Long long long ago I read a science-fiction story and it’s stuck with me to this day, but nobody I’ve ever mentioned it to has any idea what I’m talking about. I’m hoping someone here on the Dope has heard of it and can tell me where to find it again.
That’s how these threads work, right? Did I miss anything?
So, the story itself dealt with beasts of burden and was told from their point of view. The primary character, a male, is kept outdoors in a fenced-in plot of land, perhaps with other males (I forget the details, it’s been a long time). Every day his master arrives, saddles him up, and rides him around town doing errands or whatnot. Being a dumb beast, of course, exactly what the rider is doing isn’t made a part of the story as far as I remember.
One day the main character meets a female creature of his species, and of course it’s love at first sight. I seem to remember her being kept in an adjacent field, or at least nearby. Perhaps they met on the street, or perhaps during studding duty or something of the sort. Much of the story concerns her from this point, and his attempts to meet with her again. They have some form of language skills and do their best to communicate when possible, but of course being dumb beasts are limited in their ability to do so.
Another important part of the story refers to a large tower, central to the nearby city, which is for reasons undisclosed to the protagonist considered sacred or otherwise off-limits for these riding beasts to approach. As I recall, the riders would dismount at a gate, leave the beasts in some kind of stable or something, then approach the tower on foot. Perhaps it was here that the aforementioned love interest began, now that I think about it.
Anyway, as the story goes along the protagonist eventually contacts his female, they concoct a plan and escape together. Having nowhere else in particular to go, or perhaps this was the idea all along, they decide to find out just what the heck is so special about this forbidden tower anyway. After some adventure, they arrive and make their way inside it.
…At which point we discover that the tower itself was some kind of ancient space rocket, and the ‘beasts of burden’ were the ancestors of humans who landed on this planet long ago, only to be enslaved by the gremlin-like natives of said planet. I also seem to recall they activate the rocket and take off into space once again at the end, with implications that they will rejoin the rest of humanity and come back for revenge.
I read this story only once or twice, several decades ago, and haven’t seen anything quite like it since then. This would have been sometime in the mid-to-late 1970s, perhaps as late as the early 1980s. It was a shorter story, so probably in some sort of anthology or other collection. It may even have been in a school book of some sort, as at one point I had a rather large collection of such books designed for classroom reading.
Anybody ever heard of something like this? The ‘mounts’ being human, the ‘riders’ being gremlin-like, and the rocket-tower are very clear and distinct, although the rest of the story is somewhat less so after all these years so I may have mis-told that part of the tale.
—Thanks, Phnord.
