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FOURTEEN Horn of Unicorn

Empleado refused to let them bury Hake and Roo in the hole Eichra Oren had blasted from the ground. Instead, a handful of unlucky noncoms was given the task of digging a double grave out of crumbling carbonaceous chondrite and sticky mud. In a way, they were lucky; the rain had stopped. However the sky was beginning to dim; nightfall had come to 5023 Eris.

Reille y Sanchez had just returned from a long, fruitless couple of hours searching for Richardson. The first shift, just before hers, had discovered a spent cartridge case, 11.43x23mm Lenin, in the trees close to the camp, but no trace of the missing woman. By the time the newly fledged KGB colonel was back from what she increasingly regarded as a futile expenditure of manpower, Dr. Nguyen had repaired Demene Wise's shattered knee as best she could.

It had been a bloody mess in the most literal sense. The physician had spent her two hours picking bone splinters from the wound before calling for sutures and bandages. Why Pulaski was able to assist her without getting sick was a mystery. The joint would never be the same, that being the way of knees, but in his own way, Wise was lucky, too. In this gravity he'd be ambulatory long before a similar recovery would have been possible on Earth. Eichra Oren would have to begin watching his back.

At least the so-called p'Nan debt assessor had saved Dr. Nguyen the time and energy involved in healing Roger Betal's "injury" which, given present technology and the minimal resources available, might otherwise have been as badly wasted as in the search for Richardson. Reille y Sanchez had watched him before returning what she presumed was a cased sword and leaving on her hopeless quest. He'd squatted beside the man, still conscious but far gone in shock and pain. Eichra Oren's ecstatic concentration had returned for a moment. Placing his hands over Betal's, he'd moved them in a complex pattern impossible for the eye to follow, as if casting a spell. When he lifted them, Betal's fingers had unlaced from one another. The KGB bully had sighed, a look of beatific gratitude on his face, and passed out.

Now Eichra Oren had a friend for life, she realized—and a couple of problems. Wise, despite his name, was too stupid to learn from experience, however painful. He'd pursue the man who'd crippled him, not giving up this side of the grave—probably his own. Betal, however, was a classic authoritarian: once beaten properly, he'd be loyal forever. On second thought, she grinned to herself. Maybe Eichra Oren's problems were self-canceling.

Changing to fresh clothes aboard the Dole for the second time that day—Richardson's, even the rank tabs were right—she found him sitting among empty crates under the starboard wing of the McCain, drinking coffee with the doctor who rose and left them, making noises about checking on her patients. The mysterious case lay across his legs. Sam, at his knee, grinned up at her, but his expression, like a dolphin's, seemed a permanent feature. The man lifted a thermos bottle. "Home is the hunter, and my fellow—or is it competitive?—investigator. Would you like some coffee?"

She smiled, taking a small crate on the opposite side of a large crate from his own. "Nothing I'd like better. This is comfortable, like a sidewalk café, complete with a billion-dollar aluminum-graphite awning. Let's leave it `fellow investigator' as long as we can, shall we? Is your combat technique something special, or can anybody do it where you're from?"

"Wherever that is," he poured coffee for her into a paper cup, voicing her unspoken thought, "because God, or someone more acceptably Marxist, forbid that there may be any more at home like me?"

She took a sip. "Look, I don't care if you agree with your boss's condescendingly negative opinion of Marxism or not. I'm just trying to have a nice, polite, diplomatic conversation—"

"While obtaining whatever data you can persuade me to part with?" He leaned against the tire of the shuttle, shifted the leather case, and crossed his legs at the ankles (she thought it was like watching a cat stretch), grinning as he looked her over from beneath annoyingly raised eyebrows. "Fair enough, fair Colonel, if you return the favor. What would you like to know? The pocket arm I carry is fusion-powered—you'd call it a `steam pistol'—with a coaxial laser pointer. Its power plant is about the size of a thimble, far beyond any current Soviet or American capability, and would serve the energy needs of all three of your spacecraft for a—"

She shook her head. Being a trained and experienced warrior herself, she was fascinated, astonished, by virtually every aspect of the man's appearance on 5023 Eris, but, at least for now, she'd leave the engineering questions to somebody else. "I know something about martial arts. Did you kill Roo by projecting your ki into him?"

"Nothing so romantic." He laughed. "Plain old hydrostatic shock."

More engineering, a phenomenon associated with high-velocity bullets. "What I really wondered, is it something specially devised with the help of the Elders? They're so advanced—"

Eichra Oren laughed again, not in an unkindly way. He did that a lot, she realized, the same open, unguarded laughter as during the fight. For some reason she found it more terrifying than the even greater mysteries he represented. "Art's pathetic leg-breakers," he explained, "were doomed the moment they initiated force against me, Estrellita. Once committed, the poor devils never stood a chance."

"But they—"

"I know how they're carried on your expedition roster. Wise is supposedly a mining technician, Betal a structural engineer. Hake and Roo were agricultural equipment operators."

From the beginning, like everyone else, Reille y Sanchez had known that the four worked for Empleado. In fact they were—had been—exactly what they seemed to be, even to someone as naive as Pulaski: tough, highly trained KGB enforcement agents.

"Their failure was by no means their fault," Eichra Oren went on, "this I swear to you." By now, the strange exultation she'd twice seen in his eyes seemed to have faded altogether. In her judgment, he seemed apologetic, ashamed of himself, of the amazing thing he'd done—four to one, two armed with knives—afraid the survivors might be punished on his account. "Nor the fault of those—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, isn't it, or is it still sometimes called Russia?—who trained them."

She managed to summon up an official KGB frown far sterner than she actually felt. "What do you mean?"

"Their school of martial arts is simply more primitive than mine."

"How much," she thought of the two hundred thousand millennia nautiloid culture had existed, "more primitive?"

"Give or take a century or two, maybe fifteen thousand years. Like the Aztecs fighting your Spetznaz—did I say that right?—instead of Hernan Cortez. Only much worse."

They sat for a long moment in silence.

"Just who are you, anyway, Eichra Oren?" she demanded, reflecting on his weird talent and what kept striking her as the impossibility of his existence. "And more important from a strategic and tactical viewpoint, where the hell did you come from, all of a sudden?"

He spread his hands in a half-shrug, opening his mouth to speak.

"While I'm indulging myself," she interrupted, "asking questions that'll never be answered, what are the Elders searching for on Eris?" With a chill running up her spine, she realized she'd been saving the most frightening question for last. "What sort of terrible thing is it that an advanced people like the Elders need so desperately?"

"On our first date?" He took case in hand and arose from the crate he was sitting on. "My dear Colonel, I'm shocked. But I'll tell you what: I'm overdue to check in with the entity you call my boss. Until I do, believe it or not, I won't know a great deal more about all of this than you do. I'll leave Sam with you. Maybe he can answer some of your questions. All except that last one, that's—what's the expression?—`classified.' You're right, you'll probably never know the answer. Sam, remember you're with a lady and on your best behavior." With that, Eichra Oren turned and strode away from the shuttle, out into the jungle, and was gone.

"Swell: my first act as a KGB agent." She put her elbows on the makeshift table, chin in hands, glaring at the animal as it sat with its tongue hanging out through an idiot grin. "Interrogating a furry ventriloquist's dummy!"

The dog turned his head toward her. "Estrellita, my lovely, I'll be nice if you will. That's what he meant, `best behavior.' He always accuses me of being a wise guy, if that's the idiom. Me, I think my sense of humor's fifteen thousand years more advanced than his, give or take a century or two."

"So you can talk!" She glanced around, remembering the relay carried by Semlohcolresh's separable tentacle, suspecting some kind of practical joke. On the other hand, how reasonable was the idea of a giant squid running this entire show? By comparison, a talking dog seemed downright mundane.

"No," Sam replied, "it's your imagination. The strain you're under. You're cracking up."

"That I can believe." Coming to a decision, she stood. "But cracking up or not, he said you'd answer my questions. Only let's take a walk, so I can enjoy my schizophrenia in privacy." They followed the route Eichra Oren had, slipping between two shuttles—she checked the contents of the chamber and magazine of her Witness, mindful of another colonel, whose uniform she wore—far enough into the trees so she could still see by half a dozen lights Sebastiano had strung around the camp.

" `Wise guy' is the correct idiom," she told the dog when they were out of human earshot, "although it's a bit dated. Your English is actually very good. So is Eichra Oren's. He also knows a lot about Earth's current and not-so-current history."

"Why shouldn't he?" Sam asked. "That's where we both come from."

Reille y Sanchez found a spot at the base of one of the giant growths where the ground was fairly dry despite the recent rain. She kept her pistol in her lap. "Yes, but what I've learned here—almost the only thing I've learned—is that there's Earth and then again there's Earth. Which version are you and Eichra Oren from?"

Sam stretched and lay down on the ground. "That's an assumption, isn't it, that he and I are from the same Earth? You don't know, Estrellita, maybe I'm from the Planet of the Dogs."

She chuckled. "Like Aelbraugh Pritsch is from the Planet of the Birds?"

"Birdbrains," he corrected, "and you're from the Planet of the Apes. But no, in this case your assumption's correct. It's an Earth where, for uncounted millennia, no sapient—including Eichra Oren, although I seem to be the cynical and worldly member of the firm—has ever known domination by, or of, another sapient. That's what scares you about him, Estrellita."

"What?"

"Didn't think I'd noticed, did you? I'm a dog, remember? I can smell fear. It smells like shit. You're frightened whenever he laughs. But, speaking of shit, with your political education, you've no way of realizing that it's merely the uncalculated laughter of a free individual, something you've never had a chance to see. Or be."

"There's a much simpler explanation than that, Sam." She took a deep breath. "Shit's all I seem to be wading through on my way to the truth. `Uncounted millennia,' you say. Eichra Oren says `fifteen thousand years.' On my Earth, fifteen thousand years ago, people were pretty much limited to stone knives and bear skins. What makes your Earth so different?"

Sam took several moments to answer. Deeper among the trees, Reille y Sanchez thought she saw fireflies winking. "Look," he told her, "suppose one of your space shuttles accidentally landed on some primitive island where people are still limited to stone knives and bear skins. There are still places like that on your Earth, aren't there?"

She nodded. "I suppose so. Jungles in New Guinea, maybe."

"All right, now suppose for some reason you had to explain fully and accurately where you'd come from and how you'd gotten there. The natives' view of the universe revolves around magic and mythology. It doesn't include things like science or spaceflight. They don't even know the world is round. You'd have to do a lot of preliminary educating before you got around to things like airfoils and rocket engines, wouldn't you?"

"Yes, you would." She frowned. "What're you driving at, Sam?"

"New Guinea primitives mightn't like what you tell them. They might get scared and burn you at the stake or shrink your head or something. I'm trying to warn you, Estrellita, that a full and accurate understanding of, well, of Eichra Oren's origin, or mine, requires that you unlearn a lot that's taken for granted—mistakenly—by your own civilization."

This time it was her turn for a long, thoughtful pause. I'm having this conversation, she told herself, with a big white shaggy animal. "Sam, I've been trying to cut down on burning people—and dogs—at the stake. It causes cancer. And I've given up shrinking heads for Lent. Will you please tell me what this is leading up to?"

"Simply that Eichra Oren's the descendent of an ancient civilization."

"That much I've managed to gather on my own, thank you."

Sam sat up. "Yes? Well, it's a civilization which existed on your very own alternate version of Earth, Estrellita. By a long, indirect route, he and I come from exactly the same place you do. Unfortunately, it happens to be a civilization none of your historians ever heard of and your archaeologists would maintain never existed." Observing her confused expression, he added, "Any questions, so far?"

"Sure. Lots. At the moment, I find the most important is this: is it at all smart to believe any of this nonsense you're telling me? Let me rephrase that: how can one tread safely between intellectual flexibility and foolish gullibility?"

"Between having an open mind and holes in your head?" he asked. "In my off moments, I've often pondered that never-ending conflict, myself."

She grinned at the dog and started, from reflex, to reach down and pat him on the head, stopping herself only at the last moment. "Most of all," she told him, "I wonder about myself, my own potential for both of those attributes. Would I have believed Galileo when he told me what he'd just seen through his telescope? Or William Harvey, claiming that the human heart is merely a mechanical pump?"

"Or whoever it was in your culture " Sam suggested, "who discovered that most human evils are caused by invisible plantlife?"

"Louis Pasteur." She nodded. "On the other hand, would I have been able to spot Piltdown Man or the Giant of Cardiff as hoaxes, or would I have been taken in with the rest of the crowd? Would I have dismissed truly revolutionary and valuable information as . . . as—"

"Having been decanted from a cracked pot?"

"Pretty good, Sam. You know, I remember reading somewhere that Sir Isaac Newton believed in astrology and numerology. He once conducted `scientific' experiments with what he thought was the powder of ground unicorn horn. What was it you said? An Earth where, for uncounted millennia, no sapient being has dominated, or been dominated by, another sapient being? My Earth, Sam, the distant past, that's what you were talking about. And you're right, it does scare me. It also sounds a lot like powdered horn of unicorn."

"There's your answer, Estrellita, don't believe me. See for yourself. Excuse me." He reached up with a hind foot, scratched behind one ear, and Reille y Sanchez was reminded all over again what sort of creature she was discussing politics with. "You came to the right place for it."

"Well," she answered, giving it visible consideration. She'd meant her remark about unicorn horn, but maybe this was a way to draw him out. "I haven't seen any evidence of military discipline among the Proprietor's people—so many different weird and wonderful creatures. They don't seem to display anything resembling the legendary capitalist corporate loyalty. As far as I can tell, there isn't any clear-cut hierarchy of authority, no official table of organization, not even much of the minimal social pecking order I'd expect to see among intelligent and competitive beings."

"No distemper, worms, or rabies, either."

"Have it your way. Obviously you and Eichra Oren share the Elders' peculiar philosophy. Or is that an assumption, too? But it also means you're sitting ducks—you know that idiom?—for anybody better organized. You have no sense of internal security, no solidarity which would tend to protect you or your company secrets."

"Right again, Estrellita, try it for yourself. None of the Elders, nor any of their many associated species, will demonstrate even the slightest reluctance to tell you anything and everything you want to know."

She shifted the Witness in her lap, then discovered that some ground dampness was beginning to creep through her clothing after all. She decided to stick it out for a few more minutes. "The single exception being the precise reason or reasons for their presence on the asteroid to begin with, apparently at the order or suggestion or request, I can't tell which, of the one identifiable authority figure, the so-called Proprietor."

"The big fat bum."

She leaned forward, concentrating. "And even that secret, I'm inclined to agree with General Gutierrez, seems to have religious undertones about it which make me doubt the value of ferreting it out."

"Didn't one of your own greatest philosophers once observe that one man's theology is another man's belly laugh?"

"Wait," she held up a hand, "let me think. I'll make a bet with you, Sam. If the people here turn out to be anything, it'll be too goddamned cooperative, won't they? As the expedition's—and Earth's—official investigator, I'll find myself in the worst imaginable position, inundated with more information than I can evaluate. That kind of generosity might be a clever tactic, in itself, mightn't it?"

Sam grinned and wagged his tail. "You say that with what sounds like grudging admiration."

"It's true," she replied distractedly, still thinking, then shifted her focus back to here and now. "But it's also true that I pride myself on being a practical, efficient type at heart, afflicted with very little unbridled imagination or useless curiosity." She leaned back against the tree.

"Anyway," he suggested, "that's what you've always wanted to believe about yourself."

"Sam! I thought you were going to be nice if I was."

"A point, Estrellita, but I can smell other things besides fear, you know. Intelligence. Curiosity. Imagination. They smell nice. You reek of them, if you don't mind my saying so."

She crossed her arms. "That's a hell of a compliment. I'll just have to take immediate and stern measures to control them."

"Do that, Estrellita, it'll be interesting to watch. I'll—" He lifted his head, ears perked rigid. "But you'll have to excuse me, I'm being paged. `His master's voice' and all that. Can you find your way back?"

"Thanks, I'm a sapient, too, you know." A bit stiff from dampness, she climbed to her feet. He grinned, turned, and ran off into the jungle.

But not very sapient, she thought, I hardly found out anything I wanted to know, especially about where Eichra Oren came from. Shrugging to herself, always the practical, efficient type, she simply added the task of discovering more about the mystery man to a long list of other chores she saw, in her incurious, unimaginative way, looming ahead of her.

 

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Framed