Uncharted Territory

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.”