F&SF BK OF UNICORN VOL1.indb Read online

  The Fantasy and Science Fiction Book of Unicorns, Volume 1

  Copyright © 2017 by Gordon Van Gelder

  This is a collected work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the publisher.

  Cover art “The First Last Unicorn”

  copyright © 2004 by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law

  Cover design by Elizabeth Story

  Interior design by James DeMaiolo

  Tachyon Publications LLC

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  415.285.5615

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  [email protected]

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  Project Editor: Rachel Fagundes

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-61696-281-4

  First E-book Edition: 2017

  “The Silken-Swift” by Theodore Sturgeon. Copyright © 1953 by Fantasy House, Inc. Copyright renewed 1981 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1953. Reprinted by permission of the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust.

  “The Flight of the Horse” by Larry Niven. Copyright © 1969 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1969, as “Get a Horse!”. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Spectrum Literary Agency.

  “Braid of Days and Wake of Nights” by E. Lily Yu. Copyright © 2016 by E. Lily Yu. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jan./Feb. 2016.

  “Billy and the Unicorn” by Terry Bisson. Copyright © 2006 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2016.

  “The Final Quarry” by Eric Norden. Copyright © 1970 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1970.

  “The Sacrifice” by Gardner Dozois. Copyright © 1982 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1982. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Hunting a Unicorn” by Vered Tochterman. Copyright © 2003 by Spilogale, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Dec. 2003.

  “How to Make Unicorn Pie” by Esther M. Friesner. Copyright © 1998 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jan. 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  For

  David Hartwell

  Table of Contents

  “The Silken-Swift” by Theodore Sturgeon

  “The Flight of the Horse” by Larry Niven

  “Braid of Days and Wake of Nights” by E. Lily Yu

  “Billy and the Unicorn” by Terry Bisson

  “The Final Quarry” by Eric Norden

  “The Sacrifice” by Gardner Dozois

  “Hunting a Unicorn” by Vered Tochterman

  “How to Make Unicorn Pie” by Esther M. Friesner

  The Silken-Swift

  Theodore Sturgeon

  THERE’S A VILLAGE by the Bogs, and in the village is a Great House. In the Great House lived a squire who had land and treasures and, for a daughter, Rita.

  In the village lived Del, whose voice was a thunder in the inn when he drank there; whose corded, cabled body was golden-skinned, and whose hair flung challenges back to the sun.

  Deep in the Bogs, which were brackish, there was a pool of purest water, shaded by willows and wide-wondering aspen, cupped by banks of a moss most marvellously blue. Here grew mandrake, and there were strange pipings in mid-summer. No one ever heard them but a quiet girl whose beauty was so very contained that none of it showed. Her name was Barbara.

  There was a green evening, breathless with growth, when Del took his usual way down the lane beside the manor and saw a white shadow adrift inside the tall iron pickets. He stopped, and the shadow approached, and became Rita. “Slip around to the gate,” she said, “and I’ll open it for you.”

  She wore a gown like a cloud and a silver circlet round her head. Night was caught in her hair, moonlight in her face, and in her great eyes, secrets swam.

  Del said, “I have no business with the squire.”

  “He’s gone,” she said. “I’ve sent the servants away. Come to the gate.”

  “I need no gate.” He leapt and caught the top bar of the fence, and in a continuous fluid motion went high and across and down beside her. She looked at his arms, one, the other; then up at his hair. She pressed her small hands tight together and made a little laugh, and then she was gone through the tailored trees, lightly, swiftly, not looking back. He followed, one step for three of hers, keeping pace with a new pounding in the sides of his neck. They crossed a flower bed and a wide marble terrace. There was an open door, and when he passed through it he stopped, for she was nowhere in sight. Then the door clicked shut behind him and he whirled. She was there, her back to the panel, laughing up at him in the dimness. He thought she would come to him then, but instead she twisted by, close, her eyes on his. She smelt of violets and sandalwood. He followed her into the great hall, quite dark but full of the subdued lights of polished wood, cloisonné, tooled leather, and gold-threaded tapestry. She flung open another door, and they were in a small room with a carpet made of rosy silences, and a candlelit table. Two places were set, each with five different crystal glasses and old silver as prodigally used as the iron pickets outside. Six teakwood steps rose to a great oval window. “The moon,” she said, “will rise for us there.”

  She motioned him to a chair and crossed to a sideboard, where there was a rack of decanters—ruby wine and white; one with a strange brown bead; pink, and amber. She took down the first and poured. Then she lifted the silver domes from the salvers on the table, and a magic of fragrance filled the air. There were smoking sweets and savories, rare seafood and slivers of fowl, and morsels of strange meat wrapped in flower petals, spitted with foreign fruits and tiny soft seashells. All about were spices, each like a separate voice in the distant murmur of a crowd: saffron and sesame, cumin and marjoram and mace.

  And all the while Del watched her in wonder, seeing how the candles left the moonlight in her face, and how completely she trusted her hands, which did such deftness without supervision—so composed she was, for all the silent secret laughter that tugged at her lips, for all the bright dark mysteries that swirled and swam within her.

  They ate, and the oval window yellowed and darkened while the candlelight grew bright. She poured another wine, and another, and with the courses of the meal they were as May to the crocus and as frost to the apple.

  Del knew it was alchemy and he yielded to it without questions. That which was purposely over-sweet would be piquantly cut; this induced thirst would, with exquisite timing, be quenched. He knew she was watching him; he knew she was aware of the heat in his cheeks and the tingle at his fingertips. His wonder grew, but he was not afraid.

  In all this time she spoke hardly a word; but at last the feast was over and they rose. She touched a silken rope on the wall, and panelling slid aside. The table rolled silently into some ingenious recess and the panel returned. She waved him to an L-shaped couch in one corner, and as he sat close to her, she turned and took down the lute which hung on the wall behind her. He had his moment of confusion; his arms were ready for her, but not for the instrument as well. Her eyes sparkled, but her composure was unshaken.

  Now she spoke, while her fingers strolled and danced on the lute, and her words marched and wandered in and about the music. She had a thousand voices, so that he wondered which of them was
truly hers. Sometimes she sang; sometimes it was a wordless crooning. She seemed at times remote from him, puzzled at the turn the music was taking, and at other times she seemed to hear the pulsing roar in his eardrums, and she played laughing syncopations to it. She sang words which he almost understood:

  Bee to blossom, honey dew,

  Claw to mouse, and rain to tree,

  Moon to midnight, I to you;

  Sun to starlight, you to me . . .

  and she sang something wordless:

  Ake ya rundefle, rundefle fye,

  Orel ya rundefle kown,

  En yea, en yea, ya bunder bee bye

  En sor, en see, en sown.

  which he also almost understood.

  In still another voice she told him the story of a great hairy spider and a little pink girl who found it between the leaves of a half-open book; and at first he was all fright and pity for the girl, but then she went on to tell of what the spider suffered, with his home disrupted by this yawping giant, and so vividly did she tell of it that at the end he was laughing at himself and all but crying for the poor spider.

  So the hours slipped by, and suddenly, between songs, she was in his arms; and in the instant she had twisted up and away from him, leaving him gasping. She said, in still a new voice, sober and low, “No, Del. We must wait for the moon.”

  His thighs ached and he realized that he had half-risen, arms out, hands clutching and feeling the extraordinary fabric of her gown though it was gone from them; and he sank back to the couch with an odd, faint sound that was wrong for the room. He flexed his fingers and, reluctantly, the sensation of white gossamer left them. At last he looked across at her and she laughed and leapt high lightly, and it was as if she stopped in midair to stretch for a moment before she alighted beside him, bent and kissed his mouth, and leapt away.

  The roaring in his ears was greater, and at this it seemed to acquire a tangible weight. His head bowed; he tucked his knuckles into the upper curve of his eye sockets and rested his elbows on his knees. He could hear the sweet susurrus of Rita’s gown as she moved about the room; he could sense the violets and sandalwood. She was dancing, immersed in the joy of movement and of his nearness. She made her own music, humming, sometimes whispering to the melodies in her mind.

  And at length he became aware that she had stopped; he could hear nothing, though he knew she was still near. Heavily he raised his head. She was in the center of the room, balanced like a huge white moth, her eyes quite dark now with their secrets quiet. She was staring at the window, poised, waiting.

  He followed her gaze. The big oval was black no longer, but dusted over with silver light. Del rose slowly. The dust was a mist, a loom, and then, at one edge, there was a shard of the moon itself creeping and growing.

  Because Del stopped breathing, he could hear her breathe; it was rapid and so deep it faintly strummed her versatile vocal cords.

  “Rita . . .”

  Without answering she ran to the sideboard and filled two small glasses. She gave him one, then, “Wait,” she breathed, “oh, wait!”

  Spellbound, he waited while the white stain crept across the window. He understood suddenly that he must be still until the great oval was completely filled with direct moonlight, and this helped him, because it set a foreseeable limit to his waiting; and it hurt him, because nothing in life, he thought, had ever moved so slowly. He had a moment of rebellion, in which he damned himself for falling in with her complex pacing; but with it he realized that now the darker silver was wasting away, now it was a finger’s breadth, and now a thread, and now, and now—

  She made a brittle feline cry and sprang up the dark steps to the window. So bright was the light that her body was a jet cameo against it. So delicately wrought was her gown that he could see the epaulettes of silver light the moon gave her. She was so beautiful his eyes stung.

  “Drink,” she whispered. “Drink with me, darling, darling . . .”

  For an instant he did not understand her at all, and only gradually did he become aware of the little glass he held. He raised it toward her and drank. And of all the twists and titillations of taste he had had this night, this was the most startling; for it had no taste at all, almost no substance, and a temperature almost exactly that of blood. He looked stupidly down at the glass and back up at the girl. He thought that she had turned about and was watching him, though he could not be sure, since her silhouette was the same.

  And then he had his second of unbearable shock, for the light went out.

  The moon was gone, the window, the room. Rita was gone.

  For a stunned instant he stood tautly, stretching his eyes wide. He made a sound that was not a word. He dropped the glass and pressed his palms to his eyes, feeling them blink, feeling the stiff silk of his lashes against them. Then he snatched the hands away, and it was still dark, and more than dark; this was not a blackness. This was like trying to see with an elbow or with a tongue; it was not black, it was Nothingness.

  He fell to his knees.

  Rita laughed.

  An odd, alert part of his mind seized on the laugh and understood it, and horror and fury spread through his whole being; for this was the laugh which had been tugging at her lips all evening, and it was a hard, cruel, self-assured laugh. And at the same time, because of the anger or in spite of it, desire exploded whitely within him. He moved toward the sound, groping, mouthing. There was a quick, faint series of rustling sounds from the steps, and then a light, strong web fell around him. He struck out at it, and recognized it for the unforgettable thing it was—her robe. He caught at it, ripped it, stamped upon it. He heard her bare feet run lightly down and past him, and lunged, and caught nothing. He stood, gasping painfully.

  She laughed again.

  “I’m blind,” he said hoarsely. “Rita, I’m blind!”

  “I know,” she said coolly, close beside him. And again she laughed.

  “What have you done to me?”

  “I’ve watched you be a dirty animal of a man,” she said.

  He grunted and lunged again. His knees struck something—a chair, a cabinet—and he fell heavily. He thought he touched her foot.

  “Here, lover, here!” she taunted.

  He fumbled about for the thing which had tripped him, found it, used it to help him upright again. He peered uselessly about.

  “Here, lover!”

  He leapt, and crashed into the door jamb: cheekbone, collarbone, hip bone, ankle were one straight blaze of pain. He clung to the polished wood.

  After a time he said, in agony, “Why?”

  “No man has ever touched me and none ever will,” she sang. Her breath was on his cheek. He reached and touched nothing, and then he heard her leap from her perch on a statue’s pedestal by the door, where she had stood high and leaned over to speak.

  No pain, no blindness, not even the understanding that it was her witch’s brew working in him could quell the wild desire he felt at her nearness. Nothing could tame the fury that shook him as she laughed. He staggered after her, bellowing.

  She danced around him, laughing. Once she pushed him into a clattering rack of fire-irons. Once she caught his elbow from behind and spun him. And once, incredibly, she sprang past him and, in midair, kissed him again on the mouth.

  He descended into Hell, surrounded by the small, sure patter of bare feet and sweet cool laughter. He rushed and crashed, he crouched and bled and whimpered like a hound. His roaring and blundering took an echo, and that must have been the great hall. Then there were walls that seemed more than unyielding; they struck back. And there were panels to lean against, gasping, which became opening doors as he leaned. And always the black nothingness, the writhing temptation of the pat-pat of firm flesh on smooth stones, and the ravening fury.

  It was cooler, and there was no echo. He became aware of the whisper of the wind through trees. The balcony, he thought; and then, right in his ear, so that he felt her warm breath, “Come, lover . . .” and he sprang. He sprang
and missed, and instead of sprawling on the terrace, there was nothing, and nothing, and nothing, and then, when he least expected it, a shower of cruel thumps as he rolled down the marble steps.

  He must have had a shred of consciousness left, for he was vaguely aware of the approach of her bare feet, and of the small, cautious hand that touched his shoulder and moved to his mouth, and then his chest. Then it was withdrawn, and either she laughed or the sound was still in his mind.

  Deep in the Bogs, which were brackish, there was a pool of purest water, shaded by willows and wide-wondering aspens, cupped by banks of a moss most marvellously blue. Here grew mandrake, and there were strange pipings in mid-summer. No one ever heard them but a quiet girl whose beauty was so very contained that none of it showed. Her name was Barbara.

  No one noticed Barbara, no one lived with her, no one cared. And Barbara’s life was very full, for she was born to receive. Others are born wishing to receive, so they wear bright masks and make attractive sounds like cicadas and operettas, so others will be forced, one way or another, to give to them. But Barbara’s receptors were wide open, and always had been, so that she needed no substitute for sunlight through a tulip petal, or the sound of morning-glories climbing, or the tangy sweet smell of formic acid which is the only death cry possible to an ant, or any other of the thousand things overlooked by folk who can only wish to receive. Barbara had a garden and an orchard, and took things in to market when she cared to, and the rest of the time she spent in taking what was given. Weeds grew in her garden, but since they were welcomed, they grew only where they could keep the watermelons from being sunburned. The rabbits were welcome, so they kept to the two rows of carrots, the one of lettuce, and the one of tomato vines which were planted for them, and they left the rest alone. Goldenrod shot up beside the bean hills to lend a hand upward, and the birds ate only the figs and peaches from the waviest top branches, and in return patrolled the lower ones for caterpillars and egg-laying flies. And if a fruit stayed green for two weeks longer until Barbara had time to go to market, or if a mole could channel moisture to the roots of the corn, why it was the least they could do.