Unicorns II

by Gardner Dozois

  UNICORNS II

  EDITED BY

  JACK DANN & GARDNER DOZOIS

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-118-4

  Copyright © 2013 by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

  First printing: November 1992

  Cover art by: Ron Miller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:

  "The Calling of Paisley Coldpony," by Michael Bishop, copyright © 1988 by Davis Publications, Inc.; first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, January 1988; reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Unicornucopia," by Lawrence Watt-Evans, copyright © 1992 by Lawrence Watt-Evans; this is an original story, appearing here for the first time; used by permission of the author.

  "The Black Horn," by Jack Dann, copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc.; first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1984; reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Hole in Edgar's Hillside," by Gregory Frost, copyright © 1991 by Davis Publications, Inc.; first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Mid-December 1991; reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Hunting of Death: The Unicorn," by Tanith Lee, copyright © 1984 by Tanith Lee; first published in Night Visions 1 (Dark Harvest); reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Stalking the Unicorn With Gun and Camera," by Mike Resnick, copyright © 1986 by Mercury Press, Inc.; first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Boy Who Drew Unicorns," by Jane Yolen, copyright © 1988 by Jane Yolen, first published in The Unicorn Treasury, edited by Bruce Coville (Doubleday & Company); reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  "Ghost Town," by Jack C. Haldeman II, copyright © 1992 by Jack C. Haldeman II; this is an original story, appearing here for the first time; used by permission of the author.

  "The Stray," by Susan Casper and Gardner Dozois, copyright © 1987 by Susan Casper and Gardner Dozois; first published in The Twilight Zone Magazine, December 1987; reprinted by permission of the authors.

  "The Shade of Lo Man Gong," by William F. Wu, copyright © 1988 by William F. Wu; first published in Pulphouse Two (Pulphouse Publishing); reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Princess, the Cat, and the Unicorn," by Patricia C. Wrede, copyright © 1988 by Patricia C. Wrede; first published in The Unicorn Treasury, edited by Bruce Coville (Doubleday & Company); reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Naked Wish-Fulfillment," by Janet Kagan, copyright © 1989 by Janet Kagan; first published in Pulphouse Three (Pulphouse Publishing); reprinted by permission of the author.

  For

  Christopher Casper

  and

  Jody Scobie

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The editors would like to thank the following people for their help and support:

  Susan Casper, who helped with much of the word-crunching here; Jeanne Van Buren Dann; Janet Kagan; Ricky Kagan; Ellen Datlow; Mike Resnick; Laura Resnick; Sheila Williams; Ian Randall Strock; Jane Yolen; Lawrence Watt-Evans; Jack C. Haldeman II; Gregory Frost; Michael Swanwick; the staff of Borders bookstore in Philadelphia, and particularly Pedro Dias; all the folks on the Delphi and Genie computer networks who offered suggestions; Peter Heck; and special thanks to our own editors, Susan Allison and Ginjer Buchanan.

  Preface

  After the dragon, the unicorn is probably the most popular and pervasive of all mythological beasts. Although we tend to think of the unicorn in a medieval European setting, it was known to the classical Greeks and Romans, and in actuality is an ancient symbol that can be found all over the world, in Jewish and Hindu mythology as well as Christian folklore. Like the dragon, the unicorn also has a Chinese counterpart, the k'i-lin, one of the four animals of good omen (the dragon, the phoenix, and the tortoise are the other three), and the foremost of all the creatures who live on the land. While the k'i-lin is depicted as having the body of a deer and the tail of an ox, the more familiar version of the unicorn is the Western Unicorn, usually described as being like a white horse with a goat's beard and a long twisted horn projecting out of its forehead.

  Although originally a symbol of untamable ferocity—in Solinus's words, of all creatures "the cruelest is the Unicorne, a Monster that belloweth horrible . . . He is never caught alive; kylled he may be, but taken he cannot be"—by medieval times the unicorn had become a meek, gentle, and mild creature, a common symbol of Christ: a beast who would be drawn to seek out a virgin and trustingly lay his head in her lap . . . whereupon the huntsmen would leap out of concealment and fall upon him with spears and knives. The unicorn's horn, gained through such cruel deceptions as these, was probably the most valued magic object in European mysticism. In Edward Topsell's words, powdered unicorn horn "doth wonderfully help against poyson," and in addition is proof "against the pestilent feaver . . . against the bitings of ravenous Dogs, and the strokes or poysonsome stings of other creatures . . . and . . . against the belly or mawe worms." It also helped you to drink as much as you wished without becoming drunk, and even made "the teeth white or clear"—all this in addition to its well-known properties as an aphrodisiac! No wonder there are so few unicorns left!

  Even in our busy modern world, the unicorn seems to have lost none of its power to fascinate, and is as potent an archetype today as it ever was in the Middle Ages. The image of the unicorn can be found everywhere these days, from calendars to coffee mugs, from jewelry to stuffed toys to posters . . . but to find the soul of this elusive beast, one must turn to the works of contemporary fantasists, where the myth of the unicorn is still alive and growing, changing in sometimes surprising ways as society itself changes . . . and where the unicorn itself may be encountered in its most vivid, evocative, and elemental form.

  As you are about to encounter it yourself, in the stories that follow!

  The Calling of Paisley Coldpony

  by

  Michael Bishop

  Michael Bishop is one of the most acclaimed and respected members of that highly talented generation of writers who entered SF in the 1970s. His renowned short fiction has appeared in almost all the major magazines and anthologies, and has been gathered in three collections: Blooded on Arachne, One Winter in Eden, and Close Encounters With the Deity. In 1981 he won the Nebula Award for his novelette ''The Quickening," and in 1983 he won another Nebula Award for his novel No Enemy but Time. His other novels include Transfigurations, Stolen Faces, Ancient Days, Catacomb Years, Eyes of Fire, The Secret Ascension, and Unicorn Mountain. His most recent novel is Count Geiger's Blues. Bishop and his family live in Pine Mountain, Georgia.

  Here he offers us a fascinating study of a young Ute Indian girl's strange search for something beyond the life we know. . . .

  i.

  In the Sun Dance lodge, she found that she was one of sixteen ghostly dancers and the only female.

  Was this the second or the third day? Or the fourth of one of those controversial four-day dances decreed by Alvin Powers in the late 1970s? No. She'd been a mere child then, and the year after Powers's heart attack Sun Dancing with the Wind River Shoshones in Wyoming, DeWayne Sky had a vision calling on the Southern Utes to go back to their traditional three-day ceremony.

  But the young woman felt sure it wasn't the first day, for on the first day the center pole—the conduit of power from the Holy He-She—supp
orted no buffalo head. Although the sun coming into the Thirst House struck so that she could not really focus on the totem lashed just beneath the crotch of the sacred cottonwood, she could see that something was there.

  On the second day of the event, the tribal Sun Dance committee had tied it in place—an animal head now so halo-furred that she could give it no clear outline. She was praying to it, as well as to the Holy He-She, to channel water down the Tree of Life into her orphaned body so that she could do miracles. The miracle that she most wanted to do was the restoration of the health and dignity of her tribe. And of herself, too.

  Which day is this? she wondered again. How much longer must I dance with these men?

  In the path to the center pole next to her own path strutted Larry Cuthair. This was strange. Larry was between his junior and senior years of high school, a grade behind her.

  It defied all logic that the Great Spirit had chosen Larry—in too many ways a quasi-Anglicized young man—to dance now. In fact, she would have bet that Larry was a decade or two away from such an honor, if he were going to attain to it at all, and yet he was dancing up to the Tree of Life and falling back from it in the path next to hers. She could smell not only his boyish sweat but also the chalky odor of the white paint smeared all over his belly and chest, his face, neck and arms. The ceremonial skirt he wore, his beaded waistband, and the eagle feathers that he clutched also gleamed white—in eerie contrast to the multicolored garb of the dancers at every other Sun Dance she'd attended.

  This, too, was peculiar. But, then, looking around the dance floor of the Thirst House, she saw that all the other dancers—DeWayne Sky, Brevard Mestes, Timothy Willow, all of them—had powdered themselves in the same alarming way.

  Their skirts, ivory. Their waistbands, like bone. Their bare feet, chalk-dusted and ghostly.

  The impression that she had was of a room in an insane asylum for spendthrift bakers, men compelled to throw handfuls of flour into the air and then to frolic solemnly in the fallout. But, of course, when she looked, she saw that she (though a woman, and the sort of woman who would pester a Sun Dance chief to accept her into a ceremony once exclusively male) had followed their example. Her own body paint was white. So were her doeskin dress, her sequined apron, her eagle-bone whistle, and every bead on every necklace or bracelet adorning her person. She had joined the crazy bakers in their floury celebration, and this Sun Dance would fail because its purpose was not just to acquire power, but to appease the Old Ones already dead—to guide their spirits to rest in the ghost lands beyond the mountains. Its purpose certainly wasn't to mock the Old Ones by pretending to be an ini'putc' oneself.

  "Why are we dressed like ghosts?" she cried.

  Her cry went unanswered. The noise of the men drumming in the corral's arbor, the guttural chanting of the men and women around the drummers, and the shuffling and shouts of encouragement from the spectators opposite the singers—all these noises kept her from being heard. But maybe that was good. She knew that to talk too much while dancing was considered folly. It cut one off from the trance state triggered by the heat, the drumming, the chanting, the pistoning of legs, the prayerful flailing of arms.

  And, she knew, it was this trance state that gave one access to God's Spine, the Tree of Life, the Sacred Rood at the heart of the lodge. For only through the center pole and the totems tied to it could one take the power that every dancer coveted for the sake of the entire Sun Dance community. Maybe it was good that no one had heard her shout. Many of her neighbors already resented DeWayne Sky for letting her—a woman only recently out of high school—dance with the men. They would take great pleasure in telling everyone that she had been guilty of sacrilege, or at least of imperfect seriousness, while dancing, and that her behavior in the corral not only disgraced her and her dead mother, Dolores Aniola, but also destroyed the value of the dance for every Southern Ute. That was the more dreadful result, for all her tribespeople would ostracize her.

  But so what? she thought. Ever since Mama D'lo shot herself, I've lived without their help. I don't need them and I don't want their approval. I want the Utes to be strong—to be better than they are—but if they turn their backs on me, so what? It's only what I've been doing to them since the night Mama spray-painted our walls with her brains. So I'm dancing today—my second day? my third? my fourth?—as a kind of apology for appearing not to wish them well. I do wish them well. I just don't want them to smother me with their fretful love.

  Again, she shouted, "Why have we all made ourselves look like ini'putc'?"

  But the shrill piping of eagle-bone whistles and the constant thunder of drums kept everyone from hearing her. Except, she soon learned, Larry Cuthair, who strutted up and rebuked her. Did she want to screw up everything? he growled. The Old Ones would think her questions out of place, disrespectful.

  "The way we look is out of place!" she countered, dancing at Larry's side. "The way we look is disrespectful!"

  Larry regarded her with something like incredulity. "DeWayne Sky told us to dress and paint ourselves like this—to pretend to be our own ancestors."

  "We should honor them, Larry, not mock them!"

  "But he only instructed us as he did because your dreams—the ones you had in the spring—showed us dancing this way. It's all your doing, Paisley."

  "Horseshit!" said Paisley Coldpony. She danced away from the center pole, angry at Larry for feeding her such garbage.

  All her doing? How?

  Yes, the Shoshones at Fort Hall sometimes used white body paint at their Sun Dances, one of which she had attended with D'lo three years ago, but it was idiotic to say that she had influenced Sky to tell every Southern Ute dancer to wear white dress and body paint because of her dreams.

  What dreams? And why would their Sun Dance chief go along with such a major change solely on her say-so? Some people believed that three or four dancers every year lied about their dream calls, saying that they had had one when they really hadn't, and would-be dancers who went to Sky with a vision requiring novel alterations in the ceremony got looked at askance.

  Besides, Paisley told herself, I had no dream like that. I had no such dream at all. But if not, what was she doing dancing with these men? They owed their tribe three days without food or water—solely in the hope of gaining the Great Manitou's curing powers, the repose of the dead, and their neighbors' respect. You couldn't dance without being dream-called, but Paisley had no memory of her summons. What was happening here?

  Defiantly, she cried, "Why are we mocking our dead?"

  An old man on the north side of the lodge shook a willow wand at her. Although Paisley had never known him to dance, he regarded himself as an expert on the ritual. The whites in Ignacio knew him as Herbert Barnes, the Utes as Whirling Goat. He had a face like a dry arroyo bottom and a voice like a sick magpie's.

  "Do it right!" he taunted her. "Do it right or get out!"

  Dancing toward the Tree of Life, half blinded by the sunlight pouring through its fork, Paisley shrieked her whistle at Whirling Goat, then gestured rudely at him. Another broken rule—but the old sot had provoked her.

  "You don't know how!" he called. "You don't belong!"

  "Stuff it, goat face," Larry Cuthair said, swerving out of his path toward the spectator section. Barnes retreated a step or two, pushing other onlookers aside, but halted when farther back in the crowd. From there, he croaked again for Paisley's removal—she was fouling the ceremony, turning good medicine to bad.

  At that point, the gate keeper and the lodge policeman decided that Barnes was the one "fouling the ceremony" and unceremoniously removed him. Many onlookers applauded.

  "Forget him," Larry whispered when next they were shoulder to shoulder on their dance paths. "He's a woman hater."

  Whirling Goat confirmed this judgment by breaking free of his escorts at the western door, running back into the Thirst House, and yelling at her, "You foul the dance! You pollute the lodge!" He held his nose in a gesture implying that,
against all law and tradition, she had entered the corral while in her cycle.

  Many people jeered, but now Paisley couldn't tell if they were jeering Barnes or her. What hurt most was that she was clean, as her people still insisted on defining a woman's cleanliness. And Whirling Goat, a famous toss-pot often as fragrant as a distillery, could not've smelled even Larry's sister Melanie Doe's overpowering styling mousse without having a ball of it stuck directly under his nose. In any case, the gate keeper and the lodge policeman dragged him outside again.

  Much aggrieved, Paisley told Larry, "He was lying."

  "I know," Larry said. He smiled to show that he didn't mean to denigrate her entire gender, but the smugness of the remark ticked her off as much as had Whirling Goat's old-fashioned bigotry. She moved away from Larry, toward the backbone of the lodge. She tried to make the furry totem on the center pole resolve out of the sun's glare into a recognizable buffalo head.

  Meanwhile, it amazed her to see that Tim Willow, a dancer, was wearing reflective sunglasses. His face appeared to consist of two miniature novas and a grimace. Surely, it couldn't be fair to Sun Dance thus disguised, thus protected. Or could it?

  ii.

  Hours passed. Paisley's thirst increased. Her throat felt the way Barnes's face looked—parched. That was to be expected; it was a goal of the dance to empty oneself of moisture so that the purer water of Sinawef, the Creator, could flow down the cottonwood into the lodge and finally into one's dried-out body. Thirst was natural, a door to power.