Sugar Rain (21 page)

“But there are crimes of silence, as well as speech. That is what he stands accused of, and I too would be guilty if I were to remain silent. Even now he has not lied, gentlemen. Don’t think that. He has not spoken one word of falsehood in this chamber. But there are many kinds of lies—gentlemen, every day we have heard him speak. Every day we have sat mesmerized and listened in respectful silence while he outlined the minute details of public policy. Yet in this matter, which affects us all, he has said nothing. We have honored him with the most important post in our new government—minister of distribution. Yet now we learn that he, of all people, has conspired to release half a million criminals onto our streets. He is minister of distribution, let him tell us now what plans he has made to feed and clothe this multitude. What plans has he made to find them shelter, in a city where the recent fires have left one hundred thousand homeless, where most of the sixth ward is still under water? Gentlemen—I have seen them sleeping every night under the Embankment—these people are subsisting on five grams of artificial rice a day!”

Throughout the speech of Valium Samosir, the noise in the assembly had been building, until finally it blocked out his words. Delegates from the outer circles of the amphitheater stood on their chairs to hurl abuse down on the moderates, while the president of the assembly rang his bell. One drunken member, wearing an orange headband, beat the back of the chair in front of him with a wooden club. Raksha Starbridge said nothing, only slunk down deeper into his seat and made a cage out of his trembling fingers. Then suddenly, a smile passed over his lips; he turned towards Valium Samosir and winked.

The young man still had not finished. “Mr. President!” he cried, raising his hand. “Mr. President!” But it was no use. So in a little while he gave up, and crossed his arms over his chest, and stood scowling contemptuously out over the pandemonium that he had made.

He was a fastidious young man, well washed, his white shirt beautifully laundered. He was over six feet tall, but fine-boned, with high cheekbones and pale lips. So that when Professor Sabian stood up, even his supporters saw the contrast, the beautiful young man and the tiny old professor. Emaciated and intensely frail, Sabian stood leaning on his desk, supporting his weight on his knuckles. He seemed very tired, his neck bent, his head bowed low, as if overburdened by the weight of his features—his big eyes, his enormous nose and ears.

“Gentlemen,” he said, and the sound of his high voice succeeded where the bell of the president had failed, for all around him the assembly settled down to listen. “Gentlemen,” he said. “I sense an accusation in what my … honored colleague says, and yet I don’t understand it. What he says is true: I have given orders for the release of all the political prisoners of the former government, a number which my sources put at not above three hundred thousand. And it is true: I did not think it necessary to advise this assembly of my decision. That is not a mark of my contempt for this assembly, as the honorable gentleman has implied, but of my trust: I still cannot believe that any citizen of this city could find it in his heart to disagree with my decision. But it seems I was mistaken.”

Professor Sabian raised his head for a moment to peer around the room, and then he looked back down at the notes upon his desk. “I was mistaken,” he said quietly. “Now we have heard this morning from the honorable gentleman, introducing Motion Number Four-four-one-c and d before the Board of Public Health. Several gentlemen have spoken up in favor of this bill, and still I don’t believe it. That any delegate of this assembly should seriously introduce a motion proposing that the gateways of the Mountain of Redemption be walled up and that three hundred thousand men and women there be left to starve, whose only crime was that they were enemies of our great enemy—brothers and sisters, these prisoners are the first heroes of our revolution. Many are in urgent need of medical attention.”

He paused for a moment, then went on. “Now I know. No one understands, as I do, the burden this will place on our resources. But in all conscience, we have no other choice. And there is a way—for the past week I have been working on the preliminary arrangements. They are practically complete. And I believe that with courage and confidence, and with God’s help … ,” but after that he could go no further. The assembly, which had been listening in silence, suddenly broke out into an uproar of shouting and abuse. It was a serious political mistake, to bring the name of God into that debate, for it touched everything that Sabian had said with the stigma of reaction. It was a slip of the tongue, and political observers later claimed it never would have happened if Professor Sabian had not been so tired, so broken down with working. He was not a religious man, not in the old sense.

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 took 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.