Paul Park - Starbridge 02 - Sugar Rain

VIP免费

2024-12-21 0 0 515.83KB 187 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

SUGARR AIN

ISBN: 1-930815-45-X

Published by ElectricStory.com, Inc.

ElectricStory.com and the ES design are trademarks of ElectricStory.com, Inc.

This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales are either the product of

the author’s imagination or used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.

eBook conversion by Ron Drummond.

For our full catalog, visit www.electricstory.com.

Sugar Rain

The Starbridge Chronicles: Book II

By Paul Park

ElectricStory.com, Inc.

For Mary and Nathaniel Lawrence

Part One:

Charity Starbridge

T here is a fresco in the prince’s library where it is all set out: the Sun painted on the black background

of deep space, while around it spins the wheel of Earth’s majestic orbit. And the rim of the wheel is made

of numbers, tiny calculations of painted gold, for in those days the length of the year was a matter of

dogma. Knowing it to be a lie, the bishop’s astronomers had put the figure down as eighty thousand days

precisely. They were in love with a vision of celestial harmony: four seasons of twenty thousand days,

twenty phases of a thousand days each, ten months of a hundred days, ten weeks of ten, twenty hours of

a hundred minutes each. The artist has painted a portrait of the bishop, enthroned within the circle of the

Earth. In her hand she holds a silver sword. It is composed of numbers, the magical equation 1 X 10 X

10 X 10 X 20 X 4 = 1. Under her feet writhe demons and heretics, arbitrary and conflicting figures

issuing from their mouths.

Closer in around the Sun and farther out in space, the nine planets of hell pursue their separate

ways—tight, fiery circles and long, cold ellipses. Each is decorated with scenes of souls in torment. Men

freeze in icy prisons or burn like torches; they burst apart or weigh a thousand pounds, depending on the

differing effects of temperature and atmosphere. And beneath each planet the artist has depicted the

kinds of criminals who inhabit it. Under Baqui Minor, for example, he has painted a seascape, a storm

raging on a sea of liquid helium. Almost overwhelmed by the waves, a raft breaks through a cloud of

spray. Clutched to the deck, miserable men and women huddle together for warmth, a murderer, a tailor,

a paralytic, a smuggler, a homosexual, a man with yellow hair. Each carries, cut into his forehead or the

muscle of his upper arm, the symbol of his vice.

In temporary orbit around Mega Prime moves Paradise, the source of life, a captive planet among the

terrors of the solar system. Its towers and lakes and shining palaces are painted with a kind of wistful

brilliance, and its complicated path among the planets is traced with ribbons of gold. Smallest of all the

planets, it is also the greatest, painted as if lit from within, surrounded by halos of luminescence which

spread out into darkest space. Angels and demons cavort in its upper atmosphere, and on the topmost

tower of the brightest palace sits Angkhdt, dog-headed prophet of God, enthroned on a dais, surrounded

by companies of the blessed, his mouth contorted in a dog-like scowl. He has opened his hand and

released a bird into the air, a falcon bearing a lantern in its claws, setting its wings over the wide abyss

towards Earth.

The falcon flies over a recumbent figure, a sleeping giant painted on an empty section of the wall. The

bones of his forehead have been stripped away, and within the caverns of his brain sit convocations of

God’s priests, holding the synapses of his system in their ancient, spotted hands.

The giant is symbolic of the body of the state. Along his shoulders sit regiments of Starbridges—judges,

princes, generals, financiers, all in gorgeous uniforms. Lower down, craftsmen and artisans crouch among

the giant’s hands, the pennants of their guilds sprouting from his fingers. Along the passages of his entrails

slog tradesmen and merchants in shit-colored robes, dragging enormous packages on sledges. Soldiers

camp upon his thighs. And on his legs and feet squat crowds of men and women dressed in yellow rags,

working people, slaves.

Yet even these are not the lowest. For the giant has relieved himself before going to sleep. A pile of

excrement smokes near his feet, and in it squirm heretics and atheists painted in the shape of

maggots—antinomials, adventists, cannibals, carnivores, and a dozen others, the marks of their heresies

branded on their backs.

* * *

In the days when the fresco was first painted, men believed in miracles. When Paradise was in rotation

close to Earth, people could see with the naked eye what looked like sparks and streamers falling out

from its bright surface into space. They believed there was a spark of divinity burning in the hearts of

men. They believed that from his companies of angels God had exiled some for punishment on Earth.

And when a child was born in those days, a priest would come to cast its horoscope and pattern its

tattoos. He would listen to its crying. For then, in the language of the newborn, the fallen angel in the heart

of every child would describe the sins that had pulled it down, given it flesh and blood, molded its young

bones. And some babies were arrested right away and beaten or condemned to prison. Others, less

perverse, were permitted to learn trades. But most were condemned in their cradles to lifetimes of labor.

For God marked the most sinful with certain signs. They were born into poor families, or their limbs were

crooked, or their eyes were green.

The fresco’s border is decorated with scenes from the life of the Beloved Angkhdt, painted in exquisite

detail. In those days every citizen of Charn could recite the story of how the prophet left his wife and

family to set out on his journey through the stars. He divided his goods among his friends: to Cosro

Starbridge, his gun. To Nestrim Starbridge, his money and his books. To Bartek Starbridge, his livestock

and his plow. In this way he divided all the earth. And at the time the fresco was first painted, in the early

phases of spring, 00016, in the city of Charn, the descendants of these men held sovereign power. They

were the priests and the administrators. They owned every bird and every stone, for their power was in

trust from God. They were the wardens of the prison world.

* * *

Parts of the fresco are so complicated, they require a magnifying glass to decipher. Standing in her

brother’s library, the princess peered at it doubtfully. There was a crack in the wall under the image of

the Sun, a tiny imperfection in the plaster. She reached out to rub it with her thumb, and then she turned

away. * * *

Outside her tower window the city stretched away into the rain and the dark night. She stood staring

towards the east. There, still far away, her brother’s fire turned the intervening houses into jagged

silhouettes, lit from behind by green and silver flares, and the deep red burning. Closer in, the river had

risen through the lowest slums and spread into a lake five miles around, drowning the miserable streets,

making islands out of the highest buildings, the prisons and the temples. Neon steeples and gilded domes

rose up above the water’s inky surface. From time to time, fat boats full of lamplight would glide between

them, carrying priests and soldiers on unknown errands.

She stood at the window of her brother’s library on the thirty-seventh floor. Beneath her, throngs of

people seethed around the first gates of the Mountain of Redemption, the monstrous prison at the city’s

heart. Horse soldiers with whips had kept the major streets clear, but there weren’t enough of them to do

more than that. Looking down from her tower window, Charity Starbridge could see where an entire

shanty-town had sprung up around the gate, cardboard boxes and plywood shelters, and people sitting

around bonfires dressed in urine-colored rags. Displaced by fire and flood, paupers had come from all

over the city to gather at the mountain’s base, to chant the names of rage, to recite in unison the fourteen

reasons for despair. Some squatted in the mud or huddled under umbrellas, cowed to silence by the

constant rain, but others swarmed against the barricades, shaking their skinny fists and shouting. Here

and there in the crowd, men had erected symbols of revolt: a huge chamber pot made out of

papier-mâché, dog-headed effigies of the prince of Caladon, inflated phalluses as tall as men. Someone

had made wings and a tail and a huge beak for himself out of red cardboard, and he danced on a box

above the crowd, a red bird of adventism. Elsewhere, rebel preachers gesticulated and prayed,

surrounded by devotees. Charlatans juggled torches, and mountebanks ate fire. And sometimes a dark

soldier of the purge would push his horse past the barricades around the gate, wading his horse

contemptuously through the mob, clearing a circle around himself with his pistol and his whip. From her

high window, Charity saw one of them raise his hand; she heard the shot and saw the man in the bird suit

pitch backwards into the crowd, flapping his red wings.

After a few minutes the soldier retreated back into the shelter of the gate, and the crowd closed up where

he had been. Charity stared down at him, admiring his black uniform without understanding what he was.

Drugs and innocence and social custom had made a prison out of her mind, and she stared down out of

her window as if through the bars. Somewhere among the edgeless days of marriage she had lost the

ability to think. Or rather, not completely—a week before, she had stopped taking the personality

relaxers prescribed to her on her wedding day, and already it was as if a giant bird which had nested in

her skull had spread its wings and flown away. Already the precepts of the Starbridge marriage code

seemed less consuming. It had been thousands of days since she had last stood before a window looking

out. That kind of activity was frowned on in a married woman. But still, it was hard for her to make sense

of what she saw. The scene below her was so various and complex, the significance of it so bewildering,

that in a little while she gave up trying and took consolation instead in the patterns of color and the shapes

of the buildings. Ten major avenues radiated from the mountain’s base straight to the city walls. One, the

Street of Seven Sins, emerged from the gate below her, and she took consolation in following the long

line of orange streetlights out to the far horizon, where the fire her brother had started filled the sky.

Behind her came a scrabbling and a scratching at the door. She turned and backed away from it, holding

her hands behind her as if hiding something. She backed into a dark corner of the room, where the lamps

were arranged to make her disappear into a cleft of shadow. Each room in the apartment contained a

similar place of refuge, for it was against the law for anyone except her husband or her closest relatives to

see her face. But in the course of her marriage she had broken the law many times. And not so long

before, she had pulverized it so completely that now she obeyed its strictures not out of modesty but out

of fear. She was afraid. In the doorway stood a blind man and his seeing eye.

They hesitated there, a young priest in purple robes with the tattoos of an advocate at law. In his right

hand he grasped the silken collar of his servant, a professional moron, scarcely human anymore, the

marks of surgical incisions standing out all over his pale forehead.

“Are you there?” called out the advocate in his supple, castrate voice. “Woman, are you there?” His

servant was an older man. He crouched down on his haunches, sniffing and peering like a dog, his

master’s hand still tight around his collar.

“Are you there?” called out the advocate. He was recently blinded, his sockets still raw where his eyes

had been torn away. From time to time, reddish tears ran down his face. “Are you there?” he called out.

The servant sniffed and peered, his head oscillating back and forth on the end of a long neck. For a while

his mouth had hung open; now it closed as he settled his attention on the dark corner where the princess

stood. His whole body stiffened, and his face took on an eager, sad expression. “Woman,” he said softly.

Charity Starbridge stepped backwards, and the floorboards squeaked under her feet. The advocate

turned his ruined face towards the sound. “There you are,” he said. “Don’t hide from me. You have no

reason to hide.” He smiled, displaying perfect teeth.

“Please don’t hurt me,” whispered Charity.

There was a pause. The seeing eye moved his head. “Window,” he said. “Books.”

The advocate frowned. “Where are we?” he asked. “What room is this?”

“This is my brother’s library,” answered Charity.

“It is not suitable for you to be here. Where are your servants? There was nobody to let us in.”

“I am alone here,” said the princess. “My brother’s been arrested, and my husband is dead. The servants

have all run away.”

“It is not suitable,” repeated the advocate. “But I am not here to scold you. Not yet. I am here to console

you. I bring a message from the bishop’s council.”

The seeing eye was holding a plastic attaché case in the crook of his forearm. The advocate bent down

to take it, and then he straightened up and took a few unsteady steps into the room. “I’ve brought the

clothes your husband was wearing when he died. Together with a selection of the personal belongings

from his tent. There is also a letter of commendation and a promotion. He will enter Paradise with the

rank of brigadier.”

Charity made no movement, and the advocate stood holding some papers out and frowning. Reddish

tears ran down his face. “There is also a letter,” he continued, “describing the way in which your husband

met his death. I was not there. But I am told that he died bravely on the battlefield and that he

successfully fulfilled the obligations of his name and his tattoos.”

Still in the doorway, the seeing eye peered this way and that. Freed of his master’s hand, he had sunk

down into a strange, dog-like crouch. With his forearms stretched out flat along the floor, he drummed

his fingers on the polished wood.

“I don’t understand,” said Princess Charity. “That’s not what my cousin says. My cousin Thanakar. He

said my husband died miles from the fighting. He said my husband was murdered by one of our own

priests. I don’t understand. My cousin says he was stabbed to death before the battle even started. By a

priest of God, one of the order of St. Lucan the Unmarred. Is that your order? My cousin says you carry

knives hidden in your socks.”

Her voice, puzzled, anxious, hesitant, trailed away. The advocate waited for a moment before answering,

and he turned his head to listen to his servant’s fingers drumming on the floor. “You have seen Thanakar

Starbridge?” he asked.

“No. He wrote to me. Please, I don’t mean to contradict you. It’s just that I’d like to know the truth. My

husband was always kind to me. I’d like to know.”

“Miserable female!” interrupted the advocate, his voice rising high and shrill. “How can you use his

name? How can you even say it? Thanakar Starbridge! We will hang him when we catch him. We will

hang him.” He made an angry, dismissive gesture with his arms, and it was enough to throw him off

balance, so that he staggered and might have fallen. But his servant was watching and rose to help him.

The advocate’s flailing fingers caught the old man by the hair; he yanked back on the old man’s hair and

kept himself upright that way. “Let me tell you,” he continued softly, after a pause. “Thanakar Starbridge

is under indictment for murder and for treason. Adultery is the least of the crimes he is charged with.”

“I don’t understand. He’s done nothing wrong.”

“Hasn’t he? Then be prepared.” The advocate smiled and raised his hand to wipe the red tear from his

eye. “Your cousin is a sick young man. He has picked up some moral virus somewhere, perhaps some

physical corruption. Be prepared. He might claim he contracted it from you. We’ll see. The purge went

out tonight to bring him in.”

Charity leaned back against the bookcase. She remembered a story her brother had told her when she

was just a girl, about a magician escaping from the purge, who turned himself into a sentence and

escaped between the pages of a book, safe in some bookish landscape where the soldiers never found

him. She leaned back and closed her eyes. She felt like crying, but the lawyer’s bloody parody of tears

had robbed her of the impulse, and left her with a knot in her throat and no way of getting rid of it. Inside

her, feelings fought and struggled without the armament of words. Thoughts struggled to be born.

“Say something,” demanded the advocate. “Let me tell you, the judge is disposed to be lenient. Moral

contamination is hard to prove, and frankly, we believe that Thanakar Starbridge was a criminal long

before he met you. The judge is disposed to think that if there was contamination, more likely it went the

other way. He is willing to be lenient. But you must cooperate.”

Charity said nothing. Thoughts of Thanakar had brought him back so vividly, it was as if he were standing

near her, somewhere in the library, out of sight behind her shoulder or behind a turning of the wall. A

pale, dark man with such beautiful hands, the hands of a healer. How could she have resisted, when he

touched her with those hands?

“So,” continued the advocate. “You have nothing to say.” He wiped his cheek. “You think it will be his

word against yours. Not quite.” He smiled. “We have other evidence. Learn from this. A criminal pollutes

everything he touches. He left a mark, a stain on your bedsheets. The woman who does your laundry

alerted the police.”

“She had no right.”

“True. She had no right. And she has already been condemned for her impertinence, if it is any

consolation to you. For slandering her superiors. Injected with the fever, if it is any consolation. The

sentence is already carried out. But the evidence remains.”

Charity stepped out from her dark corner. She turned to the window, her mind empty. She stared out to

the horizon, where the fire burned bright. She watched a sugarstorm gathering above the river, the

raindrops burning as they fell. Outside, far below, the crowd struggled and shouted. Wisps of chanting,

fragments of revolutionary songs rose up to the tower window. “Where is my brother?” she asked

suddenly.

“Prince Abu Starbridge is being held at Wanhope Prison. In the psychiatric ward. He too is in deep

trouble, deeper than yours. For him there is no way out. But you—let me finish. I told you, the judge is

inclined to be lenient. Thanakar Starbridge is a known criminal, and there are extenuating circumstances.

You are a widow, after all. But we need your cooperation. We need your testimony to condemn him.”

He fumbled with the papers in his case. “I’ve prepared a statement for you to sign. It is a confession of

adultery. Sign it and we will let you live. The bishop’s council has found a refuge for you in the home of

Barton Starbridge, your mother’s second cousin. Seven hundred miles south of here. You would be free

to collect your husband’s pension.”

From the window Charity could see down into the courtyard of a small shrine, where an execution was in

progress. A thicket of gallows rose from the center of an open space, protected from the crowd by a

circle of the spiritual police, the black-coated soldiers of the purge. As the princess watched, a priest

performed the last rites for a condemned prisoner, cutting the mark of absolution into his face, checking

his passports.

“Woman, say something!” cried the advocate behind her. He held out the unsigned confession, not

realizing that she had turned away from him. Squatting nearby, the seeing eye drew back his lips to reveal

long teeth filed into points. “Window,” he said softly.

“God damn it, woman, pay attention,” shouted the advocate. “Don’t waste my time. You have no choice.

If you refuse to sign, the council will vote to terminate your duties here. They’ll send you home, and I tell

you, the journey will be hard and long. Paradise is in orbit near the seventh planet. More than seven

hundred million miles from here.”

“I’d like to see my brother,” said Charity after a pause.

Down below, the priest had strung up several prisoners. They hung suspended from the highest gibbets,

their bodies revolving slowly in the rain. On the scaffold below, the priest danced a quiet version of the

dance of death, lit by a spotlight from the temple tower. He was a good dancer, graceful and sure, but

even so, the crowd was angry. They shouted and threw bottles. A bottle hit the priest on the shoulder as

he danced; he stopped and stood upright, but Charity was too far away to see the expression on his face.

He was in no danger. The purge stood around the scaffold in a circle, with automatic rifles and bright

bayonets. In a little while he started to dance again.

“I’d like to see my brother,” repeated the princess.

“That’s not possible. God damn you, why do you even ask? Here. Here he is, if you really want to see.”

The advocate stretched out his hand, palm up, and Charity turned back to watch him. In a little while the

air above his palm started to glow, and then a tiny figure materialized out of the air, a man sitting on a

bed, reading, too small even to recognize. The advocate closed his hand, and the image disappeared as if

crushed between his fingers.

“Now,” he said. “Would you like to see him die?” He opened his hand again, and Charity could see a

tiny pyre of logs. Here the scale was even smaller; Charity could see a throng of tiny figures, red-robed

priests and black soldiers. Through the middle of the crowd, a pickup truck moved slowly forward

towards the pyre, a single figure standing upright in the back.

The seeing eye sat up on his haunches and stared at the bright image, licking his lips with his long tongue.

Charity, too, stood mesmerized until the advocate closed his hands again. “There,” he said. “Are you

satisfied?”

She was not satisfied. She began to cry. At the sound, the advocate tilted his head, listening intently with

a puzzled expression on his face, though he must have been used to hearing people cry. He listened, and

then he reached his hand up to touch his cheek, where his own red tears had left a scum.

He held out the paper for her to sign, but she had turned away again. In a little while he opened his

fingers and let the paper settle to the floor. “I’ll leave it,” he said quietly. “Don’t be a fool. I’ll send my

clerk tomorrow morning, and if you still refuse, at ten o’clock I will come back to send you home. I will

pump the blood from your body, and I won’t be gentle, either. That I promise. Women like you are a

disgrace to us. You don’t deserve your own tattoos. If I could send you to hell, I would.”

* * *

All that day the churches had been packed with worshipers, and when the priests had rung the bells for

evensong, the crowds had taken to the streets, jamming the roads, moving in slow streams towards the

center of the city, down towards the Mountain of Redemption, where they had spread out around its

lower slopes. The gigantic prison blocked out the sky. Even in those days it was the biggest building in

the known universe, a huge, squat, unfinished tower, circle after circle of black battlements. It held a

population of one million souls. And all around its lowest tier, sticking up like the spikes of a crown

around a great, misshapen head, rose smaller towers, the Starbridge palaces, white and graceful, glinting

with lamplight. Below, the streets were full of people chanting and singing. They looked up towards the

windows while the rain fell steadily in dark, viscous drops, tasting of sugar and smelling of gasoline,

coating men’s clothes and crusting their skins. Here and there, preachers in the crowd spoke of the

apocalypse, and some preached slowly and softly, and some ranted like maniacs. Numerologists had

made a magic number out of the date: October 44th, in the eighth phase of spring. The forty-fourth day

of the eighth month—some had daubed this number, 4408800016, on cardboard placards, which they

waved above their heads. According to some long-extinct rule of prosody, this number duplicated the

meter of the so-called apocalyptic verses of the Song of Angkhdt, the verses that begin, “Sweet love,

you can do nothing further to arouse me. It’s late—don’t touch me anymore . . .”

An old man recited the lamentations of St. Chrystym Polymorph in a loud voice; naked to the waist, he

whipped himself listlessly with a knotted scourge, not even raising a bruise. The sugar rain coated his

shoulders. It was dismal weather, a dismal season. The food reserves, which previous generations of

priests had stored up through summer and fall, were almost gone, and the daily ration of rice soup and

edible plastic was scarcely enough to keep a child alive. Hunger had made men crazy. Strange sights and

visions had been reported. An old woman had seen huge figures stalking her street in the hour before

dawn—the angels of the apocalypse, she cried: war, famine, and civil war, she cried, and she had taken a

photograph. People stood around her and passed it from hand to hand, studying the dark, unfocused

image. The old woman was an adventist. “Sweet friends,” she cried, “the hour is here. All my life I’ve

prayed that I would live to see it. The powers of Earth are overthrown. The bishop herself has been

imprisoned. The soldiers fight among themselves. And the Starbridges . . .” She paused to spit, and

shake her fist at the pale towers above her head. “Every morning they are fewer. Every morning I have

seen them at the southern gates, their motorcars loaded up with food.” It was true. In their lifetimes

people could remember when the windows of the Starbridge palaces lit the streets for miles around, but

now more than half the windows were dark, and some whole towers stood empty, abandoned. The

Starbridges had retired south to their estates, waiting for better weather. In summertime their

grandchildren would return to rule the city.

The old woman had long gray hair, a long nose, and thin cheeks branded with the mark of heresy.

“Sweet friends,” she cried. “Old Earth is finished. But lift yourselves up, lift up your hearts, because a

flower will grow out of this wreckage, and a garden that will cover all the earth. Birds and fish will speak.

And there will be no more bloodshed, no, and no more hunger, and all these things will be like memories

of nightmares. And God will wash the world between his fingers, and he will wash away all the priests

and tyrants, the judges and the torturers. Look!” she screamed. “It has already been accomplished!” She

grabbed back her photograph and held it up above her head.

* * *

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

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

SUGARRAINCopyright©1989byPaulPark.Allrightsreserved.ISBN:1-930815-45-XPublishedbyElectricStory.com,Inc.ElectricStory.comandtheESdesignaretrademarksofElectricStory.com,Inc.Thisnovelisaworkoffiction.Allcharacters,events,organizations,andlocalesareeithertheproductoftheauthor’simaginationorusedfictitiou...

展开>> 收起<<

Paul Park - Starbridge 02 - Sugar Rain.pdf

共187页,预览38页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Paul Park - Starbridge 02 - Sugar Rain

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: