Sugar Rain

by Paul Park

  It was, of course, far too late to help most of the inmates; the bells upon the mountain’s summit had been silent for twenty-three days. The bonfires on its upper slopes had long burned out. For weeks hundreds of vultures had been observed passing in and out through the upper windows. Clouds of them had reeled and flapped around the Cathedral of the Holy Song, disturbing the city with their rude cries. And when the portal was finally broken, none of the colonel’s soldiers ventured inside. Instead they leaped away from their battering ram and dropped their hammers and their picks, for out of the hole that they had made was issuing a huge tide of vermin, rats and surgeon bugs and furry lizards, escaping as if under pressure, scattering down the streets.

  It was not until about five hours later that the first of the survivors crawled out, alive through God knew what horrors of cannibalism, and she was taken on a stretcher to Shoemaker’s Hospital. Later on through the night, others appeared, singly and in groups, several thousand in all.

  On the morning of the 87th, the majority speaker of the National Assembly stood up in his seat to protest. “This arbitrary action . . . ,” he began, but then was overtaken by a fit of coughing. Called January First by his supporters, who had lobbied hard for a new calendar, the former priest of Angkhdt was still known in the city by his old, prerevolutionary name: Raksha Starbridge. That day he was at the height of his power—commander of the Desecration League, director of the Festival, president of the Tribunal, speaker of the National Assembly. His lectures on the liberation of the mind were reprinted every day and pasted up on broadsheets all over the city. His “New Precepts of Denial” were mumbled and misquoted at cocktail parties all over Charn. Passages from his book of essays, Postmodernism and the Structure of Despair, were embroidered onto people’s clothes and tattooed on their skin. Painted onto flags, they hung sodden in the rain above the Morquar Gate.

  Nevertheless his intellectual prestige had cloaked for weeks the frailty of his political position. For weeks his power had depended on a fragile coalition of extremists. Though his gift for parliamentary maneuvering was unequaled, still the base of his support had eroded with each vote, as the mood in the assembly changed. All through the month of November his recklessness had found a sympathetic echo in the people, as with viciousness and frenzied hate he had scattered every remnant of the old regime. But finally all that was done, the ancient structure of the state demolished. People stood in the wreck, looking for the first time towards the future.

  On the morning of November 87th, the government of Raksha Starbridge depended from a bare majority of seven votes. His own supporters, called the Rim, still comprised the largest single group, but it was losing ground. In order to preserve his power, for weeks Raksha Starbridge had resorted to chicanery: bribery, extortion, kidnapping, and fraud. These devices, effective in the short run, had made him a hero to what remained of his own party. That morning, when he rose to address the National Assembly, his supporters rose with him, and they clogged the air with shouting. Two of them leaped up to bear him on their backs down from his seat along the upper rim, down through the rows of benches to the speaker’s platform on the dais. And this was necessary, because in those days Raksha Starbridge could no longer walk without assistance. Weakened by drugs, his body had begun to break apart. He had lost most of his hair, and what remained was streaked with blood. Always he was bleeding, from his nose, his lips, his cheeks, his hands, as if the vessels of his blood were too fragile to contain his life. Not able to stomach solid food, he had lost flesh until his arms and legs were like sticks. His whole body had shriveled and decayed, though he was not yet an old man. And when he got to his feet, he had to hold himself upright, clasping the rim of the speaker’s rail in his bandaged, shaking hands.

  Yet his voice was still strong. Nasal and compelling, it rose up to the vault of the vast chamber, calling for silence as the crowd stamped and roared. “Citizens,” he cried. “This arbitrary action on the part of our armed forces—my colleagues have put forward a response, which I hope you will support. Soon you will hear from them. But first, I would like to speak my mind.”

  At this point many members of the opposition jumped to their feet, hooting their derision and crying out, “Precedent! Precedent!” until at length they, too, were shouted down. Raksha Starbridge waited patiently until the hammer of the president was heard above the noise; then he resumed. “Citizens,” he said. “For weeks our colleague Dr. Sabian, as well as other members of this great assembly have dinned our ears with their complaints. Those who support the recent actions of the army—the events of yesterday night—doubtless will justify themselves on the same grounds.”

  Here again he was interrupted by a rising swell of voices. He shrugged his shoulders and then turned to the table on the platform, to where a glass of water stood next to a ceramic pitcher. But his hands were shaking. He upset the glass onto the table. It rolled to the edge in a puddle of water and then broke upon the floor, as the noise of the crowd hushed abruptly. It was a trick to gain attention; in the silence following the crash, Raksha Starbridge spun back to the rail. Raising his pallid face, raising his shaking hand, he pointed towards his assembled enemies—towards Colonel Aspe, glowering on his bench, towards Earnest Darkheart and his wife, towards Martin Sabian. When he spoke, his voice was high and shrill.

  “Cowards!” he shouted. “Cowards! Fools! I heard with my own ears, when Coriel Starbridge and her son died for their crimes upon the people’s scaffold, how some of you cried out in pity. Are you insane? Or else, are your memories so short? One hundred days ago, when we first gathered in this building, then I promised you that I would hunt these devils down, exterminate them all, and not a man stood up against me. Even you, Martin Sabian, even you. Where was your compassion then? One hundred days, one month—is that how long it takes you to forget what you have suffered, what your parents and their parents suffered from this race of tyrants? When you were coughing out your blood upon the altars of Beloved Angkhdt, when you were swinging from the gibbets of the Inquisition, do you imagine Coriel Starbridge wept for you?

  “Now, to be sure, certain of our colleagues have addressed this question, claiming that our ancient enemy is crushed, that it is beneath the dignity of this assembly to be vindictive, that we must show ourselves to be superior, after all. They do not understand. Citizens, I am not a monster. It is not that I am thirsty for more blood. But I am a student of history, and I tell you, in four years out of five in this season there has been a revolution of the people. And in four years out of five, in summer and in fall, these Starbridge parasites have crept back among us, until they were as strong as ever. This time, more than ten thousand have already escaped across the border into Caladon. How many have we caught and killed? Fewer than four thousand. Is it any wonder that I have tried to make them an example, so that other generations might not have to go through this again?

  “Now of course, this question of the Mountain of Redemption is another matter, one vastly more difficult and sadder. It was my decision, and I reached it after hours of sad imagining. People say I have no heart—I ask you, is it mercy to release a crowd of half a million homeless people into the streets? I tell you, they would have starved, and we would have starved with them. If Martin Sabian claims differently, he is a liar. Even now in the sixth ward, the citizens are eating seaweed scraped from rocks, and even that has to be imported.

  “Now, be that as it may, it was my opinion that if they were to starve, then better privately than publicly. In my speech to this assembly I made a comparison, saying that if a man has just enough to feed himself and gives half of it to a stranger, then both will starve. It was my opinion that the population of the mountain formed an ever-present danger to the population of this city, as well as to the safety of this government. It was my opinion, simply that, and it was taken and made law by the members of this great assembly.

  “But now, because of the policies of the present government, the specter of starvation has receded somewhat. No
w we can afford to be compassionate. Now we can afford to assign blame, once the problem is no more. It is true: Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have died. That is a tragedy. All death is a tragedy. I myself, I know, am soon to die. It is for this reason, perhaps, that I think differently than you, who are yet in the middle of your life and strength. Look at me! Look at my hands, look into my face, and believe me when I say that a man’s life is nothing, less than nothing, and that we should not be afraid. Justice is everything, liberty is everything, but a man’s life is worth nothing, for it is gone in the tremor of an eye. From inside ourselves we seem like magic beings, our brains as big as continents, and we fear death like the annihilation of the world. I thought so once myself. But now I see that men barely exist. I look about me and I see the dead, all those who died so that the state might live. I see in my mind’s eye an image of the state, a huge, imperishable building of blank stone, and all about it a vast park, with all the souls of all the dead men underfoot like grains of dirt. Soon I will be one of them.”

  This was the final speech of Raksha Starbridge before the National Assembly of Charn. Along with some other writings it was collected into a book of posthumous essays, The Illusion of the Self. When his followers fled the city they took this manuscript; elsewhere it was banned. Together with his other writings, it formed the base of a new book. Brutally suppressed, nevertheless it flourished underground, and in time a cult of true believers, remnants of the League, bore its message north, beyond the range of persecution. Later that same year, it was reported, children and grandchildren of these people passed beyond Rangriver. There in that traditional refuge, they hunted and ate meat, reading the precepts of denial until language failed and they used the books for kindling.

  * * *

  But on the 87th of November in the eighth phase of spring, in the chamber of the National Assembly, when Raksha Starbridge had finished speaking there was silence for about half a minute. Then Valium Samosir got up to read the resolution, which was designed to make the army more responsive to civilian government. It was a complicated proposal, but nobody was interested in debating it. Both sides—the Rebel Angels and the Rim—were anxious for a show of strength and used the resolution as a pretext. After a few hours of halfhearted arguments, the president asked the delegates to stand apart. Soldiers of the Desecration League moved among the benches, stopping fistfights and disputes. The delegates returned to their places, and the tense, enervating business of the roll call was commenced, with the bailiff reading out the names. Each delegate would raise his right hand or his left.

  That day there were many abstentions. People hesitated to commit themselves, for they all knew that something was about to happen, the voting was so close. And at every name, men raised their heads to stare up at the vote, which the bailiff recomputed on a board above the dais, and to stare at the combatants, who waged their struggle silently in this war of alternating numbers. Raksha Starbridge stood upon the platform, his head bent low, his hands shaking on the rail. Colonel Aspe sat immense and silent, picking his nose with the index finger of his steel hand. Earnest Darkheart, black-skinned and somber, leaned backwards to listen to his wife, who had her hand upon his shoulder.

  Raksha Starbridge had voted first, which was the prerogative of the majority speaker. But finally, after half an hour, as the bailiff read the third-to-the-last name, Raksha Starbridge raised his hand. On the bailiff’s board the vote stood deadlocked, 319 to 319, with 121 abstentions. But the last three delegates were on their feet. One, a solid member of the Rim, was waving his right hand. But the last two were Rebel Angels, and when he saw them standing in their places, clothed in midnight blue, Raksha Starbridge signaled to the president to stop. “I’d like to change my vote,” he said.

  Instantly Earnest Darkheart was on his feet. “Little fuck-face!” he shouted. “It’s your own law. You can’t vote against it.”

  But again, Raksha Starbridge raised his hand. “It is my prerogative,” he said. “The proposal was read by Mr. Samosir, not me.”

  At issue was a parliamentary device by which any delegate who voted with the majority could ask for a recount on a variety of pretexts. Raksha Starbridge had used that loophole once before, changing his vote when defeat seemed certain. During the recess the Desecration League had visited a dozen members in their houses, to ensure that at the recount the next day the Rim would be victorious.

  But this time, Earnest Darkheart was prepared. “No!” he shouted. “Starbridge murderer! How long can we endure this tyranny?” And then he went storming down the rows of seats, pushing delegates aside as the president rapped his hammer. Instantly soldiers of the Desecration League went up to meet him, their truncheons in their hands.

  But on the left side of the chamber, the seats around the colonel were dark with his officers in their black uniforms. As Earnest Darkheart rose, they had risen too, though their leader still sat sprawling in his chair, picking his nose. One shouted out, and at the word, sixteen soldiers of the new model army burst through the doors at the top of the chamber and spread out among the upper benches with automatic rifles in their hands. At the same time, the colonel’s adjutant drew a pistol from his waist. Holding it in both hands out in front of him, he blew a hole through the captain of the League, who was charging up the steps. At that the whole hall erupted into violence, and in the confusion Earnest Darkheart pushed his way down onto the dais. Leaping over the rail, he jumped onto the speaker’s platform, and he took Raksha Starbridge’s head between his hands and crushed him down onto the floor, crushing him senseless and breaking his jaw.

  That was the end of him. He was led away by Aspe’s soldiers and kept under arrest in Wanhope Hospital, close by. That night an enormous crowd of people rioted for his release. From Morquar Gate to the assembly, they burned shops and pillaged houses, and towards dawn they tried to break into the hospital. But there they were dispersed by Aspe’s troops: two companies of what had at one time been the bishop’s purge. They had taken down the silver dog’s head from their flags, and torn the bishop’s ensign from their collars. But they were still the purge, black-coated and contemptuous, their officers on horseback, armed with whips and nothing else, the men striding through the crowd, looking for the orange badges of the League.

  By five o’clock it was all over. Many of the members of the Rim had been imprisoned, on various charges of malicious mayhem. The League was scattered; even so, Valium Samosir and five hundred followers left the city by the northern gates, half an hour before dawn. They took with them a treasure of gold and works of art, reported variously at seven and eleven million dollars, looted from the public storerooms and from Kindness and Repair. Fifty miles north of Charn they joined with local cadres of the Desecration League, in the abandoned glassworks of Badgaon.

  But in Charn, on the 91st, when he was strong enough to stand, Raksha Starbridge went on trial before the National Assembly. The charges against him—perjury, fraud, and possession of a hypodermic—seemed out of balance with the penalty, but it didn’t matter. In the assembly chamber there were only ninety delegates still wearing the colors of the Rim. Of the rest, most were in prison or had fled away. Of those who remained, few dared to speak; they sat huddled in their seats.

  The evidence took seven hours to read. When it was over Raksha Starbridge asked to be assisted to his feet, so that he might address the chamber. He was sitting in the dock below the speaker’s platform, which was empty. But no one ventured to assist him, and no one could understand him when he spoke, for his jaw was wired shut. He tottered to his feet, and staggered to the rail and raised his hands, but no one could understand him. No one could hear him over the chanting of the Rebel Angels, who were stamping their feet and pounding on their chairs, and chanting, “Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge,” till the chamber shook.

  After a few minutes Raksha Starbridge sat back down. The assembly passed a vote of censure, and after that the verdict of the Tribunal was inevitable. Of the seven members, five
had been appointed that same day.

  On the 92nd, Raksha Starbridge met his end, grinning and shaking on the scaffold of the Morquar Gate. Spectators jammed onto the roofs of the adjoining houses, breaking the slates and kicking down the chimneys.

  Two days later they climbed again onto the same roofs, to watch Colonel Aspe lead his soldiers up the Street of Seven Sins, out over the fairgrounds and northward over the hills towards Badgaon. In the evening there was a terrible storm, a hail of crystals as heavy as ball bearings, which bruised people’s skin and made the roads impassable. In the poorer wards, people crouched under their shelters as the rain fell like blows from a hammer on the boards above their heads. Many small buildings fell down that night, collapsing from the weight of sugar on their roofs. In the morning the rain lay everywhere in crystal piles, smoldering from the pressure of its own mass. In the fairgrounds of the festival the canvas hung like rags from the tentpoles, and more than half the booths were beaten down. The ferris wheel had fallen on an angle, twenty degrees away from perpendicular.

  * * *

  This new weather lasted intermittently through January. Every day there was some kind of hard precipitation. Sometimes the sky seemed full of glass. Some nights there was a sound like breaking bottles everywhere, and in the morning there were jagged shards of crystal in the streets. Children sucked on it like candy, and some fell sick. It contained unhealthy minerals which affected the nervous system, causing insomnia and fretfulness. In the countryside beyond the city, Aspe’s soldiers followed the uneven ground. In barren valleys and in rifts of clay they camped under shelters of corrugated tin. At night they wore earplugs, and by day they carried steel umbrellas. The rain battered them and pounded down upon their heads, but even so they kept strict discipline, marching north through country that had recently been desert. Now, under the deluge, life was coming back: lichens and mosses creeping over the stones, the cracks full of beetles and wet slugs.