“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.