The Unicorn Girl

by Anne McCaffrey

  Siri Teku casually punched Kheti on the side of the head. Her head bobbed limply from the braid that Didi Badini still held. He hit her again and her whole body hung limp. Didi Badini let go the braid and Kheti fell onto the mud floor. Siri Teku slung her over his shoulder and carried her out the door.

  “That is not what I came here to see,” the gray man said in a voice like dry leaves blowing in the winter wind.

  “Your mister told me there was something worth coming here for,” Didi Badini said to the rest of the children. “Where is it? A pretty child, he said, something really special, and too young to be worth training for work.”

  Jana looked at the floor. Maybe if she didn’t look up, if she didn’t see Old Black peeping out of Didi Badini’s eyes, maybe the woman wouldn’t see her and wouldn’t question the way she was crouched awkwardly in front of the corner where Chiura sat.

  “Was it you he meant?” Didi Badini tipped up Faiz’s head with one finger under his chin. “Sweet brown eyes, but the teeth are hopeless and you look old enough to be a good worker. Not you.” She moved on to Lata, who looked up with a vacant smile and tried to focus her one good eye on Didi Badini. “If he meant this one, he’s wasting my time.” Her chubby brown feet moved on with a tinkling of the little gold bells that were attached to her golden sandal straps, until she stood in front of Jana. “Look at me, child!”

  The sweet cloud of perfume that wafted from the folds of Didi Badini’s kameez almost choked Jana, it was too much, too sweet.

  “Nice,” said a little voice behind her. “Pretty.”

  “Ahhh,” Didi Badini breathed on a long satisfied sigh. She bent and took Jana by the nape of the neck. Her fingers were surprisingly hard and strong; she threw Jana onto her side without even breathing hard. “So this is the prize.”

  “Pretty lady,” Chiura said, looking up. She grasped Didi Badini’s kameez with muddy fingers.

  “A lovely child, indeed, if she were clean.”

  “No,” Jana gasped, coming up to her knees and pushing Chiura back. “No, lady, you don’t want her, she’s simple, and sick already, she’s got a bad sickness, she’ll make you sick, too.” If only Kheti were there, Kheti who knew so many words and knew all about the city! She’d be able to think of a good story. But Kheti was gone, head lolling against Siri Teku’s back, sold to the pretty lady with Old Black in her eyes and her smile.

  “Don’t talk nonsense, girl.” Didi Badini slapped Jana aside with a backhanded blow. Her hands were covered with rings; the ornate settings cut Jana’s cheek. “I suppose you’re the one who tried to make her ugly? A right mess you’ve made of her, too, half cutting her hair and all that mud. But I can still tell she’ll clean up fine. You come with Didi Badini, little one,” she crooned to Chiura. “Come and live in the city, sleep on silk and have sorbet to drink every day.”

  Chiura lifted her muddy arms to Didi Badini, then looked over her shoulder. “Mama Jana?”

  “Your mister will take care of Mama Jana,” Didi Badini said. “She’s not coming with us. Not this time.” The cold black eyes flicked a scornful glance over Jana, sitting on the mud with blood running down her grimy face. “Maybe the mister will give her away when she gets too big for a dragger.”

  “No. Don’t take her. Please,” Jana begged. Siri Teku had come back in; she clasped his knees. “I’m teaching her to sort, she’ll be a good worker, I’ll take care of her, she won’t be any trouble.”

  Siri Teku kicked Jana away. His boot landed in her stomach and knocked the air out of her. She lay on the floor and listened to her own breath whistling like something far away and unimportant, while Chiura babbled in Didi Badini’s arms and somebody counted out credits. Then Didi Badini and the silent gray man were gone with Chiura. And Siri Teku had raised his cane.

  “I’ll teach you to try and hide my stock,” he said before the first blow landed, burning across Jana’s chest.

  There was something about waking up on a planet that always excited Acorna. Maybe it was the flavor of the air: not dead-pure as on the ship, but mixed with an infinite variety of scents and the tantalizing hint of exotic goodies to eat—tender new leaves, sweet crunchy roots, hectares of grass blowing in the wind instead of the carefully tended blades grown for her in the ship’s ’ponics system. This morning she woke with her head filled with vague dream-images of a sunny garden full of flowering shrubs and the music of trickling streams…and another music, too, from little animals that danced in the treetops and sang in sweet harmony. Was that a real place, or something she had concocted in her dream? The images were so strong, she could almost imagine they were a true memory of something she had seen when she was a child. A long, long time ago, because she’d been quite small in the dream/memory…before Nered, before Greifen, before Theloi, even before Laboue…hadn’t there been a garden where the grass was soft and blue-green, and a pair of arms that held her up to see the singing-fuzzies? But when she tried to chase down the elusive memory, it vanished like a bubble on the water, leaving her with only the feeling that nice things happened on planets if you went for a walk in the early morning.

  There was some vague discomfort and guilt associated with the clearer memory of the gardens on Laboue with their singing stones, though. Hadn’t Rafik and Calum and Gill been angry with her for going out? Oh, yes—she had forgotten to wear those robes that were supposed to cover up her horn. Well, she’d been a silly baby then. She was grown up now. They’d said so last night. And she certainly knew better than to make that mistake again!

  Feeling quite proud of her forethought, Acorna donned not only the clinging body wrap and long skirt Gill now insisted she wear, but also a scarf of filmy green to match the skirt which could be draped casually across her head so that instead of a horn, she seemed only to have a bouffant hair style from which a few silver curls escaped. Thus fully prepared, she slipped out of the mansion where they’d been brought by skimmer and prepared to explore Kezdet’s capital city of Celtalan in her own way, by walking.

  The restricted life of a mining ship left Acorna with few chances to stretch her long legs. She worked out daily in the ship’s exercise room—exercise closet was more like it, she thought, admiring the broad open spaces before her—but it wasn’t the same as having a good run on nice hard-packed dirt.

  Not that the immediate prospect from Delszaki Li’s house offered any good opportunities for a run. Already, early though it was, the open space between rows of town houses was filled with people in skimmers darting back and forth on urgent errands. They flew low, obviously not expecting to have to dodge pedestrians, and Acorna prudently kept to the narrow stone-covered strip just along-side the houses. She congratulated herself on her intelligence and forethought in keeping away from the skimmers. Gill and the others were all wrong when they said she didn’t know how to take care of herself dirtside. True, she’d never been alone on a planet before. She’d gone out only on those carefully chaperoned shopping trips where they stopped to sell their payloads. But how dangerous could it be? This wasn’t like EVA from the Uhuru, where a slight mistake could leave you without air to breathe or send you spinning dizzily away from the ship into space. Planets were easy; they had gravity and atmosphere. What more did she need?

  But this part of this planet was boring—row after row of faceless walled houses with metallic grills across their windows, and the only people awake were locked away in their skimmers and darted past her with no chance for interesting conversations. Acorna raised her head, looking to the horizon for something more amusing, and her sensitive nostrils caught a whiff of something green and growing not too far away. She followed the scent along stone pedestrian strips, her feet clacking on the smooth-worked stone, until she reached its source.

  Though Acorna did not know it, the Riverwalk was Celtalan’s glory of city planning—at its western end—and its shame at the eastern end, where the river that gave the park its name had long been allowed to degenerate into a polluted, half-choked stream. She entered by th
e arches cut through hedgerows on the western side of Celtalan, where everything was neatly manicured and controlled to a fare-thee-well. The view through the first arch gave the illusion of spacious countryside with rolling hills; it was only after Acorna had walked through the entranceway that she realized how clever landscaping and tricks of perspective had made this park surrounded by city buildings seem so much larger than it really was. Little streams (carefully purified before they were guided into their preformed channels) trickled over miniature waterfalls of moss-covered boulders; half-size gazebos and follies, perched atop grassy mounds, gave the illusion that one was looking down vistas of limitless space laid out by a landscape architect of infinite means. Acorna beguiled half an hour in a flowering maze before the sweet smell of the fresh green buds next to the flowers became unbearably tempting. Rafik and Gill had impressed upon her strongly that it was considered a social faux pas to eat other people’s gardens. If she went back to the big house, that nice Mr. Li would probably find her something she could eat. But she wasn’t tired yet, and at the far side of the maze she could see that the careful landscaping of the Riverwalk began to degenerate into something wilder and less carefully manicured. Instead of the gravel path that hurt her feet, there was a path of hard-packed earth, a perfect surface for running on…. Acorna glanced around, saw no other early risers who might be surprised or offended by her actions, and carefully kilted up her long flowing skirts to above her knees. After all, she assuaged her conscience, she had only promised Gill that she would wear the skirt; she was still doing that, wasn’t she?

  Two Kezdet Guardians of the Peace, observing the park from overhead scanners, saw the tall girl take off at a galloping run down the dirt path that led to the river on the eastern edge of the Riverwalk Park. They shrugged and continued sipping their morning kava. Most members of the wealthy technoclass who inhabited the west-side mansions knew better than to go anywhere east of the river without an armored skimmer and armed bodyguards. Doubtless this girl would turn back before she reached the river bridge. And if she didn’t—well, there might be a reward in it for them if they got her out of trouble and saw her safely home. Before she got into trouble, there was no reason to bestir themselves.

  Pounding down the dirt path, her horn-covered feet landing solidly on the earth, Acorna felt more alive than she could ever remember. Some atavistic instinct deep inside her told her that this was what she was born for—not the sterile confines of a ship, but long glorious runs up grassy slopes and down the other side, effortless leaps over the ragged brambles that impeded her way after she left the path, the morning breeze blowing through her tangled curls. The blood throbbed in her veins and she increased her speed until she felt as though she were flying over the grass and bushes, flying down a long weed-infested downhill slope….

  The same instincts that had urged her into a run saved her from a fall into the stinking river at the bottom of the slope. Without consciously thinking about the obstacle, she shortened stride, collected her balance, and launched herself from the bank in a long, glorious arc that carried her safely over the ten-foot expanse of stinking, gray-green water.

  On the far bank the park ended abruptly and the expanses of pavement resumed, but with a difference. Instead of long regular rows of tall, faceless houses there were clusters of humbler dwellings, with dirt paths winding off between the buildings. Instead of businessmen in skimmers, the main road was full of people: stalls and carts selling bangles and snacks and fruit and vegetables, a knife grinder squatting in the corner made by two mud walls, a huddle of street urchins playing some game that involved mad rushes in pursuit of something Acorna couldn’t quite see. She grinned happily. This was interesting. She would explore a little, get an apple or some other snack from one of these stalls, and be back at the house before anybody else woke up.

  Overhead, in the scanner tower, one of the Guardians of the Peace nudged the other one. “D’you see that?”

  “See what?”

  “That girl. She jumped the river!”

  “You’ve been burning too many happy-sticks,” grunted his partner. “River may be down to a miserable trickle, but it’s still too wide to jump. Besides, why would anybody take the risk of falling in there when there’s a perfectly good bridge upstream?”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to detour. Maybe she didn’t want to explain her business to the bridge guards. This could be interesting. Let’s take out a skimmer and follow her.”

  The fried meat pies being hawked from the first rolling stall didn’t appeal to Acorna, but the second wagon held a tempting display of fruits and vegetables…rather more tempting from a distance, she realized with regret, than on closer inspection. The apples were soft and wrinkled, the madi-fruits covered with brownish spots.

  “Do you not have anything fresh?” she demanded of the owner.

  “All fresh, gracious lady, picked just this morning from my cousin’s farm.”

  “Huh!” the meat pie seller grunted, just audibly, “just fell off the back of your cousin’s skimmer, more likely.”

  Acorna did not wish to get embroiled in the men’s bickering. She pointed at random to a cluster of ruta roots. They looked slightly limp, but ruta aged well, and they’d be something to nibble on while she walked back through the park. She tasted one while the stall-keeper wrapped the others in a scrap of plastifilm for her; the insides, at least, were still sweet and crunchy.

  “That’ll be five credits,” the stall-keeper said, holding out the package.

  From the way his neighbor’s eyebrows shot up, Acorna guessed that she was being charged at least double the going rate for a bundle of slightly overage rutas. But that wasn’t important. What was important was that this blasted skirt had no pockets, and she hadn’t been thinking of money when she left the house that morning.

  “Charge it to the account of my guardian, Delszaki Li,” she said.

  The stall-keeper’s face turned ugly. “Look, techie, we don’t run charge accounts this side of the river. Credits in hand is my rule.”

  “Then keep the rutas,” Acorna said, “they weren’t that fresh anyway.”

  “You’ll pay me for the one you’ve eaten! I been robbed already once this morning by one of them thieving street brats, I’m not having some techie come along and make a free meal off my stall on pretense of sampling the goods!”

  “Hey, Punja, we got the little thief for you!” called one of the street urchins whose game Acorna had noticed just before she inspected the stall.

  Now, with a sinking heart, she realized that the quarry in their “game” was not a youngling from their group, but a much smaller child, bruised and bleeding from a cut lip, who struggled madly as the larger boys hauled her bodily toward the stall.

  “And a lot of help that is,” Punja snarled, “you can tell by looking that she hasn’t a clipped credit to pay me back.”

  “What did the child take?” Acorna interrupted.

  “Three of me best madi-fruits. Gobbled them down on the run, she did. I suppose you’ll be wanting that placed to the account of your guardian, too, will you?” the man asked Acorna with heavy sarcasm.

  “You could give us a reward for catchin’ her,” one of the boys holding the child grumbled.

  “What good’s it to me that you caught the brat? You can give her a good beatin’ if you like, teach her not to steal from respectable merchants,” Punja suggested. “That should be enough reward for you. Have a little fun before you turn her loose.”

  The boy’s heavy-browed face lit up with an expression of sickening glee, and he slammed a fist into the child’s stomach before Punja had finished speaking.

  “That’s just for starters,” he told the gasping, white-faced child. “Now you can come along wif me and me mates and see if you haven’t got something to pay us back for our effort.”

  “Scrawnier’n a bondworker,” one of his pals demurred.

  “But free,” the first boy pointed out, “or did you suddenly get rich enoug
h to patronize a bonk-shop, huh? Now me, I’m…”

  He never got a chance to finish articulating his philosophy of life. All that had delayed Acorna’s intervention was the need to tuck her flowing skirt farther out of the way. Now she executed another leap from her perfectly balanced standing position, came down with one foot on the first boy’s stomach and swung the other to crunch into his mate’s nose. Rather pleased with the results of her self-defense classes with Calum, she recovered her balance and pulled the starving child up by one wrist while the rest of the gang of boys, seeing what had happened to their biggest and strongest members, melted away into the network of dirt paths behind the main thoroughfare.

  “You,” she told the child, “had much better come with me. No one shall beat you again.”

  The child struggled feebly and tried to pull away from Acorna’s hand.

  A skimmer settled in the dusty roadway, and two uniformed Guardians emerged.

  “What’s all this?” the first one out demanded.

  A chorus of voices informed him, variously, that the girl was a techie out to make trouble on the wrong side of the river; that the child was a thief and ought to be bonded to honest labor; that the girl was a foreigner who had viciously attacked two innocent boys who just happened to be standing by the stall.

  “And who’s to pay for the damage to my stock?” wailed the stall-keeper, virtuously holding up a handful of bruised fruit which he reckoned he could blame on Acorna’s part in the brief fracas.

  “My guardian, Delszaki Li, will cover all charges,” Acorna said.

  “Aye, she keeps naming Li, as if she thought the sound of his name would carry all before!” said the stall-keeper virtuously. “Y’ask me, she ought to be confronted with Li himself. If, as is no more than I suspect, she’s lying, he’ll know how to deal with impostors. Why don’t you make her go there now?”

  “I should like nothing better,” declared Acorna, “but this little girl comes with me!”