A century later. Dawn over a Mars city of great domes, and at its heart, preserved like a seed in amber, the original outpost.
It is a museum now. The first greenhouse dome and the landing capsule stand under a vast glass roof. In a display case: a faded photograph of four people at a small table, a little 3D-printed rocket, and a hand-lettered placard that says NOVA.
An old woman walks slowly through the hall. She is about a hundred years old, and beside her, patched and polished and still working, rolls HELIX-R1. Nova pauses before a small welded crib and smiles at something only she remembers. In the glass of the case her own eyes are reflected over the faces of the four who raised her.
Outside, her granddaughter bounds down the museum steps into the city. Mira Okafor has somewhere to be. A maglev train glides between the domes over gardens and crowds; from the air, dozens of domes spread across the red plain under a pale sky. Mira strides into the HELIX Terraforming Directorate and into a control room where a holographic Mars hangs in the air, wrapped in the plan: orbital mirrors, heating towers, processors. Her team work at their consoles with the schematics glowing in front of them. On Mira's desk sits an old photo of a young Nova with the original crew.
The music moves at the speed of geology. In orbit, a vast solar mirror array unfurls and catches the sun. Around the north polar cap stand giant heating towers. Atmospheric processors vent tall white plumes into the butterscotch sky. Outside in her sealed suit, Mira kneels and inspects a red rock, and on it, creeping across the stone, is dark green lichen. Mira and her engineers walk the plain beneath the towering processors, small as ants.
Night. Mira visits her grandmother. Nova opens an old photo album, and there they are on Sol 1: young Lena, James, Yuki and Mikhail, laughing at a table in a half-built dome. Nova takes out a worn paper seed packet from Yuki's vault and presses it into Mira's hands. Old R1 chirps beside them, lights blinking. Mira hugs her grandmother tightly. At the city's edge the two of them stand at the great window, and above them Earth is still a blue dot. Nova's eyes glisten, looking up.
Dawn of ignition day. Crowds fill the city terraces, faces turned to the sky. In the control room Mira's hand hovers over the ignition control. She presses it, and every screen lights.
In orbit the mirrors turn and focus a beam of sunlight on the pole. The ice cap glows; vast plumes of steam erupt. The processors roar and their plumes thicken into the sky. Over the city the sky darkens, and for the first time in the history of the planet, clouds begin to form. Faces in the crowd look up, a child on her father's shoulders. Nova watches from her window with one hand on R1. The first real clouds roll over the domes.
Mira runs out through an airlock in her sealed suit. Lightning flickers inside the new clouds. And then the first raindrops strike the red dust.
Rain streams down the dome glass and the crowd inside erupts. Mira stands outside with her face to the sky, rain splashing on her sealed visor, laughing. Behind the glass Nova weeps and smiles, a hundred years old, watching water fall on the world she was born on.
Mira kneels and presses one of Yuki's seeds into the wet red soil.
Wide: rain sweeping across the plain, the city glowing beyond it. A single green shoot in the wet soil, rain falling on it. And then the long view, from orbit: Mars with its first white cloud bands, and around its edge a thin haze of blue.
