PUNK’S LUCK

1560 4D

At least I had Jaeg‘s knife. It was a good knife, and Jaeg had shown me how to use it, but he’d hid away when three corpo cops came hunting him. The corpos were worse than the City bluecops. They’d found him.

Oh, Jaeg had been a top streetcock. He’d ruled some Darko Hejj boys. And me. Then, bam.

I was no monkey girl, but my hair hung long and straight and light. Like an andro‘s. It always seemed to draw trouble. Looking anything like a white-skinned andro sex servant was below bad, especially here.

I climbed the corkscrew stone steps. This stairway led up to Teshill Slope, and past it. On up to Aswar Nagrasai, Aswar Trigail, all the way to the surface. Thousands of steps above me buried in stone. The City was dug deep in bedrock; only the City‘s high-up rich ever saw the Sun. The Sun! What an idea — a sun, a sky, an open space above me. Maybe I could write about that, some way-off day. Down here it was all stone, stone walls, stone floors, stone ceilings, long lamps in the ceiling spine of every arched stone street, and green vines to suck light and ooze oxygen, and soften the stone echoes. Down here they say the air is heavy as stone.

I climbed. The broad gray knife went up my right sleeve, its sharp point tucked into the small plast pocket I’d sewn inside the cuff. The cinnaroot swelled up in my mouth, making sweet juice twinges. Time to stash it in one cheek.

Out of the stairwell entrance. Teshill Slope waited a few steps away, a broad, rising, bending City street. It had a gold-written bedrock ceiling carved into twisting lianas, and its polished floor showed ancient metal inlays of animals. Their bodies and limbs spelled out strange words. Nobody knew what they meant.

The crowd. Poetry: Gaggles of face-painted streetboys lined the Slope’s walls, narrow bodies for sale to strolling rich upcity men, women, yamen. Streetgang knots of young cocks flashed knives and jectors and sneers and coll colors at each other. Burly vendors bumped and shouted and sold biogrades, beam guns, street chems, hot foods, special services, and infojects. Streetchildren raced, snatched, teased, begged, screamed, fought and murdered. Slow fat beetles crawled the walls and ceilings, grazing the mosses and fungals under the vines and their broad sawedged leaves. Air shafts and vents sang soft unending whines.

I hustled out. Tanmar Fest music pounded, clashed, throbbed like a diseased machine. This was Day Two of the five-day festival — street energy flooded the air. Smells of lemon and cannabis and geraniol and vomit and sweat and musk and drying love stuffed my nose. Eyes down. Big street underbass rhythms made my long legs pump. No other tempo possible.

Someone tripped me. A grab team. I spun, staggered, cursed, reached for the wall by my left hand, and with my right hand hitched the knifepoint out of its concealed pocket, dropping the blade out and taking the handle in one quick move. I thrust up and in. Me first.

The first orange-painted face, almost against mine, went rigid. My knife was in the grabber’s unprotected side, his jaws wide, hello death. A long dagger clattered to the street.

It worked, just the way Jaeg said… my thought began. The second young cock shoved his way in and came at me with a jector.

“Jectors are nasty business,” my father had told me years earlier, before he’d been so sick. “They’ll penetrate even a full shield, and you can’t stop their projectiles. Your only hope is to be somewhere else than in their way.”

Still turning, wrenching my knife out, I pulled my arms in and speeded the turn, leaning out of the jector‘s path and putting everything I had into a kick that caught the second one in the small of his back. Something crunched on the pavement at my feet.

His jector fired. A canister of tox blew against the understreet wall, and three passers-by ducked in unison, hands over faces. Tox from a jector usually killed its target, if it went in. Dumped in the air, it was a shade below deadly.

I leaped after the staggering streetboy, tripped him, dived onto his back, my knife at his orange-painted throat. Orange was for Darko Hejj Coll, and his friends were probably not far away.

“Fuck off,” I hissed. A rattle. My precious medicines rolled loose on the street as people passed us.

I rolled off the streetboy, dived for one jar tumbling away from me, and grabbed it. A passing boot rammed pain into my leg. I bit back a yelp, found two other jars, and stood. My knees shook. Hello death, the face had said.

The streetboy scrambled to his feet and was gone; a militiaman bent over the boy’s dead companion, cocked his head at me, waggled four fingers naughty naughty, and walked away.

The militia hunted rebels, not street punks. If I’d dressed in the wrong coll colors, I’d have been hooked and sizzled about the corp assassinations. Punk’s luck.

The militia, the City police, and the corpos used electricity, chemicals and microbes to ask questions. The scars, visible or invisible, stayed with their victims. My father had shown me the pale-green tracery of mold-threads across his neck from an arrest when he’d been seventeen.

Punk’s luck. Was I a punk? I remembered how I’d used words, like playing with long strings of colored beads, only the beads were music and sound and meaning. Now I just had to watch everything, watch everywhere, and not think for too long about anything.