Terra Incognita Read online

  “And then what? Go up into the Ponypiles in that weather?” He pointed at the low clouds.

  “We’ve got to go somewhere. We can’t stay here. And any other way’s liable to lead us straight into Oklahoma.”

  “All right,” he said, getting up on his pony. “Come on, Ev. We’re going.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait for Bult?” Ev said.

  “My shit, no. He’s already gotten us in enough trouble. Let him find his own way out. That goddamn Wulfmeier. You lead,” he said to me, “and we’ll follow.”

  “You stay right behind me,” I said, “and holler if you see something I don’t.”

  Like an anticline. Like an oil field.

  I looked at the screen, wishing it would show a path for us to follow, and started slowly across the plain, watching for seep and hoping the ponies wouldn’t suddenly go in knee-deep. Or decide to keel over.

  It started to drizzle, and then rain, and I had to wipe the screen off with my hand. “Bult’s following us,” Carson said when we were halfway to the spur.

  I looked back. He had his umbrella down and was kicking his pony to catch up.

  “What are we going to tell him?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Damn Wulfmeier. This is all his fault.”

  And mine, I thought. I should have recognized the signs in the terrain. I should have recognized the signs in Bult.

  The ground turned paler, and I ran a geological and got a mix of gypsum and sulfur in with the mudstone. I wondered if I could risk turning the transmitter back on, and about that time Useless stepped in seep over his paw. It started to drizzle again.

  It took us an hour and a half to get out of the oil field and the rain and up into the first hills of the spur. They were gypsum, too, eroded by the wind into flattened and whorled mounds that looked exactly like ponyshit. It apparently hadn’t rained as much up here. The gypsum was dry and powdery, and before we’d climbed fifty meters we were coated in pinkish dust and spitting plaster.

  I found a stream, and we waded the ponies up it to get the oil off their paws. They balked at the cold water and the incline, and I finally got off and walked Useless, yanking on its reins and cursing it every step of the way up.

  Bult had caught up. He was right behind Ev, dragging on his pony’s reins and watching Carson thoughtfully. Ev was looking thoughtful, too, and I hoped that didn’t mean he’d figured things out, but it didn’t look like it. He craned his neck to look at a shuttlewren flying reconnaissance above us.

  I needed to get the transmitter back on, but I wanted to make sure we were out of camera range of the anticline first. I dragged Useless up above a clear pool and into a little hollow with rocks on all sides, and unloaded the transmitter.

  Ev came up. “I’ve got to ask you something,” he said urgently, and I thought, Shit, I knew he was smarter than he looked, but all he said was “Is the Wall close to here?”

  I said I didn’t know, and he climbed up the rocks to look for himself. Well, I thought, at least he hadn’t said anything about how well Carson and I worked together in a crisis.

  I erased the subsurfaces and geologicals and reran the log to see how bad the damage was and then reconnected the transmitter.

  “Now what happened?” C.J. said. “And don’t tell me it was another dust storm. Not when it was raining.”

  “It wasn’t a dust storm,” I said. “I thought it was, but it was a wall of rain. It hit us before I could get the equipment covered.”

  “Oh,” she said as if I’d stolen her thunder. “I didn’t think you could have a dust storm in that mud you were going through.”

  “We didn’t,” I said. I told her where we were.

  “What are you doing up there?”

  “We got worried about a flash flood,” I said. “Did you get the subsurface and terrain?” I asked. “I was working on them when the rain hit.”

  There was a pause while she checked and I wiped my hand across my mouth. It tasted like gypsum. “No,” she said. “There’s an order for a subsurface and then a cancel.”

  “A cancel?” I said. “I didn’t cancel anything. That must have happened when the transmitter went down. What about aerials? Have you got anything on the Ponypiles?” I gave her our coordinates.

  There was another pause. “I’ve got one east of the Tongue, but nothing close to where you are.” She put it on the screen. “Can I talk to Evelyn?”

  “He’s drying off the ponies. And, no, he hasn’t named anything for you yet. But he’s been trying.”

  “He has?” she said, sounding pleased, and signed off without asking anything else.

  Ev came back. “The Wall is just the other side of those rocks,” he said, wiping dust off his pants. “It goes over the top of the ridge up there.”

  I told him to go dry off the ponies and reran the log again. The footprints did look like mud, especially with the rain pocking the gray-brown dirt, and it was cloudy, so there wasn’t any iridescence. And there wasn’t a subsurface. Or an aerial.

  But there was me, saying to cancel the subsurface. And the terrain was right there on the log for them to see—the sandstone bluff and the grayish-brown dirt and the patches of evaporated salt.

  I looked at the ponies’ pawprints. They looked a little like mud, maybe, but they wouldn’t when they did the enhances. Which there was no way they wouldn’t. Not with C.J. talking about phony dust storms, not when we’d had the transmitter down for over two hours.

  I should go tell Carson. I looked down toward the pool, but I didn’t see him, and I didn’t feel like going to look for him. I knew what he was going to say—that I should have realized it was an anticline, that I wasn’t paying attention, that it was my fault and I was a crummy partner. Well, what did he expect? He’d only picked me because of my gender.

  Carson came clambering up the rocks. “I got a look at Bult’s log,” he said. “He didn’t write up any fines down there.”

  “I know,” I said. “I already checked. What’d he say?”

  “Nothing. He’s sitting up in one of those Wall chambers with his back to the door.”

  I thought about that.

  “His feelings are probably hurt that we didn’t pay him for leading us there. Wulfmeier obviously offered him money to show him where there was an oil field.” He took off his hat. There was a line of gypsum dust where the brim had been. “I told him we got worried about the rain, that we thought that plain might flood, so we decided to come up here.”

  “That won’t keep him from leading us straight back down there now that it’s stopped,” I said.

  “I told him you wanted to run geologicals on the Ponypiles.” He put his hat back on. “I’m gonna go look for a way past the field.” He squatted down beside me. “How bad is it?”

  “Bad,” I said. “You can see the tilt and the mudstone on the log, and I’m on, canceling the subsurface.”

  “Can you fix any of it?”

  I shook my head. “We had the transmitter off too long. It’s already through the gate.”

  “What about C.J.?”

  “I told her we ran into rain. She thinks the pawprints are mud. But Big Brother won’t.”

  He came around to look at the screen. “It’s that bad?”

  “It’s that bad,” I said bitterly. “Any fool can see it’s an anticline.”

  “Meaning I should’ve noticed it,” he said, bristling. “I wasn’t the one dawdling behind talking about sex.” He threw his hat down on the ground. “I told you he was going to louse up this expedition.”

  “Don’t you dare blame this on Ev!” I said. “He wasn’t the one yelling at me for half an hour while the scans got the whole damned anticline on film!”

  “No, he was the one busy noticing birds! And watching pop-ups! Oh, he’s been a lot of use! The only thing he’s done this
whole expedition is try to get a jump out of you!”

  I slammed the erase button, and the screen went black. “How do you know he hasn’t already gotten one?” I stomped past him. “At least Ev can tell I’m a female!”

  I stormed down the rocks, so mad I could have killed him, fine or no fine, and ended up sitting on a gypsum ponypile next to the pool, waiting for him to go off and look for a way down.

  After a few minutes, he did, clambering up beside the stream without a glance in my direction. I saw Ev come down from the Wall and say something to him. Carson barged past him and went out along the spur, and Ev stood there staring after him, looking bewildered, and then looked down at me.

  He was right about one thing, in all his talk about mating customs. When the hardwiring kicks in, it overrides rational thought, all right. And common sense. I was mad at myself for not seeing the anticline and madder at Carson, and half sick about what was going to happen when Big Brother saw that log. And I was covered with dried-on gypsum dust and oil and reeking of ponypiles. And, on the pop-ups, my face was always washed.

  But that was no reason to do what I did, which was to strip off my pants and shirt and wade into that pool. If Bult saw me, I’d be fined for polluting a waterway and Carson would have killed me for not running an f-and-f check first, but Bult was sulking up in the Wall, and the water was so clear you could see every rock on the bottom. It spilled down over rounded boulders into the pool and poured out through a carved-out spout below.

  I waded out to the middle, where it was chest-deep, and ducked under.

  I stood up, scrubbed gypsum plaster off my arms, and ducked under again. When I came up, Ev was leaning against my gypsum ponypat.

  “I thought you were up at the Wall watching shuttlewrens,” I said, smoothing back my hair with both hands.

  “I was,” he said. “I thought you were with Carson.”

  “I was,” I said, looking at him. I sank into the water, my arms out. “Have you figured out the shuttlewrens’ courtship ritual?”

  “Not yet,” he said. He sat down on the rock and took his boots off. “Did you know the mer-apes on Chichch mate in the water?”

  “You sure know a hell of a lot of species,” I said, treading water. “Or do you just make them up?”

  “Sometimes,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt. “When I’m trying to impress a female.”

  I paddled out to where the water came up to my shoulders and stood up. The current was faster here. It rippled past my legs. “It won’t work on C.J. The only thing that’ll impress her is Mount Crissa Jane.”

  He peeled off his shirt. “It’s not C.J. I’m trying to impress.” He pulled off his socks.

  “It’s not a good idea to take your boots off in uncharted territory,” I said, swimming toward him through the deep water. The current rippled past my legs again.

  “The female mer-ape invites the male into the water by swimming toward him,” he said. He stripped off his pants and stepped into the water.

  I stood up. “Don’t come in,” I said.

  “The male enters the water,” he said, wading in, “and the female retreats.”

  I stood still, peering into the water. I felt the zag, wider this time, and looked where it should be. All I could see was a ripple over the rocks, like air above hot ground.

  “Step back,” I said, putting my hand up. I walked carefully toward him, trying not to disturb the water.

  “Look, I didn’t mean to—”

  “Slowly,” I said, bending down to get the knife out of my boot. “One step at a time.”

  He looked wildly down at the water. “What is it?” he said.

  “Don’t make any sudden movements,” I said.

  “What is it?” he said. “Is there something in the water?” and splashed wildly out of the water and up onto the ponypile.

  What looked like a blurring of the current zagged toward me, and I plunged the knife down with a huge splash, hoping I was aiming at the right place.

  “What is it?” Ev said.

  Now that its blood was spreading in the water, I could see it, and it was definitely e. Its body was longer than Bult’s umbrella, and it had a wide mouth. “It’s a tssi mitsse,” I said.

  It was also indigenous fauna, and I’d killed it, which meant I was in big trouble. But blood in the water and a fish you couldn’t see weren’t exactly small trouble. I got away from the blood and out of the water.

  Ev was still crouching bare-beamed on the rock. “Is it dead?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, drying off my hair with my shirt and then putting it on. “And so am I.” I started pulling the rest of my clothes on.

  He got down off the gypsum, looking anxious. “You’re not hurt, are you?”

  “No,” I said, looking in the water and wishing I had been. At least then I could have claimed “self-defense” on the reports.

  The blood had spread over the lower half of the pool and was spilling over the spout into the stream. The tssi mitsse was drifting toward the spout, too, and I didn’t see any activity around it, but I wasn’t going back in the water to get it.

  I left Ev getting his clothes on and went up to the ponies, which were all lying squeezed in among the rocks. Their paws were still wet, and I thought about us walking them up the stream, and Bult not saying a word. Nobody on this expedition was doing their job.

  I took a grappling hook and Bult’s umbrella and went down to get the tssi mitsse out of the water. Ev was buttoning his shirt and looking embarrassedly at Bult, who was over by the spout, hunched over and looking at the bloody water. I sent Ev to get the holo camera. Bult unfolded himself. He had his log, and he looked pointedly at the umbrella in my hand.

  “I know, I know. Forcible confiscation of property,” I said. It didn’t much matter. Bult’s fines were nothing compared to the penalty for killing an indigenous life-form.

  The tssi mitsse had floated in close to the bank. I hooked it with the umbrella handle and pulled it to the edge and onto the bank, stepping away from it in a hurry, in case it wasn’t dead, but Bult went right over to it, unfolded an arm, and started poking his hand into its side.

  “Tssi mitss,” he said.

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “How big are the big ones?”

  It was over a meter long and was perfectly visible now that it was out of the water, with transparent jellylike flesh that must have the same refraction index as water.

  “Tith,” Bult said, pulling the mouth back. “Keel bait.”

  They looked like they could kill bite, all right, or at least take off a foot. There were two long, sharp teeth on either side of its mouth and little serrated ones in between, and that was good. At least it hadn’t been a harmless algae-eater.

  Ev came back with the camera. He handed it to me, looking at the tssi mitss. “It’s huge,” he said.

  “That’s what you think,” I said. “You’d better go find Carson.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and stood there, hesitating. “I’m sorry I jumped out of the water like that.”

  “No harm done,” I said.

  I took holos and measurements and brought down the scale to weigh it. When I started to pick it up by the head, Bult said, “Keel bait,” and I dropped it with a thud and then took a closer look at its teeth.

  Definitely not an algae-eater. The long teeth on either side weren’t teeth. They were fangs, and when I ran an analysis of the venom, it ate right through the vial.

  I hauled the tssi mitss by the tail up the rocks to camp and started in on the reports. “Accidental killing of indigenous fauna,” I told the log. “Circumstances—” and then sat and stared at the screen.

  Carson came back, scrambling up the rocks from the direction of the pool and stopping short when he saw the tssi mitss. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said,
looking at the screen. “Don’t touch the teeth. They’re full of acid.”

  “My shit,” he said softly. “Is this what was in the Tongue when Bult wouldn’t let us cross?”

  “Nope. This is the small version,” I said, wishing he’d get on with it.

  “It didn’t bite you? You’re sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m sure,” I said, even though I wasn’t.

  He squatted down and looked at it. “My shit,” he said again. He looked up at me. “Evie says you were in the pool when you killed it. What on hell were you doing in there?”

  “I was taking a bath,” I said, looking at the screen.

  “Since when do you take baths in uncharted territory?”

  “Since I ride all afternoon through gypsum dust,” I said. “Since I get covered with oil, trying to wash it off the ponies. Since I find out you can’t even tell half the time whether I’m female or not.”

  He stood up. “So you take off all your clothes and go in swimming with Evie?”

  “I didn’t take off all my clothes. I had my boots on.” I glared at him. “And I don’t have to have my clothes off for Ev to be able to tell I’m a female.”

  “Oh, right, I forgot, he’s the expert on sex. Is that what that was down at the pool, some kind of mating dance?” He kicked at the carcass with his bad foot.

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “I’ve got enough to worry about without having to fill out a form for desecrating remains.”

  “Worry about!” he said, his mustache quivering. “You’ve got enough to worry about? You know what I’ve got to worry about? What on hell you’re going to do next.” He kicked the tssi mitss again. “You let Wulfmeier open a gate right under our noses, you lead us into an oil field, you take a bath and nearly get yourself killed.”

  I slammed the terminal off and stood up. “And I lost the binocs! Don’t forget that! You want a new partner, is that what you’re saying?”

  “A new—?”

  “A new partner,” I said. “I’m sure there are plenty of females to choose from who’d traipse off with you to Boohte the way I did.”