“No reason,” Hiroko said impassively. “Stay if you want. Get out your lectern and call up Thermal Engineering, page one oh five oh. We’ll model Zygote Dome for example. Tell me what is the warmest point under the dome?”
Nirgal and Jackie attacked the problem, competing and yet side by side. He was so happy she was there that he could hardly remember the problem, and Jackie raised a finger before he had even organized his thinking about it. And she laughed at him, a bit scornful but also pleased. Through all these enormous changes in them both there remained in Jackie that capacity for infectious joy, that laughter from which it was so painful to be exiled. . . .
“Here is a question for next time,” Hiroko said to them. “All the names for Mars in the areophany are names given to it by Terrans. About half of them mean fire star in the languages they come from, but that is still a name from the outside. The question is, what is Mars’s own name for itself?”
• • •
Several weeks later Coyote came through again, which made Nirgal both happy and nervous. Coyote took a morning teaching the children, but fortunately he treated Nirgal the same as all the rest. “Earth is in very bad shape,” he told them as they worked on vacuum pumps from the liquid-sodium tanks in the Rickover, “and it will only get worse. That makes their control over Mars all the more dangerous to us. We’ll have to hide until we can cut ourselves free of them entirely, and then stand safe to the side while they descend into madness and chaos. You remember my words here, this is a prophecy as true as truth.”
“That isn’t what John Boone said,” Jackie declared. She spent many of her evening hours exploring John Boone’s AI, and now she pulled out the box from her thigh pocket, and with only the briefest search for a passage, the friendly voice from the box was saying, “Mars will never be truly safe until Earth is too.”
Coyote laughed raucously. “Yes, well, John Boone was like that, wasn’t he. But you note he is dead, while I’m still here.”
“Anyone can hide,” Jackie said sharply. “But John Boone got out there and led. That’s why I’m a Boonean.”
“You’re a Boone and a Boonean!” Coyote exclaimed, teasing her. “And Boonean algebra never did add up. But look here, girl, you have to understand your grandfather better than that if you want to call yourself a Boonean. You can’t make John Boone into any kind of dogma and be true to what he was. I see other so-called Booneans out there doing just that, and it makes me laugh when it doesn’t make me foam at the mouth. Why, if John Boone were to meet you and talk to you for even just an hour, then at the end of that time he would be a Jackie-ist. And if he met Dao and talked to him, then he would become a Daoist, maybe even a Maoist. That’s just the way he was. And that was good, you see, because what it did was put the responsibility for thinking back onto us. It forced us to make a contribution, because without that Boone couldn’t operate. His point was not just that everyone can do it, but that everyone should do it.”
“Including all the people on Earth,” Jackie replied.
“Not another quick one!” Coyote cried. “Oh you girl, why don’t you leave these boys of yours and marry me now, I got a kiss like this vacuum pump, here, come on,” and he waved the pump at her and Jackie knocked it aside and shoved him back and ran, just for the fun of the chase. She was now the fastest runner in Zygote bar none, even Nirgal with all his endurance could not sprint the way she did, and the kids laughed at Coyote as he skipped after her; he was pretty swift himself for an ancient, and he turned and jinked and went after them all, growling and ending up at the bottom of a pile-on, crying “Oh my leg, oh I’m going to get you for that, you boys are just jealous of me because I’m going to steal your girl away, oh! Stop! Oh!”
This kind of teasing made Nirgal uncomfortable, and Hiroko didn’t like it either. She told Coyote to stop, but he just laughed at her. “You’re the one that’s gone and made yourself a little incest camp,” he said. “What are you going to do, neuter them?” He laughed at Hiroko’s dark expression. “You’re going to have to farm them out soon, that’s what you’re going to have to do. And I might as well get some of them.”
Hiroko dismissed him, and soon after that he was off on a trip again. And the next time Hiroko taught, she took all the kids to the bathhouse and they got in the bath after her and sat on the slick tiles in the shallow end, soaking in the hot steamy water while Hiroko spoke. Nirgal sat next to Jackie’s long-limbed naked body which he knew so well, including all its dramatic changes of the past year, and he found that he was unable to look at her.