Days passed, one like the next. Nirgal found it very comfortable to travel with Art and Nadia; they were both even-tempered, calm, funny; Art was 51 and Nadia 120, and Nirgal only 12, which was around 25 Terran years; but despite the discrepancies in age they interacted as equals. Nirgal could test his ideas on them freely, and they never laughed or scoffed, even when they saw problems and pointed them out. And in fact their ideas meshed fairly well, for the most part. They were, in Martian political terms, moderate green assimilationists— Booneans, Nadia called it. And they had similar temperaments, which was something that Nirgal had never felt before about anyone, not for the rest of his family in Gamete or his friends in Sabishii.

As they talked, night after night, they dropped in briefly on some of the big sanctuaries of the south, introducting Art to the people there, and broaching the idea of a meeting or congress. They took him to Bogdanov Vishniac, and amazed him with the giant complex built deep into the mohole, so much bigger than any other sanctuary. Art’s pop-eyed face was as eloquent as a speech, and brought back to Nirgal most acutely the feeling he had had as a child when he first visited it with Coyote.

The Bogdanovists were clearly interested in a meeting, but Mikhail Yangel, one of the only one of Arkady’s associates to survive ‘61, asked Art what the long-range purpose of such a meeting would be.

“To retake the surface.”

“I see!” Mikhail’s eyes were wide. “Well, I’m sure you would have our support for that! People have been afraid to even bring that subject up.”

“Very good,” Nadia told Art as they drove on north. “If the Bogdanovists support a meeting, then it will probably happen. Most of the hidden sanctuaries are either Bogdanovist or else heavily influenced by them.”

From Vishniac they visited the sanctuaries around Holmes Crater, known as the “industrial heartland” of the underground. These colonies were also mostly Bogdanovist, with any number of small social variations among them, influenced by early Martian social philosophers such as the prisoner Schnelling, or Hiroko, or Marina, or John Boone. The Francophone utopians in Prometheus, on the other hand, had structured their settlement on ideas taken from sources ranging from Rousseau and Fourier to Foucault and Nemy, subtleties Nirgal had not been aware of when he had first visited. Currently they were being strongly influenced by the Polynesians who had recently arrived on Mars, and their big warm chambers sported palm trees and shallow pools, so that Art said it seemed more like Tahiti than Paris.

• • •

In Prometheus they were joined by Jackie Boone herself, who had been left there by friends traveling through. She wanted to go directly on to Gamete, but she was willing to travel with Nadia rather than wait longer, and Nadia was willing to take her. So when they took off again, they had Jackie with them.