ANDREW AND HIS FATHER
A scrawny little boy of seven raced down the City understreet in a panic. His skin flashed bronze in the overhead lamps. His huge dark eyes, glancing, sucked in everything, He dodged, weaving past a vendor jangling with jewelry, and collided with a bioandroid servant carrying a bulky sack of laundry. The sack flew open, clothes blew everywhere, the boy staggered, and the andro caught him just before his head hit the stone wall of the street. “Careful, little one!”
“Get away!” the boy cried. He’d fallen into a nest of big spiders, crushing the eggs, scrambling out to escape over the door again as the spiders came after him.
The bioandroid servants, or andros, of the City people, protected human children, but this child raced away, swiping frantically at the gluey mess on his ragged shirt. He’d crawled into a utility closet over its broken door, looking for anything he could swap or sell to passers-by.
His name was Andrew. He hated andros. His own skin was light enough to earn him “Andro!”, “Servant!”, and “Slave!” from other kids his age, taunting him with his name, and he kept to himself as much as he could.
Evening had come to Rumchi Zone in the bedrock City understreets. Andrew’s lessons had been canceled for the day, and he’d stayed away from the one place he feared the most: home. His father was asleep at this hour, late in the subterranean hours, and waking his father up after a long shift of hard labor was never a good idea.
Andrew keyed open the steel door, its Darko Hejj Coll family emblem scratched and peeled. He listened past the street noise to hear anything inside. Nothing – his brothers were quiet. He tiptoed in and closed the door as silently as he could. He joined Martin, Raul, and Norwell in their bed cubby, closing its door softly behind him.
Busied with their datasheets, they ignored him. He stripped off his soiled top, took it to the bathroom, washed it, wrung it out, and hung it on a wall hook, hoping it would dry a little before his father saw it. It was the only untorn top he had, a black weave with a small orange Darko symbol on its left shoulder. He paused, then put it on still wet.
He went out to the main room to turn on the sensi screen, but a pounding on the home door made him race to ask, “Who is it?” before his father woke up. The pounding stopped, and a creaking began; the door’s frame bent inward. Andrew backed away and called, “Father!”
Wranmar Luce, half a head taller than most men, hard as a tree trunk everywhere except in his belly, stormed out of his back hallway brandishing a steel shaft as long as his arm. He snatched the door open so fast that three attackers tumbled in and almost knocked him down. They carried long knives.
Wranmar kicked the first one, a woman with a furrowed skull, in the face; her knife flew up and hit the stone ceiling with a clang. He sidestepped, slammed the shaft into the shoulder of a boy with overmuscled bare arms as he stumbled over his leader, and blocked a blow from the long crowbar the squat third one had aimed at his knees. The skull-scarred one slumped face down, blood pouring on the floor; the second screamed, clutching his smashed upper arm, and dived out the door again, dropping his knife; the third flung the crowbar at Wranmar and ran away.
“Sucking slits!” Wranmar grabbed the prone bleeder and heaved; blood and body went flying out the door after the other two. He turned, panting, his teeth clenched, his face dark beet-red, and kicked at the blood left on his home’s front-room floor between the two large broken-down benches that served as guest furniture. Andrew ducked out of sight and into his bed cubby in the back, trembling.
Wranmar slammed the battered steel door shut, barred it, stormed into the kitchen, and flung his huge bulk in the one groaning heavy chair that could hold him. Andrew lay in the little cubby bed he shared with the other boys in the rear of the home, and listened, he and Martin clutching each other. His father muttered to himself.
“Andrew! Come here, boy.”
Andrew scrambled out to stand in front of his father in the kitchen’s dim ceiling roomlight. Street music thudded louder outside. His father, near-black eyes burning into Andrew, slid his fingers up and down the long steel shaft he’d used to drive away the gang.
Words rambled and tumbled out. “Damn bitches just tried to wedge their way in here. Can’t believe it.” His fingers moved ceaselessly up and down the smooth steel, slowing when they came to a drying red smear. “Doesn’t matter what sex or how big or how old. You gotta nail ‘em yourself, damn militia don’t burn hot as shit when it comes to helping out.”
He grinned fiercely at Andrew, shaking his head. “But you don’t got the stuff to do it, little guy. Heh. Too bad Martin and you come from your poor mama’s side. I can count on Raul, though. And Norwell. We take care of them, they’ll be big as me. But you know I love you, huh? You’ll help bring up your little brothers, huh? Gotta be all the man you can.” He winked at Andrew, then laughed and shoved him, hard, making him stagger back against the greasy kitchen wall of barely-smoothed stone.
