Lancelot and I

Lancelot and I

 

Once I visited Marion Zimmer Bradley's home in Berkeley. After playing some games of dilemma chess with her son, I walked out to the back-yard for some fresh air. It was evening. The horizon glowed red and orange; the crescent Moon shone in the western sky; above it was the planet Venus; at the zenith were the night's first stars; and there in the twilight stood Lancelot the Living Unicorn.

Lancelot was an Angora goat. He was waist-high, he had fine white silky hair, and he had a single horn. Thus the name. His human owners, Otter Zell and Morning Glory, had surgically modified the goat at birth. They transplanted Lancelot's horn buds to the center of his forehead. These merged and grew to give the goat an imposing mono-horn.

Lancelot looked almost as if he had stepped out of a medieval woodcut. Almost. He had a goat's short tail, not a long tail with lion tuft. His horn was not an elegant long spiral; instead it was a brutal-looking ribbed pyramid. He could put a serious hurt on you with that weapon.

So I stood at a polite safe distance from Lancelot, and I watched the unicorn nibble at Marion Zimmer Bradley's rosebushes. This reminded me of the Thurber story "The Unicorn In The Garden", which also had a unicorn eating a rosebush. I deduced that one of the dangers of visiting Marion Zimmer Bradley's home is that you might find yourself in a Thurber story.

I witnessed, with my own eyes, that unicorn droppings are brown, oval, one centimeter long, and half a centimeter wide. I offer this observation as my contribution to the science of unicornology.