Away Games: Science Fiction Sports Stories Page 18

  Bort the Pure was aware of the unique advantages accruing to a virgin who hunts the wild unicorn, and so had practiced sexual abstinence since he was old enough to know what the term meant. And yet he naively believed that because his virginity allowed him to approach the unicorn more easily than other hunters, the unicorn would somehow become placid and make no attempt to defend itself—and so he followed a vicious animal which was compelled to let him approach it, and entered a patch of high grass which allowed him no maneuvering room during the inevitable charge. Foolishness.

  Every year hundreds of hopeful hunters go out in search of the unicorn, and every year all but a handful come back empty-handed if they come back at all. And yet the unicorn can be safely stalked and successfully hunted, if only the stalkers and hunters will take the time to study their quarry.

  When all is said and done, the unicorn is a relatively docile beast (except when enraged). It is a creature of habit, and once those habits have been learned by the hopeful photographer or trophy hunter, bringing home that picture or that horn is really no more dangerous than, say, slaying an Eight-Forked Dragon—and it’s certainly easier than lassoing wild minotaurs, a sport that has become all the rage these days among the smart set on the Platinum Plains.

  However, before you can photograph or kill a unicorn, you have to find it and by far the easiest way to make contact with a unicorn herd is to follow the families of smerps that track the great game migrations. The smerps, of course, have no natural enemies except for the rafsheen and the zumakim, and consequently will allow a human (or preternatural) being to approach them quite closely.

  A word of warning about the smerp: with its long ears and cute, fuzzy body, it resembles nothing more than an oversized rabbit but calling a smerp a rabbit doesn’t make it one, and you would be ill-advised to underestimate the strength of these nasty little scavengers. Although they generally hunt in packs of from ten to twenty, I have more than once seen a single smerp, its aura glowing with savage strength, pull down a half-grown unicorn. Smerps are poor eating, their pelts are worthless because of the difficulty of curing and tanning the auras, and they make pretty unimpressive trophies unless you can come up with one possessing a truly magnificent set of ears—in fact, in many areas they’re still classified as vermin—but the wise unicorn hunter can save himself a lot of time and effort by simply letting the smerps lead him to his prey.

  With the onset of poaching, the legendary unicorn herds numbering upwards of a thousand members no longer exist, and you’ll find that the typical herd today consists of from 50 to 75 individuals. The days when a photographer, safe and secure in a blind by a waterhole, could preserve on film an endless stream of the brutes coming down to drink, are gone forever and it is absolutely shocking to contemplate the number of unicorns that have died simply so their horns could be sold on the black market. In fact, I find it appalling that anyone in this enlightened day and age still believes that a powdered unicorn horn can act as an aphrodisiac.

  (Indeed, as any magi can tell you, you treat the unicorn horn with essence of gracch and then boil it slowly in a solution of sphinx blood. Now that’s an aphrodisiac!)

  But I digress.

  The unicorn, being a non-discriminating browser that is equally content to feed upon grasses, leaves, fruits, and an occasional small fern tree, occurs in a wide variety of habitats, often in the company of grazers such as centaurs and p/e/g/a/s/u/s/e/s p/e/g/a/s/i/m the pegasus.

  Once you have spotted the unicorn herd, it must be approached with great care and caution. The unicorn may have poor eyesight, and its sense of hearing may not be much better, but it has an excellent sense of smell and an absolutely awesome sense of grimsch, about which so much has been written that there is no point in my belaboring the subject yet again.

  If you are on a camera safari, I would strongly advise against trying to get closer than 100 yards to even a solitary beast—that sense of grimsch again—and most of the photographers I know swear by an 85-350mm automatic-focus zoom lens, providing, of course, that it has been blessed by a Warlock of the Third Order. If you haven’t got the shots you want by sunset, my best advice is to pack it in for the day and return the next morning. Flash photography is possible, of course, but it does tend to attract golem and other even more bothersome nocturnal predators.

  One final note to the camera buff: For reasons our alchemists have not yet determined, no unicorn has ever been photographed with normal emulsified film of any speed, so make absolutely sure that you use one of the more popular infrared brands. It would be a shame to spend weeks on safari, paying for your guide, cook, and trolls, only to come away with a series of photos of the forest that you thought was merely the background to your pictures.

  As for hunting the brutes, the main thing to remember is that they are as close to you as you are to them. For this reason, while I don’t disdain blood sacrifices, amulets, talismans, and blessings, all of which have their proper place, I for one always feel more confident with a .550 Nitro Express in my hands. A little extra stopping power can give a hunter quite a feeling of security.

  You’ll want a bull unicorn, of course; they tend to have more spectacular horns than the cows—and by the time a bull’s horn is long enough to be worth taking, he’s probably too old to be in the herd’s breeding program anyway.

  The head shot, for reasons explained earlier, is never a wise option. And unless your wizard teaches you the Rune of Mamhotet, thus enabling you the approach close enough to pour salt on the beast’s tail and thereby pin him to the spot where he’s standing, I recommend the heart shot. (Either heart will do and if you have a double-barreled gun, you might try to hit both of them, just to be on the safe side.)

  If you have the bad fortune to merely wound the beast, he’ll immediately make off for the trees or the high grass, which puts you at an enormous disadvantage. Some hunters, faced with such a situation, merely stand back and allow the smerps to finish the job for them—after all, smerps rarely devour the horn unless they’re completely famished—but this is hardly sporting. The decent, honorable hunter, well aware of the unwritten rules of blood sports, will go after the unicorn himself.

  The trick, of course, is to meet him on fairly open terrain. Once the unicorn lowers his head to charge, he’s virtually blind, and all you need do is dance nimbly out of his way and take another shot at him or, if you are not in possession of the Rune of Mamhotet, this would be an ideal time to get out that salt and try to sprinkle some on his tail as he races by.

  When the unicorn dictates the rules of the game, you’ve got a much more serious situation. He’ll usually double back and lie in the tall grasses beside his spoor, waiting for you to pass by, and then attempt to gore you from behind.

  It is at this time that the hunter must have all his wits about him. Probably the best sign to look for is the presence of Fire-Breathing Dragonflies. These noxious little insects frequently live in symbiosis with the unicorn, cleansing his ears of parasites, and their presence usually means that the unicorn isn’t far off. Yet another sign that your prey is nearby will be the flocks of hungry harpies circling overhead, waiting to swoop down and feed upon the remains of your kill; and, of course, the surest sign of all is when you hear a grunt of rage and find yourself staring into the bloodshot, beady little eyes of a wounded bull unicorn from a distance of ten feet or less. It’s moments like that that make you feel truly alive, especially when you suddenly realize that it isn’t necessarily a permanent condition.

  All right. Let us assume that your hunt is successful. What then?

  Well, your trolls will skin the beast, of course, and take special care in removing and preserving the horn. If they’ve been properly trained they’ll also turn the pelt into a rug, the hooves into ashtrays, the teeth into a necklace, the tail into a flyswatter, and the scrotum into a tobacco pouch. My own feeling is that you should settle for nothing less, since it goes a long way toward showing the bleeding-heart preservationists that a unicorn can sup
ply the hunter with a lot more than just a few minutes of pleasurable sport and a horn.

  And while I’m on the subject of what the unicorn can supply, let me strongly suggest that you would be missing a truly memorable experience if you were to come home from safari without having eaten unicorn meat at least once. There’s nothing quite like unicorn cooked over an open campfire to top off a successful hunt. (And do remember to leave something out for the smerps, or they might well decide that hunter is every bit as tasty as unicorn.)

  So get out those amulets and talismans, visit those wizards and warlocks, pack those cameras and weapons - and good hunting to you!

  • • •

  Next Week: Outstaring the Medusa

  ***

  Hunting the Snark

  Author’s Note:

  When he was editing Asimov’s magazine and I was editing a line of classic African reprints for St. Martin’s Press and then Alexander Books, Gardner Dozois challenged me to write “the ultimate science fiction hunting story.” I procrastinated for almost a year—I didn’t want to write something where a hunter just killed bigger, uglier science fiction critters. Then I saw my copy of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark sitting there on the shelf, and suddenly I had a story to tell—and the only collaborator in my experience who didn’t demand half the money. I must have done something right: it was both a Hugo and Nebula nominee, and is currently under option to Hollywood.

  Believe me, the last thing we ever expected to find was a Snark.

  And I’m just as sure we were the last thing he ever expected to meet.

  I wish I could tell you we responded to the situation half as well as he did. But maybe I should start at the beginning. Trust me: I’ll get to the Snark soon enough.

  My name’s Karamojo Bell. (Well, actually it’s Daniel Mathias Bellman. I’ve never been within five thousand light years of the Karamojo district back on Earth. But when I found out I was a distant descendant of the legendary hunter, I decided to appropriate his name, since I’m in the same business and I thought it might impress the clients. Turned out I was wrong; in my entire career, I met three people who had heard of him, and none of them went on safari with me. But I kept it anyway. There are a lot of Daniels walking around; at least I’m the only Karamojo.)

  At that time I worked for Silinger & Mahr, the oldest and best-known firm in the safari business. True, Silinger died 63 years ago and Mahr followed him six years later and now it’s run by a faceless corporation back on Deluros VIII, but they had better luck with their name than I had with mine, so they never changed it.

  We were the most expensive company in the business, but we were worth it. Hundreds of worlds have been hunted out over the millennia, but people with money will always pay to have first crack at territory no one else has set foot on or even seen. A couple of years ago the company purchased a ten-planet hunting concession in the newly-opened Albion Cluster, and so many of our clients wanted to be the first to hunt virgin worlds that we actually held drawings to see who’d get the privilege. Silinger & Mahr agreed to supply one professional hunter per world and allow a maximum of four clients per party, and the fee was (get ready for it!) twenty million credits. Or eight million Maria Theresa dollars, if you don’t have much faith in the credit—and out here on the Frontier, not a lot of people do.

  We pros wanted to hunt new worlds every bit as much as the clients did. They were parceled out by seniority, and as seventh in line, I was assigned Dodgson IV, named after the woman who’d first charted it a dozen years ago. Nine of us had full parties. The tenth had a party of one—an incredibly wealthy man who wasn’t into sharing.

  Now, understand: I didn’t take out the safari on my own. I was in charge, of course, but I had a crew of twelve blue-skinned humanoid Dabihs from Kakkab Kastu IV. Four were gunbearers for the clients. (I didn’t have one myself; I never trusted anyone else with my weapons.) To continue: one was the cook, three were skinners (and it takes a lot more skill than you think to skin an alien animal you’ve never seen before without spoiling the pelt), and three were camp attendants. The twelfth was my regular tracker, whose name—Chajinka—always sounded like a sneeze.

  We didn’t really need a pilot—after all, the ship’s navigational computer could start from half a galaxy away and land on top of a New Kenya shilling—but our clients were paying for luxury, and Silinger & Mahr made sure they got it. So in addition to the Dabihs, we also had our own personal pilot, Captain Kosha Mbele, who’d spent two decades flying one-man fighter ships in the war against the Sett.

  The hunting party itself consisted of four business associates, all wealthy beyond my wildest dreams if not their own. There was Willard Marx, a real estate magnate who’d developed the entire Roosevelt planetary system; Jaxon Pollard, who owned a matching chains of cut-rate supermarkets and upscale bakeries that did business on more than a thousand worlds; Philemon Desmond, the CEO of Far London’s largest bank—with branches in maybe 200 systems—and his wife, Ramona, a justice on that planet’s Supreme Court.

  I don’t know how the four of them met, but evidently they’d all come from the same home world and had known each other for a long time. They began pooling their money in business ventures early on, and just kept going from one success to the next. Their most recent killing had come on Silverstrike, a distant mining world. Marx was an avid hunter who had brought trophies back from half a dozen worlds, the Desmonds had always wanted to go on safari, and Pollard, who would have preferred a few weeks on Calliope or one of the other pleasure planets, finally agreed to come along so that the four of them could celebrate their latest billion together.

  I took an instant dislike to Marx, who was too macho by half. Still, that wasn’t a problem; I wasn’t being paid to enjoy his company, just to find him a couple of prize trophies that would look good on his wall, and he seemed competent enough.

  The Desmonds were an interesting pair. She was a pretty woman who went out of her way to look plain, even severe; a well-read woman who insisted on quoting everything she’d read, which made you wonder which she enjoyed more, reading in private or quoting in public. Philemon, her husband, was a mousy little man who drank too much, drugged too much, smoked too much, seemed in awe of his wife, and actually wore a tiny medal he’d won in a school track meet some thirty years earlier—probably a futile attempt to impress Mrs. Desmond, who remained singularly unimpressed.

  Pollard was just a quiet, unassuming guy who’d lucked into money and didn’t pretend to be any more sophisticated than he was—which, in my book, made him considerably more sophisticated than his partners. He seemed constantly amazed that they had actually talked him into coming along. He’d packed remedies for sunburn, diarrhea, insect bites, and half a hundred other things that could befall him, and jokingly worried about losing what he called his prison pallor.

  We met on Braxton II, our regional headquarters, then took off on the six-day trip to Dodgson IV. All four of them elected to undergo DeepSleep, so Captain Mbele and I put them in their pods as soon as we hit light speeds, and woke them about two hours before we landed.

  They were starving—I know the feeling; DeepSleep slows the metabolism to a crawl, but of course it doesn’t stop it or you’d be dead, and the first thing you want to do when you wake up is eat—so Mbele shagged the Dabihs out of the galley, where they spent most of their time, and had it prepare a meal geared to human tastes. As soon as they finished eating, they began asking questions about Dodgson IV.

  “We’ve been in orbit for the past hour, while the ship’s computer has been compiling a detailed topographical map of the planet,” I explained. “We’ll land as soon as I find the best location for the base camp.”

  “So what’s this world like?” asked Desmond, who had obviously failed to read all the data we’d sent to him.

  “I’ve never set foot on it,” I replied. “No one has.” I smiled. “That’s why you’re paying so much.”

  “How do we know there’s any game to be fou
nd there, then?” asked Marx pugnaciously.

  “There’s game, all right,” I assured him. “The Pioneer who charted it claims her sensors pinpointed four species of carnivore and lots of herbivores, including one that goes about four tons.”

  “But she never landed?” he persisted.

  “She had no reason to,” I said. “There was no sign of sentient life, and there are millions of worlds out there still to be charted.”

  “She’d damned well better have been right about the animals,” grumbled Marx. “I’m not paying this much to look at a bunch of trees and flowers.”

  “I’ve hunted three other oxygen worlds that Karen Dodgson charted,” I said, “and they’ve always delivered what she promised.”

  “Do people actually hunt on chlorine and ammonia worlds?” asked Pollard.

  “A few. It’s a highly specialized endeavor. If you want to know more about it after the safari is over, I’ll put you in touch with the right person back at headquarters.”

  “I’ve hunted a couple of chlorine worlds,” interjected Marx.

  Sure you have, I thought.

  “Great sport,” he added.

  When you have to live with your client for a few weeks or months, you don’t call him a braggart and a liar to his face, but you do file the information away for future reference.

  “This Karen Dodgson—she’s the one the planet’s named for?” asked Ramona Desmond.

  “It’s a prerogative of the Pioneer Corps,” I answered. “The one who charts a world gets to name it anything he or she wants.” I paused and smiled. “They’re not known for their modesty. Usually they name it after themselves.”

  “Dodgson,” she said again. “Perhaps we’ll find a Jabberwock, or a Cheshire Cat, or even a Snark.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said.

  “That’s was Lewis Carroll’s real name: Charles Dodgson.”

  “I’ve never heard of him,” I replied.