Then at some point in our history we made a deal with the humans. They would stop eating us, and also get rid of any hungry lions who might be hiding in the bushes, and in exchange we would let them sit on our backs. Or help them move stuff around – whatever tasks that humans felt too small and feeble to undertake by themselves.
And so, with all the observational talents that nature had provided, and no hungry lions to watch out for, I found myself watching humans instead.
Being a human seemed to mostly involve moving stuff around. That is pretty much all they ever appeared to do. When they weren’t standing around barking and squawking at each other they were carrying things, putting things on things, or getting into things that could move larger things. It was a mystery how they had any energy for all this needless activity; I never saw them eating any grass. It was no wonder they needed horses to carry them about.
I had no idea why humans did anything that they did, and up until this day I wouldn’t have cared. The world was just full of stuff, and humans liked to move it all around, while horses watched and chewed grass. One particular human would visit my field every day, carrying a sack of food. I watched him as he emptied the grain into my trough and walked away, opening and closing the gate behind him. I had seen him do this a hundred times before, but watching the ceremony of the gate had become an addiction. There was a regular pattern in the way he opened and closed it which I suddenly found fascinating. A latch that lifts, a bar that slides, always the same actions, repeated identically each time.
It was annoying, this recent habit I had developed of noticing things. The world used to be a smooth clockwork mechanism that ticked pleasantly away by itself, but now I kept glimpsing the hidden hands behind the scenery that wound all its gears, and the exposed ugliness of its inner workings bothered me.
That gate, for example. I had never considered trying to open it myself, because I’d never had the need to. But now that I could see how it worked, I wondered why no horse had ever thought of having a go themselves. I casually sauntered up to the gate and sniffed it. The food-bearing human had disappeared into the alien world beyond. It looked like a dangerous and inedible world out there, and I was much better off staying in my field where food and water came delivered by human slaves, and nothing wanted to eat me.
Still, I felt compelled to test my theory of how this gate worked. Recent experience had taught me that a comfortable monotonous life in this field was no longer a certainty, so any additional options might be useful to have. I nibbled the latch and felt its weight, lifting it up as far as it could go. It dropped back down again – evidently I needed to swing it further. The bolt that slid across was easier to figure out, and having solved both mechanisms I gave the gate a nudge and watched it slowly swing open on its hinges. I almost couldn’t believe how easy it was.
The other horses didn’t seem so impressed. In fact, I think it made them like me even less. It’s possible they were concerned that the open gate would expose them to the dangers of the outside world, but I suspect they just wanted to hate me and would take any excuse. I decided to put them at ease by closing it again. The process was simple enough to complete in reverse order, and after swinging the latch down I stood back to admire the results of my efforts. This was when I realised I was accidentally on the wrong side of the gate, but at least it gave me the opportunity to practise opening it again.
Once I had successfully closed the gate with myself on the correct side, I decided to celebrate by finding something to eat. The other horses went back to ignoring me. I didn’t care what they thought of me any more, not since I had become the master of the gate. I felt that this made me the leader of the herd by default, but if they wanted to pretend otherwise then I would let them. I had more important things to think about. As I chewed on some grain, a strange idea was forming in my mind.
It was gradually dawning on me that this world was divided into two distinct categories of objects. First, there were things that were there because they wanted to be there. Things like grass and trees, or clouds and puddles. They appeared wherever they could, in patterns decided randomly depending on where the trees and clouds and puddles decided they wanted to be. They were alive with a life of their own.
The second category of things, however, did not have a life of their own. They were things that had some kind of function or purpose, like that gate I had just opened and closed, or the fence that protected us from the outside world. Even this trough I was eating from. In other words, there were things that did what they wanted, and things that did what they were told.
This in itself was not entirely shocking; in fact it seemed instinctively obvious, as if I had known it forever and only now discovered the thoughts to describe it. But I was starting to realise that the objects of purpose that cluttered my world were almost always associated with some human activity. They were things that humans moved, or carried, or got inside. Things that humans arranged in piles or swept clean every morning. Without humans they crumbled, and grass grew over them.
Even I could create one of these lifeless things; it was as easy as picking something up and putting it in the wrong place. A gate left open was immediately useless, without the power to close it again.
Before this moment my universe was structured by a simple logic: everything was where it was because it wouldn’t be there if it was somewhere else. But now a chain of rudimentary scientific reasoning was leading me towards a dizzying revelation.
This world I was living in was not simply shared with humans.
It was run by humans.
Suddenly, everywhere I looked I saw the footprints of human purpose. The tools that they used, the paths they walked on. Humans filled my trough with food and my stable with boxes and wires and glowing screens. It wasn’t just that humans needed these objects to do whatever they did; the objects needed humans in order to exist in the first place. And what about the stable itself? What about the walls and the fences and all the boundaries of my world? Could these creatures be responsible for such permanent structures as well?
The concept of creation is utterly alien to a horse. Horses don’t make things, and while things will occasionally fall out of a horse, including other horses, these objects do not require any kind of conscious assembly. If you never see something being physically pieced together, it may as well have existed in its final form since the beginning of time. But now that I considered the possibility, I was certain I had seen such evidence of construction without even realising. A hole being patched in a fence, or a broken window replaced, dozens of small acts of maintenance I had personally witnessed that could conceivably accumulate over time to form whole buildings, growing piece by piece like that small mountain of manure they kept religiously adding to for whatever reason.
Over the next few days I surreptitiously studied my surroundings in as much detail as I could manage between meals. The once solid barriers that formed a ring around my domain were now collections of pieces, clearly stuck together, in some places even coming apart with a bit of chewing. I found a hole in a wall with some bricks scattered underneath. I re-examined a collection of rubber tyres that tasted identical to the wheels of the tractor that delivered my bales of hay. Everything seemed to be made of pieces and each piece had its place. The insight was rewarding, but it was not simple curiosity that was driving this investigation. It was a question that loomed over my thoughts like a dark cloud: what place did I have in this human world I suddenly found myself in? If humans dictated the placement of all things, was I then one of those things? Was I serving some unknown human purpose?
Whatever purpose that might be was still way beyond my mental reach, but it was enough for now that the curtain had been lifted, revealing the human hands that guided and shaped this universe. It was enough to instantly shift the dynamic of power in the relationship between people and horses. Until now I had placidly assumed that both species were living and working towards some mutually beneficial goal, but I was now faced with
the probability that I was simply a cog in the machinery of their world. That I existed at their discretion.
And if there was one thing I desired above all else it was to continue to exist. Knowing, or at least suspecting, that my life was under human jurisdiction now gave me an overwhelming desire to discover the precise limits of my own destiny and do whatever I could to maximise my control over it.
In other words, I had to find out what made humans so different from horses and what I could possibly do about it.
Betty was looking at me strangely.
‘This horse…’ she said, pointing at me with a carrot. Even this simple gesture was beyond my comprehension at the time. Regardless of my recent philosophical insights, the motivations behind anything humans did, along with their methods of communication, were still largely unknown. Desires beyond my own were non-existent. I imagined any other creature that even vaguely resembled a horse would probably want the same things I wanted, and observing these humans more closely I could see certain vague horse-like qualities. There was a herd instinct they seemed to share, and a noticeable hierarchy within it. They also appeared to like carrots, or at least valued them as some form of currency.
‘This horse…’ she continued. ‘I swear it’s looking at me strangely.’
Tim looked at her strangely.
‘What do you think, Timothy? Gaze lovingly into this horse’s eyes and tell me what you see.’
Tim sighed and swivelled around in his chair. After a brief moment of scrutiny he shrugged with his eyebrows.
‘Carrots,’ he said.
‘There is definitely something in there.’ Betty was peering through my eyes as if they were windows into my thoughts. ‘What is it, Buttercup? Is it the restless soul of the wandering hooves? Are your hooves restless, my dear? It’s that endless green horizon isn’t it? The rolling ocean of hills and valleys.’
‘It’s carrots,’ Tim repeated.
‘Carrots, Timbolini? He’s hopeless isn’t he, Buttercup? Trapped inside a materialistic bubble of capitalist ideology, aren’t you, Timbo? You need to spend more time with this horse. Come and immerse yourself in the warm horsey waters. You know, I think I see what it is now, in the eyes of this horse. It is love, Timbolini.’ She began to sing. ‘Timbolini… he dreams of a horse in a bikini… only the love of this horse can free me, says Timbolini…’
Tim took the deepest of deep breaths.
‘Come here, mate,’ he said. ‘Come and look at this.’ He beckoned Betty over to his computer screen, where a wiggly line was waiting for her attention.
‘That is absolutely amazing, Timothy. What is it?’
‘It’s a plot of neural growth over time. You see those dips in the graph?’
Betty squinted at the screen through her spectacles.
‘Dips in the graph. I see them, Timbo.’
‘Yeah, so I checked the timeline. Looks like those dips match up almost exactly to the times when our horse is standing in here. With us.’
Betty blinked at him, waiting for more, but that seemed to be it.
‘Yes?’ She waited again. ‘Are you inferring something from that?’
‘Just giving you the facts, mate,’ he said, gesturing towards the screen.
‘Well, thank you very much for the facts, Timothy. I do love facts. But is there an assumption that goes with them? Are you suggesting, for example, that our horse might be better off without us? Looks like it’s learning more from frolicking in the field than it is in here, doesn’t it?’
‘Well, the numbers don’t lie, mate.’
‘Yes, the numbers, Timbo, the sacred numbers. What could they mean? Maybe frolicking time is when our horsey gets to process what’s going on in here, how about that? Do you like that? Puzzles and carrots in the classroom, then out we go for fresh air and reflection, to build our neural pathways while we munch on grass, in the absence of intellectual stimulation. You see, numbers are never the whole story, are they, Timmy? This room is where we provide food for thought. Literally.’ She held up her carrot to illustrate whatever point she was trying to make. ‘Learning isn’t about building new pathways, anyway. It’s about strengthening what is already there, even chopping back the dead wood if necessary. Synaptic plasticity, hmm? We are but dips in Buttercup’s graph, you and I. I wouldn’t take it personally though, Timmy-toes. You’re a dip in everyone’s graph, my dear.’
Tim shook his head and gazed at me as I stood motionless, patiently observing the pair of them.
‘So how do we measure our progress then?’ he asked. ‘How are we meant to assess our effectiveness? We’re on Horse 1.2 now. Not that we’ve seen much evidence of that.’
‘Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place, Timmy dear. Those dips in your graph are the wing-beats of a flying horse.’ Betty flapped her arms as gracefully as she could manage. ‘A flying horse, carrying us to the heavenly heights of discovery.’
Tim shook his head again and returned his attention to his screen.
‘Everything will be alright, Timothy. Ever upwards and Bunzel-Better. Isn’t that right, Buttercup?’ She stared into my eyes again, searching for some self-assurance.
Such close personal scrutiny would be considered the height of bad manners for most animals, if not outright threatening. However, since these creatures had been promoted from mere carrot-vending machines to orchestrators of everything around me, I no longer took this prolonged eye contact so personally. I was not a person, after all. All those human eyes saw when they looked at me was another object. The threat was now purely psychological, and the only way I could meet it was with a deeper understanding. And so I stared back.
I had to work out what it was that placed these humans in such a position of power. There were physical differences between us, but nothing that I felt gave them an obvious advantage. Their hands, with their strange worm-like fingers, made it easier to bend the world into whatever shape they wanted. But that didn’t seem like it was enough, not when I could easily open their gate myself. Hands were just tools – the real driving force behind their superiority had to be something else.
Unless it really was as simple as having the desire to do these things. Horses never opened the gate, because they didn’t want to. And why would they? Why leave, if nothing hurts and you are literally standing in your own dinner all day? There were scary things outside the friendly field. Big machines rumbled past, belching foul inedible smells, and constant loud noises drifted on the breeze like distant thunder. You could almost believe that the sole purpose of humanity’s existence was to maintain this horse haven, to keep us safe and fed, and protect us from the dangers outside. Regardless of whatever powers these creatures possessed, I couldn’t deny that they did seem to like horses. Then again, I liked carrots, and I wasn’t sure that carrots stood to benefit much from that relationship.
I searched Betty’s eyes for some kind of clue. If desire was the driving force behind their actions then I had to work out what it was they wanted from me. I was certain that there was a key difference between us that would unlock the mystery. Why was it humans, and not horses, who were running the world?
Thinking was hungry work, so I grabbed the stick with my teeth and gave it a shake. The carrot danced on the big screen. Usually this was enough to get Betty to give me a real one, but this time nothing happened. I gave the stick another shake and still she stood there with folded arms. Tim was spying on us from his corner.
‘Carrots,’ he said.
Betty pulled a carrot out of her magic bag. She held it under her nose and smelled it with relish.
‘Ooh, carrots!’ she moaned. I moved towards her but the carrot vanished from sight. ‘What? What is it, Buttercup? Did you see a carrot? Where did it go? Hmm?’ She held out her open hand. It was empty but I sniffed it to make sure, following it with my nose as she moved it to the display. ‘Oh look, what’s that, Buttercup? Is that your carrot, there?’ She poked the virtual carrot on the screen with her finger. It was something she did a lot wh
en we played the carrot game. Now she was prodding a picture of a horse that was next to it. ‘And who is this? Hmm? Look there, who’s that on the screen? Is that you?’
Tim deflated in his chair.
‘Just show it what to do, mate.’
Betty ignored him.
‘It’s a mystery isn’t it, Buttercup? The mystery of the horse and the carrot. What could the answer be?’
I waggled the stick again and Betty shook her head. I was well aware that a shaking head meant no carrots. I was also well aware by now that the movement of the stick controlled the movement of the carrot on the screen. In fact I already had a pretty good idea how to solve this particular puzzle. But there was a deeper game going on here. It was the carrot game, and I was coming to realise that Betty was playing this game herself. She was deliberately being difficult until I did whatever she wanted me to do, using my own carrot theory against me.
This called for some strategy, if I was going to avoid losing. Capitulating to Betty’s coercion would mean losing the game, as the balance of power would shift in her favour. Alternatively, I could wait a while and then perform the task, seemingly of my own volition. Any carrot I received then would be willingly given, not as a reward for an appointed task, but as payment for services rendered. The scales of supply and demand would tip back towards me, and that is how I would win.
This was no longer simply a game of carrots, it was a game of social dominance, whose basis would be instinctively familiar to any horse. There are those who lead, and those who follow. Humans had somehow extended this to include everything in the physical world around them, and presumably that included myself. But even in the kingdom of horses, where physical attributes are the prevailing currency of power, there are still psychological nuances that may be employed to offer an advantage. And in the kingdom of humans, none of those horses outside could even open a gate.
Knowledge had to be the currency of power in the human world. Horses lost because they didn’t even know the rules of the game. But I knew it now, and if knowing made me better than those other horses, then it stood to reason that the more I knew, the better I would be.
Horse Destroys the Universe Page 4