Summary
She was just a little girl. With a tiny horn in the center of her forehead, funny-looking feet, beautiful silver hair, and several curious powers: The ability to purify air and water, make plants grow, and heal scars and broken bones. A trio of grizzled prospectors found her drifting in an escape pod amid the asteroids, adopted her, and took her home to sizzling controversy. Officious bureaucrats wanted to put Acorna in a home and cut off her "deformity." Ambitious scientists wanted to isolate and study the "unicorn girl." Which was worse?
Acorna's rough-and-ready "uncles" weren't' about to hang around long enough to find out. They took their foundling back at knife point, airlocked out, and ran with her - all the way to the bandit planet Kezdet, where no questions are asked, and a girl might grow up free.
But Kezdet has its own dark secret. The prosperity of the planet is based on an unseen horror - armies of pale, silent children toiling in the factories and mines; unnamed, unseen, and unloved. A hideous trade in child slave labor, administered by the mystery man known as "the Piper."
The Piper has special plans for Acorna, whose shining horn promises wealth and power. But free little girls have a way of growing into freedom-loving young women. And Lukia, Lady of Light, is about to teach the Piper and his minions a much-needed lesson about honor, liberty - and the precious value of childhood.
- The Worlds of Anne McCaffrey © 2006The Official Anne McCaffrey website
Excerpt
At first Gill assumed it was just another bit of space debris, winking as it turned around its own axis and sending bright flashes of reflected light down where they were placing the cable around AS-64-B1.3. But something about it seemed wrong to him, and he raised the question when they were back inside the Khedive.
"It is too bright to have been in space very long," Rafik pointed out. His slender brown fingers danced over the console before him; he read half a dozen screens at once and translated their glowing, multicolored lines into voice commands to the external sensor system.
"What d'you mean, too bright?" Gill demanded. "Stars are bright, and most of them have been around a good while."
Rafik's black brows lifted and he nodded at Calum.
"But the sensors tell us this is metal, and too smooth," Calum said. "As usual, you're thinking with the Viking-ancestor part of what we laughingly refer to as your brain, Declan Giloglie the Third. Would it not be pitted from minor collisions if it had been in this asteroid belt more than a matter of hours? And if it has not been in this part of space for more than a few hours, where did it come from?"
"Conundrums, is it? I'll leave the solving of them to you," Gill said with good humor. "I am but a simple metallurgic engineer, a horny-handed son of the soil."
"More like a son of the asteroidal regolith," Rafik suggested. "Not that this particular asteroid offers much; we're going to have to break up the surface with the auger before there's any point in lowering the magnetic rake Ah! Got a fix on it." An oval shape, regularly indented along one edge, appeared on the central screen. "Now what can the sensors tell us about this little mystery?"
"It looks like a pea pod," Gill said.
"It does that," Calum agreed. "The question is, what sort of peas, and do we want to harvest them, or send them gently on their way? There've not been any recent diplomatic disagreements in this sector, have there?"
"None that would inspire the placing of mines," Gill said, "and that's not like any space mine I ever saw. Besides, only an idiot would send a space mine floating into an asteroid belt where there's no telling what might set it off and whose side might be worst injured."
"High intelligence," Rafik murmured, "is not inevitably an attribute of those who pursue diplomacy by other means close reading," he commanded the console. "All bandwidths well, well. Interesting."
"What?"
"Unless I'm mistaken" Rafik paused. "Names of the Three Prophets! I must be mistaken. It's not large enough and there's no scheduled traffic through this sector Calum, what do you make of these sensor readings?"
Calum leaned over the panel. His sandy lashes blinked several times, rapidly, as he absorbed and interpreted the changing colors of the display. "You're not mistaken," he said.
"Would you two kindly share the great insight?" Gill demanded.
Calum straightened and looked up at Gill. "Your peas," he said, "are alive. And given the size of the pod too small for any recycling life-support system the signal it's broadcasting can only be a distress call, though it's like no code I've ever heard before."
- Excerpt taken from chapter one of "Acorna"Copyright © 1997 by Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball
