The Unicorn Girl

by Anne McCaffrey

  Pal interrupted him. “Just point out the sleep shed. We won’t need your company.”

  The superintendent was disappointed; he’d expected a cut of the profits from any sale made on his shift. A discreet transfer of credits salved his disappointment and bought Pal and Acorna privacy while they picked their way through the debris of the mine to the area where Siri Teku’s gang sorted the ore they had dragged to the surface.

  There were only two children on the sorting bench. One of them was working so fast her fingers seemed to fly as she picked through the broken rocks and assessed them with an expert eye. The other stared through them with blank, empty eyes that made Acorna’s own eyes narrow in anguished sympathy.

  “Jana?” she asked, expecting the active child to answer.

  “I’m Laxmi,” said the girl who was working so hard. “She’s Jana.” She jerked her chin toward the other child. “She don’t talk much, not since…” A rattling cough interrupted her words.

  “Get her some water, Pal!” Acorna said.

  “’S okay. ’S nothing,” Laxmi croaked, wiping her chin. “Don’t tell ’m…I’m not sick!” There was desperation in her cry. “Not!”

  “Of course you are not sick,” Acorna agreed soothingly. “You are a fine, strong worker.”

  Laxmi edged suspiciously away from her as Acorna came closer, until she was on the far side of the bench with a pile of broken rocks between her and the visitors. Acorna sat down beside Jana and put an arm around her. Jana winced away with a gasp of pain.

  “Best not touch ’er,” Laxmi warned from a safe distance. “She ain’t healed from that beatin’ Siri Teku give ’er.”

  Jana’s ragged gray kameez was stuck to her back and sides in several places. When Pal came back with a bucket of scummy water, Acorna looked at it in despair, then deftly stripped off the scarves that swathed her head. Laxmi gasped and fell into another coughing fit at sight of the small white horn in the middle of Acorna’s forehead.

  Acorna dipped her horn into the water for a moment, then used her silk scarf to dab the now-clean water onto the worst of Jana’s marks. When she was finally able to lift the kameez without pulling at the broken skin underneath, she laid her forehead against each swollen, infected weal. Laxmi edged closer and closer, eyes round as she saw clean new skin replacing the raw stripes on Jana’s back and sides.

  “Please, lady,” she whispered, “I dunno what you’re doing…but could you do her knee, too? That’s what hurts her the worst. Can’t walk without a stick….”

  Acorna bent her head to the swollen knee for a long moment. Jana sat unmoving and unresponsive, but the swelling visibly went down.

  “Come to me,” she said, and Laxmi, a look of surprise on her face, slowly moved toward Acorna.

  “If you c’n fix me, too,” she said hoarsely, “reckon I’ll go with you. Kheti allus said goin’ with a Didi was worst thing as could happen to a girl…but Kheti dint see you.”

  Acorna laid her face against Laxmi’s throat and slowly moved the horn down along her chest. Laxmi drew in a deep breath and hardly coughed at all; she took another breath and another, and color crept into her face.

  “What you think you’re doing, bint?”

  The angry roar came from the mouth of the shaft behind them. A moment later a tall, lean man in brown robe and turban leapt out of the cage-lift, brandishing a long, flexible rod in one hand.

  Quickly swathing her horn, Acorna lifted her head.

  “I have a use for these children,” she said. “You will be compensated for them.”

  Siri Teku’s eyes narrowed in crafty speculation. It must be Laxmi the Didi wanted; Jana wasn’t much use to anybody now. She was trying to confuse him by pretending an interest in both children.

  “I might consider letting you have that one,” he said, nodding at Jana. “‘T’ other’s too valuable to me. Last trained sorter I got, see.”

  “I need them both,” Acorna replied firmly.

  Siri Teku mentally evaluated the worth of this new Didi’s gold jewelry and decided to take a gamble. It was true that he needed Laxmi’s services. He wouldn’t have pretended not to notice her cough for so long if he’d had anybody else half so good at sorting ore. But a month would give him time to buy some new children and have Laxmi train them. And if this Didi was really so interested in Laxmi, Old Black knew why, she’d come back at the end of that month…by which time he should be able to trade, steal, and buy enough really handsome children to make her a constant customer of his.

  Besides, he thought he recognized the silent bodyguard who stood behind the Didi. Was House Li getting into the bonk-shop business? And if so, did old Li himself know, or was the old man so senile that his employees were able to take off on their own? He needed time to check the rumors so that he could figure out how to turn the maximum profit from this situation.

  “This un’s not for sale yet,” he repeated, grabbing Laxmi’s arm and jerking her away from Acorna and Pal. “Come back next month, after I’ve had time to train some new sorters. And for the other, it’ll be fifty credits.”

  “Who’re you kidding?” Pal demanded, using a rough accent Acorna had not heard from him before. “We’d be doing you a favor to take her off your hands. Ten credits, no more.”

  “You wish to rob an honest working man of his livelihood? Besides, I will have to give a percentage to the mine superintendent. Thirty-five.”

  “Fifteen,” Acorna said.

  Siri Teku hesitated, and Acorna turned on her heel.

  “Come,” she snapped to Pal. “My time is too valuable to spend haggling over one child.”

  “Seventeen and a half!” Siri Teku cried.

  “Very well,” Acorna said, “seventeen it is.” She dropped a bundle of credits in the dirt and turned toward the skimmer.

  “And a half?”

  Acorna laughed and kept walking.

  “Remember,” Siri Teku called after them as Pal carried Jana toward the skimmer, “come back next month! I’ll make it worth your while!”

  Laxmi’s eyes followed the skimmer as it rose over the mountainous slag heap of Anyag and banked west, into the afternoon sun, toward Celtalan.

  Pal tarried long enough at Irodalmi’s house to return the jewelry, which Acorna was only too happy to remove, despite the surprise that it caused Jana.

  “I am no Didi, little one,” Acorna told Jana, stroking her no longer sore back. “I am taking you to Chiura, who has been crying for her Mama Jana.”

  “Chiura?” Jana exclaimed. Miracle upon miracle this day had for her. Not only had her pains been soothed and she had been taken from bondage with Siri Teku, but Chiura was at her destination. Furthermore, her well-honed instincts told her that this marvelous lady with the funny horn in the middle of her forehead was good, and Jana had had so little of “good” in her life, she wondered that she could believe in any. Yet why heal her when she wasn’t pretty like Chiura or useful like Khetala? That name sprang from her lips. “Khetala? You will find and free her from Didi Badini?”

  The man who drove the skimmer groaned. “One rescue a day is all I can cope with right now, and there’ll be a lot of explaining to be done for this day’s work—that I can assure you.”

  “But surely, Pal, we must save these children. The other one who coughed…”

  “Laxmi?” Jana asked hopefully.

  “Mr. Li has a large house, but there are limits to what hospitality he can extend. That is why we must make the moon colony. Then we will have a safe place for all the abused and misused children in those mines. First things must come first, Acorna.” He spoke as severely as he could, and yet the melting look in Acorna’s eyes over Jana’s head was almost more than he could bear. What amazing powers this most unusual female had!

  In December 1936, the English king, Edward VIII, abdicated his throne to marry an American divorcée, Wallis Simpson. Before Christmas of that year, schoolchildren from Land’s End to John o’Groats were chanting, “Hark, the herald angels sin
g, Mrs. Simpson’s pinched our king.” No one ever figured out how the song spread so quickly; it certainly hadn’t been part of a BBC broadcast.

  The tale of a silver goddess with a horn in the middle of her forehead, come to Kezdet especially to heal and help children, spread with similar rapidity. As with the song about Mrs. Simpson, the only certainty is that it wasn’t disseminated by anyone in authority.

  When the rest of Siri Teku’s gang came up from their twelve-hour shift Below, Laxmi told them that Sita Ram, Lady of the Sky and Above, had visited Anyag disguised as a Didi, had healed her, and had taken Jana to live with her in the sky. The other children might have scoffed, but it was a fact that Laxmi’s racking cough was gone; she breathed as easily and deeply as any of the newest arrivals. A child sold from the mines to Czerebogar took the story and the hope of that healing with him.

  In the carpet works at Czerebogar, where the children squatted on hanging benches and tied knots in the famous Kezdet carpets until their fingers bled, Laxmi’s Sita Ram was transmuted into Lukia of the Lights, and they whispered that the unicorn’s white horn shed a magical healing light that restored the sight of squinting, half-blind carpet weavers. An itinerant teacher from the Child Labor League, entering Czerebogar in disguise, found her way made easier by this legend and suggested to her colleagues that they spread it as a way of overcoming the children’s ingrained fear and distrust of all strangers.

  “Should we try to overcome it?” one of the other part-time teachers asked. “Most of the time they’re right to fear strangers.”

  “Not us,” said the young woman who’d slipped in and out of Czerebogar, bringing counting games and stories and taking away the legend of Lukia. “If they fear us, we can’t help them.”

  In the Tondubh Glassworks, the story became part of the legend of Epona, the horse-goddess who bore tired glass-runners on her back and galloped from furnace to blower with the molten glass to spare the children’s weary legs.

  Everywhere on Kezdet, where there was a mine or factory keeping children at work in cramped, poisoned, miserable conditions, there was also some legend of a rescuing goddess, spun out of the older children’s hazy memories of a mother’s arms and given strength by the younger children’s need for hope. But never before had one of the legendary goddesses taken mortal form and given solid, practical healing to a sick child. All the legends suddenly took on new life; hope flourished like an underground stream of pure water running through all the dark factories; overseers wondered why the children had begun to sing and laugh, and worried about the change.

  The repercussions from Acorna’s adventure were less than Pal had feared. Judit was frankly relieved to have Jana take over the care of Chiura, who had never ceased wailing for the older child whom she evidently regarded as a mother.

  Delszaki Li and the miners were somewhat more vocal. “You did what?” Rafik bellowed when Acorna proudly reported the results of her trip to him.

  “I told you that I was going to look for Chiura’s ‘Mama Jana,’” Acorna said.

  “Yes,” said Calum unguardedly, “but we didn’t think you’d succeed, or we wouldn’t have let you go off with just Pal and one bodyguard.”

  Nadhari Kando shifted her weight slightly, from one foot to a balanced pose on the balls of both feet. The slight movement should have gone unnoticed, but instead it drew everyone’s attention. She looked straight at Calum until his eyes dropped.

  “That is…” he mumbled, “of course you were perfectly safe with Nadhari. After all, if Mr. Li entrusts his own life to her….”

  “Quite correct,” Nadhari said. Her low, grating voice was almost without expression.

  “Don’t you want Jana?” Acorna put her arm around the bewildered child.

  “Sure we do,” Gill said heartily. He dropped to one knee before Jana, who shrank back involuntarily at the approach of this red-bearded giant. “We need you here, Jana. Chiura needs you. We all do. Plenty of room in this house for another little girl.” He glanced at Delszaki Li and received an approving nod. “We were just…surprised that Acorna found you so quickly.”

  “We underestimated her,” Rafik said gloomily.

  “Probably not for last time,” Delszaki Li chirped. His dark eyes were bright with amusement.

  Pal’s private nightmare, that the Guardians of the Peace would somehow trace him and “Didi Acorna” back from Anyag to the Li mansion and accuse him of procuring children for immoral purposes, never came true. He was not sure whether that was because they had not been traced, or because the Guardians were too bright to try to shake down so powerful a figure as Delszaki Li, or because they simply accepted as a matter of course that any man who was so inclined might buy himself a few girl children for private use whenever he felt the urge. He suspected the last.

  Even Acorna, after a few wistful comments about the amount of room there was in those upper stories and how many beds they could fit into the long parlor, seemed to accept Pal’s strict injunction against collecting any more children before Delszaki Li had started the safe haven of the lunar colony. She didn’t even promise Jana to go out and look for Khetala—thank goodness! Pal sweated when he remembered the risks he had already allowed Acorna to run in their mad escapade. The last thing he needed was to have her opening those wide silvery eyes at him and politely requesting a tour of the East Celtalan brothels. Especially since he had a terrible suspicion he would give in. The urge to give Acorna everything she wanted was only growing stronger the more time he spent in her company.

  All things considered, he should have felt relieved when, after a few days spent quietly with Chiura and Jana, her only request was to go shopping with Judit.

  “I am sure you must have many more important things to do,” she apologized to Judit, “but you see, I have promised Mr. Li not to go out alone again. There are a few things I need from the stores, and somehow I do not think that Nadhari…”

  “Of course,” Judit said. “You’re quite right. I’m pretty sure Nadhari doesn’t have a black belt in shopping. And I have been quietly going mad with inactivity while I wait for Delszaki and your friends to come up with something for me to do. Really, if he’s going to spend all his time locked in Dr. Zip’s lab or cruising the Lattice on his comunit, Delszaki hardly needs one personal assistant, let alone two!”

  “I’ll go with you,” Pal volunteered, and felt unreasonably annoyed when Acorna stammeringly refused his help.

  “Don’t be silly, Pal,” Judit said in her best bossy elder-sister tones. “One of us must stay here in case Delszaki comes out of his brown study and wants something.” Adding, after she sent Acorna off to get a heavier wrap on the pretext that there were cold winds coming in from the north, “I expect the child wants to buy feminine fripperies, Pal. She’d only be embarrassed to have you tagging along. Nadhari will come, and she’ll be quite protection enough.”

  Nadhari cleared her throat, and Pal hastily agreed that no one could want more protection than she could supply.

  Relief though it must be to have Acorna safely occupied, Judit could not repress a slight scorn when she saw the girl counting the credits in her purse before they set out. Was all the work of the Child Labor League to be set aside for Acorna’s convenience? Here was Delszaki Li off on a wild-goose chase to find Acorna’s home planet, instead of completing the plans for his lunar colony; Acorna herself, it seemed, was perfectly happy to go shopping for the latest fashions. It was true that Delszaki had advanced the credits to her himself, saying that he wished his “ward” to be dressed as befitted the House of Li, rather than continually washing and wearing the same three outfits the miners had casually picked out for her. And it was true that the plans of the Child Labor League were in much more danger from hasty enterprises such as Acorna’s rescue of Jana than from a few days of neglect. Still, Judit could not keep from fretting over all the problems remaining: the lunar colony yet to be designed, let alone set up; how the children were to be gathered together when every factory owner h
ad trained them to hide whenever strangers approached; worst of all, how to neutralize the shadowy, malevolent figure known only as the Piper, whose fortune derived entirely from the worst forms of child labor and who was supposed to be behind most of the official and unofficial bedevilment the league members had suffered. The Piper would surely find some way to stop Li’s latest and boldest plan if he got word of it, as he was sure to do sooner or later in Kezdet’s spyriddled society.

  She was further surprised when Acorna first proposed that they should walk, then stopped not five minutes from the house and hired a skimmer, directing the pilot to take them to the Gorazde Bazaar.

  “Acorna, are you sure that is where you wish to go?” Judit remonstrated as the skimmer rose and hovered over the heart of Celtalan’s wealthiest district. “The Gorazde is not at all fashionable. Respectable, yes, but it is the sort of place where Delszaki’s servants buy their daywear. It is not equipped to cater to a young lady of fashion.”

  “I am not a young lady of fashion,” Acorna said calmly, “and I inquired of the house staff before making my decision. I am confident that I shall find exactly what I need at the Gorazde.”

  “And why rent a skimmer?” Judit went on. “We could have used one of the House Li skimmers.”

  Acorna hung her head. “I wanted to do this myself,” she said, “with my own credits from the work I have done for Calum and Rafik and Gill.”

  “Do what, for heaven’s sake?”

  “That little boy at Tondubh,” Acorna said, “his feet were all burned and cut from running over hot and broken glass. I thought…he could use a pair of sandals.”

  “What a nice thought!” Judit approved.