Kaia Okafor was born on a Mars that already had weather. She grew up on a seaside promenade where nobody owned a helmet, in a city whose oldest building is a small greenhouse dome kept in a park under tall trees. The four bronze astronauts in the memorial plaza are, to most people, history. To Kaia they are family, and the album opens its last chapter with her laying tomato blossoms at their feet.
At the Olympus Mons observatory she finds a golden star with a small blue world beside it. The HELIX Council names her captain of the first ship to leave the solar system, a colossal starship built in a shipyard ring over a blue-green Mars and named NOVA, after the first child born there. It carries a crew of eight and a vault of seeds descended from Yuki Tanaka's first tomatoes.
On the spaceport plain her mother presses the old photograph of the first crew into her hand, the same one the museum kept under glass a century before. Her daughter Vela gives her a little toy rocket that a robot printed for a newborn three centuries ago. Kaia sets both beside her console in the captain's chair, puts her hand on the drive control, and takes the NOVA past Jupiter and Saturn. At the forward window the whole story arrives at once, and she smiles through tears as the ship becomes a point of light among the stars.
