by Paul Park
“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, a
nd 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.
* * *
A young woman stood away from the crowd, under the shadow of the gate. She shook her hair back from her face. She tried to comb some of the tangles out between her fingers, but the sugar rain had turned her hair into a sticky mass of knots. Yet she pulled at it restlessly, and her other hand moved restlessly over her body, touching her skin wherever it was exposed, her neck, her temples, her wrist. She was on fire. Already her temperature was way above a hundred, and the parson had told her that it would keep on rising at a steady rate until her heart burst into flame. One degree an hour, he had said. Then he had given her a glass of water and released her from the hospital, for there was no sense in keeping her. So she had wandered down into the streets, and all evening she had wandered with the crowds, and followed the crowds down into the center of the city, more desperate and distracted every minute. Now she stood at the barricade around the gate and raised her hand to gain the attention of the guard.
“Please, sir,” she whispered, her voice burning in her throat.
“Please sir,” she whispered, holding out her hand. But when the guard came to peer at her palm, she was suddenly afraid he wouldn’t let her pass. Her tattoos were forgeries, a little vinegar would wash them clean, and she was suddenly afraid that she might have smudged them in some places and that tonight of all nights, the last night of her life, the guard wouldn’t let her pass. She closed her hand into a fist. The soldier frowned. “What do you want in there?” he asked.
“I have some work to do.”
The soldier looked up at the gate. “Go home, sister,” he said. “Come back tomorrow. The laundry’s closed.”
“Please, sir. I have something that can’t wait.”
She pulled her hair back from her face, and the guard noticed for the first time how beautiful she was, how sweet her skin, how proud her eyes. He smiled. “What is your name?”
“Rosamundi,” she answered. “Like the flower.”
The soldier smiled. “Rosamundi. This is what I’ll do. The gate’s closed for the night. But give me a kiss, and then we’ll see.”
They stood on opposite sides of the barricade, a line of wooden sawhorses painted red. She ducked underneath and tried to run past him, but he grabbed her wrist in his heavy glove and twisted her against him, forcing her wrist up between her shoulder blades. He was a handsome man with long black hair, handsome in his black uniform with the silver dog’s-head insignia; he twisted her against him, forcing her hand higher when she tried to pull away. He bent down to kiss her and she turned her face away, but even so he was close enough to brush his lips against her cheek. It was enough. He released her suddenly and pushed her, so that she stumbled and fell down. “My God,” he cried. “My God.” He touched his glove to his lip, where her cheek had burned him. Then he spat, and mumbled part of a prayer of purification. “Unclean,” he said, and then he made the sign of the unclean, touching the heel of his palm to his nose and ducking his head down once to either side. In the guardpost underneath the gate, other soldiers of the purge stopped what they were doing and looked out.
Farther on along the barricade, an officer turned his horse and came towards them, flicking his whip against his leg. “What’s this?” he asked when he got close.
“A witch, sir.” The guard was rubbing his lips and pointing.
The captain looked down from his horse. “What makes you think so?” he asked. He was an older man, and he wore his gray hair fastened in a steel clasp behind his neck, in the style of a previous generation.
“Her skin, sir. She’s not human.”
The captain frowned. “Superstitious jerk,” he muttered, and then he swung himself heavily out of the saddle. He squatted down on the cobblestones near where the girl had fallen, and with the butt of his whip he pushed the hair back from her face. “Why, she’s just a child,” he said. He put his whip down on the stones, and then he stripped away one of his black gauntlets so that he could touch her face with his bare hand. “Poor child,” he said. “Injected with the fever. What crime?”
“I don’t know.” The words burned in her throat. “I don’t know,” she cried. She reached out to hold his hand against her cheek. “Please, sir. Please let me in.”
“The gate’s closed,” he said gently.
“Please, sir. My mother runs the elevator above Cosro’s Barbican. I want to see her. This is my last night.”
Soldiers had gathered from the guardpost and stood around them in a circle. The captain glared at them, and the circle widened as the men drifted away and stood whispering in little groups. The captain touched Rosa’s forehead with his fingers.
The gate loomed above them, one of ten set into the mountainside, a square brick edifice two hundred feet high. “Of course, child, of course,” he murmured. He stood and helped her to her feet, and together they passed up the steps and under the brick archway into a high, vaulted chamber stinking of urine. Wasps had made their nests among the pillars, and bats hung from the vault. At the far side, ninety-foot wooden doors led into the first tier of the Mountain of Redemption. But they were locked and barred. Rosa stood in front of them with restless hands, touching her neck, picking at the soft hair below her jaw while the captain hammered on the postern with his fist.
Nothing happened. Rosa turned to look back through the arch, behind her up the Street of Seven Sins, barricaded from the crowd on either side, patrolled by soldiers of the purge. “Don’t worry,” the captain reassured her. “Someone will come.” He looked at his wristwatch. “How much time do you have?”
“I don’t know.”
“Poor child.” He fumbled with a pouch at his belt and found a steel pillbox. “Let me give you something for the pain. If the pain gets too bad.” He held out a small white pill.
“No. My pain is my own. Every minute of it.” She scratched at the skin below her collarbone. “No,” she repeated. “Besides, I need the practice.” She laughed, and pulled down the bodice of her dress to show where the parson had marked her. He had filled her veins with fever, and then he had marked her shoulder with the sign of Chandra Sere, the fourth planet, close in around the Sun. “I need the practice,” she repeated, pulling at the strings of her bodice. “It’s hot where I’m going. Stone melts, they say.”
“Hush, child, don’t bother about that. Those are just legends. Parsons’ dreams. Don’t worry about that. What’s dead is dead.”
“Legends!” she cried. “It is my faith. My God is sending me to hell. It
is my God,” she cried, wiping the sweat from around her mouth. “Don’t try to console me. I will not be consoled. But one day I will wake in Paradise.”
“Sooner than you think, child. Sooner than you think.”
“Don’t lie to me!” Daughter of a prostitute, she gripped religion tighter for having come to it so late. Paradise, she thought. For a few nights she had seen it, the last time it had passed close to Earth. Before the sugar rain had started—she had stretched her hands out to it as it rose above the hills.
“My father was a Starbridge,” she continued. “That’s what my mother said. That counts for something, doesn’t it? I told that to the priest this afternoon, but he just laughed. Half-Starbridge, he said, that would take me halfway to Paradise. Tonight Chandra Sere is just halfway. The fire planet—how could he be so cruel?”
The captain said nothing, but he hammered on the postern with his fist. It was a small metal door to the right of the main gate, once painted red, but now streaked and dented, and in some places it had almost rusted through. But a panel on the door’s upper part had recently been repainted with a portrait of St. Simeon Millefeuille, the last of the great teachers. The saint’s face was pensive, but his eyes were vacant and flat white. As Rosa watched, they shuttered inward and disappeared. Behind them, through the saint’s left eyesocket, she could see another eye blinking out at them, and then a bulbous human finger protruded through the hole, curling down over the saint’s cheek. “Hold on,” came a voice from inside. “Who’s there?”
A beam of silver light shot out from the saint’s right eye and played upon their faces and their clothes. There was silence for a moment, and then the voice spoke again. “Gate’s closed, friends. Try the next one over. Deacon’s Portal. Half a mile along the wall, and they don’t lock up till one o’clock. Come back in the morning, better yet.”
