Unicorns

by Jack Dann

  After that, he did not delay. He took a slipcover from the couch and used it as a sack to carry his books. Then he went to the door and tried to leave his house.

  The door did not open. It was locked with heavy steel bolts that he had never seen before. They must have been built into the house. Apparently, the men in white coats, or the medicomputers, were prepared for everything.

  They were not prepared for a unicorn. He attacked the door with his horn. His horn was as hard as steel, as hard as magnacite. It was as hard as tung-diamonds. The door burst open, and he went out into the night.

  Then he saw more ambulances coming down the road. Ambulances were converging on his house from both directions. He did not know where to run. So he galloped across the street and burst in the door of the house opposite his. The house belonged to his friend, Barto. He went to his friend for help.

  But when Barto and his wife and his two daughters saw Norman, their faces filled with fear. The daughters began to wail like sirens. Barto and his wife fell to the floor and folded up into balls.

  Norman broke down the back door and ran out into the service lane between the rows of houses.

  He traveled the lane for miles, After the sorrow at his friend's fear came a great joy at his strength and swiftness. He was stronger than the men in white coats, faster than ambulances. And he had nothing else to be wary of. The medicomputers could not chase him themselves. With his biomitter gone, they could not even tell where he was. And they had no weapons with which to fight him except men in white coats and ambulances. He was free and strong and exhilarated for the first time in his life.

  When daylight came, he climbed up onto the roofs of the houses. He felt safe there, and when he was ready to rest, he slept there alone, facing the sky.

  He spent days like that—traveling the city, reading his books and committing them to memory—waiting for his transformation to be complete. When he needed food, he raided grocery stores to get it, though the terror of the people he met filled him with sorrow. And gradually his food-need changed. Then he did not go to the grocery stores anymore. He pranced in the parks at night and cropped the grass and the flowers and ran nickering among the trees.

  And his transformation continued. His mane and tail grew thick and exuberant. His face lengthened, and his teeth became stronger. His feet became hooves, and the horny part of his hands grew. White hair the color of moonlight spread across his body and limbs, formed flaring tufts at the backs of his ankles and wrists. His horn grew long and clean and perfectly pointed.

  His joints changed also and began to flex in new ways. For a time, this gave him some pain, but soon it became natural to him. He was turning into a unicorn. He was becoming beautiful. At times, there did not seem to be enough room in his heart for the joy the change gave him.

  Yet he did not leave the city. He did not leave the people who were afraid of him, though their fear gave him pangs of a loneliness he had never felt before. He was waiting for something. There was something in him that was not complete.

  At first, he believed that he was simply waiting for the end of his transformation. But gradually he came to understand that his waiting was a kind of search. He was alone—and unicorns were not meant to be alone, not like this. He was searching the city to see if he could find other people like him, people who were changing.

  And at last one night he came in sight of the huge, high structure of the General Hospital. He had been brought there by his search. If there were other people like him, they might have been captured by the men in white coats. They might be prisoners in the Emergency Division of the hospital. They might be lying helpless while the medicomputers studied them, plotting their destruction.

  His nostrils flared angrily at the thought. He stamped his foreleg. He knew what he had to do. He put his sack of books in a place of safety. Then he lowered his head and charged down the road to attack the General Hospital.

  He broke down the front doors with his horn and pounded into the corridors. People fled from him in terror. Men and women grabbed hypoguns and tried to fire at him, but he flicked them with the power of his horn, and they fell down. He rampaged on in search of the Emergency Division.

  The General Hospital was designed just like the Medical Building and the National Library. He was able to find his way without trouble. Soon he was among the many rooms of the Emergency Division. He kicked open the doors, checked the rooms, checked room after room. They were full of patients. The Emergency Division was a busy place. He had not expected to find that so many people were ill and dangerous. But none of them were what he was looking for. They were not being transformed. They were dying from physical or mental sickness. If any people like him had been brought here, they had already been destroyed.

  Red rage filled his heart. He charged on through the halls.

  Then suddenly he came to the great room where the medicomputers lived. Rank on rank, they stood before him. Their displays glared evilly at him, and their voices shouted. He heard several of them shout together, "Absolute emergency! Atmospheric control, activate all nerve gas! Saturation gassing, all floors!"

  They were trying to kill him. They were going to kill everybody in the hospital.

  The medicomputers were made of magnacite and plasmium. Their circuits were fireproof. But they were not proof against the power of his horn. When he attacked them, they began to burn in white fires, as incandescent as the sun.

  He could hear gas hissing into the air. He took a deep breath and ran.

  The gas was hissing into all the corridors of the hospital. Patients began to die. Men and women in white coats began to die. Norman began to think that he would not be able to get out of the hospital before he had to breathe.

  A moment later, the fire in the medicomputers ignited the gas. The gas burned. Oxygen tanks began to explode. Dispensaries went up in flames. The fire extinguishers could not stop the intense heat of burning magnacite and plasmium. When the cylinders of nerve gas burst, they had enough force to shatter the floors and walls.

  Norman flashed through the doors and galloped into the road with the General Hospital raging behind him like a furnace.

  He breathed the night air deep into his chest and skittered to a stop on the far side of the road to shake the sparks out of his mane. Then he turned to watch the hospital burn.

  At first he was alone in the road. The people who lived nearby did not come to watch the blaze. They were afraid of it. They did not try to help the people who escaped the flames.

  But then he saw a young girl come out from between the houses. She went into the road to look at the fire.

  Norman pranced over to her. He reared in front of her.

  She did not run away.

  She had a lump on her forehead like the base of a horn or the nub of a new antler. There was a smile on her lips, as if she were looking at something beautiful. And there was no fear in her eyes at all.

  Introduction to Eric Norden's "The Final Quarry":

  The hunt is in our blood, as much today as in prehistoric times when our ancestors painted animals on cave walls to propiate the gods, and insure dinner. But while we once hunted to survive, most of us now hunt for sport, or to satisfy our greed; and in our insatiable hunger for more trophies, pelts, and tusks, we've wiped entire species from the face of the earth forever. The list of creatures hunted to extinction by mankind is long—the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the aurochs—and the list of those creatures now tottering on the brink of extinction is longer still—the Indian Rhinoceros, the sea otter, the bald eagle, the elephant, the whooping crane, the blue whale. . . .

  Here Eric Norden, a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Playboy, and the author of the collection Starsongs and Unicorns, suggests that the unicorn might be about to be added to that dreary list, and that (as is also true of all the other creatures on the list) we won't fully realize just what we have lost until after it is gone.

  THE FINAL QUARRY

 
Eric Norden

  The last unicorn on earth lay dozing in the sun on a hilltop in northern Thessaly, memories buzzing softly through his brain like the murmur of distant bees. As unicorns go, he was not a noticeably distinguished specimen, for age had dulled the gloss of his ivory pelt, and here and there along his withered flanks tufts of hair had fallen out, lending him a patched, faintly moth-eaten quality. But his eyes, even now when filmed with dream, were luminous with wisdom, as if they had drunk in the centuries like dew, and his imperious spiral horn rested lightly on the grass, a gleaming golden icicle in the summer sunlight. He stirred once in his sleep, as the thoughts of a child in the valley reached him, crystalline as the chime of a steeple bell, and then, replenished lapsed into deeper slumber. The dark, demanding voices of the earth no longer spoke to him, and it had been a thousand years since silent wings beat the air above his head, or tingling laughter pealed in ageless mockery as he sipped from the waterfall below the gorge, but the old unicorn did not begrudge the new masters of earth, and was content to savor the endless tapestry of his dreams. A zephyr prematurely tinged with autumn brushed his horn gently as a butterfly's wings, perhaps in warning, but he slept on.

  The older and immeasurably grosser of the two Englishmen shoved his plate of cold stuffed eggplant across the rough-planked wooden table with a violent, stabbing motion and snarled at the innkeeper.

  "If this is the best you have to offer us, we shall ride on to Pharanakos tonight!"

  His florid face was suffused with a darker flush of fury as he wrenched the coarse linen napkin from his neck and hurled it to the packed dirt floor. His companion, a slim youth in his early twenties, elegantly attired in a fawn-grey cheviot lounge suit of a cut popularized by the late king and a resplendent waistcoat of brocaded maroon silk, languidly surveyed the room and tapped a cone of ash from his thick black cheroot onto the remains of his own dinner.

  "My dear Marius," he drawled, "for once I do wish you could forget your belly and remember the purpose of our visit. We are not here as scouts for the Guide Michelin, and as for myself, I should rather grub like a pig for roots than spend one more hour in that infernal coach."

  As the innkeeper hastily snatched the plate from the table and scurried towards the kitchen amidst a flurry of apologies in broken English, Sir Marius Wallaby, Bart., turned his wrath on his traveling companion.

  "God's blood, Deverish, don't let me hear from you what the purpose of this journey is. If I hadn't been gulled by your mad tale back in Athens, I wouldn't be sitting in this miserable excuse for an inn, two hundred miles from the last pretense of civilization, feeding on warmed-over table scraps and guzzling mare's piss for wine." He groaned piteously. "And my last bottle of hock gone two days back, with no decent cellars between here and the coast."

  Nigel Deverish sipped with overtly sadistic relish from his glass of white Retzina.

  "As for myself, I rather enjoy its clean, piney bite," he said. "But then I am obviously no connoisseur in such matters."

  "The matters in which you are a connoisseur I tremble to contemplate." The older man's anger crumpled abruptly as his huge frame slumped back into a rickety rattan chair precariously accommodating his twenty stone, and he ran one hand, plump and livid as a baby lobster, through thinning sandy hair before speaking in a voice thickly edged with fatigue.

  "I must caution you I don't intend going on like this much longer, Deverish. Don't think I'm not up to it physically—God knows. I've been on treks in Africa and Brazil that make this expedition look like a walking tour of Surrey." He grimaced wearily. "But then I was always after something tangible, something that left a spoor I could follow, something I could fix in the sights of my rifle. We must have passed through thirty of these half-arsed villages in the past three weeks and no one even knows what we're talking about. The whole idea is so damned vague, it's like trying to grab a handful of smoke, and it's getting on my nerves, Deverish, I'm not ashamed to confess."

  Nigel Deverish eyed his companion with thinly veiled contempt. Sir Marius Wallaby was a huge, corpulent man in his early fifties, with a flaccid basketball of a head, candid, hyperthyroid eyes of a pale, china-blue prominent in his ruddy face, now stubbled by a two-day growth of orangy beard, and a mouth pursed like a querulous rosebud. He was dressed with customary carelessness in a rumpled Norfolk hacking jacket, multidarned cardigan of muddy-brown wool, heather-green tweed knickers, and battered Peal's brogues. Hardly the picture, Deverish reflected grimly, of a man worth half a million if a guinea, but Wallaby cared nothing for appearances, or money. His only passions were, in interchangeable order, the table, the hunt, and the bottle. Wallaby's tempers were fierce but transient, for like a toothless dog he had learned long ago to rely on his bark. He was as petulant as a child, Deverish had perceived on their first meeting, and as innocent; an easy man to use, but only if one were willing to cosset him like a nanny. "My dear Marius," he now soothed, "no one understands better than I your disappointment. But surely, for the man of indomitable will, such frustrations only serve to redouble the determination to succeed. Had Stanley given up before Victoria Falls . . ." He let the sentence trail off meaningfully, mildly sickened by the ingenuousness of his appeal, but equally convinced of its effectiveness.

  "Yes, yes, I suppose you're quite right," Wallaby murmured, sitting imperceptibly straighter. "It doesn't do to get discouraged too quickly on these things." He sipped distastefully from his wine glass. "Years ago in Mombasa I ran into a dicey old Dutchman who swore he'd seen a white rino in the Gambezi. He'd been tracking it off and on for years whenever he could steer a safari into the area, and everyone thought he was crackers, of course, but one day he walked right into Starrs', threw the skin on the bar, and ordered drinks for the house. Showed us all, he did. Never forgot it." Wallaby scowled darkly. "Which is probably why I'm here with you today instead of enjoying a bottle of decent hock in Athens."

  The innkeeper moved deferentially to their table and placed a worn copper platter before Sir Marius. "This looks a bit better," the Englishman grunted as he dubiously surveyed an array of media dolma and moussaka, a local dish of beef cunningly cooked with aubergines, mushrooms and tomatoes, and smothered in a simmering soufflé of feta cheese. The elderly Greek smiled encouragingly and placed another bottle of Retzina on the table.

  "You enjoy, Kyrios, you enjoy." Panayotis beamed proudly. "I know how to cook for English. I work in Athens three years. That's where I learn your language, also French and a little Turkish." The innkeeper had regaled them earlier with his travels, for as the only local man to venture forth as far as fabled Athens and the sea, he was a minor celebrity, and served as mayor of the cluster of rude stone-and-wattle cottages comprising the hamlet of Theodorina. "You will find the best food in the Pindus mountains right here, here with Panayotis, milord."

  "I don't question that," Sir Marius grunted, tentatively slipping a fork into a mussel entwined with grape leaves, "only whether it's a recommendation." But after one bite, he smiled abruptly, like ice melting, and nodded approval to the innkeeper, who half giggled with relief and obsequiously bobbed his grizzled head in an awkward half-bow. Why do the peasants always fawn on the hulking, ill-mannered boor, Deverish reflected bitterly, when it's so obvious I'm the sole gentleman in our party? He gulped his Retzina convulsively, and lit another cheroot, gratefully dragging the harsh smoke into his lungs.

  After the meal was over and cloyingly sweet honey-and-nut pastries had been washed down with Turkish coffee and ouzo, Wallaby belched contentedly and plucked a cigar from a battered lizard-skin case.

  "Doubtless have indigestion later on, but at least I feel halfway human for the time being," he grumbled. Panayotis diffidently presented a bill, and Wallaby, without examining it, tossed a jumble of fifty-drachma notes onto the table.

  "Take our rooms from that and keep the change."

  The innkeeper's eyes fixed hotly on the bills for a long moment before he scrabbled them up with trembling hands, his mumbled words of gratitud
e cut short by Wallaby's roar for a bottle of Metaxa. Deverish choked back the bile in his throat. Of course the old fool could afford to throw away his money—he'd never had to sweat for it. He cursed for the thousandth time the perverse law of nature ordaining that cretins like Wallaby be blessed with wealth, while the rare man of genius must grovel in muck for the offal of everyday existence, lyric words and vaulting imagery strangled stillborn. Deverish stared at Wallaby guzzling brandy like a bloated pig greedily snuffling for truffles, and his hand involuntarily strayed to the sheaf of poems in his jacket pocket. It would not be long now. His eyes slivered as he smiled suddenly, exultantly, and when he spoke he no longer had to struggle to keep the hatred from his voice.

  "Don't you think you overpaid that chap a bit, old boy?"

  Wallaby looked up from his brandy and scowled.

  "You're bad enough as a guide, Deverish, don't start doubling as my accountant. In any case, the draft from Athens gives me enough to buy and sell this whole pigsty of a town—not that I'd want it, God knows." He slurped noisily from his glass and wiped his moist forehead with a tattered red bandana. "And another thing, Deverish, once and for all stop calling me 'old boy,' and trotting out your whole insufferably tatty Oxbridge act. I don't give a damn about a man's birth, and I've always held Debrett's the least reliable stud-book of the lot, but the pose bores me to tears and will only get you laughed at back in London." His eyes suddenly softened. "I don't mean that harshly, Deverish. Just be yourself, that's all. You'll get along better that way."

  Deverish stood up abruptly, his sallow cheeks flaming. Wallaby's insult he could have almost savored, on account so to speak, but the gratuitous fillip of condescension was intolerable. His fists tightened into balls and he spun on his heels to hide his face from Wallaby's eyes.