“Do the Boohteri have a name for this?” Carson asked Bult.
Bult hesitated, as if looking for some cue from Carson, and then said, “Thitsserrrah.”
“Tchahtssillah?” Carson said.
Rocks are supposed to begin with a belching “b,” but Bult nodded. “Tchatssarrah.”
“Tssirrroh?” Carson said.
They went on like that for fifteen minutes while I strapped the terminal on my pony and rolled up the bedrolls.
“Tssarrrah?” Carson said, sounding irritated.
“Yahss,” Bult said. “Tssarrrah.”
“Tssarrrah,” Carson said. He stood up, went over to my pony, and entered the name. Then he went back to where Bult was squatting and started picking up the plastic bags. “We’ll do the rest of these later. I don’t want to spend another night in the Ponypiles.”
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 tssi mitss in the muddy pink water. But they must all have been washed downriver in the flood because he gave the go-ahead and we waded the ponies across and started up the canyon.
After the first klom or so the bank got too rocky to be muddy and the clouds started to drift off. The sun even came out for a few minutes. Ev messed with his specimen, Carson and Bult talked and gestured, deciding which way to go, and I fumed. I was so mad I could’ve killed Carson. I’d been picturing him washed up in some gulch, half-eaten by a nibbler, for the last three days. And not so much as a word when he came back about how on hell he’d made it through the flood or where on hell he’d been.
We began to climb, and I could hear a faint roar up ahead.
“Do you hear that?” I asked Ev.
He had his head in his screen, working on his shuttlewren theory, and I had to ask him again.
“Yeah,” he said, looking up blankly. “It sounds like a waterfall,” and a couple of minutes later there was one. It was just a cascade, and not very high, but right above it the river twisted out of sight, so it was a real waterfall and not just a rough section of river, and we’d gotten above where the rain started, so the water ran a nice clear brownish color.
The gypsum piles made a whole series of bubbling zigzag rushes, and it was presentable-looking enough I figured Ev would at least make a try at naming it after C.J., but he didn’t even look up from his screen and Carson rode right past it.
“Aren’t we gonna name it?” I hollered ahead to him.
“Name what?” he said, as blank as Ev when I’d asked him about the roar.
“The waterfall.”
“The water—?” he said, turning fast to look not at the waterfall, which was right in front of him, but up ahead.
“The waterfall,” I said, pointing at it with my thumb. “You know. Water. Falling. Don’t we need to name it?”
“Of course,” he said. “I just wanted to see what was up ahead first,” which I didn’t believe for a minute. Naming it hadn’t so much as crossed his mind till I said it, and when I’d pointed at it he’d had an expression on his face I couldn’t make out. Mad? Relieved?
I frowned. “Carson—” I started, but he’d already twisted around to look at Bult.
“Bult, do the indidges have a name for this?” he said.
Bult looked, not at the waterfall, but at Carson, with a questioning expression, which was peculiar, and Carson said, “He hasn’t been this far up the Tongue. Ev, you got any ideas?”
Ev looked up from his screen. “According to my calculations, a shuttlebird could construct a Wall chamber in six years,” he said happily, “which matches the mating period of the blackgull.”
“What about Crisscross Falls?” I said.
Carson didn’t even look annoyed, which was even more peculiar. “What about Gypsum Falls? We haven’t used that yet, have we?”
“They’d have to begin building before maturation,” Ev said, “which means the mating instinct would have to be activated at birth.”
I checked the log. “No Gypsum Falls.”
“Good,” Carson said and set off again before I even had it entered.
We’d never named a weed that fast, let alone a waterfall, and Ev had apparently forgotten all about C.J. and sex, unless he thought there’d be plenty of other waterfalls to pick from. He might be right. I could still hear the roar of water, even when we went around the curve in the canyon, and around the next curve it got even louder.
Bult and Carson had stopped up above the waterfall and were consulting. “Bult says this isn’t the Tongue,” Carson said when we came up. “He says it’s a tributary, and the Tongue’s farther south.”
He hadn’t said that. Carson had just told me the Boohteri hadn’t been up this far, and besides, Bult hadn’t opened his mouth. And Carson looked preoccupied, the way Bult had right before the oil field episode.
But Carson was already splashing us back across the river and up the side of the canyon, not even looking at Bult to see which way he was going. He stopped at the top. “This way?” he asked Bult, and Bult gave him that same questioning look and then pointed off up a hill. And what was he leading us into now? If he was the one leading us.
We were above the gypsum now, the soapy slopes giving way to a brownish-rose igneous. Bult led us up a break in another, steeper hill, and toward a clump of silvershim trees. They were old ones, as tall as pines and in full leaf. They would have been blinding if the sun had been out, which it looked like it might be again in a minute.
“Here’re the silvershims you were so anxious to see,” I said to Ev, and after talking to his screen he raised his head and looked at them.
“They’d look a lot better if we were out in the sun,” I said, and right then it put in an appearance and lit them up.
“I told you,” I said, putting up my hand to shade my eyes.
Ev looked dazed, and no wonder. They glittered like one of C.J.’s shirts, the leaves shimmering and reflecting in the breeze.
“Not much like the pop-ups, is it?” I said.
“That’s what gives the Wall its shiny texture!” he said, and slapped his forehead with the flat of his hand. “That was the only part I couldn’t figure out, what gave it that shine.” He started taking holos. “The shuttlewrens must chew the leaves up.”
Well, so much for the silvershims he’d come all the way to Boohte to see. Was C.J. going to be mad when she found out Ev had forgotten her and taken up with some leaf-chewing, plaster-spitting bird!