“Too light! No . . . I don’t think so. I’m trying not to let it rule the rest of my life . . . put it behind me.” The tension in her shoulders suggested that it still weighed on her.
“Does it bother you that you’re not competing?” Heris asked.
“Of course not!” It came almost too quickly, with a flush and fade of color on Cecelia’s cheeks. “It’s been thirty years; it would be ridiculous.”
“Still—”
“No. I just want to see it. I might—someday—think about going back.”
Zenebra’s orbital station carried an astonishing amount of traffic for an agricultural world. Heris had had to wait two days for a docking assignment, and had eased the yacht in among many others. On the station itself she found the kind of expensive shops she remembered from Rockhouse Major. Cecelia had called ahead, purchasing tickets for the Senior Trials, all venues. Heris saw the prices posted in the orbital station’s brochure, and winced. She hadn’t realized it could cost as much to watch other people ride horses as to own them. Or so she assumed. She also hadn’t realized that Cecelia expected her to come along—that she had bought two sets of tickets. Heris didn’t quite groan.
On the shuttle ride down to the planet she heard nothing but horse talk. At least Cecelia’s coaching had given her the vocabulary to understand most of what she heard. Stifles and hocks, quarter-cracks and navicular, stocking up and cooling down, all made sense now . . . what it didn’t make, she thought to herself, was interesting conversation. The talk about particular riders and trainers made no sense at all—she didn’t know why, for instance, “riding with Falkhome” was said with such scorn, or “another Maalinson” seemed to be a compliment. But any notion that Cecelia had no equal in fixation on horses quickly disappeared—the universe, or at least that shuttle, was full of people with equally one-track minds.
Zenebra’s shuttle port had a huge bronze—and-stained-glass sculpture of a horse taking a fence in its lobby. The groundcars had horse motifs painted on the side. Along the road to the hotel, a grassy strip served as an exercise area for the horses—all sizes, all colors—that pranced along it. The hotel itself, jammed with enthusiasts, buzzed with the same colorful slang. Heris began to feel that she’d fallen into very strange company indeed—these people were far more intense than the foxhunters at Bunny’s.
Heris had by this time seen dozens of cubes of the Wherrin Horse Trials, both complete versions of the years Cecelia had competed, and extracts of the years since. She recognized the view from the hotel room window—the famous double ditch of Senior Course A, and the hedge beyond. Although modeled on the famous traditional venues of Old Earth, the trials had made use of the peculiarities of Zenebra’s terrain, climate, and vegetation. One advantage of laying out courses on planets during colonization was the sheer space available. At Wherrin, the Senior Division alone had four separate permanent courses, which made it possible to rotate them as needed for recovery of the turf, or for the weather conditions at the time of the Trials.
Up close, the Wherrin Trials Fields looked more like the holocubes than real land with real obstacles. Bright green grass plushy underfoot, bright paint on the viewing stands, the course markers, some of the fences. Clumps of green trees. Bright blue sky, beds of brilliant pink and yellow flowers. Heris blinked at all the brilliance, reminding herself that Zenebra’s sun provided more light than the original Terran sun, and waited for Cecelia to get back from wherever she’d run off to. They had agreed to meet at this refreshment stand for a break, and Cecelia was late. Then Heris saw her, hurrying through the crowds.
“Heris—you’ll never guess!” Cecelia was flushed. She looked happy, but with a faint touch of embarrassment. Heris couldn’t guess, and said so. “I’ve got a ride,” Cecelia went on. Heris fumbled through her list of meanings . . . a ride back to the hotel? A ride to her chosen observation spot on the course? “A ride,” Cecelia said. “Corry Manion, who was going to ride Ari D’amerosia’s young mare, got hurt in a flitter crash last night. A mild concussion, they said, but they won’t put him in the regen tanks for at least forty-eight hours, and by then it will be too late. Ari was telling me all this and then she asked me—I didn’t say a word, Heris, I promise—she asked me if I would consider riding for her. I know I said I didn’t mean to compete again, but—”
“But you want to,” Heris said. From the cubes alone, and from her brief experience of foxhunting, she had had a vague notion that way herself, but one look at the real obstacles had changed her mind. “Of course you do. Can I help?”
“You don’t think I’m crazy?” Cecelia asked. “An old woman?”
Heris did think she was crazy; she thought they were all crazy, but Cecelia was no worse than the others. “You aren’t an old woman anymore,” Heris said. “You’ve been working out on the simulator. You’ve got a lifetime of skills and new strength—and it’s your neck.”
“Come on, then,” Cecelia said. “I’ll get you an ID tag so you can come in with me—you have to see this mare.”
Heris didn’t have to see the mare; she had only to see the look on Cecelia’s face, and remember that less than a year ago Cecelia had been flat in bed, paralyzed and blind.
As with the foxhunting, more went on behind the scenes than Heris would have guessed from the entertainment cubes she’d seen. The Trials organization had its own security procedures; Heris and Cecelia both needed ID tags, and Cecelia had to have the complete array of numbers that she would wear during competition. Cecelia spent half an hour at the tailor’s getting measurements taken for her competition clothes.
“I have all this somewhere, probably in a trunk back on Rotterdam,” Cecelia said. “Maybe even somewhere in the yacht, though we didn’t move everything back aboard. I don’t remember, really, because it had been so long since I needed it.”
“Why so many changes of clothes?” Heris asked. She had wondered about that even with the foxhunters. Why not simply design comfortable riding clothes that would work, and then wear them for all occasions?
“Tradition,” Cecelia said, wrinkling her nose. “And I’d like to know what a shad is, so I’d know why this looks anything like its belly.” She gestured at her image in the mirror; Heris shook her head. “Yet that’s what this kind of jacket is called.”
Heris followed her from the tailor’s to the saddler’s, where Cecelia picked out various straps that looked, to Heris, like all the others. “Reins are just reins, aren’t they?” she said finally, when Cecelia had been shifting from one to another pair for what seemed like hours. Cecelia grimaced.
“Not when you’re coming down a drop in the rain,” she said. “And by the way, see if somebody can dig my saddles out of storage and put them on the next shuttle. I’d rather not break in a new saddle on course.” Heris found a public combooth and relayed the request; Brun promised to bring the saddles herself if Heris would give permission to leave the ship.
“Fine,” Heris said, and anticipated her next request. “And why not bring Sirkin down, too? She’s probably never seen anything like this.”
Finally they arrived at one of the long stable rows. Ari D’amerosia had four horses in the trials, two in the Senior Trials and one each in Training and Intermediate. Grooms in light blue shirts bustled about, carrying buckets and tack, pushing barrows of straw, bales of hay, sacks of feed. Ari herself, a tall woman with thick gray-streaked hair, was bent over inspecting a horse’s hoof when Cecelia came up with Heris.
“Tim, we’re going to need the vet again. Cold soak until the vet comes—Oh, hi Cece. Have your rider’s registration yet?”