Bestiary!

by Jack Dann

  A lizard, startled, ran over the Minotaur's foot, as quick and soft as a shiver. The words poured from him in a cold fever, and he could hear the householders straighten, lean forward, step hesitantly out onto the cobblestones. "No one is above you now," he shouted. "But I still see the dead hands of the Lords on your shoulders."

  That got to them—he could smell their anger. His throat was dry, but he dared not spare the time to cough. His head was light, and a cool breeze stirred his curls. He spoke, but did not listen to the words.

  Yarrow was lost, somewhere on the plaza. As he spoke, the Minotaur listened for her, sniffed the air, felt for vibrations through the stone—and could not find her. "Inaction is a greater tyrant than error ever was!" he cried, listening to heads nodding agreement with the old, familiar homily. He could hear the frantic, hopping motions the madwomen made, forward and back again, baffled and half-fascinated by the hormones he was generating, by the cadences and odd rhythms of his words.

  The speech was a compulsion, and the Minotaur paid it no more mind than he did to the sliding of muscles under skin that went into his gestures, some wide and sweeping, others short and blunt. A whiff of girlish scent finally located Yarrow, not two armslengths away, but he could not go to her. The words would not release him, not until he had spoken them all.

  And when, finally, he lowered his arms, the plaza was filled with people, and the madwomen's harnesses had been ripped from them, the drug pumps smashed underfoot, their necks snapped quickly and without malice.

  He turned to Yarrow, offered his hand."Come," he said. "It's time to go home."

  The Minotaur lay belly-down on the earth under the wagon. He stared down his muzzle at a slice of early-morning sky framed by two wheel spokes. The clouds of energy were still slowly dissipating. "I'd love to go out there," he said. "To see other worlds."

  The orange-skinned woman scratched him above the ears, at the base of his small, ivory horns. Her hands were strong and sure. "They couldn't refuse you passage. What's stopping you?"

  He nodded upward. "He gets sick—I'd have to go alone."

  A triceratops beetle crept laboriously past his nose. He exhaled sharply, trying to turn it over, failed. "You two are inseparable, aren't you?" the woman asked.

  The beetle was getting away. He snorted sharply again, twice. "I guess."

  "Won't he be upset that I chose you over him?"

  It took the Minotaur a moment to puzzle out her meaning. "Ah! You mean—I see. Good joke, very good joke!" He laughed without taking his eyes away from the beetle, watched it escape into the grass. "No, the Harlequin doesn't know that women are important."

  It did not take long to gather belongings: The Minotaur had none and Yarrow few. "You can find your mother?" he asked her. They left the door open behind them, an old Centaurimen custom at final partings.

  "I can always find my mother," Yarrow said.

  "Good." Still, he did not let her go. He led her by the hand back along the waterfront. There, among the sounds and smells, the subliminal tastes and touches that had grown familiar to him, he leaned forward to kiss her tenderly on the cheeks and forehead.

  "Good-bye," he said. "I am proud that you are my daughter."

  Yarrow did not move away. There was a slight tremble in her voice when she spoke. "You still haven't told me anything."

  "Ah," the Minotaur said. For a moment he was silent, mentally cataloging what she would need to know. The history of the Lords, to begin with. Their rise to power, how they had shaped and orchestrated the human psyche, and why they thought the human race had to be held back. She needed to know of the creches, of their bioprogramming chemicals, and of those immortals released from them who had gone on to become legend. She needed to know everything about the immortals, in fact, for the race had been all but exterminated in the Wars. And how the Lords had endured as long as they had. How their enemies had turned their toys against them. All the history of the Wars. It would not be a short telling.

  "Sit down," he commanded. There, in the center of the thoroughfare, he sat, and Yarrow followed.

  The Minotaur opened his mouth to speak. At the sound of his words, resonant and deep, people would stop to listen for the briefest second ... for just a moment longer ... they would sit down in the road. The hormonal combinations that enforced strictest truth before the newshawks were to be in his voice, but combined with the strong eloquence of earlier in the day. He would speak plainly, with a fine parsimony of syllables. He would speak in strict accord with the ancient oratorical traditions. He would speak with tongues of fire.

  The waterfront would fill and then overflow as people entered and did not leave, as they joined the widening circle of hushed listeners, as the fisherfolk came up from their boats and down from their masts, the boy prostitutes came out from the brothels, the offworld tourista joined with the kitchen help to lean over the edges of their terraces.

  In future years this same telling, fined down and refined, elaborated and simplified, would become the epic that was to mark this age—his age—as great for its genesis. But what was to come in just a moment was only a first draft. A prototype. A seed. But it was to be beautiful and moving beyond all possible imagining of its listeners, for it was new, an absolutely new word, a clear new understanding. It was to sum up an age that most people did not realize was over.

  "Listen," said the Minotaur.

  He spoke.

  THE SPHINX

  What most people think of as a Sphinx has the head and breasts of a woman, a bird's wings, and the feet and body of a lion. This is the Greek Sphinx, probably the most familiar sort—it is not to be confused with the Egyptian Sphinx, which has the head of a man and the body of a lion, or the Assyrian Sphinx, which has the body of a winged bull and the crowned, bearded head of a man. The Egyptian and Assyrian versions feature mostly in statuary and monuments, as symbols of royal authority, but the Greek Sphinx plays a more active role in mythology. In Greek myth, the Sphinx roams the countryside, asking her famous riddle ("What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?"), and devouring the hapless travellers who can't come up with the correct answer. (The answer, for those of you who slept through your Comparative Literature classes, is "man"—he crawls on all fours as an infant, walks upright on two legs as an adult, and in old age walks with the aid of a staff, "three legs." Now You Know. What a relief, right?)

  In the stories that follow, we observe a pride of Sphinxes at play in their natural habitat, the golden pre-Dawn world of Myth, before the coming of man and then travel to the modern world to see how a Sphinx that cannot seem to break the ancient racial habit of asking riddles fares as a mascot at an exclusive country-club .. .

  Karen Anderson's story "Treaty in Tartessos" appeared earlier in this anthology. See that story for author information.

  Esther M. Friesner is a new writer whose work has appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Elsewhere III, Fantasy Book, and Amazing, among other places. Her first novel, Mustapha and His Wise Dog, appeared earlier in the year, from Avon.

  Landscape with Sphinxes

  by

  Karen Anderson

  THE PRIDE WAS a small one, even as sphinxes go. An arrogant black mane blew back over Arctanax's shoulders and his beard fluttered against his chest. Ahead and a little below soared Murrhona and Selissa, carrying the remnants of the morning's kill. It was time the cubs were weaned.

  The valley lifted smooth and broad from the river, then leaped suddenly in sandstone cliffs where the shadows seemed more solid then the thorny, gray-green scrub. A shimmer of heat ran along wind-scoured edges.

  In the tawny rocks about the eyrie, the cubs played at stalk-the-unicorn. They were big-eyed, dappled, and only half fledged. Taph, the boy, crept stealthily up a sun-hot slab, peeking around it from time to time to be sure that the moly blossom still nodded on the other side. He reached the top and shifted his feet excitedly. That moly was about to be a dead unicorn. The tip of his tail tw
itched at the thought.

  His sister Fiantha forgot the blossom at once. Pounce! and his tail was caught between her paws; he rolled back down on top of her, all claws out. They scuffled across baked clay to the edge of a thornbush and backed apart.

  Taph was about to attack again when he saw the grownups dip down from above. He leaped across Fiantha and bounded toward the cave mouth. She came a jump and a half behind. They couldn't kiss Murrhona and Selissa because of the meat in their jaws, so they kissed Father twice instead.

  "Easy, there! Easy!" Arctanax coughed, but he was grinning. "Get back into the cave, the two of you. How often do I have to tell you to stay in the cave?" The cubs laughed and bounced inside.

  Selissa dropped the meat she had been carrying and settled down to wash her face, but Murrhona called her cubs over to eat. She watched critically as they experimented with their milk-teeth on this unfamiliar substance.

  "Hold it down with your paw, Fiantha," she directed. "If you just tug at it, it'll follow you all over the floor. Like Taph—No, Taph, use your side teeth. They're the biggest and sharpest." And so the lesson went. After a while both cubs got tired of the game and nuzzled for milk.

  Selissa licked her right paw carefully and polished the bridge of her broad nose. There was still a trace of blood smell; she licked and polished again.

  "You can't rush them," she said rather smugly. "I remember my first litter. Time and again I thought they'd learned a taste for meat, but even when they could kill for themselves—only conies and such, but their own kill—they still came back to suck."

  "Oh, I remember how put out you were when you realized you still had to hold quiet for nursing," Murrhona smiled lazily. She licked down a tuft behind Fiantha's ear and resettled her wings. "But I really hate to see them grow up. They're so cute with their little spots."

  Selissa shrugged and polished the bridge of her nose again for good measure. If you wanted to call them cute, with their wings all pinfeathers and down shedding everywhere—! Well, yes, she had to admit they were, in a way. She licked her paw once more, meditatively, put her chin down on it and dozed off.

  An hour later Fiantha woke up. Everybody was asleep. She stretched her wings, rolled onto her back, and reached her paws as far as she could. The sun outside was dazzling. She rubbed the back of her head against the cool sandstone floor and closed her eyes, intending to go back to sleep, but her left wing itched. When she licked at it, the itch kept moving around, and bits of down came loose on her tongue.

  She rolled over on her stomach, spat out the fluff, and licked again. There—that did it!

  Fully awake now, she noticed the tip of Arctanax's tail and pounced.

  "Scram," he muttered without really waking. She pounced again just as the tail-tip flicked out of reach. Once more and she had it, chewing joyously.

  "Scram, I said!" he repeated with a cuff in her general direction. She went on chewing, and added a few kicks. Arctanax rolled over and bumped into Selissa, who jumped and gave Fiantha a swat in case she needed it. Fiantha mewed with surprise. Murrhona sprang up, brushing Taph aside; he woke too and made a dash for Selissa's twitching tail.

  "Can't a person get any rest around here?" grumbled Arctanax. He heaved himself up and walked a few feet away from his by now well-tangled family.

  "They're just playful," Murrhona murmured.

  "If this is play, I'd hate to see a fight," said Selissa under her breath. She patted Taph away and he tumbled enthusiastically into a chewing match with Fiantha.

  "Go to sleep, children," Murrhona suggested, stretching out again. "It's much too hot for games."

  Fiantha rolled obediently away from Taph, and found a good place to curl up, but she wasn't the least bit sleepy. She leaned her chin on a stone and looked out over the valley. Down there, in the brown-roasted grass, something moved toward a low stony ridge.

  There were several of them, and they didn't walk like waterbuck or unicorn; it was a queer, bobbing gait. They came slowly up the ridge and out of the grass. Now she could see them better. They had heads like sphinxes, but with skimpy little manes, and no wings at all; and—and-

  "Father, look!" she squeaked in amazement. "What kind of animal is that?"

  He got up to see. "I don't know," he replied. "Never saw anything like it in all my born days. But then, we've had a lot of queer creatures wandering in since the glaciers melted."

  "Is it game?" asked Taph.

  "Might be," Arctanax said. "But I don't know any game that moves around in the middle of the day like that. It isn't natural."

  "And the funny way they walk, too," added Fiantha.

  "If they're silly enough to walk around like that at mid-day," Arctanax said as he padded back to an extra-cool corner of the cave, "I'm not surprised they go on two legs."

  Simpson's Lesser Sphynx

  by

  Esther M. Friesner

  LATER WE ALL agreed to share the blame. We should have known Simpson was just not our kind. On the basis of blood alone we admitted him to the Club. His father was good stock: Boston, Choate, and Yale; his mother similarly Philadelphia, Miss Devon's, and Skidmore. But nature delights in sports. Who can depend on biology? We are still writing notes to next of kin, and the Club Secretary claims he will resign if those Enquirer reporters don't cease hanging around the Pro Shop, putting him off his game.

  It was August and we were bored. The market had been sluggish, and so were we. Sterling went so far as to suggest a trip to the local massage parlor to take our minds off our portfolios before he was hissed down and sent to the bar for another round of G&Ts. As he shuffled from the room, he bumped into Simpson.

  That is, he afterwards learned it was Simpson he'd encountered. The man's face was hidden behind the bulky wooden crate he bore before him. He heaved it onto the sideboard, scraping the mahogany ruinously, and blew like a draft horse.

  "There!" He wiped his brow. "That's done."

  We stared at the crate. It was riddled with air holes, and through these a pungent, unpleasant reek began to fill the room. Something inside hissed.

  "Simpson," said Dixwell severely, "no pets."

  Simpson's eyes crinkled. "Pets?" he echoed, laughing. The thing in the crate hissed again, and we heard a scrabbling sound. The smell was stronger, overwhelming the room's comfortable aura of oiled leather and good burley.

  "Here I am, back from Greece with something a sight more interesting to show than slides, and what happens?" Simpson went on. "Dixie quotes Club scripture at me. Well, it's not a pet I've got in here. It's a present, a present to the dear old Club. Now, I'll need a hammer."

  Wilkes was at his elbow on the moment, hammer graciously proffered. Wilkes is—or was—such an integral part of the Club that old members have long forgotten whether he was hired as butler, waiter, confessor, or handyman. New members were wisely too overawed to ask.

  Simpson pried the lid off the crate. Hard pine splinters flew everywhere, and the feral stench intensified. When the lid lay grinding sawdust into the Aubusson, Simpson stood back; made a dramatic flourish, and was actually heard to remark, "Ta-daah!"

  She did not respond to vulgar fanfare. Simpson had to rap sharply on the side of the crate before the tiny, exquisitely modelled head peeped over the wooden rim. It was no bigger than a man's hand, a head with the face of a Tanagra figurine framed by clusters of dark curls such as old Cretan priestesses wore. She opened her delicate lips and a third, more tentative hiss escaped.

  "Come on, Bessie," cried Simpson, seizing the crate and dropping it to the floor with a jarring thud. "Don't make me look bad. Come out and show yourself." He tipped it over and the sphynx spilled out in a tumble of feline body, bare breasts, and goshawk's wings.

  "Isn't she a beauty?" Simpson demanded. The sphynx looked at each of us in turn as he spoke, her bosom heaving and her eyes wild. You could trace the ripples of fear on her tawny flanks. Her eyes were blue. "Don't ask me how I got her through customs. Trade secret. The things I do for the Club! Wilk
es, bring me a Scotch. I want to toast our new mascot."

  "Simpson, you're mad," objected Haskins. "This . . . this creature is a miracle! A myth come to life! It can't—it shouldn't exist, and yet ..." He stretched out a hesitant hand. The sphynx sniffed it warily, cat-fashion, then allowed him to stroke her fur. Slowly an enchanting smile spread across her face; she closed her eyes and thrummed.

  "Where did you find it? How? ..." demanded Dix-well.

  Simpson shrugged. "That's a story I'm saving to dine out on."

  It was Chapin, as usual, who cast a sopping-wet blanket over the whole affair. "We cannnot keep it ... her .. . here," he decreed from the height of three hundred years of Puritan ancestry. "Quite aside from an obvious violation of U.S. Customs law, we cannot. This is a dangerous animal, Simpson. A monster!"

  "Don't you know what sphynxes eat?" put in Hobbs.

  Well, of course we'd all suffered through the Oedipus tale in the original Greek at prep school. However, none of us really liked Chapin, and it was hard to ignore how prettily the little sphynx purred and snuggled when Haskins scratched between her wings.

  "Oh, for God's sake!" Simpson spat in exasperation. "She's never taken a bite out of me, if that's what you mean. Besides, this one's purebred; can't eat manflesh unless it's gotten according to the code. I watched them for at least a week before I nabbed Bessie, and the only time I saw one of them chow down on a local boy was when he got stupid and arrogant enough to try his hand at the Riddle." You could tell Simpson meant the Riddle to be capitalized by the way he said it.

  "What riddle?" Chapin asked in minuscule. We had long suspected his education lacking. Who has not heard of the immortal riddle the sphynx propounds? What is it that goes on four legs at morning, two at noon, three at night? We also had to supply Chapin with the answer: man.

  "So you see," Simpson went on, "she's harmless. A, she can only ask the Riddle in Greek—doesn't speak a word of English, besides making cat sounds. B, she can't hurt a fly with it since every schoolchild knows the answer to that old chestnut. And C, unless the victim's willing to be questioned, she can't touch him. Now have we got a mascot?"