Shadrach in the Furnace Read online

  Karakorum by night glitters with an unearthly brightness, a stunning lunar glow. Mordecai and Crowfoot, leaving the tube train station, behold the excavated ruins of old Karakorum to their left—a solitary stone tortoise in a field of yellowed grass, the outlines of some brick walls, a shattered pillar. Nearby are gray stone stupas, monuments to holy lamas, erected in the sixteenth century; in the distance, against the parched hills, are the white stucco buildings of Karakorum State Farm, a grandiose project of the defunct Mongolian People’s Republic, a vast agricultural enterprise occupying half a million hectares of grassland. Between the farm buildings and the stupas lies the Karakorum of Genghis Mao, a flamboyant reconstruction of the original city, the great many-columned walled palace of Ogodai Khan imagined anew, the splendid observatory with its heaven-stabbing turrets, the mosques and churches, the gaudy silken tents of the nobility, the somber brick houses of the foreign merchants, all testifying to the might and magnificence of the latter-day Prince of Princes, Genghis Mao, who, according to a half-suppressed legend, had once had a humbler Mongol name, Choijamtse or Ochirbal or Gombojab—the tales vary according to the teller—and had been a minor functionary, a very insignificant apparatchik, in the bureaucracy of the old People’s Republic in the vanished Marxist-Leninist days, before the world fell apart and a new Mongol empire was constructed on its relict.

  The resurrected Karakorum is not merely a sterile monument to antiquity, though: by Genghis Mao’s decree it is an amusement park, a place of revelry and pleasures, a twenty-first-century Xanadu blazing with frantic energy. In these black and yellow and scarlet tents one may dine, drink, gamble; the latest hallucinations are for sale here; here one may find willing sexual partners of all kinds; those who indulge in the popular cults of the moment—dream-death, transtemporalism, and carpentry are the fashionable ones just now—have facilities for their rituals in Karakorum. Shadrach is a carpentry-cultist himself; Nikki Crowfoot goes in for transtemporalism, and he has dabbled in that too, though not lately. Once he came to Karakorum with Katya Lindman, and that fierce, intense woman urged him to try dream-death with her, but he refused, and she scorned him for his timidity for days afterward. Not with words. Little castrating scowls; sudden harsh flickers of her furious eyes. Mocking quiverings of her elegant nostrils.

  As they pass the dream-death pavilion now, neither of them giving it more than a casual glance, Mordecai forcing the image of Katya Lindman’s bare blazing body out of his mind, Crowfoot says, “Isn’t it risky, your going this far from Ulan Bator only a few hours after he’s had major surgery?”

  “Not especially. In fact, I always go out the evening after a transplant. A little bonus I give myself after a hard day’s work. If anything, it’s a better time for a Karakorum trip than most.”

  “Why so?”

  “He’s in an intensive-care support system tonight. If any complications set in, alarms will go off all over the place and one of the low-echelon medics will respond instantly. You know, my job doesn’t require me to hold the boss’s hand twenty-five hours a day. It isn’t needed and he doesn’t want it.”

  Fireworks abruptly explode overhead. Wheels of gold and crimson, spears coursing across the night. Shadrach imagines he sees the face of Genghis Mao filling the sky, but no, but no, just self-deception, the pattern is plainly abstract. Plainly.

  “If an emergency comes up, they’ll summon you, won’t they?” Nikki asks.

  “They won’t need to,” Mordecai tells her. Out of the dream-death pavilion comes a weird discordant music, bagpipes gone awry. He thinks of Katya Lindman crooning in Swedish an hour before the dawn one snowy night, and shivers. He pats his thigh where the implants are and says, “I’m getting the full broadcast, remember?”

  “Even out here?”

  He nods. “The telemetering range is about a thousand kilometers. I’m picking him up clearly right this minute. He’s resting very comfortably, dozing, I’d say, temperature about a degree above normal, pulse very slightly high, new liver integrating itself nicely and already making positive changes in his general metabolic state. If anything starts deteriorating, I’ll know about it immediately, and if necessary I can always get back to him in ninety minutes or so. Meanwhile I’m covered and I’m free to amuse myself.”

  “Always aware of the state of his health.”

  “Yes. Always. Even while I sleep, the information ticks into me.”

  “Your implants fascinate me philosophically,” she says. They pause at a sweets-vendor’s booth to buy some refreshments. The vendor, a squat thick-nosed Mongol, offers them airag, the ancient Mongol beverage of fermented mare’s milk, and, shrugging, Mordecai takes a flask for her and one for himself. She makes a face, but drinks, and says, “What I mean is, looking at you and the Chairman in strict cybernetic terms, it’s hard to see where the boundaries of your individuality end and his begin. You and he amount to a single self-corrective information-processing unit, practically a single life system.”

  “That’s not exactly how I see it,” Mordecai tells her. “There may be a constant flow of metabolic information from his body to mine, and the information I receive from him has some impact on the course of my actions and I suppose ultimately on his, but he remains an autonomous being, the Chairman of the PRC, no less, with all the tremendous power that that entails, and I am only—”

  “No. Look at it with a total-systems approach,” Crowfoot urges impatiently. “Let’s say you’re Michelangelo, trying to turn a huge block of marble into the David. The figure is within the marble: you must liberate it with your mallet and chisel, right? You strike the block; a chip of marble is knocked off. You strike it again. Another chip. A few more chips and perhaps the outline of an arm begins to emerge. The angle of the chisel is slightly different for each stroke, isn’t it? And maybe the intensity of the force you use to hit the chisel with the mallet is different, too. You constantly modify and correct your strokes according to the information you’re receiving from the cut face of the marble block—the emerging shape, the right cleavage planes, and soon. Do you see the total system? The process of creating Michelangelo’s David isn’t one in which you, Michelangelo, simply act on a passive lump of stone. The marble’s an active force too, part of the circuit, in a sense part of the mind system that is Michelangelo-as-sculptor. Because—”

  “I don’t—”

  “Let me finish. Let me trace the whole circuit for you. A change in the outline of the marble is perceived by your eye and is evaluated by your brain, which transmits instructions to the muscles of your arm having to do with the force and angle of the next blow, and this causes a change in your neuromuscular response as you strike the next blow, producing further change in the marble that causes further perception of change in the eye and a further alteration of program within the brain, leading to another correction of neuromuscular response for the next stroke, and so on, on and on around the loop until the statue is done. The process of carving the statue is a process of perceiving and responding to change, to stroke-by-stroke difference; and the block of marble is an essential part of the total system.”

  “It didn’t ask to be,” Shadrach says mildly. “It doesn’t know it’s part of a system.”

  “Irrelevant. View the system as a closed universe. The marble is changing and its changes produce changes within Michelangelo that lead to further changes in the marble. Within the closed universe of sculptor-and-tools-and-marble, it’s incorrect to view Michelangelo as the ‘self,’ the actor, and the marble as a ‘thing,’ the acted-upon. Sculptor and tools and marble together make up a single network of causal pathways, a single thinking-and-acting-and-changing entity, a single person, if you will. Now, you and Genghis Mao—”

  “Are different persons,” Mordecai insists. “The feedback’s not the same. If his kidney conks out, I react to the extent that I perceive the malfunction and treat it and arrange for a kidney replacement, but I won’t get sick myself. And if something goes wrong with my kidneys, it won’t affect hi
m in any way.”

  Crowfoot shrugs. “True but trivial. Don’t you see that the causal interlock between the two of you is much more intimate? Your whole daily routine is controlled by the transmissions you get from Genghis Mao: you sleep alone or sleep with me depending on his health, you go to Karakorum or stay by his bedside, you experience somatic anxieties if the signal from him starts going critical, you have a whole constellation of life-choices and life-responses that are governed almost entirely by his metabolism. You’re an extension of Genghis Mao. And what about him? He lives or dies at your option. He may be Chairman of the PRC, but he would be just another dead man next week if you fail to pick up some key symptom or fail to take the proper corrective action. You’re essential to his survival, and he controls many of your movements and actions. One system, Shadrach, one constantly resonating circuit, you and Genghis Mao, Genghis Mao and you!”

  Still Shadrach Mordecai shakes his head. “The analogy’s close, but not close enough to convince me. Not quite close enough. I’m equipped with some extraordinary diagnostic devices, sure, but they’re not all that special; my implants help me respond faster to emergencies than an ordinary doctor might respond to an ordinary patient, but that’s all. It’s only a quantitative difference. You can define any doctor-patient unit as a single self-corrective information-processing system, of sorts, but I don’t think the hookup between Genghis Mao and myself creates any kind of significant difference in that type of system. If I got sick when he got sick, the point would be valid, but—”

  Nikki Crowfoot sighs. “Let it pass, Shadrach. It isn’t worth all this palaver. In the Avatar lab we constantly have to deal with the principle that the popular notion of self is pretty meaningless, that it’s necessary to think in terms of larger information-handling systems, but maybe I’m extending the principle into areas where it doesn’t need to go. Or maybe you and I simply aren’t communicating very well right now.” She closes her eyes for a moment and clenches her jaws as if trying to discharge some jangling current pulsing through her brain. Another barrage of fireworks lights up the sky with garish purple and green streaks. Savage thorny music, all snarls and shrieks, pierces the air. After a moment Crowfoot relaxes, grins, points to the shimmering tent of the transtemporalists a few meters in front of them. “Enough talk,” she says. “Now some excitement.”

  6

  “I shall explain the method of our rite, if you wish,” says the transtemporalist. Deep slurred Mongol voice, monolithic face, all nose and cheekbones, the eyes hidden in shadows.

  “Not necessary,” Mordecai tells him. “I’ve been here before.”

  “Ah. Of course.” An obsequious little bow. “I was not sure of that, Dr. Mordecai.”

  Shadrach is accustomed to being recognized. Mongolia is full of foreigners but very few of them are black. The sound of his own name, therefore, gives him only the most fleeting jab of surprise. Still, he would have welcomed more anonymity here. The transtemporalist kneels and beckons to him to do the same. They are in a private little cubicle, formed by thick carpets draped over ropes, within the vast dim tent. A thick yellow candle set in a pewter cup on the earthen floor flickers between them sending a heavy spiral of dark sour smoke toward the tent’s sloping top. In Mordecai’s nostrils are all sorts of primeval Mongol odors, the reek of shaggy goatskin walls, the stench of what might well be a cow-dung fire somewhere nearby. The floor is densely strewn with soft wood shavings, a luxury in this land of few trees. The transtemporalist is busy at the chemistry of his vocation, mixing fluids in a tall pewter beaker, an oily blue one and a thin scarlet one, stirring them around with an ivory swizzle stick that makes lively swirl patterns, adding now a sprinkle of a green powder and a yellow one. Hocus-pocus, all of it: Mordecai suspects that only one of these substances is the true drug, the others being mere decoration. But rites demand mystery and color, and these dour priests, claiming all of time and space for their province, must heighten their effects as best they can. Shadrach wonders how far from him Nikki is now. They were parted at the entrance to the transtemporalists’ maze of a tent, each led separately into the shadows by silent acolytes. The time voyage is a journey that one must take alone.

  The Mongol concludes his pharmaceutics and, holding the cup tenderly in both hands, passes it above the candle’s sputtering flame to Shadrach Mordecai.

  “Drink,” he says, and, feeling a bit like Tristan, Shadrach drinks. Surrenders the cup. Sits back on his haunches, waiting.

  “Give me your hands,” the transtemporalist murmurs.

  Shadrach extends them, palms upward. The Mongol covers them with his own short-fingered wide-spanned hands and intones some gibberish prayer, unintelligible except for scattered Mongol words that have no contextual coherence. A faint dizziness is beginning in Shadrach Mordecai now. This will be his third transtemporal experience, the first in nearly a year. Once he visited the court of King Baldwin of Jerusalem in the guise of a black prince of Ethiopia, a Christian Moor at the swaggering feasts of the Crusaders; and once he found himself atop a stone pyramid in Mexico, robed all in white, slashing with an obsidian dagger at the breast of a writhing Spaniard spreadeagled on the sacrificial altar of Huitzilopochtli. And now? He will have no choice in his destination. The transtemporalist will choose it for him according to some unfathomable whim, aiming him with a word or two, a skillful suggestion as he is cut loose from his moorings by the drug and sent adrift into the living past. His own imagination and historical knowledge, coupled with, perhaps—who knows?—whispered cues from the transtemporalist as his drugged body lies on the floor of the tent—will do the rest. Mordecai sways now. Everything whirls. The transtemporalist leans close and speaks, and it is a struggle to comprehend the words, but Shadrach must comprehend, he needs to hear—

  “It is the night of Cotopaxi,” the Mongol whispers. “Red sun, yellow sky.”

  The tent disappears and Shadrach is alone.

  Where is he? A city. Not Karakorum. This place is unfamiliar, subtropical, narrow streets, steep hills, iron-grilled doorways, twining red-flowered vines, cool clear air, grand fountains in spacious plazas, white-fronted houses with wrought-iron balconies. A Latin city, intense, hectic, busy.

  —¡Barato aqui! ¡Barato!

  —Yo tengo un hambre canina.

  Honking horns, barking dogs, the shouts of children, the cries of vendors. Women roasting bits of meat over charcoal braziers in the cobbled streets. A thousand strident people-sounds. Where is there a city with such vigorous life? Why does no one show signs of the organ-rot? They are all so healthy here, even the beggars, even the paupers. There are no such cities. No more, no more. Ah. Naturally. He is dreaming a city that no longer exists. This is a city of yesterday.

  —Le telefonearé un día de estos.

  —Hasta la semana que viene.

  He has never spoken Spanish. And yet he recognizes the words, and yet he understands them.

  —¿Donde está el teléfono?

  —¡Vaya de prisa! ¡Tenga cuidado!

  —¡Maricón!

  —No es verdad.

  Standing in the middle of a busy street at the top of a broad hill, he is stunned by the view. Mountains! They rim the city, great snowcapped cones, gleaming in the midday sun. He has lived too long on the Mongolian plateau; mountains such as these have become unfamiliar and alien to him. Shadrach stares in awe at the immense glaciered peaks, so huge they seem top-heavy, they seem about to rumble from the sky to crush the bustling city. And is that a plume of smoke rising from the crest of that most enormous one? He is not sure. At such a distance—at least fifty kilometers—is it possible to see smoke? Yes. Yes. Beyond any doubt, smoke. He remembers the last words he heard before the dizziness took him: “It is the night of Cotopaxi. Red sun, yellow sky.” The great volcano—is that it? A flawless cone, swathed in snow and pumice, its base hidden in clouds, its summit outlined in numbing majesty against the darkening sky. He has never seen such a mountain.

  He halts a boy who darts pas
t him.

  —Por favor.

  The boy is wide-eyed, terrified, but yet he stops, looks up.

  —¿Sí, Señor?

  —¿Como se llama esta montaña?

  Shadrach points toward the colossal snowcapped volcano.

  The boy smiles and relaxes. His fear is gone; obviously he is pleased by the notion of knowing something that this tall dark-skinned stranger does not. He says:

  —Cotopaxi.

  Cotopaxi. Of course. The transtemporalist has given him a front row ticket to the great catastrophe. This is the city of Quito, then, in Ecuador, and that trailing smoke to the southeast is Cotopaxi, the world’s loftiest active volcano, and this day must be the nineteenth of August, 1991, a day that everyone remembers, and Shadrach Mordecai knows that before the sun touches the Pacific tonight the world will be shaken as it rarely has been shaken in all the time of mankind, and an era will end and a reign of fire will be loosed upon civilization. And he is the only person on earth who knows this, and here he stands below great Cotopaxi and he can do nothing. Nothing. Nothing but watch, and tremble, and perhaps perish with the half million who will perish here tonight. Can one die, he wonders, while one is traveling this way? Is it not only a dream, a dream, a dream, and can dreams kill? Even if he dreams an eruption, even if he dreams tons of lava and brimstone descending on his broken body?

  The boy is still standing there, staring at him.

  —Gracias, amigo.

  —De nada, señor.

  The boy waits, perhaps for a coin, but Shadrach has none to give him, and after a moment he runs off, pausing after ten paces to look back and stick out his tongue, then running again, sprinting into an alleyway, disappearing.

  And a moment later there is a terrible noise from Cotopaxi and a white column at least a hundred meters thick rises straight up like a scepter from a secondary cone on the volcano’s sloping flank.