a prized three-digit Founding Membership number from a direct ancestor).

After 9/11 and the birth of the Crisis, active interest dropped back to the bottom of the curve, as many became preoccupied by the struggle to survive amidst economic decline, fundamentalist terrorism and the first strikes of the coming planetary Administration.

Through it all, our ancestors struggled on. The Society held a small conference that year. Factionalism and poverty kept some away who would always rue having missed the first public performance by the only band to build a world, The Extremophiles. Some waited out the transit of Spirit and Opportunity, whose spectacular success the following year allowed the Founders to begrudgingly unite in support of plans for the Ares Expedition.

The rest is history, Earth's biggest export. History, of which the Founders bore so much together. History, which filled two toxic-waste tanks on the Ares alone, it seems.

Bickering, bloodshed, breakthrough, boomtown - all history now. Revolution, golden age, and gradual, grubby decline - all history, some of our own making, much engineered from the feedstocks so generously provided by the motherworld.

Today, Earth with all its history approaches close, but human progress has long since swept past us in its orbit. Human hopes ride with the Prometheus Expedition to Epsilon Eridani - but Prometheus was a product of the Triton Yards. A century ago, only Deimos's Singer Station could have launched humanity's best work, our brightest dream.

Today, Singer Station boasts no starships, but more retirement-home realtors per cubic kilometer than anywhere else in human space, all looking for the first crack at the tired-but-wealthy teeming masses of Earth's elderly emigrants. It is service of a sort, if not quite glory.

Earth and Mars have come around again, but humanity truly has moved forward. We rightly glorify our Founders, but as revisionist biographies finally have established, they were - mostly - even more cantankerous, single-minded, intolerant and combative than the Crisis-era norm. Still, we doubt that their sex lives were as colorful as Sage Grayson's lustily imaginative novel Mars Undercovers portrays them.

Worldbuilders are best observed from the base of their pedestal, long after their flesh has been transmuted into bronze and pigeon droppings. This column has long rued the loss of the pioneering spirit, of revolutionary ardor, of Tharsian heights of creative expression. But can we really imagine sharing a quiet caf� meal with the inventor of Mars Direct, the commander of the Ares, the architect of Port Heinlein?

Their lives - our history - reads like the stuff of children's adventure yarns. Endless generations of preteens hankering for adventure eagerly gobble Founders' tales, hungry for the addictive thrills of elation and despair. Expert wisdom holds that bloodthirsty pirates, warlords and prophets are best experienced between covers that can be closed come bedtime, and set aside for good come employment age.

But as we grow, we have been too quick to turn from the terrifying exploits of the Founders to the safe routine of our settled lives, to pooh-pooh the very tales that so thrilled us when our blood still ran rich with hormones. Besides, no matter how old and jaded we may become, this writer will always believe in the legend of Saint Christopher and the Rust Rose. Some things, after all, are sacred, some Founders of brighter bronze, even centuries on.

Meanwhile, the Prometheus crew seems as well-adjusted, kind, strong and cheerful as we would expect from carefully-crafted scions of the Outer Marches. No Red-Green split there, no petty demagoguery, no policy-driven weightless fisticuffs on the way to found their new world.

But probably, no epic poetry, no grand passion, no divine spark of Dorsa Brevia's political genius, no religious awakening like the First Olympiad. We Martians got the Founders we deserved, and all humanity is better for it.

Even if the Tritonians are too politely proud to take notice. We still do, and their legacy is ours to commemorate and to embody. Tomorrow's Terran Opposition gives us such an opportunity, to look back across the gulfs of space and time at the Old World they left behind in order to build our New World here.

So tonight, step outside and look to the southwest during the timeslip. Feel the tug of history from the motherworld. Then turn your back. Look up, and you may see the fading star of Prometheus on its way. History pulls us back, but humanity pushes on, ever on.

Turn again, and go back inside your bright warm home. Look down on sleeping little Pascal and Kelly. For the Founders' sake and the Republic's glory - and how long since you said that phrase aloud and meant it? - whisper them a tale of Martian greatness - in their generation, and in their time. Help them make some history to ship out to the motherworld and to the stars. What was close once may come around yet again.

The Spacefaring Web is a biweekly column � 2003 by John Carter McKnight, an Advocate of the Space Frontier Foundation Views expressed herein are strictly the author's and do not necessarily represent Foundation policy. Contact the author at [email protected]

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