A Man and a Horse
by Glenn Blakeslee
The horse continued to struggle long after Pell had found peace.
At first the horse fought against its enclosure with all of its equine strength. Its front hooves, failing to find purchase, pushed ceaselessly against the membrane. The horse moved its head and neck in a constant orbiting rhythm that oscillated down the length of its massive spine and terminated at its rump in a spastic humping motion.
The horse’s hind legs, meaty and stretched with bunching twitching muscle, were constrained by the membrane from offering their natural bucking defense and moved together as if hobbled. The horse’s screams and the crescendo sound of its fear were dampened by the tissue of its cell and yet still telegraphed, to Pell’s enclosed ears, the urgency of its distress.
Pell, watching motionless from his own cell, admired the horse’s spirit and determination but grinned at its mindless movement. He thought the horse resembled a real-time reenactment of Muybridge’s old photographic motion studies.
Pell had fought against the gel. He had followed his own natural reaction and frantically attempted to swim up through the tissue as if it were deep water. He couldn’t see anything that looked like surface. The impression of sun-dappled coruscation came straight from his boyhood memories and vanished quickly when he did not reach freedom. The tissue around him was not viscous and didn’t offer even the steady resistance of water.
He realized he was holding his breath only after he understood he wasn’t moving. He saw, through the haze of oxygen deprivation, his feet making feeble tip-toe movements instead of the broad strokes he had imagined and he knew, with numbing finality, that he was about to drown.
A part of him noticed the as-yet-unidentified mass of the horse. He could feel undulations from its movement in the tissue around him and he could see it as a broad dark formless thing. He gave it little regard as he expelled his depleted last breath.
Under the throbbing in his temples he found mild surprise when liquid failed to enter his mouth and lungs. He had never drowned before and his body expected to go on breathing and somehow it did. Exhaustion crept into him as the effect of adrenaline subsided and, held softly in the membrane as if in the hand of God, he dozed.
* * *
The movements of the horse woke Pell up. He struggled briefly as he became conscious, until the toxins in his muscles reasserted themselves. The small spaces created in the membrane by his previous struggle had closed up, and the tissue surrounded him completely and hermetically.
He could not determine how pervasive the tissue had become. It seemed to rest against the surface of his eyes and fill the interior of his body, yet he did not feel the discomfort he would have expected. His chest moved rhythmically. His senses were clear, although hampered by the apparent density of the membrane. He could hear a muted sloshing sound.
Pell found he could move his body, albeit passively and slowly, against the walls of his cell, and he turned toward the sound.
The horse had been encased as completely as Pell. There was no reference to measure distance, but it appeared to be several meters away and slightly below Pell. It continued to fight. The contraction of the nearly-transparent membrane against its body had heightened the horse’s visibility, so instead of being an indistinct blob it now stood out in detail. Pell could see knots in the muscles of its neck, and the cords and filaments of the tendons in the horse’s flank and withers.
He examined himself. His hand and arm and the folds of his jacket all had a green tint. He could see a slight red aurora flowing across his skin, and the hair and creases and scars on his hands stood out in contrast to his pale skin. There was no apparent light source. The gel seemed to light itself, seemed to exude something short of a glow.
It looked to Pell as if he had been molded into a gelatin, a human fruit suspended in a vast limitless bundt pan. He moved his hand, slower than he would have liked, up the left side of his abdomen. His automatic was still there, secured in its holster. Its presence relaxed him somewhat.
He briefly wondered about the physics of gelatin and its behavior relative to a ballistic body. It probably couldn’t help him in his present plight, he thought, and dismissed the idea of experimentation.
He looked back at the horse. It didn’t seem to see Pell. The sounds of terror it had made at the beginning had mellowed into a low-pitched grunt, a counterpoint to the horse’s exertion. It had declined from its extreme, erratic movement into a repetitive cycle, like a small mammal when caged for a length of time.
The horse appeared to be trying to outrun the tissue that surrounded it. Pell was surprised that the horse had fought for so long without stopping, and then admitted to himself that he knew nothing about a horse’s physical endurance beyond what he’d learned from the fiction of old cowboy movies.
* * *
He had slept again.
Small light-green tubes surrounded him, arrayed in columns and bundles as thick as his hand. Each twig-sized tube had red globs of matter moving through it like a false-color lava lamp, a poor impression of good blood. The columns were close to his body, as far as he could see and set off on the angles by a gap of the membrane.
He looked at his hand. The tubes threaded through his fingers and seemed to blend together in places. When he moved his hand some of the tubes seemed to stick, slucking from his digits unwillingly as he applied more force. He found the tubes had little more consistency than the tissue surrounding them.
He found his jacket and, when he looked further, all of his clothes had been reduced to a mush, globular and weak and free from any former woven consistency. He moved his hand to his gun and found more mush, a bit thicker, with glints of metallic highlights like shaved steel. The comforting hardness he expected was gone.
He waved some of the occluding tubes from his face and looked for the horse. It seemed nearer. It hung before him and the tubes surrounding it seemed to buoy it up, a mushroom of brown and green and tangled spots of moving red. The horse still moved, still tried to push its way through the membrane. Its muzzle and hooves poked through the tubes.
Pell began, patiently, to move upward. He felt the effects of gravity and thought again of water, of surface and freedom. He moved his arms upward and out: as he pushed down with his arms he moved his feet up to gain purchase, then pushed with his feet as he brought his arms up and then down again. He repeated this movement.
He could see the horse well below him. The tubes seemed to move with him until, two or three meters above the horse, they thinned into tiny strands and dissipated, the red globules eventually disappearing into the green tissue.
After moving upward for a while he moved forward into a semi-prone position and stopped. He could still see the horse and a distance away from it a discoloration in the gel of the membrane, the remains of his clothes. He felt a slight gnawing in his stomach and thought it strange that he wasn’t hungrier.
Pell lifted his head up and looked for anything that might resemble surface. He could see nothing but a continuation of the same featureless green of the membrane.
He smiled to himself. At least I’m going somewhere, he thought. If it’s actually nowhere it’s still better than hanging around in the middle of nothing. Maybe this green makes it hard to see the surface, and it’s still up there waiting for me to poke my head through and to really breathe, and to really see something besides green and that stupid horse.
Poor animal, he thought.
Pell rested.
* * *
The horse was there in front of him. Its head was facing him, well out of the columns of tubes that meshed with the rest of its body. He could see the horse’s girth framing its head in an oval.
The horse was an automaton. Pell could see it close its eyes, blink them open briefly as if to get its bearing by focusing on something over Pell’s shoulder, far into the green. It was moving in the same trot-like pattern, constrained by the membrane into comical half-steps and miniature lunges.
The columns had multiplied about the horse, a forest of blinking red vines. Some of the individual tubes had grown as large as Pell’s finger, the red matter within shining and moving as if in a defensive frenzy, some of it as articulate as ants moving around a nest.
Pell, despite his anger at being near the horse again, was fascinated. He had been pulled deeper, somehow. Perhaps the horse had moved up, but that wasn’t likely considering the horse’s attempts to move forward.
More important to Pell was the idea that the membrane had strengthened the number of tubes around the horse. He couldn’t understand their purpose, but the resources the membrane had to be able to mass this... attack?... must be as unlimited as its size. The next time he woke would the tubes occlude the horse? Would a tube grow as large as the horse itself, and move it upward or downward as if it were another piece of the red matter?
Maybe the best approach, Pell thought, is to be passive. Maybe the tubes are a defense system, and the best thing for me to do is to do nothing. Try not to disturb it.
He looked down at his own body. The tubes around it were still small, still unremarkable compared to the columns around the horse. He looked at his hands: the tubes seemed to pass through them.
He attempted to pull away from the tubes. Instead of separating they moved with his hand, stretching without thinning and compressing to take up the slack provided by the movement. He pushed one hand over the other. Some of the tubes pulled off, leaving a red splotch, and a few of the larger tubes allowed his hand to pass through them, morphing over his fingers and knuckles.
He shook his hand as frantically as the thick membrane would allow, then moved it slowly behind his back. The remaining tubes stretched and then released with a surprisingly crisp snapping sound.
At least I can remove them when I want, he thought. I can break free when it’s necessary. And I’m not hungry or thirsty. Just tired.
* * *
Pell awoke again. The light round him was bluer, more permeating. The light seemed to rest behind his eyes, as if his brain were starting to encompass the gel. He could hear other sounds, besides the horse. The sounds, sweeping booms and indistinct clicks, seemed far off and yet again in his head, as if carried by extended auditory nerves.
The horse was eating. The horse would extend its head, push off with all four legs in tandem, and open its mouth wide against the gel. The gel entered its mouth — Pell could see it very close now — and the horse would resume its movement.
The horse seemed to be eating its way toward him.
C’mon over, Pell thought, let’s ride!
This just proves it, Pell thought. This proves how much smarter and well adapted we humans are to the world. Not every predicament required action. Not every moment needed movement. Sometimes, he thought, maybe the best way is to do nothing, to let events take their course.
Pell was surprised that it had taken him this long, his whole lonely hard-fought life, to learn this. The horse was a lower animal but still a good teacher.
With these thoughts he was overcome. The gel around him seemed to fluoresce, and he was settled by a gentle, waiting euphoria. He floated in pleasure, open to further developments. He waited until he lapsed into unconsciousness.
* * *
Pell was vastened. He was blooded with the material surrounding him. He was a knot of nerves and brain tissue connected in a vast web of knowing, of otherness and conscious thought. He knew everything now.
He knew the angry conspiracy of the ConFormity, the backroom moves by the Defense Minister to strengthen his position in the cabinet of plunderers who ran the galaxy. He knew the plotting of the fat priests, the unholy men who claimed to have the word of God in hand and used their influence to move the mass of people to their will, to the will of the ConFormity.
He knew of his mistress Celena, and of how she’d lent her body to her own unbridled passion for power, to her own rank ambition, and how she’d sacrificed Pell with less than a moment’s regret.
The horse was very near, literally on top of Pell, but he didn’t care. He was filled with vitality, and although he couldn’t move — his muscle mass and its stringy connections to leverage bone, the taunt filaments of sinew and connecting tissue, even the bones themselves now reduced to nothing more than a discoloration in the surrounding viscous mass — he was still very powerful.
All this knowledge, everything at his now non-existent fingertips, this was a power that Pell could use. He was now nothing but concentrated knots of neuron tissue embedded in an endless matrix, but he could learn to flex his new muscles.
The horse, grunting and solid and still itself, began to eat Pell.
Copyright © 2011 by Glenn Blakeslee
