Horses!

by Gardner Dozois

  "It did cost a lot of credits. We had to bring a blind artist all the way from Olympia to paint that enamel-work. The poor man. He spent most of his time trying to steal extra gemstones when he should have known that we pay justly and never allowed anyone to get away with stealing."

  "What do you do?" asked Casher O'Neill.

  "We cut thieves up in space, just at the edge of the atmosphere. We have more manned boats in orbit than any other planet I know of. Maybe Old North Australia has more, but, then, nobody ever gets close enough to Old North Australia to come back alive and tell."

  They went on into the hospital.

  A respectful chief surgeon insisted on keeping them in the office and entertaining them with tea and confectionery, when they both wanted to go see the horse; common politeness prohibited their pushing through. Finally they got past the ceremony and into the room in which the horse was kept.

  Close up, they could see how much he had suffered. There were cuts and abrasions over almost all of his body. One of his hooves—the doctor told them that was the correct name, hoof, for the big middle fingernail on which he walked—was split; the doctor had put a cadmium-silver bar through it. The horse lifted his head when they entered, but he saw that they were just more people, not horsey people, so he put his head down, very patiently.

  "What's the prospect, doctor?" asked Casher O'Neill, turning away from the animal.

  "Could I ask you, sir, a foolish question first?"

  Surprised, Casher could only say yes.

  "You're an O'Neill. Your uncle is Kuraf. How do you happen to be called `Casher'?"

  "That's simple," laughed Casher. "This is my young-manname. On Mizzer, everybody gets a baby name, which nobody uses. Then he gets a nickname. Then he gets a young-manname, based on some characteristic or some friendly joke, until he picks out his career. When he enters his profession, he picks out his own career name. If I liberate Mizzer and overthrow Colonel Wedder, I'll have to think up a suitable career name for myself."

  "But why `Casher,' sir?" persisted the doctor.

  "When I was a little boy and people asked me what I wanted, I always asked for cash. I guess that contrasted with my uncle's wastefulness, so they called me Casher."

  "But what is cash? One of your crops?"

  It was Casher's time to look amazed. "Cash is money. Paper credits. People pass them back and forth when they buy things."

  "Here on Pontoppidan, all the money belongs to me. All of it," said Genevieve. "My uncle is trustee for me. But I have never been allowed to touch it or to spend it. It's all just planet business."

  The doctor blinked respectfully. "Now this horse, sir, if you will pardon my asking about your name, is a very strange case. Physiologically he is a pure earth type. He is suited only for a vegetable diet, but otherwise he is a very close relative of man. He has a single stomach and a very large cone-shaped heart. That's where the trouble is. The heart is in bad condition. He is dying."

  "Dying?" cried Genevieve.

  "That's the sad, horrible part," said the doctor. "He is dying but he cannot die. He could go on like this for many years. Perino wasted enough stroon on this animal to make a planet immortal. Now the animal is worn out but cannot die."

  Casher O'Neill let out a long, low, ululating whistle. Everybody in the room jumped. He disregarded them. It was the whistle he had used near the stables, back among the Twelve Niles, when he wanted to call a horse.

  The horse knew it. The large head lifted. The eyes rolled at him so imploringly that he expected tears to fall from them, even though he was pretty sure that horses could not lachrymate.

  He squatted on the floor, close to the horse's head, with a hand on its mane.

  "Quick," he murmured to the surgeon. "Get me a piece of sugar and an underperson-telepath. The underperson-telepath must not be of carnivorous origin."

  The doctor looked stupid. He snapped "Sugar" at an assistant, but he squatted down next to Casher O'Neill and said, "You will have to repeat that about an underperson. This is not an underperson hospital at all. We have very few of them here. The horse is here only by command of His Excellency Philip Vincent, who said that the horse of Perind should be given the best of all possible care. He even told me," said the doctor, "that if anything wrong happened to this horse, I would ride patrol for it for the next eighty years. So I'll do what I can. Do you find me too talkative? Some people do. What kind of an underperson do you want?"

  "I need," said Casher, very calmly, "a telepathic underperson, both to find out what this horse wants and to tell the horse that I am here to help him. Horses are vegetarians and they do not like meat-eaters. Do you have a vegetarian underperson around the hospital?"

  "We used to have some squirrel-men," said the chief surgeon, "but when we changed the air circulating system the squirrel-men went away with the old equipment. I think they went to a mine. We have tiger-men, cat-men, and my secretary is a wolf."

  "Oh, no!" said Casher O'Neill. "Can you imagine a sick horse confiding in a wolf?"

  "It's no more than you are doing," said the surgeon, very softly, glancing up to see if Genevieve were in hearing range, and apparently judging that she was not. "The Hereditary Dictators here sometimes cut suspicious guests to pieces on their way off the planet. That is, unless the guests are licensed, regular traders. You are not. You might be a spy, planning to rob us. How do I know? I wouldn't give a diamond chip for your chances of being alive next week. What do you want to do about the horse? That might please the Dictator. And you might live."

  Casher O'Neill was so staggered by the confidence of the surgeon that he squatted there thinking about himself, not about the patient. The horse licked him, seemingly sensing that he needed solace.

  The surgeon had an idea. "Horses and dogs used to go together, didn't they, back in the old days of Manhome, when all the people lived on Planet Earth?"

  "Of course," said Casher. "We still run them together in hunts on Mizzer, but under these new laws of the Instrumentality we've run out of underpeople-criminals to hunt."

  "I have a good dog," said the chief surgeon. "She talks pretty well, but she is so sympathetic that she upsets the patients by loving them too much. I have her down in the second underbasement tending the dish-sterilizing machinery."

  "Bring her up," said Casher in a whisper.

  He remembered that he did not need to whisper about this, so he stood up and spoke to Genevieve:

  "They have found a good dog-telepath who may reach through to the mind of the horse. It may give us the answer."

  She put her hand on his forearm gently, with the approbatory gesture of a princess. Her fingers dug into his flesh. Was she wishing him well against her uncle's habitual treachery, or was this merely the impulse of a kind young girl who knew nothing of the way the world was run?

  IV

  The interview went extremely well.

  The dog-woman was almost perfectly humaniform. She looked like a tired, cheerful, worn-out old woman, not valuable enough to be given the life-prolonging santaclara drug called stroon. Work had been her life and she had had plenty of it. Casher O'Neill felt a twinge of envy when he realized that happiness goes by the petty chances of life and not by the large destiny. This dog-woman, with her haggard face and her stringy gray hair, had more love, happiness and sympathy than Kuraf had found with his pleasures, Colonel Wedder with his

  powers, or himself with his crusade. Why did life do that? Was there no justice, ever? Why should a worn-out worthless old underwoman be happy when he was not?

  "Never mind," she said, "you'll get over it and then you will be happy."

  "Over what?" he said. "I didn't say anything."

  "I'm not going to say it," she retorted, meaning that she was telepathic. "You're a prisoner of yourself. Some day you will escape to unimportance and happiness. You're a good man. You're trying to save yourself, but you really like this horse."

  "Of course I do," said Casher O'Neill. "He's a brave old horse, climbing out
of that hell to get back to people."

  When he said the word hell her eyes widened, but she said nothing. In his mind, he saw the sign of a fish scrawled on a dark wall and he felt her think at him, So you too know something of the "dark wonderful knowledge" which is not yet to be revealed to all mankind?

  He thought a cross back at her and then turned his thinking to the horse, lest their telepathy be monitored and strange punishments await them both.

  She spoke in words, "Shall we link?"

  "Link," he said.

  Genevieve stepped up. Her clear-cut, pretty, sensitive face was alight with excitement. "Could I—could I be cut in?"

  "Why not?" said the dog-woman, glancing at him. He nodded. The three of them linked hands and then the dog-woman put her left hand on the forehead of the old horse.

  The sand splashed beneath their feet as they ran toward Kaheer. The delicious pressure of a man's body was on their backs. The red sky of Mizzer gleamed over them. There came the shout:

  "I'm a horse, I'm a horse, I'm a horse!"

  "You're from Mizzer," thought Casher O'Neill, "from Kaheer itself!"

  "I don't know names," thought the horse, "but you're from my land. The land, the good land."

  "What are you doing here?"

  "Dying," thought the horse. "Dying for hundreds and thousands of sundowns. The old one brought me. No riding, no running, no people. Just the old one and the small ground. I have been dying since I came here."

  Casher O'Neill got a glimpse of Perino sitting and watching the horse, unconscious of the cruelty and loneliness which he had inflicted on his large pet by making it immortal and then giving it no work to do.

  "Do you know what dying is?"

  Though the horse promptly: "Certainly. No-horse."

  "Do you know what life is?"

  "Yes. Being a horse."

  "I'm not a horse," thought Casher O'Neill, "but I am alive."

  "Don't complicate things," thought the horse at him, though Casher realized it was his own mind and not the horse's which supplied the words.

  "Do you want to die?"

  "To no-horse? Yes, if this room, forever, is the end of things."

  "What would you like better?" thought Genevieve, and her thoughts were like a cascade of newly-minted silver coins falling into all their minds: brilliant, clean, bright, innocent.

  The answer was quick: "Dirt beneath my hooves, and wet air again, and a man on my back."

  The dog-woman interrupted: "Dear horse, you know me?" "You're a dog," thought the horse. "Goo-oo-oo-ood dog!" "Right," thought the happy old slattern, "and I can tell these people how to take care of you. Sleep now, and when you waken you will be on the way to happiness."

  She thought the command sleep so powerfully at the old horse that Casher O'Neill and Genevieve both started to fall unconscious and had to be caught by the hospital attendants.

  As they re-gathered their wits, she was finishing her commands to the surgeon. "—put about 40% supplementary oxygen into the air. He'll have to have a real person to ride him, but some of your orbiting sentries would rather ride a horse up there than do nothing. You can't repair the heart. Don't try it. Hypnosis will take care of the sand in Mizzer. Just load his mind with one or two of the drama-cubes packed full of desert adventure. Now, don't you worry about me. I'm not going to give you any more suggestions. People-man, you!" She laughed. "You can forgive us dogs anything, except for being right. It makes you feel inferior for a few minutes. Never mind. I'm going back downstairs to my dishes. I love them, I really do. Good-bye, you pretty thing," she said to Genevieve. "And good-bye, wanderer! Good luck to you," she said to Casher O'Neill. "You will remain miserable as long as you seek justice, but when you give up, righteousness will come to you and you will be happy. Don't worry. You're young and it won't hurt you to suffer a few more years. Youth is an extremely curable disease, isn't it?"

  She gave them a full curtsy, like one Lady of the Instrumentality saying good-bye to another. Her wrinkled old face was lit up with smiles, in which happiness was mixed with a tiniest bit of playful mockery.

  "Don't mind me, boss," she said to the surgeon. "Dishes, here I come." She swept out of the room.

  "See what I mean?" said the surgeon. "She's so horribly happy! How can anyone run a hospital if a dishwasher gets all over the place, making people happy? We'd be out of jobs. Her ideas were good, though."

  They were. They worked. Down to the last letter of the dog-woman's instructions.

  There was argument from the council. Casher O'Neill went along to see them in session.

  One councillor, Bashnack, was particularly vociferous in objecting to any action concerning the horse. "Sire," he cried, "sire! We don't even know the name of the animal! I must protest this action, when we don't know—"

  "That we don't," assented Philip Vincent. "But what does a name have to do with it?"

  "The horse has no identity, not even the identity of an animal. It is just a pile of meat left over from the estate of Perinó. We should kill the horse and eat the meat ourselves. Or, if we do not want to eat the meat, then we should sell it off-planet. There are plenty of peoples around here who would pay a pretty price for genuine earth meat. Pay no attention to me, sire! You are the Hereditary Dictator and I am nothing. I have no power, no property, nothing. I am at your mercy. All I can tell you is to follow your own best interests. I have only a voice. You cannot reproach me for using my voice when I am trying to help you, sire, can you? That's all I am doing, helping you. If you spend any credits at all on this animal you will be doing wrong, wrong, wrong. We are not a rich planet. We have to pay for expensive defenses just in order to stay alive. We cannot even afford to pay for air that our children can go out and play. And you want to spend money on a horse which cannot even talk! I tell you, sire, this council is going to vote against you, just to protect your own interests and the interests of the Honorable Genevieve as Eventual Title-holder of all Pontoppidan. You are not going to get away with this, sire! We are helpless before your power, but we will insist on advising you—"

  "Hear! Hear!" cried several of the councillors, not the least dismayed by the slight frown of the Hereditary Dictator.

  "I would take the word," said Philip Vincent himself.

  Several had had their hands raised, asking for the floor. One obstinate man kept his hand up even when the Dictator announced his intention to speak. Philip Vincent took note of him, too:

  "You can talk when I am through, if you want to."

  He looked calmly around the room, smiled imperceptibly at his niece, gave Casher O'Neill the briefest of nods, and then announced:

  "Gentlemen, it's not the horse which is on trial. It's Pontoppidan. It's we who are trying ourselves. And before whom are we trying ourselves, gentlemen? Each of us is before that most awful of courts, his own conscience.

  "If we kill that horse, gentlemen, we will not be doing the horse a great wrong. He is an old animal, and I do not think that he will mind dying very much, now that he is away from the ordeal of loneliness which he feared more than death. After all, he had already had his great triumph—the climb up the cliff of gems, the jump across the volcanic vent, the rescue by people whom he wanted to find. The horse has done so well that he is really beyond us. We canhelp him, a little, or we can hurt him, a little; beside the immensity of his accomplishment, we cannot really do very much either way.

  "No, gentle are judging s into the Big civilization f blaster or a la a pinlighter at that civilizati would have b Ages they ha small guided Kaskaskis Effe The Dark Age science. They of work to be it begins to fa

  "Take the word. There 1 who made tha travel. To be `t to be polished horse gently, and that witne and vote freel

  There was Philip Vincer created. He lei he slapped the Are you read)

  There was ; still a questio him. The tab Hereditary Di,

  "Gentlemen yourself told choice first, ai

  "Yes," said

  The meetin

  nen, we
are not judging the case of the horse. We ace. What happens to a man when he moves out othing? Do we leave Old Earth behind? Why did !I? Will it fall again? Is civilization a gun or a ;er or a rocket? Is it even a planoforming ship or his work? You know as well as I do, gentlemen, on is not what we can do. If it had been, there een no fall of Ancient Man. Even in the Dark I a few fusion bombs, they could make some missiles and they even had weapons like the ;ct, which we have never been able to rediscover.

  s weren't dark because people lost techniques or were dark because people lost people. It's a lot human and it's work which must be kept up, or de. Gentlemen, the horse judges us.

  vord, gentlemen. `Civilization' is itself a lady's vere female writers in a country called France

  t word popular in the third century before space ;ivilized' meant for people to be tame, to be kind, If we kill this horse, we are wild. If we treat the ve are tame. Gentlemen, I have only one witness ss will utter only one word. Then you shall vote

  murmur around the table at this announcement. t obviously enjoyed the excitement he had them murmur on for a full minute or two before table gently and said, "Gentlemen, the witness.

  9„

  I murmur of assent. Bashnack tried to say, "It's

  of public funds!" but his neighbors shushed

  became quiet. All faces turned toward the stator.

  , the testimony. Genevieve, is that what you me to say? Is civilization always a woman's id only later a man?"

  Genevieve, with a happy, open smile.

  broke up amid laughter and applause.

  V

  A month later Casher O'Neill sat in a room in a medium-size planoforming liner. They were out of reach of Pontoppidan. The Hereditary Dictator had not changed his mind and cut him down with green beams. Casher had strange memories, not bad ones for a young man.

  He remembered Genevieve weeping in the garden.

  "I'm romantic," she cried, and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of his cape. "Legally I'm the owner of this planet, rich, powerful, free. But I can't leave here. I'm too important. I can't marry whom I want to marry. I'm too important. My uncle can't do what he wants to do—he's Hereditary Dictator and he always must do what the Council decides after weeks of chatter. I can't love you. You're a prince and a wanderer, with travels and battles and justice and strange things ahead of you. I can't go. I'm too important. I'm too sweet! I'm too nice; I hate, hate, hate myself sometimes. Please, Casher, could you take a flier and run away with me into space?"