by Paul Park
At the gate, the crowd around the front of the motorcar loosened and dispersed. In the gap, Thanakar could see his destination, rising over roofs and towers, still miles away, the grim Mountain of Redemption, a city in itself: circle upon circle of ramparts and black rock. It had no top. The traditions of the Prophet Angkhdt had required God’s temple to be built supported on a prison of one million souls. The text was vague, the translation unsure; as always, the controversy had been bloody. But the nineteenth bishop had resolved its literal meaning. He had discovered ancient plans and diagrams, blueprints, and memoranda dictated by Angkhdt himself, but ten lifetimes later the work was still unfinished, though there was no lack of inmates. The Temple of the Holy Song had had to be constructed on a steel scaffolding arching from the mountaintop, while far beneath it, stonemasons slaved to fill the gap. The temple was invisible, uninhabitable, swayed in every breath of wind. Four thousand feet below, the Starbridge palaces ringed the prison’s base—temporary housing already crumbling with age. When the building was completed, the Starbridges would live on top.
In the motorcar, the doctor thought: without hope, fear can never be maintained. Without the temple, people would never tolerate the prison. They would rise up. For this reason, the base of each strand of the temple’s web is guarded from sabotage by a troop of soldiers.
* * *
The most powerful priest in Charn was not the bishop, but the bishop’s secretary, Chrism Demiurge, and he was waiting for the doctor when he got home. Thanakar’s housekeeper met him in the hall to warn him. “He’s in your parents’ bedroom, sir. Please God be careful what you say.” Thanakar smiled. She loved him. She had been his nurse. It touched his heart to see the terror in her fat, kind face—she was afraid for his sake, she didn’t know why. He knew. For more than a hundred days he had experimented on his parents’ sleeping corpses, trying to rouse them, to break the mystery of the sleeping drug before they started to decay. Not because he missed them, or wanted them back, but in the interests of pure science, perhaps. Prince and Princess Thanakar Starbridge—perhaps if they had loved him more, he might have shown them more respect. He hoped his injections had left no trace.
“Did you give him something to eat?”
“They don’t need more to eat, that lot,” said Mrs. Cassimer. “They’d eat you out of house and home. Please God be careful, sir.”
“I’ll be careful.”
At the doorway to the bedroom, he paused. The room was dark, the curtains thick. He had been an adolescent when the priests had put his parents to sleep; it had been almost five thousand days. Yet still they were in the first stage of their journey back to Paradise—they were getting younger. The drug had smoothed their faces and their skin, blackened their hair, so that they lay like a new bride and bridegroom in their wedding bed. Their bodies smelled of incense. In time, the smell would sweeten. Already, a week before, he had noticed an unhealthy flush of yellow on his father’s fingertips; it was the first sign, and the second would be the incense sweetening as their spirits drew back along their drying limbs. The process, once started, would be swift, the soul’s flight to Paradise, but their bodies would be carrion, and as if to emphasize that part, the bishop’s secretary stood hunched over the bedstead, plucking at them with his long fingers like a scavenger bird. The doctor’s father groaned and pulled away.
The secretary was an old man with a long neck and a withered, sharp face. Thanakar’s shadow in the doorway caused him to look up and turn his luminous blind eyes.
“Good morning, Monsignor.”
“Ah, Thanakar,” said the old man. “Come in.”
He spoke as if the house was his. And in a sense it was. All things belonged to God, and he was God’s chief minister. The doctor moved his tongue around the inside of his mouth. The presumption made him angry. He came down into the room and limped across to yank open the curtains.
“Can I offer you a cup of water, Monsignor?”
The old man blinked in the sudden light and turned slowly towards the windows. “No, thank you. No water, thank you. I’m not thirsty. I just stopped in for a minute.” He paused, perfectly comfortable with silence. His eyes drifted around the room.
“Well, can I offer you anything?”
Again, the old man waited before replying. “I don’t think so, thank you. I would have taken anything I wanted. No, there is one thing. You can offer me advice, my son.”
“Whatever I have is yours,” responded Thanakar between his teeth.
“I know that, my son. I know that.” The old man sighed. Pulling his scarlet robes around him and stretching out his hand for guidance, he walked around the bed. Accurately, deliberately, slowly, he picked the princess’s wrist up from beneath her gauze sheet, and with the fingers of his other hand he opened wide the eyelids of his right eye, until it seemed to bulge out of its socket. Then turning towards the light and bending low, he raised her wrist up to his eye, until it was an inch away.
“What are these marks?” he asked.
“What marks?”
“These marks.”
At the window, the doctor screwed his face into a priestlike grimace. Crouching, he twisted his body into a mimic of the old man’s. “Injections, Monsignor,” he replied, and without meaning to, he allowed a parody of castrate gentleness to creep into his voice, so that the old man turned towards him curiously.
“Injections, my son? What for?”
“Vitamins. There aren’t enough in their regular diet. Not to keep them . . . healthy.”
The secretary stared at him, and under the fixed scrutiny of his blind eyes, Thanakar relaxed and stood upright.
“That is not your concern,” said the old man after a pause. “What vitamins?”
“B.”
“Vitamin B.” The secretary turned back to the princess’s wrist and rubbed it between his fingers before putting it carefully back down. “You are not,” he continued, “a religious man.” The words were phrased midway between a question and a statement.
Thanakar said nothing. “My son,” said the old man gently. “My son. This is not a . . . social call. Not completely. I have heard rumors about you that disturb me, for I knew your father well.”
Thanakar said nothing. His mother turned over on her side. She was naked under the gauze sheet. It pulled away to show her naked back.
“Lately you have gone up more than once into my prisons. Why?”
“I am doing a study, Monsignor.”
“What kind?”
“I am studying the long-term effects of untreated illnesses.”
“Yet you have been observed carrying medicines and painkillers up into the wards,” pursued the secretary gently. “Surely that would . . . invalidate your results?”
The doctor combed his long black hair back from his forehead with the fingers of one hand. “I have no apology to make,” he said finally.
“I ask for none. You will not go there again.” The secretary’s voice was pitched, once again, midway between a question and a command.
“I go where I want. It is my birthright. You can’t take that away.” Thanakar opened his palm to show the golden key tattooed under his wrist, the mark that opened all doors.
The old man sighed. “You think you have been badly treated. And truthfully, I understand it. I understand. There is a reason for it. You are a cripple. It is . . . unfortunate. Very unfortunate.”
This remark was also a key that opened doors. “Unfortunate!” cried the doctor. “Unfortunate! You did it deliberately. You know you did. You dropped me. It was the only way that you could get your hands on my father’s property.”
“You are wrong. The wealth of the earth belongs to God, and to the ministers of His temple. We lend them generously to some families. Your father has no sons capable of inheriting his name. It is unfortunate. Simply that.”
“Bastard! Eunuch!” shouted Thanakar, stung to rage. “My father always hated you,” and the figure on the bed stirred and groaned, half-awakened b
y his son’s voice.
There was a long pause before the secretary spoke. “You are talking foolishly, my son. Very foolishly. But believe me, I understand. Sometimes when I go up to the mountain, the human suffering there is too much to bear. But remember, they are God’s prisoners, not ours. He is punishing them for crimes they committed before they were even born, not on this planet, but in Paradise. As you know. You and I, we are only His instruments.”
“That makes you feel better, does it?”
The secretary eyed him thoughtfully. “You are not a religious man,” he said again.
“There are many kinds of religion.”
“You are wrong. There is one kind. But there are many kinds of criminals. Tell me, when you go down among the atheists with Abu Starbridge, do you drink with him?”
Thanakar stiffened. “Prince Starbridge is my patient,” he said stiffly.
“Yes, it is unfortunate. Yours is not a healthy influence, my son. And I’m sorry for his family’s sake. His malady is an obscure one. Self-destructive, is he not? I think I know. Abu Starbridge has lost his faith. No wonder he is so unhappy. The world’s too grim to live in without faith.”
“No, damn you. You’re a liar. It’s faith that’s made the world the way it is.”
Chrism Demiurge was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was gentler, higher, more compelling. “I’m sorry to hear you say that,” he said. “Very . . . sorry. It pains me to hear you because, don’t you see, we must stand together, you and I. As a class. The Starbridges must stand together. Our system has its flaws. None knows that better than I. But it has stood the test of seasons. Do you think a weaker system would have kept this city fed? All winter and now spring—more than a lifetime with no food worth the name. You have no conception of the work involved. You are too young to remember, but don’t you see—the rigors of the climate here require strong government. How long do you think we could survive without it? Maybe in your lifetime, maybe you will live to see some loosening of the rope. When the weather changes. But I am an old man.”
* * *
Once, a barber from the middle class, an adventist or a rebel angel, had thrown a bomb at Marson Starbridge in his carriage. That had been when Thanakar’s father was still awake, and he had taken Thanakar to watch the execution. The barber had been crucified, bolted to a steel cross through the holes drilled in his wrists, ankles, and chest. He was a large man, with coarse hair and a red beard, and on the cross he had spat, and jeered at his executioners, and sung songs of insurrection. The man was a hero; in comparison, Thanakar was nothing. He was not likely to be crucified. But still, the image was in his mind all day, after the bishop’s secretary had left. He had tried to read, and study in his workroom, but his mind wouldn’t follow his directions, and he had ended up pacing nervously through his apartments, staring out the windows. Later, he went to see the prince.
The Starbridges of Charn lived in a seething warren of towers and courtyards, all parts of the same enormous building, clutched to the first ramparts of the Mountain of Redemption. To get to a point directly opposite, you took an electric car more than a mile through the solid rock, but for shorter distances there were elevators, and airless stairways, and mirrored passages bright with chandeliers. The apartments of the rich lay behind gaudy doorways; at one of the most impressive, a silver door set with the gilt image of the sun, Thanakar stopped and entered without knocking. The prince was still asleep. His housemaid curtsied. She was a foreign girl, with a wide, flat face. It didn’t matter, said Thanakar; he would write a note. Don’t wake him. And so he sat down at a desk in the hall and took out the notepad that he always carried, but there was no message in his mind. Instead, he drew caricatures in furious, thick lines—the balding prince, grinning queasily. And then, catching a glimpse of himself in a mirror opposite, Thanakar sketched himself, taking no pity on his high forehead and long nose. The housemaid was back, curtseying, with a cup of unrequested tea.
“The commissar would like to see you, sir.”
He took the tea and let it grow cold at the corner of the desk while from memory, he sketched the commissar, Micum Starbridge, Abu’s brother-in-law. His pencil ripped through the paper. The commissar had a big chest, short neck, bristle hair, and a face, at least in caricature, like an old pig.
It was not a fair portrait. Micum Starbridge was a sad, kind man, who had fought his whole life in the eternal war. Now too old for active service, he worked in the Department of Secular Police. Though born in the twelfth phase of winter, he was still vigorous, his face soldierly, brisk, and piglike, except for his eyes. They were large, liquid, and immensely sad, qualities missing from Thanakar’s sketch. They saved his face from ugliness.
When Thanakar entered the commissar’s study, the old man was staring out over the city from the window. Far below, it stretched out to a line of hills, stretched to the horizon in radiating circles of prosperity. New civic ordinances required men to paint the tiles of their rooftops in the colors of their caste. New laws like that exhausted and depressed the commissar, but however much he might have been opposed in principle, he had to admit that the effect was beautiful in practice, at least to the inhabitants of high towers. Below him, the clergy and nobility lived in a speckled bull’s eye of red and gold, and from there, rough concentric circles of magenta, purple, violet, cobalt blue, stretched out to the slums and suburbs, where drab gray and urine yellow mixed well with dust and distance. Sprinkled throughout were mixtures of irregularities—white hospitals, black barracks, red commercial buildings, and the brass belltowers of countless temples. As he watched, one chimed and others joined in, a signal to certain types of workers that their day was over—time to return home.
He turned when the doctor came in, and held out his hands. To Thanakar he seemed, as always, unnecessarily cordial. It irritated him the way the commissar caressed his hands, as if he were trying to impress the fact that though others might reject him for his leg’s sake, Micum Starbridge never would.
“Come in, my boy; come in,” said the commissar. “Why do I never see you? You know you’re always welcome. I knew your father well. My God, but you look just like him when he was a young soldier! Put you in uniform . . . You know you’re always welcome here,” he repeated, and looked at him out of his melancholy eyes. “Why do I never see you?”
“Perhaps because you never look.” Thanakar had made up his mind to try to be offensive, and it irritated him to see that the commissar didn’t seem to mind. There was no pause, no flicker in his face. It was as if he thought that Thanakar had ample reason to be abrasive, poor boy.
“Ali, well, to tell the truth, we’re not doing so much entertaining these days,” admitted the commissar vaguely. “My brother-in-law, you know. It makes things very difficult, and my wife is also sick.”
Thanakar remembered Abu’s sister from before her marriage, a pretty girl, and at the time it had angered him that she had married someone so much older. He hadn’t seen her since; nor had anyone else.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said.
“Yes. That’s why I wanted to see you. Tell me, how is the prince?”
“Better.”
The commissar seemed to expect a larger response. When none came, he said, “That’s excellent. I had noticed it too. And his drinking?”
Thanakar shrugged.
“Well,” exclaimed the commissar with sad heartiness, “I didn’t mind a drink myself when I was young. When I could get it. Tell me,” he said. “Where does he get it?”
“No one you know.”
“I’ll bet. I’ll bet. Yes, well, I suppose it’s better not to know. It’s for the best.” He paused and looked around the room. “But no. Listen. I want to talk to you about my wife.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“No.” The commissar sighed. “No. It’s not that easy. You’re not married, are you, Thanakar?”
The doctor felt the blood in his cheeks. “You know I’m not.”
“No. Of course, how could you be? Well, in some ways you’re lucky. It’s very complicated. All these regulations. I don’t give a damn about them myself,” said the commissar, and unconsciously he touched the tattoo of legal immunity on the thumb of his right hand. “But in a way, it’s a question of duty. And some of them are for the best. I can see the sense in some of them. But when something like this happens, it’s not . . . convenient. I should be able to send her to a doctor. But there aren’t any women doctors anymore, except for midwives, and that’s not the problem. I wish it were. So I thought you wouldn’t mind having a look at her yourself. I mean, I could describe the symptoms, but it’s not the same.”
“It’s against the law. A married woman.”
“Yes, I know. I’ll understand if you refuse. But I thought, well, you’re practically a member of the family. And you’ve been so good for Abu. So discreet.”
Thanakar said nothing.
“I’m sorry to put you in this position, my boy, but I’ve been worried.”
“It’s serious?”
“No. Well, I don’t know. It’s . . . peculiar.”
Thanakar looked down at his boots. Then he nodded.
“You’ll do it?”
“Yes. For a fee.”
The commissar looked surprised. “Well, yes, of course. I suppose so. Anything you say.”
“Not like that. I want your help.” And Thanakar described his conversation with the bishop’s secretary. “I need your protection,” he said.
The commissar waited before replying. “Sit down,” he said, and then he moved over to his desk and stood by the window looking out. When he spoke, it was to change the subject. “The war’s not going well,” he said. “Did you know that?”
“I had heard rumors.”
“Yes. It’s hard to hide so many deaths. Do you know why we’re fighting?” he asked, standing with his hands behind his back, his back to Thanakar. “I mean, not the history, of course. The cause?”
“I suppose it’s a religious controversy. The kings of Caladon are heretics.”
