Terra Incognita

by Connie Willis

  There was a presentable-looking female standing next to a horse made up to be a pony and a squatty pink thing like a cross between an accordion and a fireplug. They were having an argument.

  “He’s been gone too long,” the female said. She had on tight pants and a low-slung shirt, and her hair was long and shiny. “I’m going to go find him.”

  “It’s been nearly twenty hours,” the accordion said. “We must report in to Home Base.”

  “I’m not leaving here without him,” the female said, and swung up on the horse and galloped away.

  “Wait!” the accordion shouted. “You can’t! It’s too dangerous!”

  “Who’s that supposed to be?” I said, sticking my finger into the accordion.

  “Stop,” Ev said, and the scene froze. “That’s Bult.”

  “Where’s his log?” I said.

  “I told you things were different from what I’d expected,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “Go back.”

  There was a flicker, and we were back at the beginning of the scene.

  “He’s been gone too long!” Tight Pants said.

  “If that’s Bult, then who’s that supposed to be?” I said.

  “You,” he said, sounding surprised.

  “Where’s Carson?” I said.

  “In the next scene.”

  There was another flicker, and we were at the foot of a cliff, with big, fake-looking boulders all around. Carson was sitting at the bottom of the cliff, sprawled out against one of the boulders with a big gash in the side of his head and a fancy mustache that curled at the ends. Carson’s mustache had never looked that good, not even the first time I saw him, and they had the nibblers all wrong, too—they looked like guinea pigs with false teeth—but what they were doing to Carson’s foot was pretty realistic. I hoped they got to the part where I found him pretty soon.

  “Next scene,” I said, and it flickered to me coming straight down the cliff in those tight pants, blasting at the nibblers with a laser.

  Which wasn’t the way it happened at all. Unless I’d wanted to go down the same way Carson did, there was no way off the cliff. The nibblers had run off when I yelled, but I’d had to go back along the cliff till I came to a chimney and work my way down and back around, and it took three hours. The nibblers had run off again when they heard me coming, but they hadn’t been gone long.

  Tight Pants jumped the last ten feet and knelt down beside Carson, and started tearing strips she couldn’t afford to lose off her shirt and tying them around Carson’s foot, which only looked a little bloody around the toes, sobbing her eyes out.

  “I didn’t cry,” I said. “You got any others?”

  “Episode Eleven,” Ev said, and the cliff flicked into a silvershim grove. Tight Pants and Fancy Mustache were surveying the grove with an old-fashioned transit and sextant, and the accordion was writing down the measurements.

  It looked like somebody’d cut up pieces of aluminum foil and hung them on a dead branch, and Carson was wearing a blue fuzzy vest that I had a feeling was supposed to be luggage fur.

  “Findriddy!” the accordion said, looking up sharply. “I hear someone coming!”

  “What are you two doing?” Carson said, and walked right into a silvershim. He looked around, his arms full of sticks. “What on hell is this?”

  “You and me,” I said.

  “A pop-up,” Ev said.

  “Turn it off!” Carson said, and the other Carson and Tight Pants and the silvershims compressed into a black nothing. “What on hell’s the matter with you, bringing advanced technology on an expedition? Fin, you were supposed to see to it he followed the regs!” He dumped the sticks with a clatter onto where the accordion’d been standing. “Do you know how big a fine Bult could slap us with for that?”

  “I…I didn’t know…” Ev was stammering, stooping down to pick up the pop-up before Carson stepped on it. “It never occurred to me…”

  “It’s no more advanced than Bult’s binocs,” I said, “or half the stuff he’s ordered. And even if it was, he doesn’t know anything about it. He’s over there tallying up his fines.” I pointed off toward the lights of his umbrella.

  “How do you know he doesn’t know? You can see it for kloms!”

  “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 remembe
red 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.”

  “Try telling that to Bult,” I said.

  He grinned. “Okay, maybe footprints. But nothing lasting. That’s why I wanted to come on this expedition. I wanted to do something that would make me famous, like you and Carson. I wanted to discover something that would get me on the pop-ups.”

  “Speaking of which,” I said, leaning down to pick up a rock, “how did we get on them?” I stuck the rock in my pack. “How’d they find out about the suitcases? And Carson’s foot?”

  “I don’t know,” Ev said slowly, as if the question hadn’t ever occurred to him. “Your logs, I guess.”

  It hadn’t been in the logs about my finding Carson right when the twenty-four hours were up, though. We’d told some of the stories to loaners, and one of the female ones had kept a diary. But Carson wouldn’t have told her about my crying over him.

  The hills through here were covered with scraggly plants. I took a holo of them and then halted Useless, which didn’t take much, and dismounted.

  “What are you doing?” Ev asked.

  “Collecting pieces of the planet for you to leave C.J.’s mark on,” I said, digging around the roots of a couple of the plants and sticking them in a plastic bag.

  I picked up two more rocks and handed them to him. “Either of these look like a C.J. to you?”

  I got back on, watching Bult. He hadn’t even noticed I was off my pony, let alone reached for his log. He was peering through his binocs at the hills beyond the tributary.

  “Don’t you ever wish you could have something named after you, Fin?” Ev was asking.

  “Me? Why on hell would I want that? Who the hell remembers who Bryce Canyon or Harper’s Ferry are named after even when they’ve got their names on them? Besides, you can’t name a thing just by putting it on a topographical map. That’s not the way it works.” I gestured at the Ponypiles. “When people get here, they won’t call those the Findriddy Mountains. They’ll call ’em the Ponypiles. People name things after what they look like, or what happened there, or what the indidge name sounds like, not according to regs.”

  “People?” Ev said. “You mean gatecrashers?”

  “Gatecrashers,” I said, “and miners and settlers and shopping-mall owners.”

  “But what about the regs?” Ev said, looking shocked. “They’re supposed to protect the natural ecology and the sovereignty of the indigenous culture.”

  I nodded my head at Bult. “And you think the indigenous culture wouldn’t sell them the whole place for some pop-ups and a couple of dozen shower curtains? You think Big Brother’s paying us to survey all this for his health? You think as soon as we find something they want, they won’t be down here, regs or no regs?”

  Ev looked unhappy. “Like tourists,” he said. “Everybody’s seen the silvershims and the Wall on the pop-ups, and they all want to come see them.”

  “And take holos of themselves being fined,” I said, even though I hadn’t really thought of Boohte as a tourist attraction. “And Bult can sell them dried ponypiles for souvenirs.”

  “I’m glad I came before the rush,” he said, looking at the water ahead. The hills parted on either side of the tributary, and it wouldn’t matter whether there were tssi mitss or not. A wide sandbar stretched almost the full width of the water.

  The ponies picked their way across it like it was quicksand, and Ev just about fell off, trying to lean down to look at it. “The female willowback needs to lay her eggs in still water, so the courtship ritual involves the male doing a swimming dance that dams up sand across the stream.”

  “And that’s what this is?” I said.

  “I don’t think so. It looks like it’s just a sandbar.” He sat up in the saddlebone. “The female shale-dwelling lizard scratches a design in the dirt, and then the male scratches the same desi
gn on the shale.”

  I wasn’t paying any attention. Bult was peering through the binocs at the hills between us and the Tongue, and Carson’s pony was starting to sway. “Here’s your big chance, Ev,” I said. “Rest stop!”

  After Carson and I did the topographicals and we had lunch, I hauled out my rocks and plastic bags and Carson emptied his bug-catcher, and we settled down to naming.

  Carson started with the bugs. “Do you have a name for it?” he asked Bult, holding it away from Bult so he couldn’t stuff it in his mouth, but Bult didn’t even look interested.

  He looked at Carson for a minute like he was thinking of something else, and then said what sounded to me like steam hissing and then metal being dragged over granite.

  “Tssimrrah?” Carson said.

  “Thssahggih,” Bult said.

  “This’ll take a while,” I said to Ev.

  Figuring out the indidge name for a thing isn’t so much about understanding what Bult says as trying to keep it from all sounding the same. F-and-f all sounds like steam escaping in a blizzard, lakes and rivers sound like a gate opening, and rocks all begin with a belching “B,” which makes you wonder about the indidges’ opinion of Bult. All of them sound more or less the same, and none of them sound like English letters, which is a good thing, or everything would have the same name.

  “Thssahggah?” Carson said.

  “Shhoomrrrah,” Bult said.

  I glanced at Ev, who was looking at the rocks and the bagged plants. It was fairly slim pickings—the only rock that didn’t look like mud warmed over was horneblende, and the only flower had five ragged-looking petals, but I didn’t think Ev would try what the loaners usually did, anyway, which was try to name the first flower we found a chrysanthemum, no matter what it looked like. Chrysa, for short.

  Carson and Bult finally agreed on tssahggah for the bug, and I took holos of it and of the piece of horneblende and transmitted them and their names.

  Bult had the flower and was shaking his head.

  “The indidges don’t have a name for it,” Carson said, looking at Ev. “How about it, Evie? What do you want to call it?”