The Unicorn Girl

by Anne McCaffrey

  “We’ll spend it elsewhere,” Rafik said. “Most of it. Tonight, let’s celebrate solvency by taking Acorna out to dinner in the best restaurant on Nered.”

  “Oh, boy,” Calum said, “I can hardly wait to check out Nered haute cuisine. What’s the main course, bandoleers in hot pepper sauce? With gingered grenades for afters?”

  “She can’t go dressed like that,” Gill announced, gesturing in her direction.

  Over the course of the past year, Acorna had shot up in height until even Gill’s coveralls were short on her. Inside the ship she preferred to relax without the binding, too-small clothing. Calum and Rafik turned and stared now at Acorna, where she rested in a net, happily perusing a vid on carbonyl reduction techniques for nonferrous metals. Her silvery curls had grown into a long mane that tumbled fetchingly over her forehead and tapered down her spine. Her lower parts were covered in fine white fur. She was taller than Gill and as flat-chested as a child, with nothing of an incipient mammary development visible.

  “I wonder how old she is?” Calum speculated in a low voice, so as not to attract Acorna’s attention.

  “Chronologically,” Rafik said, “probably about three. It’s been two years since we found her. Physiologically, I’d guess around sixteen. Evidently her species matures quickly, but I don’t think she’s come to her full growth yet; look at the size of her wrist and ankle bones relative to her height.”

  “Six feet six and counting,” Calum muttered.

  And that would shortly pose a serious problem. The Khedive had been designed for three small-to-average-size miners. Gill’s broad shoulders and excess height had put a strain on the system; sharing the quarters with a fourth passenger had necessitated some fancy reshuffling of the interior arrangements; fitting a seven-foot-tall unicorn into the small confines of the mining ship was virtually impossible.

  Acorna looked up from her vid. “Calum,” she said, “could you explain, please, how this sodium hydroxide reduction process forms liquid TiCl2?”

  “Umm, that’s a late stage,” Calum said. He bent to draw a quick diagram on the vid screen next to the explanatory text and pictures. “See, you have to pump dilute HCl into the electrolysis cell…”

  “They should have said so explicitly,” Acorna complained. Her language use had asymptotically approached standard Basic in the last year; only a slight formality in her speech, and a faintly nasal inflection, gave any suggestion that she was not a native speaker of the galactic interlingua.

  “And developmentally,” Rafik murmured, watching Calum and Acorna threshing out the details of electrolytic metals separation, “she’s four going on twenty-four.”

  “Yeah,” Gill agreed. “She knows almost as much as we do about mining, metallurgy, and navigation of small spacecraft, but she doesn’t know anything about, well, you know…”

  “No, I don’t know,” Rafik said, watching Gill’s face turn as red as his beard.

  “You know. Girl stuff.”

  “You think it’s time for one of us to sit her down and have a little talk about the human reproductive system? Frankly, I don’t see the point,” said Rafik, fighting his own embarrassment at the idea. “For all we know, her race may reproduce by—by pollinating flowers with their horns.”

  “That fur doesn’t cover everything,” Gill said, “and anyway, I bathed her as often as you did last year. Anatomically, she’s feminine.” He looked doubtfully at Acorna’s long, slender body. “A flat-chested female, but female,” he amended. “And she can’t go on lounging around in nothing but her long hair and white fur.”

  “Why not? Maybe her race doesn’t have a nudity taboo.”

  “Well, mine does,” Gill shouted, “and I’m not having a half-naked teenage girl parading around this ship!”

  Acorna looked up. “Where?”

  She never found out why all three men exploded in laughter.

  They still had the yards of white polysilk that Rafik had bought at the Mali Bazaar to clothe his “wives” in approved Neo-Hadithian style. Gill hacked off a length of fabric, Calum came up with some clip fasteners, and together they wrapped the material around Acorna’s waist and threw a fold of it over her shoulders. A second length of fabric provided a loosely wrapped turban which disguised her horn…well, sort of.

  “This is not comfortable,” she complained.

  “Honey, we’re not dressmakers. You can’t go out to a nice restaurant in my old coveralls. You’d better buy her some clothes while we’re here,” Gill said to Rafik.

  “You buy the clothes, you’re the one who cares,” Rafik retorted, “and you’ll be lucky to find anything but army fatigues on this planet.”

  Rafik had maligned the shopping resources of Nered unfairly. Both men and women at the Evening Star restaurant were dressed like peacocks: the men elegant in formal gray-and-silver evening wear, the women a colorful garden of fashions and styles from across the galaxy, all interpreted in brilliant jewel-toned silks and stiff rustling retro-satins. In such a gaudy gathering the miners hoped that they would escape notice. Their own formal wear was respectable, but not comparable to the silver-flashed suits currently in vogue on Nered, and Acorna, with neither jewels nor colorful silks to adorn her, should have looked quite dowdy next to the fashionable upper class of Nered. Instead her appearance had quite the opposite effect. Her height and slenderness, the tumble of silvery curls falling down from her improvised turban, and the simplicity of her white polysilk sari made her stand out in the crowd like a lily in a bed of peonies. Heads turned as they were shown to their table, and Rafik could tell from the swift calculation in the maïtre d’hôtel’s eyes that they were being given a far more prominent table than the one originally intended for four working miners from off-planet. Bad luck, that, but there was no sense in making a fuss over it now; that would only draw more attention their way. They would simply have to make it through dinner as best they could, and he would watch like a hawk to make sure Acorna’s turban didn’t fall off. He also looked around to see if any one else was wearing a turban, or was as slender as Acorna. You never knew in an interstellar area what sort of oddities you’d encounter. Returning Acorna to her own people would solve a great many problems!

  He was so intent on shielding Acorna from notice that the real danger, when it did come, took him completely by surprise. A tense young man in dark brown military fatigues thrust his way into the restaurant, knocked down a waiter carrying a tray of soup bowls, and took advantage of the confusion to level three bursts of laser fire at Rafik before making his escape.

  Gill knocked over his own chair in his haste to get to Rafik, but Acorna was faster, kneeling over an ominously still figure. The shock of the attack sent isolated nightmare images flitting through Gill’s brain. Rafik wasn’t moving; he should have been screaming in pain—half his face was burned. Acorna fumbled at her turban. Shouldn’t let her do that. She had to stay covered. Doctor! They needed a doctor! Some idiot was babbling about catching the assassin. Who cared about that? Rafik was all that mattered.

  Acorna bent over Rafik, her horn exposed now, her eyes dark pools with the pupils narrowed to virtually invisible silver slits. She—nuzzled—at him with her horn. It was heart-breaking to watch; a child mourning a parent. Gill thought numbly that he should take her away. Let her grieve in private. Hide her before too many people noticed the horn. But moving to Rafik’s side felt like swimming through heavy water, as though time itself had slowed around them, and when he reached Acorna and Rafik, Calum gripped his shoulder and held him back.

  “Wait,” he said. “She can purify water and air, and detect poison. Maybe she can heal laser wounds.”

  Even as they watched, the charred flesh on Rafik’s face was replaced by smooth new skin wherever Acorna’s horn brushed it. She lingered for a moment with her horn just over his heart, as though urging his shocked system to continue breathing and circulating. Then he stirred and opened his eyes and said irritably:

  “What in the name of ten thousand syp
hilitic she-devils happened?”

  Calum and Gill tried to tell him at once. Then those at the tables nearest them came over, now that it seemed safe to approach, to add their impression of the assassination attack. Those further away, of course, were demanding to know what had happened. When they saw no visible damage but overturned chairs and food spilled on the floor, they turned back to their own tables to resume their interrupted meal. Calum managed to put the turban on the back of Acorna’s head, and Rafik pulled it over her horn. Then both he and Gill had to explain to those nearest that no, Rafik had not been hit. No, the laser hadn’t even touched him.

  Eventually all agreed that an assassin had fired at Rafik and that the young lady had fortunately reacted quickly enough to save him by knocking him out of his chair, so that he was not even singed by a near miss. A small vociferous group wanted to discuss their idea that the would-be assassin had looked remarkably like Rafik. Gill and Calum let the story of the miraculous near miss stand and discouraged plans to hunt down Rafik’s attacker who had eluded his pursuer; all they wanted was to get back to the Uhuru at once. They had attracted far too much attention this evening!

  Six

  Delszaki Li and Judit Kendoro were finishing their evening meal when the dining room com unit beeped in the rising arpeggio that meant a scrambled message had been received.

  “That will be Pal,” Li said. He depressed a button on the left arm of his hover-chair and the sequence of jagged, screeching noises that constituted the scrambled message became audible. After a moment of silence, the com unit’s decoding module whirred busily and the original message was heard, Pal’s voice somewhat distorted and metallic due to the limitations of the coding process.

  “There are four crew, not three, presently using the Uhuru. None of them is Sauvignon. They have enemies; one of the crew was the target of an assassination attempt this evening in a fashionable restaurant. The consensus of opinion is that the assassin missed his target, but I was sitting close by in an attempt to listen in on their conversation and I believe what actually happened was quite different—and very interesting. The miner Rafik was actually struck by three bolts of laser fire; I saw the burns myself. I also saw them healed with astonishing speed by the fourth crew member. This person appears to be a very tall young woman with slightly deformed fingers and a small…” Pal’s voice paused for a moment and only the faint background noise introduced by scrambling and decoding was audible. “Sir, you’re not going to believe this, but she seems to have a small horn in the middle of her forehead. And when she nuzzled the man Rafik with this horn, his burns healed and he was conscious within seconds. Sir, I saw this with my own eyes; I’m not making it up or repeating gossip.” There was another pause. “These people have no discernible connection with our friends. But they are very interesting. I have decided to maintain contact with them until you send further instructions.”

  “A ki-lin!” Delszaki exclaimed as the message ended. He turned exultantly to Judit, who had been sitting as still as stone ever since Pal had mentioned the horn. “My dear, we have been granted a portent of inestimable value. This strange girl may be solution to Kezdet’s tragedy…or she may only portend coming of solution. We must bring her here!”

  “Acorna,” Judit said. “They called her Acorna…. I thought they had all died; their ship’s beacon was found transmitting from a crash site. I cried for them then, those three nice men and the little girl. Acorna.” There were tears standing in her eyes now.

  “You knew of a ki-lin and did not tell me?”

  “Mr. Li, I don’t even know what a ki-lin is! And I thought she was dead. And it was my fault, because I helped them get away…. They wanted to cut off her horn, you see…”

  “You must tell me all this story,” Delszaki Li said. “But first, you must understand the importance of the ki-lin and why I need her here.”

  “Ki-lin…is that Chinese for ‘unicorn’?”

  Li nodded. “But our beliefs are somewhat different from your Western tales about the unicorn. Your people have stories of trapping and killing unicorns. No Chinese would ever kill a ki-lin, or even hunt one. The ki-lin belongs to Buddha; she eats no animal flesh and will not even tread upon an insect. We would not dream of trapping the ki-lin as a gift to a ruler; rather, the wise and beneficent ruler hopes that his rule may be blessed by the arrival of a ki-lin, who, if she comes to his court, is received as one sovereign visiting another. The appearance of a ki-lin among humans is an omen of a great change for the better or of the birth of a great ruler.”

  “And you yourself believe this?”

  Delszaki Li cackled at the expression on Judit’s face. “Let us say I do not disbelieve it. How could I? I am scientist first, man of business only from necessity. No ki-lin has ever appeared in recorded history, so there is no evidence to prove or disprove the legends. But I am also man, not only scientist, and so I hope. I hope that this ki-lin will presage the change which Kezdet—and Kezdet’s children—so desperately need. And so I shall instruct Pal to make these miners an offer they cannot refuse. They will, in fact, be quite useful for one of my other projects. And while we wait for their arrival, you shall tell me what you know of this Acorna and her friends, and we shall search the Net for more information about them. Never go into a bargaining session unprepared, Judit—even if you are bargaining with a ki-lin!”

  It was Acorna who suggested they measure her to know how long the legs of pants and sleeves of shirts should be, though why she needed to cover herself, when her fur kept her quite comfortable, she couldn’t understand.

  “Didn’t you like what the women were wearing in the restaurant last night?” Rafik asked. “I saw you looking around like your eyes would pop.”

  “Her eyes don’t pop,” Gill said loyally, and then added, “but your pupils were out to the edges of your eyeballs.”

  A sort of dreamy expression crossed Acorna’s face briefly and she gave a resigned sigh. “None of those things would last a minute crawling down a conduit or in an EVA suit.”

  “That’s another thing we have to get for you,” Calum said, for he had worried about that lack. She could do with some hands-on mining experience to round out her education in asteroid extraction techniques.

  “You would need to measure me for that,” she said.

  From somewhere they unearthed a flexible tape in an old mechanic’s kit. They made most measurements using the instrumentation on board because most of what they needed to measure was out in space and their EVA suits were equipped with gauges. So they dutifully took down what they felt they needed to buy in appropriate sizes.

  Then they argued over who was to go: Gill would definitely be useless in a dress shop, or even a straight women’s-apparel outfitter. Calum’s taste, according to Rafik, reposed only in his mouth. Rafik would have to go.

  “Not when there’s an assassin out there somewhere waiting to snuff you out and this time we can’t take Acorna with us for emergency first aid.”

  “You all go,” Acorna said reasonably and before the decision-making turned into one of the interminable arguments the men all seemed to enjoy so much. “I am safe in here and will not answer any summonses.”

  That was debated, too, but it was finally decided that with Gill bulking along behind Rafik and Calum at his side, he would be less of a target and he would at least not be able to complain when either of the others came back with what he felt to be unsuitable raiment.

  They got the EVA suit first, since those could be custom-made and produced within an hour. They’d collect it on their way back.

  Despite Gill’s snide comments about the militaristic bias of Nered, it was still a wealthy planet with the usual supply of flea markets, bazaars, and good used-apparel shops. With proper measurements, they could also find the right sizes of work clothing for their growing charge. Rafik even found attractive upper-body wraps, made of an elasticized material that was guaranteed “to fit any female form comfortably.”

  “She’ll like
that,” Rafik announced, and got three plain colored ones in blue, green, and a deep purple that he felt would look well with her silvery hair, and two figured ones: one with flowers that might never have bloomed on any planet in the galaxy, and another with daisies. At least that’s what he told the other two they were.

  After looking in several used-apparel shops, he also found some skirts with elasticized waistbands, also guaranteed to fit any form comfortably.

  “It doesn’t say ‘female’,” Gill said, about to discard a splendidly patterned one.

  “Mostly females wear skirts,” Rafik said, and took the skirt from his hand. He found another that was filmy but opaque, in a misty blue that he thought Acorna would like for the flow of it—a saleslady modeled the item—the texture of the material, and the color.

  It was the saleslady, having discerned that the three attractive miners were buying for a female they all knew, decided to inveigle them to buy accessories, such as “lingerie.”

  “You men are all alike. Concentrate on the outer wear,” she said teasingly because the big, bearded redhead blushed to the color of his hair at the first mention of underclothes, “and forget there has to be something underneath.”

  Rafik beamed at her. “My niece has just reached puberty, and I don’t know what girls do wear underneath…” and he wiggled his fingers in helpless innocence. “Her parents were killed in an accident and I’m her only living relative, so we’ve sort of inherited her.”

  “Very good to do so, too, if I may say so, Captain,” Salitana said with more than usual fervor, losing her suave salesperson persona. “When you think of the traffic in orphaned children in this curve of the Milky Way, it’s nice to know some will take on responsibility for blood relations instead of selling them out of hand to who-knows-what miserable existence.”

  “Like Kezdet?” Gill asked, having glanced around first to be sure they were not overheard.

  “Out-system visitors call us paranoid,” Salitana said, “but if your planet were this close to Kezdet, you’d have a major defense budget, too.”