The Unicorn Girl

by Anne McCaffrey

  Young men, Brantley thought, were even worse than women. All they thought about was bedrooms. Too bad that middle-aged miner, Gill something, hadn’t stayed to inspect the base living quarters. He had looked like a sensible man.

  “Privacy is necessarily a low priority in this phase of the project,” he said. “Later on, when the miners start excavating below the regolith, the tunnels should provide enough living space to satisfy everyone’s needs. In fact, it will be quite luxurious. With solar power from the hyper-mirrors that we’re now constructing, we will have abundant energy. And by incorporating Mr. Nadezda’s suggestion of capturing a cometary asteroid for its ice core, we will be able to maintain a large base of water which can be passed through a swimming pool, a series of decorative ponds, and the hydroponics facility before it is purified for reuse.”

  “Excellent,” Acorna said. “You’re quite right, privacy isn’t important now. We need to provide a safe habitat for as many children as possible. We can wait as long as necessary for the luxuries.”

  Pal sighed. “I’m willing to wait as long as I have to,” he said.

  Acorna, of course, didn’t notice his double meaning. At the moment, she was so entranced with the vision of refuge for Kezdet’s children that he wasn’t sure she had even noticed his presence. Well, he could only keep trying…and waiting.

  “Perhaps you’d like to view the hydroponics section,” Brantley suggested, trying to regain the attention of his wandering audience. “Maintaining an even ecological balance is, of course, the other limiting factor in our expansion, as well as the need for shielded quarters. We could import food, but in the long run it’s better to grow it here; if enough plants are grown to provide food, they will automatically meet the oxygen demands of the people. That means approximately three hundred square meters of growing area per person, and a photosynthesis energy requirement of thirty kilowatts per person. If we increase the demand for oxygen faster than we build up the ’ponics, the whole ecosystem will go out of balance and we’ll have serious problems. Same thing if we expand the growing area significantly beyond the needs of present personnel. Balance is the key to success in any closed ecological system,” he said earnestly.

  “Mmm,” said Acorna as they ducked through the low tunnel to reach the hydroponics area. No space wasted here! She and Pal had to crouch to make it through; it was a relief to stand up in the spacious dome allocated to hydroponics, with its moist atmosphere and reflected solar light. She sniffed the air. “You have a little problem with excess nitrogen.”

  “Why, yes,” Brantley said, surprised. How had the girl managed to read the gauges from all the way across the dome? “We’re increasing the number of soybean tanks; they’re our principal nitrogen-fixing legumes. Later we’ll add peanuts, too, for a more varied diet.”

  “Good. That should take care of it. It’s a little much for me to manage on my own,” Acorna said.

  Brantley shook his head. “On her own”? Something about this conversation…These people seemed to be speaking Basic, but some of the things they said made no sense at all.

  While he was trying to regain his momentum, Acorna plucked a leaf of chard from the nearest tank and chewed it daintily, a thoughtful expression on her face.

  “Needs potassium,” she said. “Better check your mix.”

  “I’d do it if I were you,” Pal said cheerfully at the blank look on Brantley’s face. “She has great intuition about these particular things…no intuition whatever about some others, though, so it balances out.”

  “What do you mean, no intuition?” Acorna demanded

  Great. She might be annoyed with him, but at least it was attention. Pal grinned.

  “Don’t you ever think about the future?”

  Brantley Geram sidled off to activate the water testers. It would take a few minutes to verify that the girl had been talking off the top of her head when she claimed the ’ponics tanks were low on potassium, but the satisfaction would be worth it. He knew this system; he’d built it, he maintained it. No pretty girl could do a better job than his AI-driven automatic ingredient-balancing system!

  “Of course I think about the future,” Acorna snapped at Pal. “That’s practically all I think about—how many children can we house up here, and how soon we can start bringing them up.”

  “I meant your personal future,” Pal said patiently.

  “Calum is working on that.”

  “Finding your home? Yes, but that’s not all there is.”

  Acorna’s pupils narrowed to vertical slits. “Without other people like me,” she said, “I have no personal future.”

  “That,” said Pal, “is what I mean about your impaired intuition, Acorna. There are other people like you right here and you never even noticed. Don’t we want the same things? Don’t we care about the same things? Do I have to grow white fur on my legs before you’ll notice me? Or is all your love reserved for small, helpless people? Maybe I should break my leg. Would you notice me, then?”

  “I would not recommend that,” Acorna said. “I do not know if I can heal broken bones.” They had already discovered some limitations to her healing power, Delszaki Li’s nerve paralysis was too far advanced for her to do more than relieve some of his minor symptoms.

  Pal threw up his hands. “You’re impossible! You’re deliberately missing the point!”

  Acorna took his hand. “Had it occurred to you,” she said softly, “that maybe this particular point had better be missed?”

  “No, it hadn’t, and I don’t see why,” Pal said.

  Acorna took a deep breath.

  “Pal. We don’t know anything at all about my genus. Your people take twenty years to reach physical maturity; I’ve done it in four. For all we know, I could be old in another four years.”

  “I don’t care,” Pal interrupted her. “And even if it were so, is that any reason for not living now?”

  “We don’t even know if our species are interfertile.”

  “I’d be willing to run some tests. We wouldn’t even need a laboratory—” Pal smiled “—and I’d be happy to repeat the experiment over and over.”

  “Don’t you want children?”

  “Dear lady of my heart,” Pal said, “we’re going to have children. Several hundred of them, for starters!”

  As he checked the results of the water test with unbelieving eyes, Brantley Geram heard them laughing and thought they must have been running their own tests on the tank mix. Okay, so the girl had been right: potassium levels were down. A lucky guess, that was all. A lucky guess.

  Ed Minkus took the call which came into the Guardians of the Peace offices. When he realized the origin of the call, he covered the mouthpiece and hissed across the room at Des Smirnoff.

  “We’ve got the inspector on our neck. Over that dock shooting. The grieving parent is on his way here and we have to prove it wasn’t our negligence that caused his death.”

  “Negligence? Negligence?” Des said, blustering because any call from the inspector was startling—and dangerous. One day the man was going to figure out just how little he knew about this department. When he started taking an interest in things, there would be an awful lot of “things” that would need to be rapidly “lost.”

  “Yes, sir, we certainly will, sir. All the files ready and the tri-d documentation of the…ah…regrettable incident,” Des was saying, almost falling into the phone to project earnest, and innocent, sincerity. “Yes, yes. I got the name: Hafiz Harakamian.” He put the unit down as if it carried skin-eating plague.

  “Harakamian the father is coming here?” From his surfing of the trade nets the name was instantly familiar to Smirnoff, and suddenly he realized who the man known as “Farkas Hamisen,” with his connection to Rafik Nadezda, must really have been. The planet seemed to grow aliases the way some people grew…ears. “Did we save the files? I thought we gave the stuff to Nadezda?”

  “He got copies, but our files sure show the tungsten bomb, and that’ll save our li
ver and lights.”

  Smirnoff glowered at his subordinate. “You hope!”

  Then the door to their office swung open and in came their new clerk, Cowdy, a very shapely young woman, herded inside, back first, by the prodding finger of the man who was barging in without proper introduction.

  “How many times must I tell—” Smirnoff switched gears the moment he saw their visitor, who was unctuously backing Cowdy into the room. “Oh, sir, we didn’t expect you so quickly,” and he rose, as gracious as if he had never started to ream his underling our of her tights. “May I, and my partner, express our deep sympathy and regret for the unfortunate way in which your son met his end?”

  “I want to see the records,” Hafiz Harakamian said in an absolutely expressionless voice, taking a seat at the vid-screen and looking from it to Smirnoff expectantly.

  Minkus nearly fell over his own feet and Smirnoff’s to key up the necessary file. And there it was: the perp’s unswerving progress toward a certain ship, the scanners’ discovery of the tungsten bomb, their race to intercept him, and then their neat skewering of him with stunner shots. Then the all-important close-up of Des defusing the tungsten bomb.

  “He couldn’t have been that stupid,” Hafiz was heard to mutter, at which point both Minkus and Smirnoff began to relax.

  “You see, Honorable Harakamian, how little option there was! For that device to have been planted…” Smirnoff shrugged eloquently.

  “Yes, I see.” He rose from the desk and turned with a very cold and distant expression to face them. “I have come to collect his remains.”

  “There were none. He was cremated,” Ed blurted out.

  “Cremated? You donkey! You horse’s ass, you camel’s slime spit…”

  “Rafik said that was the way—”

  “Rafik?” Hafiz lowered the arm with which he was dramatically gesturing. “Rafik here?” Relief flooded his features. “Then it was done as the Prophets have ordained?”

  “Of course. How could you doubt our efficiency in such a detail?” Smirnoff said. “And, of course, we had Nadezda to direct the ceremonies. But, he is on his way to you. He felt it only necessary.”

  Hafiz’s expression altered and he regarded Smirnoff as one would camel’s green cud on formal attire. “So the bomb was meant for my nephew!”

  “It was?” Ed Minkus looked innocently at the Honorable Harakamian.

  “There was bad blood between them, that is true,” Harakamian said, dropping his head as if in deep sorrow. Then, tilting his head a trifle, he asked, “I don’t suppose you would know where the ward of my nephew would be? On the ship with him, returning my son’s ceremonially blessed ashes?”

  “No, he went by himself. The others are still at Mr. Li’s,” Ed replied, and managed a sickly grin as Smirnoff’s expression told him he should probably have reserved that information for a price.

  “Not Mr. Delszaki Li?” Hafiz exclaimed.

  “The very man,” Smirnoff replied.

  “Thank you. And good day,” Hafiz said, and made as speedy a departure as his arrival.

  “You stupid twit! You ninny-hammered log-head! You anvil-pated numskull. Have you any idea how much that information would have meant in good House Harakamian credits? And you gave it to him?”

  Ed Minkus drooped. It would take him a long time to get over that.

  It did not, however, take Hafiz Harakamian very long to reach the house of Mr. Delszaki Li. And there he sat, observing who came and went. When the skimmer pilot seemed restless, Hafiz reminded him that he had agreed to the hire of his vehicle and if he, Hafiz, wished to spend all day across from the house of Mr. Li, the meter was ticking and what difference did it make to what the vehicle did with its time?

  “Who was you looking to find?” the driver asked. “Lotsa people go in and out of that house.”

  “Well, why not?” Hafiz said to himself. “Would you have noticed a female with silver hair and…”

  The driver swung to face his client, his eyes wide with surprise. “How wouldja know anything about the Lady of the Lights? I only picked you up at the spaceport.”

  “Lady of the Lights? My sweet little Acorna has achieved the distinction of a title?” Hafiz said.

  “You better believe it. Cured my sister of a birthmark which uglified her to the point no decent man would look at one so cursed. And, without the stain, she’s not that bad lookin’.” The transformation seemed to have surprised the driver.

  Hafiz sighed. He had thought it might be easy to smuggle her back to his ship and away. But if she had achieved this sort of adoring notoriety, the odds had turned astronomical. The Didi had suggested that the girl had acquired unusual protectors.

  “Anyway,” the driver went on, all affability now, “she ain’t here. She and the big red-beard and the littler guy went off to Maganos two days ago. To see the moon installation. But they’re goin’ to have trouble with that,” he added, frowning.

  “Oh?” Hafiz said encouragingly.

  “Yeah, only they haven’t figgered it out yet. If I’d of been the one to take them to the spaceport, instead of a House Li pilot, I’d of told them a thing or two.” He laid an oily, broken-nailed finger along the side of his nose and winked at Hafiz. “You wanna know anything around here, you ask drivers. They hear a lot even if they do sit up front, pretending they’re deef.”

  “Do tell,” Hafiz said, making a paper plane out of a large denomination credit note which, with a practiced flick of his wrist, lofted over the partition, where it flew straight into the driver’s quick hand.

  “That I can, because we’re all wantin’ the Lady Epona to get the better of the Child Bonders and clean up Kezdet’s reputation. Why, just the other day, there was some kinda fanatic trying to blow up the docks with a bomb!”

  “Really! Is there some place nearby where a man like yourself and I might have a quiet meal and discreet conversation?”

  The driver revved the engine of the skimmer in answer. “Know the very place!”

  Judit listened politely, Gill with growing enthusiasm, to the mining subcontractor’s description of the simple three-drum drag scraper which was already in operation as they tested feasibility of Dehoney’s first-stage designs.

  “This is one of DPW’s stated objections to the Maganos proposal,” Judit told Gill and the sub-contractor. “They say the drag scraper is an out-dated twentieth-century technology.”

  Provola Quero, the subcontractor, sneered. “They should talk! Kezdet’s mines aren’t just outdated, they’re medieval! Besides, haven’t they ever heard of the saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’?” She jammed both hands deep into the pockets of her coveralls and paced to the next viewing window, talking nonstop. “The scraper is outdated for planetary use; it’s inefficient and inflexible. And it’s not worth setting up for quick in-and-out asteroid jobs. But as a starter system for Maganos, it is ideal. It’s simple, rugged, and required very low mass to be lifted up here. When we scale up, of course, we’ll replace this with more efficient, high-volume methods…using equipment fabricated right here on Maganos, in the pressurized repair shop we have already set up to deal with scraper repairs and working with the high-purity structural metals we reduce from the first batches of lunar regolith. Dehoney planned this operation to bootstrap itself from the git-go. He always said that the whole point of lunar industrialization was to do what you couldn’t do dirtside, not to throw away credits lifting machinery designed for gravity and atmosphere into orbit and then fixing the inevitable problems.”

  Gill’s eyes lit up. “You knew Dehoney personally?”

  “Studied with him for five years,” Provola said, running a hand through her yellow crewcut. “Helped assemble the designs for his prize-winning solar greenhouse habitat.” She tapped the stud in her nose, which Gill now recognized as a miniature version of the space-station icon that was the famed Andromeda Prize, worked in black enamel and diamonds. “I plan to be the next Andromeda prizewinner,” she added, “and Magano
s is going to do it. Just tell me what you need to make DPW happy, and I’ll bury them in documentation proving the worth of Dehoney’s plans…and my implementation.”

  She and Gill moved happily into a discussion of duty cycles, component replacement, and modular design, while Judit stared out the viewport at the monotonous drag, scrape, lift of the cable-driven machinery. She didn’t need to follow the engineering discussion in detail to be reassured that both Gill and Provola knew what they were talking about; years of working with Amalgamated had given her a sixth sense for which engineers knew their field and which ones were shooting out clouds of technical terminology to disguise their incompetence and laziness. Gill and Provola Quero were both in the first class. If they were satisfied that this three-drum whatsit was the best way to initiate lunar mining on Maganos, she had no doubt they were right.

  What she did doubt—very seriously—was the usefulness of any engineering argument to convince Tumim Viggers of the Public Works Department. Accustomed to reading nuances of speech and slight gestures of body language in order to survive with Amalgamated, Judit had picked up far more from that brief, inconclusive meeting than Viggers had actually said. The man wasn’t really concerned about the technical specifications for Maganos; he’d thrown out those objections almost casually, as if he were only playing for time. More disturbing, he had evinced no interest in Delszaki Li’s hinted bribes either. When a Kezdet bureaucrat didn’t take a bribe, you knew you were in real trouble.

  She tried listening more carefully to the technical argument, to take her mind off what she suspected were their more dangerous political problems. Gill was querying the need for the large-scale pressurized repair shop. It had been relatively low on Dehoney’s original list of priorities; why had Provola chosen to make it the first major construction?

  “Because we need it now, and we’re going to need it more every day!” Provola tugged at the one long braid dangling at the side of her short, bristly haircut. “Sure, some of this work can be done suited and on the surface, but why should we? Give me one good reason for rewinding an electric motor in a vacuum! You’ve worked asteroids; you should know that dust is the worst problem of low-g, low-atmosphere environments.” Even you, her contemptuous tone implied.