The Unicorn Girl Read online

  She looked frightened, the pupils in her silvery eyes slitted to nothing and her little body rigid. She babbled something incomprehensible to them.

  “No, sweetie pie, no,” Gill said, holding up a warning finger to her. “Understand me? Don’t touch.” And he reached out, almost touching the panel and pulling his hand back, miming hurt and putting his fingers into his mouth, then blowing on them.

  The slits in her eyes widened and she said something with a questioning inflection.

  “No!” Gill repeated, and she nodded, putting both hands behind her back.

  “Ah, it’s a grand intelligent wee bairn, so she is,” Calum said approvingly, smiling as he stroked her feathery-soft hair.

  “Should we show her the head, d’you suppose?” Rafik asked, regarding her nether regions, which were covered with a light fur.

  “She doesn’t have the equipment to use our head,” Gill said, “unless she’s a he and he’s hiding what he uses.” Gill began fingering his beard, which meant he was thinking. “She eats greens like a grazing animal….”

  “She’s not an animal!” Calum was outraged by the suggestion.

  “But she does eat greens. Maybe we should show her the ’ponics section. We’ve got that bed we use for the radishes…”

  “And you just gave her the last of the radishes….” Rafik’s tone was semi-accusatory.

  “She’s not feline or canine,” Gill went on. “In fact, sweet-looking kid as she is there’s something almost…equine about her.”

  Rafik and Calum hotly contested that category while she became quite restless, looking all around her.

  “Looks to me that she’s as close to crossing her legs as a young thing can get,” Gill went on. “We gotta try dirt.”

  They did and she bent forward slightly and relieved herself, neatly shifting loose dirt over the spot with her odd feet. Then she looked around at all the green and growing things.

  “Maybe we should have brought the dirt to her,” Gill said.

  “Let’s get her out of here then,” Rafik said. “We’ve fed and drained her and maybe she’ll go to sleep so we can all get back to the work we should be doing.”

  Indeed, she was quite content to be led back to the open pod and crawled up into it, curling herself up and closing her eyes. Her breathing slowed to a sleeping rhythm. And they tiptoed back to their workstations.

  The debate about her future disposition, however, went on through an afternoon of sporadic work, intermittently adjusting the great tethering cable around the body of the asteroid and placing the augering tool in a new location. AS-64-B1.3 might be rich in platinum-group metals, but it was making them pay for its riches with a higher crushing coefficient than they’d anticipated. The afternoon was punctuated by one or another miner taking his turn to suit up for EVA in order to search out a slightly better location for the auger, to replace a drill bit, or to clear the dust that clogged even the best-sealed tool from time to time.

  “Let’s call this asteroid Ass,” Calum suggested after one such trip.

  “Please, Calum,” Gill reproved him. “Not in front of the infant!”

  “Very well then, you name it.”

  They were in the habit of giving temporary names to each asteroid they mined, something a little more personal and memorable than the numbers assigned by Survey—if any such numbers were assigned. Many of their targets were tiny chondrites only a few meters across, too insignificant to have been located and named in any flyby mission, but easy enough for the Khedive to ingest, crush, and process. But AS-64-B1.3 was a large asteroid, almost too large for their longest tether to hold, and in such cases they liked to pick a name that used the initial letters of the Survey designation.

  “Hazelnut,” Gill threw out. Their unexpected guest was awake again and he was feeding her another leaf of chard with carrots for afters.

  “Wrong initial letters.”

  “We’ll be Cockney about it. ’Azelnut. And you can allow me a ze for an ess, can’t you?”

  “If there were any point to it. Why are you so set on Hazelnut?”

  “Because she’s a hard nut to crack!” Gill cackled and Calum smiled rather sourly. The smallest of the three men, he was the only one who could get inside the workings of the drill while wearing full EVA gear, and the dust of AS-64-B1.3 had sent him outside on this shift rather too often for him to find much amusement in it.

  “I like that,” Rafik said. “’Azelnut she is. And while you’re enjoying your way with words, Gill, what shall we name this little one? We can’t just keep calling her ‘the child.’”

  “Not our problem,” Calum said. “We’ll be turning her over to Base soon enough, won’t we?”

  He looked at the suddenly stony faces of his colleagues. “Well, we can hardly keep her here. What will we do with a kid on a mining ship?”

  “Have you considered,” Rafik said gently, “the probable cost of abandoning operations on ’Azelnut and returning to Base at high delta-V?”

  “At the moment,” Calum snapped, “I should be only too happy to leave ’Azelnut for some other fool to crack.”

  “And to bring back the Khedive with less than half a payload?”

  Calum’s pale lashes flickered as he calculated what they would make—or lose—on the trip in that event. Then he shrugged in resignation. “All right. We’re stuck with her until we make our payload. Just don’t assume that because I’m smaller than you, you Viking giant, that I’m naturally suited to play nanny.”

  “Ah, now,” said Gill with great good humor, “the creature’s walking and toilet trained already, and she’ll soon pick up our language—children learn easily. How much trouble can one toddler be?”

  “Add that to your list of famous last words, will ya?” Calum remarked at his most caustic when they found the youngling had uprooted a good half of the ’ponics vegetation, including the all-important squashes and rhubarb, whose large leaves provided much of the air purification.

  Rafik ran tests to see how much damage had actually been done to air quality. She’d gone to sleep again and had awakened so quietly that none of them had been aware of her movement until she wandered back in, flourishing cabbage leaves. Calum and Gill replanted, watered, and tied up the pulled plants in an effort to save as many as possible. The infant had evidently sampled everything, pulling up those she particularly liked instead of leaving her mouth-sized bite in leaf or stalk: she had eaten all the half-ripe legume pods, staples of Rafik’s preferred diet. These subsequently caused a diarrhea which upset her almost more than it upset them. They spent a good hour arguing over a dose sufficient to bind her back to normal. Body weight was the critical factor and Rafik used the mineral scales to weigh her and then the powder. She spat out the first dose. And the second, all over Gill. The third dose they got down her by covering her rather prominent nostrils so that she had to open her mouth to breathe—and thus swallow the medication. Once again, she didn’t cry, but her silverish eyes reproached them far more effectively than tears could.

  “We can’t have her doing this again,” Calum told Gill when they had finished replanting the garden. Then Rafik came over, showing them the readout on the atmosphere gauge.

  “It should be down, but it’s up,” he said, scratching his head and then tapping the gauge to see if the needle moved. “Not so much as a stink of excess CO2 in our air and we were about due for a good backwash.”

  “I remember me mum putting a cage around me,” Gill said, “when I would get into her garden.”

  They made one out of netting in a corner of the Khedive’s dayroom, but she was out of that as soon as they turned their backs on her. So they netted the ’ponics instead.

  They tried to find toys to amuse her with, but pots and pot lids to bang together and an array of boxes to nest and bright colored cups and bowls did not divert her long. She had to be attached to someone, somehow, which generally made doing their separate tasks difficult, if not impossible.

  “Dependence transfere
nce,” Rafik suggested pompously.

  “This is not in my job description,” Gill said in a soft voice when she had finally fallen asleep, small arms limp around his neck. Rafik and Calum helped to remove her as gently as possible.

  They all held their breaths as they managed to lay her in the open pod, which remained her nocturnal cradle.

  “And that’s another thing,” Gill said, still whispering, “she’s growing by the hour. She’s not going to fit in that much longer. What the hell species is she?”

  “Born more mature than human babies are,” Rafik said. “But I can’t find out a damned thing in the Concordance or the Encyclo, not even in the alien or the vet entries.”

  “Look, guys, I know we’ll waste time and fuel, and we haven’t got enough of a payload to resupply if we go back to Base, but do we have the right to keep her out here with us when someone might be looking for her? And Base might be able to take care of her better?”

  Rafik sighed and Calum looked away from Gill, everywhere else but at the sleeping youngling.

  “First,” Rafik said, since he usually did this sort of logical setting out of facts, “if anybody’s looking for her, they’d be looking in this sector of space, not at Base. Second, since we’ve agreed she is of an unknown alien species, what possible expertise can Base supply? There aren’t any books on how to look after her, and we’re the only ones with hands-on experience. And finally, we don’t have enough of a payload to refuel. We do have what looks like a real find here, and I’m not about to let any hijackers take it away from us. We did catch that ion trail last week, and it could very well be Amalgamated spies, just checking up on us.” Gill growled and Calum sniffed his poor opinion of the competition. “Well, we’ll just have to include her in the duty roster. An hour on, two hours off. That gives us two crew working…”

  “And one going off his nut…” Gill said, and then volunteered to take the first duty.

  “Ahahaha,” Rafik waggled a slim finger at his crewmate, “we all work while she sleeps.”

  Somehow or other the scheme worked a lot better than any of them had any reason to expect. In the first place, she learned to talk, which kept her, and her current minder, occupied. She learned also to respect “no” and brighten at “yes” and, when she was bored with sitting still, would “yes” and “no” every object in the dayroom. She never again touched a “no.” The third day, it was Rafik who brought out the markers and “dead” computer printouts. He showed her how to hold the implement and, while she could not manage her digits as he did, she was very shortly drawing lines and squiggles and looking for approval at each new design.

  “You know,” said Calum, when called upon to admire her handiwork, “looks a lot like the stuff on her egg. How mature was she born, d’you think?”

  That sent all three comparing her efforts with the egg inscription, but they finally decided that it was pure chance and how would a youngling know script at such an early age. So they taught her to print in Basic, using the now-standard figures. She outdid them shortly by repeating the computer printout programming language.

  “Well, she prints what she sees a lot of.”

  The big discovery, and the treat could take up to an hour, was bathing her.

  “You gotta bathe all kids regularly. Hygiene,” Rafik said, pausing to grin at her as she splashed the water in the big galley sink. She still fit in it at that point. “I know that much.”

  “Yeah? With water on board for three and she makes four and drinks a lot, we’ll be in deep kimchee on water quality soon,” Gill said sourly.

  “All sink water’s recycled,” Calum reminded them just as the youngling dipped her face in the bathwater and blew bubbles. And then drank the bubbles. “No, sweetie, don’t drink the bathwater. Dirty.”

  “Actually it isn’t,” Rafik remarked, looking at the clear liquid in which their charge sat.

  “Has to be. I soaped her good.” Calum peered in and the metal bottom was clearly visible. “That’s impossible. There should be lather and she’d got her kneecaps dirty crawling on the floor and she got her fingers messed up drawing before that. They’re all clean now, too.”

  “Just a jiff,” Rafik said, and went off for one of his many diagnostic tools. He inserted it in the bathwater and gawked at the reading. “This stuff is one hundred percent pure unadulterated H2O. In fact it’s a lot purer than what I used to make coffee this morning.”

  “But you saw me soap her,” Calum said in a defensive tone. “I washed her because she was dirty.”

  “Which neither she nor the water is now.” Rafik immersed the diagnostic tool again. “I dunno.”

  Calum got a crafty expression on his face. “Done a reading on our air lately?”

  Rafik grimaced. “In fact I did, like I’m supposed to this time of day.”

  “Well?” Gill’s voice rose in a prompt when Rafik delayed an answer while scratching his head.

  “Not a sign of excess carbon dioxide, and with four of us breathing air, there should be some traces of it by now. Especially as we don’t have quite as many broad-leafed plants in ’ponics because she,” he pointed at her, “likes them better than anything else.”

  The three men regarded their small charge, who was bubbling her crystal clear bathwater, greatly enjoying this innocent occupation.

  “Then there’s that sort of horn thing in the middle of her forehead,” Gill remarked. “Unicorns were supposed to purify water.”

  “Water maybe,” Calum agreed as he had been brought up with some of the same fairy tales as Gill, “but air?”

  “Wa-ter?” the youngling said, dropping her jaw in what they now recognized as her smile. “Air?” she added, though it came out in two syllables, “ayir.”

  “That’s right, baby, water and air. The two things both our species can’t live without,” Rafik said, sighing at the puzzle of her.

  “Let’s call her Una,” Gill suggested suddenly into the silence.

  “I don’t like it,” Rafik said, shaking his head. “We’re in the As, you know, not the Us.”

  “Acorna?” Calum. “Sure beats ‘baby’ and ‘youngling’ and ‘sweetums.’” He glanced sideways at Gill, whom he had overheard addressing his charge with what Calum thought a nauseating euphemism.

  “Acorna?” Rafik considered. “Better than Una.” He picked up a cup, dipped it in the clear bathwater, and as he made to pour it over her head, Gill grabbed it out of his hand.

  “You ain’t even Christian,” he said—and, pouring the water over her head, “I dub thee Acorna.”

  “No, no, you twit,” Calum said, taking the cup from his hand and dipping it in. “I baptize thee Acorna. I’ll stand as godfather.”

  “You will not. I will.”

  “Where does that leave me?” Rafik demanded. Acorna stood up in the sink, and only his quick movement kept her from falling out of the improvised bath.

  “Holding the baby,” Gill and Calum said in unison. Calum handed him the towel.

  They had learned to dry off as much moisture as possible because, once set on her feet again, Acorna tended to shake herself and there was too much equipment about that did not need daily sprinklings.

  The Khedive had cracked and digested ’Azelnut and was on her way to DF-4-H3.1, a small LL-chondrite that should have a high enough concentration of valuable metals to make up the payload for this trip, when the first announcements from Base reached them.

  “Summary of proposed adjustments to shareholder status…” Gill scowled at the reader. “Why are they sending us this garbage? We’re miners, not pixel-pushers or bean-counters!”

  “Let me see that.” Rafik snapped his fingers at the console. “Hardcopy, triple!”

  “Wasting paper,” Calum commented.

  “Acorna needs more scratch paper to mark on,” Gill said.

  “And if this is what I think it is,” Rafik added, “you two will be wanting to read it for yourselves, not to wait for me.”

  “Whatever it is,”
Gill said in disgust after peering at his printout, “it’s wrapped up in enough bureaucratic double-talk that we’ll have to wait for you to interpret anyway, Rafik.”

  “Not all of it,” Calum said slowly. “This paragraph—” he tapped his own hardcopy—“says that our shares in Mercantile Mining and Exploration are now worth approximately three times what they were when we left Base.”

  Gill whistled. “For news like that, they can wrap it up any way they please!”

  “And this paragraph,” Calum went on, “says that they have become nonvoting shares.”

  “Is that legal? Oh, well, for three times the money, who cares? We didn’t have enough shares between us to make a difference anyway.”

  Calum was blinking furiously as he translated the announcement into numbers without bothering to consult the voice calculator. “The net worth of our shares has increased by a factor of three-point-two-five, actually. But if we had ever voted our shares in a block, our interest in MME would have been sufficient to influence a close-run policy decision.”

  “I believe,” Rafik said in an oddly strangled voice, “that if you two will stop jingling your pocket change and look at the last page, you will observe the important part of this announcement. It seems MME has been acquired. By Amalgamated.”

  Gill flipped through his hardcopy. “Says here it’s a merger, not an acquisition.”