F&SF BK UNICORNS VOL 2.indb

by Gordon Van Gelder

  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 magnasite 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 fire, 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 magnasite 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.

  The Unicorn Trade

  Karen Anderson

  THEY GRAZE AT night, the unicorns, upon the fresh-dewed grasses,

  Molten starlight flying as they toss their sapphire horns,

  They step with light and dainty hoof below the stony passes,

  Shimmer under shadow where the nightingale mourns.

  The bright manes ripple over dapple flanks,

  Quarter-moon racing past cloudy banks—

  Now on the warning wind of dawn they flee night’s crimson death;

  They sleep in velvet forest shade; they spice it with their breath.

  The castle queens it on her hill, the crown of pride and power,

  Turreted and traceried and carven like a gem,

  With sunny court and golden hall, with wall and lordly tower

  Rich-tapestried with vine and grape, with rose on thorny stem;

  Rubies, damask, pomanders and swords—

  Wild loves, black hates, delights of wine and words—

  Let pipe and tabor play! And thus, hand resting light on hand,

  With quicker-beating heart we’ll foot the skipping allemande.

  There’s goodly trade in unicorns, in castles and their treasure,

  Dragons are much demanded, endless caverns, eagly crags,

  There’s trade in rings of elven work, in songs of striding measure,

  Star-smiting curses, aye, and quests, and splendid thumping brags.

  Come buy! Come choose your heart’s desire of these,

  Fable and dream, wondrous commodities.

  Already yours, these unicorns, as aught you owned yestre’en,

  This castle, real as memory, that none but you have seen.

  Olfert Dapper’s Day

  Peter S. Beagle

  DR. OLFERT DAPPER had never attended any medical school: neither in Amsterdam, where he was born, nor in Utrecht, where he had first begun employing the title Doctor Medicinae, after two years of occasional attendance at the university. Nor, in candor, had he ever visited India, China, Persia, or Africa, about all of which lands he had nevertheless published voluminously detailed and well-received books. A placid, sedentary, somewhat portly man by nature, he had seen no reason to disturb a peaceful existence by crossing undependable oceans, conducting tedious expeditions, or otherwise placing the said existence at risk of discomfort or termination. Much better to write out of a fecund imagination, an even more bountiful fantasy life, and the rich sense of survival that had served him so well for nearly forty-five years. He was, take him for all in all, a pleasant soul who had always trusted in the trust of others, and who had, until quite recently, never found that faith misplaced.

  Unfortunately, his confidence in the gullibility of country bumpkins from Eck en Wiel had lately been badly shaken when one bumpkin turned out to be related—who could have known?—to a seriously powerful member of the States-General capable of recognizing a very slightly fraudulent land contract when he saw one. On the whole, as a presumed man of medicine, Dr. Dapper recommended travel to himself: travel for reasons of health and longevity; travel to destinations which seemed a good deal less important than the swiftness of his departure. The beadle, summons under his arm, was knocking on Dr. Dapper’s front door as that good entrepreneur slipped out the back way, his quickly packed valise firm in his grip.

  But the beadle, a practiced hand in such matters, had thoughtfully stationed two large men halfway down the muddy alley that led from Olfert Dapper’s rear door to the street. Both men carried heavy bludgeons, which twitched very slightly as they waited, like the tails of stalking cats. Dr. Dapper never hesitated at the sight of them, but walked slowly forward, one hand held up in a sign of hopeless surrender, which his shamed-spaniel expression mirrored. The other arm hung limply at his side, as though he had forgotten the battered valise dangling at the end of it. The two bullies grinned at each other, anticipating quick remuneration from their employer and an early night at Fat Mina’s on the Zuilenstraat. They even glanced momentarily over Dr. Dapper’s shoulder, calling their triumph to the beadle as he lumbered through the open back door. This was a mistake.

  Olfert Dapper disapproved of running on both general and practical principles, but in a real sense his entire life had been made up of exceptions to rules. He was almost on the beadle’s men when his forlorn shuffle turned into a sprinter’s burst from the blocks. He swatted one half-raised club away with his valise, simultaneously kicked the second man reprehensibly low, and lunged between them to race away down the alley. The beadle shouted to him to come back, but Dr. Dapper could not believe that he was truly serious.

  He was briefly impressed with his own turn of speed, since he had not had to flee physical attack since his earliest youth. Unfortunately, he had not bargained for his pursuers’ endurance and determination. Hulking they were, and stupid they undoubtedly were; but they saw Fat Mina’s slipping away, and they came pounding tirelessly after a plump middle-aged man. He could not lose them. His breath was coming hard now, and he began to be afraid.

  At one time—fifteen minutes ago, perhaps—Olfert Dapper had known very nearly every grand street and unpaved lane or alleyway in Utrecht, as well as each dwelling, tavern, shop front, or business of every possible degree of legitimacy and possible usefulness. Now they blurred and ran thickly together like spilled paint before his eyes as he wheezed by, and the only clear impression he had of any of them was that no door swung open for him, and not a single soul ran out to his aid. But it was not in his nature to feel wounded or abandoned; he was too busy hoping that he would at least not disgrace himself by throwing up when the beadle’s men ran him to earth. He was a proud man, in his way.

  But then a diligence rumbled around an approaching corner, with the driver’s tip of his tall hat signifying that the small coach was un
occupied and available for hire. Dr. Dapper wrenched the door open, scrambled inside, and sprawled out over the seat while the diligence was still moving. It was some while before he was able to sit up and breathe without pain; consequently, he never had the chance to wave blithely back at his frustrated pursuers, as he would have preferred to do. But their furious shouts carried to his ears for a surprisingly long time, so he did have that satisfaction.

  The diligence, after some intense negotiation, took him by a circuitous route to the great—and hearteningly anonymous—seaport of Rotterdam. Coachman and passenger had developed a companionable rapport during the journey; and Dr. Dapper’s driver, on arriving at their destination, recommended an inn, counseled against certain others, and suggested that a man as much in demand as Dr. Dapper appeared to be might be well-advised to consider the harbor at his first opportunity. “You can’t go back to Utrecht. Not for a year, maybe two years, maybe never. Rotterdam’s no place for you, either—your little chums’ll track you here, sooner or later. And there’s too many of your sort here already.” His eyes grew unfocused, and seemed momentarily to change color. “Me, I’d be looking at the ships.”

  Dr. Dapper, for all the writing he had done about traveling to strange foreign lands, had in fact never been aboard anything larger than a duck-pond raft, and that as a child. Wandering slowly along the waterfront the next day, and the days after, studying the schooners, frigates, merchantmen, whalers, and fishing boats—all so imposing at their quays, so small when he looked out at the rain-gray water beyond—he felt strangely lonely, and very far from all he understood. He looked in the windows of chandlers’ shops, recognizing almost nothing he saw there; he heard songs he had never heard in his life; he cautiously sampled fruits and shellfish he did not recognize from barrows manned by peddlers clad in bright colors, who spoke no language he knew; he sidestepped invitations from girls who needed no language. But most of all, he smelled the sea.

  A burly, one-eyed captain with a Frisian accent eventually agreed to ferry him across the Atlantic to make, like so many other passengers, a fresh start in the New World. The fare was remitted on Dr. Dapper’s agreement to serve as ship’s physician; even surgeon, if this should prove necessary. The voyage, fortunately, turned out to be a remarkably tranquil one, except for Dr. Dapper’s stomach, which had loudly announced its distaste for a life on the rolling deep before the ship had even cast off in Rotterdam harbor. For the next seven weeks, he was his own best patient—and, fortunately for all concerned, very nearly the only one. He did, in mid-Atlantic, have to coax the ship’s cat down from the rigging, into which it had been deposited and abandoned by a malicious sailor. Dr. Dapper, who liked cats, tripped the sailor overboard not long afterward. The ship lost half a day’s progress coming about to pick the man up, and the captain was quite cross.

  Dr. Dapper disembarked in the Americas at Falmouth, on the northeastern coast, and spent a weary, anxious week trying to decide where to go from there. Back to Utrecht would have been his most fervent choice: never having ventured beyond the Netherlands, except in his excellent imagination, he had no difficulty picturing himself being murdered by any of the raw-faced, raw-voiced people thronging the muddy streets and unspeakable inns, or being torn to pieces by wild animals, or being tortured at the stake by Red Indians. But Utrecht remained out of the question, and staying in Falmouth was just as frightening, since he had no faith that the men he had offended would let three thousand miles of ocean keep their hands from his collar: for all he knew, the next sail on the horizon might convey his continued pursuit. Despite the lure of Falmouth’s many ingenuous gulls, veritable canvases for an artist like himself, there was nothing to do but bury himself for as long as necessary in the forests and backlands of this so-called New World. The hunt would surely cool down, sooner or later . . . surely.

  Supply wagons, fur traders’ pack mules, voyageurs’ canoes, and his own blistered feet eventually delivered Olfert Dapper into the Territory of Sagadahock, that province of Britain located east of the Kennebec River in the vaguely delineated colony of Maine. The French had their own name for the region, Acadia, and their own longstanding claims of ownership, but in the village of No Popery Dr. Dapper encountered few French, all of them Huguenot refugees. The local settlers were mainly recusants from the Roman-leaning reign of Charles II—English Puritans, Dutch Calvinists, and Salzburger Lutherans, plus a sprinkling of Anabaptists and a few Jews. Surrounding the village were largely ignored populations of Micmac, Abenaki, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Indians, most of them good-humored and rather bewildered. Dr. Dapper rather took to the Abenaki. He found their peaceful dispositions and placidly bleak view of the universe comfortingly akin to his own.

  For the rest, he liked neither his fellow colonists—whom he judged ignorant, unsophisticated, mostly illiterate, and generally too poor and unimaginative to be worth the effort of swindling—nor his enforced frontier existence. The houses of No Popery were, without exception, constructed of rough timber, their roofs either thatched or bearing a fine crop of grass, for better insulation, their chimneys built from clay-covered logs, their windows not even of horn but mere oiled paper. Sanitary arrangements were worse than anything he had endured aboard ship, and the climate was, as he wrote in his journal,

  “. . . insalubrious in the extreme, being pitilessly hot and miserably cold by turns, and plagued in all seasons by wicked varieties of insect life such as never we encountered in the Netherlands. Nor is this all, for there are wolves larger than the European sort, whose main prey is a kind of monstrous deer known to the Indians as a moose, and there is also a creature like an unspotted leopard, and great bears too, and not a soul with whom one can exchange ideas in a civilized manner. In truth, they are welcome to their Sagadahock, the lot of them, and it to them, and I am surely the most wretched Hollander that ever was. Worst of all, by acclamation they have made me their physician, and apothecary as well, as it was on the ship . . .”

  Coming from as small and topographically tidy a country as Holland, with its gray, sea-menaced flatness and its cathedral skies, he was overwhelmed in both senses of the word by this New World. Everything was too big, monstrously big—trees, animals, rivers, and bellowing waterfalls, even the very seasons themselves, storm and snow and April alike—while the shocking splendor of the changing leaves; the wildflowers; the vast, foggy hills; the dark, virgin, sweet-smelling earth made him want to hide. I would be better in prison. I have no business here.

  There are a limited number of crises and emergencies for which a ship’s doctor, however counterfeit, needs to be prepared. Fractured limbs, scurvy, drunkenness, various souvenirs of Venus, even treatment after a disciplinary flogging—these can be anticipated and prepared for, even by a reasonably experienced impostor, with, in general, no worse damage left in his wake than might be expected from a genuine doctor. But in an isolated settlement of assorted dissenters, fanatics, and castaways, stranded in a completely strange land, with neither impressive-looking implements nor reasonably harmless medications at hand (though the local Abenaki were sometimes whimsically helpful here), Olfert Dapper was most often the only resort of people who had fallen down cliffs; abruptly removed hands or legs while cutting firewood; contracted a disease of which he knew neither the name, the cause, nor the treatment; or come off second-best in some encounter with a bear or a panther. Even had he actually possessed a medical degree, it would likely have proved worse than useless, faced with the dangers and mysteries of Sagadahock. He felt almost as sorry for his patients as he did for himself.

  “Wretched Hollander” or no, paradoxically, he was held in higher respect in No Popery than he ever had been in his homeland.

  Until recently he had been acceptably successful in his various questionable enterprises, if successful can be defined as getting away with it. Not a day of his life had been spent in prison, physical labor, or repentance: a situation that felt far more natural to him than holiness to a saint, since sainthood involves constant stru
ggle and failure, and struggle again. If he had not had a single true friend, there had been few true enemies—or, at least, none who knew where he lived—and it can honestly be said that he had borne ill will toward no man living. Nor woman, either, if it came to that; except perhaps for one Margot Zeldenthuis, who had long since vanished from his life, along with the forty-nine guilders under his pillow. Yet he sighed more often than he cursed when he thought of soft-footed Margot. Like his victims, Olfert Dapper had always had a streak of romance in his nature . . . just less than they.

  In No Popery, to his horror, he was needed. There was no one else in the village who could do what he did, even if he could do little. Gaining trust had always been his living; more than that, it had been his gift, his art, his entire existence and his purpose for existence. Trust bestowed, trust gratefully volunteered, was another matter entirely, and Dr. Dapper would have been the first to admit that, if there had been anyone in his new life to admit it to. His patients—who, for the most part, paid him in venison, wild turkeys, rabbits, vegetables from their small gardens, and labor around the tiny house they had built for him—remained admiring and utterly loyal, whether or not his medications, all invented out of thin blue air, were successful. Socially, he ranked with the minister, a grim, lantern-jawed soul named Giles Kirtley, lean as a winter wolf; slightly ahead of Matthew Prouty, the schoolmaster; and he was a frequent guest at far more well-provided tables than was even Nathaniel Markham, the wealthiest farmer of No Popery, who had real clapboards covering the raw frame of his house, and real glass in his windows. These, according to the lights of the village, were successful men: Dr. Olfert Dapper was celebrated.