The Unicorn Girl

by Anne McCaffrey

  “If you were, then you know something of us. But what do we know of you? Why should you take this risk for us?” Gill demanded.

  Judit threw him a scornful glance. “Have you ever heard of Kezdet?”

  Gill shook his head.

  “My Uncle Hafiz,” Rafik said, “recommended it as a place to be avoided.”

  “Your uncle was right. I got myself and my sister out of Kezdet,” Judit said, “and pretty soon I’m going to get my kid brother out. Besides…but that doesn’t concern you. Let’s just say I have seen enough children suffering. If I can save this one, maybe…maybe it’ll make up for what I ignored in order to get myself out.”

  A few minutes later, Judit Kendoro walked through the swinging doors of Surgery and presented her Amalgamated badge to the desk clerk. “Here to collect Child, Anonymous, recent arrival on the Khedive,” she said in a bored monotone. “Dr. Forelle will have transmitted the orders.”

  The clerk nodded and pressed a button. The doors behind her slid open and a tall woman in sterile scrubs came out.

  “I wish you people would make up your minds,” she said. “We had to give her a global anesthetic, the local didn’t work. I could go ahead and get all the restorative work done right now if Forelle would just wait a day.”

  Judit shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to me, I’m just the courier. You want her back when we’re done?”

  “If the order for surgery hasn’t been canceled by some other department,” the woman snapped. “For now, take her with my compliments. I have enough real patients without getting caught in some power struggle between the psych departments.”

  She nodded toward the room she had come from and a green-gowned aide wheeled out a gurney on which Acorna lay limp and unconscious. The tangle of silvery curls had already been shaved in a wide naked semicircle around her horn.

  “I’ll take her on the gurney,” Judit said in a bored tone, “no need for your people to waste time with the transfer.”

  As soon as Judit had control of the gurney, Rafik sprang forward and grabbed her from behind. A plasknife slid out of his sleeve and gleamed across Judit’s throat.

  “Thanks for showing us the way, dummy,” he growled in his best threatening tones. “We’ll take the kid back now.”

  “You can’t do this! You tricked me!” Judit was a terrible actress; the words came out as woodenly as someone reading a Basic literacy test.

  “Raise the alarm,” Rafik threatened the desk clerk and surgeon, “and the girl gets it. Keep quiet, and we’ll let her go when we’re safely away. Understand?”

  Gill reached down to the gurney and swept Acorna up in one arm, and Calum held the doors while he and Rafik and Judit made their exit.

  “Is she all right?” As soon as the doors swung shut behind them, Rafik dropped the pretense of holding Judit at knife point. Now he was at Gill’s side, feeling for a pulse in Acorna’s wrist.

  “Breathing,” Gill said. “We’ll see about the rest when the anesthetic wears off. Judit, is there anything we should know about that?”

  She shook her head. “Standard anesthesia. She’ll be out an hour, maybe two, depending on how long ago it was administered. Just as well, really. Gives you time to get her back on ship-board without a fuss…. I’d better go with you, though. Keep the knife out, Rafik, and hold my arm. You may need a hostage again.”

  “Which way from here to the docking bay?” Gill asked.

  “We can take the service tunnels. Less chance of running into people.” Judit pressed a panel in the wall and a narrow inner tunnel opened before them, barely wide enough to admit Gill with the burden of a sleeping Acorna.

  They reached the docking bay without incident. The bored, mechanical clerk who’d replaced Johnny Greene hardly lifted his head when they came to his desk.

  “Warn personnel out of the bay and prepare the outer doors for opening,” Calum said. “Khedive departing immediately.”

  “Not cleared,” the clerk mumbled without looking up from his console.

  “Please,” Judit said in a shaky voice, “do what they say. He—he’s got a knife.”

  This got the clerk’s attention. His head snapped up, he gave a startled look at the plasknife in Calum’s hand, and he dove under his desk. “Do what you want, just leave me out of it!”

  “Well, well,” said Gill softly, “and here I thought the wee man might make trouble by trying to be a hero. Calum, d’you know the docking system well enough to clear us for departure?”

  “If Amalgamated hasn’t changed it too much,” Calum said. “Here, hold this.” He handed the plasknife to Judit, who quickly handed it on to Gill. “I’m a hostage, you idiots,” she hissed.

  Gill laughed quietly and accepted the task of holding Judit “hostage.” Calum, having swiveled the desk console to face him, was oblivious to the byplay. He brought up a series of screens in quick succession, nodding in satisfaction. “Hmm,” he said at the sight of the fifth screen. “Hmm…Uh-huh. Okay, next, okay, uh-huh.” He zipped through the rest of the status screens and tapped in a command. “Okay, that clears us. But there are a couple of little problems.”

  “Anything that would keep us on the base?”

  “No, but…”

  “Right. We’ll discuss them later. Come on! And Judit, act normal. The bay may be cleared, but unless Amalgamated’s remodeled, the loading staff can watch us from the top gallery. We don’t want any of the staff to notice you’re being a hostage.”

  “So I’m not-a-hostage trying to act like a hostage trying to act not-a-hostage,” Judit muttered as they passed through the series of doors that protected the interior of Base when the docking bay was open to space. “It’s as bad as singing Cherubino, having to be a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to dress up as a girl.”

  “You like ancient opera?” Gill asked in surprise.

  Judit shrugged. “I was in a couple of amateur productions at school. My voice isn’t good enough to go professional. But one year we got Kirilatova to coach us in Figaro. She did Susanna, of course.”

  “Kirilatova? But she’s got to be about a hundred and ten by now!”

  “Not quite. She was seventy then,” Judit said, “and when she sang Susanna, if you had your eyes closed, she was a girl of twenty about to be married to her beloved. It was an incredible performance. I wish I’d been born early enough to hear her at her peak.”

  “I have cubes,” Gill said. “Early performances, originally preserved on DCVCD, then transferred to tri-D when the new format came out.”

  “Are you going to invite the girl up to listen to your opera cubes, Gill? How about lifting Acorna up first?” There was an edge of sarcasm in Calum’s voice. They had crossed the open bay without incident while Gill and Judit talked about dead singers.

  “I might at that,” Gill said thoughtfully. He took Judit’s hand. “You could come with us. You don’t belong with the psych-toads at Amalgamated, you know. As the customer said to the Vassar girl in the brothel, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

  Judit shook her head. “As the Vassar girl said to the customer, ‘Just lucky, I guess.’ I know nothing of mining; I’d be useless cargo to you.”

  Calum, who’d been on the verge of making that point, opened his mouth and shut it again with an audible snap.

  “You’d better knock me out, too, before you go. The hostage act may not have been totally convincing.”

  “After all the help you’ve been? I couldn’t bear to, acushla.”

  “It will lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,” Judit said. “Look, I need this job. I can earn enough here to see Pal through technical school. Anyway, I…I have my reasons for staying with Amalgamated. Now will you get on with it?”

  “Can’t,” Rafik said. “You’ve no protection. If you’re in this docking bay when we open the doors, and not on the ship, you’re dead. You will have to walk back through the inner doors. As soon as you’re safe, we’ll take off.
They won’t have time to cancel the clearing sequence.”

  Unexpectedly, Judit laughed. “That fat little toad of a receiving clerk is probably still under his desk, and nobody else knows anything’s wrong…yet. But I look too unharmed to have been the hostage of you brutal roughnecks. Give me the knife, Gill.” With rapid efficiency she sliced through her outer coverall at the point where Gill had been pretending to hold the knife point against her side, then pulled half the hair out of her braid and let it fall in a dark cloud over the side of her face. “Do I look enough of a mess yet?”

  “You look most beautiful,” Gill said, “and I shall carry your memory with me through the cold of space.”

  “Get on with it, you two!” Calum snapped. “We’ve got Acorna webbed in. The longer you spend chatting the girl up, the more chance of somebody noticing something’s wrong.”

  “That’s a brave girl,” Gill said as he climbed on board the Khedive and strapped himself in for takeoff. He watched Judit’s halting progress across the floor of the docking bay. “I hope that limp is part of the acting….”

  “She was moving just fine on the way to Surgery,” Calum pointed out. “Rafik! Systems ready? I want us in action the minute she’s through the first doors.”

  “Second doors,” Gill said firmly. “She’s too valuable to risk.”

  “And Acorna? Not to mention us? And the Khedive?”

  “We’ll make it,” Gill said with confidence.

  And they did.

  “Now what?” Calum said when they were well away from Base.

  Gill shrugged. “Long term or short term? Long term, we’ve still got our skills and our ship, and there are other companies to contract with— or we can go independent. Short term…you said something about problems when you were humming over the console back there. What’s our status?”

  “Refueling only partially complete, but that’s no problem; we’ve enough to make it back into the asteroid belt, and once there, we can mine a carbonaceous chondrite to supply hydrogen for the fuel converter.”

  “A C-type chondrite will replenish our water and oxygen, too, if necessary,” Rafik pointed out. “So what’s the problem?”

  “Food’s low. We’re about to be temporary vegetarians.”

  “At least one of us won’t mind that,” Gill said with a tender look at the net where Acorna lay, moving just enough in her drugged sleep to reassure them all that she would wake soon enough.

  “And we didn’t get the replacement auger bits,” Calum said. “Azlenut cracked most of them and Daffy just about finished the rest of the box off. Our tether cables are worn, too. We were due for a good deal of refitting at Base.”

  There were more immediate complications than shortage of spare parts, as they learned when they activated the com units.

  “Just receiving,” Rafik advised them. “Transmitting would give away our position.”

  “Ah, they’re not going to follow us out of sector for one little girl nobody had claimed anyway.”

  “‘Why step on me?’ the ant asked the elephant. ‘Because I can, and because you have annoyed me,” Rafik answered obliquely. “It is not wise to annoy the elephant.”

  “I’ve got the Base frequency,” Calum announced. “You two might want to listen in.”

  They listened in tight-lipped anger to the repeated announcement being broadcast to all Amalgamated bases and ships.

  “They’re claiming the Khedive is stolen property!” Gill exploded. “They can’t do that! She’s our ship, free and clear!”

  “That ghastly female said something about the Khedive being theirs,” Calum said thoughtfully. “Rafik, is there some legal mumbo-jumbo in the reorganization that could possibly make it look like we had been leasing the ship from them?”

  “They can claim whatever they want to,” Rafik pointed out. “And if they catch up with us, and we have to argue it out in the courts, who’ll be taking care of Acorna?” He smiled benignly at his colleagues. “We might be well advised to take on a new identity.”

  “We can call ourselves whatever we want,” Gill grumbled, “but the ship’s registered and known….”

  Rafik’s smile was seraphic. “I might know someone who can take care of that little matter for us. For a fee, of course.”

  “What have we got to pay your someone with? I have a strong suspicion Amalgamated’s accountants are not going to credit us for all the iron and nickel we’ve been sending back by drone,” Calum said dourly. “And the platinum and titanium are sitting in the Amalgamated shipping bay—wrapped up in our only container nets!”

  “We have,” Rafik said gently, “a large block of extremely valuable, if nonvoting, shares of Amalgamated stock. I think Uncle Hafiz will be willing to convert it into local currency for us.”

  There was a moment’s pause, then Gill laughed and slapped his knee. “So Amalgamated pays for the refit, after all! Good enough.”

  “We’ll be broke afterward,” Calum grumbled.

  “We’ll have our ship, our tools, and our skills,” Gill said in high good humor. “And Acorna! Never worry, man. There are asteroids out there richer than anything we ever mined on contract. I can feel it in my bones.”

  “So, onward to Uncle Hafiz?” Rafik asked, setting himself at the navigational board and posing his fingers over the keys.

  “Yeah. Where is your famous Uncle Hafiz?”

  “The planet is called Laboue; the location is a family secret I’m not allowed to divulge,” Rafik said, already plotting in a course. He had completed it and cleared the screen before either Gill or Calum could see what he had entered. “Naughty, naughty!”

  “Nauuughtie?” a feeble little voice queried.

  “Acorna, sweetie,” and Gill, being nearest, strode to her hammock. “Sorry, hon, sorry. We had no idea at all what those idiots were going to do to our little Acorna.”

  Her pupils widened and the fear drained from her features, her hands and feet opening in relief at finding herself back on board the Khedive and with them.

  “That stupid woman! Glad I decked her,” Calum said.

  “Very stupid woman,” Acorna agreed, nodding her head vigorously and then moaning. “Oh, my head!”

  “It’ll wear off, acushla,” he said, and then added to Gill. “Get webbed. We’re about to go into the wild black yonder!”

  Three

  Acorna was very nervous for the next few days, so they all made a big effort to divert her and promise, on their honors, that she’d never be left alone with stupid strangers again. One of the few unessential tasks that Calum had had time to do, before they went to collect Acorna, was to pick up some seed from the chandler. He was offered flowers, too.

  “There are quite a few decorative broad-leafed types, flowering, too, which do give you some diversity in your ’ponics. Also some botanical oddities that do quite well on nutrient solutions,” he’d been told. “Quick growing.”

  While he had been more interested in vegetables and edible legumes and some of the new bean types, he also picked up alfalfa, timothy, and lucernes seeds, remarking that he would be making a planetfall and was doing a favor for a friend.

  Setting out the seeds and using the Galactic Botanical from the ship’s library program to figure out how to speed up their growth helped pass the time and increase the variety of their meals. Acorna had read just as much as Calum and Gill had of the GB and she very shortly told them she had the matter well in hand and they were to please do something else.

  “You don’t suppose she remembers stuff…racial memory?” Calum asked.

  Gill shrugged. “Who’s to know? I did manage to check that blood sample we took when she scraped her knee. She’s not of a known genotype. Shit!” And he obediently put a half credit in the FINE box. It joined its fellows with a clink.

  “Hey, man, how much have we got in there?” Calum asked and Gill opened the container, spilling out a good fifty half-credits.

  “Won’t buy much, but it’s a start.”

  “
Uncle Hafiz will set us up, lads,” Rafik assured them from the pilot’s seat. Then he leaned forward. “Gill, d’you remember that dead ship we found rammed halfway through an asteroid?”

  “What about it?”

  “Wasn’t it the same class as this one?”

  “Year or two older.”

  “But same class. Are you getting at what I think you’re getting at?” Gill asked, brightening.

  “Indeed I am, dear lad,” Rafik said, grinning from ear to ear. “And that asteroid belt is also on our present heading…well, with a slight detour.”

  “We change identities with it?” Calum asked. “Can we do that?”

  “With a little extra help from Uncle Hafiz, that should be no problemo,” Rafik said. “Shall we?”

  Gill and Calum made eye contact.

  “Well, it’s worth the effort, I think, especially if Uncle Hafiz can fiddle some updates about where that ship has been while she was missing.”

  “He’s a whiz at that sort of thing,” Rafik said and began to whistle off-key.

  “Sure get Amalgamated off our tail if they should bother to come looking for us,” Calum said, looking anxiously in the direction of the ’ponics, where Acorna was working.

  “It would at that,” Gill said, after finger-combing his beard. He held up a portion of the belt-long hirsute appendage. “Well, I wanted to have a good trim, but I’ll bet Amalgamated axed the barber shop, too.”

  “I’ll give you a trim,” Calum suggested suavely.

  “No way, mate,” Gill said, wrapping his beard up and stuffing it down the front of his tunic.

  “Uncle Hafiz has an excellent barber,” Rafik said soothingly.

  “I can’t wait to meet this Uncle Hafiz,” Gill said.

  “He will amaze you,” Rafik said with smug pride. He then added, in a much less confident tone, “Only one thing. He isn’t to know about Acorna.”

  “Why not?” Gill and Calum asked in unison.

  “He’s a collector.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of whatever’s going, and I’m bloody sure he’s never seen anything like Acorna.”