I objected at first. Thalia and I spoke in the Shaulese manner, through channels inaudible to humans. “But only Melpomene and I can understand you - you won’t be able to talk to anyone else.” Thalia didn’t care. “I will not have my soul pinned to a gasbag of gears, like Melpomene.” Melpomene did not react. “And talking is overrated. I will master understanding, and taking action. He has lightning in his heart, this creature. We met, mated, gave birth and died in an instant. I am no longer Thalia, and he is no longer a stallion. But if we had had a dozen like him on Shaula, the war would have ended differently.”
Thalia was already a formidable warrior, but if this infatuation served our cause in the coming war, then so much the better.
But MouthBreather understood very little. “You’re telling me that this horse is now the program that was running in the laptop, with the squeaky voice?”
At another time he would have been punished for speaking to me in that manner, but encouraging good manners can be deferred, if not forgotten.
“Yes.”
“Yeah, right, and my pinto is Pegasus.” Thalia just then skittered in sudden exuberance under me, reared up and whinnied loud and long.
“Well, he’s not much of a singer.” MouthBreather observed.
“She.”
“Uh huh. And you plan on bringing him … her … with us to Cupertino?”
“Yes.”
He wisely kept quiet. I occupied myself with choosing one of the other horses from the rest of the herd, which had kept up with us. Thalia would have carried me, but she was not my servant - she ruled alongside me in my court. So I chose a shy, white Arab filly, with a black forehead star. She had quiet fire in her, quiet, but deep and strong. She accepted me as her rider.
We headed out again, with Thalia in the lead. We rode into the wind, and I vicariously shared the filly’s superb sense of smell, all the while keeping a blanket of steam around MouthBreather and his pinto, keeping him from harm. But after a few miles we noticed something startling: MouthBreather was manipulating the steam on his own, keeping the link open between his soul and the soul of the pinto. This is unheard of on Shaula, where pricks are just vain fashion plates, quite incapable of comprehending the structure of reality. Melpomene, especially, was impressed with MouthBreather’s progress. “He is less than a complete idiot,” was her comment, which MouthBreather, somehow, chose to interpret as a compliment.
On Shaula, we do not have domesticated animals. But the equine species on Earth is extraordinary - they walk the line between the chaos of pure steam, and the hardpack trail under their hooves. They can cross that line at will, and become airborne demons racing right above the surface of the earth, rejoicing in glory and imminent destruction. We three were in love with them, and even MouthBreather had an inkling of their extraordinary nature.