Runaways

forward, like a train. A very dumb train.' She let out a long breath. 'Do horses get aphasia, I wonder?'

Wilma narrowed her eyes at Buddy as he leaned over and began to crib thoughtfully at the top rail of the fence. She poked his muzzle with one finger to try and stop him. He tossed his head and snapped at her. 'Question should be more like, can one recover from being hit repeatedly in the head with a ball-peen hammer? Because that's what he's working up to.'

'Yeah.' Megan gave him a look. 'You,' she said to Buddy, 'are nothing but a collection of potential cans of dog food flying together in close formation. Do you know that?'

The horse regarded her with an expression of complete unconcern and tried to start chewing on the rail again.

Wilma looked at this with mild concern. 'Maybe it's his diet,' she said.

'It's about as likely to be sunspots,' Megan said, unconvinced. 'He gets every vitamin and mineral supplement known to humankind as it is. And more than he needs to eat, if you ask me.'

'You suppose that's the problem? Too much grain? It's late for grass bloat.'

Megan shook her head. Her suspicions were far worse. 'I doubt it. I think it's the modeling that's gone wrong somehow.'

'I don't know if it's that wrong. The real one is doing the same thing.'

'Cribbing?'

'Yeah, but not just that. The rail problem, too. All yesterday afternoon.' Wilma's expression was eloquent of annoyance as severe as Megan's. 'I was mortified.'

Megan leaned on the rail. 'You know, you might be right, though,' she said. 'If it's some obscure muscle or bone thing… the supplements wouldn't necessarily be enough to put him right'

'Maybe it's why he keeps cribbing,' Wilma said. 'Minerals.'

Megan sighed. 'Without getting bloods drawn on him and having them sent for an analysis, and the figures fed into the model, there's no way to tell that for sure. If the model is doing what the real horse is, then the chances are that it's something weight- or motion-based. Which is unfortunate for us…'

'… Because it makes it look like we're doing something wrong, instead of him.'

'Please,' Megan said. She was desperately tired of the way the model was behaving, but the Region One Young Riders Championship of the U. S. Dressage Federation was only four days away, and she dared not waste any possible practice time. The championship was a dream that had been some time coming, for Megan was not the kind to compete at something without a suspicion that she might actually make some kind of decent showing. She and Wilma had together been working with Buddy for the past year, and a respectable score in the championships had actually started to look possible. So together with various other kids from the local riding club, they had filed their statements of intent, paid their entrance fees, and had successfully ridden the qualifier test, the FEI Prix St. Georges Freestyle. Now they were in the final stages of preparation for the trials to be held at the dressage center at Potomac Valley. And all this would have been just wonderful, except that Buddy seemed suddenly and inexplicably to be losing several very basic skills which he and his riders were nonetheless going to be expected to exhibit in the ring, and as a result, both Megan and Wilma both now seemed doomed to be horribly embarrassed in front of thousands of people. Everybody who saw them would (as was only to be expected) assume that the horse's poor performance was something to do with the inadequacies of the rider, and she and Wilma were both going to die hundreds of deaths. Or at least so it seemed to Megan.

'Why didn't we go in for some kind of virtual sport,' Wilma muttered. 'One where you can just create yourself giant muscles and perform like a demigod, even if you don't actually have the equipment.'

'Because any sport like that would be a dumb sport, one without challenges and suitable only for idiots,' Megan said, 'and we thought we were made of better stuff. Able to handle a sport with some rules to it, some rigor. We thought!' She laughed helplessly.

Buddy stamped and snorted softly. They both turned baleful looks on him. 'Rules it's got,' Wilma said, sounding grim. 'Especially the ones that say it's too late to pull out and get our fees back.'

'Who cares about the fees? What I care about is attempting to ride a twenty-meter circle on an animal who appears to have forgotten how to go in any direction whose path can't be laid out with a ruler!' Megan sighed as she leaned against the rail. 'You want to give it a try?'

'I'll just kick him,' Wilma said. 'I did yesterday.'

'You can kick the model if you like,' Megan said. 'It just complains about illegal instructions.'

'I've had worse.' Wilma swung up into the saddle. She looked good in the arena gear they were both wearing: black jodhpurs, black jacket, the regulation white cravat and black riding helmet. Megan sighed at Wilma's pulled- together appearance, for she was never sure that she herself looked like anything more than a female version of a popular lawn ornament, and the top hat that they would both be wearing in the ring on Saturday, for Megan, just made the feeling worse.

Wilma was settling herself in the saddle, and now began to walk Buddy in an 'informal' warm-up circle, which to Megan's sudden rage the model now did perfectly. 'I hate him,' she said. 'In a sport where the one thing you ask of the creature is that he do the same thing at least twice in a row, he just won't.'

'Mmh hhhmmm,' Wilma said, and continued to ride the circle. Megan looked at her thoughtfully. Her seat wasn't great-she was slumping a little-and she wasn't looking ahead of her. Bad signals, Megan thought, and nearly said out loud, but then she stopped herself. There were enough other things going on at the moment in Wilma's life which also involved rather confusing signals.

'Anything from Burt this morning?' Megan said. It was a question she had been avoiding asking for nearly two hours now, one which her annoyance at Buddy had helped her put aside.

'Huh?'

'Burt. You remember. Tall guy, blond hair, supposed to be practicing with us, canceled out at the last minute.'

Wilma flushed red and reined Buddy in, finally looking straight out over his ears, but not at anything that had to do with the competition arena. 'No,' she said.

Megan looked at her sympathetically. 'You should ditch him,' she said. 'He's making you nuts.'

'It's not like he doesn't have reason,' Wilma said. 'You should have heard his folks-'

'I understand that his parents don't seem to be the world's best,' Megan said, 'and I feel for him, but, jeez, Wil, he passes twice as much of the grief on to you as he gets himself! I hear him when we're out together.. and it's more than I'd put up with.'

'You don't feel about him the way I do,' Wilma said, in a rather small voice.

Megan restrained herself mightily from saying Thank God! Instead she said, 'Look. He could at least message us, or send a virtmail, if he's not going to make practice. This isn't a big matter of the heart, it's just, you know, life and death stuff.'

Wilma had to laugh at that, though the sound was pained. 'I suppose. I'll mention it to him.'

'Sounds good. So go ahead, let's give it a try. Track right, turn down the centerline at A, leg yield left D to S, then come back and halt at X.'

'Right. Put the aids up?'

'Oh, sure. Workspace-'

'Listening.'

'Guides on, please.'

'Guides on.' Immediately, faintly burning red letters of the alphabet, A through S with some omissions, and the letter X, now manifested themselves around the edges of the competition arena, and in a straight line down the middle of the sawdust, hanging in the air about a meter and a half high. These were the markers that told you where to start a move or series of moves and where to stop them. In competition it was your business to know exactly how long it took you to get from one to another, and how many steps your horse needed to take between them; before every competition, you would see all the dressage people draped over the rails and searching intently for some twig or leaf or post-mark in that particular arena that corresponded to the lettered spots in the arena in their heads.

'Okay,' Megan said. 'Go.'

Buddy moved smoothly forward. That's the way it should look, Megan thought, no obvious moves, no obvious weight shift, everything subtle, the horse going smooth. At least the model was behaving at the moment.

This had been her own project, on and off, for the better part of the last six months: building a virtual 'model'