Shadrach in the Furnace Read online

  He does not need to understand what functions all this equipment serves. He will perform no actual surgery. His role in the operation is as part of the auxiliary equipment—for, with his capability to monitor, evaluate, and report on the moment-by-moment physiological changes within Genghis Mao’s body, he is a kind of supercomputer, far more supple and perceptive than any medical machine could be. The Chairman’s condition will, of course, be monitored by the usual machinery as well (redundancy is our main avenue…) but Shadrach, standing at Warhaftig’s elbow and receiving direct bulletins from the Khan’s interior, will be able to interpret and recommend with an intuitive and deductive wisdom that no machine could attempt. He is neither flattered nor insulted by his function as a supercomputer: it is merely what he is here to do.

  The gurney waddles onto the operating stage and positions itself next to the table. The table’s own octopuslike, power-driven, glittering steel arms, extending telescopically, embrace Genghis Mao, lift him, and make the transfer; the gurney marches away. Mordecai, Warhaftig, and Warhaftig’s two assistants, all properly scrubbed and gowned, enter the aseptic bubble; it is sealed behind them and will not open again until the operation is over. Now a soft hissing: the atmosphere of the bubble is being withdrawn and replaced by a surgically clean environment.

  Genghis Mao, supine but still conscious and in high spirits, darts bright, keen glances everywhere, alertly observing each phase of the preparations. The assistants lay bare the Chairman’s small hard torso—Genghis Mao is light-framed but muscular, with little subcutaneous fat and sparse body hair; the fine scars of innumerable operations crisscross his yellow-bronze skin—and begin the laborious process of connecting the terminals of the monitoring devices. Warhaftig thoughtfully palpates the Khan’s abdomen and adjusts the cutting angle of the surgical laser. The anesthesiologist, whose post is outside the bubble, runs off preliminary acupuncture combinations on his keyboard. “Hook up the perfusion,” Warhaftig mutters absently to Shadrach Mordecai, who is pleased to have something to do.

  Since Genghis Mao will be liverless for four to six hours, an artificial liver must be used to sustain him during the operation. But no wholly artificial liver has ever been perfected, not even now, after more than fifty years of organ-transplant technology. The squat cubical device Warhaftig employs is a mechano-organic composite: pipes, tubes, pumps, and electrodialytic filters keep the patient’s blood properly pure, but the basic biochemical functions of the liver, having thus far proven impossible to duplicate mechanically, are performed by the naked liver of a dog, resting in a bath of warm fluid at the core of the apparatus. Mordecai deftly slides two needles into Genghis Mao’s upper arm, one tapping a vein, the other entering an artery. The arterial line seems to encounter some resistance and Shadrach hesitates. The Chairman winks. This is old stuff to him. “Go ahead,” he murmurs. “I’m all right.” Mordecai completes the hookup and nods to an assistant. Shortly the Chairman’s blood is traveling toward the dialyzing coils, perfusing thereafter through the moist red lobes of the canine liver, and returning to the Chairman’s body. Shadrach keeps careful check on Genghis Mao’s telemeter reports: fine, fine, everything fine.

  “Immunosuppressives,” Warhaftig orders.

  For several weeks, in anticipation of the operation, Mordecai has been dosing the Khan with antimetabolitic drugs, gradually raising the level in order to damp out Genghis Mao’s normal graft-rejecting immune response. By now the Khan’s antigenic structure has been so weakened that the chance of a graft rejection is slight, but no risks will be run: Genghis Mao receives a last jolt of antimetabolites now, as well as a dose of corticosteroids, and an aide outside the bubble activates a node that will irradiate the blood passing through the liver-surrogate, thus destroying the rejection-inducing lymphocyte corpuscles. Redundancy, redundancy, ever redundancy! The Khan’s heart beats strongly. Everything is at normal throb, Mordecai perceives: blood pressure, pulse, body temperature, peristaltic rhythm, muscle tonus, pupil dilation, muscular reflexes.

  “Anesthesia,” Warhaftig says.

  The anesthesiologist, perched high on the far wall at the keyboard of an instrument more complicated than a concert synthesizer, begins his virtuoso performance. A touch of his sensitive fingertips and the shining retractable claws of the operating table unfold and hover over the Chairman’s body. The anesthesiologist seeks the acupuncture points, maneuvering the claws into place by remote control, probing with little sonic blurts until he finds the precise conduits of neural energy; when he has arranged his metal fingers to his satisfaction, he activates the ultrasonic generators and beams of sonic force rush from the hovering fingers into the Khan’s relaxed, motionless body. No acupuncture needles penetrate Genghis Mao, merely a laminar flow of high-frequency sound entering the acupuncture meridians. Warhaftig, using epidermal electrodes, tests the Khan’s reactions, confers with the anesthesiologist, tests again, asks Mordecai for a reading, runs a deeper test, gets no wince of pain from Genghis Mao. The steel digits of the sonipuncture equipment sparkle in the bright light of the operating chamber; they surround Genghis Mao like the bristly organs of insects, palps or stings or ovipositors. Genghis Mao never permits a general anesthetic to be administered to him—loss of consciousness is too much like death—and Warhaftig dislikes all chemical anesthetics, general or local, so sonipuncture is the method of choice both for doctor and for patient. Fully conscious still, terrifyingly alert, Genghis Mao offers reports on his deepening loss of sensation. At last Warhaftig and the anesthesiologist deem the process complete.

  “We begin now,” the surgeon declares.

  There is a momentary dip in the illumination as all surgical devices and support systems are activated at once. Mordecai imagines a throb passing through the entire building under the sudden power demand. To the left of the operating table is the perfusion machine, quietly pumping blood from Genghis Mao and forcing it through the dialysis coils. To the right waits the new liver, which has been stored in an iced saline solution since its removal from the donor and now is being bathed by warm fluids bringing it to body temperature. Warhaftig checks his laser bank one last time and, with a quick jab of a long bony finger against the control stud, causes a flash of dazzling purple light to leap forth and cut a thin red incision in Genghis Mao’s abdomen. The Khan remains entirely motionless. The surgeon glances at Shadrach, who says, “All systems placid. Keep going.”

  Deftly, Warhaftig slices deeper. As he makes each cut, scanners record the epidermal stratifications down to the cellular level, so that all joins will be perfect when the abdominal cavity is resealed. Bright steel retractors move automatically into place to hold the widening incision. The Khan watches the early phases with deep fascination, but, as his internal organs are laid bare, he turns his head away and stares toward the domed ceiling. Perhaps he finds the sight of his viscera frightening or repellent, Mordecai thinks, but more likely the Chairman is merely bored with them, having been cut open so many times.

  Now the dark diseased liver is visible, heavy, spongy, sullen in color. Warhaftig, fingers moving like unerring spindles, clamps the arteries and veins connected to it. With quick daredevil flicks of his laser scalpel he severs the portal vein, the hepatic artery, the inferior vena cava, the ligamentum teres, and the bile duct. “Done,” he murmurs, and Genghis Mao’s third liver is lifted from his abdomen. Away for biopsy; the fourth waits close by, large and plump and healthy, resting within a crystalline jewel-case.

  The surgeon and his team commence the most taxing part of the operation. Any pigsticker can make an incision, but only an artist can execute perfect sutures. Warhaftig seals flesh to flesh with a different laser, one that welds rather than cuts. Slowly, showing no sign of fatigue, he connects the closed-off arteries, veins, and bile duct to the new liver. Genghis Mao is limp, almost comatose now, eyes glazed, lips slack: Shadrach Mordecai has seen this response before and understands it well. It is a sign neither of exhaustion nor of shock. It is no more than a kind of yogic exer
cise by which the Chairman disassociates himself from the boredom of his long ordeal. His vital signs are still high, with a preponderance of alpha rhythms in the cerebral output. Warhaftig toils on. The liver has been installed. The Khan’s pulse rate rises and corrective measures must be taken, but this is to be expected; no cause for alarm. Meticulously Warhaftig rejoins peritoneum and muscular layers and dermis and epidermis, collaborating in this process with the computer that feeds him the stratification data. Every join is flawless. Scar formation will be minimal. Now the abdominal wall is closed. Warhaftig steps back, cool, self-satisfied, and lesser beings take over. The transplant has been accomplished in exactly five hours. Mordecai leans forward to study Genghis Mao’s face. The Chairman sleeps, so it would seem, facial muscles relaxed, eyes quiescent, chest rising and falling evenly; but no, but no, the mere shadow of Shadrach seems to register on the Khan’s consciousness, for his thin lips pull back in a frosty smile; his left eye opens and performs an unmistakable wink.

  “Well, that’s another one over with,” Genghis Mao says, his voice firm and clear.

  5

  And so, in early evening, the day’s work done and his Hippocratic responsibilities well discharged, it is off to Karakorum, the playground of this weary world’s ruling class, for Shadrach Mordecai, with Nikki Crowfoot as his playmate.

  He picks her up three hours after the operation in the Project Avatar laboratory on the seventh level of the Grand Tower of the Khan. A great green-walled barn of a place it is, experimental animals caged everywhere, crazy animals, cockadoodling hawks and tree-climbing gorillas, and colossal banks of testing equipment wherever there are no cages. There is a laboratory stink to the air down here, a stink Mordecai remembers well from his Harvard Med days, a mix of Lysol and formaldehyde and ethyl alcohol and mouse shit and Bunsen-burner fumes and burned insulation and what-all else. Most of the Avatar staff has left for the day, but Crowfoot, in gray lab smock and battered sandals, is busy at a five-meter-high agglomeration of computers and playback heads and television screens when he comes in. She stands with her back to the door, watching pyrotechnic bursts of green, blue, and red erupt and wiggle wildly across the face of a gigantic oscilloscope. Shadrach slips up behind her and, sliding his hands under her arms, cups her breasts through the smock. Her back goes rigid at the first touch of his fingers, but then she relaxes immediately, and does not turn around.

  “Idiot,” she says, but there is only affection in her voice. “Don’t distract me. I’m running a triple simulation. That’s a real Genghis Mao tape down there, the green, and the blue above it is our April seven persona-construct, and—”

  “Forget it. Genghis Mao died on the table when we pulled his liver out. The revolution started an hour ago. The city—”

  She squirms in his embrace, pulling around, staring wide-eyed at him, aghast.

  “—is in flames, and if you listen you can hear the explosions where they’re blowing up the statues—”

  She sees his expression and begins to laugh, “Idiot! Idiot!”

  “Actually, he’s doing fine, even though Warhaftig put the new liver in upside down.”

  “Stop it, Shadrach.”

  “All right. He really is in good shape. He took ten minutes off to recuperate and now he’s leading Mongol-style square-dancing in Committee Vector One.”

  “Shadrach—”

  “I can’t help it. I’m in my postoperative manic phase.”

  “Well, I’m not. It’s been a garbage day here.” Indeed her depression is obvious, once he slows down long enough to perceive it: her eyes are strained, her face is tense, her shoulders are uncharacteristically slumped.

  “Your tests came out bad?”

  “We blew them altogether. Hit a feedback loop and wiped three key tapes before we knew what was happening. I’m trying to salvage what’s left. We’ve been set back a month, a month and a half.”

  “Poor Nikki. Is there any way I can help?”

  “Just get me out of here,” she says. “Amuse me. Distract me. Make funny faces. How did the operation go?”

  “Flawless. Warhaftig’s a wizard. He could do a nuclear implant on an amoeba with his thumbs and bring it off.”

  “The great man rests well?”

  “Beautifully,” Mordecai says. “It’s almost obscene, the way an eighty-seven-year-old man bounces back from major surgery like this every five or six weeks.”

  “Is that what he is, eighty-seven?”

  Shadrach shrugs. “That’s what the official figure is. There are stories that he’s older, perhaps a lot older, ninety, ninety-five, even past a hundred, they say. Rumors that he served in World War II. What we’re talking about, of course, is the brain, the epidermal integument, and the skeletal structure. The rest of him’s been cobbled together relatively recently out of fresh parts. A lung here, a kidney there, dacron arteries, ceramic hip joints, a plastic esophagus, a molybdenum-chromium shoulder, a new liver every few years—how it all hangs together I don’t know. But he just gets younger and younger, stronger and stronger, wilier and wilier. You ought to hear his vital signs ticking away in here.”

  Grinning, Nikki Crowfoot puts her hands to Shadrach’s thighs as though to feel the sensor implants. “Ye-es. He’s doing marvelously well for his age. At the moment he’s fornicating a nurse. Wait, Wait. I think he’s coming! No, it’s a sneeze. And now I pick up audio input. Gezundheit, she just said. How is Genghis Mao’s sex life, anyway?”

  “I try not to ask.”

  “Doesn’t your inner machinery tell you?”

  “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” Mordecai says. “Doubtless he’s got a splendid sex life. Probably more active than mine.”

  “You didn’t have to sleep alone last night.”

  “My vocation demanded it of me.” He gestures toward the door. “Karakorum?”

  “Karakorum, yes. But first I need to wash and change.”

  They go to her apartment, forty stories higher in the building. All important members of Genghis Mao’s staff have lodgings in the tower; but a research-group director has far less prestige than the Chairman’s personal physician, and Crowfoot’s suite is not nearly as opulent as Shadrach Mordecai’s, just three rooms, plain furnishings, floors of common wood, no balcony, a sliver of a view. Shadrach settles into a webfoam lounger while Nikki strips and heads for the shower. Her bare body is strikingly beautiful, and desire stirs in him at the sight of her heavy dark-tipped breasts, her powerful thighs, her flat hard belly. She is long and lean, with strong shoulders, a narrow waist, sudden flaring hips, sleek muscular buttocks; a dense flood of thick black hair descends to the middle of her back. Unclothed she sheds the laboratory aura, the tense and fatigued look of the dissatisfied scientist, and becomes something primitive, barbaric, primordial—Pocahontas, Sacajawea, moon-begotten Nokomis. Once when he made such feverish comparisons when they were in bed together she became embarrassed and self-conscious, and mockingly, defensively, called him Othello and Ras Tafari and Chaka Zulu; never again has he overtly romanticized her savage ancestry, for he does not like to be twitted about his own, but the feeling persists, whenever she bares herself to him, that she is a princess of a fallen nation, high priestess of the great plains, red Amazon of the pagan night.

  She emerges and dons a floor-length robe of openwork golden mesh, blatantly provocative, the antithesis of her epicene lab smock. Chocolate nipples show through, hints of the blue-black wire-stiff pubic triangle, flashes of haunch and thigh. He would gladly bed her this moment, but he knows she is tired and hungry, still preoccupied with the failures of the day, not yet at all in the mood for making love, and in any case she usually dislikes afternoon couplings, preferring to let erotic tensions build through the evening. So he contents himself with a light playful kiss and an appreciative smile, and out they go, down to the depths of the tower, to the loading ramp of the Karakorum tube-train.

  Karakorum lies four hundred kilometers west of Ulan Bator. Five years ago a nuclear-powered subterrene dri
lled a wide tunnel connecting the two cities beneath the Central Gobi, its invincible thermal-stress penetrator slicing serenely through the resistant deep-lying Paleozoic granites and schists. Now high-speed trains on silent inertialess tracks sweep between the ancient capital and the modern one, making the journey in less than an hour. Shadrach Mordecai and Nikki Crowfoot join the pleasure-bound throngs on the platform; the next train is due to depart in just a few minutes. Several people greet them but no one comes close. There is something formidable and intimidating about a truly impressive-looking couple, something that seals them within a zone of chilly unapproachability, and Shadrach knows he and Nikki are impressive, tall slender black man and tall sturdy copper-skinned woman, handsome of form and face, elegantly dressed, Othello and Pocahontas out for a night on the town. But there is another isolating factor at work—Dr. Mordecai’s professional proximity to the Khan: these people are aware that he has face-to-face access to Genghis Mao, one of the very few, and some of the Chairman’s aura has been transferred to him, a contagion of awesomeness, making Mordecai one not to be approached casually. He dislikes this but there is little he can do about it.

  The tube-train pulls in. Off now to Karakorum go Shadrach and Nikki.

  Karakorum. Founded eight hundred years ago by Genghis Khan. Transformed into a majestic capital by Genghis’s son Ogodai. Abandoned a generation later by Genghis’s grandson Kublai, who preferred to rule from Cambaluc in China. Destroyed by Kublai Khan when his rebellious younger brother attempted to make it the seat of his revolt. Rebuilt eventually, abandoned again, allowed to fall into decay, forgotten entirely. Its site rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century by archaeologists of the Mongolian People’s Republic and the Soviet Union. And now much restored by decree of Genghis II Mao IV Khan, self-anointed successor to one ancient empire and one modern one, who wishes to remind the world of the greatness of Genghis I and to make it forget the centuries of Mongol slumber that followed the decline of the Khans.