Sugar Rain (3 page)

 

A young woman stood away from the crowd, under the shadow of the gate. She shook her hair back from her face. She tried to comb some of the tangles out between her fingers, but the sugar rain had turned her hair into a sticky mass of knots. Yet she pulled at it restlessly, and her other hand moved restlessly over her body, touching her skin wherever it was exposed, her neck, her temples, her wrist. She was on fire. Already her temperature was way above a hundred, and the parson had told her that it would keep on rising at a steady rate until her heart burst into flame. One degree an hour, he had said. Then he had given her a glass of water and released her from the hospital, for there was no sense in keeping her. So she had wandered down into the streets, and all evening she had wandered with the crowds, and followed the crowds down into the center of the city, more desperate and distracted every minute. Now she stood at the barricade around the gate and raised her hand to gain the attention of the guard.

“Please, sir,” she whispered, her voice burning in her throat.

“Please sir,” she whispered, holding out her hand. But when the guard came to peer at her palm, she was suddenly afraid he wouldn’t let her pass. Her tattoos were forgeries, a little vinegar would wash them clean, and she was suddenly afraid that she might have smudged them in some places and that tonight of all nights, the last night of her life, the guard wouldn’t let her pass. She closed her hand into a fist. The soldier frowned. “What do you want in there?” he asked.

“I have some work to do.”

The soldier looked up at the gate. “Go home, sister,” he said. “Come back tomorrow. The laundry’s closed.”

“Please, sir. I have something that can’t wait.”

She pulled her hair back from her face, and the guard noticed for the first time how beautiful she was, how sweet her skin, how proud her eyes. He smiled. “What is your name?”

“Rosamundi,” she answered. “Like the flower.”

The soldier smiled. “Rosamundi. This is what I’ll do. The gate’s closed for the night. But give me a kiss, and then we’ll see.”

They stood on opposite sides of the barricade, a line of wooden sawhorses painted red. She ducked underneath and tried to run past him, but he grabbed her wrist in his heavy glove and twisted her against him, forcing her wrist up between her shoulder blades. He was a handsome man with long black hair, handsome in his black uniform with the silver dog’s-head insignia; he twisted her against him, forcing her hand higher when she tried to pull away. He bent down to kiss her and she turned her face away, but even so he was close enough to brush his lips against her cheek. It was enough. He released her suddenly and pushed her, so that she stumbled and fell down. “My God,” he cried. “My God.” He touched his glove to his lip, where her cheek had burned him. Then he spat, and mumbled part of a prayer of purification. “Unclean,” he said, and then he made the sign of the unclean, touching the heel of his palm to his nose and ducking his head down once to either side. In the guardpost underneath the gate, other soldiers of the purge stopped what they were doing and looked out.

Farther on along the barricade, an officer turned his horse and came towards them, flicking his whip against his leg. “What’s this?” he asked when he got close.

“A witch, sir.” The guard was rubbing his lips and pointing.

The captain looked down from his horse. “What makes you think so?” he asked. He was an older man, and he wore his gray hair fastened in a steel clasp behind his neck, in the style of a previous generation.

“Her skin, sir. She’s not human.”

The captain frowned. “Superstitious jerk,” he muttered, and then he swung himself heavily out of the saddle. He squatted down on the cobblestones near where the girl had fallen, and with the butt of his whip he pushed the hair back from her face. “Why, she’s just a child,” he said. He put his whip down on the stones, and then he stripped away one of his black gauntlets so that he could touch her face with his bare hand. “Poor child,” he said. “Injected with the fever. What crime?”

“I don’t know.” The words burned in her throat. “I don’t know,” she cried. She reached out to hold his hand against her cheek. “Please, sir. Please let me in.”

“The gate’s closed,” he said gently.

“Please, sir. My mother runs the elevator above Cosro’s Barbican. I want to see her. This is my last night.”

Soldiers had gathered from the guardpost and stood around them in a circle. The captain glared at them, and the circle widened as the men drifted away and stood whispering in little groups. The captain touched Rosa’s forehead with his fingers.

The gate loomed above them, one of ten set into the mountainside, a square brick edifice two hundred feet high. “Of course, child, of course,” he murmured. He stood and helped her to her feet, and together they passed up the steps and under the brick archway into a high, vaulted chamber stinking of urine. Wasps had made their nests among the pillars, and bats hung from the vault. At the far side, ninety-foot wooden doors led into the first tier of the Mountain of Redemption. But they were locked and barred. Rosa stood in front of them with restless hands, touching her neck, picking at the soft hair below her jaw while the captain hammered on the postern with his fist.

Nothing happened. Rosa turned to look back through the arch, behind her up the Street of Seven Sins, barricaded from the crowd on either side, patrolled by soldiers of the purge. “Don’t worry,” the captain reassured her. “Someone will come.” He looked at his wristwatch. “How much time do you have?”

“I don’t know.”

“Poor child.” He fumbled with a pouch at his belt and found a steel pillbox. “Let me give you something for the pain. If the pain gets too bad.” He held out a small white pill.

“No. My pain is my own. Every minute of it.” She scratched at the skin below her collarbone. “No,” she repeated. “Besides, I need the practice.” She laughed, and pulled down the bodice of her dress to show where the parson had marked her. He had filled her veins with fever, and then he had marked her shoulder with the sign of Chandra Sere, the fourth planet, close in around the Sun. “I need the practice,” she repeated, pulling at the strings of her bodice. “It’s hot where I’m going. Stone melts, they say.”

“Hush, child, don’t bother about that. Those are just legends. Parsons’ dreams. Don’t worry about that. What’s dead is dead.”

“Legends!” she cried. “It is my faith. My God is sending me to hell. It is my God,” she cried, wiping the sweat from around her mouth. “Don’t try to console me. I will not be consoled. But one day I will wake in Paradise.”

“Sooner than you think, child. Sooner than you think.”

“Don’t lie to me!” Daughter of a prostitute, she gripped religion tighter for having come to it so late. Paradise, she thought. For a few nights she had seen it, the last time it had passed close to Earth. Before the sugar rain had started—she had stretched her hands out to it as it rose above the hills.

“My father was a Starbridge,” she continued. “That’s what my mother said. That counts for something, doesn’t it? I told that to the priest this afternoon, but he just laughed. Half-Starbridge, he said, that would take me halfway to Paradise. Tonight Chandra Sere is just halfway. The fire planet—how could he be so cruel?”

The captain said nothing, but he hammered on the postern with his fist. It was a small metal door to the right of the main gate, once painted red, but now streaked and dented, and in some places it had almost rusted through. But a panel on the door’s upper part had recently been repainted with a portrait of St. Simeon Millefeuille, the last of the great teachers. The saint’s face was pensive, but his eyes were vacant and flat white. As Rosa watched, they shuttered inward and disappeared. Behind them, through the saint’s left eyesocket, she could see another eye blinking out at them, and then a bulbous human finger protruded through the hole, curling down over the saint’s cheek. “Hold on,” came a voice from inside. “Who’s there?”

A beam of silver light shot out from the saint’s right eye and played upon their faces and their clothes. There was silence for a moment, and then the voice spoke again. “Gate’s closed, friends. Try the next one over. Deacon’s Portal. Half a mile along the wall, and they don’t lock up till one o’clock. Come back in the morning, better yet.”

The captain stepped forward and held his palm up so that the light shone on his tattoos. “Ah, Captain,” said the voice. “I didn’t recognize you.” There came the sound of bolts being drawn back, and then the door swung inward, revealing a fat man standing in the gap. “Evening, Captain, miss,” he said. He took off his cap and stood rubbing his nose.

“Hello, Dim. Can you let this girl inside?”

“Don’t know why I should.”

“On my responsibility. I’ll answer for it.”

“That’s all very well,” said the little man. “You know the rules.”

“It’s only a few hours, Dim. She’s got the fever. She says her mother runs the elevator up by Cosro’s Barbican. Can you let her in?”

“Don’t want to, Captain. Doesn’t seem likely, anyway. Not unless her mother’s a man.”

The Captain squinted. “What do you mean?”

“Styrene Denson’s run that barbican as long as I can remember. I reckon he’s alive and well.”

Puzzled, the captain turned around, but Rosa was too quick. The fever gave her strength; she jumped into the doorway and pushed the little man in his fat stomach so that he sprawled back against the wall. The captain swore and reached out his hand, but she was already gone, running barefoot down the corridor inside. The captain drew his pistol, but it was already too late. She was gone around a bend in the passageway, and he could hear her bare feet slapping up the first of thirty-seven flights of stairs. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “She can’t go far.”

“I don’t see why not,” replied the little man, touching his stomach where the girl had pushed him. “We’re not chasing her.”

“Well, maybe you should ring the alarm.”

The little man looked up at the wall above his head, to where a red handle was connected to a frayed blue wire all covered with spiderwebs and dirt. “Hasn’t worked in my lifetime,” he said. “Not unless they fixed it recently.”

 

Princess Charity lay sleepless on her bed. She raised herself up on one elbow and looked around, half-dazed and suffocating in her airless, windowless room. In a little while she sat up against the wall and drew her knees up to her chest. At some parts of her life she had been able to sleep all day in that bed, and all night too. For weeks at a time she had been awake only for a few hours in the evening, when her maids had brought her food. Dreams had become more real than life. And this night, too, she had been drowsy. It was her last night on Earth, and she had meant to sleep it through. Already yawning, she had made dinner for herself with her own hands, sitting at the kitchen table peeling strawberries and golden oranges, eating the last of the hashish ice cream straight out of the can. But now, in bed, sleep receded from her grasp, and all the tricks that she had ever learned to coax it closer failed. She leaned her head back against the wall. She hadn’t signed the lawyer’s paper. She hadn’t even read it. She had forgotten all about it.

A silver lamp stood on the table beside her bed, a clump of silver wildgrass, with tiny lights hidden in among its stems. She reached out to turn it on, fumbling with the switch, and then she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up unsteadily. The room was in a whirl around her. She caught a glimpse of her naked shoulder in the mirror hung above her washstand, a glimpse of her hand holding on to one of the carved bedposts. Though it had been months since she could smell it, she could taste the odor of her scented wallpaper in the back of her throat. It sickened her. All around her, queasy combinations of pink and gray fought queasy warfare on the walls—colors high up on the bishop’s scale of visual eroticism, mixed into horrifying patterns by a blind priest. He had lit incense and spattered her mattress with drops of holy oil. He had consecrated her bedroom as a shrine of love. A grotesquely phallic statue of Beloved Angkhdt crouched in one corner over an oil lantern. Her shelves were lined with devotional literature, and the night table was still crowded with unguents and powders, and aphrodisiacs, and strange mechanical devices. She had inherited them from her predecessor in that room, the old man’s second wife. They were neatly arranged and carefully dusted, never opened, never used.

She looked across at herself in the mirror above her washstand, the outlines of her famished body, her dark hair. Mesmerized by her reflection, she walked towards it from across the room, wondering, as her face came into focus, at what point, at what moment she had departed from beauty, for she had been a beautiful child. When she was a child, she had been able to make a silence just by walking into a room. Now, sitting down to stare at herself in the spotted surface of the glass, she wondered at what moment that had changed. There must have been a single instant, she thought, when misery and disappointment had broken through the surface of her features, changing not their shape but their significance. It couldn’t have been long ago. She had been born in spring, and spring was not half gone. She remembered her wedding party when she was just a girl, the day she had married the old man. Then she had been beautiful, in her white dress. And she remembered her friends and schoolmates crowding around to say goodbye, young girls, and boys in their first uniforms. “We will meet again in Paradise,” they had said, loudly coached by the deaf parson who had performed the ceremony. Except for one—she remembered her cousin Thanakar, with his long hair and his long face, limping through the crowd. “It’s a goddamned shame,” he had said, scowling, and when the priest had reached out to restrain him, Thanakar had pushed the deaf man’s hand away, his face twisted up with loathing. He was the only one whom she had seen again.

On a table next to the washstand stood vats and jars of makeup—eyeliner and mascara, vermilion, and aromatic powders wrapped in leaves. Idly, she mixed some colors on her palette, wondering if she could draw some beauty back into her face. She had always been skillful with her hands. She raised her brush up to her eyelid and then hesitated, staring at her face in the mirror. What had gone wrong? Nose, ear, lips, cheek, skin—everything was perfect. Nothing had changed. And yet, something had been added that had ruined it all. In her eye, perhaps. In the center, in the bottom of her eye, there lurked some poisonous new thing.