A foolish story
Luís wandered in a half-broken daze through the streets of the town where he’d inexplicably wound up.
He dropped a coin as a deposit into the equally inexplicable rental machine for horses. It wasn’t truly automated; in fact, the slot just connected to a mechanical contrivance that rang a loud bell when a proper coin was inserted. Supposedly the only reason the machine existed was because the set of people who knew how to control and maintain the horses and the set of people who knew how to tell a real coin from a fake, or even one type of coin from another, were mutually exclusive, at least among the scattered remaining residents of the place. The only reason the facility existed was because there were still some places that could only be reached by horse; the terrain became too unstable for most vehicles, and it was too large an area to traverse on foot, so what was left? The recent highway funding bill might have changed all that, were it not for the violent protests of the locals. Removing the last horse route would spell disaster for those whose livelihoods relied on there being a market for the necessary skills, and probably would spell disaster for the rest of local culture as well, as integral as the trade was to it.
Luís looked uneasily around. A woman clad in protective denim was approaching, leading a bay horse behind her with all the trappings and equipment of domestication. Luís started walking towards her, trampling grass under his boots. Words were exchanged; so were coins. Disagreement ensued.
Finally Luís gave up and handed the woman his credit card. That part, at least, was modern enough.
He rode out…
As he approached the wooden house from a distance, it appeared entirely quiet. He circled carefully around it partway, looking in through the windows and out the other side, turning one corner, then another, and then almost colliding with a standing woman whom he had not seen before. The near-impact so startled him that he actually fell off his horse, crashing to the ground in a heap, but the woman seemed unperturbed.
She smiled at him. She offered her hand, speaking in an androgynous voice with a slight Southern accent. “You can call me Oracle.”
He took the hand and got unsteadily to his feet. “No, don’t say it. Let me guess. You’ve been expecting me.”
She laughed for a moment, then nodded. “Please do come in.”
He went in…
“So what did you need to know? The procedure is similar for each question, but it’s energized by the specific question being asked by the specific questioner, so I can’t also fulfill the myth of simply knowing what you were going to ask, giving you the answer, and slamming the door in your face, as much as I would like to with some people.” She grinned at him unnervingly.
He coughed. “Well—I’ve been having a lot of trouble figuring out what I want to do in life, and, you know, I’ve tried all these different careers but none of them seem to really work. I was… hoping you could help me.” He nodded and looked up at her expectantly.
The Oracle rolled her eyes at him and chuckled. “Banal… but those lead to the most interesting answers. That will be twenty-five peseta, please.”
Luís blinked. “Peseta?” He began rummaging through his handbag (previously a saddlebag) for the appropriate coins and placing them on the table one by one. “I don’t think anyone uses those anymore.”
The Oracle smiled, taking the coins and placing them into a small coffer in a drawer attached to the table where they sat. “Means a certain dedication, I believe. Ready?”
“Ready.”
The Oracle began to wave her fingers over the black crystal ball on the table. The etched lines in the base underneath it responded by glowing, spinning outwards to form geometric patterns in the air that lifted the ball up, up towards the correct position, until it was finally struck by a beam of sunlight from outside and exploded into a roiling, three-dimensional pool of imagery, casting shadows across the table, the ceiling, the floor, the Oracle herself—the Oracle looked up into the chaos, eyes widening—
“Luís!”
He jerked awake, groaning from his position on the floor. The hard floor. Trying to resolve the objects in his visual field yielded another proffered hand, which he took, hoisting himself up as carefully as before. She steadied him for a long moment, then took her place on the other side of the table again.
“So what I’ve found… you’re no doubt wondering about,” she said, raising an eyebrow again. “Ready to hear it?”
He unsteadily sat back down. “Ready. Yes.”
“You, Luís, are going to be a great biographer.”
His eyes almost popped out of their sockets. “Biographer? I’ve never written a word before that got published in so much as a school newspaper, much less written any books!”
“Yes, yes, biographer. Particularly, in your case, an autobiographer. Would you like to know how I arrived at this conclusion?”
“Please.”
“That will be another twenty-five peseta, then.”
He groaned and reached for his handbag, which wasn’t there. The Oracle laughed for a moment, reaching under the desk to pick it up. “Don’t bother. I already extracted them just in case.” She handed him back his bag over the table, which he accepted with growing discomfort. “That’s also how I knew your name, by the way. Did you really think I wouldn’t sneak a peek at your ID while you were out cold?” She smirked.
He coughed, but spoke insistently. “Please. The details. I need to know them.”
She smirked some more. “All right. We’ll start with your past lives. Now, you may not know it, but in one of your past lives, you were a soldier in the American Revolutionary War, did you know that?” She gave him a pointed look.
He rubbed his eyes and hesitated, contorting his face in desperation. “No, I—please, just—just tell me. I don’t want to be asked any more questions; I’m here to get answers. Questions trouble me. Please.”
She chuckled for a moment, then continued. “All right then. Well, anyway, you were. A brave-hearted soldier, at that, but your actual combat ability was a little deficient. Your senior officers saw your theoretical potential, but also your practical deficiencies, and kept sort of sending you around at random; they just didn’t know what to do with you.
“Near as I can tell, and that’s pretty near if I do say so m’self, you managed to have almost no effect the whole time. But boy, was it important to you; you put all your soul into becoming the best soldier you could. It was just good enough, maybe; just good enough to let you defeat a single British soldier when assigned as infantry at Bartlett’s Keep. A single one, that’s all the effect you had. Goes to show, doesn’t it? When you defeated him, you had such a moment of satisfaction that it vindicated everything you’d done so far, in your own eyes. Unfortunately, your luck didn’t hold out, and you were slain only a few minutes later in the same battle.
“Now, you should know that among the British regiment in that battle, most of them were noble-hearted folks, fighting for what they thought was a good cause, for their country. But the one you killed was an exception. That’s what led to his downfall, in fact; since he didn’t actually love what he was fighting for, even though he was willing to fight for it anyway, he couldn’t pour himself into the task like you could. One moment of distraction, and blam, dead as a doornail.
“But since you two died in the same battle, and in such a connected way, your souls got linked that day, and have been chasing each other around time and space ever since. You might not have noticed at all, though, because he got sent waaay back through the Wheel of Karma, due to how much he screwed up in that one life. He had to spend time as a fly, then as a frog, then as any number of other things. But gradually he’s worked his way back up to the higher-ranking creatures. And in fact, I believe he’s waiting outside.” She craned her head to look through the window, where the bay horse was quietly waiting for them to finish.
Luís blinked as he tried to process all the information. “You mean, my horse. My horse was a soldier, that I killed in a war. And now, we are linked to each other?”
She nodded judiciously. “Yep. Though not necessarily for much longer, now that he’s learning his lessons. You’ve been helping him through, though you might not know it—guiding him onto the right track, you know. You know how I know this so well? Hmm?” She leaned forward to look into his eyes more closely, a slightly raised hand silencing any attempt to answer her question.
“When I first saw you coming towards this house, I was struck immediately by the way you were able to handle that horse, and how docile and well-behaved he was under you. Why, you look like you’ve been riding for years, even though I know you just finished a course on it three months ago. For the very purpose of coming out here alone, in fact.” She held up a finger. “That’s another piece of information I got straight out o’ your saddlebag there, by the way—you might want to protect that better, else you’ll succumb to all kinds of impersonators and thieves and other rascals o’ that sort.” She coughed; her accent shifted subtly as she spoke. “But I digress.”
The Oracle took a deep breath, steadying herself for a moment, then continued. “Anyway, from the point when I saw that aspect of you, I kept wonderin’ what it could mean. O’ course, such things are usually revealed to me when I look into my crystal ball here, and they were, just like always. Now I know what it means, and how it relates to everything. And that’s why I’m tellin’ you that you have to become a writer of biographies, and that ultimately, after a successful career, your own autobiography is going to be the most famous and respected of all your works. It’ll be one of the richest and most interesting autobiographies the world has ever seen, and you know why?
“’Cause as it turns out, you’ve been ridin’ your own lives’ Tory all along.”