A LITTLE STREET GIRL

1563 4D

The knock boomed at the steel door some distance off, and jolted Andrew awake. How long had he been asleep? Where was he? He stared up at the faintly-lit, roped and knotted wall decorations, so much like the clothes the children wore, the children in the street with their knives, the blood brown at the corners of their mouths, their gun-muzzle eyes. The knock boomed again, over an insistent remote thudding rhythm.

A voice. “Yes, he’s here. What do you want? No. He’s been sleeping and he needs the rest.” Engel‘s voice. Andrew remembered where he was, and raised himself on an elbow, pressing deep into the soft thick bedmat on Engel‘s floor. Engel‘s voice murmured with others. Andrew looked around. Jeddin lay on his back on a nearby bedmat, looking at him with bright sharp eyes.

“They must be looking for us,” Jeddin said. “You’ve been out for a day and a half.” He glanced around the room as if reading all of it in one sweep, maybe looking for an exit.

Andrew stood up, threw a coverall on over his liners, and got boots on, calling to Engel, “Who is it?”

Engel appeared at the door from the front of his home. “The military. Some woman with rank, and an escort. Said you sent word to come here.”

“Yeah, sorry, I should have told you. Overgroup Manager Frintar. She said she’d come.” Andrew ran a hand through his hair. Engel looked surprised — apparently he hadn’t expected the apology.

Frintar was a lean and lithe woman who moved silently, her bearing erect, her eyes deep-set and watchful. She and Andrew sat in the front room alone together, on a pair of low and rickety frame chairs, the only ones Engel had there.

Looking around with distaste at the tiny window high in the streetwall and the sparse furnishings, Frintar said, “This situation is highly unusual. You and the andro are the only ones we know who have the combination of skills and capabilities to pilot that ship. We would like you to meet with us upcity, tomorrow at midday, to discuss terms of contract as pilots for the government. We are also interested in any technological insights you can offer us.” Frintar shrugged and smiled ruefully. “And we want to know where the ship is hidden. We have hundreds of scientists begging to examine it, everything from the hull seals to that incredible drive.”

Carchesme must have been talking. Andrew said, “Jeddin should be here. You can’t treat him like an ordinary andro.”

“We aren’t. But we assume you’re speaking for him in all this, since you conducted the negotiations at the ship.”

“No. He has his own agenda. He has to speak for himself. May I call him in?”

Frintar slowly nodded, as if fighting to keep her head from signaling a negation. “I don’t like having to show the others I represent that they’re dealing with an andro on matters of human import. But bring him in if you want.”

Andrew studied her lined face and stiff dark hair. Behind the iron manner, she seemed honest, if unreceptive. “Do you know what a headsmith is?”

Frintar gave a brief nod. “That’s slang for an andro neural maintenance virus.”

“I’ve had one. It’s a rogue, loose in the City. It’s changed both humans and andros.”

Frintar‘s brows lowered and knotted. “Don’t believe every rumor you hear. If what you say is true, we’ll have to deal with those things later. In the meantime, here’s the place and time.” Frintar thrust a datacard at Andrew. “Bring him if you want to.” She stood up, turned her back on him, and walked to the street door.

Her demeanor brought a surge of anger to Andrew. As the door closed behind her, he looked at the datacard and smiled. This time, in the City‘s chosen meeting place, he held the power, and he knew what to do with it. Maybe.

Engel looked in. “She’s gone?”

“Yeah. She didn’t like my manners, I guess. I wasn’t what she’d expected.”

“She’s a power freak,” Engel said.

“Maybe not,” Andrew said. “I was direct. She’s got a lot riding on this. Maybe she’s protecting me from others. It’s hard to say.”

Engel looked his father over, and said, “You’ve changed a lot. You used to hate tough women.”

“Did I?” Andrew looked away.

“Oh, yeah. You never gave anybody room to argue with you. None of us, I mean, like us kids. Or Mother. But now—“

“Come on,” Andrew said, embarrassed, remembering. “It’s just, they’re gone except you and Janny, and I’m so afraid to lose—“

“Father. About Janny.” Engel, his face looking pained and determined, took his father by the shoulders and faced him. “This little girl is not your daughter. She’s not my sister. I remember Janny. You loved her, I know, but—“

“Don’t say this!” Andrew turned his face aside. His son’s hands gripped him, shaking a little.

“It’s true. When I found these kids they were working the street and I looked at her just the way you must have, and I said, ‘That’s Janny', and she saw me and called me ‘Daddy’ and climbed up my leg.”

“No more,” Andrew said, shaking his head, but he waited.

“And I looked, oh, morons, I looked so closely because I wanted it to be her. Even when I saw the farm, all burned with a big fence around it, and I climbed it and got in, and the corpos grabbed me, I still hoped—“

“And they wrapped you up and stuck you in a van and punched you, oh, shit, I was there.” Andrew grabbed his son and hugged him close, feeling his own tears start up, forcing the words out. “I’d been walking all day to get there. I tried to get out and stop them, but they drove away before I could do anything. I’m sorry.”

Engel still held Andrew as he said, “Arlen did all this to us. Now there’s just you and me, and you said you’d seen Mother but she died.” Engel shuddered as if stifling a sob.

“And Janny.” Andrew‘s hope faded.

“No. If you want to believe it, that’s fine. But she’s just a little street girl, out of thousands of them, with her own way of attaching to somebody and getting what she needs. But I proved she’s not Janny.”

“How? You asked her? She stuck her finger in her mouth just like Janny always did.” Andrew pinched the bridge of his running nose.

Engel said, “Janny was born with two things Mother never talked about: a pale patch of skin on the inside of her left thigh, in back, almost like andro skin. And her head had a slight crease in the back, that ran from the bump at the back of her skull up halfway to the top.”

“Of course.” Andrew remembered the crease, and the skin patch. He hadn’t wanted to try to find them on Janny in Babiar, not even later when Ezzar had washed her.

“And I didn’t want to go on, but I finally checked it out. This little girl hasn’t got either one. No patch of pale skin, and no crease. She’s just found a nice couple of guys to give her a few things now and then, when she isn’t out in the darker streets stripping bodies. She seems to like her work.” Engel shivered. “They’re so young, and they never really turn into people, not quite. And they’ve got no colls, except their own. This little Janny, or whoever she is, killed a guy with a beamer while I watched.”

Dizziness started to turn Andrew. He said, “I’ve got to sit down.” He sat, and stared off at the side wall of Engel‘s front room, discreetly bare in contrast to the inscribed and sculpted walls in the back rooms. This wall carried only a broken viewscreen, as wide and high as a full span of arms, with a huge hole in the middle showing the pale-orange painted stone surface behind. “Do you think there’s any chance we’ll find Maiji? I mean, your mother made it out of there, but not alive, like I told you before.”

Engel sat in the other chair. “I don’t know. If she survived the fire, she could be anywhere. When I went through the ruins, I couldn’t find bones or teeth or anything, so I didn’t give up hope. Even when Norwell told me, I wouldn’t believe him. Now I’m not so sure.”

Andrew remembered Janny‘s little fingers in his hair, and VeeVee and Billy T looking hopefully down at him as they’d straddled his shoulders. “You know, they ARE people,” he said slowly. “They’re as much people as you and me.”

“I’ve seen too many of them,” Engel answered wearily, “and they stay killers when they get older. They never develop a conscience. They don’t belong where people are civilized.”

“Did you develop a conscience?” Andrew swung to face his son.

“I had a good family,” Engel said.

“So did Arlen.”

“But—“

“Look, I’ve just done things that will haunt me as long as I live. It doesn’t matter what I believed, or what I was taught, or how I justified anything. It doesn’t matter how guilty I feel for killing. It’s just there. It’s a part of me as surely as Janny‘s killing is a part of her.”

Engel persisted. “But she won’t care. You do.”

“You know she doesn’t? Do you know what she dreams, or what she says to herself with her fingers when no one is nearby? Can you hear the sound of her conscience?”

“She’s a little animal that’s learned to act like a person sometimes.” Engel shrugged.

“Who isn’t?” Andrew pressed. “We’re no farther away from that than our trigger fingers and our tempers. To be human isn’t a place we are. It’s a struggle all the time.”

Engel nodded. “It would be nice to have an easier struggle sometimes.”

“Yeah. There’s a lot of people who just stop struggling and hide out. They’re all over, easing through life. And then a reloc comes, or a virus, and they’re gone like dust.”

“Everybody’s dust.”

“No! For a little time, we’re not. What do we do with that time? You know. You know what to do when you hear the sandrukha, or when Corsang Run grabs you, or when Madhvi grabs you. You grab right back.” Andrew grinned, then remembered Leil, and let his smile fade slowly. “I grabbed, and I’ll keep on. And so will Janny, and Billy T, and VeeVee, and Jeddin, and Marra and Deen. And you will. Even Raul and Norwell. Everybody who’s alive. We’re all people. And Janny is my little girl, no matter what.”

Madhvi appeared in the entrance to the front room. “I’m getting some food ready. It’s time to eat, and I’m hungry. Been talking with Jeddin. You going to come join us?”

Engel nodded and turned to his father. “We’re trying to get a life together here, the two of us. Maybe children, but I don’t know. There’s a story going around about new land offerings out south.” He put his arm around Madhvi.

Andrew smiled ruefully. “I hope you have better luck with things like that than I did.”

Engel and Madhvi left the room. Until Madhvi came and called him again to eat with them, Andrew stayed and listened to the throb and gabble beyond the street door. The high sharp voices of children danced above it all.