Then she had a brighter notion. A river! If there were a river anywhere near, Burgess could float on that, leaving no trail.
Colene went to Seqiro. She signaled him to bring his head down. She put her head to his. River! she thought, in what she hoped was a limited, noninterceptable signal. Burgess—river.
Seqiro’s ears perked. He led the way down into a winding gully. Burgess was able to follow, because of the downslope. At the base was a section of exposed rock, also suitable for the floater. Finally it led to a river, large enough to have a smooth surface. Ideal!
Burgess floated out on the water. The rest of them made their way along the bank. They melted into the increasingly rugged land. Now it would be difficult indeed for the minions of the horses to locate them.
Indeed, the pursuit seemed to peter out. There was no longer a path to follow, and Burgess might as well have ceased to exist, because the horses would have no idea he could use water as a highway. They had escaped.
But they were hardly out of trouble. They had to maintain mental silence, so couldn’t hold much of a dialogue.
Nona could not do magic, so they had to use their own supplies and forage from the land. Getting back to the anchor would be a formidable problem, because the horses would certainly be waiting in ambush there.
Colene knew that the others had come here because of the mind predator’s attack on her. They had taken an awful risk. So now she had to do her part.
Maresy had faithfully followed her, ignoring the others. Seqiro had known they couldn’t leave the mare in the prison stall. It was time to restore her to a fully functional state.
While the others set up camp, Colene tackled the mare. Maresy was a good deal smaller than Seqiro, but still a pretty fine solid horse with good muscle under her matted coat. Her shoulder was four inches above the top of Colene’s head, but not above Nona’s. Colene put her head up against Maresy’s head, so as to fire short-range thoughts into it. She had a mental picture of those thoughts passing through the mare’s head and being largely stifled there, like the sound of a gun with a silencer, so that only unrecognizable fragments radiated out for enemy horses to intercept. Maybe that wasn’t accurate, but it allowed her to use her telepathy to train the mare.
“Maresy. I am your friend Colene. I will not be with you long, but I will help you to be a full horse again. You have been badly hurt in your mind, but you can recover.” If only Colene could recover from her own hurt, and be a true woman to Darius! “First I will check you and brush you and see to your injuries. You must not hurt yourself anymore. You must take care of yourself, and not be afraid.”
Colene got a brush, and worked on Maresy’s coat as she continued talking. Her mental contact with the horse was getting easier, because she was becoming more familiar with Maresy, and because Maresy’s own telepathy was beginning to manifest. Colene thought of the computer analogy, again: a blank disk and blank memory did nothing, but a little bit of programming could enable them to start to help themselves. The power was there, it just had to be structured. Colene did not encourage the mare to use her mind that way, because that could alert the bad horses. She just wanted the mare to listen to her thoughts and understand. What she hoped to do was shape Maresy into the horse Colene had dreamed of, before she met Seqiro, because she knew more about that horse than any other. Maresy was, above all, a competent, self-assured, sensible, nice creature, very good at listening. Just the way Seqiro had turned out to be.
“Let me tell you about Maresy, before you lost your memory,” Colene said, working a burr out of the horse’s mane. “I am an introspective sort. I like to express my thoughts. But sometimes I have trouble writing fast enough to keep my thoughts going in a straight line. I have so much verbal information hit me at once that I can’t write or type fast enough to get it out. And talking just does not work. I can’t talk as fast as I think, but I speak faster than I write. Speaking and talking are different. Talking is two-way; speaking is one-way. Your thoughts get interrupted by the other person when you talk. I get the greatest ideas when I’m just lying there on my bed nearly asleep, letting my thoughts wander. They wander where they will. My thoughts are like my hair: they have a mind of their own. I’ve created whole worlds, then lost the greatest part of my creations when I fell asleep. My shoddy memory just can’t get it right the next day.
“But with Maresy it was always all right. Because Maresy heard and understood everything I said, and didn’t interrupt. Or forget. Just as you are doing now. She was the ideal listener. Sometimes I did write to her, too, and she never chided me for being slow. It was all right with her how much time I took.
“You know, I used to be shy. Then I went from shy to downright antisocial. No one knew, because I pretended I wasn’t. I was always pretty good at fooling people, especially myself. Of course it happened gradually, so I could adjust. I know I’m not truly antisocial because I’m lonely as all hell. If I was antisociety I wouldn’t give a flying dump about the human race. I do give. So I filled the void with a nonhuman pen pal, and that was Maresy. I could tell her anything, and she never told anyone else. She always kept my secrets. I discovered I could not relate to your average run-of-the-mill teenagers. Because when I became a teenager I was neither average nor run-of-the-mill. I was the classic description of still waters run deep. School became for me the root of all evil. I tried to forget it existed. But it was hard to do when I did homework for four hours every night. I never could just skim a chapter then say I’d read it. I was honest to a fault. Honest to the point of not having FUN like a normal person. It got painful to hear other kids laugh. It was more painful to see them kiss. The only romance I had was in romance novels, which I read by the truckload. That was my life: school-work (‘cuz nothing else about the school experience applied to me) and romance novels. I love fantasy, but it’s not plentiful in small-town libraries. Romance, on the other hand, was available from anywhere from a nickel to fifty cents at just about any yard sale in the state. I would buy like twenty or thirty at a time, read them, and trade them. I’ve read so many formula stories I can’t keep most of them straight.
“Of course some of what I read did stand out. There was this hard-core erotic novel an old man in a hospital showed me. Now I know I didn’t understand it at all. If I had, I would have known better than to let four horny freaks get me alone in an apartment. And I couldn’t tell anyone about that, either. Except Maresy. Life sucks. I hate school. I love to learn. This is no paradox. So I learned that honesty doesn’t necessarily pay, and I learned to fool everyone. The funny thing was, I became the life of the crowd. A popular girl. A socialite. But it was all a lie, and I was slicing my wrists in the toilet. Just never had the nerve to go all the way and die. But Maresy understood. She understood how life is one long unending irony. Irony is what I live on. It keeps me going. If you can’t see the humor in your existence any more, at least look for the irony. As far as I was concerned, for a while, it was reason enough to stay alive, just to be able to thumb my nose at existence. By the way, Alive and Exist are as much alike as Talk and Speak.
“You know, I came to feel that ninety per cent of my classmates were plastic. Shallow as a credit card. I discovered that I’m not a herd animal, and never will be. I also discovered that the key to sanity is to take the entire world with a grain of salt. To have a finely tuned sense of the ridiculous. I’m looking for other people who realize that the universe is one big contradiction, and the only true purpose to life is to smell the flowers and hug your friends. Life can be beautiful if you let it. There was this song by Nirvana, ‘It Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ I really liked it, even if the lyrics were senseless. I understand the song got its name from a deodorant commercial, with three or four young women wearing bright but non-threatening clothing with conservative but bouncy shoulder-length hair, glistening smiles, and peppy attitudes. They liked this deodorant because it smelled like teen spirit. The first time I saw that ad I thought, ‘This is the stupidest most patronizing thing to grace the small screen I’ve ever had the misfortune to see.’ I don’t think girls like that exist. They’re like every suburban mother’s fantasy child. Besides, teen spirit, if condensed down to a scent, wouldn’t be peppy, light, bright, and fresh, it’d be dark, angry, clashing, reckless, sexual, wild—despair and exultation in a bottle.”