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that they were emptying the place. Maybe the good guys finally won one, he
thought hopefully. Not that it would do him much good. They were clearly just
shifting operations for a while, and where did mat leave him? Either they'd
shoot him or they'd take him with them to put on some other courier run. It
wouldn't even matter if somebody found him. What would they see? A nice
little horse with a horn, that was all. Too small for real horse work and, as
a gelding, not handy for any other reason. How could he even contact somebody
else to tell them he was more than he seemed? More important, would it make
any difference? It was getting harder and harder to remember things. Not just
little things, big things. Before he was a horse he'd been a man, but a man
who did what? He had memories of a desert and some tent towns and a city by a
big wall, and he remembered a woman of the same race, but even she was kind
of blurry. And before that there had been someone, something else, but that
was so distant and so confusing, he wasn't sure about it. He tried frantically
to think, to remember. I'm not a horse! I'm a ... But he was a horse. He
couldn't get around that. No matter who or what he'd been, he was now a
horse. He was always going to be a horse. What was the use of fighting it, of
dredging up those old memories, of worrying about things that he could not do
anything about?
Someone .. . somebody else ... had struggled with a big change, and it had
driven them nuts. The woman. And when they'd stopped fighting and accepted who
and what they were, they were finally able to find some happiness, to stop
torturing themselves.
Maybe that was it. Maybe he should just stop trying to be anything else and
accept it. Stop the thinking, the remembering, the deep thoughts. Just . . .
live. If he was going to just be a horse, what would his wants be? Food,
water, sleep, and maybe a little care and grooming by somebody nice. What
else could he ever want or need? Nothing these men had. Nothing anybody had
that he could imagine.
Then why did he feel such a sense of loss? That was why he'd been searching
around in those memories, but while he could come up with all sorts of
memories, episodes, and mental pictures, he couldn't come up with anything
any of those past lives had offered that seemed at all important or
interesting to him now. All it seemed like was an endless search to find
things he hadn't had. But he'd never really found them, he knew that, because
he had never been sure what he wanted.
And now, here he was, and he knew exactly what he needed and wanted, and the
simple things on the list didn't go beyond the basics. Maybe what he'd lost
were all those problems and worries. His big problem now was that he hadn't
been thinking like a horse.
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With that idea in mind, he drifted back to sleep, but it was a lot easier to
decide on this course than to stop the dreams.
The Quilst were a kind of cross between animals and plants, it seemed. The
pictures made them look like walking, talking turnips who ate dirt. They
weren't said to be particularly hostile, but they didn't really build roads
and seemed to spend most of their time training hordes of insects to do
stuff. Maybe the data was true, but the fact that the Quilst hadn't even put
a Zone ambassador down south in recent memory meant that if the information
was out of date, she was up the creek there.
The Betared were those horrid little bear things. They were well involved with
the cartel at the highest levels, but they all had the temperaments of Genny
on a bad day. The Mixtim looked like giant multicolored grasshoppers, but
they supposedly had taken steam energy to its highest levels. They were so
totally omnivorous that they could, and did, eat almost anything, but aside
from often disturbing visitors with their culinary tastes, they weren't
threatening and were very civilized, if specialized, like lots of insect
cultures. She'd never seen or heard of one with the cartel, though, and they
certainly looked like the best of a bad lot. Even if it proved less than
inviting even for a getaway, Mixtim was well located with a variety of other
hexes available. They'd also take international credits there, which they used
for trade, so at least it would provide options. Mix tun it was, then.
Now a haircut, and a dye job, some practical working clothes, and a bit of an
identity switch, and she'd be ready to reclaim her little living treasures.
She hoped the zoo wouldn't be too
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