Unicorns

by Jack Dann

  He had given the girl three gems. He held three more in his hand while he beckoned her onto the flight stick. She shook her head; she would not go. Instead she mounted the animal.

  She and the horse, they watched Svetz for his next move.

  Svetz capitulated. He had expected the horse to follow the girl while the girl rode behind him on the flight stick. But if they both followed Svetz it would be the same.

  The horse stayed to one side and a little behind Svetz's flight stick. It did not seem inconvenienced by the girl's weight. Why should it be? It must have been bred for the task. Svetz notched his speed higher, to find how fast he could conveniently move.

  Faster, he flew, and faster. The horse must have a limit . . .

  He was up to eighty before he quit. The girl lay flat along the animal's back, hugging its neck to protect her face from the wind. But the horse ran on, daring Svetz with its eyes.

  How to describe such motion? Svetz had never seen ballet. He knew how machinery moved, and this wasn't it. All he could think of was a man and a woman making love. Slippery-smooth rhythmic motion, absolute single-minded purpose, motion for the pleasure of motion. It was terrible in its beauty, the flight of the horse.

  The word for such running must have died with the horse itself.

  The horse would never have tired, but the girl did. She tugged on the animal's mane, and it stopped. Svetz gave her the jewels he held, made four more and gave her one.

  She was crying from the wind, crying and smiling as she took the jewels. Was she smiling for the jewels, or for the joy of the ride? Exhausted, panting, she lay with her back against the warm, pulsing flank of the resting animal. Only her hand moved, as she ran her fingers repeatedly through its silver mane. The horse watched Svetz with malevolent brown eyes.

  The girl was homely. It wasn't just the jarring lack of makeup. There was evidence of vitamin starvation. She was short, less than five feet in height, and thin. There were marks of childhood disease. But happiness glowed behind her homely face, and it made her almost passable, as she clutched the corundum stones.

  When she seemed rested, Svetz remounted. They went on.

  He was almost out of corundum when they reached the extension cage. There it was that he ran into trouble.

  The girl had been awed by Svetz's jewels, and by Svetz himself, possibly because of his height or his ability to fly. But the extension cage scared her. Svetz couldn't blame her. The side with the door in it was no trouble: just a seamless spherical mirror. But the other side blurred away in a direction men could not visualize. It had scared Svetz spitless the first time he saw the time machine in action.

  He could buy the horse from her, shoot it here and pull it inside, using the flight stick to float it. But it would be so much easier if . . .

  It was worth a try. Svetz used the rest of his corundum. Then he walked into the extension cage, leaving a trail of colored corundum beads behind him.

  He had worried because the heat-and-pressure device would not produce facets. The stones all came out shaped like miniature hen's-eggs. But he was able to vary the color, using chromic oxide for red and ferric oxide for yellow and titanium for blue; and he could vary the pressure planes, to produce cat's-eyes or star gems at will. He left a trail of small stones, red and yellow and blue . . .

  And the girl followed, frightened, but unable to resist the bait. By now she had nearly filled a handkerchief with the stones. The horse followed her into the extension cage.

  Inside, she looked at the four stones in Svetz's hand: one of each color, red and yellow and light blue and black, the largest he could make. He pointed to the horse, then to the stones.

  The girl agonized. Svetz perspired. She didn't want to give up the horse . . . and Svetz was out of corundum . . .

  She nodded, one swift jerk of her chin. Quickly, before she could change her mind, Svetz poured the stones into her hand. She clutched the hoard to her bosom and ran out of the cage, sobbing.

  The horse stood up to follow.

  Svetz swung the rifle and shot it. A bead of blood appeared on the animal's neck. It shied back, then sighted on Svetz along its natural bayonet.

  Poor kid, Svetz thought as he turned to the door. But she'd have lost the horse anyway. It had sucked polluted water from an open stream. Now he need only load the flight stick aboard . . .

  Motion caught the corner of his eye.

  A false assumption can be deadly. Svetz had not waited for the horse to fall. It was with something of a shock that he realized the truth. The beast wasn't about to fall. It was about to spear him like a cocktail shrimp.

  He hit the door button and dodged.

  Exquisitely graceful, exquisitely sharp, the spiral horn slammed into the closing door. The animal turned like white lightning in the confines of the cage, and again Svetz leapt for his life.

  The point missed him by half an inch. It plunged past him and into the control board, through the plastic panel and into the wiring beneath.

  Something sparkled and something sputtered.

  The horse was taking careful aim, sighting along the spear in its forehead. Svetz did the only thing he could think of. He pulled the home-again lever.

  The horse screamed as it went into free fall. The horn, intended for Svetz's navel, ripped past his ear and tore his breathing-balloon wide open.

  Then gravity returned; but it was the peculiar gravity of an extension cage moving forward through time. Svetz and the horse were pulled against the padded walls. Svetz sighed in relief.

  He sniffed again in disbelief. The smell was strong and strange, like nothing Svetz had ever smelled before. The animal's terrible horn must have damaged the air plant.

  Very likely he was breathing poison. If the cage didn't return in time . . .

  But would it return at all? It might be going anywhere, any when, the way that ivory horn had smashed through anonymous wiring. They might come out at the end of time, when even the black infrasuns gave not enough heat to sustain life.

  There might not even be a future to return to. He had left the flight stick. How would it be used? What would they make of it, with its control handle at one end and the brush-style static discharge at the other and the saddle in the middle? Perhaps the girl would try to use it. He could visualize her against the night sky, in the light of a full moon . . . and how would that change history?

  The horse seemed on the verge of apoplexy. Its sides heaved, its eyes rolled wildly. Probably it was the cabin air, thick with carbon dixoide. Again, it might be the poison the horse had sucked from an open stream.

  Gravity died. Svetz and the horse tumbled in free fall, and the horse queasily tried to gore him.

  Gravity returned, and Svetz, who was ready for it, landed on top. Someone was already opening the door.

  Svetz took the distance in one bound. The horse followed, screaming with rage, intent on murder. Two men went flying as it charged out into the Institute control center.

  "It doesn't take anaesthetics!" Svetz shouted over his shoulder. The animal's agility was hampered here among the desks and lighted screens, and it was probably drunk on hyperventilation. It kept stumbling into desks and men. Svetz easily stayed ahead of the slashing horn.

  A full panic was developing . . .

  "We couldn't have done it without Zeera," Ra Chen told him much later. "Your idiot tanj horse had the whole Center terrorized. All of a sudden it went completely tame, walked up to that frigid bitch Zeera and let her lead it away."

  "Did you get it to the hospital in time?"

  Ra Chen nodded gloomily. Gloom was his favorite expression and was no indication of his true feelings. "We found over fifty unknown varieties of bacteria in the beast's bloodstream. Yet it hardly looked sick! It looked healthy as a . . . healthy as a . . . it must have tremendous stamina. We managed to save not only the horse, but most of the bacteria too, for the Zoo."

  Svetz was sitting up in a hospital bed, with his arm up to the elbow in a diagnostician. There was
always the chance that he too had located some long-extinct bacterium. He shifted uncomfortably, being careful not to move the wrong arm, and asked, "Did you ever find an anaesthetic that worked?"

  "Nope. Sorry about that, Svetz. We still don't know why your needles didn't work. The tanj horse is simply immune to tranks of any kind.

  "Incidentally, there was nothing wrong with your air plant. You were smelling the horse."

  "I wish I'd known that. I thought I was dying."

  "It's driving the interns crazy, that smell. And we can't seem to get it out of the Center." Ra Chen sat down on the edge of the bed. "What bothers me is the horn on its forehead. The horse in the picture book had no horns."

  "No, sir."

  "Then it must be a different species. It's not really a horse, Svetz. We'll have to send you back. It'll break our budget, Svetz."

  "I disagree, sir—"

  "Don't be so tanj polite."

  "Then don't be so tanj stupid, sir." Svetz was not going back for another horse. "People who kept tame horses must have developed the habit of cutting off the horn when the animal was a pup. Why not? We all saw how dangerous that horn is. Much too dangerous for a domestic animal."

  "Then why does our horse have a horn?"

  "That's why I thought it was wild, the first time I saw it. I suppose they didn't start cutting off horns until later in history."

  Ra Chen nodded in gloomy satisfaction. "I thought so too. Our problem is that the Secretary-General is barely bright enough to notice that his horse has a horn, and the picture-book horse doesn't. He's bound to blame me."

  "Mmm." Svetz wasn't sure what was expected of him.

  "I'll have to have the horn amputated."

  "Somebody's bound to notice the scar," said Svetz.

  "Tanj it, you 're right. I've got enemies at court. They'd be only too happy to claim I'd mutilated the Secretary-General's pet." Ra Chen glared at Svetz. "All right, let's hear your idea."

  Svetz was busy regretting. Why had he spoken? His vicious, beautiful horse, tamely docked of its killer horn . . . He had found the thought repulsive. His impulse had betrayed him. What could they do but remove the horn?

  He had it. "Change the picture book, not the horse. A computer could duplicate the book in detail, but with a horn on every horse. Use the Institute computer, then wipe the tape afterward."

  Morosely thoughtful, Ra Chen said, "That might work. I know someone who could switch the books." He looked up from under bushy black brows. "Of course, you'd have to keep your mouth shut."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Don't forget." Ra Chen got up. "When you get out of the diagnostician, you start a four-week vacation."

  "I'm sending you back for one of these," Ra Chen told him four weeks later. He opened the bestiary. "We picked up the book in a public park around ten PostAtomic; left the kid who was holding it playing with a corundum egg."

  Svetz examined the picture. "That's ugly . That's really ugly. You 're trying to balance the horse, right? The horse was so beautiful, you've got to have one of these or the universe goes off balance."

  Ra Chen closed his eyes in pain. "Just go get us the Gila monster, Svetz. The Secretary-General wants a Gila monster."

  "How big is it?"

  They both looked at the illustration. There was no way to tell.

  "From the looks of it, we'd better use the big extension cage."

  Svetz barely made it back that time. He was suffering from total exhaustion and extensive second-degree burns. The thing he brought back was thirty feet long, had vestigial batlike wings, breathed fire, and didn't look very much like the illustration; but it was as close as anything he'd found.

  The Secretary-General loved it.

  Introduction to Thomas Burnett Swann's "The Night of the Unicorn":

  The late Thomas Burnett Swann was a fantasist who composed a rich body of pastoral novels and stories about the fabulous creatures that inhabited the old worlds of Rome ("Where is the Bird of Fire?"), Egypt (The Minikins of Yam), Minoan Crete (Day of the Minotaur), Persia ("Vashi"), and Medieval England ("The Manor of Roses," probably his best story, and one of the best of all modern fantasy novellas). Here, in a departure from his other work, he takes us instead to the New World, to the hot, dusty streets of the Yucatan village during festival time, where we learn that perfection, like beauty, is to be found in the eye of the beholder.

  Swann's other books include The Goat Without Horns, Cry Silver Bells, Green Phoenix, The Forest of Forever, Lady of the Bees, Where is the Bird of Fire?, The Werewoods, The Dolphin and the Deep, and Queens Walk in the Dust.

  THE NIGHT OF THE UNICORN

  Thomas Burnett Swann

  It was the night of the unicorn, and the villagers of Cozumel, the capital and only town of a small island off the Yucatan peninsula, had begun to gather in the square. The maidens wore their brightest prints, lemon and turquoise and hyacinth, so that the animal could see their dresses even if not their virginal countenances and give them the approval of his notice. Somewhat more sedate in dress, their mothers maintained that haughty vigilance which had thus far safeguarded the daughters for marriage, while the young men of the town, casual in figured American sport shirts, looked impishly at the girls who would one day become their wives.

  Maria stood in the doorway of her basket shop, debating if she should join the rest. The night of the unicorn! The words sang themselves in her brain, like an old Mayan chant to the god of swallows. It was said that a hundred years ago, a unicorn had emerged from the Mayan-haunted jungles of the interior and walked through the town, acknowledging the purest women with a nod of his golden horn or the press of his warm muzzle. He had never returned. But the villagers still celebrated in the hope that they could once again lure him from the jungle. Besides, Maria guessed, they loved a holiday and the chance to wear finery.

  "Shall we go?" asked Mico, appearing quietly beside Maria in the door. At seventeen, his face looked adolescent but his eyes, gray and deep and a little sad, looked forty. He was small and copper-skinned like most of the islanders, with short-cut prickly hair. Also like them, he worked for tourists in the season, gigging lobsters or guiding photographers into the interior of the island where Mayan temples still thrust their stone jaguars through matted lianas. But a seriousness of purpose, almost a solemnity, distinguished him from the other youths, who laughed when he drew out his English grammar and announced that one day he would go to school in America. Maria loved him as a brother. Only Mico had befriended her since she had come to the island a year ago to open her shop.

  "Shall we go?" he repeated. "The unicorn may truly come this year. My father saw strange tracks beside the Temple to the Jaguar."

  "It is my dream to see the unicorn," Maria sighed. "But he will probably ignore me." It was not a secret that Maria, in Merida, had sold her body and thus amassed the money with which, at forty-one, she had come to Cozumel to open a basket shop. She had come to forget her tawdry past. But the men of Cozumel remembered her from Merida. Since she was still beautiful, with the slenderest figure on the island and with curious slanted eyes as purple as a murex shell, they paid her unpleasant attentions. What was worse, their jealous wives refused to buy her baskets, and her shop was threatened with failure. With a few hundred dollars, she could purchase curios for the tourist trade; but she lacked such a sum and the poor baskets she imported from Merida were fit only for the islanders who refused to buy them. Her money would soon be gone. What then? The prospect of returning to Merida alarmed her.

  "He will not pass you by," said Mico firmly. "If he comes at all, he will come to you."

  She touched his cheek and smiled. "Let us go."

  He took her arm and they walked toward the square. A breeze from the sea brought the stench of lobster shells rotting in the harbor. Was there something else, Maria asked herself, a fragrance of jungle flowers and the sweet moistness of buried temples? For an instant, figures tumbled to clarity within her mind, a silken unicorn surrounded by jaguars, boa
rs, and coatis. When the unicorn raised his head, the scythe of his golden horn flashed in the green light.

  "Mico, is there something in the air tonight?"

  Mico sniffed. "Yes," he said matter-of-factly. "There are pigs and chickens and asses—" Indeed, they were passing a wire-fenced yard where children huddled with pigs under sapodilla trees and roosters drowsed in the branches. Ahead of them in the street, an ass and a mongrel sniffed at a tuft of garbage.

  "You're right, of course. I thought for a moment—"

  "You thought it was the unicorn," said Mico, apologetic because he had not guessed her meaning. "Tonight he will surely come."

  "What will he look like, Mico?" Sometimes she tried to draw him into moods of fantasy, though she loved him no less because he was more a realist than a dreamer.

  "A lordly beast, my father says. His horn will catch the lamplight and gleam like a crescent moon above the white clouds of his mane. He will move up the street like a Mayan priest in a sacred procession. And he will pause beside the innocent—"

  "If I could only glimpse him," she sighed. "Just a glimpse, no more."

  "When he comes," Mico continued, "he will pause beside you." Maria claimed Mayan blood, and Mico had often compared her to the ancient corn goddesses who came from the jungle to teach the natives agriculture. "He will pause and dip his horn—"

  "Maria, go home," screeched a female voice, its owner concealed in a blur of faces. "You will frighten the unicorn!"

  Suddenly Maria saw that the people in the street, both men and women, were staring at her. The men spoke loudly, careful that she should catch their gross compliments:

  "Maria's kiss is worth a dozen unicorns. . . ."

  "In Merida they called her the Crimson One. . . ."

  Maria lowered her head but she did not turn aside or slow her pace. "We will stand apart," she whispered to Mico. "There is no need that the unicorn see us. Only that we see him." They sought the shelter of a bougainvillea bush, its moon-silvered blossoms, purple by daylight, exploding earthward. Beyond the bush a row of streetlights kindled the village to a garish orange. But the sacred circle of the bougainvillea seemed inviolate to the work of man, aloof from his artificial lamps, his overpainted houses, and his strident outcries. Within this circle, companioned only by the moon, Maria and Mico awaited the unicorn.