by Paul Park
Later analysts would claim that if it had not been for that one mistake, Sabian’s party would have carried that vote, as it had so many others. But what use are such speculations? For a moment the professor tried to make himself heard above the din. Then he sat down. He took his glasses off to rub his eyes, and then he looked up towards the other members of the Board of Health. Raksha Starbridge sat slouching on the upper rim, scratching and smiling nervously. Below him and to the right, Earnest Darkheart sat sucking on a pencil.
Darkheart was unpredictable in these debates. He was a man of intense and violent principles. Yet it was as if he understood that the time for his ideas had not yet come; he favored the abolition of all property, collective labor, and equality for women. Traditionally, such experiments were part of the political climate of another season, late spring or early summer. In spring it was too early in the year for him to speak his mind, except to a few chosen followers. Instead, he wavered, voting sometimes with the moderates and sometimes against them, according to an inner criterion that Sabian had yet to understand.
With him sat his wife, a big woman, as handsome and as black as he. As Sabian tried to catch his eye, she leaned over to him and whispered in his ear. He nodded, and wrote a few words on a slip of paper. Raising his head, he stared down at the professor for a moment and then lifted his hand. A messenger sprang forward, a young girl with her hands dyed red, who took the slip of paper from his fingers and then started down through the rows of seats. She moved quickly through the banks of shouting delegates, until she stood at Sabian’s side. The dye from her hands had come off on the paper, but the sentence on it was still legible, a rough, heavy scrawl. It said, “I am with you.”
Sabian felt a surge of hope. He turned to look back up behind him, to where the fourth member of the board sat surrounded by his officers. This was Colonel Aspe, commander of the army, still in the black uniform he had worn in the service of the bishop. He too was unpredictable—born an antinomial, a warrior chieftain of the frozen north, he had been broken by a life of service in the army, broken but not tamed. He had no politics and seemed to vote at random, but on the other hand, he had abstained from six out of the last seven votes. Again this time he showed no sign of listening to or understanding the debate, but sat heavily in his chair, his gaunt, enormous frame dominating that entire section of the chamber. His fierce eyes were fixed on nothing. One of his hands was made of steel. With the other, he tightened and untightened the screws that moved his fingers.
Professor Sabian came to a decision. He motioned to the president of the assembly, signaling for him to adjourn so that the Board of Public Health could stand apart and vote. But Raksha Starbridge had anticipated him. His drugged, dilated eyes missed nothing, and he had seen the note pass between his rivals. Guessing what it said, he was already standing up and speaking, and his harsh, nasal voice cut through the uproar and the noise of arguments.
Fearing defeat, or at best a deadlocked vote before the Board of Health, Raksha Starbridge called upon the president to put the motion to the assembly as a whole, where he knew he had the strength to win. “Mr. President,” he said. “You understand I have no wish to threaten the authority of the board, of which I am a founding member. Together, my colleagues and myself have worked long hours in the people’s name. We have accomplished much that could not have been accomplished otherwise. Yet from time to time it is my fear that we forget the power on which our power rests. In love with our own arguments, we forget that we are mere extensions of the people’s will. Mr. President, today is such a time. Mr. President, I ask your permission to read this motion in front of the entire assembly. What I want to know is, is there a precedent for this?”
In those days Raksha Starbridge was an intimidating sight. He had traded his parson’s cassock for a style of clothing then in vogue among the delegates of the Rim, the old, urine-colored uniform of the starving class. It was ripped and filthy. His face, too, had not been washed in days; it was streaked with dirt and with the purple kohl that he used around his eyes.
In those days his methamphetamine addiction had started to affect his entire system. His legs, his fingers, and his head were all afflicted with a constant trembling, and his arm was shaking as he lifted it to point down at the president at the conclusion of his speech.
The president was sitting at his high desk on the dais in the center of the chamber. It was a rotating position among the members of the assembly, and that day the president was a weak-willed man, a lawyer underneath the old regime, in love with legal precedent and terrified of Raksha Starbridge. He rang his bell, and in the hush that spread around the room, he let his voice sink to a whisper. “There is a precedent,” he said.
He spoke so softly that the upper benches couldn’t hear him. He cleared his throat and started to repeat himself, but in the gap, with the whole assembly silent and straining to hear, Professor Sabian stood up in his place. He took off his spectacles and shook them in the air above his head.
“Citizens!” he cried. “How long will you stand for this? Does this not sound familiar to you? Am I the only one among you who remembers? God help me, when I was a child I remember standing up in Durbar Square to hear my father read a proclamation from the bishop’s council, when Marson Starbridge was the minister of family planning. Does no one here remember? One hundred thousand children were rounded up that day—my own brother was condemned—and taken to the mountain. God knows, perhaps he is still there. Brothers and sisters, can you have forgotten? Can you have forgotten your own suffering, that you let our ship of state be captained by this Starbridge parasite, this Starbridge and his band of sycophants, who sanction murder as a public policy, as they have since I was born . . . ?”
He would have continued, only he was interrupted by the president’s bell, and by the shouting of the Rim, and by the voice of Raksha Starbridge rising up above the crowd: “Do not call me that! You are lying—I have changed my name!”
“Fool!” shouted Professor Sabian. “Show me your hands, Raksha Starbridge. Do you think it is that easy?” And then suddenly his voice was overwhelmed, and the assembly was conscious of another sound, darker and more ominous, coming from the right, where Earnest Darkheart and the Rebel Angels sat. They were stamping their feet in a slow rhythm till the floorboards resounded, and pounding on their chairs. “Starbridge!” they were shouting. “Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge!”
* * *
Resolution 441 passed narrowly that evening, after a long debate. When it was over, Professor Sabian loaded his briefcase full of papers and walked slowly down into the hall. He ignored all offers of assistance, all inquiries about his health, and when a colleague approached him and invited him to dinner at his house, he turned away. Instead he walked down alone through the gates and out into the street, past the expensive carriages of Valium Samosir and other prominent members of the assembly. A group of lobbyists and petitioners sat waiting for him on the steps underneath a headless statue of Sebastian Starbridge. He forced himself to stop and listen for a moment, and accept the pamphlets that they thrust into his hands. But as soon as he could, he left them and stepped down, planning to walk the half mile to his lodgings in the Street of the Old Shoemaker.
There too, all around the gate of his building, people were waiting for him with petitions and complaints. He had let it become known that his door was never locked, that night and day he was accessible to any man or woman in the city who might seek him out.
Also in those days he still had a public practice as an obstetrician. Throughout the city there was a shortage of trained doctors, for most had fled away, and many more had been imprisoned. The ones that remained worked overtime; Professor Sabian’s house was built into a tower above Shoemaker’s Hospital, and the lobby of the tower was full of pregnant women.
His wife was one of these, though she was past the age when women generally conceive. She waddled out to meet him in the courtyard, and pushed away a supplicant, and to
ok his hands. “What happened?” she asked.
“We lost. The soldiers go tomorrow to wall up the gates. They have enough food for a week inside the prison, maybe more. But after that . . .”
The woman said nothing; only she took his briefcase and led him from the crowd, back into the house, up into the tower, into their private rooms. She had some dinner waiting on a hot plate: nothing much.
She put him down into an armchair, and he sat there without speaking for a long time. Outside it grew dark, and after seven o’clock it began to rain again, big, heavy drops that hit the windowpanes and stuck there like old pieces of gum. He ate rice porridge out of a bowl, and then he put it aside to take his wife’s hands again as she pulled up her chair by his. From time to time they were interrupted, but she had given orders to the servant girl to keep the people out. It was only the most strident of supplicants that managed to get past, and even they went away quite soon, because they saw quite soon that there was nothing to be done. Professor Sabian was sitting with his eyes closed.
But at nine o’clock, the hour before midnight, a young woman forced her way up the stairs of the tower and into the professor’s room, not through violence or loud language but by the pressure of her need. She didn’t say a word. The professor was asleep. He woke from the middle of a dream to see her standing there, her back against the door. How long she had been there, he had no idea. His wife had disappeared.
The woman was standing with her hands behind her. She had black eyes, high cheekbones, and black hair cut short, and she looked around the room with quick, nervous movements of her head. She was very thin, but in those days that was not unusual.
Mrs. Sabian came in through another doorway. “Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t disturb him. Can’t you see that he’s asleep?” She crossed the room to take the woman’s arm and lead her out. But the woman shied away and put her hands up to ward her off. Sabian noticed for the first time that she was wearing gloves. That in itself was not unusual; since the revolution, it had become the style in Charn. But not gloves like these: beautiful white linen gloves up to the elbow, and covered with blood.
* * *
Mrs. Soapwood’s time had come that evening, when the top part of the house shook with her screams. Mr. Taprobane had closed the door that afternoon and marked it with black chalk to keep the gentlemen away. But when the screaming started, many of the women fled as well, fearing contagion. Even women who were used to childbirth blocked their ears and hid themselves away, for the birth of sugar children was a terrifying thing, and was always presaged by that terrifying sound. It was a roaring and a gibbering, as if someone were torturing a monkey in an upstairs room: That was the signal. The pious thought that Angkhdt himself was speaking through the mother’s lips, and they feared what he was saying. When Charity came up from the basement, summoned by her mistress’s cries, the house was dark and empty. Only Marcelline and Mr. Taprobane were left.
They were in the bedroom, and Marcelline was holding Mrs. Soapwood by the wrists while the cripple held her head. “Oh, ma’am,” she said. “Thank God you’ve come.”
She had called Charity “ma’am” since the incident in the bathtub, and could not be persuaded to stop. Fortunately Mrs. Soapwood was past noticing. She lay on her bed with her spine bent like a bow, while Mr. Taprobane sat above her on her pillow and held her shoulders down. There was froth on her lips, and her eyes were rolled back in her head.
Suddenly her left hand broke free, and she grabbed a spoon from the bowl on her night table. She stabbed it up into her face and managed to draw blood out of her cheek before Marcelline could wrestle it away. “This part of it started last night,” said Marcelline. “She’s tried to hurt herself.” And in fact the woman’s lips were bitten, and her arms and cheeks were badly scratched. Her hair was bloody where she had tried to pull it out.
“Help me tie her hands,” said Marcelline. Charity tore one of the silken pillowcases into strips, and then together they tied the woman down and tied her hands in front of her. “What shall we do?” cried Marcelline. “She’ll die like this. You know she will.”
“Shut up,” answered Charity. She was sitting on the woman’s legs, with the woman’s belly in her hands. “Tell me,” she said. “Have her contractions started? Did her water break?”
Mr. Taprobane was crying quietly, the tears running down his face. Mrs. Soapwood was babbling and shouting, the words like curses in the language of the gods. She was bleeding heavily from between her legs, blood mixed with water. Charity’s gloves were soaked in it.
She jumped down off the bed. “Stay here,” she said, “and hold her still. I’ll go get help.”
“Where?”
“Shoemaker’s Hospital. It’s not far, is it? Professor Sabian has a clinic there.”
Marcelline turned towards her, horrified. “Not Sabian,” she said. “You can’t go there. You won’t fool him. Not him. One look at you, he’ll know.”
“You shut up,” answered Charity. “I fooled you, didn’t I?”
Nevertheless, she took precautions. She sent Mr. Taprobane out for a rickshaw, and while she waited, she examined herself in the mirror in the hall. She found some lipstick in the pocket of Mrs. Soapwood’s raincoat, and with careful fingers she rubbed some color in around her eyes. It was a common shade, yellow mixed with brown—a shade most Starbridges would rather die than wear. She tied a rayon scarf around her shoulders, the peach-colored emblem of the guild of prostitutes. She tied it in the knot of bondage and was searching for clean gloves when the rickshaw came.
It was not far. But when she got to Sabian’s house, she felt afraid. There was nothing to worry about; Marcelline had showed her how to streak her hair, and now the solid Starbridge black was streaked with red. It was a good disguise, but that was all it was. It had not changed her. Courage was still the obligation of her caste.
She told her rickshaw driver to wait, and then she stepped across the road and under the archway of the building. There she hesitated, for the court was full of soldiers, a detachment of the revolutionary police. They were playing bowls by torchlight, wrapped in yellow capes against the rain, and some were eating vegetables out of a bucket.
One of them saw her and made a gesture with his fork. He whistled, and others turned to stare at her. She felt the pressure of their staring on her naked cheeks; even though it had been most of a month since she had fled from home, still she was not used to the glances of strange men. It was pollution, and that was a feeling that had lost the thrill of novelty in the filthy streets of Charn.
She pulled her collar up around her face and walked across the yard. The soldiers were staring at her, and two of them had their mouths open. But none of them tried to stop her, and none said anything. And in the house itself no one asked her where she was going, though the rooms and staircases were full of nurses and ink-stained secretaries working late.
She continued up the stairs, slipping past servants and orderlies from the hospital, ignoring their questions. “I can see him,” she said. “Any citizen can see him, that’s what the posters say. Don’t tell me it’s a lie.” And after that they let her pass. They asked her name. “Rosamund,” she said.
They let her pass. And in an upper room she found him, sitting asleep, a small, big-featured man with something childlike in his face once sleep had smoothed away the lines. His glasses had fallen down into his lap.
Unsure of what to do, she stood with her back against the door. She put her hand out towards him and then drew it back. But then an inner door swung open and a fat woman came in. “Ssh,” she said. “Don’t wake him. Please go away.” But he was awake already. He put his fingers to his eyes.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” said Charity. “My mistress has gone into labor.”
“Please go away,” repeated the fat woman. “How did you get in? You need a midwife, that is all. Does my husband have to deliver every baby born in Charn?”
“No midwife will touch her,” said Charity.
“It’s a sugar birth.”
Professor Sabian was having trouble focusing. He sat looking from one woman to the other, blinking his eyes. But when his wife went to the door to call to the people in the outer room, he spoke. “Sugar birth?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. I knew you had an interest,” answered Charity. Then, as the fat woman took hold of her arm to lead her away, she continued, “Sir, you’ve got to help her. She’ll die if you don’t come.”
“Sugar,” repeated the professor, still not quite awake. He rubbed his eyes and put his glasses on. “Let go of her,” he said.
His wife tightened her grip. “Martin,” she said. “Look what she is. She’s with the guild; look at her clothes. Don’t let her fool you.”
Sabian frowned. “Let go of her.” And then, to Charity: “Don’t be afraid. Tell me what you know.”
“Please, sir, she’s forty days beyond her time. At least that’s what she told me.”
“How long has it been?” asked Sabian.
“Almost seven hundred days. That’s not normal, is it, for this time of year? My mother carried me that long, but that was wintertime.”
“It’s far too long. Why is this the first I’ve heard of it? Surely she had time enough to make arrangements.”
“I don’t know. She was afraid.”
“Afraid? But there is nothing supernatural about this. It is a natural phenomenon.”
“She was afraid,” said Charity.
Professor Sabian got to his feet. He was grumbling to himself. “Where are you going?” asked his wife. “You sit down. Why is it always you—can’t you send somebody else?”
“She asked for you,” said Charity. “She asked for you by name.”
At that, Professor Sabian looked her full in the face. His eyes seemed enormous underneath his glasses. He frowned and then he shrugged his shoulders. “Today my government condemned three hundred thousand people to a cruel death,” he said. And then he turned back to his wife. “I have a debt to pay.”
