Shadrach in the Furnace Read online

  SHADRACH

  IN THE

  FURNACE

  It is the twenty-first century, and a battered world is ruled by a crafty old tyrant, Genghis II Mao IV Khan. The Khan is ninety-three years old, his life systems sustained by the skill of Mordecai Shadrach, a brilliant young black surgeon whose chief function is to replace the Khan’s worn-out organs. Within the vast tower-complex, the most advanced equipment is being used for three top-priority projects, each designed to keep the Khan immortal. Most sinister of these is Project Avatar, by which the Khan’s mind and persona will be transferred to a younger body.

  Shadrach makes the unsettling discovery that it is his body that is to be used. His friends beg him to flee, but he refuses to panic. Instead, with almost incredible composure, he evolves a dangerous plan that could change the face of the earth; if it backfires, it could mean the end of his life.

  Shadrach in the Furnace is a big, sweeping novel; a harsh, abrasive, irreverent book about a life-and-death battle between two titans—one, the epitome of evil; the other, a paragon of idealism—in a society pushed to extremes.

  By Robert Silverberg

  The Stochastic Man

  Born with the Dead

  Dying Inside

  The Book of Skulls

  Tower of Glass

  Son of Man

  The World Inside

  Nightwings

  Downward to the Earth

  The Second Trip

  Up the Line

  Thorns

  A Time of Changes

  The Masks of Time

  The Man in the Maze

  Copyright © 1976 by Robert Silverberg

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form

  Published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.

  Indianapolis/New York

  Designed by Sheila Lynch

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  FIRST PRINTING

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Silverberg, Robert.

  Shadrach in the furnace.

  I. Title.

  PZ4.S573Sh [PS3569.I472] 813’.5’4 75-31608

  ISBN 0-672-51993-3

  For Norbert Slepyan

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 / Chapter 12 / Chapter 13 / Chapter 14 / Chapter 15 / Chapter 16 / Chapter 17 / Chapter 18 / Chapter 19 / Chapter 20 / Chapter 21 / Chapter 22 / Chapter 23 / Chapter 24

  1

  It is nine minutes before sunrise in the great city of Ulan Bator, capital of the reconstituted world. For some time now Dr. Shadrach Mordecai has lain awake, restless and tense in his hammock, staring somberly at a glowing green circlet in the wall that is the shining face of his data screen. Red letters on the screen announce the new day:

  MONDAY

  14 May

  2012

  As usual, Dr. Mordecai has been unable to get more than a few hours of sleep. Insomnia has plagued him all year; his wakefulness must be some kind of message from his cerebral cortex, but so far he has been unable to decipher it. Today, at least, he has some excuse for awakening early, because great challenges and tensions lie ahead. Dr. Mordecai is personal physician to Genghis II Mao IV Khan, Prince of Princes and Chairman of Chairmen—which is to say, ruler of the earth—and on this day the aged Genghis Mao is due to undergo a liver transplant, his third in seven years.

  The world leader sleeps less than twenty meters away, in a suite adjoining Mordecai’s. Dictator and doctor occupy residential chambers on the seventy-fifth floor of the Grand Tower of the Khan, a superb onyx-walled needle of a building that rises breathtakingly from the dusty brown Mongolian tableland. Just now Genghis Mao sleeps soundly, eyes unmoving beneath the thick lids, spine enviably relaxed, respiration slow and even, pulse steady, hormone levels rising normally. Mordecai knows all this because he carries, surgically inlaid in the flesh of his arms, thighs, and buttocks, several dozen minute perceptor nodes that constantly provide him with telemetered information on the stale of Genghis Mao’s vital signs. It took Mordecai a year of full-time training to learn to read the input, the tiny twitches and tremors and flickers and itches that are the analogue-coded equivalents of the Chairman’s major bodily processes, but by this time it is second nature for him to perceive and comprehend the data. A tickle here means digestive distress, a throb there means urinary sluggishness, a pricking elsewhere tells of saline imbalance. For Shadrach Mordecai it is something like living in two bodies at once, but he has grown accustomed to it. And so the Chairman’s precious life is safeguarded by his vigilant physician. Genghis Mao is officially said to be eighty-seven years old and may be even older, though his body, a patchwork of artificial and transplanted organs, is as strong and responsive as that of a man of fifty. It is the Chairman’s wish to postpone death until his work on earth is complete—which is to say, never to die.

  How sweetly he rests now! Mordecai runs automatically through the readings again and again: respiratory, digestive, endocrine, circulatory, all the autonomic systems going beautifully. The Chairman, dreamless (the motionless eyes), lying as customary on his left side (faint aortal pressure), emitting gentle hhnnorrking snores (reverberations in the rib cage), obviously feels no apprehension about the coming surgery. Mordecai envies him his calmness. Of course, organ transplants are an old story to Genghis Mao.

  At the precise moment of dawn the doctor leaves his hammock, stretches, walks naked across his bedchamber’s cool stone floor to the balcony, and steps outside. The air, suffused now with early blue to the east, is clear, crisp, cold, with a sharp wind blowing across the plains, a strong southerly breeze racing through Mongolia from the Great Wall toward Lake Baikal. It ruffles the black flags of Genghis Mao in Sukhe Bator Square, the capital’s grand plaza, and stirs the boughs of the pink-blossomed tamarisks. Shadrach Mordecai inhales deeply and studies the remote horizon, as if looking for meaningful smoke signals out of China. No signals come; only the little throbs and tingles of the implant disks, caroling the song of Genghis Mao’s irrepressible good health.

  All is quiet below. The whole city sleeps, save for those who must be awake to work; Mongols are not given to insomnia. Mordecai is; but then, Mordecai isn’t a Mongol. He is a black man, dark with an African darkness, though he is no African either; slender, long-limbed, tall—some two hundred centimeters in height—with dense woolly hair, large wide-set eyes, full lips, a broad though high-bridged nose. In this land of sturdy golden-skinned folk with sharp noses and glossy straight hair. Dr. Mordecai is a conspicuous figure, more conspicuous, perhaps, than he would like to be.

  He squats, straightens, squats, straightens, jackknifing his arms out and in, out and in. He starts every morning with a calisthenic routine on the balcony, naked in the chilly air: he is thirty-six years old, and even though his post in the government gives him guaranteed access to the Roncevic Antidote, even though he is thus spared the fear of organ-rot that obsesses most of the world’s two billion inhabitants, thirty-six is nevertheless an age when one must begin conscientiously to take measures to protect the body against the normal unravelings time brings. Mens sana in corpore sano; yes, keep on bending and twisting, Shadrach; make the juices flow; let the old yin balance the yang. He is in perfect health, and his bodily organs are the ones that were in him when he popped from the womb one frosty day in 1976. Up, down, up, down, unsparing of self. Sometimes it seems odd to him that his vigorous, violent morning exercises never awaken Genghis Mao, but of course the flow of telemetered data runs only in one direction, and as Mordecai puts himself through his fierce balcony w
orkout, the Chairman snores placidly on, unaware.

  Eventually, panting, perspiring, shivering lightly, feeling alive and open and receptive, hardly worrying at all about the coming surgical ordeal, Mordecai decides he has had enough of a workout. He washes, dresses, punches for his customary light breakfast, and sets about his morning routine of duties.

  So, then, the doctor confronts Interface Three, through which he daily enters the residential suite of his master the Khan. It is a ponderous diamond-shaped doorway, two and a half meters high. From its silken-smooth bronze surface jut a dozen and a half warty cylindrical snouts, three to nine centimeters high. Some of them are scanners and sensors, some are audio conduits, some are weapons of ineluctable lethality; and Shadrach Mordecai has no idea which is which. Most likely, what serves as a scanner today may well be a laser cannon tomorrow; with such random shifts of function does Genghis Mao contrive to confuse the faceless assassins he so vividly dreads.

  “Shadrach Mordecai to serve the Khan,” Mordecai says in a clear firm voice into what he hopes is today’s audio pickup.

  Interface Three, now emitting a gentle hum, subjects Mordecai’s announcement to voiceprint analysis. At the same time, Mordecai’s body is being checked for thermal output, mass, postural stress, olfactory texture, and much more. If any datum should fall beyond the established Mordecai-norm, he could find himself immobilized by loops of suddenly spurting webfoam while the guards are summoned to investigate; resistance at that point might lead to his immediate destruction. Five of these interfaces protect the five entrances to Chairman Genghis Mao’s chambers, and they are the wiliest doors ever devised. Daedalus himself could not have forged more clever barriers to guard King Minos.

  In a microsecond Mordecai is recognized to be himself, rather than some cunning lifelike simulacrum on a king-slaying errand. With a smooth hiss of perfectly machined joints and a gentle nimble of flawless bearings the interface’s outer slab glides open. This admits the doctor to a stone-walled inner holding chamber hardly larger than himself. No welcome vestibule for claustrophobes, this. Here he must halt another microsecond while the entire surveillance is repeated, and only after he passes this second muster is he allowed to enter the imperial residence proper. “Redundancy,” Chairman Genghis Mao has declared, “is our main avenue of survival.” Mordecai agrees. The intricate business of crossing these interfaces is a trifle to him, part of the normal order of the universe, no more bothersome than the need to turn a key in a lock.

  The room just on the far side of Interface Three is a cavernous sphere known as Surveillance Vector One. It is, in a literal sense, Genghis Mao’s window on the world. Here a dazzling array of screens, each five square meters in area, rises in overwhelming tiers from floor to ceiling, offering a constantly shifting panorama of televised images relayed from thousands of spy-eyes everywhere on the planet. No great public building is without its secret eyes; scanners look down on all major streets; a corps of government engineers is constantly employed in shifting the cameras from place to place and in installing new ones in previously unspied-upon places. Nor are all the eyes in fixed positions. So many spy-satellites streak through the nearer reaches of space that if their orbits were turned to silk they would swathe the earth in a dense cocoon. At the center of Surveillance Vector One is a grand control panel by means of which the Khan, sitting for hours at a time in an elegant thronelike seat, is able to control the flow of data from all these eyes, calling in signals with quick flutters of his fingertips so that he may look at will into the doings of Tokyo and Bangkok, New York and Moscow, Buenos Aires and Cairo. So sharp is the resolution of the Khan’s myriad lenses that they can show Genghis Mao the color of a man’s eyes at a distance of five kilometers.

  When the Chairman is not making use of Surveillance Vector One, the hundreds of screens continue to function without interruption as the master mechanism sucks in data randomly from the innumerable pickup points. Images come and go, sometimes flitting across a screen in a second or two, sometimes lingering to provide consecutive sequences many minutes in length. Shadrach Mordecai, since he must pass through this room every morning on his way to his master, has formed the habit of pausing for a few minutes to watch the gaudy, dizzying stream of pictures. Privately he refers to this daily interlude as “Checking the Trauma Ward,” the Trauma Ward being Mordecai’s secret name for the world in general, that great vale of sorrow and bodily corruption.

  He stands in mid-room now, observing the world’s griefs.

  The flow is jerkier than usual today; whatever giant computer operates this system is in a twitchy mood, it seems, its commands moving restlessly from eye to eye, and pictures wink on and off in a frenzied way. Still, there are isolated flashes of clarity. A limping woebegone dog moves slowly down a dirt-choked street. A big-eyed, big-bellied Negroid child stands naked in a dust-swept ravine, gnawing her thumb and crying. A sag-shouldered old woman, carrying carefully wrapped bundles through the cobbled plaza of some mellow European city, gasps and clutches at her chest, letting her packages tumble as she falls. A parched Oriental-faced man with wispy white beard and tiny green skullcap emerges from a shop, coughs, and spits blood. A crowd—Mexicans? Japanese?—gathers around two boys dueling with carving knives; their arms and chests are bright with red cuts. Three children huddle on the roof of a torn-away house rushing swiftly downstream on the white-flecked gray breast of a flooding river. A hawk-faced beggar stretches forth an accusing clawlike hand. A young dark-haired woman kneels at a curb, bowed double in pain, head touching the pavement, while two small boys look on. A speeding automobile veers crazily from a highway and vanishes in a bushy gulley. Surveillance Vector One is like some vast tapestry of hundreds of compartments, each with a story to tell, a fragmentary story, tantalizing, defying comprehension. Out there in the world, out in the great big wide Trauma Ward that is the world, the two billion subjects of Genghis II Mao IV Khan are dying hour by hour, despite the best efforts of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee. Nothing new about that—everyone who has ever lived has died hour by hour all through his life—but the modes of death are different in these years following the Virus War; death seems ever so much more immediate when so many people are so conspicuously rotting within all at once; and the general decay out there is that much more poignant because there are these innumerable eyes to see it in its totality. The scanners of the Khan capture everything, making no comment, offering no judgment, merely filling these walls with a staggering, baffling portrait of the revised postwar early-twenty-first-century version of the human condition.

  The room is a touchstone of character, drawing revealing responses from every viewer. To Mordecai the whirling stream of scenes is fascinating and repelling, a crazy mosaic of decomposition and defeat, courage and endurance; he loves and pities the sufferers who flash so quickly across the screens, and if he could he would embrace them all—lift that old woman to her feet, put coins in the beggar’s gnarled hand, stroke that child’s distended belly. But Mordecai is, by inclination and profession, a healer. To others the brutal theater that is Surveillance Vector One serves only as a reminder of their own good fortune: how wise of them it was to attain high governmental rank and steady supplies of the Roncevic Antidote, to enjoy the favor of Chairman Genghis Mao and live free of pain and hunger and organ-rot, insulated from the nightmare of real life! To others the screens are unbearable, arousing not a sense of smug superiority but rather a feeling of intolerable guilt that they should be here, safe, while they are out there. And to others the screens are merely boring: they show dramas without plot, transactions without discernible purpose, tragedies without moral significance, mere stray snatches of life’s scratchy fabric. What Genghis Mao’s own reactions to Surveillance Vector One may be is impossible to determine, for the Khan is, in this as in so many other things, wholly inscrutable as he manipulates the controls. But he does spend hours in there. Somehow the room feeds him.

  Shadrach Mordecai takes his time this morning, giving the hug
e room five minutes, eight, ten. Genghis Mao still sleeps, after all. The implanted monitors tell Mordecai that. In this world no one escapes surveillance; while the many eyes of Genghis Mao scan the globe, the slumbering Khan is himself scanned by his physician. Mordecai, standing quite motionless beside the Chairman’s upholstered throne, receives a flood of data within and without, Genghis Mao’s metabolic output twanging and tweaking the doctor’s implants, the flowing shimmer of the screens assailing his eyes. He starts to leave, but just then a screen high up and to his left shows him a glimpse of what is certainly Philadelphia, unmistakably Philadelphia, and he halts, riveted. His native city: he was a Bicentennial baby, entering the world in Ben Franklin’s own town, coming forth high up in Hahnemann Hospital when the United States of America was four months short of its two hundredth birthday. And there is Philadelphia now, turning in the gyre of some ineffably keen satellite-mounted eye; the familiar childhood totems, City Hall, Independence Hall, Penn Center, Christ Church. It is years since he last was there. For a decade now, Shadrach Mordecai has lived in Mongolia. Once it was hard for him to believe that there really was such a place as Mongolia, fabled land of Prester John and Genghis Khan, but by this time it is Philadelphia that has started to seem a place of fable to him. And the United States of America? Do those syllables still have meaning? Who could imagine that the Constitution of Jefferson and Madison would be forgotten, and America pledge allegiance to a Mongol overlord? But that overstates the case: America, Mordecai knows, is governed like all other nations by a local wing of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, that alliance of radical and reactionary groups functioning through a series of vestigial quasi-democratic institutions; and the aged recluse Genghis Mao is merely the Chairman of the Committee, a remote and semimythical figure who governs indirectly and has no immediate consequence in the daily lives of Dr. Mordecai’s former countrymen. Probably no one in America pauses to consider Genghis Mao the embodiment of the authority of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, and thus the true master of the body politic, any more than one considers the chairman of the board of the local electric company to be the source and controller of the power that flows when the switch is thrown. But he is. Not that many Americans would be disturbed to learn that they owed fealty to a Mongol. The whole world has abdicated; the game of politics is ended; Genghis Mao rules by default, rules because no one cares, because in an exhausted, shattered world dying of organ-rot, there is general relief that someone, anyone, is willing to play the role of global dictator.