We spent much of the next two weeks accepting or dodging interviews. Messages flooded in: offers of vast fortunes for a whole cyst (Ilya did not personally own any of the cysts he had found — they belonged to Erzul, of course); requests for information from schoolchildren; offers to turn our story into LitVids and sims.

No one in the general public seemed to care that the plasm from the cyst died before we got it back to Olympus . The “Martian” degenerated in a few hours to simple proteins and monosaccharides, remarkable enough coming from clay and quartz and mineralrrich water, but hardly the stuff of romance.

We had demonstrated two things, however. The cysts might still be viable, and the genetic information for a Martian ecos was contained in the mineral formations within the cyst, locked in the minute intricacies of clay and quartz. There had probably never been extra organs to help ecos reproduction.

But cyst fragments could not reproduce even a portion of an ecos. Whole cysts were necessary.

Biologists could understand some of the process — but not all of it. The trick to reproduction was still elusive. Whole cysts simply did not respond to being doused in water. There was some combination of water, water-soluble minerals, and temperature that triggered the cysts, and the combination had existed in Cyane Sulci, but no attempt to duplicate those conditions in a lab worked.

Back in the sulci, the gray ice dust had long since broken down and soaked into the soil or evaporated; the snake-canyoned landscape offered no immediate clues. The moment had passed, and no cyst, buried or dug up, had germinated successfully.

Perhaps their time was over, after all.

I received a message from Charles.

My reply — brief and polite — went unanswered. I was frankly too busy to worry. My new life held many more satisfactions than my old, chief among them Ilya, who handled the brief nova of our celebrity with high wit. He was not self-impressed.

He answered mail to schoolchildren before he replied to scientists. I helped him frame the replies.

The celebrity glow faded. We declined the sims and LitVid project offers, knowing few if any would have come to fruition, and we did not need the money. Erzul BM was doing well and I was being drawn back into management, and there would soon be little enough time for us to be together.

Being close to death had triggered something deep in me. It took me weeks to sort it out. I was subjected to a string of nightmares — dreams of choking, or ecstatic flight reduced to terror as I plunged into the red soil and smothered… I sometimes woke beside Ilya, tangled in bedclothes, wondering if I would need some sort of therapy. But fear of our close call was not the cause of my nightmares.

I told myself I simply wanted to work at a job that kept me near Ilya and let me live the emotionally rich life of a lawbonded woman, and stay out of the LitVid glare wherever possible (something we had certainly failed at). Looking back, however, I see clearly that my surface wishes and my deep needs did not coincide. The lull after our crisis on Earth was just that — not a permanent state of affairs, but a respite, and no one could know how long it would last. If Mars was going to stand up against Mother Earth, no capable Martian could step aside and live a disengaged private life.

Ti Sandra kept hinting of larger plans.

I had learned on Earth that I had some small ability in politics; my nightmares were caused by the growing in me of a sense of responsibility. That new sense was, certainly nurtured by Ti Sandra, but it was not planted by her.

Ilya would have been happy to have me share his trips and researches for the rest of our days, but I had already resisted…

Not that Ilya himself bored me. I loved him so much I was sometimes afraid. How would I live if I should lose him? I thought of my father after my mother’s death, half his life drained, of his long quiet lapses into reverie when Stan and Stan’s wife Jane and I visited, and his conversations always leading back to Mother…

There were hideous risks in love, but Ilya did not feel them. He focused so intently on his work that a long tractor ride through untraveled territory to reach a possible ancient aquifer (and, coincidentally, fossil site) caused him not a femto of personal worry. To be left alone, helping manage the Erzul businesses, while he went on such trips was more than I could stand. So more and more I distracted myself by taking consulting jobs away from Olympus Station, meeting with syndics and managers from other BMs, trading vague probes of intent with regard to the future shape of Martian economics and politics. Once again, members of the Council were trying to get the syndics to talk about unification. The air was rich with speculation.

Ilya did not worry about me when I was gone. When I accused him of not caring, he told me, “I enjoy your absences!” and when I pouted melodramatically, he said, “Because our reunions ars so fierce.”

And they were.

Legend surrounds many of these people now, but of all of them, Ti Sandra seemed most suited to be legendary, even then.

I saw her frequently in meetings held to vet the family business deals. We worked together well, and her husband Paul, Ilya, and I often dined together. Paul and Ilya could spend hours speculating about ancient Mars, Paul making wild and unfounded assertions — -intelligent life, legends of buried pyramids, underground cities — and Ilya laughingly following a middle course.

Ti Sandra and I talked of a new Mars.

Ti Sandra promoted me to be her assistant — a move which made me very nervous — and then appointed me as ambassador for Erzul to the five largest BMs.

“You’re famous,” she told me over strong jasmine tea in her office at Olympus Station. “You stand for something special about Mars, something our own that we all have in common. You’re well connected, from Majumdar, with close relatives transferred to Cailetet.” She was referring to Stan. “You have management arid political skills. You’ve been to Earth — I never have.”

“It was a disaster,” I reminded her.

“It was a step in a long process,” she rejoined. She spoke precisely, carefully considering her words, keeping direct eye contact. She had never been so serious before. “You seem happily married.”

“Very,” I said.

“And you seem to be able to spend some time apart from Ilya… working separately.”

“I miss him,” I said.

“I will be frank,” Ti Sandra said. “Because of your fame, you can help me… and help Erzul. You might have noticed I am an ambitious woman.”

I laughed. “You might have noticed I’m not,” I said.

“You are very capable. And you do not always know yourself. There is a person inside you who wants out, and who wants to do things that are important. But the right occasion, the proper colleagues, have eluded you… have they not?”