History crawls across the dead cities of Mars, darkens their tunnels, rides their manufactured winds like a dandelion seed.

I cannot tell you how terrifying this is.

History is vulgar. The criminal disappears after the inventor. The artist, though: the artist disappears last.

Evolution is a poem written in the language of life. A poetic pattern retains inertia. Goes on. Grows. A vulgar one discards it, slows, stops: dies. Is overtaken by its betters. The artist knew this, I think. Knew, too, that perfect changelessness, eternal art, may only be attained by nullification.

The face of the artist (did he have a face?) will never be known. His (her? its?) crimes are, as crimes, forgotten. An instant after it was used, his great invention was dust. History has erased these things. I hope.

And yet I fear that the art remains.

It happened like this. I think.

Go back thirty or forty million years. Mars is wet, alive, and populous. As near as we can guess, seven sentient races share her golden grasslands and towering forests and (yes) vast webs of canals and cavernous underground cities. They have shared them, in peace, for perhaps a billion years.

Imagine that, earthling.

Now imagine it gone, gone so thoroughly that it might never have existed, in an instant.

Art as the death of history. The death of history as art.

I don't know, of course, but I would guess that he (she? it?) was bored. Bored by the now, pressed down by the weight of a billion years of the new, the old, the forgotten, the rediscovered. But. Did you know that boredom breeds creativity? Boredom makes art possible. But history is the death of art, as it is the death of the new.

So try to imagine, at the end of a billion years of history, the ultimate boredom of the ultimate artist that lead to the creation of the ultimate artwork: the perfect dissolution of all civilization. All of the now, and all of the past, erased. Or to put it another way: made able to be new again.

It must have been some kind of unthinkably tiny machine. Small enough to infiltrate the blood of the living and the infinitesimal crevices of the buildings, books, sculptures--everything. And then there must have been some kind of trigger. And then, only the red dust, everywhere and forever.

I wonder, did he (she? it?) announce to the world what was about to happen? Or was it part of the work that the world should die unknowing? I rather suspect the latter.

In any case, obviously, it failed. The work was flawed. Incomplete. Interrupted? Yes, every Martian died. Yes, we have only the barest, thinnest hints of what they looked like, what they thought, or who they were. All writing, if there was writing, was erased. No machine survived, unless the mindless guardians that the newspapers call "jellyfish" are machines. All of the cities fell to dust. All but one. Two, perhaps, if the reports out of Elysium are true.

But history won. Or: history has prevailed, so far.

This is, of course, only speculation. There is no evidence that such an artist ever lived, or that such a monstrous artwork was ever created. How could there be? And yet. And yet, what else explains what we have found, and what we have not found?

These are my thoughts, this morning, as I drink my café au lait and read about the mess in Europe and wonder if I will be called away from my work to fight. If my colleague Kitzhaber and I will one day face each other across the trenches. If war is humankind's own monstrous work of art.

I wonder every day, before I grasp my travel stone and find myself in the ruins beneath Olympus Mons, if this will be the day that I examine the wrong artifact, walk the wrong tunnel, open the wrong door, think the wrong thought, make the wrong sound--and loose upon two worlds a plague that, thirty million years ago, left one dry and dead.

It chills me to think that the artist may, in fact, have planned this. Mars must have known that life on Earth could one day produce a civilization to rival her own. Did the artwork truly fail, or did the artist purpose to leave just enough behind to tantalize? Has it merely been-- waiting?

Only speculation. But the history is there. Mars is a world of Pompeiis.

Where is her Vesuvius?