Nine White Horses (18 page)

“Your exemption is revoked,” said Hendrick Manygoats
Watanabe. “Your breeding patterns are invalid. You will be receiving
instructions, which you will follow. This complex, for example,” he said,
tilting his head toward the wallscreen, “will be removed. There will be no
further random breeding of live male to live female. You will conduct your program
in accordance with the rules and regulations of the Mandate.”

Papa Morgan did not bother to contend that there was nothing
random about the family’s choices. He only said, “The Mandate has no provision
for the preservation of rootstock.”

“The whole of the Mandate encompasses such a provision. Your
stock has been allowed to proliferate without rule or regulation. It has no
specific function—”

“On the contrary,” said Papa Morgan. “It is the most purely
functional of all the equids. It lives to dance.”

Watanabe’s mouth opened, then closed again. Marina wondered
if he had ever been interrupted in his life.

“We will appeal the decision,” said Papa Morgan.

Watanabe recovered himself with an air almost of pleasure. “Your
appeal is denied.”

o0o

“We have to fight them.”

The family was gathered where the elders had been since
morning, all of them down to the toddlers from the creches. There had been food
earlier, and there was drink going around, intoxicant and stimulant and even
plain water. The inspector was gone. He had taken his mechanical and his flyer
and flown back to the Hippodrome without ever once looking at the horses.

“We should have dragged him out there,” some of the younger
trainers were insisting. “If he could see—”

“He saw all he needed to see.” Marina surprised herself by
speaking out—usually she kept quiet and let the others do the talking. “He
looked at the helices, he saw how untidy and unregulated they were, and he knew
they couldn’t be allowed to continue.”

Up among the elders, the same argument was going on, at
nearly the same volume. Papa Morgan said in his deep voice that carried without
effort, “We’ve been fighting the Mandate since it was made. We’ve been
appealing this decision at every level. The answer is always no. We can keep our
rootstock—by which they mean the type we breed and raise here. But we have to
clean up its helices.”

“But if we do that,” Cousin Bernardin pointed out, “it’s not
rootstock anymore. It’s modified. You know—we all know—that the helices are
untidy because they need to be. That’s where the strength is. That’s what makes
our horses what they are.”

“The Mandate believes otherwise,” said Papa Morgan. He
sounded tired.

Papa Morgan was never tired or impatient or, all divinities
forbid, defeated. But now he was close to all of them. He looked as if he
wanted to turn and walk away, but the press of people hemmed him in. He had to
stay and listen to all this fruitless babble.

Marina was freer than he was, but she could not leave,
either. Whatever had brought her here in the morning was not letting her go.
Family intuition, Tante Estrella would call it. Tante Estrella had more than
her fair share of it herself.

As if the thought had invoked her, she came quietly to stand
by Marina, not doing anything, watching people argue. She was still wearing her
breeches, but her long whip was gone, laid aside somewhere. She did not seem
agitated at all. If anything she was amused.

“Wait,” she said to Marina out of nowhere in particular. “See
what happens.”

Nothing happened that Marina could see. The gathering
ended in disarray. The Mandate left no choice and no debate. Its rules were
strict and its regulations precise. Genetic codes would be corrected according
to its guidelines, animals bred without the untidiness of stallion courting
mare in the breeding pen or the pasture, pregnancies monitored and embryos
transferred with clean mechanical precision.

There was none of the usual springtime excitement, the
pleasure of matching this stallion to that mare, the waiting for her to come
into season and accept him, the beautiful randomness of conception in a living
womb. It was all done in the laboratory, as coldly meticulous as a chemical
equation.

One thing at least the Mandate did not forbid, though it did
not encourage it, either. It could not keep mares from carrying their own
foals. Their clean, derandomized, genetically perfected foals, each set of
helices prescribed by the authorities in the Hippodrome. Hendrick Manygoats
Watanabe himself, according to the signature, reviewed and approved each one.
The family’s breeding managers were not permitted to select the matches. Not
this season. They would be shown, he had informed them, what they were to do;
then in other seasons they would know what was correct and what was permitted.

In much older days an insult of that proportion would have
led to a duel at least, and maybe to a war. This season, with their greatest
power stripped from them and handed to strangers, the elders in the breeding
pens said nothing whatsoever.

They did as they were told. They collected specimens, handed
them to the inspectors who flew in from the west, stood by unspeaking while
those same inspectors returned from the laboratory with technicians and racks
of labeled vials. When the horses objected, they made no move and spoke no
word. More than one inspector or technician discovered that these undersized,
primitive creatures were remarkably strong and self-willed—and utterly
unforgiving of insults from strangers.

When the tech who had tried to collect a specimen from
Favory Ancona went home with a broken femur, Papa Vladimir, who looked only to
Papa Morgan for authority in the breeding pens, was seen to smile slightly and
observe, “He should have asked first.”

o0o

There was only one mercy in all of it. Once breeding
season was over, the inspectors and technicians went away. They had done all
they needed to do. The rest they left to the mares, and to the family. In the
spring there would be foals, genetically purified and officially sanctioned,
each with the Mandate’s signature in its cells.

Marina did not know why, but after the first shock she
stopped being upset. Angry, yes. The family had been trampled on. Its horses
had been relegated to the status of a disease in need of a cure, its beautiful
old bloodlines condemned as unsanitary. She could sit in the library with the
books scrolling behind her eyes, telling over the names. The breeds that they
kept pure here, the old breeds, the horses of princes: Arabian, Andalusian,
Lipizzan. The lines preserved in each. Skowronek whose helices Watanabe had
sneered at, Celoso whose sons were all kings and whose daughters were all
queens, Favory and Conversano and Siglavy who had danced before kings. Ghazala,
Princesa, Presciana; Moniet and Mariposa and Deflorata. They were woven in the
helices, flaws as well as perfection, a memory as deep as the bone and more
lasting.

It was immortality, not of the single creature but of the
species itself. And the Mandate wanted to kill it in the guise of perfecting
it.

o0o

Novinha was the first to come into heat and the first to
get in foal. On a day of early spring when snow had been allowed to fall, she
showed signs that she would foal in the night. Marina had foal watch in the
broodmares’ barn, blankets spread on straw next to the foaling stall. In the
Hippodrome she did not doubt that they left such things to monitors and
mechanicals. Here it was reckoned that foals of the old stock grew and thrived
best if they were born the old way, with human hands ready if the mare
faltered.

As the old mare began to pace her stall, Tante Estrella
slipped in past Marina. She always knew when it was time, and she always came,
no matter how late the hour. In fact it was early for a foaling, not quite
midnight.

The long waiting, close on a year from breeding to birth,
ended as it always did, with astonishing speed. As Novinha went down, Estrella
was there, Marina close behind her, moving in concert as they had so often before.

There was little actually to do till the foal had slipped
free of its mother. Novinha knew her business. This was her seventh foal, her
luck-foal as family superstition had it, and she gave birth easily and quickly,
from the first sight of the hoof wrapped in glimmering caul to the wet tangle
of limbs sorting itself out in the straw.

Marina and Estrella stared at the foal, the perfect foal,
designed and conceived under the Mandate. It was struggling to its feet
already, lifting its head with its delicate curled ears.

Novinha was a Lipizzan, and so was the sire of record,
Favory Ancona who had left so lasting a mark on the technician from the
Hippodrome. They were all born dark, and turned glimmering white as they grew.

This foal of theirs under the Mandate had bypassed the dark
phase. It was silvery white already, though it was no albino: its skin was dark
under the pallor of the coat.

It was a colt. He was a big one, substantial for one so
young, with a big square shoulder and a solid rump. In that he was just as he
should be. There was even a hint of an arch to his profile, the noble nose that
distinguished his breed and his line.

And yet there was something odd . . .

Estrella was quicker than Marina, and maybe less unwilling
to acknowledge what she saw. She inspected the small hooves as the colt wobbled
up on them, marking that each was the same and each preposterous, cloven like a
goat’s or a deer’s. And the tail, not the brush of a normal foal but a tasseled
monstrosity, and on the forehead where the silver-white hair whorled to its
center—

Estrella laughed with unalloyed delight. “Didn’t we warn
them? Didn’t we, then? And they meddled with our beauties regardless.”

o0o

All the mares were foaling unicorns. Every one. Colt or
filly, Lipizzan or Andalusian or Arabian, each was the same: silver-white,
cloven-hooved, with the bud of a horn on its brow. The Mandate had outsmarted
itself.

“There was a reason,” said Papa Morgan, “for the untidiness
in the helices.”

“We did try to tell them,” Tante Concetta said. She kept to
the house and seldom went among the horses, but she had gone down to the barn
that first morning to look at Novinha’s colt. She laughed as Estrella had, with
the same high amusement.

None of the elders was at all surprised, no more than they
had been by the lowering of the Mandate. They had expected this. It must be
something one learned when one became an elder, a secret that had stopped being
a secret when Novinha’s foal was born.

He had a name from before birth in the ancient tradition of
his breed. Favory Novinha: Favory for the ancestor of his line, Novinha for his
dam who inspected him with as little surprise as the elders had shown, and a
quietly luminous pride. If it disconcerted her to be mother to such strange
offspring, she did not show it.

Marina was beyond surprise when they got him out into the
light and she had her first clear sight of his eyes. They were not brown at
all, not even the near-black of his heritage, but a deep and luminous blue. Nor
did they change as he grew. They were part of him, like the goat-feet on which
he walked and the horn that sprouted on his forehead.

She was more or less in charge of him. It was usual for
whoever had foal watch on a particular night to inherit, in a manner of
speaking, the foal who was born on that watch.

There was not much to do when the foal’s dam was as
experienced as Novinha. Mostly Marina watched him. She never quite admitted
that she was waiting for him to do something unusual, something magical.

But he never did, unless it was magic that he grew so fast
and moved so light. Lipizzans grew into their grace. When they were young they
were awkward, gangling, often heavy on their feet. This colt was graceful from
birth. He was born knowing how to move, how best to dance.

That was his magic, she supposed. He knew what other foals
had to learn.

o0o

The Mandate had no provision for such an eventuality as
this. It had not intended to create a new—or recreate a very old—species. It
had been meddling, that was all. Asserting its sense of order on a disordered
breed.

Hendrick Manygoats Watanabe came back as the last of the mares
waited to deliver their foals. This time he was accompanied by Shanna Chen-Howard.
She, for once, was not smiling. He was looking remarkably humble.

“They retired me,” she said to Papa Morgan as they walked
away from the flyer that had brought her. She was direct as always, though
Watanabe looked sourly disapproving. “They tossed me out on my ear, told me to
take myself a vacation, gengineer some roses, take up locustkeeping in the
Sahel—anything but get in their way when they decided to lay the Mandate on
everybody who was exempt. I gather they did much the same to you.”

Papa Morgan spread his hands, eloquent of resignation. “What
could we do? We’re subject to the law. If the law says we have to give in to
the Mandate . . .”

Shanna Chen-Howard slanted a glance at him. Marina,
following at a discreet distance, thought she saw laughter in it. “You were
always law-abiding citizens,” she said blandly.

o0o

They had turned the mares out in the wide green pasture
that rolled down to the river. Two sides of it were fenced in water, with a
forcefence to remind the bolder foals that they were not to go exploring. All
the mares with foals at side, as it happened, were greys; none of the dark
mares had been bred this year, again under the Mandate.

It was a pretty picture from a distance, white horse-shapes
on green, the larger grazing peacefully, the smaller playing or nursing or
lying flat on the grass in the sun. Closer in, one realized that the mares were
ordinary enough, but the foals were odd.

Marina found herself walking just behind Watanabe. He
stepped gingerly, as if he had never walked on a dirt road before. The glances
he shot at the pasture almost made her laugh aloud. He must be having dreadful
visions of hip-deep mud, reeking manure, creatures crawling up the grassblades
to devour him whole.