Nine White Horses (17 page)

Novinha was thinking about coming into season. Some of the
other mares were more than thinking about it. They paced the fence as the stallions
danced past, flagging their tails and squealing at any who so much as flicked
an ear.

The stallions knew better than to be presumptuous. Young
Rahman snorted and skittered, but his rider brought him lightly back in hand.
The others arched their necks, that was all, and put on a bit of prance for the
ladies. Because they were dancers and this was Dancer’s Rest, they pranced with
art and grace, a shimmer of white manes and white necks and here and there a
black or a bay or a chestnut.

There were horses already in the training rings, the great
ones, the masters of the art that the others were still learning. They had gone
through the steps of the dance, and for duty and reward were dancing in the
air: levade, courbette, capriole; croupade and passade and ballotade. The names
were as archaic and beautiful as the dance.

o0o

Marina should have been riding one of the young stallions,
dappled silver Pluto Amena or coal-black Doloroso or fierce blood-bay Rahman
who was fretting and tossing his head under Cousin Tomas’ hand. Tomas had less
patience than Rahman liked, and stronger hands.

But Marina was up on the hill beyond the broodmares’
pasture, where she could see the whole of Dancer’s Rest like an image in a
screen. She had gone up there to watch the sun come out, and stayed longer than
she should, because of the flyer that was coming from the west. West was City
and Dome. West was the Hippodrome, where things raced and exhibited themselves
and even tried to dance, that were called horses but were not horses at all.
Not in the least. Not like the ones that danced and grazed and called to one
another in spring yearning below and all around her.

She had seen the horse-things. Everyone at Dancer’s Rest
had, because Papa Morgan let no one in the family ride or train or handle the
horses unless he or she had seen what had been done in the name of fashion and
function and plain unmotivated modernity. Horses in the Hippodrome looked very
little like horses at Dancer’s Rest—and very little like one another. Those
that ran were lean whippy greyhound-bodied things, all legs and speed. Those
that exhibited could not walk, could not trot, could not canter or gallop,
could only flail the air in the movement called “show gait.” It was a little
like a prance and a little like a piaffe and a great deal like the snap and
ratchet of a mechanical toy. And those that were there simply to be beautiful
could stand, that was all, and pose, and arch their extraordinarily long necks.
They could carry no rider; their backs were grown too long and frail. They
could walk, but with difficulty, since their hindlegs were so very long and so
very delicate. But they were lovely, like living art, pure form divorced from
function.

After a long day in the Hippodrome, Marina had come home to
shock and a kind of grief. The family’s horses were old stock—raw unmodified
equine. They looked small and thick-legged, short-bodied, heavy and primitive.
Their movements were strange, too varied and almost too heavy, all power and
none of the oiled glide of the racers or the flashing knee action of the
exhibition stock. They were atavisms. The world had passed them by. All that
was new and bold and reckoned beautiful was engineered, designed, calculated to
the last curve of ear and flick of tail.

“That’s why,” Papa Morgan had said when she came back too
cold of heart to cry and too angry to be wise. “That’s what you needed to see.
What they’ve made, and what we keep.”

“But why keep it?” Marina had demanded. “Why bother with old
stock at all? Nobody wants it. Nobody likes the way it looks or moves or
handles. It can’t run, it can’t show, it can’t stand up and look correctly
beautiful.”

“And worse than that,” said Papa Morgan, “it has a mind of
its own.” He sighed. “That’s why. Because it’s not what people want. It’s what
it is.”

She had understood, as she should, because she was family
and she had learned the lesson from infancy. But her understanding was a shallow
thing. She thought too often of going away as so many of the cousins and the
siblings did, leaving Dancer’s Rest to live in the world of cities and domes
and gengineered equines. Only the strongest-minded stayed, and the ones who loved
the horses above anything in the greater world, and those like Marina who were
too weak-willed to leave.

Weak-willed, and bound to the horses, however primitive or
unfashionable they might be. She was family. She was bred to this as surely as
racers to the track and show stock to the ring.

The flyer was close enough now to see. She scrambled up from
the damp grass, brushing at blades that clung, and knowing but not caring that
her breeches were stained as green as Novinha’s haunch. She ran down the hill toward
the road, to the delight of the yearlings whose pasture it was. They swirled
about her, a storm of hooves and tails and tossing heads, parting and streaming
along the forcefence as she ran through. She felt the tingle of the field,
though the gate-chip was supposed to make it invisible and imperceptible. But
she always knew where the fence was, and in much the same way the horses did.

Horse instincts, Papa Morgan said, had been in the family
since long before gengineering.

And why, she wondered, did she want to rear and shy and run
away from the flyer that was coming to rest on the family’s pad? It was only
the inspector from the Hippodrome, come as she did every year at the start of
breeding season, to inspect the stock and approve the roster of breedings-to-be
and enjoy a long and convivial visit with Papa Morgan and the rest of the
family. Marina had honed and polished Pluto Amena’s levade for the exhibition
that would crown the afternoon—she should be in the stable now, seeing that he
was clean and ready to be shown.

But instead of turning toward the stable she kept going
toward the house. She was not the only one. Papa Morgan and the elders were
waiting, of course, as was polite, but there were others about as well, who
should have been in the stables or in the house. Tante Concetta was standing
near the pad, and Cousin Wilhelm, and Tante Estrella in breeches and boots with
a long whip in her hand.

Tante Estrella was a wild one, as wild as the young mares
she preferred to train and handle, and as beautiful as they were, too. She
looked a little frightening now, as if her ears were laid back and her tail
lashing, threatening to kick or strike at the person who had emerged from the
flyer.

It was not round smiling grey-haired Shanna Chen-Howard, nor
any of the people who had always come with her to Dancer’s Rest. This was a
stranger. No human person came with him; only a mechanical, a mute and
blank-faced metal bodyguard and recording device. It looked slightly more human
than the stranger did, to Marina’s eye.

Pity, too. He was young and not bad-looking. Gengineered, of
course, but not so as to be obvious. That was the fashion these days. His
parents would have designed him to emerge au naturel, with any serious flaws or
inconveniences carefully and unobtrusively smoothed away.

They did not seem to have included a module for good humor.
He looked as if he never smiled. His eyes as they scanned the people and the
place were cold, and grew colder as they passed Cousin Wilhelm. Cousin Wilhelm
stayed at home mostly, not for shame or shyness but because he was more
comfortable there, where he did not need eyes to know where everything was.
Implants had never taken, and mechanicals, he said, were worse than nothing at
all. Marina thought he preferred the dark he had been born to, as rich as it
was in sounds and smells. He was a better rider than most men who could see,
and a wonderful trainer of horses.

This stranger in the inspector’s tabard saw none of that. He
saw a blind man in antique riding breeches, leaning on the arm of a greying and
unnecessarily plump woman. Marina could read him as clearly as if he had spoken.
Primitive
, he was thinking.
Atavistic.
Outdated.
Like the house in front of him, and the stables and the
pastures beyond, and the horses in them, crude unmodified creatures without
even the grace to be clean.

He was at least polite to Papa Morgan. It was a frigid
politeness, with a bare minimum of words. Papa Morgan, who was never flustered,
moved smoothly through the formulae of introduction, and took no notice of the
brevity of the responses. It was briefest of all in front of Cousin Wilhelm: a
sharp dip of the head that Cousin Wilhelm could not see, thoughtless maybe, but
to Marina’s mind as rude as an outright insult.

Papa Morgan noticed. He showed no sign of offense, but
Marina saw how he led the inspector into the house without offering the
greeting-cup, the wine and the bread and salt that sealed a friendship. Shanna
Chen-Howard would have known what that signified. This person, this Hendrick Manygoats
Watanabe, did not even seem to realize that he had been slighted.

Marina trailed after them. She was not invited, but neither
was she shut out. There was a smell in the air, a little like hot iron, a great
deal like fear.

o0o

“Yes,” Papa Morgan said. “We do unregulated breeding here.
We have a license to do so—a dispensation under the Mandate, for the
preservation of rootstock.”

He should not have had to explain to an inspector who
administered the Mandate. The inspector knew exactly how much and how far
Dancer’s Rest was permitted to depart from the laws that governed gengineering.
But he was insisting on being obtuse.

There was nothing convivial about the meeting. He had
refused refreshment, which meant that no one with him could have it, either:
distressing as the day wore on and they all went hungry. He had also refused
the tour of the stables, and declined the pleasure of the exhibition. He had
come, he said, to investigate the breeding practices at Dancer’s Rest. They
would present the records, please, and explain the entries, and be quick about
it.

Papa Morgan was the most patient person Marina knew. He had
to be, to be the head of the family. She had never seen him lose patience. Nor
did he now with this stranger who would not look at his horses, but there was a
glitter in his eyes that she had not seen before. It made her shiver.

She could have left long ago. But she stayed, and the others
stayed, too, unnoticed and unreprimanded. They were like a bodyguard, she
thought, though what they were guarding against, except bureaucratic niggling,
she did not know.

Hendrick Manygoats Watanabe was not a patient man. He would
never make a trainer of horses, she thought as she watched him scan the
records. She wondered if he knew anything about horses at all, or if he cared.
Shanna Chen-Howard had been one of those unfortunates who lack both the balance
and the talent to do more than haul themselves into a saddle and sit more or
less in the middle, but she had loved to watch the horses, ridden and free, and
she had known many of them by name.

This man who had come in her place, who had not troubled to
explain why, would never know Novinha and Selene and Bellamira and Sayyida, nor
care that Maestoso Miranda liked sugar but Rigoletto preferred apples. His whole
world was a scroll of data, columns of numbers, files labeled by genetic type.
The living flesh, the animal that was the sum of its genes, was an irrelevance.

He frowned as the files scrolled behind his eyes. “Random,”
he said to himself, but not as if he cared who heard. “Untidy. This string—” He
called it to the wallscreen in the family’s meeting room, which was an insult
of sorts: they all had implants, they were not primitives or atavists who
refused the seductions of the net. The pure flow of data resolved into an
image, a helix of stars, each with its distinctive color and form.

Marina recognized the shape of it. One of the elders, Mama
Tania, said what they all knew. “That’s the Skowronek gene line. Very old, very
illustrious. Prepotent.”

“And severely flawed,” said Hendrick Manygoats Watanabe. “You
see here, here, here.” Light-pointers flashed. “This is worse than untidy. This
is a possible lethal recessive.”

“So it is,” Papa Morgan said mildly.

“And you make no effort to remove it?”

Papa Morgan seemed to grow calmer, the more agitated the
inspector became. “Of course you do understand, Ser Watanabe. It was explained
to you. We preserve the old stock, the rootstock. Unaltered. Unrefined. Flaws
and all.”

“But that is against the Mandate,” said Watanabe.

“We are exempt from the Mandate,” Papa Morgan said.

“That,” said Watanabe, “is a matter of debate.”

There was a silence. Someone drew a long, slow breath. It
was as loud as a rushing of wind.

Marina was too young to remember how the exemption had been
granted, but everyone knew the story. Someone, the family had argued, should
preserve the old stock—for antiquarian reasons, or sentimental ones, or for
scholars and scientists who might find new modifications based on the old
genetic materials. There had been a movement then in favor of such curiosities;
the exemption had passed, and no one had challenged it.

Papa Morgan was not surprised to meet a challenge now. Nor
were the other elders. They had expected this, then. They might even have
expected the stranger who came in Shanna Chen-Howard’s place.

She felt a flicker of anger. No one had told her. And how
many of the others knew, who had kept it quiet because it could only upset the
young and disturb the horses?

Elders’ prerogative. She did not have to like it. She was
here, when she could perfectly well have been told to leave—she had no place or
position, and no authority beyond that of an assistant trainer.

So. She knew what this stranger was here for. Why he had
been sent, and how he had gained authority for it—and also, within the rest,
why Shanna Chen-Howard had not come. Her faction must have lost power in the
Hippodrome. This was the new faction, and the new law.