Terra Incognita Page 12

  They squatted in a corner, and Carson emptied out his pockets. Wherever he’d been, he’d collected lots of f-and-f. He had three plants in plastic bags, a holo of some kind of ungulate, and a whole pocketful of rocks.

  He ignored us, which didn’t bother Ev, who was busy dissecting his specimen. I packed up everything and got the wide-angles on the ponies.

  Carson picked up one of the rocks and handed it to Bult. It was a crystal of some kind, transparent with triangular faces. By rights, I should be running a mineralogical to see if it already had a name, but I wasn’t about to say anything to Carson, not when he was so pointedly not looking at me.

  “Do the Boohteri have a name for this?” Carson asked Bult.

  Bult hesitated, as if looking for some cue from Carson, and then said, “Thitsserrrah.”

  “Tchahtssillah?” Carson said.

  Books are supposed to begin with a belching “b,” but Bult nodded. “Tchatssarrah.”

  “Tssirrroh?” Carson said.

  They went on like that for fifteen minutes while I strapped the terminal on my pony and rolled up the bedrolls.

  “Tssarrrah?” Carson said, sounding irritated.

  “Yahss,” Bult said. “Tssarrrah.”

  “Tssarrrah,” Carson said. He stood up, went over to my pony, and entered the name. Then he went back to where Bult was squatting and started picking up the plastic bags. “We’ll do the rest of these later. I don’t want to spend another night in the Ponypiles.”

  And what was that all about? I thought, watching him put the plants in his pack.

  Ev was still working on his specimen. “Come on,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

  “Just a couple more holos,” he said, grabbing up the camera.

  “What’s he doing?” Carson said.

  “Gathering data,” I said.

  Ev had to take holos of the outside, too, and scrape a sample of the outside surface.

  It was another half hour before he was finished, and Carson acted fidgety the whole time, swearing at the ponies and looking at the clouds. “It looks like it’s going to rain,” he kept saying, which it didn’t. The rain was obviously over. The clouds were breaking up, and the puddles were already drying.

  We finally set off a little past midday, Bult and Carson in the lead and Ev bringing up the rear, taking holos of the Wall and the shuttlewren who was supervising our departure.

  The stream that had cut across the ridge was already down to a trickle. We followed it down to where it connected with the Tongue, and began following it east.

  It made a wide canyon here with room on the far side for ponies. Bult knelt down on the bank and inspected it, though I didn’t see how he’d be able to see a tssi mitss in the muddy pink water. But they must all have been washed downriver in the flood because he gave the go-ahead and we waded the ponies across and started up the canyon.

  After the first klom or so, the bank got too rocky to be muddy and the clouds started to drift off. The sun even came out for a few minutes. Ev messed with his specimen, Carson and Bult talked and gestured, deciding which way to go, and I fumed. I was so mad I could’ve killed Carson. I’d been picturing him washed up in some gulch, half eaten by a nibbler, for the last three days. And not so much as a word when he came back about how on hell he’d made it through the flood or where on hell he’d been.

  We began to climb, and I could hear a faint roar up ahead.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked Ev.

  He had his head in his screen, working on his shuttlewren theory, and I had to ask him again.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking up blankly. “It sounds like a waterfall,” and a couple of minutes later there was one. It was just a cascade, and not very high, but right above it the river twisted out of sight, so it was a real waterfall and not just a rough section of river, and we’d gotten above where the rain started, so the water ran a nice, clear brownish color.

  The gypsum piles made a whole series of bubbling zigzag rushes, and it was presentable-looking enough I figured Ev would at least make a try at naming it after C.J., but he didn’t even look up from his screen and Carson rode right past it.

  “Aren’t we gonna name it?” I hollered ahead to him.

  “Name what?” he said, as blank as Ev when I’d asked him about the roar.

  “The waterfall.”

  “The water—?” he said, turning fast to look not at the waterfall, which was right in front of him, but up ahead.

  “The waterfall,” I said, pointing at it with my thumb. “You know. Water. Falling. Don’t we need to name it?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I just wanted to see what was up ahead first,” which I didn’t believe for a minute. Naming it hadn’t so much as crossed his mind till I said it, and when I’d pointed at it he’d had an expression on his face I couldn’t make out. Mad? Relieved?

  I frowned. “Carson—” I started, but he’d already twisted around to look at Bult.

  “Bult, do the indidges have a name for this?” he said.

  Bult looked, not at the waterfall, but at Carson, with a questioning expression, which was peculiar, and Carson said, “He hasn’t been this far up the Tongue. Ev, you got any ideas?”

  Ev looked up from his screen. “According to my calculations, a shuttlebird could construct a Wall chamber in six years,” he said happily, “which matches the mating period of the blackgull.”

  “What about Crisscross Falls?” I said.

  Carson didn’t even look annoyed, which was even more peculiar. “What about Gypsum Falls? We haven’t used that yet, have we?”

  “They’d have to begin building before maturation,” Ev said, “which means the mating instinct would have to be activated at birth.”

  I checked the log. “No Gypsum Falls.”

  “Good,” Carson said and set off again before I even had it entered.

  We’d never named a weed that fast, let alone a waterfall, and Ev had apparently forgotten all about C.J. and sex, unless he thought there’d be plenty of other waterfalls to pick from. He might be right. I could still hear the roar of water, even when we went around the curve in the canyon, and around the next curve it got even louder.

  Bult and Carson had stopped up above the waterfall and were consulting. “Bult says this isn’t the Tongue,” Carson said when we came up. “He says it’s a tributary, and the Tongue’s farther south.”

  He hadn’t said that. Carson had just told me the Boohteri hadn’t been up this far, and besides, Bult hadn’t opened his mouth. And Carson looked preoccupied, the way Bult had right before the oil field episode.

  But Carson was already splashing us back across the river and up the side of the canyon, not even looking at Bult to see which way he was going. He stopped at the top. “This way?” he asked Bult, and Bult gave him that same questioning look and then pointed off up a hill. And what was he leading us into now? If he was the one leading us.

  We were above the gypsum now, the soapy slopes giving way to a brownish-rose igneous. Bult led us up a break in another, steeper hill, and toward a clump of silvershim trees. They were old ones, as tall as pines and in full leaf. They would have been blinding if the sun had been out, which it looked like it might be again in a minute.

  “Here’re the silvershims you were so anxious to see,” I said to Ev, and after talking to his screen he raised his head and looked at them.

  “They’d look a lot better if we were out in the sun,” I said, and right then it put in an appearance and lit them up.

  “I told you,” I said, putting up my hand to shade my eyes.

  Ev looked dazed, and no wonder. They glittered like one of C.J.’s shirts, the leaves shimmering and reflecting in the breeze.

  “Not much like the pop-ups, is it?” I said.

  “That’s what gives the Wall its shiny texture!” he sa
id, and slapped his forehead with the flat of his hand. “That was the only part I couldn’t figure out, what gave it that shine.” He started taking holos. “The shuttlewrens must chew the leaves up.”

  Well, so much for the silvershims he’d come all the way to Boohte to see. Was C.J. going to be mad when she found out Ev had forgotten her and taken up with some leaf-chewing, plaster-spitting bird!

  The ponies had slowed to a crawl, and I would have been happy to take a rest stop and sit and look at the trees for a few minutes, but Bult and Carson rode on through the middle of them. When Bult wasn’t looking, I picked a handful of the leaves and handed them to Ev, but I doubted if Bult would have fined me if he’d seen me. He was too busy looking ahead at a stream we were coming to.

  It wasn’t much bigger than the trickle up on top of the ridge, and it was coming from the wrong direction, but Bult claimed it was the Tongue. We started up it, winding in and out between the trees till the igneous on either side began to shut them out. It stacked up in squarish piles like old red bricks, and I grabbed a loose piece and ran an analysis. Basalt with cinnabar and gypsum crystals mixed in. I hoped Carson knew where he was going, because there was no room to backtrail here.

  The canyon was getting steeper, too, and the ponies started to complain. The stream climbed up in a little series of cascades that chortled instead of roaring, and the banks turned into reddish-brown blocks, as steep as stairs.

  The ponies’ll never make it, I thought, and wondered if that was what Carson was up to—leading us into some defile so steep we’d have to carry the ponies through it on our shoulders just for spite. Carson’d have to carry his, too, though, and the way he was kicking his and swearing at it I didn’t think he was playacting.

  Carson’s pony stopped and leaned back so far on his rear legs I thought he was going to pitch back onto me. Carson got off and pulled on the reins. “Come on, you beam-headed, rock-brained hind end,” he shouted, leaning right in his pony’s face, which must have scared him because he dumped a huge pile and started to topple over, but the rock wall stopped him.

  “Don’t you dare try that,” Carson bellowed, “or I’ll dump you in this stream for the tssi mitss to eat. Now come on!” He gave a mighty yank on the reins, and the pony stepped back, dislodged a rock, which went clattering down into the stream, and took off up the steps like he was being chased.

  I hoped my pony would get the hint, and he did. He lifted his tail and plopped a big pile. I got off and took hold of his reins. Bult took out his log and looked at Ev expectantly.

  “Come on, Ev,” I said.

  Ev looked up from his screens, blinking in surprise. “Where are we going?” he said, like he hadn’t so much as noticed we weren’t still meandering through the silvershims.

  “Up a cliff,” I said. “It’s a mating custom.”

  “Oh,” he said, and dismounted. “The shuttlewren’s flight range puts the silvershims well within range. I need to run tests on the plaster’s composition to make sure, but I can’t do that till I get back to King’s X.”

  I knotted the reins tight under Useless’s mouth, and whispered, “You lazy, broken-down copy of a horse, I’m going to do everything Carson’s ever threatened you with and some he hasn’t even thought of, and if you shit one more time before we’re out of this canyon, I’ll pull that pommelbone right out of your neck.”

  “What on hell’s keeping you?” Carson said, coming back down the steps. He didn’t have his pony.

  “I’m not carrying this pony,” I said.

  He sidestepped the piles and got behind Useless and pushed for a while.

  “Turn her around,” he said.

  “It’s too narrow,” I said. “You know ponies won’t backtrail.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and took the reins and yanked her around till she was nose to nose with Ev’s pony. “Come on, you poor imitation of a cow, let alone a horse,” he said, and pulled, and she backed right up the canyon.

  “You’re smarter than you look,” I called after him as he went back for Ev’s.

  “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” he said.

  We didn’t have any more trouble with the ponies—they hung their heads like they’d been outsmarted and plodded steadily upward, but it still took us the better part of an hour to climb half a klom, and we were going nowhere. The stream shrank to a trickle and half disappeared between the rocks. It obviously wasn’t the Tongue, and Carson must have had the same idea, because the next side canyon we came to he led us into it back the direction we’d come.

  It was just as steep and twice as narrow. I didn’t have to stop and take mineral samples, I just scraped them off with my legs as we rode past. The basalt blocks got smaller and began to look like a brick wall, and between them there were zigzag veins of the triangle-faceted crystals Carson had brought home. They acted like prisms, flashing pieces of the spectrum across the narrow canyon when the sun hit them.

  Just about when I’d decided the canyon was going to run into a bricked-up dead end, we climbed up and onto the flat and back into silvershims.

  We were on a wide overhang with trees growing right up to the edge, and I could see, off to the right, the Tongue far below and hear the roar of its waterfalls. Carson ignored it and rode off through the middle of the trees, heading straight for the far edge, not even bothering now to pretend Bult was leading.

  I was right, I thought, he is leading us over a cliff, and came out of the trees. He’d tied his pony to a trunk and was standing close to the edge, looking out across the canyon. Ev rode up, and then Bult, and we just sat there on our ponies, gawking.

  “Well, what do you know?” Carson said, trying to sound astonished. “Will you look at that? It’s a waterfall.”

  That cascade with the gypsum piles was a waterfall. There was no word for what this was, except that it was obviously the Tongue, meandering through the silvershim forests on the far side and then plunging a good thousand meters into the canyon below us.

  “My shit!” Ev said, and dropped his shuttlewren. “My shit!”

  My sentiments exactly. I’d seen holos of Niagara and Yosemite Falls when I was a kid, and they were pretty impressive, but they were only water. This—

  “My shit!” Ev said again.

  We were standing a good five hundred meters above the canyon floor and opposite a rose brick cliff that rose up another two hundred meters. The Tongue leaped out of a narrow V in the top of it and flung itself like a suicide down into the canyon with a roar I should never have mistaken for a cascade, throwing up a billow of mist and spray I could almost feel, and crashing into the swirling green-white water below.

  The sun ducked under a cloud and then came out again, and the waterfall exploded like fireworks. There was a double rainbow across the top of the spray, and that one was probably from the water’s refracting the sunlight, but the rest of them were from the cliff. It was crisscrossed with veins of the prismatic crystal, and they sparkled and glittered like diamonds, flashing chunks of rainbow onto the cliff, onto the falls, into the air, across the whole canyon.

  “My shit!” Ev said again, hanging on to his pony’s reins like they could hold him up. “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!”

  “Lucky us stumbling onto it this way,” Carson said, and I turned to look at him. He had his thumbs in his belt loops and was looking smug. “If we’d kept on up that canyon,” he said, “we’d have missed it altogether.”

  Lucky, my boots, I thought. All that dragging us through silvershims and up steps and consulting with Bult like you didn’t know where you were going. This is what you were doing while I was waiting for you in the Wall, worried sick. Off chasing rainbows.

  He must have found it by following the Tongue, looking for a way around the anticline, and then gone off wandering up cliffs and in and out of side canyons, searching for the best vantage point to sh
ow it to us from. If we’d stayed on the Tongue, the way he probably had when he found it, we’d have caught a half glimpse of it around some bend, or heard the roar get louder and guessed what was coming, instead of having it burst on us all at once like some view of rainbow heaven.

  “Really lucky!” Carson said, his mustache quivering. “So what do you want to name it?”

  “Name it?” Ev’s head jerked around to look at Carson, and I thought, Well, so much for birds and scenery, we’re back to sex.

  “Yeah,” Carson said. “It’s a natural landmark. It’s gotta have a name. How about Rainbow Falls?”

  “Rainbow Falls?” I snorted. “It’s gotta have a better name than that,” I said. “Something big, something that’ll give some idea of what it looks like. Aladdin’s Cave.”

  “Can’t name it after a person.”

  “Prism Falls. Diamond Falls.”

  “Crystal Falls,” Ev said, still staring at it.

  He’d never get it past them. Chances were Big Brother, ever vigilant, would spot it and send us a pursuant that said Crissa Jane Tull worked on the survey team and the name was ineligible, and this time they’d be able to prove a connection, and we’d get fined to within an inch of our lives.

  It was too bad, because Crystal Falls was the perfect name for it. And until Big Brother caught it, Ev would get a lot of jumps out of C.J.

  “Crystal Falls,” I said. “You’re right. It’s perfect.”

  I looked at Carson, wondering if he was thinking the same thing, but he wasn’t even listening. He was looking at Bult, who had his head bent over his log.

  “What’s the Boohteri name for the waterfall, Bult?” Carson asked, and Bult glanced up, said something I couldn’t hear, and looked down at his log again.

  I left Ev drooling into the canyon and went over by them, thinking, Great, it’s going to end up being called Dead Soup Falls or, worse, Ours.

  “What’d he say?” I shouted to Carson.

  “Damage to rock surface,” Bult said. He was catching up his fines. “Damage to indigenous flora.”

  I figured he was going to have to add, “Inappropriate tone and manner,” but Carson didn’t look so much as annoyed. “Bult,” he shouted, but only because of the roar, “what do you call it?”