Dame a la Licorne

Judith Tarr

Peter Beagle asked me to write a story about unicorns. Naturally it turned out to be science fiction.

I

They turned off the rain at dawn that day.

By early feeding the sun was on, the filters at their most transparent, and the sky so blue it hurt. The grass was all washed clean, new spring green.

Some of the broodmares had taken advantage of the wet to have a good, solid roll in their pasture. Old Novinha, pure white when she was clean, had a map of Africa on her side, and a green haunch. She was oblivious to it, watching with interest as the stallions came out for their morning exercise.

Novinha was thinking about coming into season. Some of the other mares were more than thinking about it. They paced the fence as the stallions danced past, flagging their tails and squealing at any who so much as flicked an ear.

The stallions knew better than to be presumptuous. Young Rahman snorted and skittered, but his rider brought him lightly back in hand. The others arched their necks, that was all, and put on a bit of prance for the ladies. Because they were dancers and this was Dancer’s Rest, they pranced with art and grace, a shimmer of white manes and white necks and here and there a black or a bay or a chestnut.

There were horses already in the training rings, the great ones, the masters of the art that the others were still learning. They had gone through the steps of the dance, and for duty and reward were dancing in the air: levade, courbette, capriole; croupade and passade and ballotade. The names were as archaic and beautiful as the dance.

o0o

Marina should have been riding one of the young stallions, dappled silver Pluto Amena or coal-black Doloroso or fierce blood-bay Rahman who was fretting and tossing his head under Cousin Tomas’ hand. Tomas had less patience than Rahman liked, and stronger hands.

But Marina was up on the hill beyond the broodmares’ pasture, where she could see the whole of Dancer’s Rest like an image in a screen. She had gone up there to watch the sun come out, and stayed longer than she should, because of the flyer that was coming from the west. West was City and Dome. West was the Hippodrome, where things raced and exhibited themselves and even tried to dance, that were called horses but were not horses at all. Not in the least. Not like the ones that danced and grazed and called to one another in spring yearning below and all around her.

She had seen the horse-things. Everyone at Dancer’s Rest had, because Papa Morgan let no one in the family ride or train or handle the horses unless he or she had seen what had been done in the name of fashion and function and plain unmotivated modernity. Horses in the Hippodrome looked very little like horses at Dancer’s Rest—and very little like one another. Those that ran were lean whippy greyhound-bodied things, all legs and speed. Those that exhibited could not walk, could not trot, could not canter or gallop, could only flail the air in the movement called “show gait.” It was a little like a prance and a little like a piaffe and a great deal like the snap and ratchet of a mechanical toy. And those that were there simply to be beautiful could stand, that was all, and pose, and arch their extraordinarily long necks. They could carry no rider; their backs were grown too long and frail. They could walk, but with difficulty, since their hindlegs were so very long and so very delicate. But they were lovely, like living art, pure form divorced from function.

After a long day in the Hippodrome, Marina had come home to shock and a kind of grief. The family’s horses were old stock—raw unmodified equine. They looked small and thick-legged, short-bodied, heavy and primitive. Their movements were strange, too varied and almost too heavy, all power and none of the oiled glide of the racers or the flashing knee action of the exhibition stock. They were atavisms. The world had passed them by. All that was new and bold and reckoned beautiful was engineered, designed, calculated to the last curve of ear and flick of tail.

“That’s why,” Papa Morgan had said when she came back too cold of heart to cry and too angry to be wise. “That’s what you needed to see. What they’ve made, and what we keep.”

“But why keep it?” Marina had demanded. “Why bother with old stock at all? Nobody wants it. Nobody likes the way it looks or moves or handles. It can’t run, it can’t show, it can’t stand up and look correctly beautiful.”

“And worse than that,” said Papa Morgan, “it has a mind of its own.” He sighed. “That’s why. Because it’s not what people want. It’s what it is.”

She had understood, as she should, because she was family and she had learned the lesson from infancy. But her understanding was a shallow thing. She thought too often of going away as so many of the cousins and the siblings did, leaving Dancer’s Rest to live in the world of cities and domes and gengineered equines. Only the strongest-minded stayed, and the ones who loved the horses above anything in the greater world, and those like Marina who were too weak-willed to leave.

Weak-willed, and bound to the horses, however primitive or unfashionable they might be. She was family. She was bred to this as surely as racers to the track and show stock to the ring.

The flyer was close enough now to see. She scrambled up from the damp grass, brushing at blades that clung, and knowing but not caring that her breeches were stained as green as Novinha’s haunch. She ran down the hill toward the road, to the delight of the yearlings whose pasture it was. They swirled about her, a storm of hooves and tails and tossing heads, parting and streaming along the forcefence as she ran through. She felt the tingle of the field, though the gate-chip was supposed to make it invisible and imperceptible. But she always knew where the fence was, and in much the same way the horses did.

Horse instincts, Papa Morgan said, had been in the family since long before gengineering.

And why, she wondered, did she want to rear and shy and run away from the flyer that was coming to rest on the family’s pad? It was only the inspector from the Hippodrome, come as she did every year at the start of breeding season, to inspect the stock and approve the roster of breedings-to-be and enjoy a long and convivial visit with Papa Morgan and the rest of the family. Marina had honed and polished Pluto Amena’s levade for the exhibition that would crown the afternoon—she should be in the stable now, seeing that he was clean and ready to be shown.

But instead of turning toward the stable she kept going toward the house. She was not the only one. Papa Morgan and the elders were waiting, of course, as was polite, but there were others about as well, who should have been in the stables or in the house. Tante Concetta was standing near the pad, and Cousin Wilhelm, and Tante Estrella in breeches and boots with a long whip in her hand. Tante Estrella was a wild one, as wild as the young mares she preferred to train and handle, and as beautiful as they were, too. She looked a little frightening now, as if her ears were laid back and her tail lashing, threatening to kick or strike at the person who had emerged from the flyer.

It was not round smiling grey-haired Shanna Chen-Howard, nor any of the people who had always come with her to Dancer’s Rest. This was a stranger. No human person came with him; only a mechanical, a mute and blank-faced metal bodyguard and recording device. It looked slightly more human than the stranger did, to Marina’s eye.

Pity, too. He was young and not bad-looking. Gengineered, of course, but not so as to be obvious. That was the fashion these days. His parents would have designed him to emerge au naturel, with any serious flaws or inconveniences carefully and unobtrusively smoothed away.

They did not seem to have included a module for good humor. He looked as if he never smiled. His eyes as they scanned the people and the place were cold, and grew colder as they passed Cousin Wilhelm. Cousin Wilhelm stayed at home mostly, not for shame or shyness but because he was more comfortable there, where he did not need eyes to know where everything was. Implants had never taken, and mechanicals, he said, were worse than nothing at all. Marina thought he preferred the dark he had been born to, as rich as it was in sounds and smells. He was a better rider than most men who could see, and a wonderful trainer of horses.

This stranger in the inspector’s tabard saw none of that. He saw a blind man in antique riding breeches, leaning on the arm of a greying and unnecessarily plump woman. Marina could read him as clearly as if he had spoken. Primitive, he was thinking. Atavistic. Outdated. Like the house in front of him, and the stables and the pastures beyond, and the horses in them, crude unmodified creatures without even the grace to be clean.

He was at least polite to Papa Morgan. It was a frigid politeness, with a bare minimum of words. Papa Morgan, who was never flustered, moved smoothly through the formulae of introduction, and took no notice of the brevity of the responses. It was briefest of all in front of Cousin Wilhelm: a sharp dip of the head that Cousin Wilhelm could not see, thoughtless maybe, but to Marina’s mind as rude as an outright insult.

Papa Morgan noticed. He showed no sign of offense, but Marina saw how he led the inspector into the house without offering the greeting-cup, the wine and the bread and salt that sealed a friendship. Shanna Chen-Howard would have known what that signified. This person, this Hendrick Manygoats Watanabe, did not even seem to realize that he had been slighted.

Marina trailed after them. She was not invited, but neither was she shut out. There was a smell in the air, a little like hot iron, a great deal like fear.

o0o

“Yes,” Papa Morgan said. “We do unregulated breeding here. We have a license to do so—a dispensation under the Mandate, for the preservation of rootstock.”

He should not have had to explain to an inspector who administered the Mandate. The inspector knew exactly how much and how far Dancer’s Rest was permitted to depart from the laws that governed gengineering. But he was insisting on being obtuse.

There was nothing convivial about the meeting. He had refused refreshment, which meant that no one with him could have it, either: distressing as the day wore on and they all went hungry. He had also refused the tour of the stables, and declined the pleasure of the exhibition. He had come, he said, to investigate the breeding practices at Dancer’s Rest. They would present the records, please, and explain the entries, and be quick about it.

Papa Morgan was the most patient person Marina knew. He had to be, to be the head of the family. She had never seen him lose patience. Nor did he now with this stranger who would not look at his horses, but there was a glitter in his eyes that she had not seen before. It made her shiver.

She could have left long ago. But she stayed, and the others stayed, too, unnoticed and unreprimanded. They were like a bodyguard, she thought, though what they were guarding against, except bureaucratic niggling, she did not know.

Hendrick Manygoats Watanabe was not a patient man. He would never make a trainer of horses, she thought as she watched him scan the records. She wondered if he knew anything about horses at all, or if he cared. Shanna Chen-Howard had been one of those unfortunates who lack both the balance and the talent to do more than haul themselves into a saddle and sit more or less in the middle, but she had loved to watch the horses, ridden and free, and she had known many of them by name.

This man who had come in her place, who had not troubled to explain why, would never know Novinha and Selene and Bellamira and Sayyida, nor care that Maestoso Miranda liked sugar but Rigoletto preferred apples. His whole world was a scroll of data, columns of numbers, files labeled by genetic type. The living flesh, the animal that was the sum of its genes, was an irrelevance.

He frowned as the files scrolled behind his eyes. “Random,” he said to himself, but not as if he cared who heard. “Untidy. This string—” He called it to the wallscreen in the family’s meeting room, which was an insult of sorts: they all had implants, they were not primitives or atavists who refused the seductions of the net. The pure flow of data resolved into an image, a helix of stars, each with its distinctive color and form.

Marina recognized the shape of it. One of the elders, Mama Tania, said what they all knew. “That’s the Skowronek gene line. Very old, very illustrious. Prepotent.”

“And severely flawed,” said Hendrick Manygoats Watanabe. “You see here, here, here.” Light-pointers flashed. “This is worse than untidy. This is a possible lethal recessive.”

“So it is,” Papa Morgan said mildly.

“And you make no effort to remove it?”

Papa Morgan seemed to grow calmer, the more agitated the inspector became. “Of course you do understand, Ser Watanabe. It was explained to you. We preserve the old stock, the rootstock. Unaltered. Unrefined. Flaws and all.”

“But that is against the Mandate,” said Watanabe.

“We are exempt from the Mandate,” Papa Morgan said.

“That,” said Watanabe, “is a matter of debate.”

There was a silence. Someone drew a long, slow breath. It was as loud as a rushing of wind.

Marina was too young to remember how the exemption had been granted, but everyone knew the story. Someone, the family had argued, should preserve the old stock—for antiquarian reasons, or sentimental ones, or for scholars and scientists who might find new modifications based on the old genetic materials. There had been a movement then in favor of such curiosities; the exemption had passed, and no one had challenged it.

Papa Morgan was not surprised to meet a challenge now. Nor were the other elders. They had expected this, then. They might even have expected the stranger who came in Shanna Chen-Howard’s place.

She felt a flicker of anger. No one had told her. And how many of the others knew, who had kept it quiet because it could only upset the young and disturb the horses?

Elders’ prerogative. She did not have to like it. She was here, when she could perfectly well have been told to leave—she had no place or position, and no authority beyond that of an assistant trainer.

So. She knew what this stranger was here for. Why he had been sent, and how he had gained authority for it—and also, within the rest, why Shanna Chen-Howard had not come. Her faction must have lost power in the Hippodrome. This was the new faction, and the new law.

“Your exemption is revoked,” said Hendrick Manygoats Watanabe. “Your breeding patterns are invalid. You will be receiving instructions, which you will follow. This complex, for example,” he said, tilting his head toward the wallscreen, “will be removed. There will be no further random breeding of live male to live female. You will conduct your program in accordance with the rules and regulations of the Mandate.”

Papa Morgan did not bother to contend that there was nothing random about the family’s choices. He only said, “The Mandate has no provision for the preservation of rootstock.”

“The whole of the Mandate encompasses such a provision. Your stock has been allowed to proliferate without rule or regulation. It has no specific function—”

“On the contrary,” said Papa Morgan. “It is the most purely functional of all the equids. It lives to dance.”

Watanabe’s mouth opened, then closed again. Marina wondered if he had ever been interrupted in his life.

“We will appeal the decision,” said Papa Morgan.

Watanabe recovered himself with an air almost of pleasure. “Your appeal is denied.”

o0o

“We have to fight them.”

The family was gathered where the elders had been since morning, all of them down to the toddlers from the creches. There had been food earlier, and there was drink going around, intoxicant and stimulant and even plain water. The inspector was gone. He had taken his mechanical and his flyer and flown back to the Hippodrome without ever once looking at the horses.

“We should have dragged him out there,” some of the younger trainers were insisting. “If he could see—”

“He saw all he needed to see.” Marina surprised herself by speaking out—usually she kept quiet and let the others do the talking. “He looked at the helices, he saw how untidy and unregulated they were, and he knew they couldn’t be allowed to continue.”

Up among the elders, the same argument was going on, at nearly the same volume. Papa Morgan said in his deep voice that carried without effort, “We’ve been fighting the Mandate since it was made. We’ve been appealing this decision at every level. The answer is always no. We can keep our rootstock—by which they mean the type we breed and raise here. But we have to clean up its helices.”

“But if we do that,” Cousin Bernardin pointed out, “it’s not rootstock anymore. It’s modified. You know—we all know—that the helices are untidy because they need to be. That’s where the strength is. That’s what makes our horses what they are.”

“The Mandate believes otherwise,” said Papa Morgan. He sounded tired.

Papa Morgan was never tired or impatient or, all divinities forbid, defeated. But now he was close to all of them. He looked as if he wanted to turn and walk away, but the press of people hemmed him in. He had to stay and listen to all this fruitless babble.

Marina was freer than he was, but she could not leave, either. Whatever had brought her here in the morning was not letting her go. Family intuition, Tante Estrella would call it. Tante Estrella had more than her fair share of it herself.

As if the thought had invoked her, she came quietly to stand by Marina, not doing anything, watching people argue. She was still wearing her breeches, but her long whip was gone, laid aside somewhere. She did not seem agitated at all. If anything she was amused.

“Wait,” she said to Marina out of nowhere in particular. “See what happens.”

II.

Nothing happened that Marina could see. The gathering ended in disarray. The Mandate left no choice and no debate. Its rules were strict and its regulations precise. Genetic codes would be corrected according to its guidelines, animals bred without the untidiness of stallion courting mare in the breeding pen or the pasture, pregnancies monitored and embryos transferred with clean mechanical precision.

There was none of the usual springtime excitement, the pleasure of matching this stallion to that mare, the waiting for her to come into season and accept him, the beautiful randomness of conception in a living womb. It was all done in the laboratory, as coldly meticulous as a chemical equation.

One thing at least the Mandate did not forbid, though it did not encourage it, either. It could not keep mares from carrying their own foals. Their clean, derandomized, genetically perfected foals, each set of helices prescribed by the authorities in the Hippodrome. Hendrick Manygoats Watanabe himself, according to the signature, reviewed and approved each one. The family’s breeding managers were not permitted to select the matches. Not this season. They would be shown, he had informed them, what they were to do; then in other seasons they would know what was correct and what was permitted.

In much older days an insult of that proportion would have led to a duel at least, and maybe to a war. This season, with their greatest power stripped from them and handed to strangers, the elders in the breeding pens said nothing whatsoever.

They did as they were told. They collected specimens, handed them to the inspectors who flew in from the west, stood by unspeaking while those same inspectors returned from the laboratory with technicians and racks of labeled vials. When the horses objected, they made no move and spoke no word. More than one inspector or technician discovered that these undersized, primitive creatures were remarkably strong and self-willed—and utterly unforgiving of insults from strangers.

When the tech who had tried to collect a specimen from Favory Ancona went home with a broken femur, Papa Vladimir, who looked only to Papa Morgan for authority in the breeding pens, was seen to smile slightly and observe, “He should have asked first.”

o0o

There was only one mercy in all of it. Once breeding season was over, the inspectors and technicians went away. They had done all they needed to do. The rest they left to the mares, and to the family. In the spring there would be foals, genetically purified and officially sanctioned, each with the Mandate’s signature in its cells.

Marina did not know why, but after the first shock she stopped being upset. Angry, yes. The family had been trampled on. Its horses had been relegated to the status of a disease in need of a cure, its beautiful old bloodlines condemned as unsanitary. She could sit in the library with the books scrolling behind her eyes, telling over the names. The breeds that they kept pure here, the old breeds, the horses of princes: Arabian, Andalusian, Lipizzan. The lines preserved in each. Skowronek whose helices Watanabe had sneered at, Celoso whose sons were all kings and whose daughters were all queens, Favory and Conversano and Siglavy who had danced before kings. Ghazala, Princesa, Presciana; Moniet and Mariposa and Deflorata. They were woven in the helices, flaws as well as perfection, a memory as deep as the bone and more lasting.

It was immortality, not of the single creature but of the species itself. And the Mandate wanted to kill it in the guise of perfecting it.

o0o

Novinha was the first to come into heat and the first to get in foal. On a day of early spring when snow had been allowed to fall, she showed signs that she would foal in the night. Marina had foal watch in the broodmares’ barn, blankets spread on straw next to the foaling stall. In the Hippodrome she did not doubt that they left such things to monitors and mechanicals. Here it was reckoned that foals of the old stock grew and thrived best if they were born the old way, with human hands ready if the mare faltered.

As the old mare began to pace her stall, Tante Estrella slipped in past Marina. She always knew when it was time, and she always came, no matter how late the hour. In fact it was early for a foaling, not quite midnight.

The long waiting, close on a year from breeding to birth, ended as it always did, with astonishing speed. As Novinha went down, Estrella was there, Marina close behind her, moving in concert as they had so often before.

There was little actually to do till the foal had slipped free of its mother. Novinha knew her business. This was her seventh foal, her luck-foal as family superstition had it, and she gave birth easily and quickly, from the first sight of the hoof wrapped in glimmering caul to the wet tangle of limbs sorting itself out in the straw.

Marina and Estrella stared at the foal, the perfect foal, designed and conceived under the Mandate. It was struggling to its feet already, lifting its head with its delicate curled ears.

Novinha was a Lipizzan, and so was the sire of record, Favory Ancona who had left so lasting a mark on the technician from the Hippodrome. They were all born dark, and turned glimmering white as they grew.

This foal of theirs under the Mandate had bypassed the dark phase. It was silvery white already, though it was no albino: its skin was dark under the pallor of the coat.

It was a colt. He was a big one, substantial for one so young, with a big square shoulder and a solid rump. In that he was just as he should be. There was even a hint of an arch to his profile, the noble nose that distinguished his breed and his line.

And yet there was something odd. . .

Estrella was quicker than Marina, and maybe less unwilling to acknowledge what she saw. She inspected the small hooves as the colt wobbled up on them, marking that each was the same and each preposterous, cloven like a goat’s or a deer’s. And the tail, not the brush of a normal foal but a tasseled monstrosity, and on the forehead where the silver-white hair whorled to its center—

Estrella laughed with unalloyed delight. “Didn’t we warn them? Didn’t we, then? And they meddled with our beauties regardless.”

o0o

All the mares were foaling unicorns. Every one. Colt or filly, Lipizzan or Andalusian or Arabian, each was the same: silver-white, cloven-hooved, with the bud of a horn on its brow. The Mandate had outsmarted itself.

“There was a reason,” said Papa Morgan, “for the untidiness in the helices.”

“We did try to tell them,” Tante Concetta said. She kept to the house and seldom went among the horses, but she had gone down to the barn that first morning to look at Novinha’s colt. She laughed as Estrella had, with the same high amusement.

None of the elders was at all surprised, no more than they had been by the lowering of the Mandate. They had expected this. It must be something one learned when one became an elder, a secret that had stopped being a secret when Novinha’s foal was born.

He had a name from before birth in the ancient tradition of his breed. Favory Novinha: Favory for the ancestor of his line, Novinha for his dam who inspected him with as little surprise as the elders had shown, and a quietly luminous pride. If it disconcerted her to be mother to such strange offspring, she did not show it.

Marina was beyond surprise when they got him out into the light and she had her first clear sight of his eyes. They were not brown at all, not even the near-black of his heritage, but a deep and luminous blue. Nor did they change as he grew. They were part of him, like the goat-feet on which he walked and the horn that sprouted on his forehead.

She was more or less in charge of him. It was usual for whoever had foal watch on a particular night to inherit, in a manner of speaking, the foal who was born on that watch. There was not much to do when the foal’s dam was as experienced as Novinha. Mostly Marina watched him. She never quite admitted that she was waiting for him to do something unusual, something magical.

But he never did, unless it was magic that he grew so fast and moved so light. Lipizzans grew into their grace. When they were young they were awkward, gangling, often heavy on their feet. This colt was graceful from birth. He was born knowing how to move, how best to dance.

That was his magic, she supposed. He knew what other foals had to learn.

o0o

The Mandate had no provision for such an eventuality as this. It had not intended to create a new—or recreate a very old—species. It had been meddling, that was all. Asserting its sense of order on a disordered breed.

Hendrick Manygoats Watanabe came back as the last of the mares waited to deliver their foals. This time he was accompanied by Shanna Chen-Howard. She, for once, was not smiling. He was looking remarkably humble.

“They retired me,” she said to Papa Morgan as they walked away from the flyer that had brought her. She was direct as always, though Watanabe looked sourly disapproving. “They tossed me out on my ear, told me to take myself a vacation, gengineer some roses, take up locustkeeping in the Sahel-anything but get in their way when they decided to lay the Mandate on everybody who was exempt. I gather they did much the same to you.”

Papa Morgan spread his hands, eloquent of resignation. “What could we do? We’re subject to the law. If the law says we have to give in to the Mandate. . .”

Shanna Chen-Howard slanted a glance at him. Marina, following at a discreet distance, thought she saw laughter in it. “You were always law-abiding citizens,” she said blandly.

o0o

They had turned the mares out in the wide green pasture that rolled down to the river. Two sides of it were fenced in water, with a forcefence to remind the bolder foals that they were not to go exploring. All the mares with foals at side, as it happened, were greys; none of the dark mares had been bred this year, again under the Mandate.

It was a pretty picture from a distance, white horse-shapes on green, the larger grazing peacefully, the smaller playing or nursing or lying flat on the grass in the sun. Closer in, one realized that the mares were ordinary enough, but the foals were odd.

Marina found herself walking just behind Watanabe. He stepped gingerly, as if he had never walked on a dirt road before. The glances he shot at the pasture almost made her laugh aloud. He must be having dreadful visions of hip-deep mud, reeking manure, creatures crawling up the grassblades to devour him whole.

The fence along the road was an atavism, a real post-and-rail fence, though there was a forcefence just behind it to keep it secure. One of Papa Morgan’s predecessors had thought it worthwhile to have at least one old-fashioned fence for leaning on and watching the horses. Papa Morgan did just that now, and Shanna Chen-Howard kept him company. Watanabe hung back, with Marina still behind him.

The mares had been aware of them all along, but most were busy cropping the new grass. It was Novinha’s colt who came forward first, curious to see who these visitors were. He took a circuitous way about it, showing off his floating gait, spiraling in toward the fence till he stood just inside of it, nostrils flared, head up, bright eye fixed on them all.

Shanna Chen-Howard took a while to find her voice. When she did, it wobbled a little, but then it was its forthright self again. “Well. You weren’t exaggerating.”

“Neither were the holorecords we sent you,” Papa Morgan said.

“No,” said Shanna Chen-Howard, “but somehow, in the flesh, it’s more effective.”

She stretched a hand over the fence. The colt sniffed it, thought about nipping, caught Marina’s eye and behaved himself. He let Shanna Chen-Howard stroke his nose, and stood still for her to run her hand up it till it touched the base of the horn. She almost recoiled then: Marina saw how she tensed. But he leaned into her, encouraging her to scratch where it was always itching.

“It is real,” she said as he obliged him. “It really is.” She began to laugh.

The only one who seemed to need an explanation was Watanabe. He was not about to get one. She kept laughing when Papa Morgan let her into the pasture, the same way Tante Estrella had when the colt was born, and Tante Concetta. It was a grand joke on the Mandate.

o0o

“The trouble,” she said as they lingered over dinner that evening, “is that the Mandate has no sense of humor whatsoever. You’re exonerated—there’s no sign of tampering, and every breeding was administered entirely by technicians from the Hippodrome—but you know how the law works. It has to cast blame on somebody.”

No one looked at Hendrick Manygoats Watanabe. He had a plate in front of him as they all did, the elders and the trainers who had been admitted to the meeting, the senior trainers and the younger ones like Marina who were in charge of this year’s foals. He had eaten nothing and said nothing. It was probably excruciating for him to have to dally like this, being endlessly inefficient, eating and drinking and hanging about instead of working on the problem at hand.

“I’d ask, Why not blame the Mandate?” said Tante Estrella, “except I’m not that foolish. We did warn you—them—of what might happen if they tried to meddle with old stock.”

“So you did,” said Shanna Chen-Howard, “but after all, the horses bred under the Mandate were meddled with, too, in the beginning. Why would these be any different?”

“Because they’re old stock,” Tante Estrella said. “The others had already been meddled with till they forgot where they came from. These never did. The Arabian is the oldest and purest of all. The others were bred from it by masters who knew better than any Mandate how to make perfection in the form of a horse. It’s dangerous to meddle with perfection.”

Shanna Chen-Howard shook her head. She was not arguing, at least not with Tante Estrella. “So. We tampered with something that was already finished. We turned it into something else altogether.”

“Exactly,” said Papa Morgan.

Shanna Chen-Howard sighed heavily. “This is not going to go over well with the committee in the Hippodrome. There’s that clause in the Mandate, you see, that your predecessors helped write. The one that draws the line between modification and complete transformation. We can tidy up your horses’ helices. We can’t turn their offspring into something other than horses.”

Papa Morgan smiled. There was nothing smug about it, but Hendrick Manygoats Watanabe got up abruptly, kicked back his chair, and stalked out.

III

None of it was really about the Mandate, or about the Hippodrome’s mistake. Marina’s, too, for thinking that it was so simple. She had not been paying attention. That was a bad fault in a horse trainer.

It was a long summer. The weather was on a random cycle, which meant heat and sun and a daily explosion of thunder. The nights were steamily warm, with a crackle of lightning near the horizon.

Marina liked to walk the pastures at night. The horses were quiet then, grazing or drowsing. There were monitors set to catch anything out of the ordinary, but they were part of the forcefence, invisible and almost imperceptible.

She went out on a night when the moon was full and the lightning had sunk almost out of sight over the world’s rim, and wandered from pasture to pasture. There were mares in foal again, bred the old way, without the Mandate to interfere. They were standing together at the far corner of their pasture, looking out into the next, where their sisters were, and the foals.

Novinha’s colt had a horn now as long as Marina’s hand. It was ivory, densely spiral-grained and keenly pointed. The elders had been talking about blunting the foals’ horns or capping them like an elephant’s tusks or removing them altogether, for their own and their mothers’ safety.

While the elders failed to agree on what to do, the foals did each other no damage, though they loved to spar like swordsmen. They seemed to have an instinct, a sense of just how far it was wise to go. It held even with humans. And that, thought Marina, was the most unfoallike thing about them. Young horses were reckless of their strength, but these were remarkably careful, for babies. It was as if they were born knowing how to conduct themselves in the world.

Novinha’s foal called to Marina as she came down to the pasture, running along the fence with head and tail high, tossing his head with its moon-bright gleam of horn. The others followed more slowly. They had their own chosen humans; they acknowledged Marina but did not welcome her as the colt did. In that they were Lipizzans, but again they were young for it.

She slipped through the gate in the wooden fence. The colt was waiting for her. He followed her as she walked to the river, with the others trailing behind, and even a few of the mares.

She stopped as she always did at her favorite place, a stone like a chair, where she could sit and watch the water flow by. The colt lay down as he liked to do and laid his head in her lap. The moon glowed in his coat. She stroked it. It was the softest thing in the world, and warm, and it smelled of flowers. He closed his eyes and sighed.

He was not asleep, not quite. His ears flicked as the other foals and their mothers found things to do nearby. A pair of shadows moved softly through them, stroking a neck here, a nose there.

Tante Estrella and Tante Concetta sat on the grass near Marina’s stone. Some of the foals circled, curious, even came to be petted, but none came as close as the colt had, or laid his head in a welcoming lap. Maybe it was Novinha who prevented it: she had come to stand over Tante Concetta, huge and white and quiet.

Marina’s head was full of questions. There were too many of them; they crowded each other. They silenced her.

Tante Estrella only sat for a moment before she was on her feet again, stroking and talking softly to one of the younger mares. That one had a filly, who came to investigate Estrella, nibbling boldly on the hem of her coat.

“Look,” Estrella said abruptly. Marina started. The colt opened an eye but closed it again, refusing to wake for anything as trivial as human chatter.

“Look around you,” Estrella said. “Do you know what you see?”

She was expecting an answer. Marina groped for one. “A mistake,” she said. “The Mandate carried too far.”

“No,” said Estrella. “You don’t see.”

Marina frowned. She had come here to be alone in the quiet, not to be put in the training ring and set on a circle.

“Estrella is saying,” said Concetta from Novinha’s shadow, “that you need to look harder. What do you see?”

“Twelve baby unicorns,” Marina said sharply, though she tried to be light. “Next you’re going to tell me you planned this.”

“We did expect that it would happen, yes,” Concetta said. “We thought the Hippodrome needed a lesson.”

“It could have blown up in your faces,” Marina said. “We could have been shut down. If they get angry enough, we could still—”

“No,” said Estrella. She was smiling. It was the same smile Papa Morgan had had, that had driven away Hendrick Manygoats Watanabe.

Marina was not as easily routed, and she had a unicorn in her lap. She looked around as she had been told to, in the moon’s bright light. The mares were all around them, and the foals, watching as if what she said could matter to them. And how could it? She had nothing wise or intelligent to say.

She had to say something. She said, “We’re old stock, too. Aren’t we? What happens if they put us under the Mandate?”

Estrella laughed. It was a silvery sound, but very human. “Not what you’re afraid of! We turn into what we were to start with. Gypsies. Tinkers. Tamers of horses from Old Troy onward. No more and no less than we always were.”

“But,” said Marina. “I don’t—” She stopped herself, started again. “I’m not seeing what I obviously should see.”

“We’re all blind when we’re young,” Concetta said. “We have to learn to see. Like foals.”

“Not these,” Marina said, ruffling the colt’s mane. “We’re custodians, aren’t we? We were given them, and they us. We protect them.”

“That’s part of what we do,” Concetta said. “We watch over the old arts, too, and the old lines.”

“Which happen to go back to the old stories,” said Estrella. She seemed to find the fact delightful. So would Marina, if she had time to think about it—if she were not so afraid. She had grown up under the Mandate. She could not imagine it giving way so easily. The family could not be that strong. No one was.

She said that last aloud. Estrella shook her head at Marina’s foolishness. “We don’t need to be. We have our horses. And,” she said, “their children. Haven’t you wondered what will become of them?”

“Often,” Marina said.

“In an older world,” said Concetta, “there would be no place for them. This world, that makes new species out of the rags of the old . . . there’s room in it for a myth.”

Marina looked at the colt asleep in her lap. He did not feel like a myth. He was warm and solid and inescapably real.

“Is he going to live forever?” she asked.

She had no idea where the question came from. It simply was, hanging out there in front of them.

One of the mares snorted and stamped. The sound swelled to fill the silence.

Estrella spoke softly, almost too soft to hear. “We don’t know.”

Marina widened her eyes. “You don’t know? But you know everything!”

Estrella said nothing. Concetta sighed. “We only know what all the elders know. What we teach the young ones when they’re ready. What we preserve here, as far as the world ever knew, is the old way of training horses, and the old lines. Now it knows what the old lines are, and what they come from. But what else we’ve let the Mandate make here. . . we don’t know. They may just be very long-lived.”

“How? Like their mothers, still strong at thirty? Or like us with our hundred years? Or more than that?”

They did not answer.

The colt stirred suddenly and scrambled to his feet. He shook himself all over. He scratched an ear with a hind hoof; scratched his rump with his horn. He nudged against Novinha and, with a careful twist of the head that kept the horn from her belly, began vigorously to nurse.

Miranda could see how he would grow, from the way the moonlight struck him: not tall but broad and sturdy, built to carry a rider, to pull a carriage, to stand in marble on a monument. He was not the delicate goat-creature of the myth. None of them was, even the ones who had been bred from Arabians. They were all as real as the stone she sat on.

“And they said,” she said, “that the rootstock was a rhinoceros.”

“That was a diversion,” said Estrella, “to keep the secret safe till people were ready to know it. It’s not how long one of them lives, do you see? It’s that the line lives. Just as with us. One person dies, gives way to another, but the species goes on and on. Eventually it changes. Or if people meddle with its helices, it discovers what it would have been.”

Marina nodded slowly. “I wonder,” she said. ‘Will they breed true?”

“We don’t know that, either,” said Concetta, but not as if she were deeply troubled by it.

Marina thought of finding answers. Of breeding under the Mandate; of being exempt from it. Of discovering what they had, and what it would turn into.

Shanna Chen-Howard would come back. Others would come with her. They would try to meddle. They could not help it. Somehow under the moon it did not matter. The world was so much wider than it had been, the day the Mandate lowered itself on Dancer’s Rest.

“It did better than it knew,” she said.

“Oh, it knew,” said Concetta. “It just didn’t know how much it knew.” She pushed herself up, shaking out her skirts. “It was meant, after all, to make the imperfect perfect.”

“And when it found something that was exactly as it ought to be,” Estrella said over the back of her favorite mare, “it made something completely new, that was as old as memory.”

And they said the magic had gone out of the world. Marina shook her head and found herself smiling. It was hard not to smile, with mares and foals all around her, and one coming to rest his horn gently over her heart.

“I wonder,” she said, “how you’ll take to the training ring.” He snorted and raised his head and stamped. And went up, smooth and sure, all silver in the moonlight: a levade as polished as any in the arena.

She laughed. His eye seemed to laugh with her. She had an answer to that question at least. It was quite enough to go on with.

Copyright © 1995 by Judith Tarr

First published: Peter S. Beagle’s Immortal Unicorn, ed. Peter S. Beagle and Janet Berliner