Hall threw up his hands. All right, we'II let all that pass for the moment. Right now, suppose you drop that deep and mysterious mien of yours and break down and tell me how you managed to put a slop to the greatest space battle ever contemplated and to put two of the mightiest space armadas ever assembled to rout.
The Sphinx laughed, softly this time. You already know part of the answer. Daniel Hall. You know that we're parthenogenetic. You know that we build pyramids-or what you think of as pyramids. And you know that some of your legends depict us with wings. How do you account for that, Daniel Hall? Why should we be depicted with wings when we don't have any and never did?
The truth dawned on Hall then. "You lay eggs'" he gasped.
We do indeed. And we incubate them in inviolable capsules that lend the illusion of invisibility. These capsules are placed just beneath the apexes of the structures that you call ' "pyramids" but which we call "nests." Originally, we did this out of instinct alone; now, we do it out of knowledge as well.
Owing to the length of the incubation period-some fifty-two hundred of your years-nests of this kind are ideal for the survival of our species. They provide protection, they provide warmth, they- But no egg could possibly contain enough nutrients to nourish an embryo for fifty-two hundred years! Hall objected.
Of course it couldn't. My race obtains ninety-five percent of its nutrition from the sun, Daniel Hall, and your sun is an even better provider than ours is. I may seem to consist of flesh and blood, but I don't-at least not in the sense that you do.
And do you always build three nests of three different sizes?
Always. Our eggs are three in number and our offspring vary in size. Not very much, but enough to necessitate larger or smaller incubation areas. Now that the eggs which / incubated on the Gizeh ptateau have hatched. I'm due to procreate again; consequently, I've built three new nests.
When the time arrives, I'll remove the as-yet'unsealed apexes, place the eggs in the capsules, which are already in position, and seal the apexes over them.
I can anticipate your next question, Daniel Hall. so there's no need for you to ask it. Incubation time never varies, and can be computed to the second, and the main reason I and my sister in the neighboring dhen were- chosen for the job was that our procreation times were compatible with the Terran and Uvelian time periods that had to be used. At the end of the incubation period an adult rather than a child emerges from the nest. Physically, she's only partially grown, but mentally, she's completely mature, having inherited the parent's knowledge and abilities, plus a sizable quantity of the parent's judgment. As a result, she's perfectly capable of carrying out whatever commands the parent may have implanted in her embryo-mind at the beginning of incubation. In the case of my Gizeh offspring, the commands which I implanted were three in number: Take over the Terran capital of Kafr el Haran, establish immediate contact with the Terran Space Navy and order all of its units to return to base at once; then retain control of the Terran government until otherwise advised. The commands which my sister implanted in her offspring were basically the same, and her three offspring carried out the Uvel end of the operation at roughly the same time mine were carrying out the Terran end of it. Consequently, both governments are now under the dominion of Pornos, and moreover they will remain under the dominion of Pomos until such time as the million-year peace treaty is signed. Since my sister just notified me that her scout has already agreed to cooperate, the fate of the long-range aspect ^,vf our plan is now in your hands, Daniel Halt.
Hall sighed. Oh, I'll go along with you, I suppose-I'd be pretty much of a heel iff didn't. But before we get down to brass tacks, how about relieving my mind on a certain little matter? Granted, I'm half in love with Ahura, and maybe she's half in love with me as you say, but there has to be more to it than that for marriage to work. Now that the crisis is past, how about taking a peek a little ways into the future and finding out whether Ahura and I are going to hit it off the way a married couple should?
I'll try, Daniel Hall, said the Sphinx. She looked straight ahead, and Hall could tell from the serious expression on her face that she was concentrating with all her might. A few minutes passed. Then the Sphinx turned to him and winked.
Unicorn
The unicorn is a legendary one-horned creature. Almost all horned animals have two horns, one on each side of the head. An exception is the rhinoceros, which has a single horn on the nose, and there is some thought that the legend of the unicorn in the Middle East and in Europe originated with vague tales of rhinoceroses in India.
Much more likely is thai it originated with Assyrian representations of wild bulls in profile. In profile, naturally, the two horns overlapped and only one was visible.
Somehow this gave rise to the thought of one-horned bulls.
In the Bible, mention is made of a creature named re-em in Hebrew. The reference was to the wild bull (called an aurochs in Europe) which is the primitive ancestor of domestic cattle, and which is now extinct. It was described as immensely powerful.
In the Greek translation of the Bible, re-em was translated as monokeros ("one-horn"), the reference being to the Assyrian representations in profile. This became unicomis (also "one-horn") in Latin, and the legend was fixed.
Somehow, the unicorn tale became preltied up. Instead of a one-horned bull remarkable for its strength, it became a one-horned horse, or horselike antelope, remarkable for its beauty and swiftness. It began to symbolize purity and virginity; it could be caught only by a virgin woman.
Its horn is now pictured as a tight spiral, extending forward and slowly tapering. This is actually the "horn" (really, the tooth) of the narwhal, a species of whale. The narwhal tooth was brought back by sailors and sold as a unicorn horn for large sums, since such a horn was considered a powerful aphrodisiac.
The following story deals with the unicorn at its prettiest.
The Silken Swift
by Theodore Sturgeon
There's a village by the Bogs. and in the village is a Great House. In the Great House lived a squire who had land and treasures and, for a daughter, Rita.
In the village lived Del, whose voice was a thunder in the inn when he drank there; whose corded, cabled body was golden-skinned, and whose hair flung challenges back to the sun.
Deep in the Bogs, which were brackish, there was a pool of purest water, shaded by willows and wide-wondering aspen, cupped by banks of a moss most marvelously blue. Here grew mandrake, and there were strange pipings in midsummer.
No one ever heard them but a quiet girl whose beauty was so very contained that none of it showed. Her name was Barbara There was a green evening, breathless with growth, when Del took his usua! way down the lane beside the manor and saw a white shadow adrift inside the tall iron pickets. He stopped, and the shadow approached, and became Rita. "Slip around to the gate," she said, "and I'll open it for you.*'
She wore a gown like a cloud and a silver circlet round her head. Night was caught in her hair, moonlight in her face, and in her great eyes, secrets swam.
Del said, "I have no business with the squire."
"He's gone," she said. "I've sent the servants away.
Come to the gate."
"I need no gate." He leaped and caught the top bar of the fence, and in a continuous fluid motion went high and across and down beside her. She looked at his arms, one, the other; then up at his hair- She pressed her small hands tight together and made a little laugh, and then she was gone through the tailored trees, lightly, swiftly, not looking back. He followed, one step for three of hers, keeping pace with a new pounding in the sides of his neck. They crossed a flower bed and a wide marble terrace. There was an open door, and when he passed through it he stopped, for she was nowhere in sight.