The Unicorn Girl

by Anne McCaffrey

  He had managed to make contact, again through Mr. Li’s amazing network of contacts, with a lunar engineer: an elderly man, one Martin Dehoney, now retired, who had been responsible for the ingenious structures that were almost compulsory on moon mining installations for their high safety factors and low budget requirement. He was also said to be a treasure chest of innovative ideas which conservative agencies, such as large corporations and governments, would not consider. So, when Rafik contacted him, at first the Architect Dehoney had demurred by virtue of his age and debility, but Rafik’s gentle persuasion—and the explanation that the plan would ruin the system of Kezdet’s child-bondage system—won him over. He allowed that he had quite a few novel ideas for moon installations which he felt might be eminently suitable, and which someone of Rafik’s breadth of understanding might appreciate more than bureaucracies. To know that some of his best work would see the light of a sun would be very nice indeed before he slept. It took a moment for Rafik to realize he meant the “long sleep” of death.

  To his and Mr. Li’s intense gratification, a veritable harvest of plans, complete with specifications (although some of these were improvements and annexes to some of Dehoney’s existing lunar facilities—fascinating in themselves) arrived by special courier three weeks later.

  “It’s not just the innovative design for integrating living facilities and life-support hydroponics,” Calum marveled. “The man has an incredible instinct for mining engineering problems! Look at this bootstrap proposal. It’s so elegant it’s beautiful!” He was looking at Dehoney’s projected Phase II of the lunar base. In Phase I the lunar regolith would be raked for metal grains, which would then be reduced to their component elements by the gaseous carbonyl process. At the same time, a related chemical vapor deposition process would be used to fabricate large-sized, ultra-lightweight mirrors from the carbonyls of iron and nickel. In Phase II, when the regolith had been raked down to the underlying rock, these mirrors could be used to concentrate solar heat and break up the rock without the use of explosives, which would have to be imported, or mechanical drills, which as Calum knew all too well were subject to frequent dust clogging and friction wear in near-vacuum conditions.

  “And he uses by-products of the regolith beneficiation to provide shielding from solar flares in the first habitats,” Gill pointed out, “then, in Phase II, we can construct extensive living quarters in the rocky areas we excavate. So there’s very little added cost for habitat construction and radiation shielding.” They were poring over the doubled-domed, lock-connected habitat and hydroponics design when Judit interrupted them to turn on Universal News and the report of Dehoney’s demise: in his sleep.

  “He must have just sent the plans off to us,” Rafik said, awed and chagrined. Had his urgency contributed to a fatal fatigue?

  “I wouldn’t have thought you could care about such things,” Judit said, giving him an odd look.

  “You malign me,” Rafik said, though he knew that she had overheard him dealing rather ruthlessly with some suppliers. He laid one hand on his heart, allowing his hurt to show. “I would be callous indeed to work an old man to death. Even if children are being done so daily here, until we can get this underway.”

  Mr. Li regarded Judit over his nose as he had a habit of doing when he wished her to do something that she did not wish to do.

  “My apologies, Rafik.”

  “We will name the main dome ‘Dehoney’ after his inestimable contribution to the project,” Rafik announced, though he looked at Mr. Li for confirmation of this sudden whimsy. Then, with a deep sigh, which could be interpreted in any way she chose, he unrolled the rest of the plans and studied them.

  With such detailed plans, even to the environmental shifts as the population increased, Rafik was able to send out tenders to the construction firms which Gill had been checking out for integrity and the reputation of finishing jobs on time and within budgetary parameters. They sent the tenders out with a return address of the Uhuru, so that Mr. Li’s privacy would not be invaded by the importunate. When word of the size of this job got out, they would be besieged by every penurious subcontractor looking to make more than his work was worth. Better that the office of record be a space ship so that dock security could be tipped to see that the worst did not gain entrance.

  That meant that Rafik and Gill would have to have a discreet and secure modem link to Mr. Li so he could supervise affairs.

  “Rafik has the energy this project has needed,” Mr. Li said, smiling beneficently at Judit and patting her hand, “while I can still supply the wisdom of experience which his young head has not yet had time to accumulate.”

  Judit had just discovered the packet of disks, part of the consignment, and, exclaiming with delight, loaded them into the computer. Almost instantly, the sketches became three-dimension drawings, moving as the strained voice of Marty Dehoney added explanation to his vision of a lunar mining station that could also vie for use as a holiday resort, so complete were the amenities.

  “And look at this!” Gill exclaimed as Dehoney went into his expansion plans. “To cut down the hazard of fire, he suggests we capture small carbonaceous asteroids and release their nitrogen.”

  “Not to mention we can get sulfates and phosphates from the same source, if needed, to supplement the lunar minerals,” Calum pointed out. “If you hadn’t been so single-minded about collecting valuable metal payloads, you’d have thought of that yourself. We passed up plenty of carbonaceous chondrites in between E-types.”

  “I didn’t notice you coming up with the suggestion, either.”

  “Didn’t need it to support a crew of four,” Calum said smugly. “If we’d been trying to stabilize life-support and atmospheric systems for an entire colony, naturally I would have mentioned it.”

  “Oh, naturally,” Gill drawled with heavy irony.

  They were still viewing the comprehensive disks when Pal came to announce that dinner was ready. On noticing their intent faces, he very quickly called down to ask the butler to hold the meal for at least half an hour.

  Tapha’s tongue stuck out between his pinched lips as he worked his way through the cipher program built into his personal com. His father was so stupidly old-fashioned, requiring all his operatives to use a cipher that depended on recalling large chunks of the Books of the Three Prophets from memory. He’d probably have a fit if he knew that Tapha had reprogrammed his personal com to generate enciphered messages automatically, always using the First Verse of the First Book as the key…and even so, there was more hands-on labor involved than Tapha cared for. When he took over the organization, one of the first changes he’d make would be to modernize the communications system, using an automatic encryptor instead of this cumbersome system. Hafiz was overly concerned about security, anyway. Why, Tapha had been using the same encryption key for every message he sent from Kezdet, and there was no sign that any of them had been broken.

  Nor was there any sign that any of them had been received, though he knew they must have been. Hafiz was just being mean and petty, refusing to advance the credits necessary for Tapha to live in the style befitting the heir to the Hafiz Harakamian empire, forcing him to sell off one by one the jewels he’d collected when he fled. Well, all that would change now. With satisfaction Tapha completed the encrypted message telling his father that he had located his prized unicorn girl and would return her…for a price. He could not resist adding the cryptic comment that he had also found the way to solve another family problem here on Kezdet. Without help! Well, without very much help, anyway. Didi Badini’s mention of House Li had been enough of a clue for Tapha to locate Acorna and Rafik on his own. He wouldn’t need to go back to her for information…though he might go back for his own amusement.

  After handing in his message at one of the public comsuites on the main streets of Celtalan, Tapha went on his way to arrange the solution of that nagging family problem. How proud his father would be when he learned that Tapha had not only recaptured the un
icorn girl but had also revenged the trickery practiced on their house by Cousin Rafik! More to the point, with Rafik safely out of the way, there would be no more plots to do Tapha out of his rightful position as his father’s heir apparent. This time Tapha did not intend to make any stupid, impulsive moves, such as the attack at the restaurant…although that should have worked; he still couldn’t figure out how Rafik could have moved fast enough to avoid taking even one blast of laser fire. No matter. This time his disguise would allow him to get close enough to make absolutely sure that Rafik was quite thoroughly dead.

  And once that little matter had been cleared up, he had only to wait until his father’s emissaries arrived with enough credits to make it worth his while to tell them where the unicorn girl was. No need to put himself to the effort of capturing her; that was work for subordinates. He, Tapha, was the mastermind behind the plan, and that was quite enough. No, he would simply relax at Didi Badini’s until Hafiz responded to this latest news. The old bat would give him anything for a few kisses and sweet words…and when he was ready for something fresher, he would offer to help train this new acquisition, the scarred girl from the mines. An enjoyable way to wile away the days of waiting, and one advantage accrued to this child, since she was already marked, was that presumably the Didi wouldn’t care if she acquired a few more scars during “training.” There’d be no need to be careful as he had been ever since that unfortunate accident with the joy-toy girl on Theloi.

  As was routine on Kezdet, Tapha’s latest message and all other messages with off-planet tags were routed through a Guardians of the Peace office on their way to their final destination. Ed Minkus browsed through the day’s mail list with a casual eye out for any interesting anomalies or potential profits, stopping at the obviously encrypted message purporting to concern differing religious interpretations of the First Verse of the First Prophet.

  “Hey, Des,” he called to his partner, “here’s some more crap from that Tapha guy. You know? The one with the funny-looking ears who keeps writing home for money and uses the same encryption key every time.”

  “So?” Des grunted. “Unless he actually gets some money, he’s no use to us.”

  “This one is something different.” Ed activated the decryption program and scanned the cleartext as it appeared on the screen. “He’s found something valuable…might be worth a cut of the action…oh, and it looks as if he’s planning to assassinate some guy named Nadezda.”

  “Nadezda?” Des rolled out of his chair and into a standing position over Ed in one savage movement. “Nadezda! He can’t do that! That triple-timing, two-tailed miner is mine! Nobody kills Nadezda before I get mine back on him!”

  Delszaki Li’s payment of the “fines” owed by Calum, Gill, and Rafik to Kezdet had left Des without official excuse to persecute the miners, but with none of his original lust for vengeance diminished in the slightest.

  “Well, then,” Ed replied mildly, “we’ll just have to stop this Tapha before he gets there, won’t we?”

  The vid-screen in a corner of Didi Badini’s luxuriously furnished sitting room transmitted only a jagged pattern of neon flashes that made the Didi’s head hurt.

  “Drop the bloody scramble, can’t you? It hurts my eyes—and it’s not as if I’d never seen you before.” Immediately she made that last comment, the Didi regretted it. It was not wise to remind the Piper that you were one of the few people on Kezdet who had seen his face…even if you had no idea where in the ranks of Kezdet’s techno-aristocracy he led his “real” life.

  “I have already been careless enough,” a dry voice whispered from the speaker grill surrounding the screen, “accompanying you to that mine. And for what? First sight of a pretty girl-child whom you managed to lose before she was back in your house!”

  Didi Badini cringed at the anger in the whispering voice and forbore to remind the Piper that he, too, had been in the skimmer when that little beast Khetala distracted them and gave Chiura her chance to run away. Never mind. She dared not express her anger at the Piper, but she could take it out on Khetala later. The brat had been locked below long enough to take the fight out of her; now she would turn her over to Tapha to break her.

  “A thousand apologies, master,” she said, swallowing her rage at this unfair criticism. “How may I serve you now?”

  “There are rumors—” the voice whispered, while neon-green and bile-yellow stripes crawled and writhed across the vid-screen, “rumors that the goddess of some children’s cult walks the soil of Kezdet. She has a thousand names but only one face, long and narrow, with a horn like a unicorn’s sprouting from her forehead.”

  “Didi Acorna!” Didi Badini sat upright on her pile of cushions. “I knew she was no true Didi, for none of the sisterhood knew of her!”

  “Didi, goddess, what does it matter?” the Piper interrupted her. “The tales they are spreading of her healing powers are gross exaggeration, but that does not matter, either. What matters is that the children believe. The Child Labor League and that malcontent Li are stirring up enough trouble now; we do not need some goddess cult serving as the focal point for more resistance. This horned freak must disappear. And I must not be seen to be involved in it. I will not have my official position compromised.”

  Didi Badini’s plump, powdered face creased in an unpleasant smile. “Nothing,” she assured the Piper, “would give me more pleasure. And there need be no hint of politics about the removal, either. For impersonating a sister without paying dues to our guild, she has already earned punishment. And there are those who would pay well for that horn of hers; powdered unicorn’s horn is an aphrodisiac of unparalleled power.”

  “But will removal of the horn kill her?” asked the voice, like dry leaves rustling.

  “I think we can be sure of that little point,” said Didi Badini, smiling as the vid-screen display abruptly went gray.

  Then her face sagged with relief. She might not be able to see the Piper, but she knew he could watch and interpret every change of expression on her face. A little longer, and she might have been rash enough to let him find out exactly how she proposed to locate this Didi Acorna. She saw no need to tell him that she counted on young Tapha to lead her to the girl. The Piper might think that he could more profitably deal with Tapha directly…and Didi Badini had not been lying when she mentioned the resale value of a unicorn’s horn. She had customers whose natural powers were failing, to be revived only by some special treat such as a very young virgin or the whipping of a recalcitrant girl; they would pay handsomely for this by-product of Acorna’s death.

  Ten

  Tapha gave his borrowed dock worker’s coveralls a last nervous hitch and strode through the workers’ gate to the spaceport, giving the security guard a jaunty wave as he passed. He could scarcely conceal his jubilation. The disguise had worked! The coveralls were a gift from Didi Badini, who had bought them from a lower-class Didi whose establishment of aging ladies was patronized by the poorer dock mechanics and by transients who knew no better. It had been a simple matter for Didi Hamida to slip a trank into one of her clients’ drinks, remove his uniform while he slept, and subsequently remove his unclothed body to a gutter some distance from her establishment.

  Women helped him, Tapha thought as he paced down the cavernous hangar where ships in for repairs were being disassembled and worked on. He definitely had a way with women…and once this little job was taken care of, he looked forward to returning to Didi Badini’s establishment to have his way with the new girl. Experienced women were all very well, but there was nothing quite like the young and untouched…and if they were frightened as well, that added spice to the encounter.

  “Hey, you!” a real mechanic bawled at him. “Get me a hydraulic splitter! Not that way, you idiot,” he went on as Tapha sauntered on his way. “Stores are the other side of the hangar!”

  Tapha waved and mouthed something intended to be totally unintelligible. The mechanic shrugged in disgust, said something to his mates about f
ardling idiot foreigners who didn’t even speak Basic properly and what was the Guild coming to, and went to get his own hydraulic splitter-whatever that might be. Tapha neither knew nor cared, but he quickened his pace so as to reach the Uhuru’s docking space outside the hangar before anybody else could delay him. It would be a real pity if the fiendish cunning of his new disguise and improved weaponry were spoiled by encountering somebody who expected him to actually know about mechanicals. Tapha patted the sagging pocket of his coveralls and grinned. This time there would be no possibility of a miss.

  From a borrowed office high on the hangar wall, Des Smirnoff and Ed Minkus watched Tapha’s sauntering progress. “Idiot thinks he got through the security check by dressing up like a mech,” Ed commented. “He doesn’t even guess that we had the weaponry and retinal scanners turned off and told the guard not to check IDs when the little guy with the funny ears showed up. Why did we let him through the check, anyway? Would’ve been easier to’ve picked him up there. Or did you change your mind about letting him off Nadezda for you?”

  “Hell, no,” Des replied, “but he hasn’t done anything illegal yet. He hasn’t even cheated the scanners, since they were turned off. It would be exceeding our charter as Guardians of the Peace to stop a man who, for all we know, is paying an innocent family visit.”