Shadrach in the Furnace Read online

  “And meanwhile,” Avogadro says, “suspects will be rounded up, minds will be pried into, the innocent will suffer, my staff will be wasting its energies on a foolish pursuit of a nonexistent assassin—”

  “Can’t you delay the purge a few days, then?”

  “He ordered us to start at once, Doctor.”

  “Yes, I know, but—”

  “He ordered us to start at once. We’ve done so.”

  “Already?”

  “Already. I understand the meaning of an order from the Chairman. Within the past ten minutes the first arrests have taken place. I can try to stretch out the process of interrogation so that as little harm as possible will come to the prisoners before I can bring my findings on Mangu’s death to the Chairman, but I have no authority to sidetrack his instructions altogether.” Quietly Avogadro adds, “I wouldn’t want to risk it, either.”

  “Then there’ll be a purge,” Shadrach says, shrugging. “I regret that as much as you do, I suppose. But there’s no way to stop it now, eh? And no real hope that you’ll persuade Genghis Mao to swallow the suicide theory, not this afternoon or tomorrow or next week, not if he wants to think Mangu was murdered. I’m sorry.”

  “I am also,” Avogadro says. “Well. Thanks for your time, Doctor.” He begins to move away; then, pausing, he gives Shadrach a deep, uncomfortably appraising look, and says, “Oh, one more thing. Doctor. Is there any reason you might know of for Mangu to have wanted to kill himself?”

  Shadrach frowns. He considers things.

  “No,” he answers after a moment. “No. Not that I’m aware of.”

  He goes on into Surveillance Vector One. The big room is crowded with high staff personnel. He begins to feel a little odd, wandering around headquarters without a shirt. General Gonchigdorge sits at Genghis Mao’s ornate throne, jabbing with stubby fingers at the enormous keyboard that controls the whole vast spy-eye apparatus. As the general pounds the buttons, images of life out there in the Trauma Ward swing jerkily in and out of focus, zooming into view and vanishing rapidly. The scene on the screens looks just as dizzyingly random as when the machine is left to its own whims; not surprising, for Gonchigdorge really does seem to be tapping the keys without system, without purpose, in a kind of sullen petulance, as though he hopes to uncover a revolutionary cadre out there by some stochastic process of nondirected scoops—dipping down into the world here and there until he comes upon a band of desperados waving a banner, WE ARE CONSPIRATORS. But the screens reveal only the usual human story, people working, walking, suffering, quarreling, dying.

  Horthy, appearing silently at Mordecai’s left elbow, says, with a certain glee, “The arrests have already begun.”

  “I know. Avogadro told me.”

  “Did he tell you that they have a prime suspect?”

  “Who?”

  Horthy delicately prods his thumbs into the corners of his bulging, bloodshot eyes. A psychedelic effluvium still hovers about him. “Roger Buckmaster,” he says. “The microengineering man, you know.”

  “Yes. I know. I’ve worked with him.”

  “Buckmaster was heard making wild statements at Karakorum last night,” Horthy says. “Calling for the overthrow of Genghis Mao, yelling subversion at the top of his lungs. The Citpols picked him up, finally, but they decided he was just drunk and let him go.”

  In a low voice Shadrach says, “Is that what happened to you?”

  “Me? To me? I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “At the tube-train station. I saw you there, remember? While they were running the tape of Mangu’s speech. You made some remarks about the Antidote distribution program, and then the Citpols—”

  “No,” Horthy says. “You must be mistaken.” His eyes fix on Shadrach’s and lock there. They are intimidating eyes, cold and hostile, despite all their dissipated bleariness. With great precision Horthy says, “It was someone else you saw at Karakorum, Dr. Mordecai.”

  “You weren’t there last night?”

  “It was someone else.”

  Shadrach chooses to take the crude hint, and decides not to press the issue. “My apologies. Tell me about Buckmaster. Why do they think he’s the one?”

  “His eccentric behavior last night was suspicious.”

  “Is that all?”

  “You’ll have to ask the security people for the rest.”

  “Was he found near Mangu’s apartment at the time of the murder?”

  “I couldn’t say. Dr. Mordecai.”

  “All right.” On the surveillance screens, in repellent close-up, the image of a girl vomiting. It is the crimson puke of organ-rot, in glistening lifelike color. Horthy seems almost to smile at the sight, as though nothing horrid is alien to him. Shadrach says, “One more thing. You saw Mangu fall, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you notified Genghis Mao?”

  “I notified the guards in the lobby first.”

  “Of course.”

  “And then I went to the seventy-fifth floor. The security people had already sealed it, but I was able to enter.”

  “Going straight to the Chairman’s bedroom?”

  Horthy nods. “Which was under triple guard. I obtained admittance only by insisting on my ministerial privileges.”

  “Was Genghis Mao awake?”

  “Yes. Reading PRC reports.”

  “What would you say was his general state of health?”

  “Quite good. He looked pale and weak, but not unusually so, considering that he had just had a major operation. He greeted me and saw from my expression that something was wrong, and asked me, and I told him what had happened.”

  “Which was?”

  “What else?” Horthy says snappishly. “That Mangu had fallen from his window, naturally.”

  “Is that how you put it? ‘Mangu has fallen from his window’?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Did you talk about his being pushed, maybe?”

  “Why are you interrogating me, Dr. Mordecai?”

  “Please. This is important. I need to know whether the Khan arrived at the idea that Mangu was assassinated by himself, or if you inadvertently put the suggestion in his mind.”

  Horthy stares balefully up at Shadrach Mordecai. “I told him exactly what I saw: Mangu falling from the window. I drew no conclusions about how it had happened. Even if someone had thrown him, how much could I have seen, four hundred meters below? At that distance Mangu himself was no bigger man a speck against the sky, a doll. I didn’t recognize him until he had nearly reached the ground.” A disconcerting gleam appears in Horthy’s eyes. He leans close to Shadrach and says, almost crooning, “He looked so serene. Dr. Mordecai! Floating there above me—his eyes wide open, his hair straight out behind him, his lips drawn back—he was smiling, I think. Smiling! And then he hit.”

  Ionigylakis, who has evidently been eavesdropping, interjects abruptly, “That’s strange. If someone had just flung him from the window, would he have looked so cheerful?”

  Shadrach shakes his head. “I doubt that Mangu was conscious at all by the time Horthy could see his face. That serene expression was probably just acceleration stupor.”

  “Perhaps,” Horthy says crisply.

  “Go on,” Shadrach tells him. “You informed the Khan that Mangu had fallen. Then what happened?”

  “He sat up so sharply that I thought he would break the medical machinery all around him. He turned red in the face and began to perspire. His breath came in gasps. Oh, it was very bad, Dr. Mordecai. I thought he would die from overexcitement. He started to wave his arms, to shout about assassins—suddenly he sank back against the pillow, he put his hands to his chest—”

  “You thought he would die from overexcitement,” Shadrach says. “But it never occurred to you beforehand that it might be unwise to trouble him with news like that, in his state of health.”

  “One doesn’t think clearly at a time like that.”

  “One ought to, if one
is in a position of high responsibility,”

  “One’s judgment is not always perfect,” Horthy retorts. “Especially when one has nearly been killed oneself a few minutes before by a body plummeting from the sky. And when one realizes that the dead man is such an important figure in the government, in fact the viceroy. And when one suspects that his death may be murder, assassination, the beginning of revolution. And when—”

  “All right,” Shadrach says. “All right. He managed to survive the unnecessary shock. But what you did was very risky, Horthy. Worse: it was dumb. Extremely dumb.” He frowns. “You think there’s some conspiracy, eh?”

  “I have no idea. Clearly it’s a possibility.”

  “So is suicide, though.”

  Ionigylakis says, “You think so, Shadrach?”

  “Avogadro certainly does.”

  “But Avogadro’s men have arrested Buckmaster.”

  “I’ve heard. The poor crazy devil. I pity him.” Gonchigdorge is still jabbing buttons. The screens are full of weirdly distorted faces, as though the spy-eye lenses are getting much too close to their targets. Donna Labile, from the far side of the room, calls to Horthy, who gives Shadrach a frosty incomprehensible look and stalks away. Shadrach is altogether unable to make sense out of Horthy, but suddenly it does not matter. Nothing matters. This room is a madhouse, through which he wanders, bare-chested and feeling a bit of a chill, baffled by all the frantic activity around him. He feels too sane, too mundane, for this environment. The screens of Surveillance Vector One suddenly go blank, and then grow bright with wild jagged streaks of blue and green and red. General Gonchigdorge, in his heavy-handed pursuit of conspirators, has broken something. “Ficifolia!” the general yells. “Get Frank Ficifolia up here! The machine has to be repaired!”

  Ficifolia is already present, though. Cursing softly, he shoulders through the crowd toward the enthroned general. As he passes Shadrach he pauses to murmur, “Your friend Buckmaster’s in the quiz room right now. I suppose you won’t weep over that.”

  “On the contrary. Buckmaster wasn’t in his right mind when he was hassling me last night. And now he’ll pay for it.”

  “Avogadro himself is interrogating, I hear.”

  “Avogadro thinks it was suicide.”

  “So do I,” Ficifolia says, and keeps going.

  Shadrach has had enough. He heads for the interface. As he reaches it, he looks back at the turmoil, the blaring jags of color on the screens, Gonchigdorge shouting like an angry child, Horthy and Labile deep in some mysterious intense discussion punctuated by fierce Italo-Magyar gesticulations, Ionigylakis looming above everyone and announcing his confusions in booming tones, Frank Ficifolia squatting by an open panel to insert a long slender wrench into a turbulent spaghetti of bubble-circuits. While somewhere in the depths of this huge building Avogadro, who does not believe a murder was committed, is nevertheless preparing to administer torture to Roger Buckmaster, suspected of having committed that murder, even though Buckmaster almost certainly could not have been capable of murdering anyone this morning. And in the great bedchamber of the Khan that old, old man, his near-fatal episode of shock all but over according to the tickety-tock pulsations and quivers running through Shadrach Mordecai’s body, lies in bed scheming with calm crazy dedication how best to make sacred the memory of the departed viceroy and how to destroy his supposed slayers. Enough, enough. More than enough: too much. Shadrach requests exit from the interface, which opens with blessed promptness and admits him to the holding chamber, and then, quickly, to his own apartment on the far side.

  How peaceful it is here! Crowfoot is awake and out of the hammock; she has just taken a shower, and stands, bare, beautiful, in the middle of the room, drying herself, droplets of moisture still glittering on her smooth sleek skin, nipples puckered and taut in the coolness of the air. “I’m going to be awfully late getting to the lab today,” she says casually. “What’s been happening?”

  “Everything. Mangu’s dead, the Khan nearly had apoplexy when he found out, they’ve arrested Buckmaster, a general purge of subversives has been ordered, Horthy is—”

  “Wait,” she cries, blinking. “Dead? Mangu? How?”

  “Fell out the window. Pushed or jumped.”

  “Oh.” A little sucking intake of breath. “Oh, God. When was this?”

  “Half an hour ago, more or less.”

  She crumples her towel into a ball, hurls it into a corner, and begins to pace the room, striding like a splendid perplexed tigress. Whirling on him, she demands, “Which window?”

  “His own,” he tells her, mystified by the drift of her question.

  “Fell from the top of the building? His body must have been smashed to a ruin.”

  “I imagine so. But what—”

  “Oh, Shadrach! My project!”

  “What about it?”

  “This sounds terribly inhuman, doesn’t it? But what will happen to my project now? Without Mangu—”

  “Oh,” he says dully. “I hadn’t considered that.”

  “He was intended for—”

  “Yes. Don’t say it.”

  “It’s awful of me to have that reaction.”

  “Was the entire project built about Mangu as the specific particular one—the recipient?”

  “Not necessarily. But—oh, to hell with the project!” She crouches near the floor, folding her arms across her breasts. She is shivering. “I don’t understand. Who would kill Mangu, anyway? What’s going on? Is there going to be a revolution, Shadrach?”

  “Mangu may have killed Mangu,” he tells her. “No one knows yet. Avogadro’s men didn’t detect any sign of forced entry to his apartment.”

  “Yet they’ve arrested Buckmaster?”

  “Because of the nonsense he was spouting last night in Karakorum, I suppose. But they haven’t arrested Horthy, who was being just as subversive. Horthy’s right next door in Surveillance Vector One, He was the one who brought the news about Mangu to Genghis Mao. Damn near killed him with the shock of it.”

  Nikki, looking up somberly, says, “Perhaps that’s what he wanted to do.”

  11

  Things grow calmer. The messages from the interior of Genghis Mao indicate that the medical crisis is past. The Khan is healing, the morning’s upheavals will have no serious impact. Here at noon, Shadrach Mordecai at last dresses for the day, neutral gray doctor’s clothes. He feels rootless, disoriented: too much sleep, after all these months of insomnia, the nap in Nikki’s arms in Karakorum and then the long, emergency-interrupted spell in the hammock, and now his mind is foggy. But he’ll fake it through the day, somehow.

  Heading for his office, he passes as usual through Surveillance Vector One, much quieter now than it was fifteen or twenty minutes before. The high panjandrums are gone, Gonchigdorge and Horthy and Labile and that crowd, and no one remains, except three underlings, a Citpol man and a couple of Avogadro’s lieutenants, who stare moodily at the jumpy mosaic flitting across the hundreds of screens. Their eyes are glazed. Informational overkill, it is. They see so much that they know not what they see.

  Bypassing Committee Vector One—Shadrach has no yearning to intrude on the politicos this tense morning—he takes the long route to his office, via Genghis Mao’s own vacant office and the Khan’s majestic dining room. It is, as always, comforting to be among his familiar talismans, his books, his collection of medical instruments. He wanders from case to case, getting himself together. Picks up his devaricator, sinister splay-elbowed forceps used to pry open wounds. Thinks of Mangu, splattered against the terrazzo pavement; banishes the thought. Examines the hacksaw with which some eighteenth-century surgeon accomplished amputations. Thinks of Genghis Mao, livid, beady-eyed, ordering mass arrests. Off with their heads! That may be next; why not? Fondles a fifteenth-century anatomical doll from Bologna, elegant ivory homunculus, female—what is the feminine of homunculus, he wonders? Homuncula? Feminacula?—the belly and breasts of which lift away at the push of a fingertip,
revealing heart, lungs, abdominal organs, even a fetus crouching in the uterus like a kangaroo in the pouch. And the books, oh, yes, the precious musty books, formerly _ owned by great doctors of Vienna, Montreal, Savannah, New Orleans. Valesco de Taranta’s Philonium Pharmaceuticum et Cheirurgicum, 1599! Martin Schurig’s Gynaecologia Historico-Medica, 1730, rich with details of defloration, debauchery, penis captivus, and other wonders! Here is old Rudolf Virchow’s Die Cellularpathologie, 1852, proclaiming that every living organism is “a cell state in which every state is a citizen,” that a disease is “a conflict of citizens in this state, brought about by the action of external forces.” Aux armes, citoyens! What would Virchow have said of transplanted livers, borrowed lungs? He’d call them hired mercenaries, no doubt: the Hessians of medical metaphor. At least they fight fair in the cellular wars, no sneaky defenestrations, no snipers on the overpass. And this huge book: Grootdoorn, Iconographies Medicalis, luscious old engravings—see, here. Saints Cosmas and Damian in the sixteenth-century portrait, shown grafting the dead Moor’s leg to the cancer victim’s stump. Prophetic. Transplant surgery circa 500 A.D., performed posthumously, no less, by the saintly surgeons. If I ever find the original of that print, Shadrach thinks, I’ll give it to Warhaftig for Hanukkah.

  He spends half an hour updating Genghis Mao’s medical file, dictating a report on the liver operation, adding a postscript about this morning’s brief alarm. Someday the printout of the Genghis Mao dossier is going to be a medical classic, ranking with the Smith Papyrus and the Fabrica, and he toils conscientiously over it, preparing his place in the history of his art. Just as he finishes the account of the current episode, Katya Lindman phones him.

  “Can you come down to the Talos lab?” she asks. “I’d like to show you our latest mock-up.”

  “I suppose so. You’ve heard about Mangu?”

  “Of course.”

  “You don’t sound very concerned.”

  “What was Mangu? Mangu was an absence. Now the absence is absent. His death was more of an event than his whole existence.”