The Unicorn Girl Read online

  Rafik shrugged. “When the tiger executes a merger with the goat, which one walks away?”

  “Ah, it’s nothing for us to be concerned about,” Gill said. “We hadn’t enough shares to be worth the voting anyway, Calum, and besides, we were never around for their AGMs when we could vote. And it says right here that nothing is going to change in the way the company is run.”

  Rafik shrugged again. “They always say that. It’s a sure sign that heads are about to roll.”

  “Back on Base? Sure. But that won’t affect us.”

  “Not immediately, no.”

  “Oh, quit spouting doom and gloom, Rafik. Since when do you know so much more about the ways of big business than the rest of us? Like I said, we’re miners, not pixel-pushers.”

  “My uncle Hafiz,” Rafik said demurely, “is a merchant. He has explained some of these matters to me. The next announcement should follow within twenty-four to thirty-six hours Standard. That will be the company’s change of name. The restructuring and the first revised organizational chart will occur somewhat later, but still well before we reach Base—especially if you still intend mining Daffodil before our return.”

  “I’m beginning to think we should rename DF-4-H3.1 Daffy, in your honor, Rafik,” Gill said. “You can’t possibly predict all that.”

  “Wait and see,” Rafik suggested. “Or to make it more amusing, how about a small wager? I’ll give you odds of—umm—three to two that you’ll not recognize the old MME by the time we bring the Khedive in again.”

  Calum grinned. “Not very good odds, Rafik, for someone who claims to be as certain as you are of the outcome!”

  Rafik’s brown lashes swept down across his face as demurely as any dancing girl in his ancestors’ harems could have looked. “My uncle Hafiz,” he murmured, “also kept racing horses. He instructed me never to bet on longer odds than I had to.”

  “And even if they do reorganize,” Gill went on, “we’re independent contractors, not staff employees. It won’t affect us.”

  “Remembering some of your other famous last words, Gill,” Calum said unhappily, “I rather wish you hadn’t said that.”

  The Khedive stayed out much longer than their original prospecting plan filed with MME. A case of finding Daffodil nearly as lucrative as ’Azelnut and covering a wider area. Since their water remained pure and their air remarkably clear of CO2, they really were not at all pushed.

  Acorna also supplied diversion enough to keep all three men from feeling any need to seek fresher companions. Though their arguments about her upbringing slowly verged on the “what’ll we teach her today” rather than physical concerns, the debates usually occurred while she was sleeping. She did require a good deal of sleep, growing out of nap times to at least ten hours in the hammock they devised as her sleeping accommodation. Once asleep, she was impervious to noise—except for the one time a thruster misfired and set off the hooter and she was wide awake in an instant and standing by her assigned escape pod. (Rafik had put her original pod in it, “just in case” he’d said, and the others had concurred. As there were only three pods on the Khedive, and Calum was the smallest of the miners, he would share hers.) So they would discuss her lessons quite freely and sometimes at the top of their lungs.

  Such EVA work as was needed was generally accomplished when she was asleep, or so involved with her “studying” she didn’t notice that one of them was gone.

  “We’re going to have to train her out of such dependence, you know,” Rafik said one night. “I mean, when we get back to Base, we’ll each have duties that will separate us, and she’s got to learn that having just one of us around is okay, too.”

  “How do we do that?” Calum wanted to know.

  “Start doing short EVAs while she’s awake, so she sees us going and coming back. I think once she realizes that we do come back, she’ll settle down more,” Rafik said, shaking his head and casting a sorrowful glance to where she swayed slightly in her hammock. “Poor tyke. Losing her family to who knows what. Small wonder she needs to see all of us all the time.”

  They’d been giving her lessons in Basic, naming everything in the Khedive for her. At first she had reciprocated—at least they thought that was what she was doing—with sounds in her own language. But since her words sounded like nothing they’d ever heard before and their efforts to repeat them were dead failures, she soon began accepting and using their vocabulary.

  “Just as well,” said Gill.

  “A pity for her to lose her original language,” Calum said, “but she’s so young, I doubt she had that much command of it anyway.”

  “Well, she sure knew how to say…” and Gill spelled the word out rather than upset Acorna by hearing it spoken.

  “Avvi?” she said aloud in response. The look of expectancy in Acorna’s eyes as she looked toward the airlock of the Khedive nearly had the tender-hearted Gill in tears.

  “She can spell?” Rafik exclaimed, grasping the important facet of that incident. “Hey, there, Acorna baby, what does R-A-F-I-K spell?”

  Diverted, she pointed her whole hand, the digits closed as was her habit, at Rafik and said his name.

  “And G-I-L-L?”

  “Gill.” She made the odd noise through her nostrils which the men had identified as her laugh.

  “C-A-L-U-M?” demanded the last of her parent figures.

  “Calum!” Now she drummed her closed hands on the table and her feet on the floor, her expression of high happiness.

  A good bit of that day’s segment went into a spelling lesson. That evening produced the knowledge that she had assimilated the alphabet, and with only a little help from her friends, she began to print what she spelled.

  “In a ten-point type, gentlemen, if you will examine the evidence,” Calum said, holding up one of the sheets she had covered with her delicately wrought script.

  “What’s so amazing about that?” Rafik asked, turning the sheet to the other side where the printout words were also in ten point type.

  “How much has she absorbed?”

  “Damn,” Acorna said very clearly as the writing implement she was using ran dry.

  “I’d say more than enough, mates,” Gill said, “and he who uses foul language will pay one half credit to the box for every foul-mouthed syllable uttered from this point onward.” He picked up an empty disk box, started to write FOUL MOUTH on it when Acorna, reading it, repeated the legend. He erased it hastily and wrote FINE instead.

  “What is ‘fine’?” Acorna asked.

  That’s when they showed her how to access the Khedive’s reference programs. She had a bit of trouble getting her oddly shaped fingers to hit just the keys she wanted until Rafik made up a keyboard with spacings appropriate to her manual dexterity. If improving this new skill kept her occupied so that they could get on with their professional work and more beneficiated ore was sacked and stored in the drone carrier pods that festooned the exterior of the Khedive, she totally confounded them three days later.

  “Cargo pods are nearly two-thirds full. What…when they are three-thirds full?”

  “Say what?” Rafik asked, blinking at her.

  “I think she’s trying to ask what we’ll do then. We take the three-thirds full pods back to Base, get paid for them, resupply the ship, and come back for more,” Calum replied, trying to speak in a nonchalant tone.

  “But Daffodil is more than three-thirds cargo pods.”

  “Well, you know, we send the iron and nickel back by the mag drive. The ship’s own payload is merely the metals too valuable to send that way,” Calum explained, as if he really expected Acorna to understand him.

  “Platinum is val-uble.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then palladium and rhodium and ruthenium is val-uble.”

  “Are,” Calum corrected absently.

  Rafik had straightened. “Did you hear that? She knows the platinum-group metals!”

  “And why not?” Gill retorted. “Doesn’t she h
ear us talking about them all the time?”

  Acorna stamped her foot to get back their attention. “Osmium is val-uble. Iridium is val-uble. Rhenium is not val-uble.”

  “Rhenium isn’t one of the platinum group,” Calum corrected her, “but at the moment, thanks to the boom in proton accelerometers, it is very valuable indeed.”

  Acorna frowned. “Not mining rhenium.”

  “We would if there was any on Daff, I assure you, honey.”

  “Rhenium is. Deep.”

  “No, love, Daffodil’s regolith is rich in platinum-group metals, but low in iron and the minor metals, including rhenium. We could tell that from spectroscopic analysis and…um, other instruments,” said Gill, who left the technical task of deciding which asteroids were likely candidates to Calum whenever he could. “That’s why we’re miners, hon. This is our job. And we are very lucky to have found Daffodil. ’Azelnut was good, but the Daff’s been better for us.”

  “Deep!” Acorna insisted. “Use auger. Drill. Find rhenium, go back soon. Then go somewhere new?”

  “To find your folks?”

  Acorna’s eyes narrowed and she looked down an elegant but definitely equine nose at her closed hands.

  “Honey, one of the reasons we’ve stayed out so long is to make enough money to do a real good galactic search for your folks. Your Avvi. Was Avvi the only one in your ship?”

  “No. Lalli there, too.”

  “Your mother and father?” Gill asked, hoping that now her comprehension of Basic was so good, she might be able to make the leap to translating her mother tongue.

  “No, Avvi and Lalli.”

  “Nice try, Gill,” Rafik said, laying a sympathetic hand on his arm.

  “By the way, hon, three-thirds full is all full. Three-thirds make one,” Calum said, seeking to distract her from her sad contemplation of her hands. “Thirds are fractions.”

  “Fractions?” Her head came up.

  “Parts of a whole. There’re all kinds of fractions, halves and quarters and fifths and sixths and lots and lots, and when you have two halves, you have a whole. When you have four quarters, you have a whole.”

  “And five fives is a whole, too?” Her eyes were wide again as she grasped the concept. “What is the smallest? One and one?”

  “We also got us a mathematical genius,” Rafik said, throwing up his slim fingered hands in humorous awe.

  One mathematical concept led to another, and it wasn’t long before Acorna was accessing algebraic equations. Calum, muttering something about leaving no regolithic grain unturned, bullied the others into using the tether and auger to go beneath the fine, friable rubble of Daffodil’s outer layers.

  “Why not teach her something useful? Like how to watch the catalytic converter gauges and switch over at the right temps?” Rafik asked. “Then I’d get to go out with you guys on EVAs and she’d have less of this dependency thing.”

  “I think,” Calum said in awed tones, “she was born knowing more useful things than we can imagine.” He was inspecting the latest drilling samples by remote control. “Look at this analysis, will you?”

  “Rhenium and hafnium,” Rafik said slowly, bending over the screens. “High concentrations, too. If the drill keeps bringing up this quality of ore, we can make our payload and be back at Base sooner than if we keep working the surface regolith for platinum. And the load will be richer by—”

  “Forty-two point six five percent,” Calum said, blinking absently. “She said there was rhenium down deep, you know.”

  “Daffodil shows as an undifferentiated asteroid. There’ve been no atmospheric processes to move deposits. Logically, the deep rock should be the same metals, in the same concentration, as the surface regolith…just harder to get at.”

  “Logically,” Gill retorted, “looking at this analysis, it isn’t. There just may be a few things the cosmologists don’t know yet. But I’d give a pretty penny to know how you knew, Acorna acushla. I think we’d better teach her the rest of the metals, gentlemen, so she knows what to tell us about from now on. And as for dependency…” Gill snorted. “Once you made her her own keyboard, she undepended herself, or hadn’t you two noticed?”

  “Some are born to be hackers, and some ain’t,” Rafik said.

  “Well, it won’t hurt to try, now will it?” was Gill’s retort, but he was as proud of Acorna as they all were. “We’re not doing so bad as parents, are we?”

  “How mature was she born?” Calum asked, almost plaintively. “She’s only been aboard for…” He had to access the log for the date she’d been recovered. “Hey, twelve months and fifteen days!”

  “A year?” Rafik repeated astonished.

  “A year!” Gill cried. “Hell, we forgot her birthday!”

  The other two, tight-lipped with anger, pointed to the FINE jar, which hadn’t actually been fed for some time.

  Two

  Purely superficial changes,” Gill said as the Khedive arrived within visual range of the old MME Base. “You’ll not claim your winnings on the basis of a few cosmetic details, will you now, Rafik?”

  “I should be delighted,” Rafik said, “not to claim them at all.”

  No announcement of any reorganization had reached them, but the MME logo that had once decorated both sides of each docking gate had been replaced by a much larger sign reading, AMALGAMATED MANUFACTURING. Instead of Johnny Greene’s cheerful greeting, they had been read into position by something with a dry mechanical voice that refused to give its name and complained about their failure to introduce themselves with “the Amalgamated protocol,” whatever that might be.

  The docking bay itself was much the same, but immediately within the double airlock doors leading to the interior of Base they were met by the owner of the dry voice, still complaining about their failure to use the Amalgamated protocol.

  “Look, mate,” Gill said, “like the pilot here told you—” he nodded toward Calum “—we’re the Khedive, on contract to MME, and we didn’t get word of any new approach and docking protocol. If you chaps wanted us to use something new, why didn’t you send us the rules?”

  “Violation of regulations to send classified company protocols via unsecured space transmissions.”

  “The ancient Americans had a phrase for it,” Rafik said, smiling slightly. “Something about a twenty-two catch, I believe.”

  “And where’s Johnny Greene?”

  “Redundant.”

  “And just what is that supposed to mean?”

  Gill’s voice had grown loud enough to echo down the corridors. A young woman in a pale blue coverall, her fair hair drawn back into a bun, hurried forward with one hand raised.

  “Eva Glatt,” she introduced herself, holding out one small hand, “TT&A—that’s Testing, Therapy, and Adjustment Department. The consolidation of MME with Amalgamated has resulted in a number of organizational changes for efficiency, Mr.—Giloglie, is it? I’ve come to take charge of the child.”

  “She is in our charge,” Gill said.

  “Oh, but surely you won’t want to be bothered with her while you’re filling out the docking protocol forms and reregistering the Khedive as an Amalgamated ship. I’ve prepared everything, though your message did not give us much time to make ready.”

  Rafik and Calum had convinced Gill that it would be tactful to tell Base something about the enigma they were bringing back from this latest expedition, but they had all waited until they were on the way back from Daffodil, just in case Base had any ideas about issuing an immediate recall.

  “And Dr. Forelle himself wishes to inspect the pod in which she was found and your tapes of the initial contact,” Eva went on. “I’ll just have that material brought off the ship and taken to him while you’re reregistering yourselves, shall I? And you can come with me, you poor baby.” She knelt and held out her hand to Acorna, who put both hands behind her own back and stepped back a pace, narrowing her pupils to vertical slits.

  “Not,” she said with emphasis.


  “Complete sentences, Acorna acushla,” Gill said with a sigh.

  “Now, dear,” Eva Glatt said brightly, “you’ll be very bored staying here with your nice uncles while they do all that tedious paperwork. Wouldn’t you like to come along to the crèche and play some nice games?”

  Acorna glanced at Rafik. He gave a small nod and she relaxed her guarded pose slightly. “Will go,” she said. “Short!”

  “There, you see,” Eva Glatt said, straightening, “it’s just a matter of elementary psychology. I’m sure she’ll be quite docile and trainable.”

  “That woman,” said Gill as Eva led Acorna off, “is an idiot.”

  “She said something about a crèche,” said Rafik. “Acorna might enjoy being with some other children for a change. And I do have a presentiment that the next hour or so will be boring in the extreme.”

  While Gill, Rafik, and Calum worked their way through questionnaires demanding everything from grandmother’s middle name to preferences in basic food groups, Dr. Alton Forelle skimmed through the ship’s log of Acorna’s first utterances half a dozen times.

  “Again!” he snapped, and his assistant, Judit Kendoro, obediently replayed the first segments of that haunting cry.

  “Idiots,” Forelle said cheerfully. “Why couldn’t they have recorded everything she said? Why did they have to interfere by an attempt to overlay Basic Universal speech patterns? There’s not nearly enough data here to analyze.”

  “There’s enough to tell that she was just a lost baby crying for somebody she knew,” said Judit softly. She thought she might be reduced to tears herself if she had to listen to that wail of “Avvi, avvi!” any longer.

  Forelle shut off the player. “You’re anthropomorphizing, Judit,” he said. “How can we presume to interpret an alien speech merely from inflection and situation? We shall have to make a thorough syntactic and semantic analysis before any conclusions at all are valid.”

  “And just how are we going to do that,” Judit said, “when she’s been with these people for over a year, exposed to Basic Universal and forgetting her own speech patterns?”