F&SF BK OF UNICORN VOL1.indb

by Gordon Van Gelder

  “I know,” said Barbara. “But I thought I might, so that’s why I came.” And before Rita could answer, she dropped behind again.

  The last ridge, the one which overlooked the unicorn pool, saw a series of gasps as the ranks of villagers topped it, one after the other, and saw what lay below; and it was indeed beautiful.

  Surprisingly, it was Del who took it upon himself to call out, in his great voice, “Everyone wait here!” And everyone did; the top of the ridge filled slowly, from one side to the other, with craning, murmuring people. And then Del bounded after Rita and Barbara.

  Barbara said, “I’ll stop here.”

  “Wait,” said Rita, imperiously. Of Del she demanded, “What are you coming for?”

  “To see fair play,” he growled. “The little I know of witchcraft makes me like none of it.”

  “Very well,” she said calmly. Then she smiled her very own smile. “Since you insist, I’d rather enjoy Barbara’s company too.”

  Barbara hesitated. “Come, he won’t hurt you, girl,” said Rita. “He doesn’t know you exist.”

  “Oh,” said Barbara, wonderingly.

  Del said gruffly, “I do so. She has the vegetable stall.”

  Rita smiled at Barbara, the secrets bright in her eyes. Barbara said nothing, but came with them.

  “You should go back, you know,” Rita said silkily to Del, when she could. “Haven’t you been humiliated enough yet?”

  He did not answer.

  She said, “Stubborn animal! Do you think I’d have come this far if I weren’t sure?”

  “Yes,” said Del, “I think perhaps you would.”

  They reached the blue moss. Rita shuffled it about with her feet and then sank gracefully down to it. Barbara stood alone in the shadows of the willow grove. Del thumped gently at an aspen with his fist. Rita, smiling, arranged the bridle to cast, and laid it across her lap.

  The rabbits stayed hid. There was an uneasiness about the grove. Barbara sank to her knees, and put out her hand. A chipmunk ran to nestle in it.

  This time there was a difference. This time it was not the slow silencing of living things that warned of his approach, but a sudden babble from the people on the ridge.

  Rita gathered her legs under her like a sprinter, and held the bridle poised. Her eyes were round and bright, and the tip of her tongue showed between her white teeth. Barbara was a statue. Del put his back against his tree, and became as still as Barbara.

  Then from the ridge came a single, simultaneous intake of breath, and silence. One knew without looking that some stared speechless, that some buried their faces or threw an arm over their eyes.

  He came.

  He came slowly this time, his golden hooves choosing his paces like so many embroidery needles. He held his splendid head high. He regarded the three on the bank gravely, and then turned to look at the ridge for a moment. At last he turned, and came round the pond by the willow grove. Just on the blue moss, he stopped to look down into the pond. It seemed that he drew one deep clear breath. He bent his head then, and drank, and lifted his head to shake away the shining drops.

  He turned toward the three spellbound humans and looked at them each in turn. And it was not Rita he went to, at last, nor Barbara. He came to Del, and he drank of Del’s eyes with his own just as he had partaken of the pool—deeply and at leisure. The beauty and wisdom were there, and the compassion, and what looked like a bright white point of anger. Del knew that the creature had read everything then, and that he knew all three of them in ways unknown to human beings.

  There was a majestic sadness in the way he turned then, and dropped his shining head, and stepped daintily to Rita. She sighed, and rose up a little, lifting the bridle. The unicorn lowered his horn to receive it—

  —and tossed his head, tore the bridle out of her grasp, sent the golden thing high in the air. It turned there in the sun, and fell into the pond.

  And the instant it touched the water, the pond was a bog and the birds rose mourning from the trees. The unicorn looked up at them, and shook himself. Then he trotted to Barbara and knelt, and put his smooth, stainless head in her lap.

  Barbara’s hands stayed on the ground by her sides. Her gaze roved over the warm white beauty, up to the tip of the golden horn and back.

  The scream was frightening. Rita’s hands were up like claws, and she had bitten her tongue; there was blood on her mouth. She screamed again. She threw herself off the now withered moss toward the unicorn and Barbara. “She can’t be!” Rita shrieked. She collided with Del’s broad right hand. “It’s wrong, I tell you, she, you, I . . .”

  “I’m satisfied,” said Del, low in his throat. “Keep away, squire’s daughter.”

  She recoiled from him, made as if to try to circle him. He stepped forward. She ground her chin into one shoulder, then the other, in a gesture of sheer frustration, turned suddenly and ran toward the ridge. “It’s mine, it’s mine,” she screamed. “I tell you it can’t be hers, don’t you understand? I never once, I never did, but she, but she—”

  She slowed and stopped, then, and fell silent at the sound that rose from the ridge. It began like the first patter of rain on oak leaves, and it gathered voice until it was a rumble and then a roar. She stood looking up, her face working, the sound washing over her. She shrank from it.

  It was laughter.

  She turned once, a pleading just beginning to form on her face. Del regarded her stonily. She faced the ridge then, and squared her shoulders, and walked up the hill, to go into the laughter, to go through it, to have it follow her all the way home and all the days of her life.

  Del turned to Barbara just as she bent over the beautiful head. She said, “Silken-swift . . . go free.”

  The unicorn raised its head and looked up at Del. Del’s mouth opened. He took a clumsy step forward, stopped again. “You!”

  Barbara’s face was set. “You weren’t to know,” she choked. “You weren’t ever to know . . . I was so glad you were blind, because I thought you’d never know.”

  He fell on his knees beside her. And when he did, the unicorn touched her face with his satin nose, and all the girl’s pent-up beauty flooded outward. The unicorn rose from his kneeling, and whickered softly. Del looked at her, and only the unicorn was more beautiful. He put out his hand to the shining neck, and for a moment felt the incredible silk of the mane flowing across his fingers. The unicorn reared then, and wheeled, and in a great leap was across the bog, and in two more was on the crest of the farther ridge. He paused there briefly, with the sun on him, and then was gone.

  Barbara said, “For us, he lost his pool, his beautiful pool.”

  And Del said, “He will get another. He must.” With difficulty he added, “He couldn’t be . . . punished . . . for being so gloriously Fair.”

  The Flight of the Horse

  Larry Niven

  THE YEAR WAS 750 AA (AnteAtomic) or 1200 AD (Anno Domini), approximately. Hanville Svetz stepped out of the extension cage and looked about him.

  To Svetz the atomic bomb was eleven hundred years old and the horse was a thousand years dead. It was his first trip into the past. His training didn’t count; it had not included actual time travel, which cost several million commercials a shot. Svetz was groggy from the peculiar gravitational side effects of time travel. He was high on pre–Industrial Age air, and drunk on his own sense of destiny; while at the same time he was not really convinced that he had gone anywhere. Or any when. Trade joke.

  He was not carrying the anesthetic rifle. He had come to get a horse; he had not expected to meet one at the door. How big was a horse? Where were horses found? Consider what the Institute had had to go on: a few pictures in a salvaged children’s book, and an old legend, not to be trusted, that the horse had once been used as a kind of animated vehicle!

  In an empty land beneath an overcast sky, Svetz braced himself with one hand on the curved flank of the extension cage. His head was spinning. It took him several seconds to realize tha
t he was looking at a horse.

  It stood fifteen yards away, regarding Svetz with large intelligent brown eyes. It was much larger than he had expected. Further, the horse in the picture book had had a glossy brown pelt with a short mane, while the beast now facing Svetz was pure white, with a mane that flowed like a woman’s long hair. There were other differences . . . but no matter, the beast matched the book too well to be anything but a horse.

  To Svetz it seemed that the horse watched him, waited for him to realize what was happening. Then, while Svetz wasted more time wondering why he wasn’t holding a rifle, the horse laughed, turned and departed. It disappeared with astonishing speed.

  Svetz began to shiver. Nobody had warned him that the horse might have been sentient! Yet the beast’s mocking laugh had sounded far too human.

  Now he knew. He was deep, deep in the past.

  Not even the horse was as convincing as the emptiness the horse had left behind. No reaching apartment towers clawed the horizon. No contrails scratched the sky. The world was trees and flowers and rolling grassland, innocent of men.

  The silence—It was as if Svetz had gone deaf. He had heard no sound since the laughter of the horse. In the year 1100 PostAtomic, such silence could have been found nowhere on Earth. Listening, Svetz knew at last that he had reached the British Isles before the coming of civilization. He had traveled in time.

  The extension cage was the part of the time machine that did the traveling. It had its own air supply, and needed it while being pushed through time. But not here. Not before civilization’s dawn; not when the air had never been polluted by fission wastes and the combustion of coal, hydrocarbons, tobaccos, wood, et al.

  Now, retreating in panic from that world of the past to the world of the extension cage, Svetz nonetheless left the door open behind him.

  He felt better inside the cage. Outside was an unexplored planet, made dangerous by ignorance. Inside the cage it was no different from a training mission. Svetz had spent hundreds of hours in a detailed mock-up of this cage, with a computer running the dials. There had even been artificial gravity to simulate the peculiar side effects of motion in time.

  By now the horse would have escaped. But he now knew its size, and he knew there were horses in the area. To business, then . . .

  Svetz took the anesthetic rifle from where it was clamped to the wall. He loaded it with what he guessed was the right size of soluble crystalline anesthetic needle. The box held several different sizes, the smallest of which would knock a shrew harmlessly unconscious, the largest of which would do the same for an elephant. He slung the rifle and stood up.

  The world turned gray. Svetz caught a wall clamp to stop himself from falling.

  The cage had stopped moving twenty minutes ago. He shouldn’t still be dizzy!—But it had been a long trip. Never before had the Institute for Temporal Research pushed a cage beyond zero PA. A long trip and a strange one, with gravity pulling Svetz’s mass uniformly toward Svetz’s navel . . .

  When his head cleared, he turned to where other equipment was clamped to a wall.

  The flight stick was a lift field generator and power source built into five feet of pole, with a control ring at one end, a brush discharge at the other, and a bucket seat and seat belt in the middle. Compact even for Svetz’s age, the flight stick was a spinoff from the spaceflight industries.

  But it still weighed thirty pounds with the motor off. Getting it out of the clamps took all his strength. Svetz felt queasy, very queasy.

  He bent to pick up the flight stick, and abruptly realized that he was about to faint.

  He hit the door button and fainted.

  “We don’t know where on Earth you’ll wind up,” Ra Chen had told him. Ra Chen was the Director of the Institute for Temporal Research, a large round man with gross, exaggerated features and a permanent air of disapproval. “That’s because we can’t focus on a particular time of day—or on a particular year, for that matter. You won’t appear underground or inside anything because of energy considerations. If you come out a thousand feet in the air, the cage won’t fall; it’ll settle slowly, using up energy with a profligate disregard for our budget . . .”

  And Svetz had dreamed that night, vividly. Over and over his extension cage appeared inside solid rock, exploded with a roar and a blinding flash.

  “Officially the horse is for the Bureau of History,” Ra Chen had said. “In practice it’s for the Secretary-General, for his twenty-eighth birthday. Mentally he’s about six years old, you know. The royal family’s getting a bit inbred these days. We managed to send him a picture book we picked up in 130 PA, and now the lad wants a horse . . .”

  Svetz had seen himself being shot for treason, for the crime of listening to such talk.

  “. . . Otherwise we’d never have gotten the appropriation for this trip. It’s in a good cause. We’ll do some cloning from the horse before we send the original to the UN. Then—well, genes are a code, and codes can be broken. Get us a male, and we’ll make all the horses anyone could want.”

  But why would anyone want even one horse? Svetz had studied a computer duplicate of the child’s picture book that an agent had pulled from a ruined house a thousand years ago. The horse did not impress him.

  Ra Chen, however, terrified him.

  “We’ve never sent anyone this far back,” Ra Chen had told him the night before the mission, when it was too late to back out with honor. “Keep that in mind. If something goes wrong, don’t count on the rule book. Don’t count on your instruments. Use your head. Your head, Svetz. Gods know it’s little enough to depend on . . .”

  Svetz had not slept in the hours before departure.

  “You’re scared stiff,” Ra Chen had commented just before Svetz entered the extension cage. “And you can hide it, Svetz. I think I’m the only one who’s noticed. That’s why I picked you, because you can be terrified and go ahead anyway. Don’t come back without a horse . . .”

  The Director’s voice grew louder. “Not without a horse, Svetz. Your head, Svetz, your HEAD . . .”

  Svetz sat up convulsively. The air! Slow death if he didn’t close the door! But the door was closed, and Svetz was sitting on the floor holding his head, which hurt.

  The air system had been transplanted intact, complete with dials, from a Martian sandboat. The dials read normally, of course, since the cage was sealed.

  Svetz nerved himself to open the door. As the sweet, rich air of twelfth-century Britain rushed in, Svetz held his breath and watched the dials change. Presently he closed the door and waited, sweating, while the air system replaced the heady poison with its own safe, breathable mixture.

  When next he left the extension cage, carrying the flight stick, Svetz was wearing another spin-off from the interstellar exploration industries. It was a balloon, and he wore it over his head. It was also a selectively permeable membrane, intended to pass certain gasses in and others out, to make a breathing-air mixture inside.

  It was nearly invisible except at the rim. There, where light was refracted most severely, the balloon showed as a narrow golden circle enclosing Svetz’s head. The effect was not unlike a halo as shown in medieval paintings. But Svetz didn’t know about medieval paintings.

  He wore also a simple white robe, undecorated, constricted at the waist, otherwise falling in loose folds. The Institute thought that such a garment was least likely to violate taboos of sex or custom. The trade kit dangled loose from his sash: a heat-and-pressure gadget, a pouch of corundum, small phials of additives for color.

  Lastly he wore a hurt and baffled look. How was it that he could not breathe the clean air of his own past?

  The air of the cage was the air of Svetz’s time, and was nearly 4 percent carbon dioxide. The air of 750 AnteAtomic held barely a tenth of that. Man was a rare animal here and now. He had breathed little air, he had destroyed few green forests, he had burnt scant fuel since the dawn of time.

  But industrial civilization meant combustion. Combusti
on meant carbon dioxide thickening in the atmosphere many times faster than the green plants could turn it back to oxygen. Svetz was at the far end of two thousand years of adaptation to air rich in CO2.

  It takes a concentration of carbon dioxide to trigger the autonomic nerves in the lymph glands in a man’s left armpit. Svetz had fainted because he wasn’t breathing.

  So now he wore a balloon, and felt rejected.

  He straddled the flight stick and twisted the control knob on the fore end. The stick lifted under him, and he wriggled into place on the bucket seat. He twisted the knob further.

  He drifted upward like a toy balloon.

  He floated over a lovely land, green and untenanted, beneath a pearl-gray sky empty of contrails. Presently he found a crumbling wall. He turned to follow it.

  He would follow the wall until he found a settlement. If the old legend was true—and, Svetz reflected, the horse had certainly been big enough to drag a vehicle—then he would find horses wherever he found men.

  Presently it became obvious that a road ran along the wall. There the dirt was flat and bare and consistently wide enough for a walking man; whereas elsewhere the land rose and dipped and tilted. Hard dirt did not a freeway make; but Svetz got the point.

  He followed the road, floating at a height of ten meters.

  There was a man in worn brown garments. Hooded and barefoot, he walked the road with patient exhaustion, propping himself with a staff. His back was to Svetz.

  Svetz thought to dip toward him to ask concerning horses. He refrained. With no way to know where the cage would alight, he had learned no ancient languages at all.

  He thought of the trade kit he carried, intended not for communication, but instead of communication. It had never been field-tested. In any case it was not for casual encounters. The pouch of corundum was too small.

  Svetz heard a yell from below. He looked down in time to see the man in brown running like the wind, his staff forgotten, his fatigue likewise.

  “Something scared him,” Svetz decided. But he could see nothing fearful. Something small but deadly, then.