Shadrach in the Furnace Read online

  “American,” Shadrach says, though the label sounds odd in his ears. What else is he to answer, though? Mongol?

  “American? Ah! New York? Los Angeles? Once we had plenty Americans here. Before the big death, you know? That plane they come in, it was big, too big, it was always full, all those Americans! They come to see the animals, you know? Out in the bush. With cameras. Not any more. Long time, no Americans here. No anybody here.” He laughs. “Different times, now. Too bad, these times. Except for the animals. Good times for the animals. You see, there, by the road? Hyena. Right by the road!”

  Yes, Shadrach sees: a lumpy, sinister beast, like a small ungainly bear, squatting at the edge of the highway. The driver tells him that there are wild animals everywhere now, ostriches strutting down Nairobi’s main streets, lions and cheetahs preying on the suburban farmers, gazelles moving in huge fluttery herds across the university campus. “Because there are not enough people now,” he says. “And most of them too sick. Not much hunting now. Last week, big elephant, ripped up thorn tree in front of New Stanley Hotel. Very old thorn tree, very famous. Very big elephant.” Of course. With the world’s population cut back now to early nineteenth-century levels, the animals would be starting to reclaim their domain. The Virus War had left them unscathed, even the primates closest to man: only the unlucky human chromosomes could harbor the rot.

  On the way to the city he sees more animals, two stunning zebras, some wart-hogs, and a group of heavy-humped spindle-shanked antelopes; these are wildebeests, the driver informs him. It pleases Shadrach to observe this resurgence of nature, but the pleasure is tainted by sadness, for if wildebeests graze on the margins of great highways and grass grows in city streets, it is because the time of man is coming to its end, and Shadrach is not ready for that.

  Actually not much grass is growing in the streets of Nairobi, at least not on the broad, elegant boulevard on which the taxi enters town. Flowering shrubs erupt in beauty on all sides. After monochromatic Ulan Bator, Nairobi is a visual delight. Bougainvillea, red and purple and orange, cascades over every wall; some creeping succulent with densely packed lavender blossoms carpets the islands in the roadway; thick, many-tentacled aloe trees stand like sentinels at street corners; he recognizes hibiscus and jacaranda, but most of the bushes and trees that fill the streets with such gaudy masses of color are unknown to him. The effect is gay and sparkling and unexpectedly moving: who could feel despair, he wonders, in a world that offers such intensity of beauty? But in that moment of transcendent joy that the glowing flowers of neatly manicured Nairobi create comes its own instant negation, for Shadrach asks himself also how, having been turned loose in this beautiful world, we could have contrived to make such a woeful mess out of so much of it. Nevertheless this serendipitous city inspires more pleasure than gloom in him.

  Through flowery sun-loved Nairobi rides Shadrach Mordecai in an old rump-sprung taxi to his hotel, the Hilton, an aging cavernous place where he may well be the only guest. The hotel staff treats him with extraordinary deference, as though he is some visiting prince. In a way he is, to these people. They know he lives at the capital and travels on a PRC passport; probably they conclude from that that he must sit at the right hand of Genghis Mao, which in truth he does, though he is not a part of the government at all. Yet even those who have not seen his passport regard him with awe, here. They pause at their work in corridors, and turn and look. They whisper among themselves. They nod, they point, Shadrach is reminded again of what he tends often to forget: that he is a man of great presence and dignity, capable and self-assured and of striking physical appearance, who radiates an aura that leads others to defer to him. It is hard, living in the shadow of Genghis Mao, to remember that one is a person oneself, even a considerable person, and not merely an extension of the Chairman. In Nairobi he learns it.

  Strolling about the city half an hour after checking in, he makes another discovery of the obvious: everyone here is black. Almost everyone, at any rate. He notices a few Chinese shopkeepers, a couple of Indians, a few elderly whites, but they are exceptions, and they stand out as clearly as he does in Ulan Bator. Why should the negritude here surprise him? This is Africa; this is where people are black. And it was the same, really, when he was a boy in Philadelphia—whites rarely ventured into his neighborhood, and at least in early childhood it was easy for him to assume that the ghetto was the world, that black was the norm, that those occasional creatures with pink faces and blue eyes and loose, lank hair were freakish rarities, like the giraffes in his picture book. But this is no ghetto. It is a nation, a universe, where the policemen and the schoolteachers and the Committee delegates and the firemen are black, the engineers at the fusion plant are black, the brain surgeons and the optometrists are black, black through and through. Brothers and sisters everywhere, and yet he is apart from them, he feels not kinship but surprise at the universality of the blackness. Possibly he has lived in Mongolia too long. Living in that polyglot multiracial amalgam that surrounds Genghis Mao, he has lost some degree of his own racial identity; and, living amid millions of Mongols, he has developed some heightened sense of himself as outsider, as freak, that leaves him alienated even among his own kind. If these people, speakers of Swahili, intimates of ostrich and cheetah, bloodlines undiluted by slavemaster genes, can be said to be his own kind.

  He discovers yet another obviousness: that Nairobi is not just beautiful boulevards and clear vibrant air, not just bowers of bougainvillea and hibiscus. This place is, however lovely it may be, still very much a part of the Trauma Ward, and he does not need to walk far from the precincts of his hotel to find the sufferers. They straggle through the streets, scores of them, in all phases of the disease, some merely pallid and sluggish, showing the first bafflement at the onrushing crumbling of their bodies, and some bowed and shrunken and dazed, some already hemorrhaging, dizzy with pain and flecked with the shiny sweat of imminent death. Those in the late stages travel in solitary orbits, each shambling alone through the streets, God knows why, struggling with incomprehensible determination to reach some unattainable destination before the final breakdown overtakes them. Often the organ-rot victims pause and stare at Shadrach, as if they know he is immune and want from him some gift of strength, some charismatic infusion that will clothe them in the same immunity, that will heal their lesions and make their bodies whole. But there is nothing particularly reproachful or envious in their gaze: it is the calm, steady, equable look that one sometimes gets from grazing cattle, unreadable but not threatening, with no hint in it that they hold you guilty of the slaughterhouse.

  At first Shadrach cannot meet that level stare. He was taught, long ago, that a doctor must be able to look at a patient without feeling apologetic for his own good health, but this is a different case. They are not his patients, and he is healthy only because his political connections give him access to protection they cannot have. He is curious about organ-rot—it is the great medical phenomenon of the age, the latter-day Black Death, the most terrible plague in history, and he studies its effects wherever he encounters them—but neither his curiosity nor his medical detachment is enough to let him look straight at these people. He gives them only darting sidewise glances until he realizes that his feelings of guilt are irrelevant. These lurching wrecks don’t care if he looks at them. They are beyond caring about anything. They are dying, right out here in public; their bellies are ablaze, their minds are fogged; what does it matter to them if some stranger stares? They look at him; he looks at them. Invisible barriers screen him from them.

  Then the barriers are breached. Shadrach turns away momentarily from the procession of the damned to investigate the window of a curio shop—grotesque wood carvings, zebra-skin drums, elephant’s-foot ashtrays, Masai spears and shields, all manner of native artifacts mass-produced for the tourists who no longer come—and someone gives his elbow a sharp stinging blow. He whirls, instantly on guard. The only person at all near him is a small withered old man, chalky-skinned, r
ag-clad, white-haired, fleshless, who is moving back and forth in front of him in an erratic semicircle, making little harsh clicking noises deep in his throat.

  A terminal case. Eyes blotched and dim, belly distended. The disease eats slowly through epithelial tissue, indiscriminately ulcerating any flesh in its path; the lucky ones are those whose vital organs are pierced quickly, but only a few are lucky. Eighteen years have passed since the Virus War launched the organ-rot upon mankind; Shadrach has read that many who were infected in the first onslaught are still waiting for the end to come. This man looks like one of those eighteen-year cases, but he can’t have long to wait now. Every interior mechanism must be seared and corroded; he must be nothing but a mass of holes held together by frail ropes of living fabric, and the next erosion, wherever it strikes, will surely be fatal.

  He seems to want Shadrach’s attention, but he is unable to come to a halt in the proper place. Like a robot with rusty contacts he keeps overshooting, going by Shadrach in jerky convulsive motions, stopping, clashing internal gears, pivoting with a wild flapping of slack dangling arms, coming back for another try. At last on one desperate pass he succeeds in clapping his hand around Shadrach’s forearm and anchors himself that way, standing close by him, leaning on him, rocking gently in place.

  Shadrach does not pull away. If he can do no more for this maimed creature than give him support, he will at least do that.

  In a terrible apocalyptic caw of a voice, a sort of whispered shriek, the old man says something to him that appears to be of high importance.

  “I’m sorry,” Shadrach murmurs. “I can’t understand you.”

  The old man leans closer, straining to reach his face up to Shadrach’s, and repeats his words with even greater urgency.

  “But I don’t speak Swahili,” Shadrach says sadly. “Is that Swahili? I don’t understand.”

  The old man searches for a word, wrinkled lips moving, throat bobbing, face taut with concentration. There is a sweet, dry odor about him, the odor of faded lilies. A lesion in one cheek seems nearly to go completely through the flesh from inside to out; probably he could thrust the tip of his tongue through it.

  “Dead,” the old man says finally, in English, delivering the word like a monstrous weight that he drops at Shadrach’s feet.

  “Dead?”

  “Dead. You—make—me—dead—”

  The words fall one after another from the ravaged throat without expression, without inflection, without emphasis. You. Make. Me. Dead. Is he accusing me of having given him the disease, Shadrach wonders, or is he asking for euthanasia?

  “Dead! You! Make! Me! Dead!” Then more Swahili. Then some strained rheumy coughs. Then tears, amazingly copious, flooding in deep channels down the dusty cheeks. The hand that grips Shadrach’s forearm tightens with sudden incredible strength, crushing bone against bone and wringing a sharp yelp of pain from him. Then the unexpected pressure is withdrawn; the old man stands free for a moment, tottering; from him comes a hoarse clucking noise, an unmistakable death rattle, and life leaves him so instantly and completely that Shadrach has a quasi-hallucinatory vision of a skull and bones within the old man’s tattered clothes. As the body falls Shadrach catches it and eases it to the pavement. It weighs no more than forty kilos, he guesses.

  What now? Notify the authorities? Which authorities? Shadrach looks about for a Citpol, but the street, busy a few minutes ago, is mysteriously empty. He feels responsible for the body. He can’t simply abandon it where it dropped. He enters the curio shop to find a telephone.

  The proprietor is a sleek, plump Indian, sixty years old or so, with large liquid eyes and thick dark silver-flecked hair. He wears an old-fashioned business suit and looks dapper and prosperous. Evidently he has witnessed the little curbside drama, for he bustles forward now, palms pressed together, lips clamped in a fussy oh-dear expression.

  “How regrettable!” he declares. “That you should be troubled in this way! They have no decency, they have no sense of—”

  “It was no trouble,” Shadrach says quietly. “The man was dying. He didn’t have time to think about decency.”

  “Even so. To importune a stranger, a visitor to our—”

  Shadrach shakes his head. “It’s all right. Whatever he wanted from me, I couldn’t provide it, and now he’s dead. I wish I could have helped. I’m a doctor,” he confides, hoping the disclosure will have the right effect.

  It does. “Ah!” the shopkeeper cries. “Then you understand these things.” The sensibilities of doctors are not like those of ordinary beings. It no longer embarrasses the proprietor that one of his shabby countrymen has had the poor taste to inflict his death on a tourist.

  “What shall we do about the body?” Shadrach asks.

  “The Citpols will come. Word gets around.”

  “I thought we might telephone someone—”

  A shrug. “The Citpols will come. There is no importance. The disease is not contagious, I understand. That is, we are all infected from the days of the War, but we have nothing to fear from those who display actual symptoms. Or from their bodies. Is this not true?”

  “It’s true, yes,” Shadrach says. He glances uncomfortably at the small sprawled corpse, lying like a discarded blanket on the sidewalk outside the store. “Perhaps we ought to phone anyway, though.”

  “The Citpols will come shortly,” the shopkeeper says again, as if dismissing the subject. “Will you have tea with me? I rarely have the opportunity to entertain a visitor. I am Bhishma Das. You are American?”

  “I was born there, yes. I live abroad now.”

  “Ah.”

  Das busies himself behind the counter, where he has a hotplate and some packets of tea. His indifference to the body on the street continues to distress Shadrach; but Das does not seem to be an unintelligent or insensitive man. Perhaps it is the custom, out here in the Trauma Ward, to pay as little attention as possible to these reminders of the universal mortality.

  In any event Das is right: the Citpols do indeed arrive swiftly, three black-skinned men in the standard uniforms, riding in a long somber hearselike vehicle. Two of them load the body into the car; the third peers through the shop window, staring long and intently at Shadrach and nodding to himself in an unfathomable, oddly disturbing way. The Citpols finally drive away.

  Das says, “We will all die of the organ-rot sooner or later, is this not true? We and our children as well? We are all infected, they say. Is this not true?”

  “True, yes,” Shadrach replies. Even he carries the killer DNA enmeshed in his genes. Even Genghis Mao. “Of course, there’s the Antidote—”

  “The antidote. Ah. Do you believe there is indeed an antidote?”

  Shadrach blinks. “You doubt it?”

  “I have no certain knowledge of these things. The Chairman says there is an antidote, and that it will soon be given to the people. But the people continue to die. Ah, the tea is ready! Is there, then, an antidote? I have no idea. I am not sure what to believe.”

  “There is an antidote,” says Shadrach, accepting a delicate porcelain cup from the merchant. “Yes, truly there is. And one day it will be given to all the people.”

  “You know this to be fact?”

  “I know it, yes.”

  “You are a doctor. You would know.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah,” Bhishma Das says, and sips his tea. After a long pause he says, “Of course, many of us will die of the rot before the antidote is given. Not only those who lived in the days of the War, but even our children. How can this be? I have never understood this. My health is excellent, my sons are strong—and yet we carry the plague within us too? It sleeps within us, waiting its moment? It sleeps within everyone?”

  “Everyone,” Shadrach says. How can he explain? If he talks of the structural similarities between the organ-rot virus and the normal human genetic material, if he describes how the virus liberated during the long-ago war was capable of integrating itself into the nucleic
acid, into the germ plasm itself, becoming so intimately entwined with the human genetic machinery that it is passed from generation to generation with normal cellular genes, a deadly packet of DNA that can turn lethal at any time, how much of this will Bhishma Das comprehend? Can Shadrach speak of the inextricability of the lethal genetic material, the inexorable way in which it must be incorporated into the genetic endowment of any child conceived since the Virus War, and get the meaning across? The intrusive organ-rot gene has become as intimate a part of the human heritage as the gene that puts hair on the scalp or the one that puts calcium in the bones: our tissues now are automatically programmed at birth to deteriorate and slough off when some unknown inner signal is given. But to Bhishma Das this may be as baffling as the dreams of Brahma. Shadrach says at last, after a moment’s pause, “Everyone who was alive when they turned the virus loose absorbed it into his body, into the part of his body that determines what he transmits to his children. It can’t be eradicated once it enters that part. And so we pass the virus along to our sons and daughters the way we do the color of our skins, the color of our eyes, the texture of our hair—”

  “A dreadful legacy. How sad. And the antidote, Doctor? Would the antidote free us from this legacy?”

  “The antidote they have now,” Shadrach says, “keeps the virus from having a harmful effect on the body. It neutralizes it, stabilizes it, holds it in a state of latency. You follow me?”

  “Yes, yes, I understand. In the deep freeze!”

  “So to speak. Those who receive the antidote have to take a new dose every six months, at present. To hold the virus in check, to keep the organ-rot from breaking out in them.”

  “More tea, Doctor?”