"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.