The Unicorn Girl

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Won’t that complicate matters a trifle?”

  Rafik cocked his head to one side, then the other, and shrugged. “I am not my uncle’s nephew for nothing. We will contrive. We can not lose Acorna.”

  The physical exchange of their beacon with that of the wreck took, in the end, three days of sweaty labor. The first problem was that mining tools were ill adapted to the task of cutting and welding ship parts, and their mechanical repair tools were not designed to function in the vacuum, dust, and temperature extremes of the asteroid surface.

  “Without Acorna to purify the air,” Calum commented at the end of their first shift, “this cabin would be stinking like the locker rooms at the TriCentennial Games by now.”

  “Water, too,” Gill agreed. With constant recycling, ship’s air and water usually developed a stale tang that nothing could get rid of. “Acorna, you’re good fortune to us.”

  Acorna shook her head, sadness filling her dark eyes as the centers narrowed to slits.

  “You are that,” Calum insisted. “What’s the matter?”

  “You run away. We hide. I…” Acorna visibly struggled to put the words together. “If I go back, you do not have to hide. My fault!”

  The men’s eyes met over her head. “We’ve been talking too freely,” Rafik said softly.

  “She speaks so little,” Calum agreed, “I forget how much she understands.”

  “Never mind that now,” Gill said more loudly. “The important thing is to explain that she’s got it all wrong, don’t you think?” He picked Acorna up and hugged her. “Not your fault, sweetie-pie. Remember the stupid woman Uncle Calum decked? Not your fault she was such a twit, was it now?”

  Acorna put the fingers of one hand into her mouth. Her eyes were dark disbelieving pools.

  “Listen, Acorna,” Rafik said. “We did not like those people at Base. We did not want to work for them. If we had never…met…you, we would still not work for Amalgamated. Would we, fellows?”

  Calum’s and Gill’s emphatic “No!” seemed to halfway convince Acorna; at least, the silvery pupils of her eyes slowly returned to normal and she consented to munch thoughtfully on the spinach stalks Rafik offered her. By the end of the shift, she was sufficiently recovered to pester them about why they stayed on an asteroid that she could tell held no interesting concentration of metals.

  “This is a carbonaceous chondrite, Acorna,” Calum explained.

  “Simplify it, will you? The kid doesn’t know those big words!”

  “Just because basic astronomical chemistry is beyond you, Gill,” Calum retorted, “don’t assume Acorna is as thick as you are. She knows the words we teach her, and we might as well teach her the right ones for the job.” He went on explaining that the hydrogen and oxygen they could extract from this asteroid would provide them with extra air and water, as well as with the fuel they would need to reach their next stop.

  “I clean air,” Acorna said, stamping a hooflike foot.

  “So you do,” Calum agreed easily, “but we don’t know your tolerances yet, see, and we don’t want to have you doing more than you can handle at this body weight. Besides, we need fuel….” Every few sentences he had to stop and draw diagrams of molecular structures and conversion routines. Acorna was fascinated, and Calum drew the teaching session out until she fell asleep in his arms.

  “Whew!” Calum fastened the sleeping child in her net and stood up, stretching his back. “Okay, fellows, a few ground rules. We’d better discuss certain things only when Acorna is asleep. She’s too clever by half; if she knows everything, she’ll carry a load of guilt she doesn’t need. That goes for the beacon switch, too. If she doesn’t know about it, she won’t ask inconvenient questions about it later. As far as she’s concerned, we’re just here to refuel, right?”

  “Just as well we never got around to picking a suit small enough for her out of Stores,” Gill commented.

  Rafik nodded. “Soon she must be allowed to go outside with us. She can be inestimably useful in locating and assessing mineral deposits, and irrespective of the benefit to us, Acorna needs to feel useful. But for now, yes, it is as well to keep her in ignorance of our real reason for stopping here.”

  After that it took even longer to exchange the beacons, because they had to do the work only when Acorna was asleep, officially confining their activities when she was awake to the extraction of hydrogen and oxygen. Once the onerous task was completed, Rafik reprogrammed the navigation computer for the destination he still refused to reveal, and all three men slept as much as possible on the way to planetfall.

  “Are we to stay on the ship the whole time we’re here?” Gill demanded.

  “Rafik’s probably afraid you’ll be able to identify this planet’s star if we set foot outside the port area,” Calum said. “You can stop worrying, Rafik. There was really no point in those little games you played with the navigational computer. I know exactly where we are.”

  “How?” Rafik demanded.

  “Fuel consumption,” Calum said smugly. “Triangulation on known stars. Time. Course corrections. I plotted the course in my head and checked the numbers on my wrist unit. We’re on the fourth planet from—”

  “Don’t say it,” Rafik interrupted. “At least let me swear to Uncle Hafiz that the name and location of his hideaway have never been spoken on board this ship.”

  “Why?” Calum asked. “What’s the big deal? Anybody could compute—”

  “No, Calum, they couldn’t!” Rafik rolled his eyes heavenward. “I could write a book on the hazards of shipping with a mathematical genius who hasn’t an ounce of street sense to balance the other side of his head. There are all sorts and conditions of people here, Calum, and the one thing they all have in common is a strong desire for anonymity. A desire,” he added pointedly, “which we share with them, or have you forgotten already? Now, let’s keep this simple. You stay right here. I visit Uncle Hafiz and see what sort of a cut he’ll want from the profit on our shares in return for converting them to galactic credits and fixing the registration of the new beacon.”

  “He’s not going to do it from family feeling, huh?” Gill asked.

  Rafik rolled his eyes again and sighed heavily. “Just…stay…here. I’ll be back as soon as I can, okay?”

  “If you people are that big on secrecy, why couldn’t we do it all by tight-beam transmission from low orbit? Why make a personal visit?”

  Rafik looked shocked. “All this time working together, and you two have yet to learn decent manners. You infidels can cut deals electronically if you wish, but Children of the Three Prophets meet face to face. It’s the honorable way to settle an agreement. Besides,” he added more prosaically, “no transmission is so tight that it can’t be intercepted.”

  He was back sooner than they expected, tight-lipped and burdened down with a quantity of squashy parcels wrapped in opaque clingfilm.

  “You do not look entirely happy. What’s the matter, does Uncle Hafiz want an extortionate cut of the shares?” Calum asked.

  “And how come you stopped off to go shopping?” Gill added.

  “Uncle Hafiz,” Rafik said, still tight-lipped, “is more traditionally minded than I am. He wishes to meet the other parties to the agreement face to face before we begin serious discussions.”

  “Not Acorna!”

  “Port authorities reported four crew members. He wants to see all four. It’ll be all right,” Rafik soothed Gill, “he won’t actually see Acorna. I’ve thought of a way around it. It’s a good idea, too; one we might want to use from now on.”

  “And it involves yards and yards of white polysilk,” said Calum, investigating the contents of one of the packages. “Umm, Rafik, don’t take offense, but I’ve had previous experience with some of your ‘good ideas.’ If this is going to be like the time we tried to slip into Kezdet space to collect that titanium that was just sitting there begging to be mined and refined…”

  “That was a good idea, too!” Rafik said indignan
tly. “How was I to know that the Kezdet Guardians of the Peace had just hired a new hand who would recognize our beacon from old days at MME?”

  “All I’m wondering,” Calum murmured, “is what crucial factor don’t you know this time?”

  “It’s nothing like that,” Rafik said. “Just a minor costume change. Look, we don’t want anybody noticing Acorna, right? So we’re going to be more traditional even than Uncle Hafiz. I told him I’d been studying the Three Books—that made him happy. Then I explained that I had been inspired by the First Book to study further, and that I had been accepted into the Neo-Hadithians.”

  “All of which means precisely what?” Gill asked.

  “The theological ramifications are probably beyond you,” Rafik said. “The important point is that my wives wear hijab, which will be the perfect disguise for Acorna.” He took a length of white polysilk from Calum and held it up with both hands so that they could see the shape of the garment: a many-layered hood atop a billowing gown of even more layers, each individual layer light and seemingly transparent, but collectively a cloud of iridescent reflective white. “As an enlightened Child of the Three Prophets, naturally I know better than to adhere to the ancient superstitions about the veiling of women. There is actually nothing in the First Book—what you unbelievers call the Koran—that requires women to be veiled and secluded. And the Second Prophet absolutely repudiated that and other barbaric practices, such as the prohibition against fermented liquors. But the Neo-Hadithians claim that the Hadith, the traditional tales of the life of the First Prophet, are as sacred as the words of the Books. They want to go back to the worst of the bad old ways. Including the veil. Uncle Hafiz is disgusted with me, but he says he will respect my religious prejudices while waiting for me to outgrow them. He will not actually look upon the faces of my wives, but they must be present during the agreement.”

  “Wives?” Calum repeated.

  Rafik’s eyes sparkled. “That is the really brilliant part of the idea. I told Uncle Hafiz that I was accompanied by my partner, an unbeliever, and by my two wives. You see, that neatly accounts for the four people reported on this ship. And anybody looking for three miners and a little girl will probably not think to investigate a neo-Hadithian, his two wives, and his partner.”

  “Sounds risky to me,” said Calum. “You mean one of us stays on the ship and you pick up some local girl to play your second wife? How can you be sure she won’t talk?”

  “That—er—was not quite what I had in mind,” Rafik said. He shook out the second length of white polysilk and held it up against Calum. “Yes. I estimated your height quite well. Now, do remember to take small steps and keep your eyes down like a proper Neo-Hadithian wife, will you?”

  “I don’t believe it,” Dr. Anton Forelle said explosively when he read the reports on the Khedive. “I—don’t—believe—it.”

  “I didn’t want to believe it either,” said Judit, “but the reports are quite clear.” She had been crying. “It’s so sad. Those nice men, and the little girl…”

  “If it were true,” Forelle said, “it would be a tragedy. The end of my chance for the research coup of the decade—of the century! But it’s not true. Amalgamated hires fools; I should know, I’m in charge of inventing the language of the lies they feed their fools, making up nice-sounding words for inhumane policy directives.” He shot a shrewd glance at Judit. “You don’t like the sound of that, do you, girl? Don’t like me to say straight out what our department’s about. But you’re not as stupid as the rest of them. You must have noticed. Well, I had my reasons for taking the job—deplorable, the lack of support for pure research these days, and no matter what my ex-colleagues at the university say, I could have completed a respectable thesis if I’d been able to get funding for my research. And I suppose you have your reasons for putting up with Amalgamated, too.”

  “They pay well,” Judit said. “I’ve a younger brother on Kezdet. He’s not quite through school yet.”

  “And when he is,” Forelle said, “no doubt you’ll find some other excuse to make to yourself for taking their money. They buy a few good minds and corrupt us, and use us to buy as many fools as they want. Including the idiots who think the Khedive crashed on an asteroid!”

  “The beacon signal—” Judit began uncertainly.

  “Faked. I don’t know how, I’m no engineer, but it was faked.”

  “Too hard. There’d be registration numbers on the ship body and engines.”

  “Ha! Nobody went out and actually looked, did they? They just trusted the computer records.”

  Judit was silent. Forelle’s idea was insane…but it was true, nobody had physically checked the crash site.

  “I’ll wager you that ship is not the Khedive. Yes, that’s it. The beacon signal is faked, and they’re in some different sector of space by now, laughing at us all. And Amalgamated will let the matter drop, because they know that no matter what legal juggling they indulged in, no sensible court would uphold their claim to the ship—so rather than pursue it, they’d just as soon write off the ship as a wreck and the dissidents as dead. But I’m not going to let it drop!” Forelle glared at Judit as if she’d dared to think of contradicting him. “That—that unicorn girl is too conspicuous to disappear without a trace. Amalgamated has plants and bases galaxy-wide. I shall put out a standing order for any mention of a child with those particular deformities to be routed to my console with top priority. Sooner or later, they’ll slip up. I’ll find her, and we’ll get our paper, Judit. And then I’ll be able to leave these fools and take up the university position I deserve. They’ll probably endow a chair for me. Well, get on with it. Compose the order, and I’ll edit it so that they know it’s urgent and won’t question why, and won’t forget it either. Finally applied psycholinguistics will be good for something besides keeping Amalgamated’s workforce happy.”

  Judit thought he was deluding himself, but it was a delusion she would have liked to share. However, if the child had by some miracle lived, she had no desire to see Forelle get hold of her for his experiments. So she put her best psycholinguistic training into composing a memo that would look urgent enough to satisfy Dr. Forelle, while actually encouraging anybody who skimmed it to mentally dismiss the whole matter as “just another one of Anton’s crazy ideas.”

  The skimmer that Rafik rented to take them from the port area to Uncle Hafiz’s residence passed over a trackless expanse of tropical vegetation, brilliant green sprinkled with blazes of red and yellow flowers. To the east, an indigo-blue sea gave off glints of silver in the sunlight; to the west, they could just see the long blue line of an escarpment that must have discouraged any building of roads into the interior of the continent.

  “The Mali Bazaar,” Rafik said as they passed over a collection of buildings with flat roofs inlaid in jewel-toned mosaics.

  Gill pressed his nose to the window of the skimmer to get a better view of the pictures delineated by thousands of glazed ceramic tiles. “Anywhere else,” he said reverently, “that would be a major tourist attraction. Why do they put it on the roof where nobody can see it?”

  “Most travel here is by skimmer,” Rafik said, “and it’s a kind of advertisement for their services. Everybody knows where the Mali Bazaar is. That’s where I bought your hijab, by the way.”

  “Isn’t it a nuisance not having roads to the port?” Gill asked. “How do you transport heavy goods and machinery?”

  “By sea, of course,” Rafik said. “There are, if you think about it, many advantages in dispensing with a road network. Most of the residents of Laboue have a strong preference for personal privacy; traveling by skimmer reduces the chances of meeting other travelers who might be curious about one’s errands. It certainly works in our favor, wouldn’t you agree? Then, too, roads require a degree of cooperation which is difficult for the strong individualists who make their homes here. There’s no central government, no taxation, no centrally supported infrastructure.”

  “Expensive,
” Gill murmured. “Inefficient.”

  Rafik gave him a bright-eyed glance of amusement. “Can any system really compete with the massive inefficiencies of a well-entrenched bureaucracy? As for expense…one entrepreneur did attempt a network of toll roads, but he couldn’t afford the cost of guarding them.”

  “You have problems with bandits?”

  “Let’s say there are residents who find it difficult to put aside their traditional ways of life,” Rafik said, banking the skimmer into a smooth turn that brought them down in a paved square surrounded by high bougainvillea-covered walls. He handed Acorna and Calum out of the skimmer with the care a Neo-Hadithian would be expected to take of his delicate and precious wives. “Remember,” he whispered to Calum, “don’t talk! As long as you’re wearing that veil, convention dictates that you are not really here.”

  The long, multilayered Neo-Hadithian robes of white polysilk concealed Calum and Acorna marvelously; in the brilliant sunlight they looked like two moving clouds of white iridescence, shapeless and indistinguishable save that one was somewhat taller than the other.

  As Gill made his exit from the skimmer, a section of bougainvillea-covered wall swung away from the rest, revealing a dark man of medium height in whom Rafik’s elegant features were sharpened to a look of dangerous wariness.

  “You and your family and guests are welcome to this humble abode,” he said to Rafik, with a quick gesture of his right hand from forehead to lips to chest.

  Rafik repeated the gesture before embracing him. “Uncle Hafiz! You are gracious indeed to receive us. You are well?” he asked as though they had not been conversing only a few hours before.

  “I am, thanks be to the Three Prophets. And you, my nephew? You are well?”

  “Blessed be the Hadith and the revelations of Moulay Suheil,” Rafik said, “I am, and my wives also.”

  A faint shadow of distaste crossed Uncle Hafiz’s features at the mention of the Hadith, but he controlled himself and gave properly courteous answers as Rafik went on to inquire about the health of innumerable cousins, nephews, and distant connections. Finally, the initial greetings finished, Uncle Hafiz stepped back and invited them, with a wave of his hand, to precede him into the garden revealed beyond the walls around the skimmer landing area.