CULTURE
The Intergalactic
Space Chronicle
Random Wild Horses Speaking Human?
Aidelyn Neuman
A horse is a horse of course, of course? Until it shows up by your tent, while you’re trekking in the Alaskan wilderness and says it would prefer to go by the name “Tulip”.
Once you’ve accepted this new name you wonder if it’s for all horses or just this one? But you’re too afraid to offend it, so you figure you’ll just ask the next wild talking horse you meet, "Do you also want to be called Tulip?”
You tell the Tulip (horse) you’d still like to be called human even though your name is Aidelyn, because at this point you're not sure what the labeling system is. And anyway, you’d rather get into the more interesting part of the conversation in which the Tulip tells you how it is talking to you.
No hallucinatives were taken by you or your friends, who are all seeing the Tulip as well. After the last trek, when you woke up on a public space train going to Mars, you all realized that treks and hallucinatives don’t always work together. Especially if one of your friends is way too adventurous and has stupid ideas that seem brilliant when you’re high. We left Todd somewhere near Mars.
So a wild horse that’s actually a Tulip is talking, why? Is there a good way to ask that? After all, you don’t want to offend a newly communicating animal. This is a job for your most offensive friend, the one you’re not sure why you keep around.
“Go ahead George, go at it, “ask it”, you whisper in his direction. To which he says, as if you just busted open the Tall Dams of Earth’s New York, “Say, Tulip Horse, how is it that you are talking to us?”
To which the Tulip replies: “My pack and I were caught decades ago and experimented on by people with pink long lab coats. Then one day they just disappeared and left us like this. I can speak ten languages now, but there’s not a lot of people to speak to them with that come around here.”
You just want to smack yourself in the head at this point, because you could have totally guessed that one. This seems just like a Pink Coat act. This is just the kind of thing those scientists on the fringe would do: science in the wild bypassing the long bureaucracy and permits required by global treaties.
I don’t mind a random talking horse, but I must admit once you’ve established what it wants to be called and why it’s talking human, there is a bit of an awkward loll. What should we talk about next, “the weather”? Do these Tulips or one Tulip care about the weather anyway?
“So, do you want a beer?” George finally asks and you remember why you keep him around. He knows just the right thing to do when no one knows what to do. You smile at him and nod your head as he pours beer down the Tulips throat.