“Just the part I watch over,” Casseia explained with a laugh.

And she gave me her own special tour, treating me like a granddaughter. There was such a gleam in her eyes when she stopped the tractor beneath an aqueduct bridge. We sealed our helmets and got out, looking up at the huge deep-red petals of the flowers, as wide as I was tall, clustered the length of a pier which stretched thirty meters into the blue-black sky. The great glassy liquid-filled vines stretched across the ridges and hummocks and deep valleys like cables on a bridge. A full-grown man could walk through these vines, if they were emptied of their slow sugary sap.

“My husband and I saw the first signs of old Martian life returning,” Majumdar said.

“I know,” I answered, too smart. “They told us about it in school.”

“How gratifying. Have you read my book?”

“Of course!”

She looked away, shaking her head slowly. “Lovely flowers, but mostly futile. They miss the services of glider bees… but they are pretty, aren’t they?”

I said I thought they were beautiful.

“Well, the arbeiters pollinate a few of them each year, and I’m allowed to harvest the fruit, and sell them, and eat what I want myself. One does me for a year.”

She took me up to a broad pier and placed my gloved hand on the solid deep green surface. “Here’s something for keeps,” she said, “They’re half a billion years old, you know, and these are little more than babies.”

Years after Casseia Majumdar died, I visited the statues and the plaque placed on a flat rocky plain, open to the sky, near the University of Mars Sinai .

The plaque rests at the feet of statues of Ti Sandra Erzul and Casseia Majumdar (who steps forward with an intense expression, as if alarmed or puzzled, hand out) and Charles Franklin and the rest of the Olympians.

The plaque lists their names, and says:

While I read the plaque, the ground shivered with a small marsquake. The statues did not sway, though I did. And the sky was bluer still.