“Fin?!” Carson said, and let out a whoop. “Fin?! Can’t be. Look at her. She’s way too clean. And she looks too much like a female. Half the time with Fin you can’t even tell!” He whooped again and slapped his leg. “And look at that chest. You sure that’s not C.J.?”
I reached out and slapped the pop-up shut.
“What’d you do that for?” Carson said, holding his middle.
“Time to turn in,” I said. I turned to Ev. “I’m gonna keep this in my boot tonight so Bult can’t get hold of it,” I said and went over to my bedroll.
Bult was standing next to Carson’s bedroll. I glanced out toward the Tongue. The umbrella was still there, burning brightly.
Bult picked up my bedroll to look under it. “Damage to flora,” he said, pointing at the dirt underneath.
“Oh, shut up,” I said and crawled in.
“Inappropriate tone and manner,” he said, and went back out toward his umbrella.
Carson laughed himself sick for another hour, and I lay there after that an hour or so waiting for them to go to sleep and watching the moons jostling for positions in the sky. Then I got the pop-up out of my boot and opened it on the ground beside me.
“Episode Eight. Reduce eighty percent and cloak,” I whispered and lay there and watched Carson and me sitting on horses in a pouring rain and tried to figure out which expedition this was supposed to be. There was a blue buffalo standing up the hill from where we were, and the accordion was pointing at it. “It is called
It had taken us four hours to figure out what Bult was saying. “
“
“Suitcases?!” Carson said, so mad his mustache looked like it’d shake off. “We can’t name them suitcases!” and right then a couple thousand suitcases had come roaring up over the hill at us. My pony stood there like an idiot and nearly got both of us trampled.
In the pop-up version my pony ran off, and I was the one who stood there looking dumb till Carson galloped up and swung me up behind him. I was wearing high-heeled boots and pants so tight it was no wonder I couldn’t run, and Carson was right, she was way too clean, but he hadn’t had to fall in the fire laughing about it.
Carson swung me up, and we rode off, my tight pants hugging the horse and my hair streaming out behind me.
“Nothing here’s what I expected,” Ev had said back at King’s X, “except you.” Tonight he’d said, “You looked exactly the way I pictured you.” Which, I thought, trying to figure out how to make the pop-up run it again, was pretty damn good.
Expedition 184: Day 2
By noon the next day we were still on this side of the Tongue and still heading south, and Carson was in such a foul mood I steered clear of him.
“Is he always this irritable?” Ev asked me.
“Only when he’s worried,” I said.
Speaking of which, I was getting a little worried myself.
Carson’s water analysis hadn’t showed up anything but the usual f-and-f, but Bult had insisted there were
But that wasn’t what was worrying me. What was worrying me was Bult. He hadn’t fined us for anything all morning, not even when we broke camp, and he kept looking off to the south through his binocs. Not only that, but Carson’s binocs had turned up. He found them in his bedroll after breakfast.
“Fin!” he’d shouted, dangling them by the strap. “I knew you had ’em. Where’d you find ’em, in your pack?”
“I haven’t seen ’em since the morning we left for King’s X when you borrowed ’em,” I said. “Bult must’ve had ’em.”
“Bult? Why would he’ve taken ’em?” he said and gestured at Bult, who was peering through his own binocs at the Ponypiles.
I didn’t know, which was what was worrying me. The indidges don’t steal, at least that’s what Big Brother tells us in the pursuants, and in all the expeditions we’d gone on, Bult hadn’t ever taken anything away from us but our hard-earned wages. I wondered what else he might start doing—like take us deep into uncharted territory and then steal our packs and the ponies. Or lead us into an ambush.
I wanted to talk about it with Carson, but I couldn’t get close to him, and I didn’t want to risk another dust storm. I tried riding up alongside him, but Bult kept his pony dead even with Carson’s and glared at me when I tried to move up.
Ev stuck almost as close to me, asking questions about the shuttlewren and telling me about appetizing mating customs, like the male hanging fly, which spins a big balloon of spit and slobber for the female to mess with while he jumps her.
We finally found a place to cross the creek as it zagged sideways across a momentarily flat space, and headed southwest through a series of low hills, and I did a triangulation and then started running terrains.
“Well, we’re in uncharted territory now,” I told Ev. “You can start looking around for stuff to name after C.J. so you can get your jump.”
“If I wanted a jump, I could get it without that,” he said, and I thought, I bet you could.
“I know how C.J. feels, though,” he said, looking out across the plain. “Wanting to leave some mark. You go through that gate, and you realize how big a planet is, and how insignificant you are. You could be here your whole life and never even leave a footprint.”
“Try telling that to Bult,” I said.
He grinned. “Okay, maybe footprints. But nothing lasting. That’s why I wanted to come on this expedition. I wanted to do something that would make me famous, like you and Carson. I wanted to discover something that would get me on the pop-ups.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, leaning down to pick up a rock, “how did we get on them?” I stuck the rock in my pack. “How’d they find out about the suitcases? And Carson’s foot?”
“I don’t know,” Ev said slowly, as if the question hadn’t ever occurred to him. “Your logs, I guess.”
It hadn’t been in the logs about my finding Carson right when the twenty-four hours were up, though. We’d told some of the stories to loaners, and one of the female ones had kept a diary. But Carson wouldn’t have told her about my crying over him.
The hills through here were covered with scraggly plants. I took a holo of them and then halted Useless, which didn’t take much, and dismounted.
“What are you doing?” Ev asked.
“Collecting pieces of the planet for you to leave C.J.’s mark on,” I said, digging around the roots of a couple of the plants and sticking them in a plastic bag. I picked up two more rocks and handed them to him. “Either of these look like a C.J. to you?”
I got back on, watching Bult. He hadn’t even noticed I was off my pony, let alone reached for his log. He was peering through his binocs at the hills beyond the tributary.
“Don’t you ever wish you could have something named after you, Fin?” Ev was asking.
“Me? Why on hell would I want that? Who the hell remembers who Bryce Canyon or Harper’s Ferry are named after even when they’ve got their names on them? Besides, you can’t name a thing just by putting it on a topographical map. That’s not the way it works.” I gestured at the Ponypiles. “When people get here, they won’t
