Shadrach in the Furnace Read online

  Philadelphia vanishes from the screen and is replaced by an idyllic tropical scene, pink-white half-moon beach, feathery palm fronds, flowering hibiscus in scarlet and yellow, no people in view. Mordecai shrugs and moves on.

  The imperial chambers are circular in layout, occupying the entire top story of the Grand Tower of the Khan except for the five wedge-shaped apartments, such as the one where Mordecai lives, that notch into the suite equidistantly around its rim. As the doctor crosses Surveillance Vector One he comes to three massive doorways, spaced some eight meters apart along the side of the room farthest from the interface through which he entered. The left-hand doorway leads to the bedroom of Genghis Mao, but Mordecai does not take it—best to let the Chairman have all the sleep he needs, today—nor does he choose the central doorway, which goes to the Chairman’s private office. Instead he approaches the right-hand doorway, the one that opens into the room known as Committee Vector One, through which he must pass to reach his own office.

  He waits briefly while the door scans and approves him. All the inner rooms of the imperial suite are divided one from another by such impermeable barriers, smaller in scope than the main doors at the five interfaces but similarly suspicious: no one is allowed to range freely here from room to room. After a moment the door grants him entry to Committee Vector One. This is a large, brightly lit room, spherical like all the major rooms of Genghis Mao’s suite. It occupies the physical center of the apartment, the locus around which all else turns, and in a less literal sense it is the nerve center of the planetary governing structure, the Permanent Revolutionary Committee. Here, day and night, arrive urgent communiques from Committee cadres in every city; and here, day and night. Committee potentates sit in front of intricate switchboards glistening with terminals, making policy and communicating it to the lesser satraps in the outer provinces. All applications for Roncevic Antidote treatments are routed through this room; all requests for organ transplants, regeneration therapy, and other vital medical services are considered in Committee Vector One; all jurisdictional disputes within the regional Committee leadership are settled here according to the principles of centripetal depolarization, Genghis Mao’s chief philosophical gift to humanity. Shadrach Mordecai is not a political man and he has little concern with the events that take place in Committee Vector One, but since the floor plan of the building requires him to cross the room many times a day, he does occasionally pause to observe the bureaucrats at their labors, the way he might stop to examine the behavior of bizarre insects in a crumbling log.

  Not much seems to be going on here now. At times of high crisis all twelve of the switchboard seats are occupied, and Genghis Mao himself, seated at his own elaborate desk at the very center of everything, fiercely manipulating his formidable battery of sophisticated communications devices, directs the course of strategy. But these are quiet days. The only conspicuous crisis in the world is the one in the Chairman’s liver, and that will soon be remedied. For weeks now Genghis Mao has not bothered to take up his post in Committee Vector One, preferring to discharge his sovereign responsibilities from his smaller private office adjoining his bedroom. And only three of the switch-boards are in use this morning, operated by weary-looking vice-chairmen, one male and two female, who yawn and slouch as they take incoming messages and formulate appropriate replies.

  Mordecai is halfway across the room and walking briskly when someone calls his name. He turns and sees Mangu, the heir-apparent to Genghis Mao, heading toward him from the direction of the Chairman’s private office.

  “Do they operate on the Khan today?” Mangu asks worriedly.

  Mordecai says, nodding, “In about three hours.”

  Mangu frowns. He is a sleek, handsome young Mongol, unusually tall for his kind, nearly as tall as Mordecai himself. His face is round; his features are symmetrical and pleasing; his eyes are bright and alert. At the moment he seems tense, jangled, apprehensive.

  “Will it go well, Shadrach? Are there any risks?”

  “Don’t worry. You won’t become Khan today. It’s only a liver transplant, after all.”

  “Only!”

  “Genghis Mao’s had plenty of those.”

  “But how much more surgery can he stand? Genghis Mao is an old man.”

  “Better not let him hear you say that!”

  “He’s probably listening right this minute,” says Mangu casually. Some of the tension goes from him. He grins. “The Khan never takes what I say seriously, anyway. I believe he sometimes thinks I’m a bit of a fool.”

  Mordecai smiles guardedly. He also sometimes thinks Mangu is a bit of a fool, and perhaps more than a bit. He remembers Dr. Crowfoot of Project Avatar, Nikki Crowfoot, his Nikki with whom he would have spent this past night but for Genghis Mao’s operation, telling him months ago of the dismal fate reserved for Mangu. Mordecai knows, as Mangu almost certainly does not, that Genghis Mao plans to be his own successor, through the vehicle of Mangu’s strong, healthy young body. If Project Avatar is carried to a successful conclusion, and the auguries are favorable for it, the fine sturdy figure of Mangu will indeed someday sit upon the throne of Genghis Mao, but Mangu himself won’t be there to enjoy the occasion. To Mordecai, anyone who marches as blithely toward his own destruction as Mangu is doing, perceiving nothing, suspecting nothing, fearing nothing, is a fool and worse than a fool.

  “Where will you be during the operation?” Mordecai asks.

  Mangu gestures broadly toward the main command desk of Committee Vector One. “Over there, pretending to run the show.”

  “Pretending?”

  “You know there are many things I still have to learn, Shadrach. I’m not going to be ready to take over for years. That’s why I wish he wouldn’t undergo all these transplants.”

  “He doesn’t do it for the exercise,” Mordecai says. “The present liver’s been failing for weeks. It’s got to come out. But I tell you: don’t worry.”

  Mangu smiles and grips Mordecai’s forearm for a brief, affectionate, surprisingly painful squeeze. “I won’t. I have faith in you, Shadrach. In the whole medical team that keeps the Khan alive. Let me know the moment it’s over, will you?”

  He strides away, toward the main command post, to play at being monarch of the world.

  Mordecai shakes his head. Mangu is an attractive figure, genial and charming and even charismatic. In a dark time lit only by ghastly jagged flashes of nightmare-light, Mangu is something of a popular hero. In the past ten months or so he has become the Chairman’s public surrogate, appearing in Genghis Mao’s place at formal functions, dam dedications, Committee congresses and the like, and the dashing, gallant prince-in-waiting, so disarming, so unpretentious, so accessible to the populace, is beloved in a way that Genghis Mao never has been, never for an instant. Those who have observed Mangu at close range are aware that he is essentially a hollow man, all image and no substance, shallow and plump-souled, an amiable athlete living an implausible charade; but though Mangu is trivial, he is far from contemptible, and Mordecai feels genuine compassion for him. Poor Mangu, fretting over the possibility that he might succeed the Khan this day, with his apprenticeship not yet finished! Does it ever occur to Mangu that he will never—not in a year, not in ten years, not in a thousand—be a fit successor to Genghis Mao, that he is fundamentally incapable of wielding the terrible power which he is ostensibly being groomed to inherit? Apparently not. Or else Mangu, knowing his own limits, would have begun to wonder what plan Genghis Mao really had for him, why the Chairman had picked as his successor a mere handsome boy, his own opposite in all important respects. To train him to be supreme sovereign? No. No. To be a puppet, merely; to dance before the people and win their love. And then, one day, to have his identity scooped out and thrown away, so that his body might become a dwelling for the wily mind and dark soul of Genghis Mao, when the Chairman’s own ancient patched hull can no longer be repaired. Poor Mangu. Mordecai shivers.

  He hurries on into his own office, closes th
e door, seals it.

  There is a sudden sharp twanging in his left thigh, close to the hip, the place where he receives Genghis Mao’s cerebral output. Four rooms away, the Khan is awakening.

  2

  Mordecai’s office is an island of tranquility for him within the tumultuous intensity of life atop the Grand Tower of the Khan. The room, a sphere ten meters in diameter, has many entrances, but they are programmed to open only for himself or Genghis Mao. One is the door through which he has just come, out of Committee Vector One. Another goes to the Khan’s private dining room, and another, on the far side, to a seldom-used heavy-insulation study known as the Khan’s Retreat. The last door is Interface Five, connecting the doctor’s office to the two-story-high Surgery that occupies one of the five outer wedges of the tower.

  In the sanctuary of his office Shadrach Mordecai enjoys a few moments of peace before proceeding on his voyage into the turmoils of the day. Though Genghis Mao is up, there is no need to hurry. Mordecai’s implants tell him—by now, he can equate every trifling inner signal with some concrete aspect of the Khan’s activities—that the imperial servitors have entered Genghis Mao’s bedchamber, have helped the Khan to his feet, are walking him through the series of mild arm-swinging chest-stretching exercises that the old man, at Dr. Mordecai’s insistence, performs every morning. Next they will bathe him, then they will shave him, finally they will dress him and bring him forth. Though there will be no breakfast for Genghis Mao today, because of the impending operation, Shadrach Mordecai has at least an hour before he must attend the Khan.

  Simply being in the office buoys him. The dark, rich paneling, the subdued lighting, the curving uncluttered desk of strange exotic woods, the splendid bookcase of crystalline rods and thin travertine slabs in which he keeps his priceless library of classic medical texts, the elegant armoires that house his extensive collection of antique medical instruments—it is an ideal environment for him, a perfect enclosure for the doctor he would like to be and occasionally is able to believe he is, the master of the Hippocratic arts, the prince of healers, the preserver and prolonger of life. Not that this room is a place for the practice of medicine. The only medical tools here are ancient ones, romantic and quaint apparatus, odd beakers and scalpels and lancets, bloodletting knives and cauterizing irons, ophthalmoscopes and defibrillators, early and inaccurate anatomical models, chirurgical saws, sphygmomanometers, electrical invigorators, flasks of discredited antitoxins, trephines, microtomes, relics of more innocent times. He has acquired these things eagerly in the past five years, by way of establishing his professional kinship with the great physicians of yesterday. The books, too, rare and auspicious, landmarks of medical history, talismans of scientific progress: the Fabrica of Vesalius, De Motu Cordis of Harvey, Boerhaave’s Institutiones, Laënnec on auscultation, Beaumont on digestion—with what joy be has collected them, with what reverence he has fondled them! Not without some guilt, too, for in this battered and deflated era it is all too easy for those few who have power and wealth to take advantage of those who have not; and Mordecai, so close to the throne, has accumulated his treasures cheaply, catching them as they slip from the grasp of older, unluckier, perhaps more worthy possessors. Still, had these things not descended to him they might have been lost altogether in the chaos that surges freely through the world beyond the Grand Tower of the Khan.

  Mordecai’s actual medical work is done elsewhere, in the Surgery beyond Interface Five, which serves not only for actual surgical operations but also for any other medical attention Genghis Mao may need. Mordecai’s office is a place for research and reflection only. Just to the right of his desk are keyboards, compact data terminals, giving him instant access to entire libraries of medical knowledge; he need only touch a finger to a key or even speak a coded word, cite symptomata, facies, tentative diagnosis, and back will come, in neatly codified form, extracts from the accumulated scientific wisdom of the eons, the relevant distillate of everything from the Smith Papyrus and Hippocrates and Galen down through the latest findings of the microbiologists and immunologists and endocrinologists who labor in the laboratories of the Khan. It is all here: encephalitis and endocarditis, gastritis and gout, nephritis, nephrosis, neuroma, nystagmus, aspergillosis and bilharzia, uremia and xanthochromia, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Time was when doctors were shamans in feathers and paint, bravely pounding drums to frighten away frightening demons, doing solitary battle against unfathomable causes and unaccountable effects, gamely piercing veins and ventilating skulls, grubbing for roots and leaves of purely magical merit. Alone against the dark spirits of disease, no guide but one’s stock of inherited supernatural lore and one’s intuition. And now! Here! The answer machine! A touch of the finger and behold: etiology, pathology, symptomatology, pharmacology, contraindications, prophylaxis, prognosis, sequelae, the whole miraculous scroll of diagnosis and treatment and cure and convalescence unrolling at a command! In moments of lull Shadrach Mordecai enjoys testing his wits against the computer, setting hypothetical problems for himself, postulating symptoms and proposing diagnoses; he is eleven years out of Harvard Medical School and still a student, ever a student.

  Today allows few lulls. He swings to his left and taps out the telephone number of the Surgery.

  “Warhaftig,” he says crisply.

  A moment, and there the screen shows the flat, homely face of Nicholas Warhaftig, surgeon to the Khan, veteran of a hundred critical transplant operations. The camera picks up a sweeping view of the operating room behind him, boards glittering with measuring dials and control panels, the laser bank, the anesthesiologist’s spidery maze of needles and tubes and pipes, and, only partly visible, the main surgical stage itself, dais and bed and lights and instruments, white linens and dazzling chrome-steel fixtures, everything awaiting the imperial patient.

  “The Khan’s awake,” Mordecai says.

  “We’re on schedule, than,” says Warhaftig. He is sixty years old, silver-haired, phlegmatic. He was already the supreme organ-transplant man when Shadrach Mordecai was an idol-worshipping undergraduate, and though Mordecai is technically his superior on Genghis Mao’s staff now, there is no doubt in either man’s mind about which one of them actually holds the greater professional authority. This makes their relationship an uncomfortable one for Mordecai. Warhaftig says, “Will you get him to me by 0900 sharp?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Try hard,” Warhaftig replies dryly, mouth quirking. “We begin perfusion at 0915. The liver’s still on ice, but coordinating defrost is always tricky. How’s he feeling?”

  “As usual. The strength of ten men.”

  “Can you give me quick readings on blood glucose and fibrinogen production?”

  “A moment,” Mordecai says. Those are not factors on which he receives direct telemetering from Genghis Mao’s body; but he has become skillful in deducing hundreds of the Chairman’s lesser body functions from clues given by the main metabolic responses. He says shortly, “Glucose doing fine, within the expected reduced levels caused by the general hepatic necrosis. It’s harder to get the fibrinogen reading, but my feeling is that all the plasma proteins are on the low side. Probably the fibrinogen not as bad as the heparin.”

  “And bile?”

  “Off sharply since Friday. Down some more this morning. No critical breakdowns of any function yet.”

  “All right,” Warhaftig says. He gestures brusquely to someone beyond camera range. The surgeon’s hands are formidable, long and muscular, fingers like elongated pliable wands, incredible octave-devouring fingers of extraordinary power and delicacy. Shadrach Mordecai, although he is no surgeon, has strong and graceful hands himself, but the sight of Warhaftig’s always make him think of his own as coarse and stumpy, butcher-fingered hands. “We’re moving well here. I’ll expect you at 0900. Anything else?”

  “I just wanted you to know the Khan was awake,” Mordecai answers, a little sharply, and breaks the contact.

  Next he
phones the Chairman’s bedchamber and talks briefly with one of the Khan’s valets. Yes, Genghis Mao is awake, he has bathed, he is readying himself for the operation. He will begin his morning meditation in a moment. Does the doctor wish to speak with the Khan before that? The doctor does. The screen goes blank, and there is a lengthy pause during which Mordecai feels his adrenalin levels beginning to rise: not yet, not even after all this time, has the fear and awe that Genghis Mao inspires in him begun to ebb. He forces himself into calmness with a quick centering exercise, and none too soon, for abruptly the head and shoulders of Genghis II Mao IV Khan appear on the telephone screen.

  The Chairman is a lean, leathery-looking man with a narrow triangular skull, powerful cheekbones, heavy brows, fierce eyes, thin harsh lips. His skin is more brown than yellow in tone; his hair is thick, black, combed back straight from his forehead and descending almost to his shoulders. His face is one that readily and obviously evokes dread, but also, oddly, trust; he seems omniperceptive and omnicompetent, a man to whom all the burdens of the world can be given and who will uncomplainingly and effectually assume them. The recent deterioration of his current liver has had visible effect on him—a bronzing of his skin beyond its normal deep hue, some blotches of pigment on his cheeks, an uncharacteristic feverish brightness of the eyes—but still he seems a man of regal bearing and inexhaustible strength, a man designed by nature to endure and to rule.