Runaways

Chapter 2

The sun was extremely hot on the back of Megan O'Malley's neck as she rode in a careful circle, eyes ahead of her, taking care about how she sat in the saddle as she came around toward the painted white top rail of the fence around the arena-a sight which, after three straight hours of this, was now causing her a mixture of apprehension and disgust. Her muscles ached, but that was the least of her problems. The biggest problem on her mind right now was underneath her, a problem called Alistair's Kingstown Walk Softly, known to his friends as Buddy, and to his detractors-of whom Megan was rapidly becoming one-as the Big Stick.*

This was because he seemed to have a big stick, ramrod, or other such straight and inflexible implement stuck right down the middle of his spine. In a horse being trained for dressage-the art of riding a horse with seemingly effortless grace through complex steps and paces in the showring-this made for a problem, since one of the moves required of even beginners was to walk or canter gracefully and evenly in a circle. And at the moment Buddy didn't seem willing to bend his body into the slightest kind of curve. Nor was he terribly interested in walking in circles, either. Every time he got near one of the fence rails in the dressage arena, he tried to break out of the circle and follow it straight on.

Now they were approaching the rail again, moving softly through the sawdust in what for the moment was a tolerable enough curve. Oh, please just do it right this time, just once, Megan thought, more in despair than in any hope that it would actually happen. She concentrated on keeping her seat correct and looking straight ahead, rather than down between the brainless creature's ears at the spot where she would love to take a club and whack him, and at just the right moment shifted her weight in the saddle just fractionally to the right, just so, the signal for Buddy to turn. Megan knew that she was doing it right, she knew it, and sure enough he altered his angle toward the rail just enough, and began to make the curve, continuing the circle-and then at the point when he should have started to curve away, took another step straight, and another, and another-

Megan couldn't stand it. She reined him in and just sat there, looking around the arena, trying to find the patience to keep from saying all kinds of horrible things. Buddy stood there, chewing reflectively on his bit and looking completely unconcerned.

"What happened?" Wilma said.

"You saw! He just broke out of circle and started to go straight."

"You shifted-"

"I didn't! Not the wrong way, anyway." She let out a long exasperated breath, glancing around the sunny ring. "I swear," Megan said, "if I owned him, I'd sell this dumb cluck off to Amtrak and let them convert him for rails. He'd be more use as part of a freight train."

Leaning against the rails on the far side of the arena, Wilma snickered, then pushed off and walked over to her. Megan glanced around the arena, a duplicate of the one where they would be riding at Potomac Valley over the weekend-a rectangle sixty meters long and forty meters wide, surrounded by white three-rail fencing a meter and a half high. Under the downpouring sunshine, covered bleachers where all too many spectators would be sitting ran down both "long" sides of the rectangle. And in front of those spectators she and Wilma would both ride out, one at a time, on Buddy, to do their Level 3 routines…

And die horribly, because the horse has suddenly become a waste of time, Megan thought. But she didn't say it out loud. There was still a chance of a miracle, or that something had gone wrong here that wasn't wrong in the real world.

Wilma came over to her, looked Buddy over. It was Megan's considered opinion that Wilma Christensen had more brains, as regarded matters equine, than any other rider she'd met since she got started sitting on top of horses. Wilma seemed to think good things about Megan, too. At least, they had hit it off instantly when they'd met a few years back, though they made something of an odd pair-Wilma short and thin compared to Megan's height and somewhat athletic build, Wilma blond and fair where Megan was tanned and brown. In any case, they had become inseparable at riding school, and later it had seemed obvious that they would start eventing together. But neither of us thought we'd wind up with a horse who's overnight turned into an idiot, Megan thought, and a "model" who seems to be doing the same thing…

Megan wondered, though, if Wilma was having the same kind of thoughts as she patted Buddy and walked around him, looking him over. "Are you sure you're not giving him some other kind of signal besides the weight shift?"

"I am not giving the big stupid lump any signal except that I want him to go in a circle," Megan said, annoyed, "that being probably one of the first things that a dressage animal ever learns, and which he knew perfectly well how to do until about a month and a half ago, except that now he doesn't. He just glues himself to the rail and goes forward, like a train. A very dumb train." She let out a long breath. "Do horses get aphasia, I wonder?"

Wilma narrowed her eyes at Buddy as he leaned over and began to crib thoughtfully at the top rail of the fence. She poked his muzzle with one finger to try and stop him. He tossed his head and snapped at her. "Question should be more like, can one recover from being hit repeatedly in the head with a ball-peen hammer? Because that's what he's working up to."

"Yeah." Megan gave him a look. "You," she said to Buddy, "are nothing but a collection of potential cans of dog food flying together in close formation. Do you know that?"

The horse regarded her with an expression of complete unconcern and tried to start chewing on the rail again.

Wilma looked at this with mild concern. "Maybe it's his diet," she said.

"It's about as likely to be sunspots," Megan said, unconvinced. "He gets every vitamin and mineral supplement known to humankind as it is. And more than he needs to eat, if you ask me."

"You suppose that's the problem? Too much grain? It's late for grass bloat."

Megan shook her head. Her suspicions were far worse. "I doubt it. I think it's the modeling that's gone wrong somehow."

"I don't know if it's that wrong. The real one is doing the same thing."

"Cribbing?"

"Yeah, but not just that. The rail problem, too. All yesterday afternoon." Wilma's expression was eloquent of annoyance as severe as Megan's. "I was mortified."

Megan leaned on the rail. "You know, you might be right, though," she said. "If it's some obscure muscle or bone thing… the supplements wouldn't necessarily be enough to put him right"

"Maybe it's why he keeps cribbing," Wilma said. "Minerals."

Megan sighed. "Without getting bloods drawn on him and having them sent for an analysis, and the figures fed into the model, there's no way to tell that for sure. If the model is doing what the real horse is, then the chances are that it's something weight- or motion-based. Which is unfortunate for us…"

"… Because it makes it look like we're doing something wrong, instead of him."

"Please," Megan said. She was desperately tired of the way the model was behaving, but the Region One Young Riders Championship of the U. S. Dressage Federation was only four days away, and she dared not waste any possible practice time. The championship was a dream that had been some time coming, for Megan was not the kind to compete at something without a suspicion that she might actually make some kind of decent showing. She and Wilma had together been working with Buddy for the past year, and a respectable score in the championships had actually started to look possible. So together with various other kids from the local riding club, they had filed their statements of intent, paid their entrance fees, and had successfully ridden the qualifier test, the FEI Prix St. Georges Freestyle. Now they were in the final stages of preparation for the trials to be held at the dressage center at Potomac Valley. And all this would have been just wonderful, except that Buddy seemed suddenly and inexplicably to be losing several very basic skills which he and his riders were nonetheless going to be expected to exhibit in the ring, and as a result, both Megan and Wilma both now seemed doomed to be horribly embarrassed in front of thousands of people. Everybody who saw them would (as was only to be expected) assume that the horse's poor performance was something to do with the inadequacies of the rider, and she and Wilma were both going to die hundreds of deaths. Or at least so it seemed to Megan.

"Why didn't we go in for some kind of virtual sport," Wilma muttered. "One where you can just create yourself giant muscles and perform like a demigod, even if you don't actually have the equipment."

"Because any sport like that would be a dumb sport, one without challenges and suitable only for idiots," Megan said, "and we thought we were made of better stuff. Able to handle a sport with some rules to it, some rigor. We thought!" She laughed helplessly.

Buddy stamped and snorted softly. They both turned baleful looks on him. "Rules it's got," Wilma said, sounding grim. "Especially the ones that say it's too late to pull out and get our fees back."

"Who cares about the fees? What I care about is attempting to ride a twenty-meter circle on an animal who appears to have forgotten how to go in any direction whose path can't be laid out with a ruler!" Megan sighed as she leaned against the rail. "You want to give it a try?"

"I'll just kick him," Wilma said. "I did yesterday."

"You can kick the model if you like," Megan said. "It just complains about illegal instructions."

"I've had worse." Wilma swung up into the saddle. She looked good in the arena gear they were both wearing: black jodhpurs, black jacket, the regulation white cravat and black riding helmet. Megan sighed at Wilma's pulled- together appearance, for she was never sure that she herself looked like anything more than a female version of a popular lawn ornament, and the top hat that they would both be wearing in the ring on Saturday, for Megan, just made the feeling worse.

Wilma was settling herself in the saddle, and now began to walk Buddy in an "informal" warm-up circle, which to Megan's sudden rage the model now did perfectly. "I hate him," she said. "In a sport where the one thing you ask of the creature is that he do the same thing at least twice in a row, he just won't."

"Mmh hhhmmm," Wilma said, and continued to ride the circle. Megan looked at her thoughtfully. Her seat wasn't great-she was slumping a little-and she wasn't looking ahead of her. Bad signals, Megan thought, and nearly said out loud, but then she stopped herself. There were enough other things going on at the moment in Wilma's life which also involved rather confusing signals.

"Anything from Burt this morning?" Megan said. It was a question she had been avoiding asking for nearly two hours now, one which her annoyance at Buddy had helped her put aside.

"Huh?"

"Burt. You remember. Tall guy, blond hair, supposed to be practicing with us, canceled out at the last minute."

Wilma flushed red and reined Buddy in, finally looking straight out over his ears, but not at anything that had to do with the competition arena. "No," she said.

Megan looked at her sympathetically. "You should ditch him," she said. "He's making you nuts."

"It's not like he doesn't have reason," Wilma said. "You should have heard his folks-"

"I understand that his parents don't seem to be the world's best," Megan said, "and I feel for him, but, jeez, Wil, he passes twice as much of the grief on to you as he gets himself! I hear him when we're out together.. and it's more than I'd put up with."

"You don't feel about him the way I do," Wilma said, in a rather small voice.

Megan restrained herself mightily from saying Thank God! Instead she said, "Look. He could at least message us, or send a virtmail, if he's not going to make practice. This isn't a big matter of the heart, it's just, you know, life and death stuff."

Wilma had to laugh at that, though the sound was pained. "I suppose. I'll mention it to him."

"Sounds good. So go ahead, let's give it a try. Track right, turn down the centerline at A, leg yield left D to S, then come back and halt at X."

"Right. Put the aids up?"

"Oh, sure. Workspace-"

"Listening."

"Guides on, please."

"Guides on." Immediately, faintly burning red letters of the alphabet, A through S with some omissions, and the letter X, now manifested themselves around the edges of the competition arena, and in a straight line down the middle of the sawdust, hanging in the air about a meter and a half high. These were the markers that told you where to start a move or series of moves and where to stop them. In competition it was your business to know exactly how long it took you to get from one to another, and how many steps your horse needed to take between them; before every competition, you would see all the dressage people draped over the rails and searching intently for some twig or leaf or post-mark in that particular arena that corresponded to the lettered spots in the arena in their heads.

"Okay," Megan said. "Go."

Buddy moved smoothly forward. That's the way it should look, Megan thought, no obvious moves, no obvious weight shift, everything subtle, the horse going smooth. At least the model was behaving at the moment.

This had been her own project, on and off, for the better part of the last six months: building a virtual "model" of Buddy, doing the necessary physical and mass metrics to allow her Net workspace to construct a horse that looked, acted, and rode exactly like the real thing.

It was a useful adjunct to your (admittedly invaluable) practice with the horse you were actually going to ride, especially when there might be four or five other people qualified to team with the same horse, and all fighting to get enough practice time… of which there was never enough even if there was just one of you. With a model, though, a simulated horse, you could at least make sure your own moves were right. And you could ride the sim for hours at a time without stopping, if you overrode the "reality" constraints… one of the minor advantages to practicing virtually. You could ride it in the middle of the night if you liked, a process to which a normal horse would object violently.

The only problem was the actual design of the sim itself, which ran into big money. Megan had looked into the cost of professional character and movement profiling by some dedicated firm like eQuines Unlimited or The Horseman's Word, and had come away horrified. It was just too exorbitant to even think about, even if the family had been rich, which (as her father constantly reminded her) it was not. So Megan had started building the virtual Buddy herself, learning entirely too much about the art of simming live creatures in the process. He was a work literally in progress, and the only problem with it all was that Megan was an amateur, and wasn't ever entirely sure that she was getting it right.

She still wasn't sure. More, from the expression on Wilma's face, she got the feeling that Wil wasn't sure either. She reined in, stopped. "I'm not sure about the way he's moving. You want to turn him clear?"

"No problem." Wilma started to ride him back to the point from which she would once again begin the pattern. "Workspace-"

"Listening."

"Model change. Transparent mode."

"Transparent mode enabled."

— and suddenly Wilma was riding a horse made of brown glass. At least it looked that way. The skin was hardly there, and the inferred organs inside were just vague shadows, but the details of the horse's musculature and bone structure could clearly be seen as he went. Megan got lost in watching this, and stood in the middle of the arena, turning and turning again as Buddy went around with Wilma on his back, watching the bones and muscles move, watching the nature of the motion itself, looking for anything uneven, anything that would reveal where the problem lay.

"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.

"You done in there?" Sean said.

"Done," Megan said, "yes. Finished. Through." She plunked herself dispiritedly into one of the wooden chairs by the scrubbed-oak kitchen table and briefly dropped her head into her hands, rubbing her eyes. "Everything is going to pieces, and the world is coming to an end."

Sean, still halfway into the fridge, said only, "Good, then no one has to go out and get milk."

"We wouldn't need to get it three times a day," Megan said, "if all you guys didn't drink it as if it came out of the faucet."

"I'm a growing boy," Sean said.

"You're twenty-one going on twenty-two, your bones are through growing, so don't give me that!"

"Speaking of which," Sean said, withdrawing his tall blond self, closing the door and heading out of the kitchen and down toward the den, "what are you getting me for my birthday?"

Megan looked at the ceiling as if imploring it for help, but no help came. The door leading to the hallway, the den and the bedrooms now merely produced another brother, this time dark-haired Mike, in jeans and sneakers and a bodyform T-shirt presently radiating in traveling abstract calligraphic patterns of blue and green on navy blue. He also opened the fridge, put his upper body into it, and a moment later came out with a large stack of cold- cut packages. These Mike carried over to the counter, where he rooted around in a cupboard over the work surface, acquiring a bottle of mustard and a small shake-on container of the deadly chili powder that he had been putting on everything lately. Mike then got a loaf of rye bread out of the breadbox on the counter and began hastily assembling something that bore the same resemblance to a sandwich that the Leaning Tower of Pisa did to more normal buildings.

Megan watched this performance with the resigned expression of a farmer on some African savannah watching the locusts make their scheduled descent onto the landscape one more time. "You might leave some of that for someone else," Megan said, in a tone of voice meant to convey a very strong hint.

"Why? They'd just eat it," Mike said, finishing the building of the sandwich. He took down a plate from the cupboard, moved the sloppy and unstable construction onto it with some difficulty, and carried it out of the kitchen. Megan prayed earnestly for an earth tremor, but none came.

She sat there at the table for a few more moments. I really should eat something, Megan thought. But whether from the events in her virtual arena, or from watching Mike throw together his snack, her appetite was now completely gone.

She could hear someone coming down the hall again, but to her intense relief it wasn't another of her brothers. It was her dad-tall, balding a little on top, dressed in jeans and a soft work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, holding his pipe in one hand, a Holmesian antique "deerstalker" meerschaum of which he was inordinately proud. "Dad," Megan said, "I need your professional help."

"What's the problem?"

"I want to kill my brothers in some way that can never be traced back to me."

Her father the mystery writer raised his eyebrows as he opened one of the kitchen drawers and started going through it, apparently looking for a pipe cleaner. "I have a few interesting new methods on tap this week. But all of them require considerable preparation, and no witnesses. And your conscience will still pain you afterward."

"Hah," said Sean, heading back into the kitchen and shrugging into an overslick as he went. "She doesn't have one. Six days till my birthday, Meg."

The door slammed behind him. "You see my point?" Megan said to her dad.

Her father turned around, leaning on the drawer to push it closed, and began performing the nearest thing to single bypass surgery on his pipe. "Your mother and I have invested a lot in their educations," he said mildly. "I'd hate to assist in their murder before we see some kind of return on our investment. Unless, or course, you're in a position to guarantee that you're going to make a salary the size of all their salaries combined."

"Plus twenty percent," Mike said as he came in the kitchen door again, putting his own jacket on, "and my birthday's coming up, too" He hurried out the back door after Sean.

Megan looked after him in mild annoyance. "You see what I put up with," she said.

Her father sighed. "More clearly than you imagine. Honey, have you had a bad day? My keen eye for observation suggests there's a certain sense-of-humor loss in the air." He removed the pipe cleaner he was working with from the pipe stem, eyed the horrible color it had become, chucked it into the garbage can and went looking in the drawer for another.

'That's a bad habit," Megan said. "You should give it up."

"I smoke one pipe a week. I breathe more smog than that in a day. Don't try to change the subject, honey. What's the matter?"

She told him about her afternoon's practice, the malfunctioning model-assuming that the malfunction was its and not Megan's-and Wilma's sudden departure.

Her father looked down the pipe's mouth, took the stem off and began reaming it out again. "A little unusual. And her mother said-what? That Burt had left home?"

"It sounded that way."

"This the first you've heard of this?"

Megan raised her eyebrows. "Not as such." She sighed. "Dad, far be it from me to describe this as the perfect family-"

He gave her a slightly cockeyed look. "I wouldn't go quite that far myself. Especially since I pay the grocery bills."

"Yeah, well, that's not what I mean." She fiddled with the fringe on one of the knitted placemats on the table.

"You and Mom," Megan said, "are extremely good to us… compared to some parents."

Her father straightened, put the pipe aside. "Well," he said, "it's always dangerous to get judgmental about other people's family lives, their interrelationships. There are so many factors that make a big difference, but never get exhibited to the world at large. That makes it hard to figure out what's really going on."

"Not always," Megan said. "Dad… Burt takes a lot of.. well, it's emotional abuse, really. There's no other word for it. His folks… I don't go over there much. We try to make ways for Burt to get away, because really, when he's home, both his mother and his father ride him constantly. There's just nothing he can do right. They find fault with every single thing he does, no matter how innocent. And when they do start finding fault, they really yell at him. Not just cutting remarks, sarcasm, or whatever. It's scary, sometimes. If I heard you or Mom ever make that kind of noise about something, I'd faint."

"You might be surprised," her father said, sounding dry. "I've heard your mother's end of some of the editorial conferences for TimeOnline. Pretty rough stuff."

"Maybe it is. But, Daddy, you've never treated any of us that way. I can't imagine what that kind of thing would be like, coming from your own parents. And Burt's been putting up with it for years."

Megan leaned back in the chair. "Lately he's been starting to mention not putting up with it anymore. Getting out. But Burt's never been clear about exactly where he planned to get out to. I don't think he had a lot of money saved, for one thing. If he's got enough money to move out, all of a sudden, I'd think maybe he'd robbed a bank or something… I don't know where else Burt would be getting it."

Her father brooded for a few moments, turning the half- pipe over in his hands, then fitting the stem to it again.

"Are there friends who might have given him a place to stay?"

"Not that I know of. I mean, none who wouldn't tip his mother off right away once they got a feeling for what was going on. If he's staying with someone, it's nobody from school, I'd bet, or from the riding crowd. Someone none of us know." Megan began tying the bit of fringe into a knot. "But what's going to drive poor Wilma right around the bend is not knowing. She's seriously freaked already. If Burt doesn't at least get in touch with her to let her know he's okay, wherever he is, Wilma's going to get even more frayed at the edges."

And Megan groaned and put her head down in her hands. "I don't believe this is happening," she muttered. "Why couldn't he have waited until after the competition? What kind of person does this to their friends before they're about to do something so important? What kind of person does it at all?

"Burt's kind, apparently," her father said, leaning against the counter and sucking experimentally on the pipe. "Yech."

Megan looked up, for this was an unusual reaction for her dad, but it was the pipe he was scowling at, and now he took it apart again and went rooting in the drawer for another pipe cleaner. "Well," he said after a moment, "this leaves you with an interesting choice."

"I don't see that it leaves us with any choices at all," Megan said, mournfully.

"Whether to let this ruin your competition, for one thing."

Megan straightened up and felt her mouth set in a grim expression. "I'm not sure the horse isn't going to do that for us," she said. "Even without Burt, things are looking pretty awful."

Her father raised his eyebrows as he worked on the pipestem. "So even if he hadn't gone off wherever he's gone, you'd still have problems."

"More than enough," Megan said, and sighed again.

"No, I see your point, PopsMy life won't exactly come to an end. I may wind up looking incredibly incompetent and dumb in front of hundreds of people, but that's nothing, really…"

Her father's eyebrows went up higher, this time in response to her ironic tone. "I've done it in front of millions, in my time," Megan's father said. "That last review in the New York Times, for example."

"I thought you said that didn't matter, because the Times critic was an obsequious cretin."

Her father smiled very slightly as he put down the pipe stem and started working on the pipe end. "I meant that, first of all, he was wrong, and second, yes, he is an obsequious cretin. But lots of people think he's not, so I probably looked dumb to them." Her father shrugged. "They're not usually people who would have bought my book anyway, so I don't care what they think. It's the ones who bought it and didn't like it that I worry about. After all, I took their beer money and didn't entertain them. But third, and most important… how much does it really matter? In two hundred years who's going to care?"

Megan blinked… then sighed again. "Okay," she said. "This is that 'sense of proportion' thing you keep telling me about."

"When humor fails you," her father said, grimacing at the second pipecleaner and throwing it away, "there's no better substitute. Meanwhile, what have Burt's folks been doing about this situation?"

"I don't know," Megan said. "I should call Wilma and see if she knows anythingI don't want to call them myself. I don't know them all that well."

"And from the sound of it, you don't want to."

Megan shook her head. Every time she had called Burt's house in the past, there had been the sound of shouting in the background, and once, when the phone was on visual, she had seen Burt's mother go by in the background of the view, looking grim and purposeful about where she was going, and carrying.. She shook her head again. Surely nobody in this day and age actually hit their kid with a belt. She had to have seen that wrong. Oh, jeez, I hope I saw that wrong… "It's not high on my list," Megan said to her father. "I'll call Wilma in an hour or so and see what she found out."

"And what about Saturday?" her father said. "Are you going to be able to replace Burt if no one can find him?"

Megan rubbed her eyes again. "It's not that simple," she said. "The team qualifies as a group, and everybody has to have been preregistered as part of a team with the horse they're working with. If we're incredibly lucky, we might be able to get one of the other riders who's certified with Burt's horse to fill in. But there's no guarantee that whoever it is will've been working on the same figures and patterns that Burt was preparing… the ones the judges are going to be looking for." She sighed, looked up again. "Dad," Megan said, "what do you do when you see a complete disaster coming, and no matter how you try to cope, there's just no way to avoid it?"

He was frowning at the meerschaum pipe, screwing it together again. "Prepare your responses in advance," her father said, sounding resigned, "and do your best to make them graceful. People do remember that afterward, no matter what the winners say."

Megan sighed as her father went out of the kitchen, and got up to throw herself together some kind of dinner, while thinking morosely about Burt, Buddy, her sim of Buddy, and the general unfairness of life. Vd better get the nourishment into me now, because Vm not gonna have time in the next seventy-two hours…