They’re not real doors, more like a hole poked in the middle of the side, and there’s no floor either. The sides curve up like an egg. There was a bunch of sandblossoms laid out on the bottom of this one, and in the middle of it one of the American flags Bult had bought two expeditions ago.
“Courtship ritual,” I said, but Ev was looking up at the curved ceiling, trying to see if there was a nest. “There are several species of birds that nest in the homes of other species. The panakeet on Yotata, the cuckoo.”
We started back to the ponies. It was starting to sprinkle. Up ahead, Bult was getting his umbrella out of his pack and putting it up. Carson was off his pony stomping back to us. “Fin, what on hell do you think you’re doing?” he said when he got up to us.
“Taking a rest stop,” I said. “We haven’t had one all day.”
“And were not going to. Were finally heading north.” He took hold of Useless’s reins and yanked him forward. “Ev, you stay back here and bring up the rear. Fins coming up to ride with me.”
“I like it back here,” I said.
“Too bad,” he said, and dragged my pony forward. “You’re riding with me. Bult, you lead. Fin and I are riding together.”
Bult gave me a murderous glance and lit up his umbrella. He crossed the creek and then rode up along it, going west.
“Now, get on,” Carson said and mounted his pony. “I want to be away from the mountains by nightfall.”
“And that’s why I have to ride with you,” I said, swinging my leg up, “so I can tell you which way’s north? It’s that way.”
I pointed north. There was a high bluff in that direction, and between it and the Ponypiles a strip of flat grayish-pink plain, splotched here and there with whitish and dark patches. Bult was heading catty-corner across the flat, still following the stream, his pony leaving deep pawprints in the soft ground.
“Thanks,” Carson said. “The way you been acting, I didn’t figure you knew which end was up, let alone north.”
“What on hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you haven’t been paying attention to anything since Evelyn showed up and started talking about mating customs. I’d’ve thought you’d’ve run out of species by now.”
“Well, we haven’t,” I snapped.
“You’re supposed to be surveying, not listening to the loaners. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in uncharted territory, we don’t have any aerials, Bult’s half a klom ahead of us—” He pointed up ahead.
Bult’s pony was drinking out of the stream. It was still sprinkling, but Bult turned off his umbrella and collapsed it.
”—and who knows where he’s going. He could be leading us into a trap. Or around in circles till the food runs out.”
I looked ahead at Bult. He’d crossed the creek and ridden a little way up the other side. His pony was taking another drink.
“Maybe Wulfmeier’s back and Bult’s leading us straight to him. And you haven’t looked at a screen all morning. You’re supposed to be running subsurfaces, not listening to Evie Darling talk about sex.”
“Listening to him is one hell of a lot more fun than listening to you tell me how to do my job!” I kicked the log on and asked for a subsurface. Up ahead, Bult’s pony was stopped and drinking again. I looked down at the stream. Where it cut the low banks, the rock looked like mudstone. “Cancel subsurface,” I said.
“You haven’t been paying attention to anything,” Carson said. “You lose the binocs, you lose the pop-up—”
“Shut up,” I said, looking at the bluff, backing the full length of the plain. The plain tilted slightly to its base. “Terrain,” I said. “No. Terrain cancel.” I looked out at the closest whitish patch. Where the drops of rain were sticking to it, it was pocked with pink.
“You were supposed to keep the pop-up in your boot. If Bult gets hold of it—”
“Shut up,” I said. Where Bult’s pony had walked there were fifteen-centimeter-deep pawprints in the grayish-brown dirt. The ones up ahead were dark on the bottom.
“If you’d have been paying attention, you’d have realized Wulfmeier—” Carson was saying.
“My shit!” I said, “Dust storm!” and jammed the disconnect. “Shit.”
Carson jerked around in the saddlebone as if he expected to see a dust tantrum roaring down on him, and then jerked back and stared at me.
“Subsurface,” I said to the terminal. I pointed at the pony’s pawprints. “Off-line, and no trace.”
Carson stared at the pawprints. “Is everything off?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, checking the cameras to make sure.
“Are you running a subsurface?”
“I don’t have to,” I said, waving at the plain. “It’s right there on top. Shit, shit, shit.”
Evelyn rode up. “What is it?” he asked.
“I knew he was up to something,” Carson said, looking ahead at Bult. He was off his pony and squatting down at the edge of a dark patch. “I
told
you I thought he was leading us into a trap.”
“What
is
it?” Ev said, pulling his knife out. “Nibblers?”
“No, its a couple of royal saps,” Carson said. “Was the log on?”
“Of course it was on,” I snapped. “This is uncharted. Terrain, off-line and no trace,” I said, but I already knew what it was going to show. A bluff backing a tilted plain. Mudstone. Salt. Seepage. A classic anticline, just like in Wulfmeier’s holos. Shit, shit, shit.
“What
is
it?” Evelyn said.
The terrain came up on the screen. “Subsurface overlay,” I said.
“Nahtth,” Bult called.
I looked up. He had his umbrella up and was pointing with it at the bluff.
“The sneak,” Carson said. “Where’s he leading us now?”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I said, scanning the subsurface. It was worse than I thought. The field was fifteen kloms square, and we were right in the middle of it.
“He wants us to follow him,” Carson said. “He probably wants to show us a gusher. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“I know,” I said, scanning the subsurface. The salt dome went the whole length of the bluff and all the way to the foot of the Ponypiles.
“What do we do?” Carson said. “Go back to the Wall?”
I shook my head. The only sure way out of this was the way we’d come, but the ponies wouldn’t backtrail, and the subsurface showed a secondary fault south of the creek. If we went off at an angle we were liable to run into seep, and we obviously couldn’t go north.
“Distance overlay,” I said. “Off-line and no trace.”
“We can’t stay off-line all day,” Carson said. “C.J.’s already suspicious.”
“I
know”
I said, looking desperately at the map. We couldn’t go west. It was too far, and the subsurface showed seepage that way. “We’ve got to go south,” I said, pointing at the foothills of the Ponypiles. “We need to get up on that spur so well be up above the natural table.”
“Are you sure?” Carson said, coming around to look at the screen.
“I’m sure. The rocks are gypsum.” Which is frequently associated with an anticline. Shit, shit, shit.
“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.”
“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 mud-stone. 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 mud-stone 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.?”