by Lisa Mangum
“Never,” said Sharareh.
The he-woman and the Northern warrior exchanged glances.
The pharaoh’s karkadann sidled up next to Azazel, and Sharareh found herself facing the woman’s piercing gaze. Her head bowed of its own accord.
“Look at me,” the woman said, as she pressed a water skin into Sharareh’s hands.
Sharareh glanced upward. The weight of authority pressed her down, and she squirmed, uncomfortable, feeling the force of the queen’s judgment like a physical burden. Sharareh fought years of teachings in her battle to hold the other woman’s gaze. The accumulated wisdom of history shrieked in her ears, and her heart clenched, warning her she deserved whatever punishment this woman chose to give in exchange for her audacity in daring to deem herself worthy to look the pharaoh in the eye.
How could she stand up before a karkadann and still be so cowed by a fellow human being? Fury smoldered in her belly, raging that she should have to debase herself, and then Sharareh realized with some surprise that she did not feel denigrated in the slightest. She sat astride a karkadann of her own, and she faced this woman, if not quite as an equal, then at least as a fellow rider.
It was not her place to demand the other woman’s name, but neither did she shy away from her. She lifted the skin and drank deeply of sweet, clear water; then she hooked it to the sash of her robes and waited.
“I am Anpu, the jackal, guardian of buried knowledge, and this is Samiel, the poison wind.” The goddess-queen stroked the golden neck of the karkadann that bore her, for it seemed now to Sharareh’s eyes that the woman did not master Samiel so much as Samiel suffered her human companion to ride upon her back.
Samiel spoke in a brassy voice like distant thunder. “With us are Huojin of the kirin, and her companion, Yi, bringer of justice; Citrine, from the lands to the northwest, and her partner, Anahita, healers both; and Liberata and Quiteria, warrior saints, who among their people are called the holy sister and her mount.” Samiel whickered, as though laughing, in mockery of the fools who did not recognize the heavy-set unicorn as the equal of her rider.
Sharareh felt her ears burning, ashamed that she had been surprised when the karkadann had spoken in a human tongue.
She raised her arms in her tribe’s traditional gesture of welcome, but all the while, she despaired. What did she have to offer these people? She was no lawgiver, like Yi; no doctor, like Anahita; no holy woman, like Quiteria. She was certainly not royalty, as Anpu must be. She did not dare imagine herself the equal of the unicorns. She wondered what her father and John would think, if they were to see this gathering, and she knew what their blindness would suggest to them: four mere women and a man who wished to be a woman, sitting atop five stupid beasts.
“How do you call yourself?” Anpu inquired.
It took a moment for Sharareh to understand the pharaoh’s question. “I am Sharareh, a single spark.”
“Ah,” said Samiel, and Anpu echoed, “Ah.” And it was only then that knowledge dawned upon Sharareh as well, like the first glimmerings of violet in the morning sky.
“A single spark,” said Sharareh, slowly at first, “can, it is true, glow for a short time before it is extinguished and forgotten. But,” she continued, her voice growing stronger, “a single spark can also be the flame that starts a wildfire, or the flash that ignites a candle to provide illumination in the darkness.”
“I am Azazel,” rumbled the purple karkadann, “rugged in exile. If you come with me, Sharareh-a-Single-Spark, you will be forever cast out from your people.”
She lifted her eyes to the horizon, thinking of John’s horse, who dreamed of the freedoms he had lost. She would not pass her days in her father’s tent, looking, like the black gelding, into the distance and wishing.
“If you bury a spark beneath a bushel basket,” Sharareh retorted, “you will smother it, and it will shine no more.” Her lips curved, and she saw the other women nod and return her smile. “My destiny is mine to make, and I would go with you.”
The unicorns lifted their heads and gave voice in recognition of her choice. Citrine’s high clarion blended with Liberata’s baritone and Huojin’s melodic piping like the sound of wind through reeds. Samiel loosed a cry like a hawk’s, Azazel replied, and then Sharareh was yelling, laughing as the group of unicorns and warrior-women moved forward, taking Azazel and Sharareh into their midst. The unicorns surged into a gallop, and Sharareh spread her arms like wings and sang, bride of freedom, warrior among warriors, partner of a karkadann, a single spark igniting.
***
Best of All Possible Worlds
John D. Payne
“Dammit!” Lem shouted, reaching the bus stop just after the CT2 to Kendall/MIT pulled away. He ran a few more steps and then gave up with a heavy sigh that he hoped would attract the attention of the girl who sat waiting inside the booth. She didn’t look up.
Tresses of dark brown hair with magenta streaks spilled out from underneath her oversized Panama hat and fell on an olive drab coat that looked like it had seen combat. She had been wearing a different hat every time he had seen her—four or five times over the last couple of months. Although he’d tried to catch her eye, so far he hadn’t even got her to acknowledge his presence.
It made sense. Even a nice bus stop wasn’t a great place to meet people, and this one wasn’t nice. Beat-up Plexiglas walls sported a discolored map, an ad for a cancelled TV show, and lots of graffiti—including the words “PURPLE UNICORN” in large, silver letters. The roof and sides were spattered with the poop of the ten thousand pigeons who made their home under the McGrath highway overpass. In short, the place lacked ambience. This wouldn’t be easy.
Fixing a wry smile on his face, Lem stretched out a hand toward the bus, now well on its way down Washington. He pursed his lips and blew out another sigh of disgust, but the girl in the hat appeared to take no notice of him. Slender white cords ran from her earbuds to the tablet in her hands.
“Can you believe that?” Lem said, shaking his head. “They must have seen me, but they didn’t even stop. I was right here.”
“Not really.”
He froze. She’d never spoken to him before. In fact, the wide brim of her hat hid her face so completely that he hadn’t seen her lips move even now. But the only other person around was the homeless guy who always had one eye screwed shut, and his voice was raspier. And he pretty much only talked about (and to) things that no one else could see.
Both elated and terrified, Lem realized that first contact was within his grasp. He also realized that he hadn’t responded, hadn’t said anything in … too long. Awkwardness had filled the vacuum left by his complete inability to hold a normal conversation with a cute girl.
“Uh …” he said.
“You weren’t here. You were late. Maybe you should get that app.” Her fingers flicked idly across the screen of her tablet, presumably turning digital pages.
Lem closed his mouth and then opened it again. “Funny story. I actually have that app.”
“Funny,” she said, flicking her finger across the screen, “but not ha-ha funny.”
“Oh, I love that episode,” Lem gushed.
She looked up. “What?”
It was his first good look at her face. She wore big black glasses like from NASA mission control. Most people’s glasses made their eyes look smaller, but if anything, hers were magnified. They had to be. They were huge, like ridiculously Japanese-cartoon huge. And beautiful with thick, dark lashes like Elizabeth Taylor’s. If only he were Richard Burton. Hell, he would even settle for being a regular guy who didn’t know anything about NASA or Japanese cartoons or Elizabeth Taylor.
Sports. He should know about sports.
“Uh …” he said. “That line. It’s from a Simpsons episode.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“The one where they go to Camp Krusty.” He felt his face growing warm. He’d wanted to talk to this girl since the first time he saw her, and this was the best he co
uld come up with? He searched his brain for some smooth line. “It’s a really old one. You’ve probably never seen it.” Better yet, why didn’t he just shut up?
She looked away, following the passage of a helicopter as it whupped across the sky. Damn, her eyelashes were like butterflies. How did they not knock her glasses off?
In desperate need of something else to talk about, his eyes lit upon the graffiti scrawled on the bus stop wall in what looked like silver marker.
“‘Purple unicorn,’” he read, pointing at the tag. “What’s that? Like, Somerville’s gayest street gang?”
Her eyes narrowed a bit, and she cocked her head to one side.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” he amended, spreading his hands and making an awkward shrug.
Both her eyebrows went up, and she gave him that kind of tight-lipped smile that let him know she was feeling embarrassed for him just in case he wasn’t feeling embarrassed enough for himself. “Okay then,” she said, returning to her tablet.
That was good-bye. And who could blame her? This was just like the time he’d been in an elevator with Summer Glau and had geeked so hard he hadn’t even been able to get his own name out. It was understandable. What red-blooded nerd wouldn’t have been just as nervous? The real question was why he found the girl in the hat nearly as intimidating.
She certainly had an exotic look: olive skin, unbelievably big eyes, striking nose, strong jaw. Persian, maybe. Or Arab. Was there a polite way to ask? No. It was a micro-aggression, an otherization. Instead of staring at her and trying to figure her out, why not just get to know her as a person?
He took a deep breath and stuck out his hand. “Hi. I’m Lem.”
“You’re … lame?”
“Lem. Short for Lemuel.” He shrugged. “I know, it’s an old man’s name. Blame my parents.”
She took his hand and shook it, looking amused—of course.
What is this, the forties? Who shakes hands? Gah!
“I’m Pris,” she said. “So I know what you mean.”
“No, that’s nice. Pris. Like—” He stopped abruptly and tried to cover it with a fake cough that would fool absolutely no one. Still, better than telling her how cool it was that she shared a name with one of the androids in Blade Runner. “So, what do you think that is?”
She glanced at the graffiti tag. “What, that?”
“Yeah. I mean, who would write that? If I were a teenage hoodlum, I’d try to come up with a name that sounded a little more threatening. Or at least … cool.” Not that I would know anything about sounding cool. Hoodlum? Who says that? What is wrong with me?
“Oh, I don’t know.” She switched off her tablet. “Purple unicorn could be a very cool name for something. Not a gang, though. More like a LARPing group.”
“LARPing?”
She blushed. “Live-action role-playing. It’s—”
“Oh,” he interrupted, “I know what LARPing is. I go to MIT. There are people who cosplay not just on campus but in class.”
“You study engineering?”
“Linguistics. My thesis is about how lexical ambiguity is resolved through the pragmatics of …” He shrugged. “It’s super boring. I got into it because of Tolkein, to tell you the truth. All the languages he created.”
She gave him a sly smile. “So you were one of those nerds who dug into the appendices.”
“Damn straight.” He leaned back against the wall of the bus stop with arms folded, trying to look confident.
“Me, too. Nerd power.” She raised a fist and stuck her lips out in a defiant pout.
“Represent.” He bumped a fist against his chest. This was going even better than he could have imagined. He pointed once more to the graffiti. “Purple unicorn’s a little on the nose for a LARPing group, I think. Plus, it’s not plural. Maybe a band.”
After a moment’s reflection, Pris closed her eyes and grabbed an invisible microphone. “Hello, Boston! We’re Purple Unicorn and we’re here to rock!” Opening her eyes, she shook her head. “Fails the arena test.”
“I was thinking nerdcore. Or filk.”
She made a face like she had taken a swig of milk that was three days past its sell-by date. “No, it’s no good.”
“All right,” Lem said. “What do you think it is?”
“Sounds like one of those cupcake places.” She leaned forward and rested her chin in one hand. “Employee-owned, a co-op. And only women. The name is playful to let you know they have a sense of humor, but they’re serious about being socially responsible with their product.”
“Vegan soymilk cream cheese frosting. All-natural fair-trade hot pink food coloring. Organic, locally grown sprinkles.”
“You see it.” She shared a knowing little smile with him, a facial expression that didn’t come his way often. He liked it a lot.
“I do,” said Lem. “Although the cupcake market is getting pretty crowded. I hate to say it, but I think our all-femme worker’s cooperative might have trouble drumming up business.”
Pris gestured at the graffiti. “Thus, their unconventional advertising strategy.”
Lem nodded and tapped the side of his nose. He hoped it made him look intriguing and cosmopolitan, rather than like a guy who watched too much Masterpiece Theatre. Or reruns of Doctor Who, which is where he had actually picked up the gesture.
“How about a bar?” Pris asked.
“What? It’s like …” Lem glanced at his phone. “Nine eighteen. I don’t even know what would be open.”
Pris rolled her eyes.
“Oh. You mean—”
“Yes.”
“For the purple unicorn. For the bar. For the name. The name of the bar would be Purple Unicorn. That’s what they would call it.” At that point, his brain mercifully shut his mouth down so he could devote himself fully to thoughts of suicide.
She nodded slowly, her eyebrows raised. “Uh-huh.”
“Kind of a froufrou name for a bar,” Lem said. “Unless it’s a gay bar.”
“Back on that again, are we?”
Lem felt a hot blush hit his face. “Hey, tell me ‘purple unicorn’ doesn’t sound just a little bit gay to you. I mean, think about it. That could be like the whole theme of the bar. No.” He held up a finger. “A dance club. Oiled-up muscular dudes in fluffy purple chaps and unicorn masks.”
Pris blinked a couple of times, which was hard to ignore given her immense lashes. “That’s an oddly specific image, which you came up with rather quickly.”
“Tell me that place doesn’t already exist in P-town.”
She laughed. “Yeah, but the only ones who go there are tourists. Locals find it ridiculous.”
“Except for one thing. Everyone loves the club’s signature drink, also called the Purple Unicorn.” He spread his hands out before him like a magician finishing a trick.
“Ooh!” said Pris. “I like that. Obviously the color would be purple.”
“Grape schnapps.”
“Blackberry vodka. And for a stirrer, they use a lollipop or a sucker.”
“Poking out of the top of the drink like a unicorn horn.”
“Precisely.”
Lem smiled. Finally, he was digging himself out of the hole. Of course, this was also usually the place where he completely torpedoed the conversation by getting too excited and pushing too hard. Better to play it cool. Stick to small talk. The basics.
“So, um,” he began, throwing a hand in her direction, “what do you do?”
“What do I do?” She looked amused.
“Sure. I mean, like I study linguistics. What about you? Are you in school or do you have a job, or…?”
“I knew someone who said the problem with Americans is that we think our identities reduce to our occupations. ‘What do you do?’ As if our answer to that question could really capture who we are.” She sighed and looked back down at her tablet.
Was she foreign after all? She didn’t have an accent, but you never knew. “Okay. I can se
e that. The triumph of materialism, corporations, all that stuff.” Lem pushed his glasses back up his nose. “But on the other hand, America also gave the world Office Space and Dilbert. So we got that going for us.”
She gave him a grunt that was not quite a pity laugh and flicked a finger across the screen of her tablet. Once again, the brim of her hat completely hid her face. Three feet away from her, and he might as well be in another state. Damn it, how had he blown this? She was so cool!
He sighed quietly and stepped out from under the cover of the bus stop. Another CT2 was coming down the street. He glanced at his phone. Maybe he should just go.
“I have a research job,” Pris said.
Lem turned around, letting the bus pass by behind him. She was looking up at him with those gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor eyes of hers. He smiled.
“Really? What do you research?”
She shrugged. “Had to sign an NDA. Sorry. I just … I get tired of explaining to everyone that I can’t really talk about my work.”
“No, it’s no problem. I get it. One of my buddies works at Lincoln Labs.” Actually, less of a buddy and more of a guy who occasionally dropped in to ruin the weekly Pathfinder game by being a ridiculous rules lawyer. But close enough.
Stay on target, he admonished himself. Don’t get lost in your own thoughts. Pay attention. Keep the conversation alive. The problem was, all he could think of at the moment was her mystery job. He had all kinds of questions he wanted to ask about that, but she had just said she was sick of people bugging her about that stuff.
He glanced back at the silver graffiti tag on the wall. That had been working.
“What if purple unicorn doesn’t mean anything?” He stroked his chin.
She followed his gaze and smiled. “It probably doesn’t—our imaginary Provincetown dance club notwithstanding.”
“No, no, no.” He narrowed his eyes. “What if it’s a code phrase? ‘Elvis has left the building.’”
“‘Climb Mount Niitaka.’”
“Right. So then the question is, who do we say this to, and what happens next?”