Shadrach in the Furnace

by Robert Silverberg

“I ought to be, after what you just told me. You got dropped for illegal diversion of the Antidote, you say, and then you turn around and ask me to do the same thing.”

  “It’s different. You’re the doctor of—”

  “Even so. There’s no point in giving you the Antidote, for reasons that I’ve just explained. But even if there were, I couldn’t get any for you. I’d never get away with it.”

  “You don’t want to risk your ass. Even for an old friend.”

  “No, I don’t. And I don’t want to be made to feel guilty for refusing to do something that doesn’t make any sense.” There is nothing gentle in Shadrach’s voice. “The Antidote is useless to you now. Absolutely entirely useless. Get that straight and keep it straight.”

  “You wouldn’t even try some on me? Just for an experiment?”

  “It’s useless. Useless.”

  After a long pause Ehrenreich says, “You know what I wish, old buddy? That you find yourself in bad trouble someday, that you find yourself right on the edge of the cliff and you’re hanging on by your fingernails. And some old buddy of yours comes along, and you yell out to him, Save me, save me, the shits are killing me! And he tromps on your hand and keeps on walking. That’s what I wish. So you’d find out what it’s like. That’s what I wish.”

  Shadrach shrugs. He can feel no anger toward a dying man. Nor does he choose to talk about his own problems. He says simply, “If I could heal you, I would. But I can’t.”

  “You won’t even try.”

  “There’s nothing I can do. Will you believe that?”

  “I was sure you’d be the one. You if anybody. Didn’t even remember me. Won’t lift a finger.”

  Shadrach says, “Have you ever done any carpentry, Jim?”

  “You mean, in the chapels? Never interested me.”

  “It might help you. It won’t cure what you have, but it might make it easier for you to live with it. Carpentry shows you patterns that you can’t necessarily see for yourself. It helps you sort what’s real and important from what doesn’t matter much.”

  “So you’re a carpentry nut?”

  “I go now and then. Whenever things cut too close. There are some chapels down by Fisherman’s Wharf. I wouldn’t mind going now. Suppose you come down there with me. It’ll do you some good.”

  “There’s a bar at Washington and Stockton that I go to a lot. Suppose we go there instead. Suppose you buy me some drinks on your PRC card. Do me even more good.”

  “Bar first, then chapel?”

  “We’ll see,” Ehrenreich says.

  The bar is dark, musty, a forlorn place. The bartender is an automatic: card in slot, thumb to identification plate, punch for drinks. They order martinis. Ehrenreich’s truculence subsides after his second drink; he grows morose and maudlin, but he is less bitter now. “I’m sorry I said what I did, man,” he mutters.

  “Forget it.”

  “I really thought you’d be the one.”

  “I wish I could be.”

  “I don’t wish any trouble on you.”

  “I’m in trouble already,” Shadrach says. “Hanging on by my fingernails.” He laughs. A new round of drinks comes from the machine. He lifts his glass. “Never mind. Cheers, friend.”

  “Cheers, man.”

  “After this one we’ll go to the chapel, right?”

  Ehrenreich shakes his head. “Not me. It’s not for me, you know? Not now. Not right now. You go without me. Don’t nag me about it, just go without me.”

  “All right,” Shadrach says.

  He finishes his drink, touches Ehrenreich’s arm lightly in farewell—the man is glassy-eyed, inarticulate—and finds a cab to take him down to the Wharf. But the chapel gives Shadrach no ease today. His fingers tremble, his eyes will not focus, he is unable to slip into the meditative state. After half an hour he leaves. He sees a car full of Citpols in a lot up the block. They’re still watching him. There is a bearded man in street clothes in the car, also. Ehrenreich? Is that possible? At this distance he can’t make out faces, but the heavy shoulders look about right, the thinning hair is familiar. Shadrach scowls. He hails a taxi, goes back to his hotel, packs, heads for the airport. Three hours later he is on his way to Peking.

  23

  In Peking, ensconced at the Hundred Gates Hotel in the old legation quarter adjoining the Forbidden City district, where Kublai Khan and Ch’ien-lung once held court, Shadrach begins once more to detect emanations from Genghis Mao. He is still some twelve hundred or thirteen hundred kilometers from Ulan Bator, he calculates—beyond the optimum telemetering range, and so the incoming impulses are blurred and faint. Then, too, after these weeks of separation Shadrach is no longer as much in concord with the broadcast from Genghis Mao’s body as he had been. But when he sits very still, when he tunes his attention perfectly to the task, he finds himself able to read the old warlord’s biodata with gradually sharpening clarity.

  The gross functions come in best, of course: heartbeat, blood pressure, respiration, body temperature. The Khan’s major systems all seem to be thundering along at their usual level of irrepressible vitality. Liver and kidney action register in their normal range. Basal metabolic expenditure normal. Neuromuscular responses normal. It never ceases to amaze Shadrach how healthy, how strong, the old man is. He takes a certain vicarious pride in Genghis Mao’s heroic durability and resilience.

  Some unexpected puzzles begin to develop, though, as Shadrach extends his reach and starts to bring in the subtler, more refined data. These tend to contradict some of the gross indications. The muscle-firing responses do not seem quite right—phosphate breakdown appears weak, enzyme activity off. Blood viscosity is lower than normal and blood pH is nudging slightly toward the alkaline. Intestinal absorption is minutely down, cholesterol accumulation up, perspiration a trifle above normal.

  None of these things is cause for real alarm in a man of the Chairman’s age who has recently undergone so much radical surgery—it is hardly reasonable to expect him to be in perfect health—but the combination of factors is peculiar. Shadrach wonders how much of what he is reading is simply an artifact of distance and noise on the line: he is straining for some of these inputs, and he may not be getting them accurately. Still, the distortions, if distortions they are, are remarkably consistent. He gets the same reading whenever he returns to any sensor.

  And a hypothesis is starling to take shape.

  Diagnosis at more than a thousand kilometers’ range is tricky. Shadrach misses his medical library and his computers. But he has an idea of what the problem may be, and he knows what data he needs to confirm his theory. What he does not know is whether Buckmaster’s implant system is good enough to transmit analogues of such small-scale phenomena across so great a distance.

  If blood viscosity is down and blood pH is alkaline, plasma protein levels are probably subnormal, and osmotic pressure, which draws fluids from the tissues to the capillaries, is going to be low. If the hydrostatic blood pressure is normal, as the gross function modulator is telling him, and the osmotic blood pressure is off, Genghis Mao’s tissues may be building up an accumulation of excess fluids—not serious, not dangerous, not yet, but such fluid accumulations may be leading toward the development of edemas, of watery swellings, and edemas can be symptomatic of impending failure in the kidneys, the liver, perhaps the cardiac system. Bearing down in intense concentration, Shadrach roves Genghis Mao’s body in search of signs of excess fluid. The lymphatic-system checkpoints give him nothing but normal levels, though. The reports from the pericardial, pleural, and peritoneal outposts are positive. Renal and hepatic functions, as before, are fine. Nothing seems to be wrong. Shadrach begins to abandon his hypothesis. Perhaps the Khan is not in difficulties. Those few negative indications were probably just noise on the line, and therefore—

  But then Shadrach notices that something is not quite right in Genghis Mao’s skull. Intracranial pressure is unusually high.

  The implant monitors in the Chairman’
s cranium are not as comprehensive as they are elsewhere. Genghis Mao has no history of stroke or other cerebrovascular events, and surgeons have never had reason to invade the imperial skull. Since most of the telemetering equipment in Genghis Mao has been installed during the course of routine corrective surgery, Shadrach must make do with relatively skimpy coverage of the state of the Chairman’s brain. But he does have a sensor that reports to him on intracranial pressure, and, as he makes his total scan of Genghis Mao’s body, the rise in that pressure catches his attention. Is that where the fluid buildup is taking place?

  Struggling, stretching for the data, Shadrach pulls in whatever correlative information he can grab. Osmotic pressure of the cranial capillaries? Low. Hydrostatic pressure? Normal. Meningeal distension? High. Condition of the cerebral ventricles? Congested. Something is awry, very marginally awry, in the system that drains cerebrospinal fluid from the interior of Genghis Mao’s brain to the subarachnoid space, next to the skull wall, where it normally passes into the blood.

  What this means, at the moment, is that Genghis Mao probably has been having bad headaches for a few days, that he will have worse ones if Shadrach Mordecai does not return to Ulan Bator at once, and that he may suffer brain damage—possibly fatal—if prompt corrective action is not taken. It means, also, that Shadrach’s holiday is at its end. He will not do the sightseeing tour of Peking. Not for him the visit to the Forbidden City, the historical museum, the Ming tombs, the Great Wall, the temple of Confucius, the Working People’s Palace of Culture. Those things are unimportant to him now: this is the moment for which he was waiting during his wanderings from continent to continent. The unstable system that is Genghis II Mao IV Khan has, in the absence of the devoted physician, begun to break down. Shadrach’s indispensability has been made manifest. He is needed. He must go to his patient immediately. He must take the appropriate actions. He has his Hippocratic obligations to fulfill.

  He has his own survival to think about, besides.

  Shadrach descends to the hotel lobby to arrange for a seat aboard the next flight to Ulan Bator—there is one that evening, he learns, leaving in two and a half hours—and to check out of the room he so recently checked into. The clerk, a gaunt young Chinese who is unable to contain his fascination with the color of Shadrach’s skin, staring and staring with surreptitious sideways glances, comments on the brevity of his stay in Peking.

  “Change of plan,” Shadrach declares resonantly. “Urgent business. Must return at once.”

  He glances down the length of the lobby—a dim, fragrant space, like the vestibule of some enormous Chinese restaurant, cluttered with mahogany screens and porcelain urns and huge lacquer bowls on rosewood pedestals—and sees, towering above a pair of porters, the husky, hulking figure of Avogadro. Their eyes meet and Avogadro smiles, nods his head in salute, waves a hand. He has just arrived at the hotel, it seems. Shadrach is not at all surprised to discover the security chief here. It was inevitable, he decides, that Avogadro would show up to make the arrest in person.

  Neither of them remarks on the coincidence of their presence in this exotic place. Avogadro asks amiably, “How have you been enjoying your travels, Doctor?”

  “I’ve seen a great deal of the world. Most interesting.”

  “That’s the best word you can choose? Interesting? Not overwhelming, illuminating, transcendental?”

  “Interesting,” Shadrach repeats deliberately. “A very interesting trip. And how is Genghis Mao bearing up in my absence?”

  “Not too badly.”

  “He’s well looked after. He likes to think I’m indispensable, but the relief staff is quite capable of handling most of what’s likely to come up.”

  “Probably so.”

  “But he’s been having headaches, hasn’t he?”

  Avogadro looks mildly startled. “You know that, do you?”

  “I’m just at the edge of the telemetering range here.”

  “And you can detect his headaches?”

  “I can pick up certain causal factors,” Shadrach says, “and deduce a headache from them.”

  “How clever that system is. You and the Khan are practically one person, wouldn’t that be so? Connected the way you are. He aches and you feel it.”

  “Well put,” Shadrach says. “Actually, Nikki was the first one to make that point to me. Genghis Mao and I are one person, yes, one united information-processing unit. Comparable to the sculptor and the marble and the chisel.”

  The analogy does not appear to register with Avogadro. He continues to smile the fixed, determinedly affable smile that he has been smiling since they first approached one another in the lobby.

  “But not united closely enough,” Shadrach goes on. “The system could be linked even more tightly. I plan to talk to the engineers about building some modifications into it, when I get back to Ulan Bator.”

  “Which will be when?”

  “Tonight,” Shadrach tells him. “I’m booked on the next flight out.”

  Avogadro’s eyebrows rise. “You are? How convenient. Saves me the trouble of—”

  “Asking me to return?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you might have had something like that in mind.”

  “The truth is that Genghis Mao misses you. He sent me down here to talk to you.”

  “Of course.”

  “To ask you to come back.”

  “He sent you to ask me that. Not to bring me, but to ask me. If I would return. Of my own free will.”

  “To ask, yes.”

  Shadrach thinks of the Citpols keeping tabs on him all around the world, huddling, conferring, passing bulletins on to their colleagues in distant cities. He knows, and he is sure that Avogadro knows that he knows, that the real situation is not as casual as Avogadro would have him believe. By buying that ticket on this evening’s flight, he has spared Avogadro the embarrassment of having to take him into custody and return him to Ulan Bator under duress. He hopes Avogadro is properly grateful for that.

  He says, “How bad are the Khan’s headaches?”

  “Pretty bad, I’m told.”

  “You haven’t seen him?”

  Avogadro shakes his head. “Only on the telephone. He looked drawn. Tired.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “The night before last. But there’s been talk in the tower all week about the Chairman’s headaches.”

  “I see,” Shadrach says. “I thought it might be like that. That’s why I’ve decided to go back ahead of schedule.” His eyes rest squarely on Avogadro’s. “You understand that, don’t you? That I bought my return ticket as soon as I realized the Khan was in discomfort? Because it was my responsibility to my patient. My responsibility to my patient is always the controlling factor in my actions. Always. Always. You’re aware of that, aren’t you?”

  “Naturally,” Avogadro says.

  June 23, 2012

  What if I had died before my work was done? Not an idle question at all. I am important to history. I am one of the great reconstituters of society. Subtract me from the scene in 1995, in 1998, even as late as 2001, and everything tumbles into chaos. I am to this society as Augustus was to the Roman world, as Ch’in Shih Huang Ti was to China. What kind of world would exist today if I had perished ten years ago? A thousand warring principalities, no doubt, each with its own pathetic army, its own legislature, currency, passports, border guards, customs levies. A host of petty aristocracies, feudal overlords, secret cabals of malcontents, constant little revolutions—chaos, chaos, chaos. New outbreaks of virus warfare, very likely. And ultimately the extinction of mankind. All this if you subtract Genghis Mao at the critical moment in history. I am the world-savior.

  It sounds obscenely boastful. World-savior! Culture-hero, myth-figure, I, Krishna, I, Quetzalcoatl, I, Arthur, I, Genghis Mao. And yet it is true, truer for me than for any of them, for without me all of mankind might be dead today, and that is new in the history of the savior-myth. To end the strife
, to seal away the virus, to sponsor Roncevic’s work—yes, no doubt of it, this could have been a dead planet by now if I had gone into the tomb ten years ago. As history will recognize. And yet, and yet, what does it matter? I will not be forgotten when I die—I will never be forgotten—but I will die. Sooner, later, my subterfuges will exhaust themselves. Neither Talos nor Phoenix nor Avatar can sustain me indefinitely. Something will fail, or boredom will conquer me and I will terminate my own systems, and I will die, and then what will it have meant to have saved the world? What I have done is ultimately meaningless to me. The power I have attained is ultimately empty. Not immediately empty—here I sit, do I not, among splendor and comfort?—but ultimately empty. I pretend that there is meaning in empire, but there is none, no meaning anywhere. This is a philosophy common among the very young, and, I suppose, among the very old. I must pretend that power is important to me. I must pretend that the reckoning of history is the all-consoling consolation. But I am too old to care. I have forgotten why it mattered to me to do what I have done. I am playing out a foolish game, unwilling to let it reach its end, but unsure of the nature of the winning gambit. And so I go on and on and on. I, Genghis II Mao IV Khan, savior of the world, taking care to conceal from those around me the profound and paralyzing vacancy that lies beneath the subcellars of my spirit. I think I have lost the thread of my own argument. I am tired. I am bored. My head hurts.

  My head hurts.

  “Shadrach!” Genghis Mao roars. “This filthy headache! Fix me, Shadrach!”

  The old buccaneer forces a grin. He sits propped up against triple pillows, looking weary and frayed. His jaws are set in a rigid grimace; his eyes have a harsh glare and they waver frantically as though he is struggling to keep them in focus. At this close range Shadrach can easily detect a dozen different symptoms of the pressure building up in the recesses of the Chairman’s brain. Already there are many tiny signs of deterioration in Genghis Mao’s cerebral functions. No doubt of the diagnosis now. No doubt of it.

  “You were away too long,” the Khan mutters. “Enjoying yourself? Yes. But the headache, Shadrach, the miserable hideous headache—I shouldn’t have let you go. Your place is here. Beside me. Watching me. Healing me. It was like sending my right hand on a voyage around the world. You won’t go away again, will you, Shadrach? And you’ll fix my head? It frightens me. The throbbing. Like something trying to escape in there.”