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themselves.”
    They had drunk the bottle dry. Snow opened
the other; Jackal watched her face, the quiet satisfaction as she made
short work of the cork and collapsed the nail back into the bone and
steel pocket built inside her fingertip.
    “How do you know that's who you really
are?” Jackal asked finally.
    Snow nodded. “That's the same question as
the one you asked before, about names.” Jackal blinked: she had
forgotten. She was struck again by Snow's ability to connect one idea
to another: she imagined Snow's mind as an Escher construct, like the
series of waterfalls that flowed back up into themselves, nothing ever
lost.
    “It's funny that we don't talk about names
in the web,” Snow said. “Maybe they're just so much a part of who we
are that we don't wonder about them. You've always been Jackal to me. I
can barely remember a time when you were Ren.” She peered at Jackal.
“Why did you choose Jackal? You could've had any name you wanted, why
that one?”
    It was full dark now; still early, but the
black sky and full moon and the phosphorescent surf had the feeling of
late night, remote and slightly out of tune. It reminded her of a day
she had come unexpectedly upon Donatella in one of the corporate
offices, and the dislocating instant before her mother recognized her.
The night world looked on her with the same blankness she had seen in
her mother's eyes.
    “It'll start getting cold soon,” she told
Snow. “Can you feel it coming on? I hated being cold when I was little.
I didn't understand how other people could bear it. Then I figured out
that they couldn't—that's why they put on a hundred layers of clothes
and drank hot soup all the time. And I don't like being bundled up, I
can't move with so many layers under my arms, and anything tight around
my neck makes me feel like I can't breathe. So now being cold is really
a choice to not wrap myself up like something that's been rolled in too
much dough.
    “But I didn't know that when I was little.
I just spent months being angry with the weather and with my parents
for making me go out in it.” She shook her head, remembering.
    Snow smiled and passed her the bottle. “I
can picture it. Grumpy little Jackal.”
    “Grumpy little Ren. Jackal came later.”
    “You didn't have the name, but you were
still the person who hated being cold.”
    Jackal considered this. “Okay,” she
answered finally. “But it did make a difference about the name. In
February after I turned twelve, when it was decided that our web names
would be nature-based, my mother started dragging in all the books and
holomovies she could find. We went to the zoo and the arboretum seven
times that month so that I could make an informed decision.”
    “Your mother likes to have a plan,” Snow
said dryly.
    “You have no idea. She researched nature
symbology in world religions. She dug up information on the way that
various animals are regarded culturally by the member countries of the
Earth Government Permanent Council. She said that it was important that
my name be a symbol that everyone in the world could relate to, could
draw some measure of hope from. She even got one of the Jungians from
Educational Games to talk to her about the iconic roles of elements and
weather descriptives in the unconscious.”
    “She's got the determination gene.”
    “She's got it twice. So eventually she
drew up a shortlist of names, ranked in order of maximum cross-cultural
positive impact combined with religious inferences of leadership,
strength, and wisdom. Stop laughing.”
    “I can't. Really, I can't…here, take this
before I spill any more.” Jackal smiled and drank.
    Snow said, “I guess Mouse wasn't at the
top of the list.”
    “Nope.”
    “Emu.”
    Jackal shook her head.
    “Swamp thing.”
    “If my mother had her way, you'd be
calling me Elephant.”
    Snow gave a delighted hoot, and Jackal
began to giggle helplessly. They ended up on their backs in the sand,
heads together, their