''And this gigantic project was perfectly natural work to them. At one stop on the piste Maya and Diana got out and drove with some friends of Diana's out onto one of the ridges of the Zea Dorsa, which ran out onto the southeast quarter of the basin floor. Now most of these dorsa were peninsulas running out under another ice lobe, and Maya looked down at the crevasse-riven glaciers to each side and tried to imagine a time when the surface of the sea would in fact lie hundreds of meters overhead, so that these craggy old basalt ridges would be nothing but blips on some ship's sonar, home to starfish and shrimp and krill and extensive varieties of engineered bacteria. That time was not far off, amazing though it was to realize it. But Diana and her friends, these in particular of Greek ancestry, or was it Turkish---these young Martian dowsers were not awed by this imminent future, nor by their project's vastness. It was their work, their life---to them it was human scale, there was nothing unnatural about it. On Mars, simply enough, human work consisted of pharaonic projects like this one. Creating oceans. Building bridges that made the Golden Gate look like a toy. They weren't even watching this ridge, which would only be visible for a while longer---they were talking about other things, mutual friends in Sukhumi, that sort of thing.
'This is a stubendous act!' Maya told them sharply. 'This is magnitudes bigger than anything people have been able to do before! This sea is going to be the size of the Caribbean! There's never been any project anything like this on Earth---no project! Not even close!''
A pleasant oval-faced woman with beautiful skin laughed. 'I don't give a damn about Earth,' she said.''