The Untaught Mouth

They did not answer county's handbill with another handbill.

That would have conceded too much. Paper was already breeding like mold wherever walls had forgotten shame. The last thing the city needed was one more flat authority pretending to rescue it.

Instead the lane began unteaching itself.

A fish wife stopped a porter at the exact moment he said room before body. A child corrected an aunt. An old basket man, who six weeks earlier could not have named one burden honestly, asked one quay girl who received if stairs refused. The girl answered before his pride had time to harden.

Mistakes no longer waited for old keepers to descend like clergy. The nearest hearing interrupted.

Bao hated this for three full mornings.

"There should be a proper line of who teaches whom."

Sun did not look up from drying the page edge.

"If it needs pedigree, it dies with the first keeper taken sick."

Bao could not argue with that without sounding young, which was the only mercy in it.

The clearest proof came from Wei, which wounded Bao almost as much as it helped him.

A cabbage woman arrived from upper slope with one nephew, one borrowed uncle, and the county handbill folded in her sleeve like a pardon.

She opened with perfect paper.

"Whose body. What changed. Where next."

She said it as if virtue itself had printed the order.

Wei, who had once wanted nothing more than speed and now feared speed the way wiser children fear deep water, asked the question not on the paper.

"Who receives if room says no?"

The woman froze.

The borrowed uncle opened his mouth. The nephew leaned away from him without meaning to. That small motion answered more honestly than three declarations of kinship.

Wei pointed.

"Not him. Who actually receives?"

The woman looked down at the boy, then toward the lane behind her where a true sister was still struggling uphill with the basket that ought to have come first, and at last said the useful thing:

"My sister. If she gets here in time. Bench if not."

The case moved. The borrowed uncle vanished with the relieved speed of a man whose fiction had just been politely dismissed.

Bao watched the whole thing with the troubled face of someone seeing his own preferred hierarchy fail in public for good reason.

"Who taught Wei to ask that?"

Marta was tying one strip with her teeth.

"Everyone who stopped him when he was wrong."

The lesson lay there plainly. Not one teacher, not one authorized mouth, but correction sedimented through embarrassment until a child began carrying questions no paper had room for.

County hated this because it made pedigree impossible. Shen hated it for better reasons: it meant the thing could now spread through interruption instead of instruction, which was another way of saying it could travel faster than offices.

Pei came by late and watched Yulin be corrected by a fish girl half his size on one stair case he had made too noble by speaking slowly.

"This looks chaotic."

Gao took the bowl from his hand and gave it to the right child.

"So does learning. You people only approve of the versions with benches."

By dusk even the wall copies had begun losing authority. People still glanced at them, but now they also glanced at each other, which was the more dangerous development.

They were beginning to hear for correction instead of merely for permission.

After dark the book that slept nowhere received the line in Bao's reluctant hand, which was why Sun let it stand:

untaught mouth kept body moving