Shadrach in the Furnace Read online

  “Voices, sir?”

  Genghis Mao blinks. “Did you say something?”

  “Voices, I said. You were telling me that you sometimes hear voices.”

  “I said that? I said nothing about voices. What voices? What are you talking about, Shadrach?” Genghis Mao laughs again, a low, harsh, baffling laugh. “Voices! What madness! Well, let’s not trouble ourselves with such foolishness.” He cranes his neck and peers straight up at Shadrach. “So you’ll be having a vacation from the old man and his complaints soon, will you?”

  Shadrach is sweating. Shadrach is terrified. Is this some kind of psychotic break, or merely one of Genghis Mao’s games?

  “A short vacation, yes, sir,” he says uncertainly.

  The Chairman looks momentarily wistful. “Yes. But to miss the funeral, though—such a pity—”

  “I regret that,” Shadrach says. “But I do need to get away,”

  “Yes. Yes. By all means. Take your trip, Shadrach. If you do need to get away. If you do. Need to get away.”

  There. Done. Shadrach sighs. An uneasy moment or two, but he has his permission to depart.

  Strange. That wasn’t really so difficult at all.

  May 29, 2012

  Such a long face on Shadrach when he came out with the business about his vacation. Terrified of me. Afraid I’d refuse, I guess. What would he have done if I’d said no? Go anyway? He might. He seems desperate. Had that look in his eye, trapped man fighting in a corner. One must always be wary of those. Control your opponent, yes, but don’t trap him in corners. Give him plenty of space. That way you give yourself plenty of space, too.

  I wonder why he’s going.

  Tired, he said. Tense. Well, maybe so. But there’s more to it than that. It has to have something to do with Avatar. Is he thinking of disappearing? He’s too bright for that. Must know he can’t disappear. What then? Rebelliousness? Wants to see what happens if he walks in and tells the old man he’s taking off for a month to points unknown? Naturally I wouldn’t refuse. Much more interesting to let him go and see what he does.

  First flicker of independence poor Shadrach’s ever shown. About time, too.

  What if I get seriously ill while he’s gone?

  Heart. Liver. Lungs. Kidneys. Cerebral hemorrhage. Pleurisy. Acute pericarditis. Toxic uremia. So fragile, so flimsy, so vulnerable, this body, just chunks of meat strung together. Capable of falling apart overnight.

  Mustn’t worry about that. I feel fine. I feel fine. I feel fine. I am in extraordinarily good health.

  I am not dependent on Shadrach Mordecai.

  I am not dependent on Shadrach Mordecai.

  And what if he knows some way of actually disappearing? I suppose there’s at least a slight chance of that. What becomes of Avatar then? Find another donor? But I want him. Whenever I see him, I think of how fine his body is, how agile, how elegant. I mean to wear that body someday, oh, yes!

  Should I therefore let him get out of my sight?

  No one can get out of my sight. Right.

  Anyway, I know Shadrach. It doesn’t worry me, this trip of his. He’ll go, he’ll have his fling, and then he’ll come back to me. Of his own free will. He’ll come back, all right. Yes. Of his own free will.

  It is time to think of the choosing of destinations. Shadrach can go anywhere in the world, and no concern for the cost; he is a member of the ruling elite, is he not, Antidote-blessed, an aristocrat in a world of rotting pieces. But where shall he go?

  He heads for Surveillance Vector One to consider his options.

  Though he has often paused before the screens of Surveillance Vector One for a random dip into the activities of the outer world that he calls the Trauma Ward, this is the first time that Shadrach has actually seated himself in the imperial throne from which the great spy-eye apparatus is controlled. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of colored buttons confront him: a bank of red ones, a wedge of green ones, yellow, blue, violet, orange. His hands hover above them like those of a novice organist approaching a full keyboard for the first time. Nothing is labeled. Is there a system? All about the room, images whirl and flit on the myriad screens, zipping by at unfathomable variable rates. Shadrach pokes a green button. Has anything been accomplished? The screens still seem random. He covers dozens of green buttons with both palms outstretched. Ah. Now there seems to be a detectable pattern of response. One slice of screens high up and to his right is showing unmistakably European cities—Paris, London, maybe Prague, Vienna, Stockholm. The color-coding, then, may be keyed to continents.

  Leaving the green keys depressed, Shadrach punches a bunch of orange ones. A systematic search through the whirling madness of the blinking screens shows him, eventually, a bloc of North American scenery far to his left—glimpses of Los Angeles, surely, and New York, and Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh. So. Yes.

  Half an hour of patient, absorbing work and he has mastered the system; he is a quick study. Violet is Africa, yellow is Asia, red is Latin America, and so on. He discovers, also, that there are certain master buttons—the red of red, so to speak, the blue of blues—which, when punched, wipe from the screens all data on continents other than the one covered by keys of that color, so that one need not contend with the crazy oversufficiency of information that the whole of Surveillance Vector One is capable of supplying. He learns, also, how to summon images of particular cities: the keys within each color group are arranged in a geographical analogue of their actual positions, and by activating a screen at his left elbow he can call for maps, divided into grids that show him which buttons to push. And then he systematically examines the Trauma Ward to see where he wants to go.

  The famous cities of the world, yes. The ancient capitals. Rome? Of course. He punches for it. The Colosseum flashes by, the Forum, the Spanish Steps. Yes. And Jerusalem, yes, one glimpse is enough. He considers Egypt and punches for Cairo, but rejects it when he sees the beggars shambling about the base of the Great Pyramid, their blind eyes crusted with swarming flies. He has heard rumors about Egypt, and they seem to be true: organ-rot does not frighten him, but he has no antidotes for the ghastly trachoma, for the endemic bilharziasis, for the thousand other Cairene plagues that the screens show him. The healer in him might be willing enough to go to Egypt for a laying on of hands, a spraying on of medicines, but this is meant to be a holiday, he is going abroad not as a doctor but as an anti-doctor, and he shies from that challenge. No Egypt. But he chooses Istanbul after a view of the plump mosques rising from the hills; he picks London; bypasses his native Philadelphia and, with a shudder, New York; elects San Francisco; and finally Peking. The grand tour. The great adventure.

  He sleeps alone that night, and for a change he sleeps well, as if the prospect of world-girdling travel has perversely calmed his restless spirit. Before dawn he awakens, does some perfunctory calisthenics, packs quickly, taking little with him. The green face of the data screen tells him it is

  FRIDAY

  1 June

  2012

  He does not bother with farewells. Just as the sun breaks the horizon he summons a car and is taken to the airport.

  June 1, 2012

  I did tell him about the voices after all. Despite earlier resolves. Should I have told him? But he didn’t take me seriously. Do I take me seriously? Do I take them seriously? Perhaps they are symptoms of some grave mental disorder. But were the saints mad too, then? The voices whisper to me. They have always come to me in times of crisis. During the Virus War I heard them most dearly. One voice said, I am Temujin Genghis Khan, and you are my son, and you shall be Genghis II. A voice of thunder, though he only whispered. And I am Mao, another voice said, smooth as silk. You are my son, Mao said, and you shall be Mao II. But we had already had a Mao II, nasty little coward, completely destroyed his country with his idiocies, and there was even a Mao III, briefly, during the days just before the outbreak of the Virus War, so I answered Mao, I told him he was behind the times, it was too late for me to be Mao II, I must become Ma
o IV. He understood. So they blessed me and anointed me. Genghis II Mao IV, I became. So my voices dubbed and ordained and anointed me. And they have guided me. Is it a sign of schizoid disturbance to hear disembodied voices? It could be. Am I schizoid, then? Very well, I am schizoid. But I am also Genghis II Mao IV, and I rule the world.

  20

  No flights are due to depart that morning, Shadrach learns, for Jerusalem, Istanbul, Rome, or any plausible connecting points to those destinations. There is a flight to Peking soon, but Peking is too close to Ulan Bator and Chinese look too much like Mongols; just now he needs a total change of scene. There is a flight a little later on to San Francisco, but San Francisco is awkwardly placed in respect to the rest of his itinerary. And there is a flight leaving almost immediately for Nairobi. Somehow Shadrach had not considered going to Nairobi at all, nor any other black African city, despite the vaguely felt ancestral ties. But spontaneity, he tells himself, is good for the soul. Right at this moment the idea of going to Nairobi seems oddly appealing. Impulsively, unhesitatingly, he boards the plane.

  He has not left Mongolia for two and a half years, not since the time Genghis Mao unexpectedly decided to preside in person over a vast and meaningless Committee congress being held at the dilapidated old United Nations headquarters in New York. Shadrach was not yet the Khan’s personal physician then—a shrewd, diplomatic Portuguese internist named Teixeira had that job—but Teixeira was placidly dying of leukemia and Shadrach was being phased in slowly as his replacement. Ostensibly Shadrach went to New York as a mere junior medic, a spear carrier in the Khan’s huge retinue, but when Genghis Mao came down with a hypertensive attack after delivering a six-hour harangue from the podium of the former General Assembly chamber, it was Shadrach who coped with the problem while Teixeira lay doped and useless in his suite. Genghis Mao, having subsequently invented Mangu to handle such ceremonial chores as Committee congresses, had stayed close to Ulan Bator ever since. So has Shadrach. But now he finds himself watching through the porthole of a supersonic transport plane as the bleak Mongol steppe rapidly retreats far below. In just a few hours he will be in Africa.

  Africa! Already the telemetered signals from Genghis Mao blur and fade as Shadrach approaches the thousand-kilometer boundary. He still picks up data, feeble clicks and bleats and pops out of the implant system, but as the plane streaks southwestward it becomes harder and harder for Shadrach to translate them into comprehensible analogues of the Chairman’s bodily processes: Genghis Mao, his kidneys and liver and pancreas, his heart and lungs, his arteries, his intestines, have become remote, are becoming unreal. And soon the signals are gone altogether, dropping below the threshold and leaving Shadrach suddenly, amazingly, alone in his own body. That crash of silence! That absence of subliminal input! He had forgotten what it was like, not to have those steady burbling pulses of information flowing through his consciousness, and in the first moments after leaving telemeter range he feels almost bereft, as if he has lost one of his major senses. Then the inner silence begins to seem normal and he relaxes.

  The plane is comfortable—a wide rump-gripping cushion of a seat, plenty of leg room. Probably it is about twenty years old; certainly it is pre-Virus War. Many industries have disappeared since the War, and the aircraft industry is one of them. The greatly reduced postwar population can easily make do, given a proper maintenance program, with the planes it inherited from the crowded, hectic world of the 1980s, when the old industrial economy was going through its last great period of convulsive expansion amid, paradoxically, dreadful shortages and dislocations. Not that the War and the organ-rot have brought an end to technological progress: in Shadrach’s time fusion power has rescued the world from its energy crisis, subterrene borers have created an entirely new mass-transit-tunnel system for most urban areas, communications systems have become immensely sophisticated, the computerization of civilization has been well-nigh completed, and so on. Progress continues. Things are different but not utterly different. Even corporations and stock exchanges have survived. There has not been a total break with the old days, merely because two thirds of the former population has perished and a wholly new quasi-dictatorial political structure has been imposed upon the remnant. But this is a contracting society, daily diminished by the inroads of organ-rot and oppressed by a certain sense of stagnation and futility that the regime of Genghis Mao does not appear to know how to dispel, and such a society does not need new jet transports while the old ones still can fly.

  June 1, continued

  If the ruler of the world is schizoid, doesn’t this have serious consequences for his subjects? I think not. I’ve studied history closely. Throughout all of history people have gotten the rulers they deserved, the appropriate rulers. A sovereign mirrors the spirit of his times and expresses the deepest traits of his people. Hitler, Napoleon, Attila, Augustus, Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, Genghis Khan, Robespierre: none of them accidents or anomalies, all of them organic outgrowths of the needs of the time. Even when a ruler imposes his will by conquest, as I have not, the historical imperative is at work: those people wanted to be conquered, needed to be conquered, or they would not have fallen to him. So too now. Schizoid times demand schizoid government. The people of the world are dying lingering deaths of organ-rot; an antidote exists but we do not put it into widespread distribution; the people of the world accept this situation. I define that as madness. A mad government, then, for a mad citizenry, a government that offers promises of antidotes but never delivers. Of course there isn’t enough of the Antidote to go around. But there’s some to spare. We do not give priority to expanding the supply. We offer hope but no injections, and this somehow sustains our subjects. Madness. A world that destroys itself with cloud-borne antigens is mad; one that gives itself over to an oligarchy of strangers is mad; fitting then that the oligarchs themselves are mad.

  But are we? Am I? I have done more research into the symptoms of schizophrenia this morning, consulting Shadrach’s medical library in Shadrach’s absence. Here I have a text that says that two of the most common symptoms are delusions and hallucinations. “A delusion,” I am told, “is a persistently held belief, contrary to reality as it is perceived by most people, that is not dispelled by logical arguments. Delusions in schizophrenia often hove a grandiose or a persecutory theme: the individual may express a belief that he is Jesus Christ or that he is the object of a worldwide search by a supersecret organization.” I have never expressed the belief that I am Jesus Christ. I do frequently believe with great conviction that I am Genghis II Mao IV Khan. Is this belief delusive? I believe that this belief is congruent with reality as it is perceived by most people. I believe that my belief in this belief is founded in reality. I believe I genuinely am Genghis II Mao IV Khan, or that at least I have genuinely become Genghis II Mao IV Khan, and that therefore this belief is not schizophrenic, not delusive. On the other hand, I also believe I am in imminent danger of assassination, that there is a worldwide conspiracy against my life. Classic schizoid delusion? But Mangu is really dead. They pushed Mangu from a window seventy-five stories above the ground. Do I imagine Mangu’s death? Mangu is really dead. Do I misconstrue it? I know there are those who believe he committed suicide. This is delusive. Mangu was murdered. They might come for me at any time. Despite all my precautions. Am I deluded? Then I accept my delusions. As appropriate to my position in history. And if the danger is real, how wise of me to have barricaded myself behind the interfaces!

  Let us go on. Hallucinations. “A hallucination is a perception of sight, sound, smell, or touch that is not ‘real.’ In schizophrenia, hallucinations most frequently take the form of voices.” Aha! “A patient may be tormented by voices ordering him to jump out of a window or accusing him of heinous crimes.” What’s this about windows? Could Mangu have been schizoid too? No. No. It doesn’t apply. Mangu wasn’t intelligent enough to be schizoid. I’m the one who hears voices, and my voices don’t advise lunacy. “Sometimes the hallucination consists only of noi
ses or isolated words, or the patient may seem to ‘hear his thoughts.’ Other hallucinations include frightening visions, strange smells, and odd bodily sensations.”

  I think this applies. If so, I accept it freely. But there’s more. “Delusions and hallucinations are not limited to schizophrenia,” it says. “They may occur in a wide range of organic conditions (e.g., infections of the brain substance or a decreased flow of blood to the brain caused by arteriosclerosis).” Is that the explanation? When Father Genghis whispers to me, it’s nothing but a bug in my cerebellum? When Mao whispers in my ear, it’s merely a clotted artery? I should speak to Shadrach about this when he returns. He worries about my arteries. He might want to do another transplant. After all, I still have some of my own original blood vessels, and they’re getting old. I’m, what, eighty-seven years old? Eighty-nine, ninety-three? Yes, perhaps ninety-three. So hard to keep the numbers straight. But old, very old.

  Great Father Genghis, am I old!

  In Nairobi the air is clear, dry, cool, not at all tropical although the city is only a degree or so from the equator, just about the same latitude, indeed, as fiery Cotopaxi and ravaged Quito. Quito, high in mountainous country, was cool also, but that was only a dream, a transtemporal illusion. Whereas Shadrach actually is, so far as anything is actual, in Nairobi. “We are much above sea level,” explains the taxi driver. “It is never too hot here.” The taxi man is hearty, outgoing, talkative: a Kikuyu, he says, this being his tribe. He wears huge dark sunglasses and a blue uniform that looks fifty years old. He seems healthy, although Shadrach had been half expecting to find everyone outside Ulan Bator afflicted with organ-rot. “I speak six languages,” the driver announces. “Kikuyu, Masai, Swahili, German, French, English. You are British from England?”