But then Mushi corrects, “Except ants.” How proud the day when Mushi rushed in to tell the young Apollo and the other Mojave ba’kids that even man’s greatest achievement, Space itself, was no longer a monopoly. The terraformers had found ants, stowaways in one of the nutrient shipments, which had escaped and built a colony in the new Mars soil, spiral tunnels woven like DNA around a leaking oxygen pipe. The first city on Mars was not built by humans, but under them.
