Shadrach in the Furnace

  “Where?” he says.

  “At the tower. I hate making love in rented rooms. Didn’t you know that?”

  So he must stifle his longings another hour or two. Perhaps that’s the lesson of dream-death: delay gratification, purify the spirit. Or perhaps not. It is a jolt, stepping from the radiant ambiance of the dream-death tent to the darkness without, and the night is cold, very cold even for the Mongolian May, just a hint of snow in the air, a few hard little flakes whipping on the breeze. Riding the tube-train back they say almost nothing to each other, but as they approach the Ulan Bator station he says, “Were you really there?”

  “In your dream?”

  “Yes. When we met Pancho Sanchez. And the First Emperor. And when we went to Mexico.”

  “That was your dream,” she says. “I was having other dreams.”

  “Oh. Oh. I wondered. It seemed very real, talking to you, having you beside me.”

  “The dreams always seem that way.”

  “But I’m surprised at how playful it was. Frivolous, even.”

  “Is that how it was for you?”

  “Until the end,” he says. “It got solemn then. When things grew calm. But before then—”

  “Frivolous?”

  “Very frivolous, Katya.”

  “For me it was solemn all the time. A great quietness.”

  “Is it different for everybody?”

  “Of course,” she says. “What did you think?”

  “Oh.”

  “You thought, when you met me in your dream, that I was actually there, talking with you, sharing your experiences?”

  “I confess that I did.”

  “No. I wasn’t there.”

  “No. I suppose not.” He laughs. “All right. I wasn’t thinking. For you it was somber. For me it was all games. What does that say about you, about me?”

  “Nothing, Shadrach.”

  “Really?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “We don’t express something about our inner selves in the dreams we choose for ourselves?”

  “No,” she says.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “The dreams are chosen for us. By a stranger. I don’t know more than that, but the woman in the mask told us what to dream. The broad outlines. The tone.”

  “And we have no choice about the content?”

  “Some. Her Instructions are filtered through our sensibilities. But still—still—”

  “Is your dream always the same?”

  “In content? In tone?”

  “Tone.”

  “The dream is always different,” Katya says. “And yet the flavor is the same, for death is always the same. Different things happen each time, but the dream brings you always to the same place, in the same way, at the end.”

  “To the still point?”

  “You could call it that. Yes. Yes.”

  “And the meaning of what I dreamed—”

  “No,” she says. “Don’t talk about meaning. Dream-death gives no oracular wisdom. The dream is without meaning.” The tube-train has reached Ulan Bator. “Come,” Katya says.

  They go to her suite, two floors below Nikki Crowfoot’s, a dark place, three small rooms furnished with stark, heavy hangings. Once more they are naked before one another, once more he feels the overwhelming pull of Katya’s thick sturdy body; he moves stiffly toward her, embraces her, digs the tips of his fingers into the deep flesh of her shoulders and back. But he cannot bring himself to kiss that terrifying mouth. He thinks of the joyous couplings he shared with her in dream-death, the rice paddy, the fragrant Mexican nights, and he tugs her down with him to the bed; but, though he fills his hands with her breasts, though he imprisons his head between her smooth cool thighs, though he drives himself urgently against her flesh, he is altogether unmanned by her physical presence, helpless, limp. Not for the first time, either: their sporadic lovemaking has always been marked by such difficulties, which he rarely experiences with other women. Katya is not bothered by this: calmly she pushes him back against the pillow with a thump of her knuckles on his chest, and then, bending forward, she goes to work on him with her mouth, her sinister and ferocious sharp-fanged mouth, lovingly engulfing him, and he feels lips and tongue, lips and tongue, warm and wet, no hint of teeth at all, and under her cunning ministrations he relaxes, he puts aside his fear of her, he grows stiff at last. Deftly she slides upward over him—it is a maneuver she has clearly practiced often—and, with a sudden startling thrust, drives herself downward, impaling herself on him. She squats astraddle, peasant-strong, above him, knees flexed, buttocks taut, body rocking. He looks at her and sees her face distorted by the early spasms of ecstasy, nostrils flared, eyes tight shut, lips pulled back in a fierce grimace; then he closes his own eyes and gives himself up fully to their union. An awesome energy courses through her. She rides him, now squatting high so that their only contact is at their loins, now pressing herself full length against his body, but always remaining above him, always staying in command. He does not object to this. She writhes, grinds, pushes, twists, suddenly rears back and breaks into bizarre laughter; it is, he knows, her signal, and he seizes her breasts and joins her in the final climax.

  Afterward he dozes, and wakes to find her quietly sobbing. How strange, how unlike her! He had never imagined Lindman to be capable of tears.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Katya?”

  “Nothing. Please.”

  “What is it?”

  Sullenly, face against pillow, she says, “I’m afraid for you.”

  “Afraid? Why? What about?”

  She looks toward him and shakes her head again. She clamps her lips. Suddenly her mouth looks not at all fierce. A child’s mouth. She is frightened.

  “Katya?”

  “Please, Shadrach.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She says nothing. She shakes her head. She shakes her head.

  14

  Over a week goes by before Shadrach sees Nikki Crowfoot again. She claims she is very busy in the laboratory—problems of recalibration, necessary compensatory adjustments in the Avatar persona-transplant system now that the donor body will not be Mangu’s—and therefore she is too tired in the evenings to want company. But he suspects she is avoiding him. Crowfoot has always been at her most sociable when she is most overworked; it is her escape from pressure. Shadrach does not know why she would want to avoid him. Surely the night he spent with Katya Lindman has nothing to do with it. He has been to bed with Lindman before, and with others; Crowfoot too has had other partners; such things have never mattered between them. It baffles him. When they speak by telephone Nikki is wary and aloof. Beyond doubt something has gone wrong in their relationship, but he has no theories.

  A new Genghis Mao crisis distracts him briefly from these matters. For the past several days the Khan has been leaving his bed to work in his office, to visit Surveillance Vector One, to direct the Committee activities from the headquarters room. His recuperation was proceeding so smoothly that there seemed no reason to confine him. But now Dr. Mordecai’s sensitive implants are picking up early warnings of trouble—epigastric pulsations, faint systolic murmur, general circulatory stress. Too much activity too soon? Shadrach goes to the Chairman’s office to discuss the problem. But Genghis Mao, still busy with his Mangu monuments and his roundup of assassins, does not feel like conferring with his doctor, does not want to talk about symptoms. He brushes Shadrach’s queries aside with a brusque declaration that he has rarely felt better. Then he turns back to his desk. The arrests, he tells Mordecai proudly, now total two hundred eighty-two. Of these, ninety-seven have already been found guilty and sent to the organ farms. “Soon,” the Khan says, “the lungs and kidneys and intestines of these criminals will serve to extend the lives of loyal members of the government. Is there not poetic justice in that? All things are centripetal, Shadrach. All opposites are reconciled.”


  “Two hundred eighty-two conspirators?” Shadrach asks. “Did it take that many to push one man out one window?”

  “Who knows? The actual crime perhaps required no more than two or three perpetrators. But a great network of subordinate plotters must have been needed. Security devices had to be altered, guards distracted, cameras deflected. We believe it may have taken a dozen conspirators simply to remove the bodies of the killers from the plaza after they jumped.”

  “To do what?”

  Genghis Mao smiles blandly. “We believe,” he says, “that the assassins, after hurling Mangu from the window, deliberately jumped from the same window themselves to keep from being captured in the building. Confederates in the plaza immediately gathered up their bodies and drove off with them, while others removed all signs of their deaths from the pavement.”

  Shadrach stares. “Horthy saw only one man falling, sir.”

  “Horthy did not remain in the plaza to observe further developments.”

  “Even so—”

  “If the killers of Mangu did not leap after him,” the Khan says, eyes bright with the brightness of reason triumphant, “what did become of them? No suspicious persons were found in the tower after the crime.”

  Shadrach is unable to find an appropriate reply to this. No comment he might make, he suspects, would be constructive. After a pause he says, clearing his throat, “Sir, if we could talk about your health again for a moment—”

  “I told you. I feel fine.”

  “The symptoms I’ve begun to detect are fairly serious ones, sir.”

  “Symptoms of what?” Genghis Mao snaps.

  Shadrach suspects that the Khan may be developing an aneurysm of the abdominal aorta—a defect in the wall of the great vessel that conveys blood from the heart. He asks Genghis Mao if he has felt any unusual discomfort, and the Chairman grudgingly admits recent sharp pains in the back and sides. Dr. Mordecai does not point out how this contradicts Genghis Mao’s claim of being in good health; but the admission does give Shadrach the upper hand, and he orders the Chairman back to bed for rest.

  Peering through the eye of a fiber probe extending into Genghis Mao’s catheterized aorta, Shadrach confirms his diagnosis. The recent liver surgery, perhaps, has released emboli into the Chairman’s bloodstream, and one has somehow made its way against the arterial flow, lodging in the abdominal aorta and causing infection. Or perhaps not, but at any rate a tumor is taking form, and more surgery will be necessary. If it were anyone else, the risks of an operation so soon after a major organ transplant might be even greater than the risks of letting the aneurysm expand. But Shadrach has become amazingly casual about delivering up his venerable patient to the knife. Genghis Mao’s resilient body has been opened so often that it accepts frequent surgery as the natural state. Besides, the aneurysm is not far from the liver, and Warhaftig will be able to enter through the recent incision, which is only now beginning to heal.

  The news annoys Genghis Mao. “I have no time for surgery now,” he says, irritated. “We’re still finding new conspirators every day. I must give my full attention to the problem. And next week is Mangu’s stale funeral, at which I intend to preside in person, I—”

  “The danger is critical, sir.”

  “You always tell me that. I think you enjoy telling me that. You’re too insecure, Shadrach. Even if you didn’t manage to find some new crisis every few weeks I’d still keep you on the payroll. I like you, Shadrach.”

  “I don’t invent the crises, sir.”

  “Even so. Can’t this wait a month or two?”

  “We’d have to make a fresh cut in healed tissue then.”

  “What of it? What’s one more slice?”

  “Aside from that, the risks—”

  “Yes,” Genghis Mao says. “The risks. What risks do I run by letting this thing sit?”

  “Do you know what an aneurysm is, sir?”

  “More or less.”

  “It’s a tumor containing blood or a blood clot, in direct contact with the wall of an artery and causing deteriorative changes in the tissue surrounding it. Think of it as a balloon, gradually being inflated. When balloons get too big, they explode.”

  “Ah.”

  “Eventually this aneurysm could rupture—into the intestines, the peritoneum, the pleura, or the retroperitoneal tissues. Or it might cause an embolism of the superior mesenteric artery, producing intestinal infarction. The aorta itself could rupture spontaneously. There are several other possibilities. All fatal.”

  “Fatal?”

  “Invariably fatal. Agonizing pain, death usually within minutes.”

  “Ah,” Genghis Mao says. “Ah. I see.”

  “It could come at almost any time.”

  “Ah.”

  “Without warning.”

  “I see.”

  “We’d be helpless, once the aneurysm goes. No way of saving you, sir.”

  “Ah. I see. Ah.”

  Does he see? Yes. Certainly, visions of erupting aneurysms are floating before Genghis Mao’s basilisk eyes. The lean leathery cheeks contract in profound speculation; somber frowns furrow the bronze forehead. The Khan is troubled. He had not planned on being confronted with potential extinction this morning. Now, obviously, he contemplates the going of Genghis II Mao IV Khan from the world, and likes the idea no more than ever. The Permanent Revolution that has transformed the aching world requires a Permanent Leader; though Genghis Mao has often said, echoing Mao I’s similar words, that when one participates in a revolution one attains revolutionary immortality, one transcends the death of the individual by living on indefinitely within the permanent revolutionary ferment one has helped to create, it is plain that Genghis Mao prefers the other, less metaphorical species of immortality for himself. He glowers. He sighs. He gives his consent to this latest surgical interruption of his revolutionary labors.

  Warhaftig is summoned. There are conferences; schedules are rearranged; details of the surgery are explained to the Khan. The blood vessels will be clamped above and below the aneurysm to arrest circulation temporarily while Warhaftig removes the aneurysm and installs a dacron or teflon prosthesis.

  “No,” the Khan says. “Not a prosthesis. You can use a tissue graft, can’t you? There’s not much of a rejection problem with arterial tissue. It’s like stitching in a length of hose.”

  Warhaftig says, “But dacron and teflon have proven perfectly—”

  “No. I have enough plastic in me already. And the organ banks are overflowing with new material. Give me real aorta.” Genghis Mao’s eyes gleam. “Give me aorta from one of the recently convicted conspirators.”

  Warhaftig looks at Shadrach Mordecai, who shrugs.

  “As you wish,” the surgeon says.

  Shadrach has lunch soon afterward with Katya Lindman. When they have eaten, they stroll in Sukhe Bator Square. He has spent more time than usual with Lindman since the night they went to Karakorum, although he has not slept with her again. He finds her more gentle, less threatening now, and is not sure whether she has changed or simply his attitude toward her; waking up and finding her sobbing may have had something to do with it. Certainly she has become warm and friendly, so much so that he suspects and fears she may even be falling in love with him; yet there is something reserved at her core, some ineluctable holding back, a zone of silence within her that strikes him as the enemy of love. There never were such sealed places in Nikki Crowfoot when Shadrach’s relationship with her was going well.

  The midday sun is bright, the air soft, the day warm; golden flowers gleam in the terra-cotta tubs of shrubbery that decorate the plaza. Katya walks close to him, but their bodies do not touch. She has already heard of the new crisis. News of all sorts travels inordinately swiftly through the Grand Tower of the Khan, but especially news of the health of Genghis Mao. “Tell me what an aneurysm is,” she says. He gives her an elaborate explanation and describes the operation that will be performed. They are standing near the place where Mangu fell.
When he finishes, Shadrach looks up and tries to imagine two or three assassins plummeting in Mangu’s wake, while lurking confederates spring forth to sweep up the shattered bodies and escape with them. Madness, Shadrach thinks. And this is the carefully considered theory propounded in all seriousness by the ruler of the world. Madness. Madness.

  He says, “There’ve been almost three hundred arrests so far. Ninety-seven sent to the organ farms. Last week Roger Buckmaster was alive, healthy, his own master as much as any of us is. Tomorrow we may be using his aorta to patch Genghis Mao’s. And still the arrests continue.”

  “So I gather. Avogadro’s men bring them in, day and night. When will the Khan be satisfied?”

  “When he decides that all the conspirators have been caught, I suppose.”

  “Conspirators!” Katya says scathingly. For a moment she has the old frightening intensity again. “What conspirators? What conspiracy? The whole thing is insane. Mangu killed himself.”

  “You think it was suicide too, then?”

  “Think? I know it was,” she says in a low voice, turning away from the Grand Tower as though to avoid cameras that might read her lips.

  “You talk as if you were there when he jumped.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “How can you know it was suicide, then?”

  “I know. I know.”

  “Were you there when he—”

  “Of course not,” Lindman says.

  “Then why are you so sure you’re right?”

  “Good reasons. Sufficient reasons.”

  “You know something that the security people don’t?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Then why don’t you speak up about it, before Avogadro arrests the whole world?”

  She is silent a moment. “No,” she says at last. “I can’t. It would destroy me.”