Shadrach in the Furnace Read online

  “I don’t follow.”

  “You would if I told you the story.” She studies him. “If I told you, would it stop with you?”

  “If that’s what you wanted.”

  “I feel I should tell someone. I’d like to tell you. I trust you, Shadrach. But I’m afraid.”

  “If you’d rather not—”

  “No. No. I’ll tell you. Walk with me across the plaza. Keep your back to the tower.”

  “There are cameras everywhere. It doesn’t matter which way we face. But they can’t pick up everything, I guess.”

  They start across the plaza. Lindman raises her arm, holding it across her face as though to scratch her nose with the back of her wrist, and says, mouth covered, voice muffled, “I saw Mangu the night before he jumped. We talked about Project Avatar. I told him he was going to be the donor.”

  “Oh, Jesus. You didn’t!”

  She nods grimly. “I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer. It was a Monday night, just before Genghis Mao’s liver transplant, right? Yes. Mangu had made a speech that night, something about worldwide distribution of the Antidote. Then he and I went for drinks somewhere. He was afraid Genghis Mao might die during the operation and he’d have to take charge of things—I’m not ready, Mangu kept saying, I’m not ready. And then we started talking about the three projects, and he began to speculate about Avatar. What his role would likely be in the government if they transplanted Genghis Mao’s mind into some other body. Whether Genghis Mao would still want him as viceroy after the transition, things like that. It was so sad, Shadrach, so fucking sad, so filthy sad, the way he kept poking at it, trying to figure out what was in store for him, working up all sorts of hypotheses and scenarios. Finally I couldn’t stand it and I told him to stop worrying about it, that he was wasting his time, that after the transition he wasn’t going to be around, that Genghis Mao was going to use his body as the donor.”

  Shadrach is stunned by this confession. He can barely speak; his legs tremble, his skin is chilled.

  He says, “How could you have done it?”

  “The words just came out. I mean, here was this man, this pitiful doomed man trying to understand his future, trying to see what his role would be, and I knew that he had no future. Not if Project Avatar worked out. We all knew it, all but him. And I couldn’t hold it back any longer.”

  “What happened then?”

  “His face seemed to cave in. His eyes went dead—blank—empty. He sat for a long time and didn’t say anything. Then he asked me how I knew. I said it was known to a lot of people. He asked if you knew and I said I thought so. I want to talk to Nikki Crowfoot, he said. She’s at Karakorum with Shadrach, I told him. Then he asked me if I thought Avatar really would work out, and I said I didn’t know, I had a lot of faith in my own project, with any luck Talos would head Avatar off. It’s all a matter of time, I said. Avatar’s ahead of Talos now, and if anything serious happens to Genghis Mao in the next few months they might have to activate Avatar, because the Talos automation needs at least a year of further development work and Project Phoenix isn’t getting anywhere. He thought about that. He said it didn’t matter to him whether he actually became the donor or not, the thing was that Genghis Mao had let him think he was the heir-apparent while secretly approving what amounted to his murder. That was what hurt, he said, not the idea of dying, not the idea of giving up his body to Genghis Mao, but being tricked, being treated like a simpleton. And then he got up, he said goodnight, he went out. Walking very slowly. After that I don’t know. I suppose he spent the whole night thinking things over. Thinking about how he had been duped. The prize lamb, fattened for the slaughter. And in the morning he jumped.”

  “And in the morning he jumped,” Shadrach says. “Yes. Yes. It sounds right. Some truths can’t be faced.”

  “So there are no conspirators. The conspiracy exists only in Genghis Mao’s paranoia. Those three hundred arrested people are innocent. How many sent to the organ farms so far? Ninety-seven? Innocent. All innocent. I’ve watched it happen, but there’s nothing I can do. I can’t speak out. They say the Khan refuses even to consider the suicide hypothesis.”

  “He wants there to have been a conspiracy, yes,” Shadrach says. “He enjoys punishing the guilty.”

  “And if I told him what I’ve just told you, the Khan would have me killed.”

  “You’d be in the organ farm tomorrow. Yes. Or else maybe he’d pick you as the new Avatar donor.”

  “No,” Katya says. “That isn’t likely.”

  “It would suit his philosophy. It would be very centripetal, wouldn’t it? Your loose tongue costs him Mangu’s body, so you become Mangu’s replacement. Very fitting. Very neat.”

  “Don’t be foolish, Shadrach. It’s unimaginable. He’s a barbarian, isn’t he? He’s a Mongol. He thinks he’s the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. He’d never let himself be transplanted into a woman’s body.”

  “Why not? The old Mongol khans weren’t sexists, Katya. As I recall, the Mongols let themselves be ruled by female regents now and then when the male line gave out. Of course, there are problems of adaptation he’d have, changing sexes, all the bodily reflexes, all the million little masculine things that he’d have to unlearn—”

  “Stop it, Shadrach. It isn’t a serious possibility, the Khan’s taking my body.”

  “But it’s amusing to consider—”

  “It doesn’t amuse me.” She halts and swings around to face him. She is pale, drawn, tense. “What can we do? How can we stop these hideous arrests?”

  “There’s no way. The thing has to run its course.”

  “Suppose an anonymous tip is sent to the Khan, telling him merely that Mangu had learned what was in store for him, that some unnamed person had revealed to him that he would be used for—”

  “No. Either Genghis Mao will ignore it, or else he’ll begin a vast and bloody interrogation of everybody who might have had knowledge of the Avatar plan.”

  “What if the arrests don’t stop though?”

  Shadrach says, “Avogadro’s running out of suspects. It’s almost over.”

  “And the prisoners awaiting sentence?”

  Shadrach Mordecai sighs. “We can’t help them. They are lost. Nothing can be done, Katya. One way or another, we’re all awaiting sentence.”

  He is haunted all afternoon by the vision of Mangu, pitiful deluded Mangu, stripped of all delusions, confronted at last by frosty reality. Why had Lindman tipped him to his true fate? Out of compassion? Did she really think she was helping him, for God’s sake? Had she thought that receiving such knowledge could do Mangu any good? Could she have failed to see how cruel, how merciless, she was being? No. She must have known that a man like Mangu, genial, shallow, unquestioning, a man who was living an impossible fantasy of eventual succession to the world’s most powerful office, believing he enjoyed the esteem, even the love, of Genghis Mao, would collapse totally if that structure of fantasy was ripped away.

  She must have known.

  Of course. An hour after lunching with Katya Lindman, Shadrach finally grasps the pattern. Lindman, good chess player that she is, had foreseen all the consequences of her move. Tell Mangu the truth, pretending compassion and claiming a compulsion to frankness. Mangu—out of humiliation, chagrin, fear, even vengefulness, whatever—reacts by putting his body beyond Genghis Mao’s reach. No Mangu, and Project Avatar is dealt a mighty blow. Nikki, Lindman’s rival, is discomfited; Avatar, set back by many months, loses its primacy to Lindman’s Project Talos; Shadrach, already mysteriously estranged from Nikki, is drawn inevitably closer to Katya as her star rises. Of course. Of course. And all the rest, Katya’s pretense of concern for the hapless victims of the mass arrests, Katya’s show of grief for poor pathetic Mangu—all part of the game. Shadrach shivers. Even in the harsh and perverse climate of the Grand Tower of the Khan, this seems monstrous, and Lindman a baleful and alien figure, malevolent enough to make a suitable consort for Genghis Mao himself. Or, if
not a mate, then a fitting housing for the old ogre’s devious and sinister mind. Yes! For a moment Shadrach does seriously consider urging the Khan to take Lindman’s body in place of Mangu’s: An appropriate choice, sir, very centripetal, very apt. Though he is puzzled by one still-obscure motive: why has Lindman revealed all this to him? If she is so calculating a monster, would she not have calculated the likelihood that he would sooner or later come to see her for what she is? Can that have been her ultimate aim? Why? He is dizzied by the multiplicity of speculations.

  He wants to turn to Nikki, but Nikki has continued to hold herself aloof, and he has not even spoken to her by telephone for two or three days. He phones her now, on the pretext that he needs an update on Project Avatar progress, but one of her assistants appears on the screen, a Dr. Eis from Frankfurt. Eis, classically Teutonic, pale blue eyes and soft golden hair, does an odd little take of—surprise? dismay? distaste?—at the sight of Shadrach, forehead furrowing and corner of mouth pulling in, but he recovers quickly and gives him a cool, formal greeting.

  Shadrach says, “May I speak with Dr. Crowfoot, please?”

  “I’m sorry. Dr. Crowfoot is not here. Perhaps I can be of assis—”

  “Will she be back this afternoon?”

  “Dr. Crowfoot has left for the day. Dr. Mordecai.”

  “I need to reach her.”

  “She is in her apartment, Doctor. An illness. She has asked that she not be disturbed.”

  “Sick? What’s me matter?”

  “A mild upset. A fever, headaches. She has asked me to tell you, if you called the laboratory, that we are still studying the recalibration problem, but that at present there is nothing to report, no—”

  “Danke, Dr. Eis.”

  “Bitte, Dr. Mordecai,” Eis replies crisply, as Shadrach blanks the screen.

  He starts to phone Nikki’s apartment. No. He’s had enough of evasions, excuses, procrastinations, deflections. It’s too easy for her to run numbers like that when he calls. He’ll simply go down there and ring the doorbell, uninvited.

  She lets him stand in the hallway a long time before she responds, though she must know, from her doorscreen, who’s there. Then she says, “What do you want, Shadrach?”

  “Eis told me you were ill.”

  “It’s nothing serious. Just a bad case of the lousies.”

  “May I come in?”

  “I’m trying to take a nap, Shadrach.”

  “I won’t stay long.”

  “But I feel so awful. I’d rather not have visitors.”

  He starts to turn away from the door, but, although he knows his maniac persistence can do him no good, he finds it loo painful to leave without seeing her. Helplessly he hears himself saying, “At least let me see if I can prescribe something for you, Nikki. I am a doctor, after all.”

  Long silence. Desperately he prays that no one he knows will come upon him here, out in the hall like a lovesick Romeo pleading to be let in.

  The door opens, at last.

  She is in bed, and she really does look sick, face flushed and feverish, eyes bloodshot. The air in the bedroom has that stale sickroom quality, stuffy and congested. He goes at once to open the window; Crowfoot shivers and asks him not to, but he ignores her. He sees when she sits up that she is naked under her blanket. “I’ll find your pajamas for you if you’re cold,” he says.

  “No. I hate wearing pajamas. I don’t know if I’m cold or hot.”

  “May I examine you?”

  “I’m not all that sick, Shadrach.”

  “Even so, I’d like to make certain.”

  “You think I’m coming down with organ-rot?”

  “There’s no harm in checking things out, Nikki. It’ll take only a moment.”

  “Pity you can’t diagnose me the way you do Genghis Mao, just by reading your own internal gadgets. Without having to bother me at all.”

  “No, I can’t,” he says. “But this’ll be quick.”

  “All right,” she tells him. She has not once met his eyes during this interchange, and that bothers him. “Go ahead. Play doctor with me, if you have to.”

  He uncovers her, and finds himself curiously reticent about exposing her body this way, as though their recent estrangement has somehow deprived him of a doctor’s traditional privileges. But of course he has had only one patient in his career, having gone straight from medical school to the service of Genghis Mao, having done nothing but gerontological research until being elevated to serve as the Khan’s personal physician, and he has never developed the practicing doctor’s traditional indifference to flesh: this is no anonymous patient, this is Nikki Crowfoot whom he loves, and her naked body is more than an object to him. After a moment he attains some impersonality, though, transforms her breasts into mere globes of meat, her thighs into sexless columns of flesh and muscle, and checks her over without further unsettling himself, reading her pulse, tapping her chest, palpating her abdomen, all the routine things. Her self-diagnosis turns out to have been accurate: no incipient organ-rot, just a trifling upset, some fever, nothing remarkable. Plenty of fluids, rest, a couple of pills, and she’ll be back to normal in a day or so.

  “Satisfied?” she asks mockingly.

  “Is it so hard for you to accept the fact that I worry about you, Nikki?”

  “I told you I didn’t have anything serious.”

  “I still worried.”

  “So examining me was really therapy for you?”

  “I suppose,” he admits.

  “And if you hadn’t rushed over to give me the benefit of your high-powered medical skills, I might be asleep now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “All right, Shadrach.”

  She turns away from him, curling up sullenly under the bedclothes. He stands by the bed, silent, wanting to ask a thousand unaskable questions, wanting to know what shadow has fallen between them, why she has become so mysteriously remote, so cool, why she will not even look straight at him when she speaks to him. After a moment he says, instead, “How’s the project going?”

  “Didn’t Eis speak to you? We’re recalibrating. It’ll take us a while to gear up for a new donor. The whole thing’s a colossal pain in the ass.”

  “How much of a setback is it, actually?”

  She shrugs. “A month, if we’re lucky. Or three. Or six. It all depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On—on—oh, Christ! Look, Shadrach, I don’t really want to talk shop right now. I feel sick. Do you know what being sick means? My head hurts. My belly hurts. My skin tingles. I want to get some rest. I don’t want to discuss my current research problems.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says again.

  “Will you go now?”

  “Yes. Yes. I’ll phone you in the morning to see how you’re coming along, okay?”

  She mutters something into her pillow.

  He starts to leave. But he makes one last attempt to reach her before he goes. At the door he says tamely, “Oh—have you heard the newest rumor making the rounds? About Mangu’s death?”

  She groans stoically. “I haven’t heard anything. But go on. Go on. What is it?”

  He frames his words carefully, so that he will not feel he is breaching Katya Lindman’s confidence: “The story that’s going around is that Mangu committed suicide because somebody connected with Project Talos tipped him that he was to be the Avatar donor.”

  Nikki sits upright, eyes wide, face animated, cheeks blazing in excitement.

  “What? What? I hadn’t heard that!”

  “It’s just a story.”

  “Who’s the one who’s supposed to have tipped him?”

  “They don’t say.”

  “Lindman herself, was it?” Nikki demands.

  “It’s only a rumor, Nikki. Nobody specific has been named. Anyway, Katya wouldn’t do anything so unprofessional.”

  “Oh no?”

  “I don’t think so. If it happened at all, it was probably some ambitious underling, som
e third-echelon programmer. If it happened at all. There may not be a shred of truth to it.”

  “But it sounds right,” she says. Her breasts are heaving, her skin is glossy with new sweat. “What better way could Lindman find to sabotage my work? Oh, why didn’t I think of it! How could I not have seen—”

  “Stay calm, Nikki. You aren’t well.”

  “When I get hold of her—”

  “Please,” Shadrach says. “Lie down. I wish I hadn’t said a word. You know what sort of wild rumors go floating around this building. I absolutely don’t believe that Katya would—”

  “We’ll see,” she says ominously. She grows more calm. “You may be right. Even so. Even so. We should have had much tighter security. However many people knew that Mangu was the donor, five, six, ten people, that was too many. Much too many. For the next donor—” Crowfoot coughs. She turns away again, huddling into her pillow. “Oh, Shadrach, I feel lousy! Go away! Please go away! Now you’ve got me all stirred up over something altogether new, and I—oh, Shadrach—”

  “I’m sorry,” he says once more. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Goodbye, Shadrach.”

  “Goodbye, Nikki.”

  He bolts from the apartment. He plunges through the hall, fetching up finally against a stanchion near the stairs. He grasps it, steadies himself. The visit to Nikki has hardly improved his state of mind. Her attitude toward him, he realizes, ranged from indifferent to irritated; never once did she express any pleasure that he had come to see her. He was tolerated at best.

  And now, he knows, he must hurry back to Katya.

  She seemed surprised to see him again so soon. She greets him warmly, unsubtly, as though automatically assuming he has come here to make love. His mood is far from sexual, though. He disengages himself from her embrace as soon as is politic, and gently but firmly establishes a psychic distance between them. In quick earnest blurts he reports the essence of his conversation with Nikki, stressing that the “rumor” he had invented did not in any way incriminate Katya herself in the tipping off of Mangu.

  “But of course Crowfoot immediately guessed I was the one, right?”

  “I’m afraid so. I argued that it was inconceivable you’d do any such thing, but she—”