The Unicorn Trade

by Poul Anderson

  “I’ll think of one. For instance, motherhood increases population pressure and the man-eating shark reduces it. Didn’t you see George O.’s letter in Analog?”

  “Yes. Really, though, darling, these days the position you want me to take is dismally conventional. Much more effective to declare in favor of God, motherhood, and apple pie, and against sin and the man-eating shark.”

  “Won’t work. People would only say, ‘That’s him again, on his back-to-McKinley kick.’ ”

  “You prefer Nixon? Having barely survived Johnson and Kennedy? But anyhow, brighteyes, I’m well aware that these days it is not necessary and certainly not sufficient to argue from fact and logic. Your grounds must be fashionable.”

  “Okay, let’s hear.”

  “Snuggle closer, hm? Now let me think—Ah, yes.

  “God. Well, after all, without God there wouldn’t be churches, would there? And without churches, there wouldn’t be any Social Gospel or Fathers Berrigan and Groppi or many other delightful features of our mod world. And besides, you know, God is real groovy. Like in Playboy a little while back, remember, they had this article proving what a swinger Jesus was. And man has to find Meaning—he has to get away from Dehumanizing Science—and, sure, you can find Meaning if you say Om often enough, but you can find it in First Corinthians too; and Christianity draws from so many different religions that it has more to offer than its predecessors, whose temple rites, shamans, and gods were generally pretty brutal; in other words, Christianity can drive you a lot crazier than ziggurats and witches and vile, vile Rimmon.

  “Next—don’t bother me, I’m trying to think—motherhood. You must realize that the concept involves more than simply farrowing. The image of Mother requires a child already in the world—a whole family, in fact, of which she is the serene, benign, tender but infinitely strong and patient center—to which she devotes her entire life, considering herself happy if at the end when she is old, her children kiss her work-worn hands before they set her little grandchildren on her lap that she may cuddle and care for these too.… Yes. Let’s by all means associate reproduction with motherhood; let’s get this fixed in every female heart and soul. The population curve will nosedive!

  “Apple pie.… Don’t bother me, I said.… Well, if you want to bother me that way—

  “Ah, yes. Apple pie. Good old-fashioned American apple pie. None of these frozen imitations, produced by impersonal machines in some atmosphere-polluting factory for the profit of greedy capitalists. No, people should do for themselves, expressing their individuality in arts and crafts and apple pies. In fact, they ought to raise their own apples—and wheat, which they can personally plant, harvest, thresh, and mill—thereby helping the environment, since green leaves revitalize the air.… And having baked several extra pies, you can trade them to your neighbor for some wool off the sheep he keeps, which you can wash, card, spin, and weave with your own individual hands.”

  The gentleman stopped for breath. “What about the negative side?” asked the lady. “You’re supposed to be against—”

  “Sin. I know,” he replied. “The kinds of sin being legion, let’s stay by the nineteenth-century equation of it with fornication, and see if we can convince enlightened modern youth of the virtue of chastity. Hm-m-m.…

  “One doesn’t ordinarily get positive results by saying, when first introduced to a girl, ‘How do you do? Do you fornicate?’ At least, I never did, though I admit being too chicken to try. A certain amount of courtship is involved. And even after they have bedded, a couple must find things to do outside of this, or the relationship will perish of boredom and thus the fornication will stop.

  “Therefore sinning takes time that could better be spent in demonstrating, rioting, and other socially conscious activities. It induces people to buy gifts for each other, making more profits for the corrupt establishment. They tend to drive around in automobiles, befouling the atmosphere. The mechanical contraceptives they throw away are not very bio-degradable. Or, if they use pills, these are produced in factories whose effluents doubtless go into the rivers.

  “Obviously, the only way to be with it nowadays is to stay celibate.”

  “Really?” she murmured.

  “I am a hopeless reactionary,” he reminded her.

  “You haven’t finished,” she said. “You’ve still got the man-eating shark.”

  “Forget it. A shark is not what I want right now—oh, all right. Simple. If man-eating sharks are around, people avoid swimming. This has several bad effects. For one, they don’t get close to nature in that particular fashion. Instead, they stay in town, going to a movie or drinking in a bar or otherwise helping support the corrupt establishment. Furthermore, if they don’t swim, they’re less aware of the extent to which the water is polluted, and thus less likely to get active in the struggle to save our environment. And finally, when a shark does eat a man, it converts him to ordure, and too much untreated human waste is already being dumped into the oceans.

  “Are you satisfied?”

  “Not yet,” she said.

  “Same here,” he agreed. “Let’s stop talking and develop a meaningful relationship.”

  “Can’t we just have fun?” she asked.

  —Poul Anderson

  PROFESSOR JAMES

  (melody: “Jesse James”)

  Moriarty was the name of brothers both called James,

  A colonel and a former math professor.

  The prof went bad in time, and so he turned to crime

  The crafty brain of which he was possessor.

  (Chorus)

  Moriarty in his time was Napoleon of crime.

  He wanted not for ally nor for slave.

  But Sherlock was the guy who

  wouldn’t drop or die,

  And he laid Moriarty in his grave.

  Moriarty squatted and feloniously plotted

  In the spiderweb of tangled London town.

  A thread had but to twitch, and ’twould help to make him rich;

  He’d dream a scheme and sell it for cash down.

  When Sherlock crossed his path, he first withheld his wrath.

  But soon his plots were hampered absolutely.

  He swore that he respected Holmes’ style as he detected—

  He’d murder Holmes regretting it acutely.

  He didn’t offer payoff, but he did ask Holmes to lay off,

  Explaining that he otherwise must die.

  Sherlock said to him, “Although the prospect’s grim,

  At least we’ll go together, you and I.”

  Now Moriarty swore he’d save his own dear gore,

  And sent his hoods to fix an accident:

  But Sherlock was too wary and he knew he shouldn’t tarry,

  So he dodged them all and toured the Continent.

  The little fish were netted, the ones the prof abetted,

  By evidence that Holmes sent Scotland Yard;

  But the shark himself got free across the narrow sea

  And hunted Holmes to catch him off his guard.

  Moriarty found the track that led to Reichenbach

  And by a trick got Sherlock all alone.

  A note upon the brink was the end, as all did think,

  Of the best and wisest man we’ve ever known.

  The Final Problem’s end had robbed us of our friend

  And left a void that no one else could fill.

  But his fire no man could douse, and in The Empty House

  We found that Sherlock Holmes was with us still.

  —Poul and Karen Anderson

  LANDSCAPE WITH SPHINXES

  The pride was a small one, even as sphinxes go. An arrogant black mane blew back over Arctanax’s shoulders and his beard fluttered against his chest. Ahead and a little below soared Murrhona and Selissa, carrying the remnants of the morning’s kill. It was time the cubs were weaned.

  The valley lifted smooth and broad from the river, then leaped suddenly in sandstone cliffs where the sh
adows seemed more solid then the thorny, gray-green scrub. A shimmer of heat ran along wind-scoured edges.

  In the tawny rocks about the eyrie, the cubs played at stalk-the-unicorn. They were big-eyed, dappled, and only half fledged. Taph, the boy, crept stealthily up a sun-hot slab, peeking around it from time to time to be sure that the moly blossom still nodded on the other side. He reached the top and shifted his feet excitedly. That moly was about to be a dead unicorn. The tip of his tail twitched at the thought.

  His sister Fiantha forgot the blossom at once. Pounce! and his tail was caught between her paws; he rolled back down on top of her, all claws out. They scuffled across baked clay to the edge of a thornbush and backed apart.

  Taph was about to attack again when he saw the grownups dip down from above. He leaped across Fiantha and bounded toward the cave mouth. She came a jump and a half behind. They couldn’t kiss Murrhona and Selissa because of the meat in their jaws, so they kissed Father twice instead.

  “Easy, there! Easy!” Arctanax coughed, but he was grinning. “Get back into the cave, the two of you. How often do I have to tell you to stay in the cave?” The cubs laughed and bounced inside.

  Selissa dropped the meat she had been carrying and settled down to wash her face, but Murrhona called her cubs over to eat. She watched critically as they experimented with their milk-teeth on this unfamiliar substance.

  “Hold it down with your paw, Fiantha,” she directed. “If you just tug at it, it’ll follow you all over the floor. Like Taph—No, Taph, use your side teeth. They’re the biggest and sharpest.” And so the lesson went. After a while both cubs got tired of the game and nuzzled for milk.

  Selissa licked her right paw carefully and polished the bridge of her broad nose. There was still a trace of blood smell; she licked and polished again.

  “You can’t rush them,” she said rather smugly. “I remember my first litter. Time and again I thought they’d learned a taste for meat, but even when they could kill for themselves—only conies and such, but their own kill—they still came back to suck.”

  “Oh, I remember how put out you were when you realized you still had to hold quiet for nursing,” Murrhona smiled lazily. She licked down a tuft behind Fiantha’s ear and resettled her wings. “But I really hate to see them grow up. They’re so cute with their little spots.”

  Selissa shrugged and polished the bridge of her nose again for good measure. If you wanted to call them cute, with their wings all pinfeathers and down shedding everywhere—! Well, yes, she had to admit they were, in a way. She licked her paw once more, meditatively, put her chin down on it and dozed off.

  An hour later Fiantha woke up. Everybody was asleep. She stretched her wings, rolled onto her back, and reached her paws as far as she could. The sun outside was dazzling. She rubbed the back of her head against the cool sandstone floor and closed her eyes, intending to go back to sleep, but her left wing itched. When she licked at it, the itch kept moving around, and bits of down came loose on her tongue.

  She rolled over on her stomach, spat out the fluff, and licked again. There—that did it!

  Fully awake now, she noticed the tip of Arctanax’s tail and pounced.

  “Scram,” he muttered without really waking. She pounced again just as the tail-tip flicked out of reach. Once more and she had it, chewing joyously.

  “Scram, I said!” he repeated with a cuff in her general direction. She went on chewing, and added a few kicks. Arctanax rolled over and bumped into Selissa, who jumped and gave Fiantha a swat in case she needed it. Fiantha mewed with surprise. Murrhona sprang up, brushing Taph aside; he woke too and made a dash for Selissa’s twitching tail.

  “Can’t a person get any rest around here?” grumbled Arctanax. He heaved himself up and walked a few feet away from his by now well-tangled family.

  “They’re just playful,” Murrhona murmured.

  “If this is play, I’d hate to see a fight,” said Selissa under her breath. She patted Taph away and he tumbled enthusiastically into a chewing match with Fiantha.

  “Go to sleep, children,” Murrhona suggested, stretching out again. “It’s much too hot for games.”

  Fiantha rolled obediently away from Taph, and found a good place to curl up, but she wasn’t the least bit sleepy. She leaned her chin on a stone and looked out over the valley. Down there, in the brown-roasted grass, something moved toward a low stony ridge.

  There were several of them, and they didn’t walk like waterbuck or unicorn; it was a queer, bobbing gait. They came slowly up the ridge and out of the grass. Now she could see them better. They had heads like sphinxes, but with skimpy little manes, and no wings at all; and—and—

  “Father, look!” she squeaked in amazement. “What kind of animal is that?”

  He got up to see. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Never saw anything like it in all my born days. But then, we’ve had a lot of queer creatures wandering in since the glaciers melted.”

  “Is it game?” asked Taph.

  “Might be,” Arctanax said. “But I don’t know any game that moves around in the middle of the day like that. It isn’t natural.”

  “And the funny way they walk, too,” added Fiantha.

  “If they’re silly enough to walk around like that at mid-day,” Arctanax said as he padded back to an extra-cool corner of the cave, “I’m not surprised they go on two legs.”

  —Karen Anderson

  ALPHA, BETA

  Not quite thirteen that famous August, I

  Learned α, β, γ to compare

  The blazing secrets troubled atoms share

  With phoenix stars that die and burn and die.

  I learned to spell with ξ and μ and π

  Mesons cascading from the sills of space

  In shower on crackling shower at frantic pace

  Where vacuum softens to electric sky.

  Strange when I learned, one winter through, to spell

  With those same symbols in their first design;

  Haltingly sound out particle and ray,

  And read past protons ancient tales that tell

  How heroes praised strong gods and drank strong wine,

  And, singing, hoisted sail for Troy one day.

  —Karen Anderson

  A BLESSEDNESS OF SAINTS

  Some years ago, the University of California library had an exhibit of old maps. Colorful things. Modern charts don’t compare. Coordinate grids make a drab substitute for wind gods going oompa, oompa, and contour lines are no fair exchange at all for the actual contours on some of those mermaids. To hell with radicals like Goldwater—let’s bring back the eighteenth century! But I digress. What I started out to mention was a Spanish map of the western hemisphere, dated 17-something and not very detailed. One place they did show was Cape Canaveral. And out in the Pacific they had, neatly labeled, the Islas de San Dwich.

  When Anthony Boucher heard about this, he laughed and said that must be a Catalan saint. It’s tempting to develop the hagiography further … Dwich, apostle to the Anthropophagi, martyred by being sliced very thin and served on rye bread with mustard … he did persuade the cannibals to postpone his execution twenty-four hours, till Saturday … But this moving tale had better not be written. There are far too many spurious saints already.

  Some of them are etymological too, like that St. Sophia to whom the cathedral in Constantinople was not dedicated. (For the benefit of any barbarians in my audience, though surely there are none, “Hagia Sophia” means “Holy Wisdom.”) I’ve also heard of St. Trinity (Hagia Triada), St. Saviour, and a St. Cross believed to have been a Frenchman. James Branch Cabell mentions a St. Undecimilla whose name gave rise to the legend of the eleven thousand virgins—for whom, by the way, the Virgin Islands were named—and say, couldn’t a martini be called a vergin?—But I’m digressing again.

  A vast number of saints got into the calendar during the Dark and Middle Ages, before canonization had become a controlled procedure. Some were historical enough, tho
ugh their claims to sainthood are, to put it politely, arguable. St. Olaf of Norway is still accepted, but even in medieval times people admitted that he didn’t attain any state of grace till rather late in life. One of my ambitions is to go onto the campus of St. Olaf College, a strait-laced Lutheran institution in my home town, barricade myself on the water tower, and through a bullhorn read aloud some of the racier passages from the original chronicles of the patron—murders, robberies, booze hoistings, illegitimate son, and all.

  Charlemagne was canonized by an anti-Pope at the request of Frederick Barbarossa; his festival was celebrated in some parts till fairly recently. The Byzantine Empress Zoe, whose career would have made Theodora blush, is a saint in the Eastern church though naturally not among the Romans: likewise Alexander Nevsky, because he stopped a bunch of Catholic invaders. In late years the Vatican has been re-examining the credentials of its saints and has dropped a lot of them, especially the fictitious ones. St. Hippolytus, for instance, who was said to have been dragged to death by horses, is merely Theseus’ son from pagan Greek legend. St. Philomena has likewise been declared to be fabulous. I mean fabulous in the original sense of the word. The modern sense could be applied to the legendary St. Mary the Egyptian, a pilgrim to the Holy Land who worked out her passage in an interesting capacity.

  However, no right-thinking Anglophile can go along with this business of demoting St. George to apocryphal status. Impossible. Utter nonsense. St. George doubtful? Gad, sir, that sort of thing just isn’t said. Least of all where the servants might overhear. Shows you how schism is bound to turn into sheer heresy, by Jove. Ever since those Romans left the C. of E.… St. George for merrie England! God send the right! Death to the French! But first a pint at the George and Dragon.…

  One perfectly genuine saint often confuses people. The Scandinavians have an ancient custom of lighting bonfires on Midsummer Eve; but who’s this here Sankt Hans they talk about?