by Paul Park
* * *
A little before midnight he followed Charity out into the rain, where her rickshaw was still waiting. The driver recognized him and bowed his head and pressed his knuckles to his forehead. “Stop that,” said Sabian. “We are all equal under God.”
Sitting beside him as the rickshaw wheeled out into the street, Charity turned her head away. He was still very sleepy, and he looked at her benignly, nodding his head to the rhythm of the wheels. “It’s what this revolution is about,” he said. “It is a change in public thinking above all, so that we can free ourselves from the slavery of these myths.” He held out his palm, and a raindrop splattered onto it obligingly. He rubbed it into a viscous ball between his fingers. “According to the myth,” he continued, “this is the semen of Beloved Angkhdt. It falls from heaven every spring, and where the soil has been depleted by the winter weather, the rain builds it up over the course of time, so that once again it is capable of supporting life. That is quite reasonable; to call it sperm is just a metaphor. But the myth goes further. We’ve all heard stories of how, when the rain builds deep enough, all kinds of life erupts from it spontaneously: trees, flowers, insects, animals, all the species that have disappeared over the winter. But who has ever seen this, an animal erupting from the earth? Growing from a seed—in fact, this rain is much like other kinds of rain. Its overwhelming component is water. Only it has varying amounts of a trace chemical, which we call sugar, though of course there is no sugar in it.”
He spoke slowly, lazily, fingering his earlobe, his head back against the seat. “These priests,” he said, “they took a religious metaphor and turned it into an instrument for political repression. That is what we can never allow to happen again. Like all tyrants, they based their power on the people’s ignorance. How shall we progress, how shall we break out of this cycle of tyranny, unless we can learn to look at these natural phenomena for what they are? Otherwise, these myths breed a kind of fatalism that poisons every enterprise, for we are powerless against the will of God. But these plagues and scourges are natural phenomena. That is why I find it so discouraging to hear that your friend took no precautions, made no arrangements for what she knew was happening to her.”
“She was afraid,” said Charity.
“Precisely. It is terrifying to give birth to something that is not human, particularly if you’ve seen in every church, ever since you were a little girl, images of a not-quite-human god. It is a terrifying thing to feel yourself impregnated by the seed of that fierce god. Nevertheless, if she could only have understood that these myths are born out of the phenomenon, that the phenomenon is the reason that we picture God the way we do. That the phenomenon came first and that all the myth has done is prevented us from understanding it. Then, perhaps, she would not have been afraid.”
They had reached the house. It was completely dark, save for the window at the top, and even from the street they could hear the gibbering screams. Professor Sabian looked doubtfully at the sign of the black bird, as the rickshaw slowed and stopped. “Here?” he asked. Charity nodded.
Mr. Taprobane was waiting on the stoop. When he saw them, he came running out into the road and fished the professor’s bag out of the boot, gesturing to him to come quickly. Unsure, the professor hesitated, but then he shrugged his shoulders and stepped down and followed Mr. Taprobane into the house.
The cripple took Professor Sabian’s coat and ran back along the hall with it slung over his shoulder. And when he reached the stairs, he started up them without pausing, clambering on his hands and feet, with a strange, corkscrew motion of his twisted frame. He paused at the first landing and looked back. “Come on,” he hissed. “Come quick.” It was unbelievably fast the way he moved, like a monkey or a rat, with the professor’s coat hanging down the steps behind him. “Come on,” he said, and the professor followed him slowly, peering up into the dark.
Having paid the driver, Charity entered the house last of all and turned the lights on in the hallway. From the stairs Professor Sabian looked back at her, a puzzled expression on his face.
In the rickshaw he had not even asked where they were going. Looking up at him, she could tell that he was thinking for the first time whether he had been wise to come alone. She smiled at him to reassure him, and gestured with her head.
She had not planned to follow him upstairs. But in the end she did. She was confident in herself. But Marcelline almost wrecked it from the start. She got up from Mrs. Soapwood’s bed, her hands and dress covered with blood, and came to meet the princess at the door. “Oh, ma’am,” she said. “It’s worse and worse.”
“Shut up!” said Charity between her teeth, and she grabbed hold of the woman’s upper arm. But Professor Sabian had his back turned, and Mrs. Soapwood’s screams were drowning out all other noise. Charity relented. “Get some rest,” she said more kindly. “It’s my turn now.”
Marcelline would have curtsied, only Charity was holding her upright. Instead, she bowed her head and went away, and Charity turned into the room, towards where Mr. Taprobane and the professor wrestled with the woman on the bed. One of her hands had gotten loose, and she was holding it above her head, every muscle tense, her fingers splayed out wide. “Let me go!” she shouted in a voice that was not her own. “God damn you, let me go!”
They were tying her across the body with long silken strips ripped from the bedclothes. They tied her to the posts. “God damn you!” she was shouting, and the voice inside her mouth was as low and harsh as an animal’s or a man’s. “You will freeze in hell,” she cried, and then was silent, because Mr. Taprobane had seized hold of her jaw, and Sabian was trying to gag her with a strip of cloth tied through her mouth, around her head. But she was stronger than he was, and she was twisting her head back and forth and banging him with her free hand until Charity grabbed hold of it and held it down. Then, finally, the woman was overpowered, gagged and trussed, though her back was still arched and her legs still thrashed and kicked.
Professor Sabian prepared a syringe full of tranquilizer and shot it home into her neck. Then she was quiet, though her feet still spasmed periodically while Sabian made his examination. “Will she be all right?” asked Charity.
The professor shook his head. “She has already started her descent.” He worked for a little while and then sat back and pushed his glasses back onto his nose. “I think that she will live,” he said. “She’s a big woman—nature has been kind. There is no need for extraordinary measures.”
Nevertheless he shot her full of drugs, to relax her and to kill the pain, and to dilate her as far as possible. And after that it was just waiting. Mrs. Soapwood had lost consciousness. They ungagged her and untied her hands. Charity took her head onto her lap and washed her face out of a basin of hot water that Mr. Taprobane had brought. She cleaned the spittle from the woman’s lips.
Professor Sabian sat back and watched her. “Who are you?” he asked.
Taken by surprise, she answered hesitantly, but he seemed not to notice. He grunted and then looked away, and took the conversation onto different subjects, because for a long time there was nothing they could do but wait. He told her about the new constitution of the city while Mr. Taprobane fell asleep, curled up in a corner of the room with his arms around a pillow. He asked her questions about her life, with a puzzled expression on his face, his eyes big and liquid underneath his spectacles. And even though she had prepared answers in advance about her birth and upbringing, still she was taken by surprise. Because he was asking her about her opinions, about her dreams, about her hopes for government, and as she answered, she couldn’t help but think that she was making some mistakes, taking positions that were not appropriate. So, after a while she was silent, but by then it was already too late, because already his attitude towards her had begun to change. His gestures and his way of talking took on a certain formal quality, very gradually at first, as if he were not yet aware of it. In a dozen different ways he was more distant, deferential, and at first Charity
thought that he was making fun of her. But later she decided it was something true to him: later, as the night wore on, and everything he did became a ceremony, a gentle ritual of manners. His voice, his grammar, his vocabulary changed. When she handed him the forceps from his bag, he murmured his thanks and made a little bowing motion with his head.
There was something in Professor Sabian that brought back memories of servants. For a revolutionary there was something strange about his little bows, his mastery of the nine degrees of self-abasement. How strange it is that he is such a snob, thought Charity. Small wonder that he hates us so. In fact there was no hatred in the way he was behaving. When the crisis came and they were working hard together, he seemed glad that she was there, though he was careful not to touch her hands.
“There,” he said, when it was done. Mrs. Soapwood had lost consciousness, but when the crisis came, she had cried out, and Charity was afraid that she was dead. “Please don’t concern yourself,” said Sabian. “Please don’t—I entreat you.” He pushed the woman over onto her side, and in a little while they could hear her breathing, hard and deep.
What had come out of her had no real shape, and it was dead. Professor Sabian wrapped it in a pillowcase. “I’ll take it back with me,” he said. “Permit me. Such specimens are rare.”
Charity woke up Mr. Taprobane and laid him down beside his sleeping mistress. “I’ll send somebody up to clean the room,” she said.
Professor Sabian was standing with his bag next to the door. He had wrapped his bundle up into his raincoat. “Thank you for your help,” said Charity, and he bowed low and motioned for her to precede him through the door. But for the first time there was a complicated expression in his face, uncomfortable and tentative.
She, on the other hand, felt very calm. She walked slowly down the stairs, down the hall, and out into the street. It was early morning, and the sky was gray; a soft rain was just starting. The professor followed seven feet behind her, as propriety required.
In the street she turned back towards him, but he dropped his eyes, embarrassed, and raised his hand to stop a rickshaw. “Thank you,” she said again, and again he bowed, elegant and formal. This time, for the first time, the gesture seemed a little overdone, as if he had allowed some irony to mix with his respect. She smiled, and as a mark of special favor, she stripped off her glove and put her hand out towards him, turning her palm so that he could see the tattoo of the double ring, the symbol of good fellowship. She wore no greasepaint; it was her naked skin, and he bent over it, careful not to touch her, to pollute her with his breath. He closed his eyes. “I thought it might be you,” he said. “I used to read about you in the social page, when you were just a little girl.”
The rain was insubstantial and as fine as dust. It made a mist around them as they spoke. “Go back,” he said. “There’s time to sleep for a few hours.”
He turned and walked across the street to where the rickshaw waited. From the seat he made a little wave. And late that morning, after breakfast, he sent round the soldiers.
Part Five:
The White-Faced Woman
LATER, OF COURSE, THERE WAS TO BE some semblance of justice as the city grew more prosperous. Later in the season, when the farms outside the city had begun to function, the tension in the streets grew less. By then, too, the revolution had already eaten its first children. Raksha Starbridge, Valium Samosir, Earnest Darkheart all followed each other, willing and unwilling, to the scaffold. They were replaced in the assembly by less passionate, less imaginative men.
Later that same season the effects of a new religious movement were first felt, the Cult of Loving Kindness. In summer it was to consume the politics of all that northern country. But in the time we speak of, at the end of the eighth phase of spring, 00016, in the first days of the revolution, there was no compassion in high places. The judicial system had not been much altered since the bishop’s days; only the names of the judges and the criteria for condemnation were different.
If anything, the trials were even shorter, the chances for acquittal even thinner. The trial of Charity Starbridge was quicker even than her brother’s had been under the old regime. She did not once appear before the revolutionary tribunal, nor was she notified of the charge. But on the seventh evening of her arrest, she was taken from her precinct cell to a new prison near the Battle Monument, where she was visited by Raksha Starbridge. He said, “I was wondering when we would find you. I never thought you’d be so stupid as to search us out.”
Charity shrugged. “I was working as a laundress. I was tired of it.”
“Ah. So what appears to be stupidity is really self-destruction. It must run in your family.”
“Yes,” answered Charity. “Where I am going, there are no dirty clothes.”
Raksha Starbridge laughed. “Don’t be so sure. No reliable reports have made it back.”
He took a tablet from the breast pocket of his shirt and laid it on the tabletop near where she stood. “The desanctification vaccine,” he said. “Now in tablet form. People who have taken this will never wake in Paradise.”
“I’ll pass,” she said.
He laughed. “Don’t worry. Since I saw you, I have changed the formula.” He took a few more from his pocket and popped them in his mouth. “Aspirin,” he said. “Mostly.”
“I’d rather not.”
He smiled. “I don’t want to have to force you. After all, we both know it’s nonsense. I feel sure that where we spend eternity will not be influenced by a pill. All the same, I have a duty to my government.”
The desanctification pill was not the only drug he was taking. His pupils were dilated and his fingers shook. Charity reached out to touch the tablet with her finger. “Where will this one send me?” she asked.
The pill had a small number stamped on its underside. “Proxima Vermeil,” said Raksha Starbridge. “The third planet. Not the worst alternative. It has water. Some kind of atmosphere. A tribute to your youth and beauty.” He winked. “You made quite an impression on poor Sabian. It was a wrestle with his conscience to turn you in at all.”
“How gratifying.”
They were standing in a small, narrow, high-roofed chamber, with one wall of shoddy wooden bars. It looked out along a corridor of similar spaces, all occupied.
Since the closing of the Mountain of Redemption, there was a shortage of prison space in Charn. This building was a converted stable. Formerly it had housed a troupe of circus elephants. Months before, they had all been requisitioned by the army, leaving behind huge mounds of dirty straw. Most of this was stored in the central courtyard, but there were also piles of it in every cell.
Charity had made a nest out of her pile and covered it with a blanket. That evening, when Raksha Starbridge left, she sat down on it and took the pill into her hand, to study it and wonder if it were poison. Why had he come? In the end he had not forced her. No doubt he made a round of all the Starbridge prisoners, administering his vaccine. It was not fatal, she had heard, but perhaps this pill was different. Perhaps, as a mark of special favor. . . . She rolled the pill between her finger and thumb and then pitched it across the room through the bars of her cell. It rolled a short distance along the floor of the corridor.
Staring after it, her eyes met those of another prisoner. He was in the cell opposite hers, squatting by the open wall, his hands protruding through the bars.
“That was January First,” he said.
She nodded.
“Who are you?” he asked. “You must be important.”
She shrugged. “I knew him once.” She stood up to look across the hall. The man had melted a small candle to the bars of his cell, and it illuminated a face that seemed familiar. There was something familiar in his features, his bulk, his balding head. Familiar and not familiar; now that she looked at him straight on, she saw that his face was very red, very white, and covered with small scars.
“Who are you?” asked the stranger.
For an answer she s
tretched her hand out through the bars so that he could see the silver rose, the emblem of her father’s family, tattooed in the middle of her palm. It had an effect on him. Instantly his eyes filled up with tears. He put his fist up to his mouth, and then he stood and backed away into the recesses of his cell. Later he came back again to stare at her, but only for a minute—again the tears came to his eyes, and again he turned away.
How strange, thought Charity. And there was something else: The cell beside his was in darkness, and she had thought it was unoccupied. Only now she heard a sound there, barely audible, as soft as breath. And even though she had scarcely in her life heard any kind of music, yet she had read about it. Now, listening, she found she could identify it. The sound started to lengthen and contract, moving up and down the scale. Charity listened, her heart beating faster. She had no way of guessing how the sound was made; she only knew it was not made with one of the instruments sanctioned by the bishop’s council in the old days. The thirty-first bishop had banned everything but percussive instruments: the xylophone, the drum, the cymbals, and the gong. He had banned every music that was not molded to a central beat. He had banned any music that was not dampened by religious singing—melody alone could light a fire in your mind, he had said. Listening in her cell, Charity wondered whether it was true. The man opposite her was weeping for no reason as the music of the flute went up and down. He was pressing his forehead against the bars of his door.
The sound from the dark cell stopped suddenly, interrupted by a deep, low coughing. The man turned his head in its direction. And in the silence that followed, he took a piece of paper from inside his shirt, a creased and wrinkled scrap of paper. He handled it reverently, as if it were a precious jewel or a religious amulet, and he unfolded it with special care. “I have a message for you,” he said. Then he looked towards Charity across the corridor, a strange, yearning expression on his face. “At least, it is you, isn’t it?” He turned the paper over so that she could see what looked like a name and an address written on the outside, though she was too far away to read the words.
