Eventually we arrived at the main art museum at the edge of the immense park that filled a big chunk of the island. The guide shepherded us around and lectured about various artifacts that were supposed to be important. I mostly tried to figure out why the big slabs of blue tiles with a yellow animal thingy painted on deserved a whole lecture of their own while the gigantic room-size statues of some other animals with the heads of people didn’t.
I finally nudged Angelyn. “Can I ask a really stupid question?”
“Sure.”
“Those aren’t really real, are they? There isn’t some kind of creature running around in the wilds of Earth with human faces and beards like that.”
“Um, no. It’s symbolic.”
“Oh. Of what?”
She shrugged. “Some kind of myth or religion or something.”
“… one of the great cities of early civilization, giving rise to the legend of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon…”
I thought maybe I should be takings notes, then I figured I could just look it all up later.
The museum was basically a lot of pictures of things, done in a lot of styles, from the last five thousand years, from all over Earth. Five thousand years was a long time, I knew that. I knew I ought to be impressed by the pots and stone carvings and the drawings and sculptures that had survived all that time so we could look at them now. I was supposed to be paying attention to the pictures they showed or the stories they told. I was supposed to be learning how they were made and what that said about society or technology or whatever. I might have cared at some level. But I kept catching myself staring into space.
Then I had an idea. A good and bad idea at the same time.
A surprisingly large amount of the art had to do with horses. I knew what horses were, I’d read about them, seen pictures. They had a huge role in human history before the invention of the steam- and internal-combustion engines. But I had a hard time imagining them. When someone said “horse,” I saw a picture from an encyclopedia. Not a real horse. But the instructor talked about horses like he assumed everyone had seen one, discussing the way the painting technique caught the sheen of the coat and the individual hairs. But I’d never seen a horse, and looking at some of the sculptures and pictures I’d have assumed horses had perfectly smooth, plasticky bodies. He said something about the animal’s eyes flashing, as if it were alive. And I couldn’t help but think, What, the eyes light up?
I wanted to see a horse for myself. A real one. Not some piece of horse-related art that was important for what it said about culture or technological progress. A real live, breathing, eyes-flashing horse.
As a matter of reconnaissance I had actually done some research on my own. I had to know something about the enemy terrain if I was going to conquer it. Or at least not get defeated by it. And it turned out that Manhattan had horses, right here in the very same park the museum was located in. I decided to find one.
The guide wound down the lecture on the blue-tile Babylonian thing, gazing up at the piece with awe, obviously expecting us all to do likewise. I knew what would happen next: he’d wave us on, leading us to the next room and the next treasure of Earth to be admired. I hung back, walking a little slower. Let everyone get ahead of me, which wasn’t hard; I pretended to admire the other artifacts in the room, pursing my lips, nodding. Shuffling my steps, I let the rest of the group round the corner, and their footsteps on the floor grew fainter.
And then they were gone. I slipped back the way we’d come. Just casually walking, not running, because that would be suspicious. I sort of looked around, as if I was noting the exhibits, nodding at them thoughtfully. Only one of the uniformed museum staff members who seemed to stalk the place randomly stopped me.
“Are you lost?” the man asked.
I barely slowed down to answer. “Oh, no, I just got separated from my group but I think they’re in the next wing,” I said, pointing. I totally knew what I was doing and had every right to be here.
“All right,” the staffer said, waving me on. “Have a nice afternoon.” He didn’t even blink at my Martian accent. Did Manhattan get a lot of Martian tourists?
A minute later, I was out the front door and down the steps. I had escaped. Wasn’t so hard after all. And now I had a city to explore.
I went around the building and into Central Park.
It reminded me a little too much of Yosemite. Too many trees blocking the sky, rocks and vegetation piled everywhere. But Yosemite, right in the middle of a city? Earth had it all. I supposed that was the point.
The park had a few wide main paths, cut across with lots of small footpaths and trails that looped around. They didn’t go anywhere—that wasn’t the point. They were just for walking, around and around. The whole point was to be outside. I still felt naked without my breathing mask. What if the air ran out? However much my brain knew it wouldn’t, my gut wasn’t so sure.
The horses would be on the wide paths. Mostly, they pulled carriages, though people rode some of them in saddles. I had no idea what that would look like in person. But maybe I’d find out. I picked a direction and started walking.
I was trying to figure out the difference between Central Park and Yosemite, why one was considered a “park” and one was “wilderness,” when they both had trees, grasses, rocks, birds—nature, in other words. Nature that wasn’t rocks and wind and microorganisms, anyway. The fact that one was surrounded by a city and the other wasn’t couldn’t be the only thing.
It must have been the people. The park had a lot of people around—mostly school groups like the Galileo students, obvious clumps of tourists, other tour groups wandering around. They were all easy to spot—herds of milling people led by alert-looking guides in the official Manhattan tourism vests, who constantly pointed and talked. Everyone was taking pictures with their handhelds.
Before too long, someone was going to stop me and ask me why I wasn’t part of a group or taking pictures. So I walked like I had someplace to be and I knew exactly where I was going.
The park was enclosed—I couldn’t possibly get lost, which was good. However, I could walk in circles all day long without realizing how long I’d been doing it or how far I’d gone. I tried to pay attention to landmarks, so I’d know if I started walking in circles. I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I was getting lost. I could always check the map on my handheld, I told myself, even though that would make me a wimp. Surely I’d find a horse eventually, and I wouldn’t get lost doing it.
Benches sat along the path every dozen meters or so. Finally, I sat in one, admitting my feet were tired. My legs were tired. My lungs were tired. This whole planet made me tired. I should have been used to it by now. Maybe if I sat in one place, a horse would come to me. Maybe I should have thought of that earlier.
I slumped on the bench, grumbly and angry at myself, when it happened. The horse came to me.