Uncharted Territory

Expedition 184: Day 6

The next morning the rain let up a little and then started again. The roof of the chamber developed a leak, right over where we had the equipment piled, and we had to move it over next to the ponies.

It was getting a little crowded. During the night four roadkill had dragged themselves over the door, and the shuttlewren went crazy, wheeling and circling at the top of the chamber, making passes at Ev and me, and at Tight Pants climbing down the cliff.

Bult wasn’t watching. He’d gotten up for the hundredth time and gone outside to stand on the ridge.

“What’s he doing?” Ev said, watching the shuttlewrens.

“Looking for Carson,” I said. “Or a way out of here.”

There wasn’t any way out. Water was flowing off of every mound, carrying what looked like half the Ponypiles with it, and a raging stream cut across the end of the ridge.

“Where do you think Carson is?” Ev said.

“I don’t know,” I said. During the night it had occurred to me that Wulfmeier might have gotten his gate fixed and come back to get even. And Carson was alone, no pony, no mike, nothing.

I couldn’t tell Ev that, and while I was trying to think of something I could, Ev said, “Fin, come look at this.”

He was peering up at the leak in the ceiling. The shuttlewren was making little dives at it.

“It’s trying to repair it,” Ev said thoughtfully. “Fin, do you still have those parts of the one Bult ate?”

“There wasn’t much left,” I said, but I dug in my pack and got them out.

“Oh, good,” he said, examining the fragments. “I was afraid he’d eaten the beak.” He settled down against the wall with them.

The pop-up was still on. Fin was binding up the stub of Carson’s foot and bawling. “It’s all right,” Carson was saying. “Don’t cry.”

The pop-up went dark and words appeared in the middle of the chamber. The credits. “Written by Captain Jake Trailblazer.”

“Look at this,” Ev said, bringing over one of the shuttlewren pieces. “See how the beak is flat, like a trowel? Can I run an analysis?”

“Sure.” I went over to the door and looked out. Bult was standing on the ridge, where the stream cut across, in the rain.

“I should have figured it out before,” Ev said, looking at the screen. “Look at how high the door is. And why would the Boohteri make a curved floor like that?” He stood up and looked at the leak again. “You said you’ve never seen the Boohteri building one of the chambers?” he said. “Is that right?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you remember me telling you about the bowerbird?” he said.

“The one that builds a nest fifty times its size?”

“It’s not a nest. It’s a courtship chamber.”

I couldn’t see where this was going. We already knew the indidges used the Wall for courting.

“The male Adelie penguin gives a round stone to the female as a courting gift. But the stone doesn’t belong to him. He stole it from another nest.” He looked expectantly at me. “Who does that sound like?”

Well, Carson and I’d always said we thought somebody else built the Wall. I looked up at the shuttlewren. “But it’s too small to build something like this, isn’t it?” I said.

“The bowerbird’s bower is fifty times its size. And you said the Wall was only growing by two new chambers a year. Some species only mate every three years, or five. Maybe they work on it several years.”

I looked at the curved walls. Three to five years work, and then the imperialistic indidges move in and take it over, knock the door out to make it bigger, put up flags. I wondered what Big Brother was going to say when he heard about this.

“It’s just a theory,” Ev said. “I need to run probabilities on size and strength and take samples of the Wall’s composition.”

“It sounds like a pretty good theory,” I said. “I’ve never seen Bult use a tool. Or order one either.” The Boohteri word for the wall was “ours,” but so was the word for most of Carson’s and my wages. And that was Ev’s pop-up he’d been watching.

“I’ll need a specimen,” Ev said, looking speculatively at the shuttlewren making frantic circles around us.

“Go ahead,” I said, ducking. “Wring its neck. I’ll write up the reports.”

“First I want to get this on holo,” he said, and spent the next hour filming the shuttlewren poking at the leak. It didn’t do anything to it that I could see, but by midmorning the ceiling had stopped leaking, and there was a tiny patch of new-looking white shiny stuff on the ceiling.

Bult came in, with his umbrella and two dead shuttlewrens.

“Give that to me,” I said, and snatched one away from him.

He glared at me. “Forcible confiscation of property.”

“Exactly.” I handed it to Ev. “ ‘Ours.’ You’d better stick it in your boot.”

Ev did, and Bult watched him, glaring, and then stuffed the other one in his mouth and went outside. Ev got out his knife and started chipping flakes off of the Wall.

The rain was letting up, and I went out and took a look around. Bult was standing where the stream cut across the ridge, staring up into the Ponypiles. While I watched, he splashed across and went on along the ridge.

The stream must be down, and the pool definitely was. Milky water was still spilling off every surface, but you could see Ev’s ponypat rock and the spout at the bottom of the pool. Off to the west the clouds were starting to thin.

I went back up to the ridge. Bult had disappeared. I went into the chamber and started stuffing things in my pack.

“Where are you going?” Ev said. He’d looked around to make sure it wasn’t Bult and then started scraping again.

“To find Carson,” I said, fixing the straps so I could put the pack on my back.

“You can’t,” he said, holding the knife. “It’s against the regs. You’re supposed to stay where you are.”

“That’s right.” I took off my mike and handed it and Carson’s to him. “You wait here till afternoon and then call C.J. to come get you. We’re only sixty kloms from King’s X. She’ll be here in a flash.” I stepped over the door.

“But you don’t know where he is,” Ev said.

“I’ll find him,” I said, but I didn’t have to. He and Bult were coming across the stream talking, their heads bent together. Carson was limping.

I ducked back in the chamber, dumped my pack on the floor, and asked for R-28-X, Proper Disposal of Indigenous Fauna Remains.

“What are you doing?” Ev said. “I want you to take me with you. It’s uncharted territory. I don’t think you should go look for Carson by yourself,” and Carson appeared in the door. “Oh,” Ev said, surprised.

Carson stepped over the door and into the middle of the pop-up Bult had been watching. It was raining, and Fin was standing watching two thousand luggage bear down on her. Carson swung into the saddle and galloped toward her.

Carson snapped the pop-up shut. “How wide do you think the field is?” he said to me.

“Eight kloms. Maybe ten. That’s how long the bluff is,” I said. I handed him his mike. “You lost this.”

He put it on. “Are you sure eight is as far as it goes?”

“No, but after that there’s caprock, so there won’t be any seepage. If we don’t run a subsurface, we’ll be okay,” I said. “Is that where you were, finding a way past it?”

“I want to leave by noon,” he said and walked over to Bult. “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

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.

Rocks 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 up.

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 said, 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 leapt 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 show 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?”

He looked up again and stared vaguely off to the left of the waterfall. I took the opportunity to snatch the log out of his hands.

“The waterfall, you pony-brained nonsentient!” I said, pointing, and he shifted his gaze in the right direction, though who on hell knows what he was really looking at—a cloud maybe, or some rock slung halfway down the cliff.

“Do the Boohteri have a name for the waterfall?” Carson said patiently.

“Vwarrr,” Bult said.

“That’s the word for water,” Carson said. “Do you have a name for this waterfall?” and Bult looked at Carson with that peculiar questioning look, and I thought, amazed, he’s trying to figure out what Carson wants him to say.

“You said your people had never been in the mountains,” Carson said, prompting him, and Bult looked like he’d just remembered his line.

“Nah nahm.”

“You can’t call it Nah Nahm,” Ev said from behind us. “You’ve got to name it something beautiful. Something grand!”

“Grand Canyon!” I said.

“Something like Heart’s Desire,” Ev said. “Or Rainbow’s End.”

“Heart’s Desire,” Carson said thoughtfully. “That’s not bad. Bult, what about the canyon? Do the Boohteri have a name for that?”

Bult knew his line this time. “Nah nahm.”

“Crown Jewels Canyon,” Ev said. “Starshine Falls.”

“It should really be an indidge name,” Carson said piously. “Remember what Big Brother said, ‘Every effort should be made to discover the indigenous name of all flora, fauna, and natural landmarks.’ ”

“Bult just told you,” I said. “They don’t have a name for it.”

“What about the cliff, Bult?” Carson said, looking hard at Bult. “Or the rocks? Do the indidges have a name for those?”

Bult looked like he needed a prompter, but Carson didn’t seem mad. “What about the crystals?” he said, digging in his pocket. “What did you name that crystal?”

The roaring of the falls seemed to get louder.

“Thitsserrrah,” Bult said.

“Yeah,” Carson said. “Tssarrrah. You said Crystal Falls, Ev. We’ll name it Tssarrrah after the crystals.”

The roar got so loud it made me go dizzy, and I grabbed on to the pony.

“Tssarrrah Falls,” Carson said. “What do you think, Bult?”

“Tssarrrah,” Bult said. “Nahm.”

“How about you?” Carson said, looking at me.

Ev said, “I think it’s a beautiful name.”

I walked over to the edge of the overhang, still feeling dizzy, and sat down.

“That settles it,” Carson said. “Fin, you can send it in. Tssarrrah Falls.”

I sat there listening to the roar and watching the glittering spray. The sun went in behind a cloud and burst out again, and rainbows darted across and above the cliff like shuttlewrens, sparkling like glass.

Carson sat down beside me. “Tssarrrah Falls,” he said. “It was lucky the indidges had a word for those crystals. Big Brother’s been wanting us to give more stuff indigenous names.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Lucky. What does tssarrrah mean, did Bult say?”

“ ‘Crazy female,’ probably,” he said. “Or maybe ‘heart’s desire.’ ”

“How much did you have to bribe him with? Next year’s wages?”

“That was what was funny,” he said, frowning. “I was going to give him the pop-up since he likes it so much. I figured I might have to give him a lot more than that after the oil field, but I asked him if he’d help, and he said yes, just like that. No fines, nothing.”

I wasn’t surprised.

“Did you get the name sent?” he said.

I looked at the falls for a long minute. The water roared down, dancing with rainbows. “I’ll do in on the way down. Hadn’t we better get going?” I said, and stood up.

“Yeah,” he said, looking south at where the clouds were accumulating again. “Looks like it’s going to rain again.”

He held out his hand, and I yanked him to his feet. “You didn’t have any business going off like that,” I said.

He still had hold of my hand. “You didn’t have any business nearly getting yourself killed.” He let go of my hand. “Bult, come on, you’ve got to lead us back down.”

“How on hell are we supposed to do that when the ponies won’t backtrail?” I said, but Bult’s pony walked right through the silvershims and down into the narrow canyon, and ours followed single file without so much as a balk.

“Dust storms aren’t the only things being faked around here,” I muttered.

Nobody heard me. Carson was up behind Bult, still doing the leading, down the side canyon, back through the one where the ponies had given us so much trouble, and then into another side canyon. I let them get ahead and looked back at Ev. He was bent over his terminal, probably looking at shuttlewren stats. I called C.J.

After I talked to her, I looked ahead and caught a glimpse of the side of the falls. The rainbows were lighting up the sky. Ev caught up to me. “They’ll never get it on the pop-ups like it really was,” he said.

“No,” I said. “They won’t.”

The canyon widened, and we could see the falls from an angle, the water leaping sideways off the crystal-studded cliff and straight down.

“Speaking of which,” Ev said, “what’s Carson’s first name?”

I’d told Carson he was smart. “What?”

“His first name. I got to thinking that I don’t know it. On the pop-ups you never call each other anything but Findriddy and Carson.”

“It’s Aloysius,” I said. “Aloysius Byron. His initials are A.B.C. Don’t tell him I told you.”

“His first name’s Aloysius,” he said thoughtfully. “And yours is Sarah.”

As smart as they come.

“Did you know that in some species the males all compete for the most desirable female?” he said, smiling wryly. “Most of them don’t stand a chance, though. She always picks the one who’s the bravest. Or the smartest.”

“Speaking of which, you were pretty smart to figure out the shuttlewrens built the Wall.”

He brightened. “I still have to prove it,” he said. “I’m going to have to run content analyses and work/size probabilities when I get back to King’s X. And write it up.”

“It’ll be on the pop-ups, too,” I said. “You’ll be famous. Ev Parker, Socioexozoologist.”

“You think so?” he said, as if it hadn’t occurred to him before.

“I know so. A whole episode.”

He looked hard at me. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re the one writing the episodes. You’re Captain Jake Trailblazer.”

“Nope,” I said, “but I know who is.” And her initials are C.J.T., I thought. “My shit, you may get a whole series.”

The canyon opened out, and we were on another overlook, as big as a field this time, and lower down. Off to one side there was a way down, a slope leading back along the canyon to its floor. Beyond the canyon you could see the plains, pink and lavender. I could see the bluff that backed the anticline off to the east, too far off the scans to notice anything.

“Rest stop,” Bult said and got off his pony. He sat down under a silvershim and opened out the pop-up.

“Do you hear that?” Carson said, looking up in the sky.

“It’s C.J.,” I said. “I told her to come get Ev so he can work on his theory. He’s gotta run some tests.”

“Is she doing aerials?” he said, looking anxiously back in the direction of the bluff.

“I told her to go south and come in over the Ponypiles, that we needed an aerial of them,” I said.

“What about on the way back?”

“Are you kidding? She’s going to have Ev with her. She won’t be running any aerials with him in the heli. My shit, she probably forgot to do the aerials on the way down, she was so excited.”

Carson looked at me questioningly. The heli swooped in and hovered above the field. C.J. jumped down from the bay, ran across to Ev, and practically knocked him down, kissing him.

“What’s all that about?” Carson said, watching them.

“Courtship ritual,” I said. “I told her Ev named the falls after her. I told her he named it Crystal Falls.” I looked at Carson. “It was the only way he was ever going to get a jump. On this planet, anyway.”

They were still in a clinch.

“When she finds out what we really named it,” Carson said, grinning, “she’s gonna be really mad. When are you gonna tell her?”

“I’m not,” I said. “That’s the name I sent.”

He quit grinning. “What on hell did you do that for?”

“The other day Ev almost got a name past me. Crisscross Creek. You were worrying about what Bult was up to, and I was busy trying to load everything on the ponies, and when he asked me what we were going to name that little stream we crossed, I wasn’t paying any attention. It wouldn’t have gotten past Big Brother, but it got past me. Because I was busy worrying about something else.”

Ev and C.J. had come out of their clinch and were looking at the waterfall. C.J. was making squealing noises that practically drowned out the falls.

“Crystal Falls won’t get past Big Brother either,” Carson said. “And Tssarrrah Falls would have.”

“I know,” I said, “but maybe they’ll be so busy yelling at us over naming it that and killing the tssi mitss that they’ll forget about the oil field.”

He stared at Ev. C.J. was kissing him again. “What about Evie?”

“He won’t tell,” I said.

“What about Bult? How do we know he won’t lead us out of these mountains and straight into another anticline? Or a diamond deposit?”

“That’s not a problem either. All you’ve got to do is tell him.”

He turned and looked at me. “Tell him what?”

“Can’t you tell when somebody’s got a crush on you? Making you fires, watching your scenes on the pop-ups over and over, giving you presents—”

“What presents?”

“All those dice. The binocs.”

“They were our binocs.”

“Yeah, well, the indidges seem to have a little trouble with that word. He gave you half a shuttlewren, too. And an oil field.”

“That’s why he said he’d help me with the waterfall.” He stopped. “I thought Ev said he was a male.”

“He is,” I said, grinning. “And apparently he’s got as much trouble telling what sex we are as we did with him.”

“He thinks I’m a female?”

“It’s an easy enough mistake,” I said, grinning. I started to walk away.

He grabbed my arm and swung me around to face him. “You’re sure you want to do this? We could get fired.”

“No, we won’t. We’re Findriddy and Carson. We’re too famous to get fired.” I smiled at him. “Besides, they can’t. After this expedition, we’re going to owe them our wages for the next twenty.”

We went over to C.J. and Ev, who were glued together again. “Ev, you and your pony go back with C.J. to King’s X,” I said. “You’ve gotta get that theory on the Wall written up.”

“Evelyn told me about his theory,” C.J. said. I wondered when he’d had the time. “And how he saved you from the tssi mitss.”

“We’re gonna go ahead and finish out the expedition,” Carson said, dragging Ev’s pony over. “I thought we’d survey the Ponypiles as long as we’re here.”

We heaved the pony into the bay, and told C.J. to swing west over the Ponypiles and then north on the way home and try to get an aerial.

She wasn’t paying any attention. “Take all the time you need surveying,” she said, climbing on. “And don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine.” She went forward.

Carson handed Ev his pack. “If you could take holos of the Wall at different places, I’d appreciate it,” Ev said. “And samples of the plaster.”

Carson nodded. “Anything else we can do?”

Ev looked up at the heli. “You’ve already done quite a bit.” He shook his head, grinning. “Crystal Falls,” he said, looking at me. “I still think we should’ve named it Heart’s Desire.”

He climbed up into the bay, and C.J. took off, dipping so close to the ground we both ducked.

“Maybe we did too much,” Carson said. “I hope C.J. isn’t so grateful she kills him.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. The heli circled the canyon like a shuttlewren and swooped down in front of the falls for a last look. They flew off, straight north across the plains, which meant we weren’t going to get any aerials.

“We’re just postponing the inevitable, you know,” he said, looking after the heli. “Sooner or later Big Brother’s going to figure out we’ve been having way too many dust storms, or Wulfmeier’ll stumble onto that vein of silver in 246-73. If Bult doesn’t figure out what he could get for this place and tell them first.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as we think. They didn’t build the Wall, did you know that? They just moved in afterward, clunked the natives on the head, and took over. Bult’d probably own Starting Gate and half of Earth inside a year.”

“And build a dam over the falls,” he said.

“Not if it was a national park,” I said. “You heard what Ev said about how he’d wanted to see the silvershims and the Wall, especially when they find out who built it. I figure people would come a long way to see something like this.” I gestured at the falls. “Bult could charge admission.”

“And fine them for leaving footprints,” he said. “Speaking of which, what’s to stop Bult from getting a crush on you once I tell him I’m not a female?”

“He thinks I’m a male. You said yourself, half the time you can’t tell what sex I am.”

“And you’re never going to let me forget it, are you?”

“Nope,” I said.

I went over to where Bult was sitting, watching the pop-up of Carson holding Skimpy Skirt’s hand. “Come with me,” Carson said.

“Come on, Bult,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

Bult shut the pop-up and handed it to Carson.

“Congratulations,” I said. “You’re engaged.”

Bult got out his log. “Disturbance of land surface,” he said to me. “One-fifty.”

I climbed up on Useless. “Let’s go.”

Carson was looking at the falls again. “I still think we should’ve named it Tssarrrah Falls,” he said. He went over to his pony and started rummaging in his pack.

“What on hell are you doing now?” I said. “Let’s go!”

“Inappropriate tone and manner,” Bult said into his log.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” I said. “What are you looking for?” I said to Carson.

“The binocs,” Carson said. “Have you got ’em?”

“I gave ’em to you,” I said. “Now, come on.”

He got on his pony and we started off down the slope after Bult. Out beyond the cliff the plain was turning purple in the late afternoon. The Wall curved down out of the Ponypiles and meandered across it, and beyond it you could see the mesas and rivers and cinder cones of uncharted territory, spread out before me like a present, like a bowerbird’s treasures.

“You did not give the binocs back to me,” Carson said. “If you lost ’em again—”