And Softly Fell the Black Rain

PART I

THE OLD NEW WORLD

1

In the New City, people always complained about the weather. This time, it was drizzling. Countless tiny droplets did not just fall from the grey sky but seemed to float in all directions, defying gravity, soaking pedestrians no matter how well they thought themselves protected. Umbrellas—though few carried them—were useless. Hats—useless. Women covering their hair and shoulders with plastic headscarves fared slightly better. Yet even they had rain streaking down their faces, dripping along their necks, seeping into their clothes.

In the throngs of people in dark coats, a tall gentleman in a beret was trying to outpace the crowd. From time to time, he looked back. He crossed streets and quickly turned corners. He suddenly stopped at the traffic light. It was green and the crowd was crossing the street while the man was standing frozen. He slowly turned his head and squinted, looking for someone. When the light was about to turn red, he rushed across. Three men in long black raincoats and matching brimmed hats stepped out of the crowd and followed the tall man. He picked up the pace. They matched his speed. 

“Professor Sunders! Halt!”

“Jeremy Sunders! Don’t move!” The official tone of the commands coming from a bullhorn froze the crowd. Nearby onlookers stared at the tall man, inadvertently thwarting his attempted escape. Someone else cried out from the crowd, “Jeremy, stop!”

In the space filled with rain droplets, grey crowds, and their discontented murmur, the professor’s steps hammered against the pavement. He ran, then stopped, turned, ran again, stopped. He knew he was being cornered. No one moved to help him.

“You filthy enemy of the State!” someone cursed him from the crowd. He could not see his face. They were all faceless to him—even his pursuers. Still, most of the crowd looked indifferent. There were no vehicles in the street. They must have already stopped or diverted whatever few cars were coming through. Sunders made a few steady steps to the middle of the road. Someone stepped off the walkway onto the street and slowly walked to the professor.  

Sunders saw him. Another man, dressed in a matching raincoat. He stopped twenty meters away with his hand resting at his waist. In his left hand, the man held a bullhorn.

“Professor Jeremy Sunders. You are under arrest for treason!”

The crowd gasped and stepped back from the edge of the pavement. This man—possibly an enemy of the State—had, just moments ago, been walking freely among them.

Sunders ignored the crowd. He saw the other three slowly inching towards him from his left. His eyes locked on the man with the bullhorn. The man’s other hand rested at his waist, on what Sunders was certain was a gun. Sunders looked at him, calm and sad. Then his lips twitched somewhere between contempt and an ironic smile. He knew that they wanted to take him alive. Slowly, he turned to face the three men approaching. He looked at the crowd: dozens of eyes from the grey crowd fixed on him. Sad grey wet faces. What do they know? Nothing. He could hear uneven breathing, the scraping of wet cloth, and the hissing of rain in the heavy silence.

He looked up, letting the rain pepper his face with tiny beads. Then, slowly, he took a handkerchief from his raincoat and wiped his face. He briefly pressed it against his mouth, swallowed, then threw the wet handkerchief on the road. 

Professor Sunders was not sure if his pupil was in the crowd. He could only hope that, among the hundreds of eyes watching him, one pair understood. He did not dare to look for him. He lowered his eyes to the dark surface of the road.

The men in black raincoats grabbed the professor’s hands. Their leader, the one with the bullhorn, picked up the handkerchief and shoved it into his coat pocket.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, please. I must remember your faces so your superiors know whom to promote. And don’t damage the asset—isn’t that what you call me? You might find yourselves demoted or even arrested.” 

A black van with flashing lights shot around the corner and screeched to a halt. The men pushed the professor inside and the van took off blaring the siren. Following it came another van, but it moved slowly. The loudspeakers mounted on the second van blared: “Forget what you saw! Discussion of this incident is forbidden! Move along! Move along!” Within moments, the crowd was moving again.

Inside the van, their leader pointed his gun at Sunders and ordered, “Open your mouth!” Others held him down. Jeremy’s eyes widened when he saw one of them with a pockmarked face pull out a military knife and point the blade towards his mouth. The pockmarked man gestured with the blade: wider. Sunders complied. The beam of light flooded his mouth.

“Clear,” said the man with the flashlight.

Professor Sunders closed his eyes. His mind ran through the circuits of his memory one by one, checking whether he had left any traces, any references that might endanger his friends and colleagues. He could not be a hundred percent sure—he knew that. He ran through it once more. No living relatives. The papers are gone. The safehouse is not compromised. And there was nothing—nothing—that could lead them to his pupil. 

His eyelids were growing heavy. The pockmarked man slapped him. “Hey! Stay awake! Keep your eyes open!”

Sunders had about five minutes. Roughly the time it would take them to reach the secret police building. 

2

Rihkat Nesimi, a young physicist, almost missed Professor Sunders’s arrest. He had left the laboratory late when he found himself trapped in the crowd. At barely a hundred and fifty-five centimeters tall, Rihkat could see little beyond wet shoulders, hats, and umbrellas. He heard the command: “Professor Sunders! Halt!” but he could not see his mentor. People in the crowd were pushing forward to see what was happening. Someone pushed him aside and cursed. Rihkat tried to move closer to see. He briefly saw the secret police officer with a bullhorn. Still, Sunders was nowhere in sight. When the officer announced the arrest of Sunders, some of the people in the front started pressing backwards. Again, briefly, he saw the tall figure of the professor pressing a handkerchief to his face. The next thing he saw was the police officer picking it up. He dropped it, Rihkat thought, but was not very certain. What if the police just took it from his hand?

The crowd started moving again. When the vans had already left, he overheard someone saying, “Why’d they need his filthy handkerchief?” Rihkat moved with the crowd following two men wearing heavy coats under plastic covers.

“I dunno.”

“Maybe it was something… ”

“Shut up and move along. Don’t ask stupid questions.”

Rihkat knew this incident was far from unique.  Just past winter, the metal shop worker, known to all as Uncle Sasha, disappeared for two weeks, came back, and then vanished altogether. No one had talked about him since. 

Sunders’s guidance was crucial for Rihkat’s physics education. He recalled how his mentor was carefully hinting at what questions to ask and what questions not to ask. Sunders said that scientific research results can be used for the benefit of all people or of very few, but then it would be very challenging for the privileged to control and coordinate a system as complex as society, where they have to constantly solve a barrage of problems and correct millions of mistakes, because regular citizens are deliberately left ignorant.

“Don’t ask why we are doing this. Ask what we can do to make it practical, to follow the orders of the superiors, and for the glory of our nation,” Sunders would say with a cunning smile.

“Isn’t the ‘why?’ question a cornerstone of physics? And ‘how?’—more like an engineering question?”

“Ideally, both disciplines ask similar questions. What I mean is that the scientific principles on which physics is based are often more abstract and require a chain of why and how questions. Engineering, as they teach it here, is practical knowledge: once you know how to build something, you don’t really have to understand the science behind it. You just know it works.”

“What if the machines break?”

“Engineers can fix them.”

“Should they ask, ‘Why do the machines break?’”

“Trust me, it’s a much simpler and safer question than challenging the officially established science.”

After a pause, Sunders added, “Otherwise, we are ‘dead meat’.”

Rihkat looked at him for a moment, then smiled—only briefly. The joke had another meaning between them. They had agreed long ago that if something happened to Sunders, a package of meat would arrive from his butcher.

He then said, “I thought the proper questions would lead to more practical results.”

Sunders’s broad smile and raised eyebrows deepened parallel wrinkles on his large forehead. He said, “You can think as you wish, but do not tell anyone—even me. How you got your results ultimately does not matter as long as you got them to the satisfaction of the superiors.”

Sunders’s reaction confused Rihkat. Did he really mean what he said? He wondered. Is he trying to say something else?

As Rihkat’s knowledge and experience grew, he found himself roaming the ancient archives. With special permission, Professor Sunders was allowed to study the manuscripts more than four hundred years old. That was when Rihkat realized that the real history stretched beyond one hundred fifty years of the Federation’s officially taught history. The books he had access to were damaged and missing many pages. He could not ask the ‘why?’ question. 

The reading of the archives was closely watched by archive supervisors attached to each visiting scientist. Sunders and Rihkat had to take turns reading the manuscripts under the watchful eyes of the archivists. Every visitor was obligated to take careful official notes of pages and paragraphs read. To conceal the pages they actually were reading and avoid being interrogated afterwards, Sunders and Rihkat came up with a system. Sunders would record the page and paragraph number in the official notes, where Rihkat was supposed to pick up reading. Rihkat knew what to really read and focus on based on some agreed observation on the day they were going to the archives. This could be a number of pigeons on the roof of the nearby building or even the page in the lab book. On a later visit, Rihkat would try to make connections with references from another scholarly article or a book. 

Once they were walking along the long corridor from the archives to the elevator shaft. Sunders, barely opening his mouth, whispered to Rihkat:

“Can you believe that the ancients already had the technology we are looking for more than a thousand years ago?” As he asked, he squeezed his student’s elbow, pointing forward.

“I cannot.” Rihkat struggled to stay calm. 

“We are going in circles trying to find what has been found and lost at least three times in the past millennia,” Sunders added. “Look straight.”

Sunders went on, “You saw the references to the ancient sources. The oldest sources cited were over eleven hundred years old.”

Rihkat swallowed hard, then whispered, “That is blasphemy.”

“Truth doesn’t become blasphemy because somebody forbids it.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“If we use what we found, we reveal where we found it. If we reveal where we found it, they may destroy the only surviving source.”

“Why would they do that?” 

“Why?” Sunders smiled. “Again?”

After a few steps, he added, “Think for yourself. You come up with your own discovery. Even if it had already been discovered centuries ago, you can write your own books and hope they will stay there millennia after you and I are gone.”

“Is this about vanity?”

“Legacy, my friend.”

“So you want me to think of this energy problem without digging in the archives.”

Sunders barely nodded.

“The books will be preserved, and you will add your own to the collection.”

“There is something else,” Sunders said as they neared the elevators. Two guards had their eyes on them.

“When you go there alone next time, ask for the climate collection volumes three to seven. It may help you find the clues about the source of energy. There, find the lines about the rain.”

“What? Rain?”

They stopped and nodded to the guards.

Sunders barely moved his lips.

“Black rain.”