Shadrach in the Furnace

He reaches for her hand.

  “Wait!” Buckmaster yells, running toward them. “I’m not through with you. I’ve got more to tell you, you black bahstard!”

  Mordecai shrugs and says, “All right. You can have one more minute. What do you want me to do, exactly?”

  “Leave off tending him.”

  “I’m a doctor, Buckmaster. He’s my patient.”

  “Precisely. And that’s why I call you a guilty bahstard. Billions of people to care for in the world, and he’s the one you choose to look after. Dooming us all to decades more of Genghis Mao.”

  “Someone else would serve him if I didn’t,” Shadrach says gently.

  “But you do. You. And I must hold you responsible.”

  Astonished, baffled by the force and persistence of Buckmaster’s attack, Shadrach says, “Responsible for what?”

  “For the way the world is. The whole bleeding mess. The continued threat of universal organ-rot twenty years after the Virus War. The hunger, the poverty. Oh, don’t you have any shame, Mordecai? You with your legs full of machinery that tell you every twitch of his blood pressure so you can run to him even faster?”

  Shadrach glances at Nikki, appealing to her to do something to rescue him. But she still has that far-off look; she does not appear to be aware of Buckmaster at all.

  Angrily Mordecai says, “Who designed that machinery, Roger?”

  Buckmaster recoils. He has been hit where it hurts. His cheeks blaze; his eyes glisten with furious tears. “I! I did! You bahstard, I admit it, I built your dirty implants. Don’t you think I know I share the guilt? Don’t you think I understand that now? But I’m getting out. I won’t bear the responsibility any longer.”

  “This is suicidal, the way you’re carrying on.” Shadrach Mordecai points to shadowy figures on the periphery of the path, high staffers who hover in the darkness, unwilling to come within range of possible spy-eyes while they enjoy Buckmaster’s juicy lunatic outburst. “There’ll be a report of all this on the Chairman’s desk tomorrow, Roger, more likely than not. You’re destroying yourself.”

  “I’ll destroy him. The bloodsucker. He holds us all for ransom, our bodies, our souls, he’ll let us rot if we don’t serve him, he—”

  “Don’t be melodramatic. We serve Genghis Mao because we have skills and this is the proper place to employ them,” Mordecai says crisply. “It’s no fault of ours that the world is as it is. If you’d rather have been out in Liverpool or Manchester living in some stinking cellar with your intestines full of holes, you could have been.”

  “Don’t goad me, Mordecai.”

  “But it’s true. We’re lucky to be here. We’re doing the only sane thing possible in a crazy world. Guilt is a luxury we can’t afford. You want to walk out now, go ahead, go, Roger. But you won’t want to leave the Khan when you calm down in the morning.”

  “I refuse to have you patronize me.”

  “I’m trying to protect you. I’m trying to get you to shut up and stop shouting dangerous nonsense.”

  “And I’m trying to get you to pull the plug and free us from Genghis Khan Mao,” Buckmaster wails, flushed and wild-eyed.

  “So you think we’d be better off without him?” Shadrach asks. “What are your alternatives, Buckmaster? What kind of government would you suggest? Come on. I’m serious. You’ve been calling me a lot of unpleasant names, now let’s have some rational discussion. You’ve become a revolutionary, right? Okay. What’s your program? What do you want?”

  Buckmaster is beyond the moment for philosophical discourse, however. He glowers at Mordecai in barely controlled loathing, framing words that will not leave his throat except as incoherent guttural growls; he clenches and unclenches his fists, he sways alarmingly, his reddened cheeks turn scarlet. Shadrach, all sympathy long gone, turns from him and reaches toward Nikki Crowfoot again. As they begin to walk away together Buckmaster rushes forward in a clumsy flailing lunge, clamping his hands on Shadrach’s shoulders and trying to pull him down. Shadrach pivots gracefully, bends slightly to slip free of Buckmaster’s grasp, and, when Buckmaster hurls himself at him, seizes him about the ribs, spins him around, and holds him immobile. Buckmaster squirms, kicks, spits, sputters, but Shadrach is much too strong for him. “Easy,” Shadrach murmurs. “Easy. Relax. Let go of it, Roger. Let go of everything.” He holds Buckmaster as one might hold a hysterical child, until at length he feels Buckmaster go slack, all the frenzy leaving him. Mordecai releases him and steps back, hands poised at chest level, ready for a new lunge, but Buckmaster is spent. He backs away from Mordecai in the slinking heavy-shouldered walk of a beaten man, pausing after a few paces to scowl and mutter, “All right, Mordecai. Bahstard. Stay with Genghis Mao. Wipe his decrepit arse for him. See what happens to you! You’ll finish in the furnace, Shadrach, in the furnace, in the bloody furnace!”

  Shadrach laughs. The tension is broken. “The furnace. I like that. Very literary, Buckmaster.”

  “The furnace for you, Shadrach!”

  Mordecai, smiling, takes Crowfoot’s arm. She still looks radiant, ecstatic, lost in transcendental raptures. “Let’s go,” he says. “I can’t take any more of this.”

  Softly, in a dream-furry voice, she says, “What did he mean by that, Shadrach? About the furnace?”

  “Biblical reference. Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego.”

  “Who?”

  “You don’t know of it?”

  “No. Shadrach, it’s such a lovely night. Let’s go somewhere and make love.”

  “Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego. In the Book of Daniel. Three Hebrews who refused to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s golden idol, and the king cast them into a burning fiery furnace, and God sent an angel to walk with them in there, and they were unharmed. Strange you don’t know the story.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “I told you, love. They were unharmed, not a hair of their heads singed, and Nebuchadnezzar called them forth, and told them that their God was a mighty god, and promoted them to high office in Babylon. Poor Buckmaster. He ought to realize that a Shadrach wouldn’t be afraid of furnaces. Did you have a good trip, love?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, Shadrach!”

  “Where did they send you?”

  “Joan of Arc’s execution. I watched her burning, and it was beautiful, the way she smiled, the way she looked toward heaven.” Nikki presses close against him as they walk. Her voice still comes to him out of some realm of dream; that bonfire has left her stoned. “The most inspiring trip I ever had. The most deeply spiritual. Where can we go now, Shadrach? Where can we be alone?”

  8

  He is weary of Karakorum after his encounter with Buckmaster, and he sees now how this whole long day has drained his vigor and glazed his soul; if he could he would stagger to the tube-train and let himself be whisked off to Ulan Bator and his hammock and a night of—at last—deep, satisfying sleep. But Crowfoot, eerily exultant, glows now with insistent lusts, and he does not feel strong enough to confront her disappointment if he denies her now. Arm in arm, therefore, they go to the lovers’ hospice at the north end of the pleasure grounds, a bright-skinned orange-and-green geodesic dome, and with a touch of his thumb against the credit plate he rents a three-hour room.

  Not much of a room. Bed, washstand, clothes rack, within a little slope-ceilinged segment of the vast dome, annoying bluish-purple granular-finish walls, but the place suffices. It suffices. Nikki whips off the golden-mesh robe that is her only garment and from her nude body, four meters away across the room, comes such a rush of seductive energy, such a flow of force oscillating cracklingly up and down the whole electroerotic spectrum, that Shadrach’s fatigue is swept away, Cotopaxi and Buckmaster recede into ancient history, and he swoops joyously toward her. Mouth seeking mouth, hands rising to breasts. She embraces him, then darts away, prudently offering her left hip to the contraception next to the washstand: presses the switch, receives the benevolent bath of sterilizing soft radiation, and returns to him. The tattooed no-preg sym
bol on her tawny flank, a nine-pointed star, glows in brilliant chartreuse, telling them that the irradiation has done its job. She strips him and claps hands in glee at the sight of his rigid maleness. This is not Joan of Arc he is bedding, oh, no; a warrior perhaps but a maiden no.

  They tumble to the bed. With hands nearly as skilled as those of Warhaftig the surgeon, he diligently commences the customary foreplay, but she lets him know by a quick wordless flip of her shoulders that he can skip it and get down to the main event; and he enters the taut hidden harbor between her thighs with a sudden unsparing thrust that brings grunts of pleasure from them both. Some things never change. There is a man only four hundred kilometers to the east who has had four livers and seven kidneys thus far, and in a tent just a few hundred meters from this bed they sell a drug that lets one be an eyewitness to the betrayal of the Savior, and there is a machine in Ulan Bator that flashes instantaneous pictures of virtually everything that is happening anywhere in the world, and all of these things would have been deemed miracles only two generations ago, but nevertheless in this miracle-infested world of 2012 there have been no significant technological improvements on the act of love. Oh, there are cunning drugs that are said to enhance the sensations, and there are clever devices that suppress fertility, and there are some other little biomechanical gimmicks that the sophisticated sometimes employ, but all of these are simply updated versions of peripheral equipment that has been in use since medieval days. The basic operation has not yet been digitalized or miniaturized or randomized or otherwise futurized, but remains what it was in the days of the australopithecines and the pithecanthropoids; that is, something that mere naked people do, pressing their humble natural-born bodies one against the other.

  The bodies press, copper clasping ebony, acting out the ancient rite, Shadrach surprising himself with the intensity of his passions. He is not sure whether this energy comes from Nikki, via some mysterious telepathic transfer, or from some unexpected reservoir within himself, but he is grateful for it whatever the source, and rides it to an agreeable conclusion. Afterward he slips easily into a sound sleep, awakening only when the mellow but inescapable beeper tone signals the approaching end of their three-hour rental period. He finds himself cozily pillowed against Nikki’s breasts. She is awake and evidently has been for some time, but her smile is beatific and no doubt she would have cradled him like that all night, an appealing idea. The night is well-nigh gone, in any case. They allow themselves a brief cuddle, rise, wash, dress, go forth with hands lightly touching into the chilly moon-dappled darkness. Like children unwilling to leave the playground, they drift into a gaming parlor, a wine house, a light studio, all three packed with raucous debauched-looking fun-seekers, but they stay no more than a few minutes in each place, drifting out as aimlessly as they went in, and finally they admit to each other that they have had enough for one night. To the tube-train station, then. Dawn will be here soon. From the ceiling above the station platform dangles a huge glowing green globe, a public telescreen showing a late-night news program, and wearily Shadrach peers at it: the face of Mangu looks back at him, sincere and earnest and deplorably youthful. Mangu is making a speech, so it seems. Gradually, for he is very tired, Shadrach perceives that it is the classic Roncevic Antidote speech, the one which Genghis Mao traditionally makes every five or six months and which now apparently has been delegated to the heir-apparent. “…major laboratory breakthroughs,” Mangu is saying. “…encouraging progress…fundamental qualitative transformations of the manufacturing technology…the unceasing efforts of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee…the diligent and persevering leadership of our beloved Chairman Genghis Mao…there can be no doubt any longer…large-scale distribution of the drug throughout the world…the scourge of organ-rot driven from our midst…stockpiles increasing daily…a time is approaching when…a happy, healthy humanity…”

  A florid, goggle-eyed man standing a few meters farther down the platform says in a loud harsh whisper to the woman who accompanies him, “Certainly. In only ninety to one hundred years.”

  “Quiet, Béla!” his companion cries, sounding genuinely alarmed.

  “But it is the truth. He lies when he says the stockpiles are increasing daily. I have seen the figures. I tell you, I have seen reliable figures.”

  Mordecai finds this interesting. The florid man is Béla Horthy, a dour but volatile Hungarian physicist, creator of the great fusion plant at Bayan Hongor that supplies power for most of northeastern Asia. He also happens to be minister of technology for the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, and it is a little odd to hear so formidably well-connected a government leader uttering such scandalous subversion in public. Of course, this is Karakorum, and Horthy, looking boneless and out of focus just now, is obviously adrift on some potent hallucinogen, but still, but still—

  “The Antidote stockpiles are stable at best, or even decreasing slightly,” Horthy continues, framing his words with the exaggerated precision of the extremely intoxicated. “What Mangu tells us is a lie intended to pacify the populace. He thinks that telling them such things will make them happy and induce them to love him. Pfaugh!” The woman tries desperately to quiet him. She is short and compact, efficiently constructed with her center of gravity close to the ground; her face is partly obscured by an ornate, flamboyant green domino, but Shadrach, after a moment, recognizes her as Donna Labile, no less a mogul than Horthy himself, in fact minister of demography for the Committee, whose responsibility it is to maintain a reasonable balance between births and deaths. Masked or not, it is she, no mistaking that ferocious jaw, and Shadrach observes that Horthy too has a mask, dangling from his left hand. Perhaps he thinks he still wears it. She struggles with him, taking the mask from his limp hand and attempting to fasten it in place, but be brushes her aside, and, lurching toward Shadrach Mordecai, greets the doctor with so grandiose a bow that he nearly pitches himself from the platform. Donna Labile, flapping his discarded mask about, flutters around him like an angry insect. “Ah, Dr. Mordecai!” Horthy bellows. “Our leader’s devoted Aesculapius! I greet you!”

  “…the climax of our unending struggle against…” Mangu says from the glowing globular screen.

  Horthy jerks a thumb at the image of the heir-apparent. “Do you believe that trash, Mordecai?”

  Shadrach has his own suspicions about the sincerity of the Khan’s oft-expressed plan for universal distribution of the Roncevic Antidote, but they are suspicions rather less than half formed, and in any case this is no place to voice them. Softly he says, “I’m not a member of the Committee, Dr. Horthy. The only inside information I have concerns such things as the endocrine balance of Genghis Mao.”

  “But you have an opinion, haven’t you?”

  “My opinion’s an uninformed one, and therefore worthless.”

  “Such a diplomat you are!” Horthy says in contempt.

  “Pay no attention,” Donna Labile begs. “He’s had too much tonight. Eating kot and yipka like so much candy, drugging himself crazy, now risking his whole career—”

  “It seems to be the night for it,” Shadrach remarks.

  “A filthy hoax,” Horthy says heavily, shaking his fist at the screen. He is trembling, ashen-faced beneath his florid glow, sweating profusely. “Cruel, sinister, bestial—” and he lapses into a series of unintelligible sibilant expletives, presumably Magyar, toward the end of which he begins to sob. Donna Labile, meanwhile, has disappeared. After a moment she returns leading two tall men who wear the gray-and-blue uniform of the Citizens’ Peace Brigade. It is odd to find a couple of Citpols here, for Shadrach thinks of Karakorum as an open city, naturally monitored by secret spy-eyes and the usual audio bugs but otherwise unpoliced; and these two are more man ordinarily repellent even for Citpols, for they look like identical ugly twins, gray-faced and gray-eyed, with flat heads and stiff close-cropped hair and strange malproportioned bodies, all legs and no middle. They walk in a weird clucking stride, like a couple of poorly programmed robot
s, but they appear to be human, more or less: perhaps the Committee, finding volunteers scarce, is raising a clone of monsters to serve as policemen. They surround Horthy and speak to him in low, urgent tones. One of them takes the domino from Donna Labile and with curiously fussy, almost mincing, gestures, affixes it over the bridge of Horthy’s nose. Then, slipping their arms gently under those of the minister of technology, they lead him, lifting him a bit so that his feet are dragging, toward a gray enameled door at the far end of the platform. Shadrach Mordecai is uncertain whether they are arresting him at Donna Labile’s instigation or—more likely—are hauling him up to some behind-the-scenes sobering-up facility before he can compromise himself further.

  “…a glorious epoch in the splendid history of the human race…” Mangu booms.

  The tube-train arrives. The survivors of the night’s revelries at Karakorum move slowly, sleepily aboard.

  9

  Before he heads for his hammock, Shadrach Mordecai visits the Khan. Though the implants tell him all is well, he feels obligated after his outing to make a personal call on his patient. It is early morning, and Genghis Mao lies in blissful sleep: through the electroencephalographic node in Mordecai’s haunch travel the slow rhythmic quivers of the Chairman’s peaceful delta waves. All the telemetered data reaching Shadrach is encouraging: blood pressure good, lungs clear of fluid, temperature back to normal, cardiac activity fine, bile production excellent. The newly installed liver has obviously established itself already and has begun to undo the deteriorations of the recent weeks. Shadrach passes through the interface and enters the bedroom where the Chairman rests within the intricate cocoon of the intensive-care support system. The biometer readings on the support system’s instrument panel instantly confirm Shadrach’s long-distance diagnosis: the Chairman is doing amazingly well. None of the emergency equipment has been needed, neither the oxygen tent nor the electrodialysis machine nor the heart-lung respirator nor the twelve or fourteen other instruments. There he lies, relaxed, a faint smile on his thin lips, this man of ninety years or so, only sixteen hours out of major surgery and already nearly strong enough to resume the stress of normal life. But of course there is nothing normal about Genghis Mao’s body, reconstructed so many times out of so many healthy borrowed parts: like the cannibal chieftain, he has feasted on the flesh of heroes, and their strength has become his strength. And, Shadrach suspects, there is some quality of the mind within that tapering triangular skull that will not admit bodily weakness, that banishes it altogether from his metabolic cycle. The doctor stands for a few moments by the bedside, admiring Genghis Mao’s toughness of constitution, half expecting Genghis Mao to wink at him, but the Khan’s sleep holds him utterly.