Читать книгу The Unicorn Girl - Michael Kurland - Страница 9

CHAPTER THREE

That answered my question. Something had happened, although I had no idea what. First of all, there was that blip. It wasn’t exactly a sound, it was more like a feeling —a gut-wrenching, universe-shaking, giant blip of a feeling. Then there were the changes.

It was now daylight; seemingly early morning, just after dawn, but nonetheless daylight. We were still in the middle of a woods, but it was a different woods. It was more ordered: the trees seemed almost laid out in rows. The path was now a narrow brick road. A narrow —as a matter of fact —yellow brick road.

“Michael! Chester! Help!”

We ran ahead. There, sitting on yellow bricks, was Sylvia. She was crying; long, convulsive sobs that racked her thin body and left her shaking. “Help me. Please. It’s awful,” she gasped.

“She’s hysterical,” Chester said helpfully.

“What’s the matter, Sylvia?” I asked, squatting down beside her. Silly question; what wasn’t?

Chester bent over us. “Slap her on the back,” he suggested. “Put your head between your legs,” he told Sylvia.

I ignored him. “You’ll be all right,” I told Sylvia, taking her in my arms and holding her tightly. “Come on, now. What’s the matter?”

Sylvia clutched my arm tightly for a minute and then let go and pushed me away. “Let me lie down for a while, please. That...thing...whatever it was, twisted my insides all up. Didn’t you feel it?”

“We felt it,” I told her, rolling my jacket up and putting it under her head, “but I guess it didn’t bother us that strongly. Not physically.”

“Some people get seasick and some don’t,” Chester added. “It’s like that.”

“It wasn’t this bad the first time,” Sylvia said, looking very pale in the bland, sunless dawn. “I’m cold.”

“The first time?” Chester asked.

“Yes,” she said, sitting up with my help so I could put the jacket around her instead of under her. “The first time was when the train arrived. That’s when Adolphus ran away. We thought it was one of the famous Nueva España earthquakes, but it wasn’t. I got sick then too; but at least the time and place stayed the same.” She thought about that for a second. “Or they seemed to, they seemed to. Tell me, didn’t you know about unicorns?”

“Yes,” I told her. “But to us the unicorn is a mythical beast.”

“And it isn’t nineteen thirty-six,” Chester added moodily. “That was about fifty years ago.”

“I’m in the future?” Sylvia asked.

“I thought of that,” I told her.

“Then we’d have unicorns,” Chester explained, describing a unicorn with his hands. “And, from what you told us, interstellar travel.”

“You don’t travel to far planets?”

“We barely travel to near planets.”

“Then...what is happening?”

“I’m sure we’ll figure it all out,” I said reassuringly. “Chester’s very good at figuring things out. He has an oracle.”

P h e e—e e—e e p !

“What was that?” I asked, standing up.

“It was a pheep,” Chester informed me.

“Dorothy!” Sylvia exclaimed. “That’s her signal.” She tugged out her silver whistle and gave a long triple blast on it.

P h e e—e e—e e e p P e e e p—e e e p !

“She’s coming,” Sylvia said. “I wonder why none of the others answered.”

“They might not have gone blip,” Chester said. “They may be still wandering around in the dark looking for a unicorn. There’s something to be said for that.”

“Sylvia!” Dorothy called, breaking noisily through the underbrush. “Here you are. Where is everyone else?”

“Well,” I said, “we’re here.”

“You pheeped?” Chester asked. Once he gets hold of a spelling, he seldom lets go of it.

“Pheeped?”

“Whistled,” I explained.

“Oh. Phee—ee—eep!?”

“That’s it,” Chester agreed. “Pheep.”

“I’m afraid we’re pretty much the ‘everybody else’,” I said.

“What happened, was it an earthquake?” Dorothy asked, looking around for signs of damage.

“It seems to have been more of a time quake,” Chester said, and proceeded to explain what we thought we knew about what we assumed had happened.

I sat down next to Sylvia. “How are you feeling now?”

“Much better, thank you. The effects pass quickly. I’m not so cold anymore.”

“That’s good.”

“Do you want your jacket back?”

“No, no. Keep it as long as you need it; I’m fine.” People, especially girls, always assume a selfish motive if there’s one available to be assumed. That’s rule number five.

Dorothy pheeped a few more times, but got no answers. She put the whistle away. “I guess you’re right. The silver whistle becomes merely a symbol, blown in an empty wood where none can hear.”

“We’re here,” I reminded her.

“Left alone in a quadrilateral wood to whistle for my no-dimensional friends!” she declaimed dramatically.

“If you want to be left alone,” I hinted.

“Leave her alone,” Chester ordered. “She’s merely being poetic. You, as a matter of fact (and a mind of fiction), should listen.”

I spent the next few moments working that one through, putting in the necessary punctuation and sorting it out. By the time I had it, the conversation had passed me by.

“I think so, positively,” Dorothy was saying.

“All right, it’s settled. Let’s go.” Chester finished stripping the twigs and leaves off a walking stick he was manufacturing and whipped it through the air. “Onward!”

“Where are you leading us?” I demanded.

“Listen, troop, yours is not to reason why....”

“How come every time you decide to lead you start calling me ‘troop’?” I demanded. “Have you thought of what that makes the girls?”

Chester chalked the end of his walking stick and took a couple of shots on an imaginary pool table. “Never mind making the girls. Right now we go onward—out of the woods.”

“Why don’t we go back to the Trembling Womb?”

“Because the TW probably isn’t there anymore; and that flying cigar might be.”

“Onward,” I agreed.

We followed the yellow brick road as it twisted through the orderly rows of trees, through hill and dale and over stream. The road went over water like a brick snake: no supports, just a single thickness of bricks humping across the stream. It managed to look like a part of nature and not an intrusion. But in this wood, nature itself was awfully ordered, with the trees planted in rows and the flowers growing in clumps and arranged with an eye to color.

“I think we’re in somebody’s private forest,” I announced, noticing a neat line of elm running through the oak and spruce.

“More like a garden,” Chester commented.

“Why garden?”

“Take a look at that patch of dahlia over there. Those reddish-purple flowers in the square plot.”

“I like dahlia.” Sylvia said. “They float.”

The flowers filled a square about six by six feet. In front of the patch was a sign:

DAHLIA

MULTIFLORA DAHL

23: 91;616

Rhumpartet Alternate

“So that’s how you knew they were dahlia. I agree, it’s a garden.”

“Onward!”

* * * *

“Ohhh....”

“Chester! Michael! Come look at this,” yelled one of the girls, from around the next bend in the road.

We ran.

“What?” I demanded, looking around.

“That!” Sylvia pointed up.

I looked up. And up. We had entered a grove of sempervirens. Redwoods. The trees that aren’t grown up until a thousand years and at last five hundred feet have passed under them.

“Look at them!” Sylvia breathed. “Now I know what an oak looks like to an ant.”

“This grove must be about two thousand years old,” I said, looking at the girth of a nearby tree and remembering a dated slice I’d seen at a museum. “These trees were young when Julius Caesar marched against Gaul.”

Chester whacked his stick against a tree, producing a satisfyingly solid thunk. “Now, if these were planted in rows, I’d worry.”

We walked through the grove of giants as through a living cathedral, and our footsteps on the brick echoed among the spires and were lost.

We traveled past smaller, younger redwoods, then back to oak, and finally came to a field. It was a sort of tree kindergarten, where the saplings stood in closely-ordered rows waiting to be transplanted to their spot in the forest behind us. Across the field, some hundreds of yards away, there was a road.

“There,” Chester said, pointing to where the road T’d our path. “A road. People. A town. Restaurants. Hotels. Food. Sleep. Hurray!”

I suddenly realized how tired I was, and how hungry. I stopped. “Let’s rest for a minute before we go on.”

Sylvia leaned against me. “Yes, let’s.”

“Nonsense!” Dorothy snapped. “Buck up. At least get to the road before you sit down. Here, have a lemon drop.” She produced a package of lemon drops from somewhere and passed it to us.

“Right,” I said, sucking on my lemon drop. “Onward and upward. Excelsior! To the road or bust.” And so our tired little band traversed the field of midget trees and made it to the Great Road.

The great dirt road.

I sat down by the side of the road. “That’s kind of disappointing: our main road turns out to be dirt.”

“Pace,” Chester said, raising his walking stick in benediction. “It’s still a main road, even if dirt. They do things differently in this world, or this time, or whatever.”

I stretched myself out on the grass by the side of the road and prepared to make myself comfortable. “How do you mean?” I asked Chester, who was knocking around clods of dirt, with his stick.

“This road’s been traveled over by heavy carriages. Heavy, horse-drawn carriages. Which makes it a main road, since horse roads are seldom paved. The horses don’t like it .”

“How do you know all this?”

“Elementary, my dear Theodore Bear. The depth of the rut made by the wheels and their distance apart. As to their being drawn by horses....” Chester kicked one of the clods over to where I was resting.

“Horses,” I agreed. “What makes you so smart?”

“I have my image to maintain.”

“Here comes someone,” Sylvia announced. She stood on tiptoe with her hands on her forehead shielding her eyes, like a James Fenimore Cooper Indian scout. If you can picture a leggy Indian scout in a minitunic, then you’ve got it.

Approaching us, pulled by two white horses and closely followed by a thick wave of dust, was a large, open carriage. As it got closer, we could make out the details. And the details—driver, footman and two passengers—could make us out. The carriage was white with gold trim and shaped roughly like one of Columbus’s ships on large wheels. The driver and footman were perched like red and gold masts: one in front and the other in back. From inside the carriage, peering over the high sides, a male and female head regarded us. The male head was topped by a hat that looked like a golf cap six sizes too large. The female head was wearing a yellow sunbonnet with great, stiff lace fringes.

Behind the carriage, centered in the middle of the dust cloud, rode a flatbed wagon pulled by a large, angry-looking horse and steered by a small, unhappy-looking man.

The carriage pulled to a stop in front of us. The wagon, its driver screaming a word I couldn’t quite hear, jerked to a stop behind. All was quiet on the road as the golf cap looked at us and we looked at it and the dust slowly settled. Then the capped head barked a sharp “Yimmons!” and the footman jumped down and opened the carriage door. The wearer of the head stood up, revealing a slender body cased in a black suit, vest and bowtie. Taking a step forward to the door of the carriage, he pleasantly looked down his nose at us.

“Could it be that I have found here on the edge of the wood, while going on my Tuesday morning trip to town for the week’s provisions—to be loaded into the wagon behind—some travelers, perchance hikers, who have misplaced their supplies and lost their way in the wood, becoming, perhaps, weary, hungry and thirsty and despairing of ever finding their way back to the company of gentlefolk (for surely, by their dress and manner they are of the gentry), after long hours, mayhap days, of their ordeal?”

He looked from one to the other of us and we stared blankly back at him.

“Well, could it be?” he barked.

“Robin, Robin,” a bored female voice called from inside the coach, and the other head appeared, nodding sadly. “You’re losing control.”

I thought so myself.

Robin’s female companion was a young woman, dressed in one of my great grandmother’s dresses and carrying herself with an air that was popular when my great grandmother was a young woman. She was very handsome, in a straight-laced, old-fashioned sort of way. She, Robin and the carriage complemented each other.

Chester leaned toward me and whispered without moving his lips—one of his best tricks—”Early Victorian. Cave. We may have fallen into a Gothic novel.”

The young man turned his nose toward his female companion. “Losing control? How so, Aunt?”

Aunt? She wasn’t any older than he. Well, she didn’t look any older.

She tilted her head up to what seemed to be the proper angle for conversation. “The current passion and vogue among the gentlefolk for creating and using sentences of exceeding length and complexity adds immeasurably to the pleasure of conversation when the technique is understood and properly utilized, if one can be said to utilize a vogue, and competently executed, if one can be said to execute a passion; but this is an art that should be practiced in the solitude of one’s own chamber, perhaps is front of a mirror, before introducing it in public, for fear of losing one’s way amidst the ebb and flow of modifiers, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and other parts of speech within the clauses, phrases and the like that make up the sentence, and losing control of the thought that impels the word, the fact that the fancy of language can, at best, merely analog, and bubbling off into incoherence.

“In other, simpler, shorter and more direct words....”

Robin held up his hand to stop the flow. “No other words please, Aunt. Those will have to do. I am, as you well know, a simple country squire, and have no time for such fiddle-faddle. Well then, short and to the point. Are you travelers in need of assistance, and if so will you ride with us to the town, where such can be provided?”

“Yes and yes,” I said. “And we thank you.”

“Madam,” Chester said to Robin’s young Aunt. “In behalf of four weary travelers who appear purely by chance at this point of the road at this time, and who are sorely in need of sustenance, rest and—perhaps even more important—the humanity and friendship of those whose lands we cross, however accidentally, and upon whose bounty we must now impose, I would like to thank the both of you for stopping; surely an act of unexcelled kindness which shows the goodness of your hearts; for speaking with us, which shows your humanity, consideration and knowledge of the higher values, and, most important, for offering your aid, which must surely rank with the assistance the parable tells us was offered to that other traveler in his hour of need so long ago.” He bowed stiffly from the waist.

“Oh!” said Robin’s Aunt. “Well. How elegant. Robin, have our guests mount the carriage so we can get started. You sit next to me so we can talk. What did you say your name was?”

We clambered into the coach and sat ourselves on the wide, soft, leather seats. There would easily have been room for two or three more before anyone started feeling crowded. The footman took his place and the vehicle yanked to a start. When Sylvia sat down there was a moment of confusion on the part of both Robin and his aunt. They, evidently, weren’t used to miniskirts. Robin seemed to be in some sort of mental crisis, staring at Sylvia’s legs and then quickly away, and then back at the seat as though Sylvia had disappeared.

Aunt had herself under tight control. “Your, ah, limbs, child,” she said, carefully not looking at Sylvia. “They must be cold. Here—why don’t you cover them with this?” She took a sweater from the seat beside her and poked it in Sylvia’s face.

“Thank you,” Sylvia said, taking the sweater. “It is sort of cold.” She put the sweater around her shoulders.

“I don’t think you got the point,” I murmured to her. “The knees, cover the knees.”

“What? Why?”

“Don’t ask, just do,” I said, vowing to give her a complete rundown on Queen Vicky and Tony Comstock the next chance I got, since we might be here a while. To her eternal credit, with no further questions she used the sweater as Aunt had intended.

Chester immediately launched into a sentence like a man pushing a canoe into the ocean. He was over his head in a minute, but he floundered on, drawing Robin’s and Aunt’s attention away from us while Sylvia made herself decent. At the last moment, when he was about to drown in parenthetical comments, he saved himself with a masterful summative clause and drove, dripping but unbowed, to a powerful and effective finish.

“Well!” Aunt repeated. “Well! Tell us about yourselves.”

And he did. In rich, full-colored and patently untrue detail, Chester wove a legend of our recent past. But then we couldn’t tell them the truth and expect not to be locked up. We’re from another world, or time, or something, and just arrived here on a passing blip. Sure.

“Urgh!” went Dorothy—a sort of gargle of astonishment at the back of her throat. She was staring over the side of the carriage at something in the field beyond. I swiveled my head around and peered over the edge of the coach to see what she was looking at.

I saw.

While Chester prattled on with Robin’s aunt and Robin regally surveyed his countryside, Dorothy, Sylvia and I watched as our carriage approached an orgy.

The grass was clear and green and deep, and on it six mother-naked couples frolicked in joyful abandon. Two carriages were pulled off the road onto the grass. Near them were a couple of portable tables covered with white tablecloths, on which rested wicker baskets packed with food. It was not, however, the sort of picnic that the ladies of the Church Missionary Society would have held.

The food was not yet touched. It wasn’t lunchtime yet, and the picnickers were working up an appetite. Their clothes, six sets of male garb and six complete ladies’ costumes, down to lace unmentionables, were neatly stacked in twelve separate piles. Their bodies, buffed bright and glistening with sweat, were arranged in six busy clusters. They ran, they jumped, they chased, they grabbed, they laughed, they were caught, and they fell down and joined together in the soft grass. It was beautiful to watch, if you went in for that sort of thing.

Sylvia licked her lips. “I don’t suppose they’d ask us to join them?” I was shocked for a second until I noticed that she was staring at the baskets of food. Still, it might be a good idea to find out just what the mores of my unicorn girl’s circus world were.

The scene reminded me very strongly of something out of a Victorian dirty book. The wicker baskets, the bottles of wine, the patiently-waiting horse carriages, all neatly framing the fun on the grass.

Our carriage had almost reached the scene of the action, and Chester had finally looked up from his animated conversation. He froze like a bird dog with a grouse.

“Remind you of anything?” I asked casually.

“Marin County ten years ago, but how did you know? You were in Europe.”

“That’s not what, I meant, but never mind.”

We reached the picnickers and stared over the side of the carriage at them. That is, we did, but our host and hostess ignored them completely and went on talking about the beauty of the autumn countryside.

Robin noticed that we were all staring at something, and looked out. “Ah, yes. The trees in autumn, the meadow, the countryside, the little changes of nature which can be seen every day as the leaves turn russet and gold and prepare to make their one trip from branch to mulch; this, God’s world, is where true beauty can be found and where man should seek his relaxation and find his spiritual comfort.”

“Oh?” Sylvia asked innocently. “Is that what they’re doing?”

The frolickers waved at us as our carriage passed them. One man, with his arms full of squirming blonde, made an obscene gesture.

I was puzzled by Robin’s lack of reaction. “You,” I said, gesturing at the field, “have guests, I see.”

“Yes. The little creatures of the woodland make themselves at home in the fields and sport about.”

I nodded and smiled, feeling very weak about the knees. Chester choked.

“What is the matter with you?” Aunt asked, slapping Chester heartily on the back.

Chester tried to look blasé and worldly-wise and succeeded in looking slightly bilious. “Those, ah, persons in the field,” he waved an indicative arm, out there. “Very, um, interesting.”

“Persons?” She leaned over and stared out of the carriage

The naked rompers, giggling and chortling, were spread out (individually as well as collectively) on the billiard-table lawn. Two by two they were forming themselves into letters and lining up to spell out a dirty word. Then, with the rapidity of long practice, they shifted to another dirty word. It’s amazing the postures two human beings can assume while forming a letter; especially, I suppose, a letter in a dirty word. I resolved that, with the right partner, I’d have to try one of the letters myself. The U probably, I’m basically conservative.

One-Half of a T, laughing wildly, blew a kiss at Aunt.

“What persons are these?” she asked without so much as a momentary flicker of an eyelid. “Is there somebody in our field?”

“In the field?” Robin, looking seriously concerned, peered out as a pair of melon-ripe breasts bounced by. “What would anyone be doing in our field? Where do you see them?” He stared off at the tree line. “Is someone sneaking about in our field?”

“Sneaking!” Dorothy yelped. She was suspiciously red about the ears. “The eye of man has seldom beheld such sneaking. Or of woman either!”

Aunt looked curiously at Dorothy. Chester and I looked curiously at Aunt, but she didn’t notice. “Girl,” she said sharply, “is something the matter? What is it? By your color, it’s either dyspepsia or indecision.” We had passed the picnickers and were bumping along toward the end of the field.

I looked back for one last glimpse, but the dust raised by the carriage obscured the past. It made the driver of the wagon behind us look like a World War I pilot continually coming out of a cloud bank. And hating it.