Sugar Rain (2 page)

The servant sniffed and peered, his head oscillating back and forth on the end of a long neck. For a while his mouth had hung open; now it closed as he settled his attention on the dark corner where the princess stood. His whole body stiffened, and his face took on an eager, sad expression. “Woman,” he said softly.

Charity Starbridge stepped backwards, and the floorboards squeaked under her feet. The advocate turned his ruined face towards the sound. “There you are,” he said. “Don’t hide from me. You have no reason to hide.” He smiled, displaying perfect teeth.

“Please don’t hurt me,” whispered Charity.

There was a pause. The seeing eye moved his head. “Window,” he said. “Books.”

The advocate frowned. “Where are we?” he asked. “What room is this?”

“This is my brother’s library,” answered Charity.

“It is not suitable for you to be here. Where are your servants? There was nobody to let us in.”

“I am alone here,” said the princess. “My brother’s been arrested, and my husband is dead. The servants have all run away.”

“It is not suitable,” repeated the advocate. “But I am not here to scold you. Not yet. I am here to console you. I bring a message from the bishop’s council.”

The seeing eye was holding a plastic attaché case in the crook of his forearm. The advocate bent down to take it, and then he straightened up and took a few unsteady steps into the room. “I’ve brought the clothes your husband was wearing when he died. Together with a selection of the personal belongings from his tent. There is also a letter of commendation and a promotion. He will enter Paradise with the rank of brigadier.”

Charity made no movement, and the advocate stood holding some papers out and frowning. Reddish tears ran down his face. “There is also a letter,” he continued, “describing the way in which your husband met his death. I was not there. But I am told that he died bravely on the battlefield and that he successfully fulfilled the obligations of his name and his tattoos.”

Still in the doorway, the seeing eye peered this way and that. Freed of his master’s hand, he had sunk down into a strange, dog-like crouch. With his forearms stretched out flat along the floor, he drummed his fingers on the polished wood.

“I don’t understand,” said Princess Charity. “That’s not what my cousin says. My cousin Thanakar. He said my husband died miles from the fighting. He said my husband was murdered by one of our own priests. I don’t understand. My cousin says he was stabbed to death before the battle even started. By a priest of God, one of the order of St. Lucan the Unmarred. Is that your order? My cousin says you carry knives hidden in your socks.”

Her voice, puzzled, anxious, hesitant, trailed away. The advocate waited for a moment before answering, and he turned his head to listen to his servant’s fingers drumming on the floor. “You have seen Thanakar Starbridge?” he asked.

“No. He wrote to me. Please, I don’t mean to contradict you. It’s just that I’d like to know the truth. My husband was always kind to me. I’d like to know.”

“Miserable female!” interrupted the advocate, his voice rising high and shrill. “How can you use his name? How can you even say it? Thanakar Starbridge! We will hang him when we catch him. We will hang him.” He made an angry, dismissive gesture with his arms, and it was enough to throw him off balance, so that he staggered and might have fallen. But his servant was watching and rose to help him. The advocate’s flailing fingers caught the old man by the hair; he yanked back on the old man’s hair and kept himself upright that way. “Let me tell you,” he continued softly, after a pause. “Thanakar Starbridge is under indictment for murder and for treason. Adultery is the least of the crimes he is charged with.”

“I don’t understand. He’s done nothing wrong.”

“Hasn’t he? Then be prepared.” The advocate smiled and raised his hand to wipe the red tear from his eye. “Your cousin is a sick young man. He has picked up some moral virus somewhere, perhaps some physical corruption. Be prepared. He might claim he contracted it from you. We’ll see. The purge went out tonight to bring him in.”

Charity leaned back against the bookcase. She remembered a story her brother had told her when she was just a girl, about a magician escaping from the purge, who turned himself into a sentence and escaped between the pages of a book, safe in some bookish landscape where the soldiers never found him. She leaned back and closed her eyes. She felt like crying, but the lawyer’s bloody parody of tears had robbed her of the impulse, and left her with a knot in her throat and no way of getting rid of it. Inside her, feelings fought and struggled without the armament of words. Thoughts struggled to be born.

“Say something,” demanded the advocate. “Let me tell you, the judge is disposed to be lenient. Moral contamination is hard to prove, and frankly, we believe that Thanakar Starbridge was a criminal long before he met you. The judge is disposed to think that if there was contamination, more likely it went the other way. He is willing to be lenient. But you must cooperate.”

Charity said nothing. Thoughts of Thanakar had brought him back so vividly, it was as if he were standing near her, somewhere in the library, out of sight behind her shoulder or behind a turning of the wall. A pale, dark man with such beautiful hands, the hands of a healer. How could she have resisted, when he touched her with those hands?

“So,” continued the advocate. “You have nothing to say.” He wiped his cheek. “You think it will be his word against yours. Not quite.” He smiled. “We have other evidence. Learn from this. A criminal pollutes everything he touches. He left a mark, a stain on your bedsheets. The woman who does your laundry alerted the police.”

“She had no right.”

“True. She had no right. And she has already been condemned for her impertinence, if it is any consolation to you. For slandering her superiors. Injected with the fever, if it is any consolation. The sentence is already carried out. But the evidence remains.”

Charity stepped out from her dark corner. She turned to the window, her mind empty. She stared out to the horizon, where the fire burned bright. She watched a sugarstorm gathering above the river, the raindrops burning as they fell. Outside, far below, the crowd struggled and shouted. Wisps of chanting, fragments of revolutionary songs rose up to the tower window. “Where is my brother?” she asked suddenly.

“Prince Abu Starbridge is being held at Wanhope Prison. In the psychiatric ward. He too is in deep trouble, deeper than yours. For him there is no way out. But you—let me finish. I told you, the judge is inclined to be lenient. Thanakar Starbridge is a known criminal, and there are extenuating circumstances. You are a widow, after all. But we need your cooperation. We need your testimony to condemn him.” He fumbled with the papers in his case. “I’ve prepared a statement for you to sign. It is a confession of adultery. Sign it and we will let you live. The bishop’s council has found a refuge for you in the home of Barton Starbridge, your mother’s second cousin. Seven hundred miles south of here. You would be free to collect your husband’s pension.”

From the window Charity could see down into the courtyard of a small shrine, where an execution was in progress. A thicket of gallows rose from the center of an open space, protected from the crowd by a circle of the spiritual police, the black-coated soldiers of the purge. As the princess watched, a priest performed the last rites for a condemned prisoner, cutting the mark of absolution into his face, checking his passports.

“Woman, say something!” cried the advocate behind her. He held out the unsigned confession, not realizing that she had turned away from him. Squatting nearby, the seeing eye drew back his lips to reveal long teeth filed into points. “Window,” he said softly.

“God damn it, woman, pay attention,” shouted the advocate. “Don’t waste my time. You have no choice. If you refuse to sign, the council will vote to terminate your duties here. They’ll send you home, and I tell you, the journey will be hard and long. Paradise is in orbit near the seventh planet. More than seven hundred million miles from here.”

“I’d like to see my brother,” said Charity after a pause.

Down below, the priest had strung up several prisoners. They hung suspended from the highest gibbets, their bodies revolving slowly in the rain. On the scaffold below, the priest danced a quiet version of the dance of death, lit by a spotlight from the temple tower. He was a good dancer, graceful and sure, but even so, the crowd was angry. They shouted and threw bottles. A bottle hit the priest on the shoulder as he danced; he stopped and stood upright, but Charity was too far away to see the expression on his face. He was in no danger. The purge stood around the scaffold in a circle, with automatic rifles and bright bayonets. In a little while he started to dance again.

“I’d like to see my brother,” repeated the princess.

“That’s not possible. God damn you, why do you even ask? Here. Here he is, if you really want to see.” The advocate stretched out his hand, palm up, and Charity turned back to watch him. In a little while the air above his palm started to glow, and then a tiny figure materialized out of the air, a man sitting on a bed, reading, too small even to recognize. The advocate closed his hand, and the image disappeared as if crushed between his fingers.

“Now,” he said. “Would you like to see him die?” He opened his hand again, and Charity could see a tiny pyre of logs. Here the scale was even smaller; Charity could see a throng of tiny figures, red-robed priests and black soldiers. Through the middle of the crowd, a pickup truck moved slowly forward towards the pyre, a single figure standing upright in the back.

The seeing eye sat up on his haunches and stared at the bright image, licking his lips with his long tongue. Charity, too, stood mesmerized until the advocate closed his hands again. “There,” he said. “Are you satisfied?”

She was not satisfied. She began to cry. At the sound, the advocate tilted his head, listening intently with a puzzled expression on his face, though he must have been used to hearing people cry. He listened, and then he reached his hand up to touch his cheek, where his own red tears had left a scum.

He held out the paper for her to sign, but she had turned away again. In a little while he opened his fingers and let the paper settle to the floor. “I’ll leave it,” he said quietly. “Don’t be a fool. I’ll send my clerk tomorrow morning, and if you still refuse, at ten o’clock I will come back to send you home. I will pump the blood from your body, and I won’t be gentle, either. That I promise. Women like you are a disgrace to us. You don’t deserve your own tattoos. If I could send you to hell, I would.”

 

All that day the churches had been packed with worshipers, and when the priests had rung the bells for evensong, the crowds had taken to the streets, jamming the roads, moving in slow streams towards the center of the city, down towards the Mountain of Redemption, where they had spread out around its lower slopes. The gigantic prison blocked out the sky. Even in those days it was the biggest building in the known universe, a huge, squat, unfinished tower, circle after circle of black battlements. It held a population of one million souls. And all around its lowest tier, sticking up like the spikes of a crown around a great, misshapen head, rose smaller towers, the Starbridge palaces, white and graceful, glinting with lamplight. Below, the streets were full of people chanting and singing. They looked up towards the windows while the rain fell steadily in dark, viscous drops, tasting of sugar and smelling of gasoline, coating men’s clothes and crusting their skins. Here and there, preachers in the crowd spoke of the apocalypse, and some preached slowly and softly, and some ranted like maniacs. Numerologists had made a magic number out of the date: October 44th, in the eighth phase of spring. The forty-fourth day of the eighth month—some had daubed this number, 4408800016, on cardboard placards, which they waved above their heads. According to some long-extinct rule of prosody, this number duplicated the meter of the so-called apocalyptic verses of the Song of Angkhdt, the verses that begin, “Sweet love, you can do nothing further to arouse me. It’s late—don’t touch me anymore …”

An old man recited the lamentations of St. Chrystym Polymorph in a loud voice; naked to the waist, he whipped himself listlessly with a knotted scourge, not even raising a bruise. The sugar rain coated his shoulders. It was dismal weather, a dismal season. The food reserves, which previous generations of priests had stored up through summer and fall, were almost gone, and the daily ration of rice soup and edible plastic was scarcely enough to keep a child alive. Hunger had made men crazy. Strange sights and visions had been reported. An old woman had seen huge figures stalking her street in the hour before dawn—the angels of the apocalypse, she cried: war, famine, and civil war, she cried, and she had taken a photograph. People stood around her and passed it from hand to hand, studying the dark, unfocused image. The old woman was an adventist. “Sweet friends,” she cried, “the hour is here. All my life I’ve prayed that I would live to see it. The powers of Earth are overthrown. The bishop herself has been imprisoned. The soldiers fight among themselves. And the Starbridges …” She paused to spit, and shake her fist at the pale towers above her head. “Every morning they are fewer. Every morning I have seen them at the southern gates, their motorcars loaded up with food.” It was true. In their lifetimes people could remember when the windows of the Starbridge palaces lit the streets for miles around, but now more than half the windows were dark, and some whole towers stood empty, abandoned. The Starbridges had retired south to their estates, waiting for better weather. In summertime their grandchildren would return to rule the city.

The old woman had long gray hair, a long nose, and thin cheeks branded with the mark of heresy. “Sweet friends,” she cried. “Old Earth is finished. But lift yourselves up, lift up your hearts, because a flower will grow out of this wreckage, and a garden that will cover all the earth. Birds and fish will speak. And there will be no more bloodshed, no, and no more hunger, and all these things will be like memories of nightmares. And God will wash the world between his fingers, and he will wash away all the priests and tyrants, the judges and the torturers. Look!” she screamed. “It has already been accomplished!” She grabbed back her photograph and held it up above her head.