Shadrach in the Furnace

by Robert Silverberg

  He wishes he could stay in Rome forever. A pity, he thinks, that Genghis Mao wasn’t serious about the papacy. But after a week Shadrach resolves to go onward. It is too pleasant here, too comfortable; besides, as he downs a Strega at his favorite cafe one warm humid evening, he notices two Citpols at a table at a cafe on the opposite corner, not drinking, not talking, merely watching him. Are they closing in, tightening their net? Will they pick him up tomorrow or the day after and tell him he must return to his master in Ulan Bator? He buys a ticket to London, cancels it at the last moment, and boards a plane that is about to leap over the pole to California.

  And suddenly he is in San Francisco. A toy city, white and precious, rising on formidable hills and girdled by a sparkling bay. He has never been here before. Odd how he expects famous cities to be gigantic; this one, like Jerusalem, is surprisingly small. Drop it down in Rome, in Nairobi, in crazy sprawling Istanbul, and it would vanish altogether. Surprisingly cold, too. California to him has always been a place of swimming pools and palm trees, of football games played in bright warm sunshine on wondrous January afternoons, but that California of the mind must be somewhere else, probably down by Los Angeles; San Francisco in June has a sullen late-winter feel, with sharp insistent winds and gray, clinging fogs. Even when the fog burns away in the afternoon and the city glitters in brilliant light under an intense cloudless sky, the air still carries the chill of the ocean breezes, and Shadrach huddles into his inadequate summer jacket.

  There are no ancient palaces to see here, no gazelles and ostriches running wild, no medieval ramparts or baroque churches. But there are elegant streets of Victorian houses, from grand mansions down to wooden bungalows, all of them delicately ornamented with scrollwork and cornices and friezes and gables and spires and even some stained-glass windows, most of the buildings in fine preservation, survivors of fire, earthquake, insurrection, biochemical warfare, and the collapse of the United States of America itself. There are trees and shrubs everywhere, many in bloom; this city, chilly or not, is nearly as flowery as Nairobi, and he looks with delight on trees that are great blazing masses of red blossoms, on giant tree ferns and contorted wind-sculpted cypresses, on hillsides dark with fragrant groves of eucalyptus. One long day he walks clear across the city from the bay to the ocean, emerging out of a lush dreamlike park to stand at the edge of the Pacific, staring toward Mongolia. Somewhere thousands of kilometers to the northwest Genghis Mao is awakening and beginning his morning exercises. Shadrach wonders about the current kidney functions of Genghis Mao, his pulse rate, his calcium-phosphate levels, his endocrine balances, all the myriad twitching bits of information he was so accustomed to receiving. He realizes that he has begun to miss the broadcasts from Genghis Mao’s body. He misses the daily challenge of sustaining the Chairman’s indomitable but increasingly vulnerable inner mechanisms. He may even miss Genghis Mao himself. Ah, strange, dark, mysterious! Ah, the Hippocratic compulsions!

  How goes it with the Khan? The Khan still lives and thrives, judging by the newspaper Shadrach buys—the first he has bothered to look at in all the weeks of his journey—which is strewn with photographs of Mangu’s funeral, held last week with Pharaonic pomp and majesty. There is Genghis Mao himself, in full mourning regalia, riding in the vast procession. There he is again, benevolently blessing the millions crammed into Sukhe Bator Square. (Millions? Well, so it says. Thousands, more likely.) And again, and again, the Khan doing this, the Khan doing that, the Khan orchestrating all the remaining energies of this bedraggled planet in a global outpouring of grief. Ulan Bator, Shadrach discovers, is to be renamed Altan Mangu, “Golden Mangu.” This seems comically excessive to Shadrach, but he supposes he will get used to the new name in time; the old one, which means “Red Hero,” has been obsolete anyway since the fall of the People’s Republic in 1995, and Genghis Mao has been thinking for years of changing it to something more appropriate. Well, Altan Mangu will do well enough, Shadrach decides. A noise in place of a noise.

  Pages and pages of coverage of the funereal rites! Not even a President of the United States would have received such a spread. And the funeral was last week; have they been running batches of photos like this every day since then? Probably. Probably. The funeral is the big story of the month, bigger even than the news of Mangu’s death, which happened too quickly, which lacked the linear extension in time that makes for really big news. What other news is there, anyway? That people are dying of organ-rot? That the Committee is nobly endeavoring to insure a major increase in the supplies of the Antidote, real soon now? That the Chairman’s personal physician is loose on an aimless jaunt around the world while, in some corner of his woolly skull, he plots ways to thwart the Chairman’s scheme to take possession of his body? Funeral pictures are much more interesting than any of that.

  So much fuss, in an American newspaper, about a funeral in Mongolia. Shadrach finds himself thinking about the final president of the United States—someone named Williams, he thinks, or maybe Richards, at any rate a first name turned into a last name—and what sort of funeral he had. Seven mourners and a muddy grave on a rainy day, most likely. (Roberts? Edwards? The name has slipped through his memory, beyond recapture.) There still were presidents of the United States when Shadrach was a boy, even a living ex-president or two. He tries to remember who the president was when he was born. A man named Ford, wasn’t it? Yes, Ford. Most people liked Ford, Shadrach remembers. Before him there was one named Nixon, whom people did not like, and one named Kennedy, who was shot, and Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Roosevelt—resonant names, sturdy American-sounding names. Our leaders, our great men. What is the name of our leader now? Genghis II Mao IV Khan. Who would believe that, in the old United States before the Virus War? Would George Washington have believed it? Would Lincoln? The final year before the PRC took over there were seven presidents, some of them simultaneously. It used to be that the country needed thirty or forty years to run through seven presidents, but there were seven all in one year, in 1995. There used to be emperors in Rome, too, and Augustus or Hadrian would probably have been surprised at the quality and racial origin of some of them toward the end of the imperial era, the ones who were Goths and the ones who were boys and the ones who were madmen and the ones who ruled six days before their own palace guards strangled them in disgust. Well, Lincoln would have been surprised to find Americans accepting someone named Genghis II Mao IV Khan as their leader. Or maybe not. Lincoln might have believed that people get the governments they deserve, and that we must have deserved Genghis Mao. Lincoln might even have liked the gaudy old monster.

  San Francisco is a fine city for walking. The scale of the place is modest and human, so that one can move from one neighborhood to another, from the mansions of Pacific Heights to the sunny fantasy-Mediterranean of the Marina, from Russian Hill to the Wharf, from the Mission to the Haight, in a single short brisk jaunt, with a constantly changing and always agreeable urban texture all the way. Neither wind nor fog nor steepness of hill is a serious handicap in such an amiable environment. And the city is alive. There are shops, restaurants, coffeehouses; the waterfront districts offer half a dozen big carpentry chapels of competing sects, a dream-death house, a den of transtemporalists; the people in the streets give the illusion of good health and high spirits, and though Shadrach knows it must be only an illusion, it is a persuasive one. The only thing wrong with San Francisco is the profusion of Citpols.

  There are more policemen here than he has ever seen in any one place, more even than in Ulan Bator itself. It is as though every ninth San Franciscan has enrolled in the Citizens’ Peace Brigade. Maybe it is only a delusion of his troubled mind, or maybe the unusual vitality of this city requires a correspondingly unusual quota of policing: at any rate, there are gray-and-blue uniforms everywhere, everywhere, usually in pairs but not infrequently in clumps of three, four, five. Most of them have the mechanical insectoid look that seems to be characteristic of their kind, that makes Shadrach suspect that Citpols a
re not born and trained but rather are stamped out in some ghastly factory deep in the Caucasus. And they all are watching him. Watching, watching, watching—it can’t be mere paranoia. Can it? Those dull gray watchful eyes, hard, stupid, purposeful, studying him from all angles as he strides through the city? Why are they looking at him so intently? What do they want to know?

  They are going to arrest me soon, Shadrach tells himself.

  He is certain that he has been under surveillance since his departure. He is positive that Avogadro is receiving information on his movements and is filing daily reports with Genghis Mao; and—is it his own growing tension that makes it seem that way, or is the tension in Genghis Mao?—the intensity of the surveillance appears to have been increasing, from Nairobi to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to Istanbul, from Istanbul to Rome, first a casual Citpol or two glancing offhandedly at him, then more overt scrutiny, then teams of them following him about, hovering, staring, conferring, charting his movements, until, perhaps in San Francisco, perhaps not until he reaches Peking, they get the orders from the capital and make their move, dozens of them on the housetops, in doorways, on street-corners: All right, Mordecai, come quietly and you won’t get hurt—

  And then, when he is at Broadway and Grant, about to turn downhill into teeming Chinatown and speculating darkly about the three Citpols clustered outside an Oriental grocery store across the street, someone shouts at him from the far side of Broadway, “Mordecai? Hey, Shadrach Mordecai!”

  At the sound of his name Shadrach freezes, impaled in mid-fantasy, knowing that the game is up, that the moment he has feared is at hand.

  But the man approaching him, moving in awkward dragging lurches through the traffic, is no Citpol. He is a burly, balding man with a seamed weary face and a thick unkempt gray-streaked beard, who is clad in threadbare green overalls, a heavy plaid shirt, a faded red cloak. When he reaches Shadrach’s side he puts his hand on Shadrach’s forearm in a way that seems to be asking for support as much as for attention, and thrusts his face close to Shadrach’s, assuming intimacy so brazenly that Shadrach does not resist the encroachment. The man’s eyes are watery and swollen: one of the organ-rot symptomata. But he is still capable of smiling. “Doctor,” he says. His voice is warm, furry, insinuating, “Hey, Doctor, how’s it going?”

  A drunk. Probably not dangerous, though there is a vague sense of menace about him.

  “I didn’t know I was such a celebrity here.”

  “Celebrity. Celebrity. Yeah, you’re fucking famous. At least to me you are. I spotted you from all the way across Broadway. Not that you’ve changed so much.” The man is definitely drunk. He has that heavy, overly ingratiating warmth; he is practically hanging from Shadrach’s arm. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

  “Should I?”

  “Depends. You knew me pretty well once.”

  Shadrach searches the jowly, ravaged face. Distantly familiar, but no name comes to mind. “Harvard,” he guesses. “It must have been Harvard. Right?”

  “Two points. Keep going.”

  “Medical school?”

  “Try the college.”

  “That’s harder. That goes back better than fifteen years.”

  “Take fifteen years off me. And about twenty kilos. And the beard. Shit, you haven’t changed at all. Of course you live an easy life. I know what you’ve been doing.” The man shuffles his feet and, without relinquishing his grip on Shadrach’s arm, twists away, coughs, hawks, spits. Bloody sputum. He grins. “Piece of my gut there, eh? Lose a little more every day. You really don’t recognize me. What the hell, all us white boys look alike.”

  “Want to give me more hints?”

  “Big one. We were on the track team together.”

  “Shotput,” Shadrach says instantly, feeling the datum rise out of God knows what recess of his memory banks and certain that it is correct.

  “Two points. Now the name.”

  “Not yet. I’m groping for it.” He transforms this ruin into a young man, beardless, brawn where he has fat today, in T-shirt and shorts, hefting the gleaming metal globe, going into the bizarre little wind-up dance of the shotputter, making his heave—

  “The NCAA meet, Boston, ’95. Our sophomore year. You won the sixty-meter sprint in six seconds even. Very nice. And I took the shotput at twenty-one meters. Our pictures in all the newspapers. Remember? The first big track event after the Virus War, a sign that things were getting back to normal. Hah. Normal. You were one hell of a runner, Shadrach. I bet you still are. Shit, I couldn’t even lift the shot now. What’s my name?”

  “Ehrenreich,” Shadrach says immediately. “Jim Ehrenreich.”

  “Six points! And you’re the big man’s doctor now. You said you’d be of some use to humanity, you weren’t going into medicine just to make a buck, eh? And you were right on. Serving humanity, keeping our glorious leader alive. Why do you look so surprised? You think nobody knows the name of the Chairman’s doctor?”

  “I don’t try to get much publicity,” Shadrach says.

  “True. But we know a little about what goes on in Ulan Bator. I was Committee, you know. Until last year. Where are you heading? Chinatown? Let’s walk together. Standing still like this, it’s bad for my legs, the varicose veins. I was Committee, third from the top in Northern California, even had a vector-access rating. Of course they dropped me. But don’t worry: you won’t get into trouble talking to me. Even with those Citpols standing over there watching. I’m not a fucking pariah, you know. I’m just ex-Committee. I’m allowed to talk to people.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was dumb. I had this friend, she was Committee too, very low echelon, and her brother caught the rot. She said to me, Can you jigger the computer, get a bigger requisition of the Antidote, save my brother? Sure, I said, I would, I’ll do it, only for you, kid. I knew this computer man. He could jigger the numbers. So I asked him, and he did it, at least I thought he was doing it, but it was only a trap, a sucker deal, pure entrapment—the Citpols stepped in, asked me to account for the extra Antidote allotment I had requested—” Ehrenreich blinks cheerfully, “They sent her to the organ farm. Her brother died. Me they simply dropped, no further punishment. Very fucking lucky. On account of my years of devoted service to the Permanent Revolution. I even get a little allowance, enough to keep me in vodka. But it was a waste, Shadrach, a stupid waste. They should have sent me to the organ farm too, while I was still whole. Because now I’m dying. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “They say that if you’ve been on the Antidote, and you go off it, you generally get the rot right away. It’s like the pent-up force of the disease busts loose and conquers you.”

  “I’ve heard that, yes,” Shadrach says.

  “How long do I have? You can tell that, can’t you?”

  “Not without examining you. Maybe not even then. I’m not exactly an expert on the rot.”

  “No. No. You wouldn’t be. Not in Ulan Bator. You don’t get enough exposure there. I’ve had it six months. My beard was black when I got it. I had all my hair then. I’m going to die, Shadrach.”

  “We’re all going to die. Except maybe for Genghis Mao.”

  “You know what I mean. I’m not even thirty-seven years old and I’m going to die. I’m going to rot and die. Because I was dumb, because I wanted to help the brother of a friend. I had it made, I was home safe, the Antidote in my arm every six months.”

  “You really were dumb,” Shadrach tells him. “Because nothing you could have done would have helped your friend’s brother.”

  “Eh?”

  “The Antidote doesn’t cure. It immunizes. Once the lethal stage sets in, that’s it. The disease can’t be reversed. Didn’t you know that? I thought everybody knew that.”

  “No. No.”

  “You smashed your career for nothing. Threw away your life for nothing.”

  “No,” Ehrenreich says. He looks stunned. “It can’t be true. I don’t believ
e it.”

  “Look it up.”

  “No,” he says. “I want you to save me, Shadrach. I want you to prescribe the Antidote for me.”

  “I just told you—”

  “You knew what I was going to ask. You were trying to head me off.”

  “Please, Jim—”

  “But you could get the stuff. You’re probably traveling with a hundred ampoules in your little black bag. Shit, man, you’re Genghis Mao’s own doctor! You can do anything. It’s not like being third from the top in a regional office. Look, we were on the same team, we won trophies together, we had our pictures in the paper—”

  “It wouldn’t work, Jim.”

  “You’re afraid to help me.”