“And you can hear you twice as far!” I said. “The only way he’s going to find out about it is if he comes over to see what all the hollering’s about!”
Carson snatched the pop-up away from Ev. “What else did you bring?” he shouted, but softer. “A nuclear reactor? A gate?”
“Just another disk,” Ev said. “For the pop-up.” He pulled a black coin out of his pocket and handed it to Carson.
“What on hell’s this?” he said, turning it over.
“It’s us,” I said. “Findriddy and Carson, Planetary Explorers, and Our Faithful Scout, Bult. Thirteen episodes.”
“Eighty,” Ev said. “There are forty on each disk, but I only brought my favorites.”
“You gotta see ’em, Carson,” I said. “Especially your mustache. Ev, is there some way you can tone down the production so we can watch without letting the rest of the neighborhood in on it?”
“Yeah,” Ev said. “You just—”
“Nobody’s watching anything till we get a fire built and I make sure Bult’s out there under that umbrella,” he said, and stomped off for about the fourth time.
I got the sticks made into a passable fire by the time he got back, looking mad, which meant Bult was there.
“All right,” he said, handing the pop-up back to Ev. “Let’s see these famous explorers. But keep it down.”
“Episode Two,” Ev said, laying it on the ground in front of us. “Reduce fifty percent and cloak,” and the scene came up, smaller and in a little box this time. Fancy Mustache and Tight Pants were clambering over a break in the Wall. Carson was wearing his blue fuzzy vest.
“You’re the one with the fancy mustache,” I said, pointing.
“Do you have any idea what kind of fine we’d get for killing a suitcase?” he said. He pointed at Tight Pants. “Who’s the female?”
“That’s Fin,” Ev said.
“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 soolkases in the Boohteri tongue,” he said, and I knew which one this was, only that wasn’t the way it happened.
It had taken us four hours to figure out what Bult was saying. “Tssilkrothes?” I remembered Carson shouting.
“Tssuhhtkhahckes!” Bult had shouted back.
“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 tssi mitss and led us south to a tributary. There were tssi mitss in the tributary, too, and he led us east along it till we came to one of its tributaries. This one didn’t have any tssi mitss, but it zigzagged down through a draw too steep for the ponies, so Bult led us north along it, looking for a place to cross. At this rate we’d be back at King’s X by suppertime.
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.”