by Aaron Pery
"I'll need your help with it, but we can do it. Any other questions? Well, I see no one has any so I'd love to have dinner because I'm starving."
"As is the norm for you after you do anything exciting."
Chapter 21
Before they sat down to dinner Marty took off the blouse and hung it carefully on the back of the chair that David had engineered and built. "It felt kind of weird putting on any garment for the first time since arriving here."
"Which you'll find out in about four weeks will be a necessity since the weather's going to turn quite cold by then. We all put on something warm on our upper bodies when it happens and I'm sure you will, too. Besides, you had to put something on or the gentleman you were dealing with would've thought you were pulling a sick prank on him had he seen the rest of your body."
"That's for sure. Which I'll have to put back on when he calls back."
"Yes. I was greatly impressed, though, by his reaction when he spoke of your uncle, who was yourself, with near reverence."
"That's how everyone reacted to Marty in our world," Nick said. "As though he were some sort of deity in their eyes."
"And from all the feats that Marty had pulled over here so far, I'd imagine that it was pretty much justified." David said. "I need your advice, Marty, about what to do with the small tractors that we'd already modified."
"I thought it was a given that you should distribute them amongst all the small farms so they'll become more efficient in working their lands. I'd allot each group of about ten farmers one tractor to use between them, which should make all of them very happy especially when it comes with a plow."
"Sound fair. But you realize what's going to happen to all of our horses once the equipment you got us arrives and we learn to use it properly."
"Of course, they'll become redundant. I was thinking, though, that in light of your discovery about their monogamous social attitudes, they'll soon go on their own in pairs. And those who don't will probably remain on small farmers' plots as extra help to them rather than as communal workers, particularly the geldings."
"Which we don't have too many of since they were normally slaughtered at the Gogians' orders. God, it's still hard for me to accept that they knew about the horses' intelligence and still ate them."
"It went along with the way they'd treated all of you, Dave, so try to forget they ever existed. Anyway, how many geldings do we still have?"
"A hundred, none of whom I guess will join the others so we'll need to find them homes among the small farms because we owe them that much, together with the milk mares who decided to stay."
"I'm glad that most of them will be free. But I want you to know that very few of our people ate their meat because as Brits we were raised on mutton rather than beef, and our children got the taste from us."
"So that's why you have such an enormous herd of sheep, Sue?"
"Yes, which we'll have to increase because I anticipate that our population, which had increased considerably already, will start growing over the next few years."
"Grow? How about explode once the pill's effect on the women will start to diminish and every one of them will get pregnant? Consider that by then most of our compound kids will be fully mature and you'll come up with five-thousand women bearing at least two kids apiece annually. That, my dear, will double our numbers and and may double again a year later. So before you know it we'll have a population of a hundred thousand people that we'll need to feed."
"Gosh, Marty, I didn't do the arithmetic on that. Is this why you took a chance and contacted Adam Marsh, to make proper preparation for feeding so many of us?"
"That's right, Sue. And not only that, we'll need to consider expanding into most of the neighboring islands and ultimately into mainland Greece."
"You're forever planning and scheming, Marty, aren't you?"
"That's how my mind works, Sue--always preparing myself for contingencies rather than let events overtake me."
"You mean us, don't you? Gosh, have we ever been lucky to have the two of you end up landing among us."
"Well, the moment we did, and once we realized that this will be our home from that moment on, we figured that you'll need our help not just to survive but to thrive."
"We're still glad that you're here," David burst out emotionally. "And have a twenty-century survival wherewithal. But shouldn't we inform Jenny about all that's happened here today and discuss the future with the board?"
"Good idea, Dave. So you contact Jenny and tell her about it, and I suggest that we all meet in the afternoon two days from now. And while you do that, I'm going out to the porch and have a cigar with another cup of coffee."
"I'll go out with you if you don't mind." Nick said.
"Of course not, silly."
The seat on the porch, much like the bean-bags that were the ultimate rage in the United States in the seventies, was so comfortable that Marty dropped into a relaxed sleep after putting out her cigar. She woke up a while later when she felt Nick rubbing her shoulder gently and when she opened her eyes she saw the young gelding that she had met the day they had poisoned the Gogians. He was standing below the porch steps, seemingly waiting patiently for her to wake up.
"Your friend has been waiting to speak with you for over an hour, Marty, so I guess he has something important to discuss."
Marty walked down the steps and sat on the lowest so that she would be face to face with him. "I know from the last time we met that we can communicate with our minds. Am I right?"
"You certainly are, General Sherman. And you're the only one any of us had ever been able to reach."
"Please call me Marty. And what's your name?"
"In your language it will be Swifty."
"Thank you. Are you saying that you have your own language and that all of you speak to one another mentally?"
"We do, Marty. And everyone was elated to find out that there's at least one of you we can talk to."
"Two, actually. My husband Nick, who woke me up, can hear and understand everything that we say."
"Even better. Hello Nick."
"And hello to you. I am a scientist, Swifty, whose job it is to understand things most people don't or can't. So I'd like to know who your people truly are or were in the past, which will help us understand what had happened to you here."
"I want you to know about that because it will help you comprehend who we truly are, rather than horses or dumb beasts. My ancestors, we do not know how long ago but it must have been many thousands of years in the past, had looked just as we do now--like the horses of your time."
"Do you possess all your ancestral memories in your mind?"
"Yes, but they get fuzzy the further in the past they are. Anyway, my people used to live in lands very far to the east of here where we thrived until humankind had arrived and slowly pushed us west as they grew and multiplied. Some of the primitives even tried to domesticate us as beasts of burden, which we resisted by escaping since unlike them we could not speak or fight. We kept being pushed until we reached the land just east of here, which at the time was connected to the land north of here until the big frozen lake thawed and the water burst through to separate them."
"We know about that, which created what we call Turkey, or Asia Minor, and in essence Greece as well."
"Good to know. In any case, we thrived in peace while in the land of Turkey for a very long time until, for some unknown reason, our race slowly developed into two kinds of people while our original kind literally vanished. They were both much better suited for survival because they had developed two arms and hands and communicate. They became, as you call them, centaurs and Gogians, and both races detested each other so much that whenever they met they slaughtered each other."
"That much we know about from recent history."
"I'm glad that you do. So by the time of the flood and separation of the lands, most centaurs lived in Turkey with few in Greece, where all the Gogians had gone to. Those were terrible times fo
r the centaurs because the Gogians used to hunt and kill them for sport and take their women. The centaurs, who hadn't developed advanced weapons, would ambush their enemies in the forests and cut them to pieces."
"Until the war with the aliens, when most females were rendered infertile?"
Swifty chuckled. "All except centaurs, which made them extremely happy for a while until the Gogians discovered this fact and captured many thousands of their females to breed with and exterminated all the males both in Greece and in Turkey until none were left alive. Then, for some reason, when they mated with the centaur females my old kind, as you can see, were reborn."
"Which infuriated the Gogians to such a degree that they turned you into food animals?"
"Exactly. And then you appeared literally out of nowhere, looking like my ancestors but with an upper body that looked much like the humans we had escaped from so long ago--kind of half centaur and half human. How did it happen?"
Marty responded. "We used to be two-legged humans in our past until the Gogians brought us here and grafted our upper bodies onto centaur bodies."
"And created a new breed of centaur. But why did they do that?"
"Because they found that we could breed, so they raised our children to maturity and then grafted their own upper bodies onto theirs so that their kind would survive."
They could feel the terrible pain in Swifty's mind. "So they treated you worse than even us, didn't they? They're the most horrible creatures ever born to walk the land."
"Not any longer, Swifty, because we killed their entire population who had survived their last war against each other."
"Are you saying that there are no more Gogians alive anywhere?"
"Exactly. Which was why we were able to set your people free from the moment we could do so."
"I see. Your people were always kind to mine even while following those butchers' orders, which they had to abide by."
"For which we're very sorry and feel that we owe you a great debt."
"Never mind that, Marty. The important thing is that you're honorable people and I must tell everyone about it and how you'd had horrors imposed on you just as they were on us."
"We're pleased that you will. Let us know the result of telling everyone about what had really happened here."
"I will. And thanks for telling me."
"My God, Marty, that was some story he told us."
"It sure was. Which is another subject we need to bring to the board's notice."
Susan appeared just then to tell Marty that the computer was chiming with a message for her.
"Then I better put on the blouse before I answer it."
A moment later, Adam's smiling face appeared on the screen. "Well, my dear, I just finished assembling your order, most of which is already on the way to the warehouse, which I was able to secure for you."
"Gosh, Adam, I knew you'd be the man to do it because my uncle considered you the best logistics man he'd ever known, and you just put together a sizeable order in a few hours that I doubt anyone else could've. Oh, and he said that you were a pretty decent warrior to boot."
"Thank you for saying that, Marty. Anyway, I'd imagine everything should get there no later than midnight, forty-eight hours from now. Per your instructions, my area lead man will make sure that the stuff will be set up in two rows and that the alarm will not be turned on once he leaves."
"Then I better transfer the payment to your account. Let me ask you, though, are you going to make a decent profit on the deal? I know a buyer's not supposed to ask such a thing but I'm anxious to make you happy because I'd like to use you again in the future."
Adam seemed to squirm a bit before answering. "Well, since the order's so large I priced it at cost plus ten and added to it all the expenses involved."
"I thought you would. So make it cost plus fifteen and send me the bill right now so you'll have it in your bank account almost instantly."
"I greatly appreciate it, Marty, and hope to do more business together in the near future."
"You certainly will."
"He's quite an operator, Adam is." Nick said as soon as Marty sent him the nearly two-million dollar payment. "But why did you pay him more than he asked?"
"Because he's truly the best scrounger I'd ever had, with an open mind like very few people do."
"Are you saying that you'll use him again for some other needs of ours that might crop up?"
"That's how I see it. Now, guys, let's all grab a few hours' sleep because I'm beat and I'm sure so are you."
When Marty went out to the porch the next morning with coffee and a smoke she found Swifty waiting for her accompanied by the largest and tallest horse she had even seen. She smiled at both. "Well, good morning, Swifty. And who is your friend?"
His voice in her head matched his size as he responded. "They call me Leader."
"And are you one?" Marty asked as she sat down on the wide lower step.
"You mean a leader? Sort of, I guess because people always come to me with questions they want answered."
"And do you find the answers for them?"
"Not always, but I sure try."
Marty chuckled. "Saying it this way makes you a very smart man. Did you come here with a question of your own, though?"
His laughter rambled loudly in her head. "And saying that makes you a real smart woman, just like Swifty said you are."
"Thank you, Leader." She responded just as Nick sat down next to her. "But the real smart one between us is Nick, who knows more stuff than anyone else."
"That's what Swifty told me but that you're the one who takes action when it's necessary--like getting us rid of all those animals."
"Which, just so you know, was Nick's idea to poison them like the rats that they were. Anyway, how can we help you?"
"I think you know about the fact that unlike real horses, the nature we'd inherited from our ancestors is for pairing up."
"So was ours until the Gogians fed us a drug that changed our characteristics until we became independent and stopped taking it."
"And that turned you back into real people?"
"Correct, with very strong familial attachments."
"I'm glad to hear that you'd overcome the awful conditions that the Gogians had put you in. Particularly so because you're our half cousins."
"Interesting way of putting it, which I like. So what can I do for you, Leader?"
"D'you think there's any way for us to leave this island?"
"I'm sure it can be done depending on where you want to go. But why leave here now that you're a free people?"
"A few reasons, chief among them is the fact that we consider this island a cursed place, where so many of our people were castrated and slaughtered to be eaten by the Gogians, and where our mothers and sisters were tortured as milk producers for them."
"Are you aware of the fact that their fondness for your milk had ultimately led to the Gogians' demise?"
"No. How did it?"
"Because we'd mixed the poison that killed them with our final milk delivery. Where I come from we called such a thing poetic justice."
Both looked at her with startled surprise, then burst into uproarious neighing. "That truly was justice, killing the rats with our milk. Anyway, another reason for our wish to leave here is that because both of our birth-rates, sooner or later our kind and yours will run out of living space."
"And we'll turn from friends into enemies? Yes, that's an astute observation on your part and I agree with it. Where will you want to go from here?"
"To the land that you call Turkey, where our ancestors had settled before the race had split into centaurs and Gogians. It's a very rich country for the likes of us, where food is plentiful without any need for cultivation. Which, aside from our ancestral memories, we can see on occasions from the top of the mountain just a few kilometers from here, and it looks absolutely lovely."
"Can you visualize it in your mind so Nick and I can see it as well?"
&nbs
p; "Of course."
Marty was impressed by the lush sight she received, but Nick shook his head when he saw it. "I hate to tell you, guys, but that's not Turkey. It's the island of Rhodes, which is truly beautiful and lush and is just of few kilometers from the Turkish land mass. Give me a moment to search my memory for pictures of the coast of Turkey beyond Rhodes and show it to you."
A moment later when he found it, Nick projected a series of ten pictures into theirs and Marty's mind. "That's the land you want, Leader."
"It's magnificent, even better than what we'd thought. Can you get us there, Marty?"
"How many people do you have who'll want to go?"
"The geldings and most of the older mares already stated their wish to remain here, in addition to some young stallions who became attached to them. So figure on seven-hundred in round numbers."
"That's doable because we have a few boats that the Gogians had used to bring all their people over here after the war. But they haven't been used for a while so I'll need to make sure that they're still seaworthy for the trip, which will take me a few days to arrange."
"How will you let us know?"
"Easily. Once I have the answer I'll contact you mentally and inform you. And if all's well, we'll make the arrangements at that time."
"That will be marvelous, Marty. Thank you from all of us."
Chapter 22
"From what Sue and Dave told me I understand you'd had quite an interesting visit with them." Jenny said to Marty and Nick when they sat down at the Board meeting.