Ponypiles. “We need to get up on that spur so we’ll 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 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
