Uncharted Territory by Connie Willis Read Free Book Online Page A

asked him as soon as we were out of Ev’s earshot.
    “Maybe,” he said. “So what do we do?”
    I shrugged. “Go south to the next break. It’s no farther from the northern tributaries, and by that time we’ll know if we have to check 248-76. I sent C.J. up there to do an aerial.” I looked at Bult, who was still talking into his log. “Maybe he doesn’t have it figured out. Maybe there are just more fines this way.”
    “Which is just what we need,” he said glumly.
    He was right. Our departure fines came to nine hundred, and it took a half hour to tally them up. Then it took Bult another half hour to get his pony loaded, decide he wanted his umbrella, unload everything to find it and load it again, and by that time Carson had used inappropriate manner and tone and thrown his hat on the ground, and we had to wait while Bult added those on.
    It was ten o’clock before we finally got started, Bult leading off under his lighted umbrella, which he’d tied to his pony’s pommelbone, Ev and I side by side, and Carson in the rear where he couldn’t swear at Bult.
    C.J.’d landed us at the top end of a little valley, and we followed it south, keeping close to the Tongue.
    “You can’t see much from here,” I told Ev. “This really only goes another klom or so, and then you should get a better view of the Wall. And five kloms down it comes right up next to the Tongue.”
    “Why is it called the Tongue? Is that a translation of the Boohteri name for it?”
    ‘The indidges don’t have a name for it. Or half the stuff on this planet.” I pointed at the mountains ahead of us. “Take the Ponypiles. Biggest natural formation on the whole continent, and they don’t have a name for it, or most of the f-and-f. And when they do give stuff names, they don’t make any sense. Their name for the luggage is tssuhlkahttses. It means Dead Soup. And Big Brother won’t let us give things sensible names.”
    “Like the Tongue?” he said, grinning.
    “It’s long, it’s pink, and it’s hanging out like it’s going ‘aah’ for a doctor. What else would you call it? That’s not its name anyway. The Tongue’s just what we call it. The name on the maps Conglomerate River, after the rocks it was flowing between up where we named it.”
    “An unofficial name,” Ev said, half to himself.
    “Won’t work,” I said. “We already named Tight-ass Canyon after C.J. She wants something named after her officially. Passed, approved, and on the topographicals.”
    “Oh,” he said, and looked disappointed.
    “What about that?” I said. “Any species besides homo sap have to carve a female’s name on a tree to get a jump?”
    “No,” he said. “There’s a species of water bird on Choom where the males build plaster dikes around the females that look a lot like the Wall.”
    Speaking of which, there it was. The valley had been climbing and opening out as we rode, and all of a sudden we were at the top of a rise and looking out across what looked like one of C.J.’s aerials.
    It was flat all the way to the feet of the Ponypiles, with the Tongue slicing through it like a map boundary. Boohte’s got as many oxides as Mars, and lots of cinnabar, so the plains are pink. There were mesas here and there off to the west, and a couple of cinder pyramids, and the blue of the distance turned them a nice lavender. And meandering around them and over the mesas, down to the Tongue and then away again, arched white and shining in the sun, was the Wall. At least Bult hadn’t been lying about the break. The Wall marched unbrokenly as far as I could see.
    “There she is,” I said. I turned and looked at Ev.
    His mouth was hanging open.
    “Hard to believe the Boohteri built it, isn’t it?”
    Ev nodded without closing his mouth.
    “Carson and I have this theory that they didn’t,” I said. “We think some poor species of indidges who lived here before built it, and then Bult and his pals fined them out of it.”
    “It’s