"Leg yield?" Megan said.
"Okay."
Wilma started the move, choosing the version which was usually done in the First 3 series of riders' tests, straight from the rail to the center line of the competition arena. Megan could just see her giving the signals: outside leg, inside rein, just a touch of each. Buddy had been walking straight forward. Now, keeping his body parallel to the rail, he began to walk at a thirty-degree angle from the fence, heading for the center of the arena. He ys doing this right, anyway, Megan thought with some slight relief, for he had performed it correctly for her as well. At least something's behaving consistently…
"Keep going?" Wilma said.
"Sure, why not? Take him through the next part, the traverse. Maybe you can sneak up on him with the circle and get him to forget to go straight."
Wilma didn't comment, just kept going. Buddy began to follow the rail in a way that was correct for once, haunches out, progressing forward though his body was turned sideways. Smooth, Megan thought. She's really got the touch. If I can get her to show me that a few more times, maybe I can solve our problem-
The air filled with a phone-ringing noise. Megan rolled her eyes up in annoyance at the blue "sky" and said, "Megan O'Malley-"
There was no image, only voice. "Megan, honey, hi, it's Mrs. Christensen."
"Hi, Mrs. C., Wilma's here… "
"No, it wasn't Wilma I was looking for-"
That was moderately strange. Wilma reined in. "Mom?"
"Hi, honey. I was looking for Burt."
"Uh." Wilma's face went taut with annoyance. "He's not here."
"No? I thought he was supposed to be with you girls."
"Uh, no, Ma. We thought he was going to be, but he stood us up." Wilma's expression got even grimmer. She swung down off Buddy.
"Oh. All right." Wilma's mother didn't say anything further for a moment, and there was something strange about the way she didn't say it, so that Megan said, "Was someone looking for him?"
"Uh, yes, his mother," said Wilma's mom. "She called me.
"And she didn't know where he was, either?"
Another of those odd silences. "She said he was gone," said Wilma's mother.
Wilma blinked at that. " 'Gone?' Gone where?"
"She said he had taken some things and just left, and- Well, I don't know, she sounded kind of upset, and from what she said, Burt had been talking about leaving home, and, you know, kids say things like that, but they-"
"Oh, no," Wilma whispered. Megan looked at her and was astonished to see that she had suddenly gone absolutely pale. In the bright sunlight it looked bizarre. At first she thought Wilma was going to faint, but then she realized the paleness had nothing to do with any strictly physical condition. It was fear.
"I've got to go," Wilma said. "Mom? Hang up, I'll be right there-"
The call from "outside" clicked off. "Uh, okay, sure," Megan said, confused. "But listen, Wil, practice tomorrow-"
"I don't know if I can. I'll call you."
And Wilma deactivated her virtual-experience implant, and vanished.
Megan found herself standing there in the middle of the arena, alone in the sawdust except for the virtual Buddy, who stood there by her and then very gradually leaned over to start cribbing at the fence again.
"Workspace," Megan said.
"Listening."
"Shut down the Buddy model, please."
"Default save from this point, or save from other time/ place point?"
"Default save."
"Done." The horse vanished, and a second later the competition arena was swept clear of his footprints, as if he'd never been there.
Megan stood there, her mind filling with awful things that she very much wanted to say, except that none of them would help the present situation, and besides, she could just hear her mother's voice saying reproachfully, "And after that, what will you have left to say some day when you hit your thumb with a hammer?"
"I can think of a few things," Megan muttered under her breath. "Never mind."
"Listening. Was that a command?"
"No. Sorry," Megan said, and then smiled, a wry look. She might think about all the rude words she liked, but she still caught herself apologizing to the computer, which, however smart it might be, wasn't that smart. "Revert to default configuration."
The arena, the sawdust, the sunny day, all vanished. Suddenly she was standing in her workspace as it normally appeared, as an ancient, worn, white-stone amphitheater, fifty rows high, perfect right down to the worn seat numbers still to be felt shallowly graven into the seats. But the landscape surrounding it was no olive- overgrown Greek hillside or dusty Roman plain. Methane snow, blurring into near-invisibility when the wind picked it up and blew it, lay powdered bluish-white all over the surrounding cratered landscape of the satellite Rhea, only going tarnished gold near the horizon where the light of a swollen, setting Saturn shed a cold, white-gold radiance over everything. Sharp white points of stars burned down out of the blackness, and the little pallid Sun away off to the left, just past the spot where the curve of the amphitheater ended, threw long sharp shadows behind the rims of the nearest craters.
Megan sighed, for once in no mood for the beauty, and walked past her desk, which stood in the middle of the "floor" of the amphitheater. It was covered and sur7 rounded with little geometric solids, some of them hovering in the air and oscillating for attention, changing color or squeaking piteously for attention. Megan took a close look at a few of them, recognizing designs or color schemes that indicated mail from this friend or that. Right now she couldn't care less about answering any of them. She didn't see anything urgent… at least, nothing as urgent as the complete screwing up of the coming weekend.
"Save and break out," she said to the computer managing her Net workspace.
"Saved," said the computer. "Ending session."
— and then there came the familiar sensation like being about to sneeze, and having the sneeze fail, and then Megan was sitting in the family den, in the implant chair, from which, through the Venetian blinds of the nearby window, she could see the afternoon shadows fading toward dusk. She had missed dinner, to no particular result as it turned out, and now her stomach was growling.
Megan sat there for a moment recovering herself and looking around at the bookshelves, the piles of books on the desk and laid face-down and open on the chairs-her dad was deep in research on something, and had plainly hit that point in the cycle where he was going to be untidy about it for a few days. She got up out of the implant chair after another moment or two, stretched, and found herself not as sore as she might have been. The chair's passive muscle-exercise routines were working better than usual for some reason. Then she headed out of the dimness of the den, down the hall and into the kitchen.
Dinner proper was over-assuming there'd been one. Everything was cleared away, and the dishwasher was running, in sonic cycle at the moment to judge by the faint chronic jingling coming from the silverware drawer next to it. However, the fact that there had just been a meal didn't seem to have changed one of the verities of life in the O'Malley household. One of her four brothers was in the kitchen, looking for something to eat. In this case it was Sean, all six feet of him. But about two feet of the six seemed presently to be missing, because they were shoved into the fridge. The rest of him was wearing a very trendy-looking black sliktite that made Megan suspect he was getting ready for a hot date.