The Unicorn Anthology.indb

by Peter S. Beagle

  “She’ll be even more traumatized if you shoot her. Look, I admit it’s not a great option. We just don’t have any better ones. As soon as you have a lock on the hornstalkers, you take them out. I’ll fly the Fey Spy to the girl and keep her entertained until backup arrives.”

  He’s shaking his head. “What if she runs?”

  “I’ll go get her myself. She won’t get far. She’s in flip-flops.”

  He’s about to argue, but decides against it. “Out of time,” he sighs. “We do it your way. Don’t fuck up.”

  “Don’t miss.”

  Gavin aims the rifle ahead, looks into the scope with one eye, winks the other. I look back to the Fey Spy display-screen, catch up with my targets. They’ve barely moved at all. As if they’re not sure what to do next. “I don’t think these guys are pros,” I say to Gavin.

  “Unicorn horn is worth a mint,” he says, his aim never wavering. “Every imbecile with a gun wants a piece of the action. Start flying the Fey Spy back to us.”

  I do, slaloming left and right through the forest in large swaths as I fly. It’s a little over ten minutes before we make visual contact with our hummingbird robot.

  “Good job,” says Gavin, checking his rifle’s readout. “We’ve almost got what we need. Fly the Fey Spy back over to them.”

  By the time I catch up with the poachers again, they are crouching behind a pair of trees, trying to peer into a hole the wounded unicorn must have punched through the forest as it fled. The girl stands next to the poacher with the metal leash around his wrist. She’s as still as a Degas ballerina.

  Within the space of a second Gavin fires two shots, and the two poachers simultaneously suffer seizures. They slap at their necks and fall to the ground, their guns tumbling away from them.

  I hover in place; I want to see how the girl reacts.

  She doesn’t. She just stands above her handler. He is weakly reaching up to her. The leash is looped around his wrist, her neck. Her yellow-orange hair shields her face from me.

  The poacher’s hand finally drops. He’s out. It suddenly occurs to me the girl must think he’s dead. Jesus Christ: how much worse can we make things for her?

  Gavin’s already charging ahead to the forest to go truss up the poachers with zip-ties. He’ll be there in a minute. All I need to do is keep her entertained until he gets there and make sure she doesn’t—

  —No! She slips the leash off the poacher’s wrist and takes off running.

  Here’s an important safety tip for the kids at home. Do not go tearing as fast as you can through a moderately dense forest while also trying to fly a Fey Spy. You can’t run and watch a screen and steer a robot at the same time. After my fourth stumble, I decide to go with the Fey Spy. It can move through the forest much faster than I can, and it will provide me her location via the map of the forest it’s been creating this whole time.

  It’s the right choice. In less than three minutes, I find her. The Fey Spy flies into a small clearing where I witness a scene plagiarized from a medieval tapestry. The girl—the leash still around her neck—is kneeling in front of a horse. Huge and beautiful, chestnut-colored, male. He has folded his legs under him. He can barely keep his dipping head aloft. On his flank a bullet wound yawns; a slow lava-flow of blood gurgles out of the hole. Below it spreads a scabrous beard.

  And, spiraling out from the horse’s head, is a horn almost a meter long.

  We have the Large Hadron Collider to thank for unicorns. Once the scientists at the LHC discovered they could make these adorable microscopic black holes, they couldn’t resist doing it all the time. “They only last for microseconds,” they said. “What harm could they do?” they asked.

  How about destabilizing the membrane that keeps other universes from leaking into ours?

  Think of our universe as some kid’s crayon drawing on a piece of paper. Take that drawing, and place it on top of some other kid’s. If nothing else happens, the drawing on top will hide the drawing beneath it. But now, take a spray bottle and spritz the drawing on top. Don’t ruin it or cause the colors to run; just moisten it a little. As the paper gets wet, you’ll be able to see hints of the picture that’s underneath.

  The numberless black holes created at the LHC “moistened” the paper on which our universe is drawn, allowing other universes to come peeking through.

  Handwringers have announced the inevitable collapse of our universe but, so far at least, nothing so dramatic has happened. And in fact, a great deal of good has come of the LHC’s experiments. Scientists have gained invaluable insights into how parallel universes work.

  For instance, we now know that, in at least one alternate timeline, unicorns exist. And a few specimens have found their way into our neck of the multiverse.

  Even before I entered the clearing, I could hear the girl calling out “Help! Is anybody there? Help us!” Not “Help me.” “Help us.”

  So I enter the clearing slowly. The girl sits with the unicorn’s head on her lap, petting its neck. Her face is a tragedy mask.

  She asks me, with wounded voice, “Are you a hunter?”

  I sit next to her. “My name’s Gabrielle Reál. I’m a reporter.”

  “You’re American?”

  I nod. “I’m here to help you.”

  She feels safe enough to start crying in earnest. “Can you call my parents?”

  “Help is on the way, sweetheart.”

  She cries and nods. “Can you help him?”

  She means the unicorn. How to reply? I will not compound her future suffering with a lie—truth or death, remember?—but I don’t want to heighten her present suffering by lecturing her about the stark realities of life and death. I finally settle on, “I can’t. But I have a friend coming. He’s a forest ranger. If anyone can help the unicorn, he can.”

  She nods, sniffles, redoubles her petting. The unicorn sighs, settles farther into her lap. I have to dodge his horn. It’s even more amazing up close than any picture I’ve seen. It’s a spiral of silver-gray, pitted and striated, covered with the nicks and flaws that come from a lifetime’s use. It doesn’t feel as cold as I expect; it’s like reaching into a body and touching vital bone.

  I should get us away from him, I know. This is a wounded wild animal; he can turn on us at any moment. But the truth is I don’t want to move. I don’t want this magnificent creature to die without knowing some comfort in his passing. It’s a girlish, sentimental thought, I know. That doesn’t make it any less authentic.

  I scratch the unicorn’s head. He moves slightly toward my hand, grateful. The girl rests her head on my arm, and together we pet him and weep.

  Thousands of animals—elephants especially, but also walruses, rhinoceroses, and narwhals—are massacred every year for their horns and tusks. The demand for ivory continues with little abatement in China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other countries of that region. In spite of the bans and the international efforts to curb the ivory trade, poachers have no trouble finding deep-pocket buyers and government officials on the take.

  In fact, the only thing that has seemed to be effective at slowing down the butchering of these animals has been the introduction of an even more desirable source of ivory into our universe. Unicorns.

  Unicorn horn is said to possess all sorts of salubrious woo. It can detect and cure disease, anything from nosebleeds to lupus. It’s a universal poison antidote. It can impart superhuman strength, speed, and/or intelligence; regenerate lost limbs; restore sight to the blind; recover sexual potency; reverse aging; raise the dead. Slice it, dice it, powder it, or keep it whole and use it as your magic wand—unicorn horn is good for what ails you.

  Of course it has no such properties. But what science has learned already about unicorns is almost as wondrous. Equus ferus hippoceros seems to fit so well into our timeline’s system of classification, there is reason to believe that it might actually have existed in our own universe at some point in our past, and that we may someday find indigen
ous unicorn fossils. Based on the specimens we have found so far, male unicorns seem to be up to 15% larger than the modern horse, females up to 10%. Their large skulls somewhat resemble those of large, extinct species from our Eocene era: save, of course, for the horns that spring from their head.

  A unicorn horn, much like a narwhal’s, is actually a pair of repurposed canines that grow helically from the animal’s palate and intertwine as they emerge from the forehead. Scientists believe that when the unicorn’s ancestors switched from being omnivores to herbivores, evolution found other uses for their meat-tearing teeth. Defense against predators and mating displays are obvious assumptions, though neither has been observed as yet. They have been observed, however, using their horns as “fruit procurement appliances” (Gavin’s words). And since the horn is actually two twisted teeth, it is sensitive to touch. Scientists are just beginning to hypothesize the various ways in which unicorns use their horns as sensory organs.

  In short, the unicorn is an endlessly fascinating animal, one that not only has enriched our knowledge of our own natural world, but the natural world of at least one other timeline. It’s scientifically priceless.

  As I sit petting this dying unicorn, I wonder Why isn’t that enough? Why do we have to invent magical bullshit? They just got here, and we’re hunting them to extinction based on lies.

  But then I grimly smile. Unicorns are not of our timeline. The few stragglers who have appeared here came by an LHC-induced accident. No matter what we do here, we can’t erase them from existence in all universes. Even our folly, thank the gods, has limits.

  Gavin cautiously enters the clearing. The rifle is holstered. He’s walking in smiling, open-armed, crouching, cautious. He reminds me of Caliban.

  “There they are,” he says merrily. “Glad I finally found you. Now we can get you home safe and sound. So let’s get a move on, right?”

  Neither I nor the girl move. The girl’s eyes are locked on Gavin, assessing. “Is that your friend?” she asks me.

  “The forest ranger,” I reply. “The bad men who kidnapped you are going to prison for a long time thanks to him.”

  She doesn’t take her eyes off of him. “You said he could save the unicorn.”

  Gavin shoots me a look.

  “I didn’t say he could definitely save him,” I say. “I said if anyone could, he could. He’s going to try.”

  “He can’t just try. It has to work.”

  “There, now,” says Gavin, coming over to us. He’s picked up what’s transpired between the girl and I and begins playing his part perfectly: he kneels down next to the unicorn and pats the beast’s neck, looking at it nose to tail, examining it studiously. But you don’t have to be a unicorn expert to know the beast’s almost dead.

  “Right,” he says. “I’m going to have to perform a complicated bit of field surgery on this poor fellow. Gabi, my crew’s half a klick south of here. You should head toward them with the little lady here.”

  “Come with me, sweetie,” I say to the girl, standing and holding out my hand. “Let’s get you back to your parents.”

  She doesn’t look at me. “I want to stay,” she says flatly.

  “We have to let Mr. Howard do his work,” I say. “He’s the only chance the unicorn has. You want to help the unicorn, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “The best way for us to help is to get out of the way.”

  She considers this, pets the horned horse more vigorously to help her think. Then—so, so carefully—she sets the unicorn’s head on the ground, scoots her legs out from under. The unicorn is well beyond noticing such subtle gestures. Its black unmoving oculus reflects the clouds.

  The girl rises and takes my hand. “Please do what you can,” she says to Gavin.

  Gavin opens a leather satchel of sharp instruments on the ground. They look a little crude for the fine cuts operations usually require. They look like tools for an autopsy: for sawing, hacking, flensing off. But maybe those are the tools unicorn field surgery necessitates. How would I know?

  “Don’t you worry,” Gavin says to the girl. “I’ll have Mr. Unicorn patched up in no time.”

  The support team is everything I could want from British rescuers. I’m offered tea and blankets and biscuits and a satellite phone. I call my editor and confess how I blew the story.

  “Fuck journalistic ethics!” she says. Love that woman.

  The support team does even better with the little girl. They’ve got her sitting on the tailgate of a pickup, drinking tea from a thermos, wrapped in a blanket she doesn’t need. They washed her feet. A comfortingly overzealous Mary Poppins kneels behind her in the bed of the truck and brushes out her hair. The woman chats nonstop the entire time, a stream of solicitous chatter that, like all good white-noise machines, is threatening to put the blanketed girl to sleep.

  But the girl wakes up immediately when Gavin rejoins us.

  I have exactly one second to gather the truth from his body language. Then Gavin sees the girl scrutinizing him and muscles up a smile. He marches over to her with his elbows out, like he’s about to start a musical number. “How are we doing? My people taking good care of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you talk to your mum and dad? I bet they were glad to hear your voice.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’ll be back with your family in a few hours.”

  “Did you save him?”

  He had to know that question was coming, but in the moment he still finds himself unprepared to answer. “Well,” he says slowly, looking down, “it wasn’t easy.” But then, looking at her conspiratorially: “But yes. I saved him.”

  “Really?” Her voice is chary.

  Gavin clears his throat. “We had to pull a bit of a trick to pull it off. You see, unicorns really are magic in their own universe. But when they come here, suddenly they’re as normal as any other horse.”

  “They’re magical?”

  “Sure they are, in their own time and place. Unicorns don’t die or get sick or grow old in their own universe. Once I got him back to his rightful place, he healed up like that.” Gavin snaps.

  The girl blooms. “You can do that?”

  “Sure I can. Can’t I, team?”

  “Yes. Oh, certainly. Do it all the time,” says the team.

  The girl is looking from face to face. She seems better. Finally she looks at me. “Is it true, Ms. Reál?”

  “If Mr. Howard says so,” I say before I can think about what I’m saying.

  “Promise?”

  Gavin’s lying out his ass. It’s not like there’s some handy stargate we can push unicorns through to send them back to their universe. They’re the first verifiable case we have of a living creature passing between timelines, but that may only be because, since they don’t exist in this one, they were easy to identify. Millions of animals may be traveling back and forth between universes, or maybe just unicorns. Who knows? Certainly not us, not yet. We have zero idea how to send them back to their rightful reality.

  So why am I not telling the girl all this?

  Because doing so will gut her afresh. Because there’s such a thing as mercy. Because she can learn what really happened later, when she’s stronger: maybe even from me, if she happens to read this article. If you’re reading this, P————, I’m so sorry. As a reporter, I’m supposed to be a steward of the truth. But as unheroic as it sounds, it’s better to lie and stay alive. Way, way better.

  I take P————’s hands and look her in the eye when I say, “Sweetie, I promise you, that unicorn is as alive as you and me.”

  The Brew

  Karen Joy Fowler

  I SPENT last Christmas in The Hague. I hadn’t wanted to be in a foreign country and away from the family at Christmastime, but it had happened. Once I was there I found it lonely, but also pleasantly insulated. The streets were strung with lights and it rained often, so the lights reflected off the shiny cobblestones, came at you out of the clouds lik
e pale, golden bubbles. If you could ignore the damp, you felt wrapped in cotton, wrapped against breaking. I heightened the feeling by stopping in an ice cream shop for a cup of tea with rum.

  Of course it was an illusion. Ever since I was young, whenever I have traveled, my mother has contrived to have a letter sent, usually waiting for me, sometimes a day or two behind my arrival. I am her only daughter and she was not the sort to let an illness stop her, and so the letter was at the hotel when I returned from my tea. It was a very cheerful letter, very loving, and the message that it was probably the last letter I would get from her and that I needed to finish things up and hurry home was nowhere on the page, but only in my heart. She sent some funny family stories and some small-town gossip and the death she talked about was not her own, but belonged instead to an old man who was once a neighbor of ours.

  After I read the letter I wanted to go out again, to see if I could recover the mood of the mists and the golden lights. I tried. I walked for hours, wandering in and out of the clouds, out to the canals and into the stores. Although my own children are too old for toys and too young for grandchildren, I did a lot of window-shopping at the toy stores. I was puzzling over the black elf they have in Holland, St. Nicholas’ sidekick, wondering who he was and where he came into it all, when I saw a music box. It was a glass globe on a wooden base, and if you wound it, it played music and if you shook it, it snowed. Inside the globe there was a tiny forest of ceramic trees and, in the center, a unicorn with a silver horn, corkscrewed, like a narwhal’s, and one gaily bent foreleg. A unicorn, tinted blue and frolicking in the snow.

  What appealed to me most about the music box was not the snow or the unicorn, but the size. It was a little world, all enclosed, and I could imagine it as a real place, a place I could go. A little winter. There was an aquarium in the lobby of my hotel and I had a similar reaction to it. A little piece of ocean there, in the dry land of the lobby. Sometimes we can find a smaller world where we can live, inside the bigger world where we cannot.