entertainments, their own little tradition, you know, they aren’t going to lift a finger.”
“But …” Nirgal said, and faltered.
Coyote saw the expression on his face and laughed. “Hey, who knows? Pretty soon now they’ll have another elevator in place up on Pavonis Mons, and then very likely they’ll start to screw things up all over again, those greedy bastards. And you young folks, maybe you won’t want Earth calling the shots here. We’ll see when the time comes. Meanwhile we’re having fun, right? We’re keeping the flame.”
That night Coyote stopped the car, and told Nirgal to suit up. They went out and stood on the sand, and Coyote turned him around so that he was facing north. “Look at the sky.”
Nirgal stood and watched; and saw a new star burst into existence, there over the northern horizon, growing in a matter of seconds to a long white-tailed comet, flying west to east. When it was about halfway across the sky the blazing head of the comet burst apart, and bright fragments scattered in every direction, white into black.
“One of the ice asteroids!” Nirgal exclaimed.
Coyote snorted. “There’s no surprising you, is there boy! Well, I’ll tell you something you didn’t know; that was ice asteroid 2089 C, and did you see how it blew up there at the end? That was a first. They did that on purpose. Blowing them up when they enter the atmosphere allows them to use bigger asteroids without endangering the surface. And that was my idea! I told them to do that myself, I put an anonymous suggestion in the AI at Greg’s Place when I was in there messing with their comm system, and they jumped on it. They’re going to do them that way all the time now. There’ll be one or two every season like that, they’re thickening the atmosphere pretty fast. Look at how the stars are trembling. They used to do that all the nights of Earth. Ah, boy … It’ll happen here all the time too, someday. Air you can breathe like a bird in the sky. Maybe that will help us to change the order of things on this world. You can never tell about things like that.”
Nirgal closed his eyes, and saw red afterimages of the ice meteor score his eyelids. Meteors like white fireworks, holes boring straight into the mantle, volcanoes … He turned and saw the Coyote hopping over the plain, small and thin, his helmet strangely large on him as if he were a mutant or a shaman wearing a sacred animal head, doing a changeling dance over the sand. This was the Coyote, no doubt about it. His father!
Then they had circumnavigated the world, albeit high in the southern hemisphere. The polar cap rose over the horizon and grew, until they were under the overhang of ice, which did not seem as tall as it had at the start of the journey. They circled the ice to home, and drove into the hangar, and got out of the little boulder car that had become so well-known to Nirgal in the previous two weeks, and walked stiffly through the locks and back down the long tunnel into the dome, and suddenly they were among all the familiar faces, being hugged and cosseted and questioned. Nirgal shrank shyly from the attention, but there was no need, Coyote told all their stories for him, and he only had to laugh, and deny responsibility for what they had done. Glancing past his kin, he saw how small his little world really was; the dome was less than five kilometres across, and 250 metres high out over the lake. A small world.
When the homecoming was over he walked out in the early morning glow, feeling the happy nip of the air and looking closely at the buildings and bamboo stands of the village, in its nest of hills and trees. It all looked so strange and small. Then he was out on the dunes and walking out to Hiroko’s place, with the gulls wheeling overhead, and he stopped frequently just to see things. He breathed in the chill kelp-and-salt scent of the beach; the intense familiarity of the scent triggered a million memories at once, and he knew he was home.
But home had changed. Or he had. Between the attempt to save Simon and the trip with Coyote, he had become a youth apart from the rest; the distinguishing adventures that he had so longed for had come, and their only result was to exile him from his friends. Jackie and Dao hung together tighter than ever, and acted like a shield between him and all the younger sansei. Quickly Nirgal realised that he hadn’t really wanted to be different after all. He only wanted to melt back into the closeness of his little pack, and be one with his siblings.
But when he came among them they went silent, and Dao would lead them off, after the most awkward encounters imaginable. And he was left to return to the adults, who began to keep him with them in the afternoons, as a matter of course. Perhaps they meant to spare him more of his pack’s hard treatment, but it only had the effect of marking him even more. There was no cure for it. One day, walking the beach unhappily in the grey and pewter twilight of an autumn afternoon, it occurred to him that his childhood was gone. That was what this feeling was; he was something else now, neither adult nor child, a solitary being, a foreigner in his own country. The melancholy realisation had a peculiar pleasure to it.
One day after lunch Jackie stayed behind with him and Hiroko, who had come in for the day to teach, and demanded to be included in her afternoon lesson. “Why should you teach him and not me?”
“No reason,” Hiroko said impassively. “Stay if you want. Get out your lectern and call up Thermal Engineering, page 1050. 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 organised 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
