The Unicorn Girl Read online

  “We shall even pour our own drinks,” Hafiz said, gesturing toward the pitcher. “I have seen that as a good Neo-Hadithian you follow the First Prophet’s words and abjure wine, rather than accepting the dispensations of the Second and Third Prophets. I myself usually enjoy a Kilumbemba beer with my dinner, but for tonight I will share the iced madigadi juice prepared for my guests.”

  Rafik nodded, rather sadly. Actually, as both Calum and Gill well knew, he would have liked a mug of cold Kilumbemba beer, the other specialty of that planet, to wash down the fried shellfish.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Calum muttered in his ear. “If I can wrap myself up like a white balloon to substantiate your conversion, you can drink fruit juice for one evening and like it.”

  “Your senior wife is disturbed?” Hafiz inquired. “Not another fit, I trust?”

  Rafik tried to step on Calum’s foot, but only succeeded in trampling the hem of his robe. “She is in excellent health, thank you, Uncle,” he replied, “only inclined to chatter about trifles after the manner of women.”

  “Women who are not kept veiled and secluded,” Hafiz pointed out rather acidly, “have more of a chance to develop interesting topics of conversation—oh, all right, all right! I won’t say another word against the revelations of Moulay Suheil.”

  “We are returning to the pure traditions of our original faith,” Rafik said stiffly.

  “Then let us enjoy another tradition tonight,” Hafiz said, “and drink from the same pitcher in token of perfect trust within the family.” He made a show of pouring the iced madigadi juice into each of their cups, finishing with his own and taking a deep draught from it as proof of the drink’s harmlessness. Rafik raised his own cup, but a sudden commotion outside the room surprised him into setting it down again. There was a babble of excited voices, then the high-pitched wail of a woman: an old, quavering voice.

  “Aminah!” Hafiz sighed and stood up. “Tapha’s old nurse. She treats each bit of news from the south as another installment in a vid-drama. I had best calm her. Forgive the interruption. Please, go on with your meal; I may be some time.” He strode out of the room quickly, a frown between his brows.

  Gill took a handful of the batter-fried shellfish and crunched them with enjoyment.

  “Well, he did say to go on,” he said when Rafik raised an eyebrow, “and even if the table does keep these things hot, it can’t keep them crisp indefinitely.” He took a deep breath and reached for his own cup. “Must say, I’ve never had them served quite so hot and spicy before.”

  “Any decent food tastes overspiced to you barbarians,” Rafik said. “Acorna, what are you doing?” She kept pushing and pawing at her veils until they were a tangled mess around her face.

  “Here, honey, let me fix that for you,” Gill said. “Any reason why she shouldn’t put her veils back for dinner, Rafik? It’s not as if Hafiz is gonna see anything he hasn’t seen before.”

  “Only that he may wonder why I do not permit my other wife to unveil,” Rafik said with resignation. “I suppose I shall have to explain that she is so ugly, I fear the sight would put him off his food.”

  Calum kicked him under the table.

  “That’s odd,” Gill said, feeling Acorna’s forehead.

  “Do you think she has a fever?”

  “Her skin is cool enough. But look at her horn!”

  Great drops of clear liquid were forming on the fluted sides of Acorna’s horn. She mopped at them ineffectually with the end of her veil.

  “Have a cool drink, sweetie, it’ll make you feel better,” Gill suggested, holding her cup for her.

  Acorna stared at it blankly for a moment, then took the cup from Gill and, instead of putting it to her mouth, dipped her horn into it.

  “What the deuce?”

  “She does that with the dirty bathwater, too. Acorna, sweetie-pie, do you think the juice is dirty? It’s okay, that stuff floating in it is just madigadi pulp.”

  “Is not dirty,” Acorna said firmly.

  “Well, that’s good—”

  “Is bad.” She dipped her head again, this time plunging her horn into Gill’s cup. “Now is one hundred percent good,” she informed him.

  The three men looked at one another. “He made a great show of pouring all our drinks out of the same pitcher,” Gill said.

  “Why would he want to poison us? He thinks—I mean,” Calum said, choosing his words carefully in case of unseen listeners, “we have agreed to all his wishes.”

  “Oh, it’s just a foolish fancy of the kid’s,” Rafik said easily, but he rose to his feet as he did so and offered Acorna his cup and Calum’s. “Nothing to worry about. Let’s go on with the meal!” At the same time a subtle head shake warned both the other men not to take his words literally.

  Acorna’s horn broke out in drops of sweat again as she brought her face close to Rafik’s cup. She dipped her horn into the juice for a moment, then smiled in satisfaction.

  “Ah—just a minute,” Rafik said as she moved to repeat the treatment on Calum’s cup. He put that one back on the table and offered Acorna the cup Hafiz had been drinking out of. Her horn showed no reaction.

  “How did he do it?” Gill mouthed soundlessly.

  “The drug must have been in the cups, not in the pitcher,” Rafik replied in the merest thread of a whisper. Quickly he exchanged Calum’s cup with Hafiz’s, then sat and served himself a plate of rice and pilau. “Come on, wives,” he said loudly and heartily, “let us feast and rejoice!” He piled Acorna’s plate high with fruit and greens just as Hafiz rejoined them.

  “I trust the news from the south is not bad, Uncle?” Rafik inquired.

  Hafiz’s thin lips twisted in an unpleasant grimace. “It could be worse,” he said. “It could be better. Yukata Batsu has sent back the rest of Tapha. Alive,” he added, almost as an after-thought. “Aminah cannot decide whether to bewail the loss of his ears or celebrate the return of her nursling.”

  “Felicitations on your son’s safe return,” said Gill. “And—er—I’m sorry about his ears.”

  Hafiz shrugged. “My surgeon can replace the ears. No great loss; the original ones stuck out too far anyway. As for Tapha himself…” Hafiz sighed. “No surgeon can fix what should have been between the ears. He, too, expected me to congratulate him on his return, as if he did not realize that Batsu freed him as a gesture of contempt, to show how little he fears Tapha’s attempts against him. He is as foolish as his mother was.” He twirled a ball of sticky rice on two fingers, dipped it into the pilau, and downed the combination in a single gulp. “Eat, eat, my friends. I apologize for allowing this minor contretemps to interrupt our pleasant family dinner. Do try the madigadi juice before it loses its chill; as it warms, the subtleties of the flavor are lost to the air.” He took another lengthy pull from the cup beside him.

  “Indeed,” said Rafik, following his uncle’s example, “this particular juice has some subtle, lingering aftertaste that is unfamiliar to me.”

  “Almost bitter,” Gill commented. “Good, though,” he added, quickly taking a deep drink before Hafiz could become too alarmed.

  Since none of them had any idea what drug Hafiz had put in the cups or how quickly it was supposed to act, they watched him for cues. Within fifteen minutes Hafiz had all but stopped eating, as if he had forgotten the food on his plate. His speech wandered and he began forgetting what he had said and repeating himself.

  “Ever hear th’ one about th’ two racehorses, the Sufi dervish and the jinn?” He launched into a long complicated story which Gill suspected would have been extremely obscene if Hafiz had not kept losing the thread of his own narrative.

  Rafik and Gill ignored their own food, leaned forward over the table and laughed as loudly as Hafiz did. Calum leaned back against the wall, an anonymous white bundle of veiling, and produced a rattling snore. Acorna’s eyes went from one man to the next, the pupils narrowing to slits until Gill surreptitiously squeezed her hand.

  “Don
’t worry, sweets,” he whispered under cover of Hafiz’s raucous laughter, “it’s just a game.”

  Finally Hafiz abandoned the Sufi dervish in midsentence and slumped forward into his rice. The other three waited tensely until his snores convinced them that he had lost consciousness.

  “Okay, let’s get out of here,” Gill whispered, standing and swinging Acorna to his shoulder. Calum followed suit, but Rafik bent over his uncle’s form for a moment, fumbling in his stained silk robes.

  “Come on, Rafik!”

  Finally Rafik, too, stood, showing them a holographic card that flashed a complex three-dimensional image of interlaced knots.

  “Uncle’s skimmer key and port pass,” he said happily. “Or were you planning to walk to the port?”

  Five

  Hey, Smirnoff?” Ed Minkus called to his office mate in the Kezdet Security office.

  “What?” Des Smirnoff replied without real interest, for he was scrolling through some routine ID checks as fast as he could and had to keep his eye on the screen, just in case something interesting turned up in the latest haul of dockside indigents.

  “Gotta match on an ooooold friend.”

  “Who?” Smirnoff was still not dividing his attention.

  “Sauvignon,” and he immediately had Smirnoff’s complete attention.

  “I told you then,” and Smirnoff savagely stabbed the hold key, “that perp wasn’t dead. He may have had to lie low a while…. Send the item over here.” He drummed his fingers for the few seconds it took for Ed to transfer the file to his screen. “Registered as the Uhuru now? Couldn’t change the origin, could he? So the ship’s still Kezdetian.”

  “I can’t imagine a clever perp like Sauvignon ever returning…”

  “Voluntarily, at least,” Ed interjected with a sly grin.

  “…into our own dear jurisdiction. But you…”

  “Never know, do you?” Ed had a habit of finishing Smirnoff’s sentences for him.

  “I can,” and Smirnoff’s thick fingers stabbed each key as he typed in a command, “make sure that we, and our dearest nearest neighbors in space, are aware that the Uhuru is of great interest to us here in Kezdet.”

  He gave the final number of the code sequence such an extra pound that Ed flinched. Keyboards suffered frequent malfunctions at Smirnoff’s station, to the point where both Supply and Accounting now required explanations. They always got the same one: “Get a new supplier, these boards are made of inferior materials or they’d stand up under normal usage.”

  Since most of such equipment was made in the sweat-levels (and quite possibly out of inferior grade plastics), the ones who suffered were the unfortunates who eked out a bare living anyhow. Who cared how many got fired and replaced? There were always enough eager youngsters with nimble fingers to take over.

  Having instituted a program that would apprise the office of Lieutenant Des Smirnoff the instant the beacon was scanned in any of the nearby systems which cooperated, however unwillingly, with Kezdet Guardians of the Peace (a piece of this and a piece of that was what the neighbors said), the proximity of the Uhuru would now send off bells, whistles, and sirens.

  “So the report of Sauvignon’s death is greatly exaggerated,” Des said, grinning with evil anticipation of future revenge. “How delightful.”

  “Sauvignon may be dead,” Ed suggested. “The new reg lists three names, and none of them are Sauvignon’s.”

  “Whose are they?”

  “Rafik Nadezda, Declan Giloglie, and Calum Baird,” Ed replied.

  “What?” Smirnoff erupted from his chair like a cork from a bottle of fizzy. “Say again?”

  Ed obeyed, and suddenly the names rang the same bell in his head. “Them?”

  Smirnoff punched one big fist into the palm of his other hand, jumping about the office in what had to be some sort of a victory gig, waving his arms and hollering in pure, undiluted, spiteful joy.

  “Is everything all right?” and their junior assistant, a female they had to employ to keep the Sexist Faction satisfied, though Mercy Kendoro’s role in their table of organization began and ended with taking their messages and supplying them with quik-sober. On seeing Smirnoff’s unusual antics she had hoped that one, he’d been poisoned, or two, was having a fatal heart attack or convulsion. Sometimes, not even getting out of the barrios of Kezdet made up for the humiliation she suffered at their hands.

  “I got ’em. I got all of ’em,” Smirnoff was chanting as he bounced from one large boot to the other. “Close the door!” he roared when he saw Mercy’s head peering in at them. Her reflexes were excellent and he missed her when his big boot slammed the door shut.

  “Weren’t Nadezda, Giloglie, and Baird those miners who marooned us on an asteroid before they made off with a fortune in titanium?”

  “They were, they are, and they will be ours,” Des Smirnoff said, rubbing his hands together. The expression of great gleeful anticipation intensified on his face. His thick upper lip curled: a sight that made many timorous souls tremble in fear. He was not a man to cross and he had sworn vengeance on these three by all that he held sacred. Instead of prayers, Smirnoff had a nightly litany of those who had crossed his path and on whom he was sworn to take revenge. This not only kept the names alive, but topped up his capacity for vengeance, certain in his own little mind that he would one day cross paths with every one of those in his bad books. This mining crew would pay dearly for the indignity and suffering he had endured at their hands. He was still paying off his share of the repairs to the patrol cruiser. Kezdet Guardians of the Peace were not a forgiving authority and you ponied up out of your own credits for any damage above normal wear and tear. And for rescue and salvage.

  In point of fact, he hadn’t actually paid out of his own private account, but out of the public one into which he had dribbled the credits required for the monthly payments from his little side business of protection monies. But he had other plans for that credit and meant to take it out of the miners’ hides if he ever had the chance.

  “So Sauvignon’s off the hook?”

  “Nonsense.” Des Smirnoff swiped the racks of data cubes off their rack. “They’ve got the ship, they’ve got the fines accrued against it.” The thought had him settling at his keyboard again while he accessed those fines and chuckled at the amount of interest that had accrued since Sauvignon’s disappearance.

  “You’ll own the ship, too, at that rate,” Ed said, sniffing enviously. He tried not to show it, but he did really, honestly, deeply, sincerely feel that Des kept more than his fair share of the covert rewards of their partnership. He was waiting for the day when he found some little inconsistency in Smirnoff’s duties that he could use as a handle to bargain for a larger percentage.

  “What’d I do with a crappy old tub like Sauvignon cruised? It was all but falling apart as it was. Amazing he survived. I was sure we’d penetrated the life-support system with that last bolt we fired at him.”

  “Yeah,” and Ed scratched his head, “sure looked like a direct hit, if I remember correctly.”

  “You better remember my aim is always accurate.”

  “Odd though that the ship survived, isn’t it?”

  Des Smirnoff held up one hand, his big, bloodshot brown eyes widening.

  “Wait a nano…”

  “It didn’t survive,” Ed said. “Those miners have switched beacons.”

  “Do we have their IDs?” But he didn’t wait for an answer, his big fingers slamming down the keys as he completed his own search. Then he flipped the offending keyboard up, pulling it out of the desk socket and spinning it across the room, where it crashed and split against the far wall. “We don’t. We should. They were MME, weren’t they?”

  “MME’s been absorbed by Amalgamated, I heard,” Ed replied, disguising his sigh as he opened the com unit to Mercy Kendoro. “Bring in a replacement keyboard. Now.”

  When Mercy entered, she handed the keyboard to Ed rather than approach Smirnoff, who had his hands tucke
d up under his arms and was clearly seething over whatever had caused him to break the latest keyboard.

  “Rack up those cubes, too, while you’re in here. This office must be kept neat and up to standard at all times,” Des said and smiled anew as he saw the trembling assistant bend to her task.

  Later that day, Mercy Kendoro took her midday meal break at a workers’ canteen near the docks, where the balding owner teased her affectionately about moving into the tech classes and forgetting her origins.

  “That’s right, Ghopal,” Mercy replied as always, “if I’d remembered how terrible your stew is, there’s no way I’d be eating here! What did you put in it this morning, dead rats? At least three of them, I’d guess; I’ve never seen this much meat in it before.”

  Ghopal took the teasing in good part and personally cleared away Mercy’s bowl when she had finished eating. Later, when the midday rush had petered out, he put in a call to Aaaxterminators, Inc. “We’ve found three dead rats in various spots too near the kitchens for my liking. If you’ll send out a man I’ll give him a list of the specific locations so he can find where the vermin are hiding and clear them out. And—as usual, no need to trouble the Public Health office with the matter. Eh? After all, I’m dealing with it promptly, like a good citizen.”

  Ed Minkus came across that transcript when reviewing the day’s tapes of private calls from citizens in whom Security took an interest.

  “Hey, Des,” he called, “Time to pay a little semi-official visit to Ghopal. He’s having problems with vermin again, and he’d probably be grateful not to have the matter called to the attention of Public Health. About fifteen percent grateful, I estimate.”

  “Small-time,” Des grunted. “If I catch those miners—and I will—we won’t need to bother shaking down dockside bistros any more.”