Get off the Unicorn

"Yeah, you say you like people, Nora Fenn, but I never saw anyone communicate less in my life."

"Just because I'm not always gibbering…" she'd said in self-defense.

Con had thrown back his head and howled. "The very notion of you… you… gibbering! May I be around to see the day!"

There was nothing wrong, Nora told herself stoutly, in taking pleasure in just being among people. You didn't have to participate actively…

But last night's scathing accusations rang in her ears.

"You can't be a parameter cloddie forever, Nora. You'll never really know what life is about until you start communicating and experiencing actively. And don't tell me you're in computer programming because that's your aptitude. That's your cop-out so you won't have to live and feel. If your Guidance Officer had wit one about him, he'd have phased you out of Computer Science, and shoved you into the Humanities. And opened wide holes in your father's homebrewed homilies."

"My father…"

"Your father," and Con was so incensed the cords stood out in his neck, "your father is a throwback to all the parental autocracies, the chauvinistic, narrowminded, sex-blocked, inhibiting, maladjusting, martyrizing, egotistical, possessiveness that our present system of social harmony is supposed to correct!"

"How dare you say such things!"

"Because you have! Only you're still too much under your father's domineering influence to realize how much you resent him."

"I don't resent my father. I understand his—"

"Understand?" Con threw his arms up in dramatic frustration. "Understand why he's refused to give you any decent credit allowance? By the printed circuits which feed us, every other Complex manager would do without so he could budget something for any youngster his unit can send on to Academic Advancement! And for a kid on unlimited Academic Advancement… Wake up, Nora. Your ever-loving father has never forgiven you, his daughter, much less the Educational Committee, for letting you go on to university instead of the male, his son, your brother."

"I don't need credit allowances." Nora tried to sound convincing, but she'd been hurt and confused by her father's parsimony. "I got an academic bonus of a hundred credits first term."

Con shook his finger right under her nose.

"You can fool yourself, Nora Fenn, but you, sure as zero times zero is zero, don't fool me! Your paternal parent has royally screwed you, and why you persist in trying to prove you're worth his disdainful notice, even if you are female, I don't understand. He isn't worth the effort."

Con had stepped forward then, his expression hard and angry as he grabbed her arms and gave her a good shaking. His manner was frighteningly different from the jovial, joke-cracking clown pose he usually affected.

"Abort the Computer courses, Nora. Get into Humanities. Take some Behavorial Psych. See objectively how futile it is to try and win your father over. And then grow up and live as Nora Fenn instead of George Fenn's unwanted female child."

"Thank you, Connor Clarke, for your lecture and your advice. Send me the bill! But don't try my number. I'm writing you out of my program from now on."

She had grabbed up her cloak and strode from his room, racing down the hall to the anti-grav shaft. She'd entered it fast—that's probably when she'd torn her tunic—and cried all the way down the a.g. shaft to her own level, cursing Con under her breath and desperately trying not to remember what he'd said.

But his words haunted her now as she walked into the shadow cast by the Computer Block. It was cold in the shade and Nora pulled her shabby cloak tighter around her. It had been the one piece of Complex-issue clothing she'd been able to bring with her. Not that her father had ever let his family use more than farm issue.

"No need to put credits into fancy fabrics and silly clothes you wear once a month. People should take us for what we are, not what we wear. It isn't needful for us to show our status."

"Needful," that was her father's operative word.

What was needful was procured instantly, and ordered in the best quality, regardless of the cost. What was unnecessary was given scant consideration.

It hadn't been needful for Nora to have any credit allowance from the Fenn Farm Complex. She would, George Fenn had solemnly announced, have student quarters at the University Complex, adequate food since students did not eat subsistence-level but a high-calorie diet, and sufficient clothing to cover her decently. If Nora were as good a student as the Eduucational Committee (which had passed her for Advanced Study instead of her brother, Nick) had said, then she would earn credit bonuses with those brains of hers, wouldn't she? Privately, Nora had vowed she'd earn a bundle. And she had. But now she regretted her diplomacy—no, her subservient conciliatory gesture, as Con would say—in permitting her father to select a heavy CompSci program for her first year.

"That way you'll qualify as Computer Technician Grade n by spring instead of wasting your time on unnecessary trimmings," her father had said.

What he meant, Nora knew now, was it wouldn't be needful for the Fenn complex to pay the salary of the Grade II Comptech for the spring planting.

Six months at University and Nora Fenn knew that she wouldn't be able to go back to the Farm. It wasn't simply the knowledge that her father's basic sociological orientation was limited, but the realization that she'd hated her existence there, from fattening geese to the tractor work that all the automation in the world couldn't make much less bone-jarring. The glitter of bright lights and vapid entertainments in the Metropolis didn't attract her half as much as the people: crowds, mobs, groups, the antithesis of the lonely Farm Complex with its rigid society, seasons, and the so-well-known personalities.