TEACHING

1550 4D

Jostling against workers, vendors and thieves in the stone-arched street, Andrew returned home from repairing infoconduits in a shaft the span of his shoulders. Test blasts of light energy left rakes of color fading very slowly in his aching head. It was all far too close to being an andro job.

He and Leil rode the City‘s turbulence with the buoyancy and aggressiveness of their youth. The nightmares of Andrew‘s childhood and youth had faded; the coll battles had dwindled to a sullen chill; some family members now openly made peace. As tired as Andrew felt, his life was good now. Today he had found a gift for Leil.

The narrow street, so far underground that the air itself seemed to hamper movement, throbbed with the unending pulse of street music, crowds walking nearly in and through its rhythm. The pale-gray stone floor rounded into the walls; the walls arched gently into ceiling. Along the apex of the street’s arch, pegged by gray metal brackets fused into resolidified rock, ran the multicolored electrical and luminal and vital-fluid ducts that netted the City‘s deep matrix into one sprawling world. At five-stride intervals the street lamps glowed soft yellow-white, cycling through a daily range that echoed, in muted form, the waves of light and darkness of surface life.

Musicians beat syntrells and panpans, singing collechi ballads and chants in wails and rasping gutturals; vendors howled and barked on all sides, waving and jingling their chimes and bells; storekeepers stood vigilant and smiling, hungry for shift-change customers outside their galleries and cubbies and recesses and grottoes filled with goods and foods and watchful underlings, protected by heavy steel doors that unrolled in an instant from recessed moorings above the entrances.

Here and there, scraggly vines held slithering paths up the walls, their leaves and blooms troping the light and warmth, their hairlike processes sucking moisture from the heavy air. Few bird species lived this far down in the City, but black spikefoot sparrows, eaters of the many insects of this depth, chirped wherever some safe niche in the ceiling rock gave them a nesting place. Homekeepers peered now and then from street windows heavy-lidded with steel shutters, waiting for wives and husbands and lovers and sons and daughters to come back and share the evening-phase meal.

Someone jolted Andrew on the left, and a hand groped his coverall on the right. Not today. He brought his right elbow back in a sharp arc and heard a grunt. He shook his left sleeve, and his left hand reflexively gripped the long steel access wrench as it fell out. Militia training activated itself.

“Oh, sorry,” he said. He turned and kicked as hard as he could into the figure he had knocked down with his elbow. “Terribly sorry.” Others made their way by. He scooped up the hand-sized packet he had been taking to Leil, stepped to the right around the collapsed pickpocket, and slugged him across the neck with the wrench. The man’s partner, transfixed, glared at Andrew across the unconscious body, and then stepped back.

Andrew raised the wrench, saluted, and said, smirking, “Really, very sorry.” The partner backed away and vanished in the traffic moving the other way. Andrew looked ahead through the crowd. Standing three strides ahead of him was his son Engel, seven years old.

“Mother sent me to meet you,” Engel said. He wore a gray coverall like his father’s. “What did he do to you?”

“Tried to pick my pocket,” Andrew said, wishing his son hadn’t seen. Two militiamen in blue trudged past them going the other way, parting to pass around the fallen figure, their heads bobbing slightly to the street beat.

“Oh.” Engel settled into short strides beside his father, and nibbled at a sheaf of street-fried tubers.

“He tried to steal a gift I got for your mother,” Andrew explained. “It was a hard day today.” Then he saw Engel‘s face. A streak of blood ran down from a long cut on his son’s left cheek. He pointed. “Is that why your mother sent you to meet me?”

“Yeah.” Engel looked down. “Toad wanted me to sell ‘thellin for him. He punched me and we started up. My mentor saw us and told Mother I’m fighting too much.”

“Who’s Toad?” Andrew pushed past a pair of acrobatic hookers, post-adolescent brother and sister, waving their naked toes in a handstand. They swayed awkwardly and spat curses at him from below.

“He’s another kid. A big one.”

“How big?”

“Like you.”

Andrew tried not to smile. His son looked a lot like him, but acted more like Raul: aggressive. “Did the mentor stop it?”

“No.”

“Are you all right? What about him?”

“I’m fine. He pulled a knife and I broke his knee with a chair.”

Andrew glanced around. The crowd thinned out as they got closer to home. What would he do with this son when he reached his teens? “Did you tell your mother that part?”

“No.”

“Save it for some other time. You and I are going to have an understanding about fighting.” Assuming I know what I want that to be. Crazy streets.