The Unicorn Girl

by Anne McCaffrey

  He had been silently watching for some time, entranced by Acorna’s rapt attention to the sleeping child and the tender look on her face as she nuzzled the baby’s scratches with her horn. Some people, he realized, might have found the scene outlandish or alien. To him it was simply the most perfect expression of motherly love he had ever seen. It didn’t matter that Acorna was of a different species, that she might never have children if they couldn’t locate her home, or that those children would be physically very different from the starving beggar she had snatched up out of the streets of East Celtalan. The bond of love was there.

  “But how could she have been simply abandoned to starve?” Acorna smoothed the ragged curls away from the right side of the child’s face. On the left side of her head the hair had been crudely hacked short. “She must belong to somebody.”

  “I don’t think she was abandoned,” Pal said. “She’s a beautiful child. The way her hair was hacked off, it looks as if somebody was trying to make her look ugly. Probably the same person helped her to run away.”

  “What is wrong with beauty? And what would she be running away from?” Pal sighed and prepared to recapitulate Delszaki Li’s lecture on Kezdet’s system of child labor, bondage, “recruiting,” and outright kidnapping. What Li had told Acorna and the miners had probably been too much for Acorna to take in all at one time. Calum went into rhapsodies about the speed with which Acorna absorbed mathematical and astronautical theories, but learning emotional facts was something else again.

  “There are many children on Kezdet with no one to look after them,” he said. “Some are orphans, some are unwanted children from other planets who have been brought here to work in mines and factories, some are bought from their parents to do the same work. If they don’t work, their only alternative is to starve in the street.” He frowned. “She doesn’t look young to have run away, though. Mostly it’s the older children who have the gumption to escape and the with to make some sort of plan. Perhaps when she wakes we can find out more about her, at least get some idea what workplace she was bonded to.”

  “Not to send her back!” Acorna said, flinging a protective arm over the little girl.

  “No. We won’t send her back. And if…” Pal had been about to say that if the child’s bond-owners traced her, Delszaki Li would surely buy her freedom. But he decided not even to mention that possibility in the face of Acorna’s fierce protective instincts.

  “If what?”

  “If we can find out her name,” Pal improvised, “she might have parents who are looking for her.” Personally he doubted it; most children who ended up in Kezdet’s labor system did so precisely because they had parents so desperately poor they had no option but to sell their children. But he found himself wanting to put the best possible face on the child’s situation for Acorna’s sake.

  Acorna’s eyes narrowed to slits, then she took a deep breath and deliberately widened them again.

  “Yes,” she said sadly, “all lost children like to think that their parents are searching for them. If this one has not traveled too far, perhaps her people may be found.”

  Pal could have kicked himself for his clumsy words. How could he have forgotten, even for an instant, that Acorna too had been a foundling, and one who did not know even where her race was to be found, let alone her own parents? No wonder she identified so instantly and protectively with this little waif. He stammered, trying to find some words of apology that would not deepen Acorna’s pain, and was saved by the abrupt awakening of the waif.

  “Mama!” she wailed, and pushed Acorna away when she would have cradled her in her arms. “Mama Jana. Chiura wants Mama Jana.”

  “There, you see,” said Pal, deftly catching up the flailing child and carrying her toward the bathroom before Acorna could realize how thoroughly she had been rejected, “she knows her own name and that of her mother. We’re making progress already.”

  Most of the progress they made in the next half-hour consisted of transferring large quantities of warm water from the tub and onto the carpets, draperies, and themselves. Finally Chiura calmed down, exhausted by her hysterical sobbing, and sat quietly patting the remaining few inches of water in her tub and watching the soap bubbles that formed and popped under her hands. Pal took advantage of the peaceful moment to question Chiura gently. Did she know how she came to the city? In a skimmer? Who piloted the skimmer? How did she come to be alone? Where was she before she came to the city?

  Chiura babbled and wandered from topic to topic while Pal tried to make sense of her words and kept her going with questions, always sheering away when Chiura’s eyes crinkled up and she started to look upset again. Acorna wrapped Chiura in a towel, took her on her lap, and tried to comb out the long ringlets that had been caked in mud before the bath and the first three rinses. Chiura babbled that “a bad man” had piloted the skimmer and they had come from “the bad place”…and Acorna was pulling her hair, and she wanted Mama Jana now!

  “It’s no use,” Acorna said despairingly.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Pal said. “You don’t know enough about Kezdet to work out the clues, but I’m getting a pretty fair idea where she was before she was brought to the city…and why she was wandering the streets alone.” It was as he had suspected when Acorna cleaned her up and he saw how lovely the child was.

  “Kheti said,” Chiura piped up. “Said when she made Didi Badini busy, run, run away, hide. There was a little fire.” She thought it over. “Maybe big fire. Didi Badini was mad, but Chiura hid quiet-quiet under the stinky sacks.” Her eyes crinkled and a tear plopped down her cheek. “Didi Badini hit Kheti, but Kheti didn’t tell. Then Kheti jumped on Didi Badini and they roll around and get all muddy and Chiura ran, long way, got lost. Chiura bad?”

  “No, darling,” Acorna said, hugging her and kissing her tangled curls. “Whoever this Didi Badini was, she does not sound like a nice person at all and I am sure Kheti would not have wanted you to go back to her.”

  “You see,” said Pal, “we’re getting somewhere. It’s not as hopeless as it seems. And I’d like to meet this Kheti,” he added. “Anybody who’d set a bonk-shop on fire to give a kid a chance to get away…”

  “Hopeless? Oh—I meant her hair,” Acorna explained, ruefully lifting a rat’s nest of tangles in one hand. “It will all have to be cut.”

  “Would have had to be anyway,” Pal pointed out, “to match the other side. Or did you want her to go around looking lopsided?”

  Acorna managed a smile at that. Chiura bounced up and down on Acorna’s knee and cried, “Lop-side! Lop-side!” until both adults were laughing helplessly. And Pal managed to put off explaining what he had deduced of Chiura’s fate until after she had demolished a bowl of sweet patts and beans and had fallen asleep again.

  “The name of Didi Badini is a dead give-away,” he explained then. “Didi” literally means “older sister” in the original language, but in Kezdet children’s slang it means a woman who procures young girls for…um…” He blushed under the unblinking gaze of Acorna’s wide silver eyes. “For immoral purposes,” he finished in a rush.

  “You mean, so that men can have sexual intercourse with them?” Acorna translated calmly. Then, at Pal’s look of surprise, “Calum and Rafik and Gill have an extensive library of vid-cubes on the ship, and I have watched many of them—and not only the interactive training cubes on mining techniques! I do not think I was supposed to know about the others, but sometimes it was very boring when they were all working outside and there was not yet any crushed ore for me to run through the refining processes. Those vid-cubes that Calum kept behind his bunk were boring, too,” she added reflectively. “I do not understand why anybody would want to do such uncomfortable and undignified things—and over and over, too! Except that I gather from the Encyclo that it is necessary to make babies. Still, some of the actors in the vid-cubes seemed excessively enthusiastic about their work.”

  “The enthusiasm is something that…um…develops as o
ne matures,” said Pal, making a mental note to tell the miners that their charge had a rather more extensive education than they realized. Then he had to explain to Acorna that, yes, some men were so enthusiastic they paid females to partner them in this undignified activity—and some were so perverted that they preferred the use of very young females.

  “But Chiura is only a baby,” Acorna protested. “It would hurt her!”

  “The men who buy the use of children,” Pal said grimly, “don’t care if it hurts them. Mercy—” He stopped. Mercy had made him promise never to tell Judit what had happened to her after Judit won the scholarship to get off-planet. Neither Pal nor Mercy wished to burden her with unnecessary guilt about things she couldn’t have stopped anyway. “Well, this little one seems to have been lucky. Apparently this Kheti went to a lot of trouble to give her a chance to run away. It probably wasn’t as easy as Chiura makes it sound, either.”

  “Lucky? To beg and starve on the street!”

  “Better,” Pal said. “Believe me…better.”

  “Then we have to find this other girl, this Kheti, and get her free, too.”

  “And what,” Pal inquired, “do you plan to do about the hundreds of others in like situations?”

  “Saving one is better than saving none,” Acorna said firmly.

  Pal could hardly disagree with this statement, but neither could he believe that Acorna would accomplish much by starting a crusade against the Didis of East Celtalan and that mysterious powerful figure, the Piper, who was said to support the brothel industry and to be supported in wealth by its proceeds.

  Delszaki Li had been trying for years to identify the Piper, and when Pal joined him he had brought the Child Labor League’s network of gossip and spies to bear on the problem. But not one of their covert sympathizers had turned up a whisper of the man’s identity. Even Mercy, ideally situated as she was in a Guardians of the Peace office, had been unable to give them a clue; even the Guardians, it seemed, did not know who the Piper really was. All they knew was that he was wealthy, powerful, and absolutely ruthless in crushing any opposition. There were rumors that he reserved some of the children bought by the Didis for his personal use, and that these children were the ones found strangled and floating in the river from time to time…unable to bear witness against him. Pal imagined Acorna’s long silvery body mangled and tossed into the polluted water, and felt physically sick.

  All things considered, it was almost a relief when Chiura woke up crying for “Mama Jana” again and Acorna was distracted into trying to identify Chiura’s mother. To take her mind off the plight of the children in the brothels, Pal enthusi astically tackled the task of decoding the clues they could extract from Chiura’s baby recollections…a little too enthusiastically, he realized, as they neared success.

  “This Jana can’t be her real mother,” he said after another lengthy questioning session, interspersed with games of stacking vid-cubes, rolling a wheel that had fallen off a household trolley, and other improvised amusements. “Look at what she played with the vid-cubes.” Chiura had built a completely enclosed space, then went around the room putting all the small objects she could find inside the space and naming each one. “Lata. Faiz. Buddhe. Laxmi. Jana. Chiura. Khetala.”

  “She was telling us that all these people were on the same level, all trapped.”

  Chiura had reacted vigorously when Acorna tried to lift the little bronze box representing Jana out of the enclosure.

  “No, no, no!” she shrieked. “No, run away! Siri Teku beat!”

  Then, in an abrupt change of mood, she had swiped at the stacked vid-cubes, scattering the “walls” she’d built all across the room, and moved every one of the figures out onto the open floor.

  “She was confined with a group of other children, probably all bonded laborers,” Pal interpreted. “Jana must have been one of the older ones, like Khetala, who tried to take care of her.”

  He tried to get some idea of where Chiura had been kept, but she had only the vaguest notions of place. There had been a big hill with no trees, only rocks. The sun went down behind the hill. Chiura had not been sent to work with the other children and had no idea what they did, only that they came back dirty and tired. What had Chiura herself done?

  “Stupid Chiura,” she said, her face puckering up. “Laxmi hit Chiura.”

  That night Pal consulted Delszaki Li’s extensive atlas of Kezdet.

  “I think it must be someplace relatively close to Celtalan,” he explained his reasoning to Acorna, “because Chiura says they were not very long in the skimmer—and anything over an hour’s flight would be ‘long’ to a child that young.”

  He drew a line out from the depiction of Celtalan on the screen, representing the distance a skimmer could fly in an hour, and requested detailed overlays of the region. Then he narrowed the search by looking for treeless mountains with factories situated on the eastern side of the mountain. There was only one. “It has to be the Tondubh Glassworks,” he concluded, “Unless…no. That’s the only mountain that fits her description.”

  “Then we will go there tomorrow,” Acorna said, “and find Jana.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a great idea,” Pal demurred. “Mr.Li is working on his own plans for freeing the bonded children. We could mess things up for him by going out and making a fuss at the glassworks.”

  Acorna gave him a disgusted look. “Naturally we will tell Mr. Li. But he will not stop us. That child has already lost her home, her parents, and her trust in the rest of humanity. Now you want to deprive her of the only person who cared for her and completely destroy her? I know what it feels like to be separated from the people who take care of you,” she said, remembering the terror of the barren, chemical-scented corridors of Amalgamated space base and the mean lady who would not take her back to Gill and Calum and Rafik. But they had come for her. Who would come for Chiura? They had to find this Jana.

  After the beating Siri Teku gave her for trying to hide Chiura, Jana lost her position as dragger on Face Five. Her partner Khetala was gone, and anyway she couldn’t drag. That last kick Siri Teku gave her had crunched something in her right knee; she could no longer put any weight on that leg at all, and she certainly couldn’t crawl up the narrow shafts dragging a full corf of ore behind her. Buddhe and Faiz took over the lucrative Face Five work. By way of apology for taking her place, Faiz appropriated a slat from the roof which he whittled into the shape of a rough crutch, so that at least Jana could drag herself outside to the sorting slopes and the latrine trench. She supposed it was kind of him, but she didn’t much care any longer. She hurt all the time since Siri Teku’s beating, and the weals were hot and swollen and not healing properly. Kheti would have fussed about bad food and dirt, would have made her wash the wounds and choke down nauseating stews of the weeds growing on Anyag’s mountain ous slag heap to supplement the unvarying diet of patts and bean paste. Without Khetala to nag her into it, though, Jana just couldn’t bring herself to take the trouble. She was tired and achy and there didn’t seem to be much point in making herself even more miserable with cold water and weed stew.

  Siri Teku had cursed when he saw that she was temporarily crippled, but her unfeigned wince when he drew back his foot to kick her bad knee again restored his good humor.

  “Knew I’d break that cheeky spirit of hers someday,” he exulted, not even troubling to address her directly. “She can take Chiura’s place sorting ore until she can walk again.”

  Laxmi grumbled that Jana wasn’t much more use sorting ore than “that baby” had been, and it was true. She wasted long hours just sitting on the ore heap, watching clouds drift across the sky, watching the evening shadows lengthening in front of the slag heap that blocked off half the sky, desultorily turning over bits of broken rock in her fingers from time to time. Laxmi made a point of separating her work from Jana’s so that Siri Teku would be in no doubt about who had done what at the end of the day.

  “You can be lazy and starv
e if you want to,” she warned Jana, “I’m not working double for both of us. Hafta move fast if you want to earn your dinner.”

  “Who cares?” said Jana.

  Choking down the gritty patts was just another pointless thing that seemed more trouble than it was worth. She had to concentrate harder than she liked to make the connection between missed dinners and the constant, gnawing knot of pain in her middle. It wasn’t the worst pain anyway, nothing near as bad as the throbbing of the infected whip marks on her skin, or the sharp pain whenever she dragged her bad knee somewhere. She knew, somewhere in the back of her fever-ridden mind, that if she didn’t eat she would get even weaker and die soon, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore, either. Without Kheti to bully them all into taking care of themselves, the whole gang wouldn’t last long; already Faiz had a festering sore on one hand, and Laxmi’s cough was worse than ever. Anyway, what was the point of working so hard just to keep alive? Nobody cared whether Jana lived or died, and since they took Chiura away there was no little soft warm kitten-girl to cuddle and love. If Jana had been given to putting her thoughts into words, she might have told Laxmi that without someone to love, there was no reason to live. But talking was too much trouble. She listlessly pitched another ore-bearing rock into her sorting box, to shut Laxmi up, and went back to her dreamy contemplation of the clouds.

  Pal had half hoped that Delszaki Li would flatly refuse Acorna’s request to visit the Tondubh Glassworks in search of Chiura’s “Mama Jana,” or at least would insist that she go surrounded by a small army of House Li servants and bodyguards. Acorna had in mind to go unannounced and unescorted, except by Pal, and pointed out that bringing a large group would almost certainly cause the supervisor of the glassworks to treat their visit like an official inspection, hiding all the children.

  “I think he will do so anyway,” Delszaki Li said, his eyes twinkling at Acorna, “but if you wish, shall go with only Pal and one other.” He tapped one of the buttons on the com pad of his hover-chair.