Shadrach in the Furnace

by Robert Silverberg

  “I doubt that he saw things that way himself.”

  “You are so compassionate, Shadrach,” she says in the flat voice that he knows she reserves for mockery. “I wish I shared your love of mankind.”

  “I’ll see you in fifteen minutes, Katya.”

  Her laboratory is on the ninth floor of the Grand Tower, a cluttered place festooned with cables, connectors, buses, coaxials, crates of bubble-chips, enough electronic gear to throttle a brontosaur. Out of this chaotic maze of materiel Lindman materializes, coming toward him in her customary slashing headlong stride. She is all business, very much the bustling woman of science. She wears a white blouse, a lavender lab jacket open at the throat, a short brown tweed skirt. The effect is severe, stark, and harsh, mitigated neither by the bare thighs nor the tightness of the skirt nor the exposed cleft of her breasts. Lindman is not a woman who works at projecting sexuality. Nor does she need to, with Shadrach; she holds a malign physical authority over him, the source of which he does not comprehend. He feels always when he is with her that he must be on guard—against what, he is not sure.

  “Look,” she says triumphantly, with a broad sweeping gesture.

  He follows her pointing arm halfway across the laboratory to the one uncluttered place, a kind of dais, on which, under a dazzling spotlight, the current working model of the Genghis Mao automaton sits enthroned. A single thick yellow-and-red cable runs to it from a power unit. The automaton is half again as large as life, a massive imitation of the Chairman, plastic skin over metal armature; the face is an altogether convincing replica, the shoulders and chest look plausibly human, but below the diaphragm the robot Genghis Mao is an incomplete thing of struts and wires and bare circuitry, skinless and lacking even the internal mechanical musculature that fills its upper half. As Shadrach watches, the ersatz Chairman extends its right arm toward him and, with an altogether human impatient little flip of its hand, beckons him forward.

  Go ahead,” Katya Lindman says.

  He advances. When he is three or four meters away he halts and waits. The robot’s head slowly turns to face him. The lips pull back in a cruel grimace—no, a grin, unmistakably a grin, the bleak and terrible grin of Genghis Mao, that self-congratulatory smirk, slowly forming at the corners of the leathery cheeks, a regal grin, a monstrous overbearing grin. Imperceptibly the features rearrange themselves, without apparent transition; the robot now is scowling, and the wrath of Genghis Mao darkens the room. Off with their heads, yes, indeed. And then a smile. A cold one, for there is no other sort from Genghis Mao, but yet it is a smile that puts one at one’s ease, Arctic though it is; and the smile of the robot is an uncanny replica of the smile of Genghis Mao. And, lastly, the wink, the famous wink of the Khan, that sly, disarming dip of the eyelid that cancels all the seeming ferocity, that communicates a redeeming sense of perspective, of self-appraisal: Don’t take me so seriously, friend, I may not be the megalomaniac you think I am. And then, just as the wink has achieved its effect and the terror that Genghis Mao can generate with a glance has subsided, the face returns to its original expression, icy, remote, alien.

  “Well?” Lindman asks, after some while.

  “Doesn’t he speak?”

  “Not yet. The audio is trivial to accomplish. We aren’t bothering with it just now.”

  “That’s the whole show, then?”

  “That’s it. You sound disappointed.”

  “Somehow I expected more. I’ve seen him do the grin already.”

  “But not the wink. The wink is new.”

  “Even so, Katya—you add a feather here and there, but you still don’t have an eagle.”

  “What did you think I’d show you? A walking, talking Genghis Mao? The complete simulacrum overnight?” His disappointment has angered her, obviously: her mouth works tensely, the lips drawing back from the gums again and again, baring those pointed carnivorous incisors. “We still are in preliminary stages here. But I thought you would like the wink. I like the wink. I rather do like the wink, Shadrach.” Her voice grows lighter, her features soften; he can almost hear the gears shifting within her. “I’m sorry I wasted your time. I was pleased with the wink. I wanted to share it with you.”

  “It’s a fantastic wink, Katya.”

  “And, you know, Project Talos will become much more important with Mangu gone. Everything that Dr. Crowfoot has been doing was aimed toward integrating the Chairman’s personality with the neural responses of Mangu’s living mind and body, and that’s over with, now, that whole approach must be discarded.”

  Shadrach knows enough about Nikki’s work to know that this is not literally so; apparently Mangu was indeed the template against which the Avatar personality-coding program was being plotted, but there was nothing inexorable about the use of Mangu; with the appropriate adjustments the project can readily be reshaped around some other body donor. But there is no need to tell Lindman that, if she wants to feel that her project, peripheral so far, has suddenly become Genghis Mao’s prime hope of postmortem survival. She has made an obvious effort in the past minute or two to be less intimidating, less abrasive, and he prefers her that way; he will do nothing that might spur new tension and defensiveness in her.

  In fact her mood has eased so much that she seems almost coquettish. Chattering in a shrill, girlish, wholly unKatyaesque way, she leads him on a hectic and gratuitous tour of the laboratory, displaying circuit diagrams, boxes of memory chips, prototypes for the pelvis and spine of the next model of Genghis Mao, and other bits of Project Talos that are of no conceivable significance just now; and he realizes, after a time, that her only pretext for doing all this is to detain him, to have a few minutes more of his company. It puzzles him. Lindman’s usual manner is aggressive and peremptory, but now she is coy, flirtatious, sidling up unsubtly to him, plenty of heavy breathing and forthright eye contact, actually grazing his elbow with her breasts as they stand close together rummaging through a table full of schematics. Does she think that such stuff will make him snort, sweat, paw the ground with his hooves, fling himself upon her throbbing body? He has no idea what she thinks. He rarely does. Nor is he going to find out now, for whatever she is organizing here is truncated abruptly by a squeaky summons from his pocket beeper, tracking him through the building. He activates his portable telephone. Avogadro is calling.

  “Can you come to Security Vector One, Doctor?”

  “Now?”

  “If you would.”

  “What’s happening?” Shadrach asks.

  “We’ve been interrogating Buckmaster. Your name has arisen.”

  “Oh. Oh. Am I a suspect too, now?”

  “Hardly. A witness, perhaps. Can we expect you in five minutes?”

  Shadrach looks at Katya, who is flushed, excited. “I have to go,” he says. “Avogadro. Something about the Mangu inquiry. It sounds urgent.”

  Her face darkens. Her lips compress. But she says only that she hopes to see him again soon, and, hiding her disappointment behind a mask of detachment, she releases him. As he leaves the laboratory he feels his entire body expand, as though it had been held under great pressure while he was with her.

  Security Vector One is on the sixty-fourth floor. Mordecai has never had occasion to go there, and he has little idea what to expect, other than standard police paraphernalia—magnifying glasses and fingerprint pads all over the place, no doubt, photos of known subversives mounted on tacky boards, sheafs of dossiers and transcripts, rows of tap-terminals and fiber-eyes, whatever things detectives would be likely to use in protecting the physical persons of Genghis Mao and the PRC, Perhaps such things are there, but Shadrach gets no glimpse of them. A feline, soft-voiced young man, Oriental but too sinuous to be a Mongol, probably Chinese, greets him at the reception desk and guides him through a labyrinth of blank-walled hallways, past a nest of tiny offices where weary-looking bureaucrats sit at desks heaped wish paper. The place could be the headquarters of an insurance company, a bank, a brokerage house. Only when he is usher
ed into the interrogation cell where Avogadro and Buckmaster are waiting for him does he feel that he is among the enforcers of the law.

  The room is artfully claustrophobic, rectangular and window-less, with dirty green walls and a low, oppressive ceiling from which short-stalked spotlights dangle at the ends of jointed metal arms. The spotlights are trained on the forehead of Roger Buckmaster, who sits uncomfortably slouched in a squat, hard narrow chair with broad aluminum armpieces and a high backrest. Electrodes are taped to Buckmaster’s wrists and temples; their leads disappear into the recesses of the backrest. Buckmaster looks unnaturally pale, sweaty, blotchy-faced; his eyes are glassy; his lips are slack. Clearly Avogadro has been working him over for some while.

  Avogadro, who is standing next to Buckmaster as Shadrach enters, looks little better—grim, harried, frayed. “A madhouse,” he mutters. “Fifty arrests in the first hour. We have every interrogation cell full and they’re still coming in. Lunatics, beggars, thieves, all the riffraff of Ulan Bator. And the radicals, of course. I go from cell to cell, cell to cell. And for what? For what?” A rough-edged laugh. “There’ll be plenty of meat for the organ farms before this is over.” Slowly, moving his heavy frame as though doubled gravity drags it down, he turns to the man in the chair. “Well, Buckmaster? You have a visitor. Do you recognize him?”

  Buckmaster stares at the floor. “You know bloody well I do.”

  “Tell me his name.”

  “Let me be.”

  “Tell me his name,” Avogadro urges in a tone that is tired but menacing.

  “Mordecai. Shadrach Bloody Mordecai. Em Dee.”

  “Thank you, Buckmaster, Now tell me when you last saw Dr. Mordecai.”

  “Last night,” Buckmaster says, his voice a feeble fluting thing, barely audible.

  “Louder?”

  “Last night.”

  “Where?”

  “You know where, Avogadro!”

  “I want you to tell me yourself.”

  “I already have.”

  “Again. In front of Dr. Mordecai. Tell me.”

  “Why don’t you just carve me up and be done with it?”

  “You’re making this hard for yourself, Buckmaster. You’re also making it hard for me.”

  “Pity.”

  “I have no choice about this,” Avogadro says.

  Lifting his head, Buckmaster manages a cold, sullen, furious glare. “Do I? Do I? Oh, I know the game. You’ll question me for a while, you’ll find me guilty of conspiracy, you’ll sentence me to death, and off I go to the organ farm, right? Right? And there I lie, a corpse that isn’t dead, so that whenever Genghis Mao needs a lung, a kidney, a heart, someone can come and cut out mine, right? While I lie there, dead, warm, breathing and meta-metabolizing, part of the stockpile.”

  “Buckmaster—”

  Buckmaster chuckles. “Genghis Mao thinks the stocks are getting low, and he can’t use the miserable organ-rotted people out there, so he turns on us, he tosses a few dozen of his own people to the farms, right? Very well, take me away! Turn me into cannibal food! But let’s end this farce fast, shall we? Stop asking me idiotic questions.”

  Avogadro sighs. “To continue. You saw Dr. Mordecai at—”

  “Timbuktu.”

  Avogadro lifts his left hand. A security man sitting at a table in the farthest corner does something to a control console in front of him; Buckmaster jerks and twitches and the left side of his face goes into a brief ugly spasm.

  “You saw him where?”

  “Piccadilly Circus.”

  Again the left hand, higher. Again the touching of controls; again the facial spasm, much worse. Shadrach Mordecai shifts his weight uneasily from foot to foot. In a low voice he says, “Possibly it isn’t necessary to—”

  “It’s necessary, yes,” Avogadro tells him. “The forms must be observed.” To Buckmaster he says, “I’m prepared to keep this up all day. It bores me, but it’s my job, and if I have to hurt you, I’ll hurt you, and if you make me cripple you, I’ll cripple you, because I have no choice. Do you understand? I have no choice. Now, again: you met Dr. Mordecai in—”

  “Karakorum.”

  “Where in Karakorum?”

  “Outside the transtemporalists’ tent.”

  “About what time?”

  “I don’t know. Late, but it was before midnight.”

  “Dr. Mordecai, is this correct? Your answers will be recorded.”

  “It’s all correct so far,” Shadrach says.

  “Good. Go on, Buckmaster. Tell me what you told me before. You encountered Dr. Mordecai and you said what to him?”

  “I spoke a lot of bloody nonsense.”

  “What kind of nonsense, Buckmaster?”

  “Foolish talk. The transtemporalists jumbled my mind with their drugs.”

  “What exactly did you say to the doctor?”

  Buckmaster, silent, stares at the floor.

  The right hand of Avogadro rises almost to his shoulder. The controls are adjusted. Buckmaster leaps in his seal as though speared. His right arm thrashes about like an infuriated snake.

  “Tell me, Buckmaster. Please.”

  “I accused him of doing evil.”

  “Go on.”

  “I called him a Judas.”

  “And a black bastard,” Shadrach says.

  Avogadro, with a gentle nudge, indicates to Shadrach that his prompting is unwelcome.

  “Specifically, Buckmaster, what did you accuse Dr. Mordecai of doing?”

  “Of doing his job.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “His job is keeping the Chairman alive. I said he’s responsible for keeping Genghis Mao from having died five years ago.”

  Avogadro says, “Is that correct, Dr. Mordecai?”

  Shadrach hesitates. He doesn’t particularly want to cooperate in sending Buckmaster to the organ farm. But it would be folly to try to protect the little man now. The truth about last night’s incident in Karakorum has already been drawn forth and recorded, he knows. Buckmaster is condemned out of his own mouth. No lie can save him, but only imperil the liar.

  “It is,” he says.

  “So. Buckmaster, do you regret that Genghis Mao didn’t die five years ago?”

  “Let me be, Avogadro.”

  “Do you? Do you truly want the Chairman to be dead? Is that your position?”

  “I had the drug in my head!”

  “You don’t have the drug in your head now, Buckmaster. What are your feelings about Genghis Mao at this moment?”

  “I don’t know. I simply don’t know.”

  “Hostile?”

  “Perhaps. Look, Avogadro, don’t force any more out of me. You have me, you’ll give me to the cannibals tonight, isn’t that enough for you?”

  “We can end this as soon as you cooperate.”

  “Very well,” Buckmaster says. He pulls himself upright, finding some remaining resource of dignity. “I don’t care for the regime of Genghis Mao. I am not in general agreement with the policies of the PRC. I regret having devoted so much effort to their service. I was overwrought last night and I said a lot of foul things to Dr. Mordecai for which I feel shame today. But. But, Avogadro! But I have never done anything disloyal. And I don’t know a thing about the death of Mangu. I swear I had no part in it.”

  Avogadro nods. “Dr. Mordecai, did the prisoner mention Mangu last night?”

  “I don’t think he did.”

  “Can you be more positive about that?”

  Shadrach considers. “No,” he says finally. “To the best of my recollection, he said nothing about Mangu.”

  “Did the prisoner make any threats against the life of Genghis Mao?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Try to remember. Doctor.”

  Shadrach shakes his head. “You have to understand, I had just come out of the transtemporalists’ tent myself. My mind was still elsewhere during most of Buckmaster’s tirade. He did speak critically of the government, yes,
quite strongly, but I don’t think there were any direct threats. No.”

  “I should refresh your memory, then,” Avogadro says, gesturing to his assistant in the corner. There is a hissing sound, and then, from an invisible speaker, the sound of a voice, strangely familiar but oddly strange. His own.

  This is suicidal, the way you’re carrying on. 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—

  “Again,” Avogadro says. “That last bit.”

  —I’ll destroy him. The bloodsucker. He holds us all for—

  “Do you recognize those voices, Doctor?”

  “Mine. Buckmaster’s.”

  “Thank you. The identification is important. Who was it who said, ‘I’ll destroy him’?”

  “Buckmaster.”

  “Yes. Thank you. Buckmaster, was that your voice?”

  “You know it was.”

  “Making a threat against the life of Genghis Mao?”

  “I was overwrought. I was making a rhetorical point.”

  “Yes,” Shadrach Mordecai says. “That’s how it seemed to me, I urged him not to shout nonsense. I can’t see it as any kind of serious threat. You have a tape of the whole conversation?”

  “The whole thing,” Avogadro says. “Many conversations are taped, you know. And automatically screened for subversion. The computers brought this to our attention early this morning. The voiceprints told us it was you and Buckmaster, but of course direct corroboration is useful—”

  “As though you’ll have a trial, a jury, lawyers,” Buckmaster says bitterly. “As though I won’t be meat by nightfall!”

  “He didn’t say anything about Mangu to me last night, did he?” Shadrach asks.

  “No. Nothing on the tape.”

  “As I thought. Then why hold him?”

  “Why defend him, Doctor? According to the tape, he was insulting and offensive to you.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. Nevertheless, I hold no grudges. He was a nuisance to me last night, but being a nuisance shouldn’t be enough to make me want to see him sent to the organ farms.”