Unicorn Variation

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Preface from Unicorn Variations: This story came into being in a somewhat atypical fashion. The first movement in its direction occurred when Gardner Dozois phoned me one evening and asked whether I'd ever done a short story involving a unicorn. I said that I had not. He explained then that he and Jack Dann were putting together a reprint anthology of unicorn stories, and he suggested that I write one and sell it somewhere and then sell them reprint rights to it. Two sales. Nice. I told him that I'd think about it.

Later, I was asked by another anthologist whether I'd ever done a story set in a barroom—and if so, he's like it for a reprint collection he was doing. I allowed that I hadn't. A week or so after that, I attended a wine tasting with the redoubtable George R. R. Martin, and during the course of the evening I decided to mention the prospective collections in case he had ever done a unicorn story or a barroom story. He hadn't either, but he reminded me that Fred Saberhagen was putting together a reprint collection of stories involving chess games (_Pawn to Infinity_). "Why don't you," he said, "write a story involving a unicorn and a chess games, set it in a barroom and sell it to everybody?" We chuckled and sipped. A few months later, I went up to Vancouver, B.C., to be the guest of V-Con, a very pleasant regional science fiction convention. I had decided to take my family on the Inland Passage Alaskan cruise after that. Now right before I left New Mexico I had read Italo Calvino's _Invisible Cities_, and when I read the section titled "Hidden Cities. 4." something seemed to stir. It told of the city where the inhabitants exterminated all of the vermin, completely sanitizing the place, only to be haunted then by visions of creatures that did not exist.

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