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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
71
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:
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To all who helped bring us here, that we might grow as the flowers in the sky,
in freedom, under the New Sun.
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.
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