Learning Curve

Chapter 2

Fast Lane

"But why do I have to go through all this schuzzo rigamarole?" Anakin objected, appalled gaze sliding down the lengthy placard like drool dribbling down a Hutt's jiggling chins. "That's stupid."

Obi-Wan placidly overrode the local district office's door lock with a brief wave of one hand and ushered his frustrated apprentice inside. The drone of Coruscant air traffic was muted to a subliminal buzzing; dimmed interior lights replaced the sharp reflected glare of summer daybreak. "It may be the will of the Force that you occasionally submit yourself to stupidity…. For the sake of the greater good."

Several mutinous retorts formed themselves in the young padawan's mind, but he wasn't stupid enough to voice them.

"I'm a better pilot than anybody here," he muttered beneath his breath. "Just saying."

"No doubt that is true," his mentor agreed, deliberately failing to draw the next logical conclusion, which was that they didn't need to be here.

"Business hours are between nine and seventeen hundred," the brusque Sequelli behind the desk snapped, glossy eyes fixed upon her data-display. When the intruders merely continued to wait politely, she glanced up, squinting balefully at them for a moment before bolting out of her plastimold chair. "Oh! Master Jedi! Uh…. Can I help you?"

"No," Anakin murmured, sotto voce.

"Yes," his escort replied, in his best suave diplomatic tone. "We have an appointment with Druu Rexall."

"Oh," the receptionist grunted, one sucker-padded digit directing them toward a back office. "That way." Her curious regard shadowed their steps all the way to the threshold, where Obi-Wan banged politely upon the plastoid panel.

Anakin bounced upon his heels, all the while enumerating the multitudinous reasons he didn't need to be here.

"I bet you didn't have to do this," he grumbled at the young Jedi's cloaked back.

"On the contrary. Master Qui-Gon made me come here and wait in line. During business hours."

"So?"

"So I've had a healthy appreciation for the allure of the Dark Side ever since. The Department of Metrocivilian Vehicles is an excellent testing ground for basic spiritual resilience. You should be grateful I've made you a fast track appointment." As an afterthought, he pounded upon the door again, this time with a balled fist.

"I don't need a piloting license. I'm a champion podracer. I'm the only human who can do it."

"Well then. You are about to be the only human champion podracer legally qualified to pilot within the Coruscanti airlanes." The early hour lent a sardonic edge to Obi-Wan's drollery. "I'll have the additional encomia engraved upon your plaque later."

The subtle riposte was unfair; Anakin chafed at the injustice of the cosmos in general and his master in particular, until the latter person made life interesting again : after two more fruitless attempts to request entrance by rapping politely upon the locked door, he lost his own considerable patience and simply wrenched the it open with the Force.

"Whoa!" A bacci-smoker's croaking voice bellowed from within. "You people ever hear of knocking?"

"We have an appointment," the young Jedi announced, sweeping over the threshold in a skirl of cloak.

Anakin strode in on his master's heels, hoping his own swagger had equal panache. The cubicle they had so summarily invaded was drab, its lusterless walls plastered here and there with travel holos now flickering and pixellated with age; the sagging desk groaned beneath a decade's accumulated clutter; the office's single occupant was an aging Dressalian whose beseeching eyes and lined, world-weary face begged the intruders to have pity and leave him to his own morose, pedestrian business.

Anakin felt a pang of something akin to compassion, but an upward glance at his companion revealed no corresponding softening of sentiment on Obi-Wan's part.

"An appointment," the Dressalian muttered, disgusted. His brows contracted as he squinted balefully at the young padawan. "Merciful gods… how young do you people expect me to take em?"

"I believe, Mr. Rexall, that the legislative provision is clear: the Order's prerogatives are clearly delineated in –"

At this juncture Rexall's slumping posture abruptly rectified itself, and an impropriety escaped his lips – one carefully noted by the youngest member of the party, and stored in memory for future use. "Fine, fine," the harried civil servant snorted, exhuming a datapad from the precarious towers of junk upon his desk. One long finger curtly tapped against the screen. "Name," he barked.

A gentle pressure on Anakin's shoulder prompted his response. "Oh, uh, Anakin Skywalker."

"Age?"

"Ten standard."

Rexall glared at him, then at Obi-Wan, then at the datafield, but he abstained from further comment.

"And I assume you passed the written examination?"

The padawan puffed out his chest, taking exception to the Dressalian's patronizing and dubious tone. "Aced it," he said. "Any moron can memorize a bunch of stupid traffic rules and stuff. ..Ow," he added, when his blunt assertion earned a sharp tweaking tug upon his learner's braid.

"His exam certificate is already uploaded to the system," the young Jedi supplied. "We are here to complete the piloting test and to obtain his license."

"First things first," Rexall grunted, furiously tending to the demands of paperwork. "The fly-test isn't a walk in the park. Are you sure you've logged sufficient practice hours in an airborne commuter vehicle, young sir?"

"I'm a champion podracer. I can fly anything," Anakin assured him.

Rexall rolled mournful amber eyes heavenward, then thrust his stylus at Obi-Wan. "You're riding along on this fiasco. No unaccompanied minors."

"Of course." A short bow.

"All right then." The Dressalian heaved himself to his feet and bumbled about in a drawer, eventually retrieving an ignition coder. "I'm not cutting you any slack on account of age, or being a Jedi," he warned the diminutive applicant.

"I don't need slack," the padawan grumbled, shoving hands into opposite sleeves and pursing his lips. This whole mess was a big farce, far beneath his dignity and insulting to his intelligence – but it had been made abundantly clear to him – during a protracted lecture back at the Temple – that this was one routine rite of passage from which he would not be exempted.

"Remember," Obi-Wan quietly advised him as they trailed Rexall down a dingy back passage leading to the outside docking ports, "We do not want to have to return and take a retest."

"Don't worry, Master. This is gonna be easy."

Druu Rexall flicked his last bacci-stick stub over the air-car's scuffed and battered side before double checking his safety harness latch. "Take 'er away, kid. Merge into that upper tier lane and proceed toward the Tarkall Loop."

Beside the jaded Dressalian, Anakin's golden head bobbed up and down once, before the vehicle shot forward at a sickening angle, accelerating recklessly off the docking platform and corkscrewing upward through the first six free-fly zones and then dropping with a gut-lurching precision exactly one half meter off the repulsor-array of a laden grav-trolley on the highest level.

"Whoooooop!" the daredevil in the pilot's seat hollered, apparently having forgotten the preceding lecture and any other lecture delivered within living memory on the topic of safety regulations.

The Dressalian pried hands away from his face, facial grooves starkly limned by a nauseous pallor. "Chiiiiiisskkk!" he remarked, gripping the sides of the passenger seat in abject terror.

"Anakin," Obi-Wan quietly admonished from the back row, "You are tailgating."

"Oh, right. Sorry." The child backed off the accelerator a fraction, leaving a substantially less deadly closing space between their flimsy government-issued conveyance and the seventeen mega-glokk tractor trailer immediately antecedent. "Three second rule. Right."

Drexall sucked in a quavering breath. "Take the next exit, " he wheezed, still grasping at authoritative.

"Okay."

But the next exit was a typical rush hour pile-up; Anakin skimmed by, taking the opportunity to pass the massive freight barge on the left, sideways, fast enough to peel off paint.

"Gods save me!" the DMV test proctor shrieked.

"It's okay, I got this," the diminutive applicant assured him, laying on more speed as he jinked and juked his way through the clotted lanes, making a headlong dash for the next exit.

"Closed for construction," Obi-Wan remarked, casually, as they passed a holoboard proclaiming the city's sincere regrets for the protracted inconvenience and threatening double citation fines for any violations of the resultant strictures on speed and mobility.

"Well, fark," Anakin grumbled, a sentiment echoed in moaning undertones by his cringing passenger.

"Language, Padawan."

"Sorry, Master…. But where in the – I mean, where am I supposed to get off?"

They dropped to the carpool lane, which sucked them into a vortex of disgruntled morning commuters, all clamped in the vertiginous embrace of a mag-guidance tunnel cutting through the planet's underlevels for several hundred klicks; at the terminus of this shortcut they were vomited up into one of the outlying industrial sectors amid a hurricane of cargo vessels and construction droid hover-trams.

"E'chuta!" a helmeted crew boss screamed as Anakin hurtled beneath him and cut a corner between his transport and an oncoming claw-crane carrier.

"Same to your family," the towhead snarled, twisting aside at the last moment before impact against a looming monolith of transparisteel and plastoid.

"Power generator!" Obi-Wan barked, enough command in the tone to arrest the attention of a rabid Whipid.

"Huh?" his protégé answered. Then, "…oh, right."

They avoided electrocution by a hairsbreadth – to a Force user, the vast abyss between actual and possible, but to an ordinary mortal a distance too miniscule to be registered. Drexall's screams of terror could be heard above the deafening thrum of the hundred meter generator pylons and the snap of titanic violet lightning erupting between them.

"Mercy," the poor civil servant whimpered. "Just….. dock. Anywhere. Please…. Please…."

"Okay." Anakin flipped the air car round in a tight loop-de-loop, pushing the decompensators a bit over median at the end, just for fun, and brought them to a spinning halt on the tip-top summit of the nearest scaffolding. "Voila!"

His winning smile and the youthful blush upon cheeks still soft with baby fat did nothing to brighten the Dressalian's outlook.

"Parking brake," Obi-Wan reminded the boy, as the grav clamps started to slide, bringing them a precarious half-meter from the edge.

"Oh, right. Got it." Anakin turned round in place. "I'm doing wizard, huh, Master?"

Rexall's hands shook as he attempted to fill out the forms on his hand-held 'pad. "I need a smoke," he muttered. "A smoke…."

"Those things are really choobazzi bad for you," Anakin informed him, small arms crossed over his chest.

"Here." Inexplicably, Obi-Wan produced a small packet of pink cheroots from a belt pouch. Drexall accepted the gift with feeble but heartfelt grunts of gratitude.

"Hey! Where'd you –"

"Dex. I confiscated them from him before he gave himself a pulmonary carcinoma. "

"But, Master…. –"

"Not now."

Choking clouds of smoke rose into the buzzing, pollutant laced air. Drexall slumped back against the passenger seat. "Master Jedi." A long inhalation, a longer exhalation, mauve wisps twining upward like incense, making Anakin sneeze. "Please exchange places with your student. And get us the hells back to the office."

Crestfallen, Anakin clambered into the backseat while his mentor nimbly replaced him at the helm.

"We come to serve."

The Dressalian snorted out a cynical magenta cloud through both nostrils. "Is that what you people call it?"

"Did I pass?" the padawan enquired as Obi-Wan deftly lifted them off their rickety eyrie and ascended to the maximum free-fly altitude, skimming gracefully and slowly along above the grimy miasma below in a straight as-the-mynock-flies line for the Department substation office.

But Dru Rexall made no answer at all.

Once he was firmly ensconced in his dilapidated native environs, some of the color returned to the Dressalian's face, and some of the trenchancy to his demeanor. Long fingers jabbed and thrust at data fields as he scowled over the Department computer display, long mouth turned down in a double bend of disapprobation.

"So… did I pass?" Anakin repeated, fidgeting before the inquisitor's shabby desk.

Drexall made a noise halfway between a snort and a hysterical giggle. "Pass?"

"We understand you are able to issue a license immediately, once the exam is complete," Obi-Wan prompted, waiting patiently behind his eager padawan.

The overburdened Department officer straightened, deepset eyes sparking with affront. "Pass?" he exclaimed. "Ha! No, you did not pass. What kind of responsibility would I be demonstrating toward law and society if I issued you a piloting license? Hmm?"

Anakin's brows beetled together. A hot retort swelled in the Force like a bubble, and burst –

But before it could issue into speech, Obi-Wan smoothly intervened. "We understand, Mr Rexall. And we appreciate your sense of civic virtue." A small bow, softly gilded with irony. "We shall conform to protocol, and return in two weeks time for a retest."

Anakin's protest and Drexall's apparent relief mingled in the Force like oil and water, an uneasy and sinuous admixture.

"….And two weeks again, after that, and so on and so forth…. I am certain that at some point in the future Anakin here will manage to meet your exacting - and quite proper- standards."

The Dressalian's amber eyes widened into pools of molten dread as the implications of this promise sank in. His hands stilled in mid-air, poised above the final entry-field on the holo-display.

"Ah," he wheezed. "Ah… um….. yes…."

The padawan peered upward at his teacher, the furrows of resentment upon his forehead slackening along with his jaw. "Master!"

"Shush. We shall take our leave now, and thank you again for your time."

"No! Wait, ah…. Just a moment now…" The Dresallian frantically logged backward in the display queue, knobbly digits rapping out numerals and fixing identification prints into innumerable fields. "There are certain prerogatives…. Exceptions, you understand…. Jedi, as it were, ahem…"

He tapped a final field with a tremulous flourish and grinned weakly as the chit-printer stuffed in its lonely corner spat out a shining new license, replete with identification holo and all the stamps and insignia of special privilege afforded the Jedi Order. "Your license, young sir."

"Yipppeeeee!" Anakin's celebratory dance was not in accord with Jedi dignity, though the wicked gleam in Obi-Wan's eyes as he solemnly accepted the coveted prize on behalf of his learner might have arguably indicated a more egregious departure from the Precepts of Compassionate Conduct.

Still, Master Qui-Gon was not present to pass judgment either way, so the license was summarily and smugly delivered unto its new owner and the exhausted Dru Rexall left to collapse in a boneless heap upon his sagging chair as the Jedi departed in a double skirl of cloak and with a pronounced spring in their collective step.

Once safely upon the threshold, beneath the midday glare of Coruscant's artificially controlled atmosphere and the incessant roar of traffic, Anakin swayed with triumph.

"Told you that would be easy, Master."

"Put that chit where it won't get lost, Anakin."

The boy stuffed his new credentials inside a rumpled tunic. "I'm still the only human podracer. And now I'm the youngest licensed pilot on this planet , too!"

Obi-Wan massaged a temple. "Yes, well."

They found their humble Temple transport still safely docked where they had left it, at the far end of the commercial plaza public transport bay.

"I'll drive!" Anakin offered, pride of accomplishment fanning his enthusiasm.

"No."

"But I have a license!"

Obi-Wan considered gravely.

For a long moment.

"…No," he decided, vaulting into the pilot's seat. "Come along."