Draw a Horse

She came on the Thursday, which was four days after maybe, and she came in through the kitchen because that was the door people used.

Gene had it on already. He had turned it on twenty minutes early and typed at it about nothing so that it would be going when she got up the stairs, which was the sort of thing that made sense at the time.

Roz stood in the doorway of the room and looked at the television, and then at the tray, and then at the tray under the tray.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“It’s the four hundred.”

“Yeah.”

“Ours is the eight hundred,” she said, without any particular weight on it, and came in and got down on the carpet in front of the tray with her legs folded.

She put her hands on the keyboard.

Then she took them off again and looked at them, and put one finger down on the A and pressed, and the plastic gave under it and came back with a small dry click that was not the click of a key but the click of a sheet of plastic over a contact, and the letter appeared.

“Huh,” she said.

“You get used to it.”

“You have got used to it.”

She pressed four more letters in a row to see, and then held her hand up in front of her face and turned it over.

Gene knelt down beside the tray.

“Okay so it doesn’t have a game in it. There’s no place. It’s not — you just say something and it says something back, and then you say something, and it goes like that.”

“How long.”

“Until you turn it off.”

“And then what.”

“Then that’s it.”

Roz considered the screen, which held the last of his twenty minutes — things he had typed and things it had said — and none of it was going to be there in an hour.

“Start it over,” she said. “I don’t want yours in it.”

So he powered it down and the picture collapsed to a white line and closed, and he powered it back up and the four lines printed themselves out one character at a time.

    MICROCLAUDE V1
    8192 BYTES FREE

    SAY SOMETHING.

Roz put one finger down and did not take it off the keyboard again until she was done.

    DRAW A HORSE

RETURN.

The block went solid and stayed solid a long time, long enough that Gene said it’s going, which was not information.

Then it came out a row at a time, from the top, with the spaces printing as slowly as the marks.

           3
          #  3              !
               3           !
                 3444444444
                 1 2    1 2
                 1 2    1 2
                 1      1

“Huh,” Gene said. “It’s a horse.”

Roz did not say anything for a while.

She had come up off her heels onto her knees and gone in close enough that the raster lines were separate, and she was going along the bottom of it with one finger not quite touching the glass.

“The threes are the neck,” she said.

“Yeah, it curves.”

“No — it used threes. For the curve. And the fours for the back because a four’s got the straight down it.” Her finger came along under the legs. “And it’s ones and twos. One, two, one, two.”

“So?”

“So a two’s got a bend in it.”

Gene looked at the legs.

“It’s standing wrong,” Roz said. “It’s standing with the near ones cocked. Both sides. That’s a horse resting a foot.” She sat back down onto her heels. “It picked them for the shape they are.”

“Maybe it just had them.”

“It had all of them. It had the whole keyboard.” She pointed at the tail, at the two exclamation marks hanging off in the air with nothing joining them to anything. “That’s garbage. That’s the worst tail I’ve ever seen. But it’s not garbage by accident, it’s —”

She stopped.

Gene waited.

“Ask it why it used a two,” she said.

“You ask it.”

“I’m not typing on that.”

So Gene got his hands back on the sheet, and pressed the keys one at a time with the flat of his first finger, the way he had for two years, and his hand was already sore.

    WHY DID YOU USE A 2

RETURN.

    2 FOR SECOND LEG OF PAIR. 1 FOR FRONT. 2
     FOR BACK. IT'S 3-D

Roz did not move for a second.

Then she went back up the screen to the horse and got in close again and put her finger under the last row of it, the one that was only two marks wide.

“The far ones are short,” she said.

“What?”

“The twos. They stop a row up. The ones go all the way down and the twos stop.” She counted it with her finger, front pair, back pair, bottom row. “It’s not a bend. It’s distance. The far legs are short because they’re further off.”

“Isn’t that what you said?”

“No,” Roz said. “I said it was standing funny.”

Gene looked at the horse. It looked the same as it had looked before, which was like a horse.

“So it’s right,” he said.

“Yeah.”

She sat back on her heels and looked at the two exclamation marks floating off the back end with nothing attaching them to anything, and then she looked at the rest of it again.

“Have you got paper?”

He got her the back of a mimeograph from the pile under the tray, a spelling list, and a pencil that was mostly pencil.

Roz put the paper on the carpet and copied it down. She did it the slow way, one row at a time, counting the leading spaces off the screen with her finger and laying them in as dots so she would not lose the count, and she did not talk while she did it.

When she got to the tail she stopped.

She looked at it on the screen for a moment.

Then she put the tail where it went.