by Lisa Mangum
“She’s only been working for you for the past two years,” I said.
McDavity grunted, leaned forward, and retrieved a red, plastic container with a bit of tape on top. The name Mary Sue had been scrawled on it. McDavity frowned, cracked open the lid and brought the container up to his nose. He took a deep, suspicious sniff and grumbled in appreciation. Turning his head in my direction for the first time since I’d entered the lunchroom, he allowed a broad, gap-toothed grin to split his face. “Spaghetti and meatballs!” he bellowed. “My favorite!”
I held up a finger to protest, since the container was clearly labeled, and Mary Sue would probably mind that he was sniffing her food, but it was too late. He ripped off the lid, tossed it into the sink, grabbed a fork from the counter, and began gobbling down the contents, slurping at the cold noodles and stuffing entire meatballs into each cheek.
I watched, horrified, for as long as it took me to become thoroughly disgusted: about fifteen seconds, and that’s being generous.
“Johnson!” he mumbled around a mouthful of pasta, then waved me over with his red sauce-stained fork. “I have an assignment for you.”
“I really can’t,” I protested. McDavity had a reputation for assigning his scientists to research assignments on exotic planets, and I was more interested in going home to my nice bed every night.
Besides, I’d begun an on-again, off-again romance with the waitress at the corner diner two blocks from my house. Every night, at 10 PM, I’d walk over, across black asphalt streets glowing with reflected streetlight, sit in the same booth, and order a glass of milk and a slice of coconut cream pie.
Natalie would swish over, her skirt flowing around her generous thighs, and bring me the pie, the glass of milk, and a fork, then arrange it all in front of me. Sometimes, if I was feeling particularly frisky, I’d look up at her face as she arranged things. A week ago, a tendril of hair had escaped her severe hairdo and fallen in front of her eyes, but I wasn’t courageous enough to reach up and brush it aside.
Most of the time, I just watched her hands as they moved across the table. Sometimes, when she was finished, she’d touch my shoulder and say “Enjoy!” before walking away.
I say on-again, off-again, but that’s not entirely accurate. I think I’m on-again when I can look her in the eye. The rest of the time, we’re off-again. It’s entirely up to me to take the next step, and I simply won’t be rushed into love. It isn’t proper.
McDavity was still waving the fork at me and saying something, so I stopped daydreaming about Natalie long enough to listen.
“—and you’ll go to Kepler-186f to document the existence of the monoceros purpurea.”
“What?” I squeaked. “I can’t go, Mr. McDavity. I have obligations, experiments I’m not finished running yet. A lecture to give. So, you see, it’s impossible.”
McDavity tossed the empty container into the sink, along with the fork he’d used, looked around for a napkin and, failing to find one, wiped his hands on his trousers. He finished chewing the food left in his mouth and swallowed it in a big gulp.
“Nonsense, Johnson. You’re going. Have my assistant draw up your travel papers.” He walked out of the room, whistling tunelessly. I stared after him.
This was ridiculous. I didn’t have to tolerate this.
Mary Sue walked in from the hallway and made a beeline for the refrigerator, but froze halfway when she spotted the empty container in the stainless steel sink. She scowled at me and pointed at the sink.
“You did that?” she screeched. “I can’t believe you ate my lunch! It’s labeled with my name! I am going to HR about this.” She whirled around and stomped from the room, her short, cropped hair swaying angrily.
I stared after her, openmouthed. I hadn’t even had the opportunity to deny it.
Behind me, the microwave beeped. With a muffled pop, the noodle soup exploded, coating the inside of the microwave oven with moist, sticky noodles.
I sighed. Maybe finding a monoceros purpurea wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
Then it struck me. Monoceros purpurea means “purple unicorn.”
I groaned aloud.
* * *
My second mistake was not quitting, right then and there. There’s something indubitably wrong when your boss is an unethical twit like McDavity, somebody who steals another's lunch and then lets me take the blame. I won’t describe how painful the discussion with HR was or how long it took for the travel papers to be drawn up, and I certainly won’t mention the horrible conditions on the FTL ship I took, the USS Driving Miss Daisy.
It was an older model, with subpar shielding, and I spent the first week of the trip wishing I enjoyed the taste of alcohol and the second week of the trip in soused bliss. When we disembarked on Jungle, the heavily forested Earth-like planet orbiting in the habitable zone around Kepler, I had a monstrous hangover and what felt like fur growing on my tongue.
I had absolutely no interest in finding a purple unicorn and resented being sent away from my lab. Most importantly, I hated being apart from Natalie. My stomach growled, thinking of coconut cream pie, as I stumbled off the shuttle into the bright sunlight of Jungle, or Kepler-186f.
A tiny, cheerful man with a scarlet face stood in the receiving line, holding a small sign that said Johnson on it. I assumed he was my driver, so I walked up to him, dropped my suitcase at his feet, and said, with all the dignity I could muster “I am Johnson, you diminutive tomato.”
He smiled up at me, folded the sign, and said “Come with me.” He turned and walked away, ignoring my luggage.
Grumbling, I picked up my suitcase and followed him. We walked through a pair of glass doors and into a cool, air-conditioned terminal crowded with dozens of different aliens in transit from one place to another, with Jungle being a stopover.
I was ogling a three-breasted, orange-furred woman when my driver stopped short, causing me to bump into him. Hard.
“Whass the deal?” I bellowed, swaying above him and trying to focus well enough to see what had caused him to stop.
With a grandiose gesture, he indicated a completely empty bike rack. I frowned, pointed a shaky finger, and said “Very nice. You have bike racks. Now are you going to drive me to my hotel?”
His smile never faltered, and he gestured again at the bike rack. I began to grow annoyed. I just wanted a nice, cool, dark hotel room with a bed that was connected to a concrete floor that was, in turn, connected somewhere below to solid ground. I didn’t want to sleep on a ship’s bed again anytime soon.
So I did the honorable thing and squinted once again in the direction of the bike rack. And, this time, I noticed something I’d not seen before. At the end, wedged into the last slot, there was a bicycle.
A dilapidated, rusty, oval-wheeled bicycle.
“Whassat?” I demanded, drawing myself up to my full five foot seven height. “I am expected to convey myself on that?” I pointed and, in so doing, dropped my suitcase on his foot.
His smile disappeared, and he spent the next fifteen seconds or so hopping around on the other foot, yelling words that I couldn’t understand. When the ruckus died down, my headache was worse, and, to my chagrin, a police officer stood in front of me.
He held a cudgel in one hand and kept whacking it against the horny callus on the palm of his other hand. Several highly inappropriate jokes came to mind, making me giggle.
The next thing I knew, I was staring in wonder at the very shiny patent leather shoes the police officer was wearing, and I’d completely forgotten about my headache. Because my stomach felt like a mule had kicked it.
I opened my mouth to protest and all the lunch I’d eaten on the ship slithered out and coated the tops of the very shiny patent leather shoes in front of me.
In the cold, dark, lizard portion of my brain, I found this shocking. But I wasn’t using that part of my brain at the moment, so I laughed.
When everything was straightened out and I’d apologized to everybody, I found myself r
iding down a busy street on the oval-wheeled bicycle, rising up and down, my suitcase strapped securely to a rack mounted over the rear wheel. The police officer had spoken English well enough to send off my driver—who, it turned out, was only there to greet me and extort a massive gratuity—and give me directions to the hotel and the tour guide I was supposed to be using during my search.
After navigating the streets of Jungle’s main city, Brazil, I finally found my way to the location the officer had described.
It was not, as I’d hoped, a modern hotel with dark, cool rooms and clean crisp sheets on the bed.
It was a thatched hut with a hammock and about a million small green lizards. I spent my first night in Jungle sweating profusely and knocking curious lizards off my face. The damn things flew.
* * *
The next morning, I drank about a gallon of water and looked for my guide. An older woman met me and introduced herself as Khalif.
“Khalif?” I said.
She frowned at me and crinkled her nose. “Yes,” she said in broken English. “My friends call me Khalif. You call me Miss Ocking-Klark.”
I grinned at the audible hyphen. “Are you divorced?”
She shook her head. “No, he dead. Annoyed me.” She waggled a warning finger at me. “Don’t annoy me, you.”
I ducked back into my lizard den to fetch my suitcase.
We climbed into a small truck, and she drove me into the back country. I’d done some reading on the way to Jungle and had learned that 90 percent of the planet was still unexplored. The monoceros I was seeking had been rumored to exist, but nobody had ever photographed one or captured one. Sure, other unicorns existed, of all shades, and they roamed everywhere, but nobody had documented a purple one.
We trundled our way down an almost-invisible dirt path, pushing aside vines and the clutching branches of countless bushes. The jungle reeked of warm, moist death, pungent and sharp one moment, flowery and sweet the next.
I tried to strike up a conversation with Ocking-Klark, but she refused to converse. “We be there soon!” she kept singing out, every time I asked how long it would be.
It was just turning dark when she finally stopped the truck. “Now you get out,” she said.
I looked around. “Where are we?”
She smiled at me, but no part of that smile touched her eyes. “You get out,” she said again. But this time, there was a snub-nosed automatic in her hand.
I got out.
She started the truck again and drove directly into a bush. I stared at her. Had she crashed, leaving me alone, in the middle of the jungle? White lights lit up on the rear of the truck and a horrible beeping sound began.
I scratched my head and then, without warning, the truck zoomed directly at me. Acting purely on instinct, I dove to the side, away from the truck and into a thorn bush. Dozens of thorns pierced my skin; one almost got me in the eye.
“Hey!” I shouted. The horrible beeping stopped and Ocking-Klark’s voice said sweetly, “Sorry!” There was a thump as something hit the dirt, then a loud grinding sound, and the truck pulled away from me, twin red lights disappearing down the path we’d followed, fading into the gathering darkness.
I crawled out of the thorn bush, dusted myself off, and tried to stanch the bleeding.
“Hey!” I yelled after the disappearing red pinpricks but they were gone, swallowed up in the growth.
I was alone.
I kicked the bag she’d thrown from the back of the truck and spent the next few moments hopping on one foot, clutching at the other one I’d used to kick the bag. I sat down and pulled off my shoe and sock to examine my foot. Nothing was broken, but it certainly ached.
The bag was a Jungle survival kit, and it included water, freeze-dried food, cooking utensils, a sleeping bag, a folding cot, a gas stove, and a large black block that seemed to be some sort of folded tent. It had a yellow button on the side that said press me and step back.
So I did.
With a hiss, the black block split, then split again, lurched up, and then split a third time.
Giant wings lifted up from the center, reached for the sky, and then slowly settled to either side. When the noise had abated, I found myself staring, openmouthed, at a nice four-room tent, complete with zippered mosquito netting and a functioning bathroom.
“Huh,” I said, which was as close to intelligent as I felt at that moment. I dragged everything into the tent and zipped it shut as the last of the light drained from the sky.
The tent had a clapping light mechanism that would turn on when you clapped once, then turn off when you clapped twice. I found that out by accident, never mind how, but I soon had the lights on and the equipment stashed in one of the rooms.
The tent was remarkably spacious, but I couldn’t figure out what powered the lights. There didn’t seem to be any batteries and, eventually, I gave up looking. I unrolled my sleeping bag and went to sleep, surrounded by the sound of millions of whirring insects.
* * *
The next morning, I awoke to sunlight peeking through the trees around me. A fine mist floated in the air, and the chattering of the insects from the night before was merely a memory. I went inside the little bathroom, ran some water in the sink, and washed my face. Then I unpacked my toothbrush and brushed my teeth, wondering, as I spat, where the waste water would go.
A crunching sound from outside drew my attention, and I stepped to the screened wall of what I had decided to call the living room to peer out.
I gasped. I’d flown across the dark depths of space to find a purple unicorn and, bejeweled in dew and regal in a shaft of early morning sunlight, there stood one, resplendent and majestic.
I whirled around, grabbed my datapad, and fumbled with the zipper on the tent wall. Ripping it straight up, I stepped outside and walked slowly through the underbrush, datapad held at arm’s length, trying to record this beautiful creature. It was sixteen hands high, which in horse terms is really tall, and it allowed me to approach within ten meters without trying to escape.
The high-definition camera in the datapad worked flawlessly, and I crept even closer. I hadn’t imagined that my quest would turn out to be so easy. I began to narrate as I moved, hoping to capture the information I was seeing, just in case the video portion didn’t come through.
“It is approximately nine in the morning on June 25, 2157, and I am on Jungle, deep in the backwoods. I awoke this morning and found the elusive monoceros purpurea standing outside my tent. It’s approximately a hundred and sixty centimeters high, weighs approximately four hundred and fifty kilograms, and appears remarkably tame. The horn is spiral in nature and emanates from the beast’s forehead, extending out about fifty centimeters.”
I had approached within three meters, and I imagined that my calm, relaxed voice was instrumental in maintaining the unicorn’s placid demeanor. I stepped closer and continued to narrate.
“The coat is a deep shade of aubergine, silky in appearance and without knots or matting. The unicorn appears very tame and, as I approach, has not become skittish or changed its rate of respiration.”
At this point, I was a mere meter away. I could see the whites of its eyes and the casual flaring of its nostrils as it breathed. I kept one eye on the long, spiral horn, wondering what the lethal radius for such a menacing weapon might be.
The unicorn swung its head around and looked directly at me with its left eye. It opened its mouth. I moved the datapad closer, trying to film its teeth, wondering if close examination of the molars would allow me to, later, assess the age of the giant, eggplant-colored beast.
The unicorn leaned forward a bit, clamped its teeth on the top of the datapad, and, whinnying, galloped away from me, ripping the datapad right out of my hands.
The sounds of its crashing through the bushes faded as I stood there, mouth agape, in utter disbelief.
“Hey!” I shouted.
I must have stood there, frozen in place, for five full minutes, staring in the dire
ction the unicorn had gone, hoping against hope that it might return and give me back my datapad.
Mentally, I kicked myself for having not thought about the danger inherent in approaching a unicorn so closely. I should have known better and, foolishly, I had let my scientific curiosity override common sense.
“Idiot,” I whispered, then turned around and began trudging back to my tent. I hadn’t gone three meters before I heard a slight sound, an extra crunch of greenery. I stopped. There was a half-step sound after I’d stopped moving. I strained my ears.
Something was amiss. I took three more steps, then stopped again. For the second time, I heard that odd half-step sound. As if I was being followed.
Frowning, I took two more steps and then whirled around.
Two meters behind me stood the purple unicorn, datapad firmly clamped in its teeth, stalking me. Its eyes flew open with a merry twinkle, and it spun around and galloped away.
We played this game for the better part of the morning, me giving chase, screaming to the unicorn to drop the datapad and it bounding joyously into the brush every time I drew close.
By the time midday rolled around, I was exhausted and in no mood to continue. I stepped into the tent, turned on the cold water faucet, and soaked a washcloth. Pressing the washcloth against my forehead, I collapsed on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.
Stupid unicorn. I didn’t want this assignment anyway and now McDavity was going to charge me for the lost datapad. I moved the washcloth from my forehead and wiped it across my neck, cleaning off the sweat that had accumulated there in the jungle heat. I ran it along my arms and across my face, feeling the cool dampness revive and refresh my spirits.
Then I sat bolt upright. Bed? I scrambled off the bed and looked around for the sleeping bag I’d slept in the night before. It was nowhere to be found. I looked under the bed and then behind it, just in case it had fallen between the wall and the bed.
I stopped short. Wall?
With trembling fingers, I touched the cool plaster of the bedroom wall and then ran them across the soft, cotton sheets. I scratched my head, unable to explain what I was seeing. Had I been so obsessed with the unicorn that I had missed somebody replacing my tent with a walled room?