Shadrach in the Furnace Read online

  Immediately all movement halts in the city. Everyone freezes; every head turns toward Cotopaxi. The white column, pouring from the vent with incredible velocity, rising already to a height of at least a thousand meters above Cotopaxi’s summit, is spreading now, filling the sky like a broad plume of feathers, a cloak of live steam. Mordecai perceives a low droning rumbling sound, as of a train passing through the city, but a train for giants, a titanic train that makes lanterns sway and potted plants topple from balconies. The cloud of steam has turned gray on top, with tinges of red and yellow toward its outer edges.

  —¡Aie! ¡El fin del mundo!

  —¡Madre de dios! ¡La montaña!

  —¡Ayuda! ¡Ayuda! ¡Ayuda!

  And the flight from Quito begins. Nothing has happened yet, nothing but a roar and a hiss and a column of steam rushing skyward, but nevertheless the people of the city abandon their houses, carrying little or nothing, grasping perhaps a crucifix or a child or a cat or a handful of clothes, crowding into the streets, shuffling somberly downhill, northward, long lines of people moving with hunched shoulders, no one looking back, everyone heading out of the city, heading away from Cotopaxi, from the frightening crimson cloud that now looms over the mountain, from the death that soon will come to Quito. These are people wise in the way of volcanoes, and they do not care to stay for the show. Shadrach Mordecai is swept along in the human tide. He towers over these folk as the volcano does over the city, and they glance strangely at him and some tug at his arms in a kind of appeal, as if they think he is a black deity come to lead them to safety. But he is leading no one. He is following, he is fleeing helplessly with all the rest. Unlike them he does look over his shoulder every few minutes. Whenever he can, whenever the press of refugees is not too powerful, he pauses and turns to see what is happening. The volcano now is spurting little bursts of pumice and light ash, wind-borne powdery stuff that changes the color of the air, staining it yellow, deepening the sun’s hues to an orange-red. The earth seems to be groaning. The whole city shakes. Automobiles laden with well-dressed citizens move slowly through the streets, unable to make headway in the throngs of shuffling pedestrians; there are collisions, shouts, quarrels. Soon the cars have halted altogether and their passengers, quirky-lipped and disdainful, shoulder their way into the lines of humbler folk. Shadrach has been marching for an hour or two now, perhaps three, mechanically pushing himself along; the air has grown thin and chilly, with an acrid reek of brimstone in it, and though it is only the middle of the afternoon the falling ash has so obscured the light that the street lamps have come on—the ash is accumulating like fine snow in the streets, already ankle-deep—and still Cotopaxi roars and hisses, and still the people straggle northward. Mordecai knows what will happen soon. With the eerie double-edged vision of the time traveler, he looks forward as well as back, remembering the future. Before long there will be the explosion that will be heard thousands of miles away, the earthquake, the clouds of poisonous gas, the lunatic outpouring of tons of volcanic ash that will blot out the sun all over the world, and on this night of Cotopaxi the ancient gods will be let loose on earth and empires will crumble. He has lived through this night once already, but not with the knowledge he now has. Somewhere far away at this moment is fifteen-year-old Shadrach, all arms and legs and huge eyes, doing his lessons and dreaming of medical school, and he will hear the explosion too, dull and muffled though it will sound after spanning the planet from Quito to Philadelphia, and he will think it is a terrorist’s bomb, perhaps, going off downtown, but in the morning he will see the sky tinted yellow and the swollen sun gone all red, and then the fine dust will fall for days, bringing early twilights on these summer evenings, and news will trickle out of South America of the terrible eruption, the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. What that young Shadrach does not know, what no one knows except the stranger striding through the northern outskirts of Quito under a dirty crimson cloud, is that the eruption of Cotopaxi is more than a natural event: it signals a political apocalypse, the fall of the nations about to begin, the time of Genghis Mao about to arrive.

  —¡El fin del mundo!

  Yes. Yes. The end of the world.

  And now the explosion comes.

  It happens in stages, first five quick sharp reports like cannon-fire; then a long moment of total silence when even the persistent rumble that has gone on for hours abruptly halts; then a violent shaking of the earth and a single monstrous booming sound, the loudest sound Mordecai has ever heard, a sound that breaks windows and splits walls; then silence again; then the rumbling once more; then more cannonfire, bang bang bang, quick hard pops; then a second great boom, five times as powerful as the first, that drops people to their knees, clutching at their ears; then silence, an ominous, sinister, nerve-tightening silence; and then the sound of sounds, the sound of a planet splitting apart at its core, an unending grotesque avalanche of sound that makes the neck snap and the arms jerk wildly and the eyes jiggle in their sockets, a sound that rolls over Quito like the trampling foot of an angry god. And the sky turns black and a torrent of red fire spills out of Cotopaxi and burns with a hideous glare on the horizon. The mountain appears to be ripping open. Shadrach can see huge chunks of its crest, slabs of rock that must be the size of great buildings, flying loose and soaring slowly and grandly toward Quito. The perfect cone, once as graceful as Mount Fuji’s, is a ruin now; a shattered wreck, dimly visible through the dense clouds of ash and the flying balls of pumice; it is only a stump, irregular and ghastly. The air itself is burning. People still struggle onward, moving even more slowly, dragging themselves along on leaden legs toward a salvation that is not to be reached, but they vomit, they clutch at their throats, they gasp, they choke, they fall.

  —Ayuda. Ayuda.

  But there is no help to be had. They are dying here in the early afternoon of this sparkling day, sparkling no longer.

  Shadrach, trying to breathe an atmosphere that is half ash and half carbon monoxide, falls himself, gets up, falls again, forces himself to rise. He remembers that he is a doctor and kneels beside a fallen woman, a girl, really, whose face is distorted and nearly as black as his own from asphyxiation.

  —Yo soy un médico.

  —Gracias, señor. Gracias.

  Her eyes flutter. She looks to him for aid, medicine, a drink of water, anything. How can he help her? He is a doctor, yes, but can he teach the dying to breathe poisoned air? She gags, shivers, and then—strangely—yawns. She is falling asleep in his arms. But it is a deadly drowsiness, and she will not wake. He releases her. He moves onward, handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Useless. Useless. He falls again and does not rise, he lies in a heap of weeping murmuring victims, a victim himself.

  So this is how it was on the night of Cotopaxi. Night and ash, flight and death. That saucy boy, those women roasting bits of meat, the shopkeepers and the bankers, the cab drivers and the policemen, that fall black-skinned stranger, all dying together now, the hours of frenzied flight a waste, and Cotopaxi’s ashy ejecta filling the heavens, giving all the world a blood-red twilight. El fin del mundo, yes. Shadrach claws at the ashes filling his mouth. There is another explosion, a lesser one now—for what could equal that last unimaginable apocalyptic blast?—and another, another, and he knows that the booms will continue in diminishing intensity for many hours, even for days. No one will sleep tonight in Ecuador, in Colombia, Venezuela, in all of Central America, even in Mexico; the dread thunder of Cotopaxi will resound in Canada, in Patagonia, it will reach far across both oceans, and by dawn, the dust-choked dawn, the black dawn through which no light can penetrate, the first revolution will be under way, the putsch in Brazil, the insurrectionists taking advantage of the strange darkness and the universal terror to launch their long-awaited coup; and then the chain reaction, the uprisings triggered by the Brazilian one in Argentina, Nicaragua, Algeria, Indonesia, one bloodbath providing the cue for the next, and all spurred by Cotopaxi, by the great symbol-freighted upheaval of the vol
cano; the economic crises of the 1970s and the repressions and shortages of the impoverished 1980s leading inexorably to the worldwide chaos of 1991, the global revolution, the long Walpurgisnacht touched off in some incalculable way by the eruption.

  So this is how it was on the night of Cotopaxi. The angry gods shaking the world and bringing the nations into destruction. Shadrach bows his head, closes his eyes, surrenders to the soft warm fragrant ash that drifts peacefully upon him. This is the night of Cotopaxi, yes, el fin del mundo, the sounding of the last trump, the opening of the seventh seal, and he has been part of it, he has tasted the pumice of the volcano. And now he sleeps.

  7

  He stands in the gravel-strewn walk outside the tent of the transtemporalists, dazed, the sulphurous taste of Cotopaxi somehow still in his mouth. Nikki has not yet emerged. Other people he knows wander by, members of Genghis Mao’s staff, flowing past him down the midway toward the garish cluster of gaming pavilions at the western end of the pleasure complex: there goes Frank Ficifolia, the jowly little communications man who designed Surveillance Vector One, and after him a Mongol military aide-de-camp, Gonchigdorge, all ribbons and medals in his comic-book uniform, and then two of the Committee vice-chairmen, a pallid Turk named Eyuboglu and a burly Greek named Ionigylakis. Each, as he passes, greets Shadrach in characteristic style, Ficifolia warm and effusive, Gonchigdorge offhanded and remote, Eyuboglu wary, Ionigylakis boisterous. Shadrach Mordecai manages a nod and a glassy smile in return, no more. Yo soy un médico. He still feels the earth rumbling. He wishes everyone would let him alone. In Karakorum one deserves a little privacy. Especially right now. The significant sectors of his consciousness are still in the suburbs of Quito, sinking under tons of fine hot ash. Coming out of transtemporalism is always something of a shock, but this is too much, it is as bad as eviction from the womb; he is vulnerable and fuddled, unable to cope with the social rituals. Those rough globules of airy pumice, that scent of brimstone, that inescapable sleepiness; above all, that crushing sense of transition, that feeling of one world falling apart and a new, strange one being formed—

  Out of the transtemporalists’ tent now comes a short pigeon-breasted man with crooked teeth and astonishing bushy red eyebrows. He is Roger Buckmaster, British, a microengineering expert, competent and usually sullen, a man whom few people seem to know well. He plants himself near the exit of the tent, a few meters from Shadrach Mordecai, and digs both feet firmly, flatfootedly, into the gravel as though he is uncertain about his balance. He has the stunned look of a man who has just been thrown out of a pub after five beers too many.

  Mordecai, though he has only a distant acquaintance with Buckmaster and just now has especially little interest in a conversation with him, knows all too well how confusing the first moments outside the tent can be, and is sympathetic. He feels impelled to meet Buckmaster’s wobbly gaze with some sort of polite gesture; he smiles and says hello, thinking that he will now retreat into his own confusion and fatigued meditations.

  Buckmaster, though, blinks and glares aggressively. “It’s the black bahstard!” he says. His voice is thick, phlegmy, high-pitched, not at all friendly. “The black bahstard himself!”

  “Black bahstard?” Mordecai repeats wonderingly, mimicking the accent, “Black bahstard? Man, did you call me—”

  “Bahstard. Black.”

  “That’s what I thought you said.”

  “Black bahstard. Evil as the ace of spades.”

  This is ludicrous. “Roger, are you all right?”

  “Evil. Black and evil.”

  “I heard you, yes,” Shadrach says. A miserable throbbing begins along the left side of his skull. He regrets having acknowledged Buckmaster’s presence; he wishes Buckmaster would disappear. The racial slur itself is more grotesque than insulting to him, for he has never had any reason to feel defensive about his color, but he is puzzled by the gratuitousness of the attack and he remains too deeply under the spell of his own powerful transtemporal experience to want any sort of interaction with a truculent clown like Buckmaster, not now, above all not now. Perhaps the thing to do is ignore him. Shadrach folds his arms and steps back against a light-pillar.

  But Buckmaster says into Shadrach’s silence, “You don’t feel covered with shame, Mordecai?”

  “Look, Roger—”

  “Drenched with guilt for every filthy act of your treacherous life?”

  “Come on. What have you been drinking in there, man?”

  “The same as everyone else. Just the drug, the drug, the time-drug, whatever they give you. D’ye think they fed me hashish? D’ye think I’m high on whiskey? Oh, no, just the time-drink, and it opened my eyes, let me tell you, it opened them wide!” Buckmaster advances until he stands no more man thirty centimeters from Shadrach Mordecai, glaring up at him, shouting. The pain in Shadrach’s skull is that of a spike being hammered deep. “I’ve seen Judas sell Him out!” Buckmaster roars. “I was there, in Jerusalem, at the Supper, watching them eat. Thirteen at the table, eh? I poured the wine with my own hands, you black devil, I watched Judas smirking, saw him whispering in His ear, even, and then out into the garden, y’know. Gethsemane, there in the darkness—”

  “Would you like a trank, Roger?”

  “Keep off me with your filthy pills!”

  “You’re getting overwrought. You ought to try to calm yourself.”

  “Listen to him doctoring me. Me. No, you won’t dope me, and you’ll pay heed while I tell you—”

  “Some other time,” Shadrach says. He is pinned between Buckmaster and the light-pillar, but he slips aside and makes broad swimming gestures in the air between them, as though Buckmaster is a noxious vapor he’d like to blow away. “I’m tired now. I’ve had a heavy trip in there myself. I can’t handle any of this at the moment, Buckmaster, if you don’t mind. All right?”

  “You bloody well will handle it. I saw it, everything, Judas coming up to Him and kissing Him in the garden, and saying, Master, master, just as it is in the Book, and then the Roman soldiers closing in and arresting him—oh, the bloody betraying bahstard. I saw it, I was there, I understand now what guilt means. Do you? You don’t. And you’re as guilty as he was, in a different way but the same kind, Mordecai.”

  “I’m a Judas?” Shadrach shakes his head wearily. Drunks irritate him, even if they are drunk only on the transtemporalists’ drug. “I don’t understand any of this. Who is it I’m supposed to have betrayed?”

  “Everyone. All of mankind.”

  “And you say you aren’t drunk.”

  “Never been more sober. Oh, my eyes are open now! Who is it who keeps him alive, answer me that? Who’s there by his side, giving him injections, medicines, pills, yelling for the bloody surgeon every time he needs a new kidney or a new heart, eh? Eh?”

  “You want the Chairman to die?”

  “Damn right I do!”

  Shadrach gasps. Buckmaster has obviously been driven insane by his transtemporal experience; Shadrach can no longer be annoyed with him. The angry little man must be protected against himself. “You’ll be arrested if you go on this way,” Shadrach says. “He might be listening to us right now.”

  “He’s flat on his back, half dead from the operation,” Buckmaster retorts. “Don’t you think I know that? You put a new liver into him today.”

  “Even so, there are spy-eyes everywhere, recording instruments—you designed some of them yourself, Buckmaster.”

  “I don’t care. Let him hear me.”

  “So now you’re a revolutionary?”

  “My eyes are open. I’ve had a revelation in that tent. Guilt, responsibility, evil—”

  “You think the world would be better off with Genghis Mao dead?”

  Fiercely Buckmaster cries, “Yes! Yes! He’s draining us all so he can live forever. He’s turned the world into a madhouse, into a bloody zoo! Look, Mordecai, we could be rebuilding, we could be passing around the Antidote and healing the whole world, not just the favored few, we cou
ld go back to what we had before the War, but no, no, we’re ruled by a bloody Mongol Khan, can you imagine that? A hundred-year-old Mongol Khan who wants to live forever! And he’d have been dead five years ago but for you.”

  Shadrach sees where Buckmaster is heading, and he presses his hands to his temples in dismay. He wants more desperately than ever to escape from this conversation. Buckmaster is a fool, and his onslaught is cheap and obvious. Shadrach has thought all this through, long ago, considered the moral problems, and dismissed them. Of course serving an evil dictator is wrong. No job for a nice sincere dedicated black boy from Philadelphia who wants to do good. But is Genghis Mao evil? Are there any alternatives to his rule, other than chaos? If Genghis Mao is inevitable, like some natural force, like the rising of the sun or the falling of the rain, then no guilt attaches to serving him: one does what seems appropriate, one lives one’s life, one accepts one’s karma, and if one is a doctor then one heals, without considering the ramifications of one’s patient’s identity. To Shadrach this is no glib rationalization, but rather a statement of acceptance of destiny. He refuses to assume burdens of guilt that have no meaning to him, and he will not let Buckmaster, of all people, flagellate him over absurdities nor accuse him of misplacing his loyalties.

  He notices that Nikki Crowfoot has come out of the transtemporalists’ tent and is standing to one side, hands on her hips, waiting for him, and he says to Buckmaster, “Excuse me. I have to go now.”

  Nikki seems transfigured. Her eyes are aglow, her face glistens with ecstatic sweat, her whole body seems to gleam. As Shadrach strides toward her, she acknowledges him with a mere tilt of her head, but she is far away, still lost in her hallucination.

  “Let’s go,” he says. “Buckmaster’s a little crazy tonight and he’s making a nuisance of himself.”