Uncharted territory by Connie Willis

Author:Connie Willis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, Surveyors, Adventure, Life on other planets, General, Explorers
ISBN: 9780553562941
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 1994-06-01T04:44:55.636901+00:00

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.

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