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, “
“Tchahtssillah?” Carson said.
Rocks are supposed to begin with a belching “b,” but Bult nodded. “
They went on like that for fifteen minutes while I strapped the terminal on my pony and rolled up the bedrolls.
“Yahss,” Bult said. “
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
