Shadrach in the Furnace

by Robert Silverberg

  Shadrach rises. He can sit here in reverie no longer; he has responsibilities, obligations, reports to file, projects to oversee. To begin with, he must update the Genghis Mao dossier with a concise account of today’s aorta transplant, which means collating a vast sheaf of printouts and selecting from that mass of raw and fragmentary data the significant outlines of a useful medical profile. Very well. He taps keys, summoning the outtakes of this morning’s operation. But as he works, he finds his mind invaded at times by the spurious voice of Genghis Mao, dictating stray shreds of imaginary memoir:

  May 27, 1998.

  The People’s Republic is leaderless this morning and I think the government will collapse before noon. Shirendyb, the fifth prime minister in the past six weeks, succumbed to the organ-rot late last night. No one is left in the politburo; the presidium has been decimated; the streets of Ulan Bator are choked with refugees, a slow steady stream of oxcarts and dilapidated trucks heading—where? It is the same everywhere. The old society is dying. Only ten years ago I thought fundamental change was impossible; then came the volcano, the terror, the uprising, the Virus War, the organ-rot, and three billion human beings are dead and institutions are crumbling like shoddy buildings struck by earthquakes. I will not leave Ulan Bator. I think my time is at last at hand. But the government I will proclaim will not be called a people’s republic.

  November 16, 2008.

  To celebrate the tenth year of my reign I journeyed to Karakorum and dedicated the new pleasure complex. They invited me to experience the amusements they call “dream-death” and “transtemporalism.” I chose dream-death. The irresistible fascination of the morbid. Especially the illusion of the morbid. It takes place in a tent full of pseudo-Egyptian motifs. The ugly old monster-gods hovering like gargoyles over the place; you can practically smell the reek of Nile mud, hear the buzzing of the flies. Attendants with masks. Bright lights. Much fuss made over me. Naturally I was the only one having the experience at that time. I allowed myself to be hypnotized behind a phalanx of picked security guards. A sensation as of dying, very convincing, I think. (What does any of us know about it?) And then a dream. But in my dream the world was exactly as it is when I am awake. They promised me gaudy illusions and surreal fantasies. None. Have they deceived me? Are they afraid to let Genghis Mao taste the true experience?

  June 4, 2010.

  Today the new physician began his duties. Shadrach Mordecai, a strange name. American, bright, earnest. He is terrified of me but that may pass. He holds himself so stiffly when he is with me! His training is in gerontology and he has been on the staff of Project Phoenix for several years. I told him this morning: “We make a deal, you and I. You keep me healthy, I keep you healthy, all right?” He smiled but behind that he was plainly upset. Too heavy-handed of me, I suppose.

  Somehow Shadrach finishes dictating the profile and moves along to the next task, which is to look over a project report from Irayne Sarafrazi. Nothing much new there; her project continues to wrestle with the brain-cell-deterioration problem and, as Shadrach has foreseen, is getting nowhere. All the same, he must read the report through and find some encouraging comment to make. Still the insidious voice resonates in his head, distracting him with bursts of fantasy. Doggedly he works on, trying to ignore the mental static.

  May 15, 2012.

  The most terrible news. Assassins have murdered Mangu. Comes now Horthy, bleating hysterically about falling bodies. How could this have happened? Into Mangu’s bedchamber, silently, seize him, to the window, out! Oh, my fury. Oh, my bitter grief. What will I do now? My plans for Mangu thwarted. Shadrach tells me Project Phoenix is stymied, probably forever, on biological problems. Project Talos moves slowly, and Talos I have never really liked. Which leaves Avatar, and Avatar without Mangu is—

  Ah. I will use Shadrach. A fine body—I’ll be happy in it. And black. A novelty. I should experience all the varieties of humanity. Perhaps when Shadrach’s body is old I should move on into a white one—even a woman, perhaps—perhaps a giant someday, or a dwarf—all possibilities—

  Shadrach has been a good doctor and a pleasant companion. But there are other doctors, and companionship becomes ever less important to me. Shall I feel guilty about snuffing him out? For a while, perhaps a day, two days. But I must put myself beyond such feelings.

  May 16, 2012.

  More thoughts on the choice of Shadrach to replace Mangu. Obviously some residual guilt lurking in me. But why? I propose not to murder him but to ennoble him by making his body the vehicle for immense power. Of course he might object that what I propose for him is, if not murder outright, then at best a form of slavery, and his kind has endured slavery enough. But no: Shadrach is not his ancestors, and all old debts have been canceled by the Virus War, which destroyed slaves and masters indiscriminately, struck down generals as well as babes, and left those who survived in the condition of pure survivors, pastless, liberated into a new dispensation in which history is born fresh and virgin each day. What do the sins of the slavemasters mean to anyone today? The society, the network of relationships, that evolved under the stimulus of slavery and its consequences, even of emancipation and its consequences, is wholly gone. And I am Genghis Mao and I require his body. I need not vex myself with the guilt of others. I am not German; I can send Jews to the oven if the need arises, without making apologies for past sins. I am not white; therefore I am free to enslave a black. The past is dead. History is blank pages now. Besides, if historical imperatives do still exist, I am a Mongol: my forefathers enslaved half the world. Can I do less? I will have his body.

  May 27, 2012.

  I monitor this week’s conversation tapes and find that Katya Lindman has told Shadrach the truth, that he is the next Avatar donor. Katya talks too much. It wasn’t my intention to have him find that out, but let it go. I will watch him closely, now that he possesses the knowledge. The sufferings of humanity instruct me in the arts of government. Or, to put it more harshly, I enjoy watching them squirm. Is that not ugly? But I have earned the right to indulge in some ugly pastimes, I who have borne the burdens of power for fourteen years. I haven’t been Hitler, have I? I haven’t been Caligula. Yet power does entitle one to certain amusements. By way of compensation for the murderous burden, the awful responsibility. The odd thing is that Shadrach isn’t squirming, yet. He is oddly calm. Doesn’t yet believe that what Katya told him is true, I guess. Doesn’t accept it in the viscera. He will. Wait. Just wait. It’ll hit him, sooner or later.

  Suddenly this game is not in the least amusing to Shadrach. There is no fun, any longer, in these subtle exercises in ironic parallax, these experiments in psychological perspective. The distance between himself and what he has been inventing has narrowed abruptly, and indeed it is all suddenly very painful, it cuts much too close to the nerve, it hurts, it hurts with astonishing intensity. He has managed in the last ten minutes to puncture his own affectless equanimity, and he is not merely squirming now, he is bleeding. Pain, fear, and anger assail him. He feels that everyone has conspired to sell him down the river. He—witty, urbane, handsome, humane, dedicated Shadrach Mordecai—is just another expendable nigger, it turns out. If what Katya has told him is true. If. If. Shadrach is in anguish. This, now, here is the furnace, and he is in it for sure. The heavy shadow of Genghis Mao weighs upon him. One day they will come for him, they will put the electrodes to him, they will wipe out his unique and irreplaceable soul, and shortly thereafter they will pump that crafty old Mongol into his skull. Is that how it really will be? Yes, Katya says. And can he believe that? Should he believe that? He trembles. Terror whips through him like a cold gale. He craves peace; he could use a jolt of Genghis Mao’s tranquilizer now, a hefty jolt of 9-pordenone or maybe something stronger. But Shadrach dislikes drugging himself in crisis. He needs his sharpest wits now.

  What shall he do?

  The first step is one he knows he should have taken yesterday. He will go to Nikki Crowfoot again. And ask her some questions.r />
  17

  She is pale and peaked-looking, still in the grip of yesterday’s illness, but on the mend, definitely on the mend. She seems to know why he has come, and it takes only half a dozen harsh words from him to get from her the answer he did not really want to hear. Yes, it is true. Yes. Yes. Shadrach listens for a while to her stammering confession, full of circumlocutions and evasions, and then he says, quietly, reproachfully, “You could have told me before this.” He is staring straight at her, and now, finally, she returns his stare: now that it is all out in the open between them, now that she has admitted the monstrous truth, she is at last able to meet his eyes again. “You could have told me,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me, Nikki?”

  “I couldn’t. It wasn’t possible.”

  “Wasn’t possible? Wasn’t possible? Sure it was possible. All you had to do was open your mouth and let words come out. ‘Shadrach, I think I ought to warn you that you—’”

  “Stop,” she says. “It didn’t seem that easy to me.”

  “When was it decided?”

  “The day they sent Buckmaster to the organ farm.”

  “Did you have any part in selecting me?”

  “Do you think I could have had any part in it, Shadrach?”

  He says, “One thing I learned a long time ago is that guilty people have a way of answering a troublesome question with another question.”

  But she does not seem wounded by his thrust, and instantly he regrets having made it. She is a strong woman, quite calm now that she has been unmasked by him, and in an altogether steady voice she says, “Genghis Mao chose you all by himself. I wasn’t consulted.”

  “Very well.”

  “You might as well believe that.”

  Shadrach nods. “I believe it.”

  “And so?”

  “When you learned I was the one, did you make any attempt to change his mind?”

  “Has anyone ever changed Genghis Mao’s mind about anything?”

  “You notice how you parry my question with a question of your own?”

  This time the jab hurts. She loses some of her newly regained poise. Her eyes slip from his, and she says hollowly, “All right. All right. I didn’t try to argue with him, no.”

  Shadrach is silent a moment. Then he says, “I thought I knew you pretty well, Nikki, but I was wrong.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I believed you were the sort of person who sees human beings as ends, not means. I didn’t think you’d let a—ah—a close friend—be nominated for the junkheap, and not lift a finger to save him, and not even say a word to him about it, no hint of what’s been decreed for him. And start to avoid him, even. As if you had written him off as an unperson the moment he was chosen. As if you were afraid that his bad luck might be contagious.”

  “Why are you lecturing me, Shadrach?”

  “Because I hurt,” he says. “Because someone I loved sold me out. Because I can’t bring myself to hurt you back in any way that’s real.”

  “What would you have wanted me to do?” Nikki asks.

  “The right thing.”

  “Which was?”

  “You could have stood up to Genghis Mao. You could have told him you wouldn’t participate in your lover’s slaughter. You could have let him know that there was a relationship between us, that you weren’t capable of—oh, Christ, Nikki, I shouldn’t have to be explaining all this to you!”

  “I’m sure Genghis Mao was quite aware of the relationship between us.”

  “And picked me deliberately, by way of testing your loyalty? To find out how you would react if you were made to choose between your lover and your laboratory? One of his little psychological games?”

  She shrugs. “That’s entirely conceivable.”

  “Maybe you made the wrong choice, then. Maybe he was trying to measure your fundamental humanity rather than your loyalty to Genghis Mao. And now that he sees how coldblooded, soulless, unfeeling you are, he may decide that he can’t take the chance of having a person like you in charge of—”

  “Stop it, Shadrach.” She is giving ground under his steady assault, his quiet, measured, remorseless voice; her lips are trembling, she is visibly fighting back tears. “Please,” she says. “Stop. Stop. You’re getting what you want.”

  “You think I’m being unkind? You think I’ve got no call being angry with you?”

  “There was nothing I could have done.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What about threatening to resign?”

  “He’d have let me resign, then. I’m not indispensable. Redundancy is—”

  “And your successor would have continued with the project, using me as the donor.”

  “I imagine so.”

  “Still, even if it changed nothing at all, wouldn’t you have felt cleaner putting up some kind of resistance?”

  “Perhaps,” she says. “But it would have changed nothing at all.”

  “You could have warned me, at least. I might have fled from Ulan Bator. We might have fled together, if your resignation got you in trouble with Genghis Mao. Wasn’t worth destroying your career over me, though, was it?”

  “Flee? Where to? He’d be watching us. On Surveillance Vector One, or some other spy gadget. In a day or two he’d decide we had had a long enough holiday, and the Citpols would pick us up and bring us back.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Not maybe. And I’d end up in the organ farm. And you’d still become the Avatar donor.”

  Shadrach considers that scenario. “You’re telling me that it wouldn’t have mattered whether you had warned me or not?”

  “Not to you,” Nikki replies. “It would have mattered to me. One way I lose my job and maybe my skin. The other way I get to survive a little longer.”

  “I still wish you had been the one to tell me.”

  “Instead of Katya?”

  “When did I say Katya was the one?”

  Nikki smiles. “You didn’t need to, love.”

  August 19, 2009

  A mild summer day in Ulan Bator. Across half the world it is summer now. The time of lovers. Surveillance Vector One shows me the lovers going arm in arm through the streets of Paris, London, San Francisco, Tokyo. The fond gazes, the little kisses, the nudges of hip against hip. Even the ones with organ-rot shuffling along together, slowly dying but still doing the dance of love. Fools! I think I remember how that dance goes, though it’s forty or fifty years behind me. Yes, yes, the first meeting, the preliminary tensions and assessments, the probing and parrying, the spark of contact, the dissolving of barriers, the first embrace, the tender words, the pledges, the sense of conspiracy, two against the world, the assumption that all this will last forever, the discovery that it will not, the falling apart, the falling out, the parting, the healing, the forgetting—oh, yes, the man who is Genghis Mao once danced that dance, long before he was Genghis Mao, he once played that game. Long ago. What purpose does it serve? An anesthetic for the aching ego. A lubricant for the biological necessities. A diversion, a distraction, a foolishness. When I saw it for what it was I renounced it, and no regrets. Look at them strolling together. “Eternal love.” As if anything’s eternal, but love? Love? It’s an unstable state, thermodynamic nonsense, two energy sources, two suns, trying to establish orbits around one another, each one striving to give light and heat to the other. How pretty it sounds, how implausible. Naturally the system breaks down under gravitational stress sooner or later, and one pulls the other to pieces, or they spiral into collision, or they go tumbling away from one another. A waste of energy, a futile spilling of the life-force. Love? Abolish it! If only I could.

  January 4, 1989

  The text of my doctrine is complete, and when the appropriate moment comes I will reveal it to the world. Today, as I finished the last passages, a name for it came to me: centripetal depolarization. Defined as the forging of a consensus of irreconcilables through the illusion of the at
tainment of everyone’s mutually exclusive goals. And it will sweep the world as irresistibly as once did the hordes of old Father Genghis.

  Shadrach takes momentary refuge in carpentry. Until now that fashionable cult has been mere amusement for him, a source of relaxation and release rather than the quasi-mystical focus that it is for many of its adherents, but now, frayed and desperate, no longer the calm and detached Shadrach of yore, he surrenders to its full intensity. The world has tightened around him. Ostensibly, all is as it has been, and is not going to change; his routines will continue, his doctoring and his calisthenics and his collecting and his trips to Karakorum; but in these past two days, aware now of the dread subtraction of self that Genghis Mao has covertly ordained for him, Shadrach finds the familiar and comfortable rhythms of life no longer enough to keep him together. Fear and pain have begun to seep into his soul, and the only antidote he knows for that is submission to some force greater than himself, greater even than Genghis Mao, some all-encompassing power. If he can, he will make carpentry the vehicle of that submission. With hammer and nails, then, with chisel and adze, with plane and saw and awl, he seeks, if not salvation, then at least temporary freedom from anguish.

  Usually Shadrach attends the large and majestic carpentry chapel in Karakorum. But there is always a carnival atmosphere in Karakorum, and that tends to trivialize whatever he does there, be it carpentry or dream-death or transtemporalism or mere fornication. Now, in genuine spiritual need, he wants not the fanciest chapel but the one most readily accessible, the one that will enable him most quickly to find surcease from pain, and he goes to a place here in Ulan Bator, down by the Tuula River, in one of those streets of formidable blocky white-stucco buildings constructed in the latter days of the Mongolian People’s Republic.