Sugar Rain (22 page)

But at nine o’clock, the hour before midnight, a young woman forced her way up the stairs of the tower and into the professor’s room, not through violence or loud language but by the pressure of her need. She didn’t say a word. The professor was asleep. He woke from the middle of a dream to see her standing there, her back against the door. How long she had been there, he had no idea. His wife had disappeared.

The woman was standing with her hands behind her. She had black eyes, high cheekbones, and black hair cut short, and she looked around the room with quick, nervous movements of her head. She was very thin, but in those days that was not unusual.

Mrs. Sabian came in through another doorway. “Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t disturb him. Can’t you see that he’s asleep?” She crossed the room to take the woman’s arm and lead her out. But the woman shied away and put her hands up to ward her off. Sabian noticed for the first time that she was wearing gloves. That in itself was not unusual; since the revolution, it had become the style in Charn. But not gloves like these: beautiful white linen gloves up to the elbow, and covered with blood.

 

Mrs. Soapwood’s time had come that evening, when the top part of the house shook with her screams. Mr. Taprobane had closed the door that afternoon and marked it with black chalk to keep the gentlemen away. But when the screaming started, many of the women fled as well, fearing contagion. Even women who were used to childbirth blocked their ears and hid themselves away, for the birth of sugar children was a terrifying thing, and was always presaged by that terrifying sound. It was a roaring and a gibbering, as if someone were torturing a monkey in an upstairs room: That was the signal. The pious thought that Angkhdt himself was speaking through the mother’s lips, and they feared what he was saying. When Charity came up from the basement, summoned by her mistress’s cries, the house was dark and empty. Only Marcelline and Mr. Taprobane were left.

They were in the bedroom, and Marcelline was holding Mrs. Soapwood by the wrists while the cripple held her head. “Oh, ma’am,” she said. “Thank God you’ve come.”

She had called Charity “ma’am” since the incident in the bathtub, and could not be persuaded to stop. Fortunately Mrs. Soapwood was past noticing. She lay on her bed with her spine bent like a bow, while Mr. Taprobane sat above her on her pillow and held her shoulders down. There was froth on her lips, and her eyes were rolled back in her head.

Suddenly her left hand broke free, and she grabbed a spoon from the bowl on her night table. She stabbed it up into her face and managed to draw blood out of her cheek before Marcelline could wrestle it away. “This part of it started last night,” said Marcelline. “She’s tried to hurt herself.” And in fact the woman’s lips were bitten, and her arms and cheeks were badly scratched. Her hair was bloody where she had tried to pull it out.

“Help me tie her hands,” said Marcelline. Charity tore one of the silken pillowcases into strips, and then together they tied the woman down and tied her hands in front of her. “What shall we do?” cried Marcelline. “She’ll die like this. You know she will.”

“Shut up,” answered Charity. She was sitting on the woman’s legs, with the woman’s belly in her hands. “Tell me,” she said. “Have her contractions started? Did her water break?”

Mr. Taprobane was crying quietly, the tears running down his face. Mrs. Soapwood was babbling and shouting, the words like curses in the language of the gods. She was bleeding heavily from between her legs, blood mixed with water. Charity’s gloves were soaked in it.

She jumped down off the bed. “Stay here,” she said, “and hold her still. I’ll go get help.”

“Where?”

“Shoemaker’s Hospital. It’s not far, is it? Professor Sabian has a clinic there.”

Marcelline turned towards her, horrified. “Not Sabian,” she said. “You can’t go there. You won’t fool him. Not him. One look at you, he’ll know.”

“You shut up,” answered Charity. “I fooled you, didn’t I?”

Nevertheless, she took precautions. She sent Mr. Taprobane out for a rickshaw, and while she waited, she examined herself in the mirror in the hall. She found some lipstick in the pocket of Mrs. Soapwood’s raincoat, and with careful fingers she rubbed some color in around her eyes. It was a common shade, yellow mixed with brown—a shade most Starbridges would rather die than wear. She tied a rayon scarf around her shoulders, the peach-colored emblem of the guild of prostitutes. She tied it in the knot of bondage and was searching for clean gloves when the rickshaw came.

It was not far. But when she got to Sabian’s house, she felt afraid. There was nothing to worry about; Marcelline had showed her how to streak her hair, and now the solid Starbridge black was streaked with red. It was a good disguise, but that was all it was. It had not changed her. Courage was still the obligation of her caste.

She told her rickshaw driver to wait, and then she stepped across the road and under the archway of the building. There she hesitated, for the court was full of soldiers, a detachment of the revolutionary police. They were playing bowls by torchlight, wrapped in yellow capes against the rain, and some were eating vegetables out of a bucket.

One of them saw her and made a gesture with his fork. He whistled, and others turned to stare at her. She felt the pressure of their staring on her naked cheeks; even though it had been most of a month since she had fled from home, still she was not used to the glances of strange men. It was pollution, and that was a feeling that had lost the thrill of novelty in the filthy streets of Charn.

She pulled her collar up around her face and walked across the yard. The soldiers were staring at her, and two of them had their mouths open. But none of them tried to stop her, and none said anything. And in the house itself no one asked her where she was going, though the rooms and staircases were full of nurses and ink-stained secretaries working late.

She continued up the stairs, slipping past servants and orderlies from the hospital, ignoring their questions. “I can see him,” she said. “Any citizen can see him, that’s what the posters say. Don’t tell me it’s a lie.” And after that they let her pass. They asked her name. “Rosamund,” she said.

They let her pass. And in an upper room she found him, sitting asleep, a small, big-featured man with something childlike in his face once sleep had smoothed away the lines. His glasses had fallen down into his lap.

Unsure of what to do, she stood with her back against the door. She put her hand out towards him and then drew it back. But then an inner door swung open and a fat woman came in. “Ssh,” she said. “Don’t wake him. Please go away.” But he was awake already. He put his fingers to his eyes.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” said Charity. “My mistress has gone into labor.”

“Please go away,” repeated the fat woman. “How did you get in? You need a midwife, that is all. Does my husband have to deliver every baby born in Charn?”

“No midwife will touch her,” said Charity. “It’s a sugar birth.”

Professor Sabian was having trouble focusing. He sat looking from one woman to the other, blinking his eyes. But when his wife went to the door to call to the people in the outer room, he spoke. “Sugar birth?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. I knew you had an interest,” answered Charity. Then, as the fat woman took hold of her arm to lead her away, she continued, “Sir, you’ve got to help her. She’ll die if you don’t come.”

“Sugar,” repeated the professor, still not quite awake. He rubbed his eyes and put his glasses on. “Let go of her,” he said.

His wife tightened her grip. “Martin,” she said. “Look what she is. She’s with the guild; look at her clothes. Don’t let her fool you.”

Sabian frowned. “Let go of her.” And then, to Charity: “Don’t be afraid. Tell me what you know.”

“Please, sir, she’s forty days beyond her time. At least that’s what she told me.”

“How long has it been?” asked Sabian.

“Almost seven hundred days. That’s not normal, is it, for this time of year? My mother carried me that long, but that was wintertime.”

“It’s far too long. Why is this the first I’ve heard of it? Surely she had time enough to make arrangements.”

“I don’t know. She was afraid.”

“Afraid? But there is nothing supernatural about this. It is a natural phenomenon.”

“She was afraid,” said Charity.

Professor Sabian got to his feet. He was grumbling to himself. “Where are you going?” asked his wife. “You sit down. Why is it always you—can’t you send somebody else?”

“She asked for you,” said Charity. “She asked for you by name.”

At that, Professor Sabian looked her full in the face. His eyes seemed enormous underneath his glasses. He frowned and then he shrugged his shoulders. “Today my government condemned three hundred thousand people to a cruel death,” he said. And then he turned back to his wife. “I have a debt to pay.”

 

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!”