Shadrach in the Furnace

15

It seems like a joke, and not a very good joke. He is unable to accept it at all, despite the strident note of conviction in Katya’s voice, that shrill, almost desperate note of certainty that Shadrach had also heard when Roger Buckmaster was trying to deny his complicity in Mangu’s death, that tone that says. You won’t believe this no matter how heavy an oath I swear, but what I’m telling you is true, is true, is true, is true! Yet if he has been selected as the new donor, it would explain why Nikki has been avoiding him, why she is remote and short-tempered when they speak, why her eyes will not meet his—

“No,” he says. “I don’t believe you.”

“So don’t believe me.”

“It’s absurd, Katya.”

“Undoubtedly it’s absurd. And it’ll be just as absurd the day they come for you and put the electrodes on your head and obliterate every trace of Shadrach Mordecai and pour the soul of Genghis Mao into your pretty brown body.”

“My pretty brown body,” Shadrach says, “is full og complicated and irreplaceable medical devices that register every twitch of Genghis Mao’s metabolism. It took Roger Buckmaster a couple of years to design and build that system, it took Warhaftig weeks to implant it in me, it took me a year to learn how to use it. Using it, I can protect Genghis Mao’s health in a way that was never before possible in medical history. With all the warm bodies Avatar has to choose from, do you think Genghis Mao would let them choose the one body that’s indispensable to his—”

“Think, Shadrach, think. Avatar won’t be activated unless Genghis Mao’s present body is on the threshold of death. He won’t need all your fancy implants once he moves into your body. He won’t need you as his doctor; he won’t really need a full-time doctor at all, not for many years. And he can find another doctor. He can find another Buckmaster to build a new set of implants when the time comes. He’s probably got a replacement for you in training already, somewhere in Bulgaria or Afghanistan. Remember what he always says about redundancy, Shadrach? The avenue of survival. Genghis Mao understands survival very well. Better than you, I’m afraid.”

Shadrach Mordecai’s mouth opens. Says nothing. Closes.

“If Avatar is activated,” Katya says, “you go. I swear it.”

“When was this decided?”

“More than a week ago. I found out about it a few hours before we left for Karakorum.”

Which was just about the time Nikki Crowfoot began finding excuses for not keeping company with him, Shadrach reflects. He remembers waking up in this very room, Katya’s room, the night of the dream-death excursion, and discovering Katya sobbing beside him in bed, and hearing her tell him that she was afraid for him, without offering further explanation. Yes. And he remembers all that lunatic talk of Genghis Mao’s about nominating him for Pope, for King of England — what was that about? Disguised and displaced intimations of the real nomination? He remembers, too, and the memory chills him, running shirtless into Genghis Mao’s bedroom just after the news of Mangu’s death had broken, remembers seeing the Khan eyeing his bare torso with interest, with admiration, Genghis Mao saying. You look very healthy, Shadrach. Yes. Shopping for a new body already, was he, minutes after learning of the loss of Mangu?

He thinks of Buckmaster screaming, You’ll finish in the furnace, Shadrach, in the furnace, in the bloody furnace!

No. No. No.

“I can’t believe this,” he says.

“Start learning how.”

“It makes no sense to me. I literally can’t grasp the meaning of the whole thing.”

“Doesn’t it frighten you, Shadrach?”

“No. Not at all.” He holds out his hands. Steady. As steady as Warhaftig’s. “See? I’m entirely calm. I am without affect. It doesn’t register on me. It’s unreal.”

“But it isn’t, Shadrach.”

“Nikki knows?”

“Of course.”

“She’s not the one who picked me, is she?”

“Genghis Mao picked you.”

“Yes. That figures. Yes.” He laughs. “Do you notice how I begin to talk as though I believe this? As though I accept it, on some level?”

“What will you do, Shadrach?”

“Do? Do? What should I do? Should I do what Mangu did?”

“You’re not Mangu.”

“No,” he says. “Even if I had absolute proof, even if they came to me with an engraved scroll signed by Genghis Mao, nominating me for Avatar, I wouldn’t choose Mangu’s way. I’m not in the least a suicidal person. Maybe it sets in later, Katya. First I have to feel something. I don’t feel anything yet. I don’t feel betrayed, I don’t feel endangered, I don’t think I even feel surprised.”

“Could it be that you want to be the Avatar donor?”

“I want to be Dr. Shadrach Mordecai. I want to go on being him for a long time.”

“Then keep Genghis Mao healthy. So long as his body is functioning, he won’t need yours. Meanwhile, it’ll be my task to make Avatar altogether superfluous by bringing Talos quickly to perfection. You know, Genghis Mao may actually prefer the Talos idea. I think it suits his particular brand of paranoia to be transferred into a machine, an imperishable, flawless machine. After all, even your beautiful body is going to decay and crumble. He knows that. He knows he might have twenty or thirty good years in you, and then it’ll be the same route all over again, organ transplants, drugs, constant surgery, whereas the Talos simulacrum will spare him all that. So Avatar is just a contingency plan for him, a redundancy that he hopes not to have to use, and that’s why he can pick people he values as the donors — Mangu, you — a kind of honor, in its way, the blessing of the Khan, not at all the jeopardy that it might be thought to be. I tried to tell that to Mangu, too, that Avatar wouldn’t necessarily happen, but he—”

“Why did you tell me about this, Katya?”

“For the same reason I told Mangu.”

“To help wreck Avatar?”

Her eyes flash the old Lindman fire. “Don’t be a bastard. Do you think I want you to jump out a window too?”

“What good is it, telling me?”

“I want you to be on guard, Shadrach. I want you to know what danger you’re in now. So long as there’s even a slight likelihood that Avatar will have to be used, you—”

“What does it matter to you, though ? A sore conscience? You don’t like hanging out with men who you know are secretly earmarked for destruction?”

“That’s part of it,” Katya says quietly. “I hate living a lie.”

“What’s the rest?”

“I love you,” she says.

He stares with glassy eyes. “What?” “I’m not capable of it? I’m good only for building automations, is that it? I have no emotions?”

“I didn’t mean that. But — you seemed so cold all the time, so businesslike, so matter-of-fact. Even when — ” He pauses, decides to finish. “Even when we would have sex. I never felt any emotional warmth from you; only, well, physical passion.”

“You were Nikki’s. Getting involved with you would only have been painful to me. You didn’t want me except for the occasional fling in Karakorum, except for the occasional meaningless screw.”

“And now?”

“Do you still love Nikki? She helped sell you out, you know. She went to Genghis Mao, she heard him select you for Avatar, she probably tried to get him to change his mind — we ought to give her that much credit — and she failed, and then she accepted the order. Her career comes before your life. She could have come to you and said. This is what Genghis Mao wants to do, but I can’t do it, I rebel, let’s both get out of this hideous place. She didn’t, though, did she? She simply started keeping away from you. Because of the guilt she felt, right? Not out of love, but out of guilt, out of shame.”

Numbly Shadrach shakes his head.

“This is unreal, Katya.”

“I have told you no lies today.”

“But Nikki—”

“Is afraid of Genghis Mao. As am I, as are you, as is everyone in this city, everyone in the world. That’s the measure of her love for you: her fear of that crazy old man is greater. If I’d been in her position, I might have made the same choice. But it’s not my project. I’m not faced with the option of betraying you versus defying the Khan. I’m free to go behind his back, to warn you, to let you make your own decisions. But it’s strange, isn’t it? The warm tall beautiful loving Nikki agrees to sell you out. And the bitter vengeful squat ugly Katya risks her life to warn you.”

“You aren’t ugly,” he murmurs.

Katya laughs. “Come here,” she says. She sits on the edge of the bed, tugs him down beside her, roughly presses his head against her breasts. “Rest. Think. Make plans, Shadrach. You’re lost if you don’t.” She caresses his aching forehead.

They sit that way in silence for a long while. Then, shakily, he rises, he removes his clothes, he gestures to her, and she disrobes as well. He must operate on the Khan tomorrow, but for once he does not let that matter to him. He reaches for her. He covers her strangely submissive body with his own, locking his long lean dark-skinned arms around her wide meaty shoulders, pushing his thin bony chest into the soft cushion of her bosom, and her legs open and he plunges deep within her, and stays like that, immobile, gathering strength, pasting himself together, until at last he is ready to move.

The next day is the day of Genghis Mao’s aorta transplant. Shadrach, after the usual brief fitful sleep, awakens, exercises, breakfasts, dresses, negotiates passage through Interface Three, pauses to inspect the doings in the Trauma Ward by means of Surveillance Vector One — the standard morning routine. The dancing lenses display for him the world’s two billion, perhaps twenty percent of them stricken with organ-rot, the walking dead, shambling about with perforations and lesions and corruptions, and most of the others who are still whole living in the shadow of the universal disease, going through a semblance of ordinary life with sullen courage, waiting for the spitting of blood and the fire in the guts, looking toward the demigods of Ulan Bator in envy and bewilderment. While he, light-footed Shadrach Mordecai, the pretty doctor of the Khan, has nothing worse to worry about than being evicted from his own nimble body, being kicked out on his black ass so that a Mongol usurper can move into his skull. Other than that, Shadrach, everything’s fine, right? Right. Yassuh, boss.

Shadrach wonders, as he goes to fetch Genghis Mao for the traditional and familiar gurney ride from the imperial bedchamber to the Surgery, how he will react when he comes face to face with the Khan. Surely his expression will betray his new knowledge; surely Genghis Mao, nearly ninety years canny, will see at once that his designated victim is in on the scheme. But Shadrach discovers that his mysterious tranquility of spirit does not desert him even when he is eye to eye with the Khan. He feels nothing, neither fear nor anger nor resentment: the Chairman is the patient, he is the doctor, the sensors are twitching away, loading him with information, and that’s all, no change in their relation-ship. He looks at Genghis Mao and thinks, You have secretly plotted to steal my body, and there is no effect, none. It remains unreal to him.

“And how am I this morning, Shadrach?” Genghis Mao booms jovially.

“Splendid, sir. Never better.”

“Going to cut out my heart, are you?”

“Only the aorta this time,” Shadrach says. He signals to the attendants. They wheel the Chairman away.

And there they all are once more gathered in the Surgery — the Chairman, the physician, the chief surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the nurses and other miscellaneous medical spear-carriers, everyone scrubbed and gowned and masked, the bright lights gleaming, the transparent aseptic bubble sealed, the filters and pumps pumping and filtering, the computers flashing green and red and yellow like gaudy movie props, the new aortal section — Buckmaster’s? — sitting in its container, fresh and plump, ready to be installed in Genghis Mao’s abdomen.

Warhaftig, confident, serene, prepares once more to open the spare, slight body of Genghis Mao.

“Blood pressure?” he asks.

“Normal,” Shadrach says.

“Respiration?”

“Normal.”

“Platelet count?”

“Normal. Normal. Everything normal.”

Shadrach is aware that if Genghis Mao should die on the operating table, there would be no Project Avatar to menace him: none of the three projects is ready yet to be put into effect, and if the Khan does not survive the transplant, that will be the end of him, without hope of reincarnation, perhaps even the end of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, the entire fragile society of centripetal depolarization polarizing and centrifuging into chaos the instant the legendary figure of Genghis Mao vanishes from the scene. It would not be hard to manage it. Jostle Warhaftig’s elbow, maybe, as he aims the surgical laser at the Chairman’s guts; apologize profusely afterward, but the damage will be done. Or, more subtly, feed the operating team misleading information, cockeyed reports from Genghis Mao’s ostensible interior: they trust Dr. Mordecai, they will follow his data without bothering to check it against the numbers on the scopes and meters, and he could probably cause irreversible injury to the Chairman, fatal oxygen shortage or the like, before Warhaftig realizes what is taking place. And then the apologies, I simply can’t understand why my readings were off so badly. He has no need to worry about a malpractice suit: topple the Khan and the whole fabric comes apart, every man for himself in the aftermath. But he will not. No harm will come to Genghis Mao by way of Shadrach Mordecai today, not even if he knows the Khan intends to activate Project Avatar before next Tuesday. Dr. Mordecai, in peril or not, is nevertheless a doctor, a dedicated doctor, still young and naive enough to take his Hippocratic oath seriously. He was sworn to keep pure and holy both his life and his art. He has vowed to help the sick and to abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm. So be it. Shadrach Mordecai, MD, Harvard ’01, is no traducer of sacred trusts. Genghis Mao is his patient; Genghis Mao will not die at Shadrach Mordecai’s hands this day. Perhaps this is foolishness, but there is also a certain grace in it.

The operation proceeds smoothly. Snip, and the weakened section of Genghis Mao’s aorta comes out. Stitch stitch, and the replacement is grafted in. Heart-lung machines keep the circulation bubbling. The Khan watches, conscious and beady-eyed, through the whole thing, now and again nodding to himself as Warhaftig executes some particularly admirable veronicas and entrechats and passades. He seems to know what is going on; he has spent more time observing surgeons at their trade than I have, Shadrach realizes, and can probably do the job pretty well by himself by now. Warhaftig’s elegant fingers elegantly close the incision. The tissues are raw and reddening, having been cut into for the liver transplant less than two weeks earlier, and this calls for some special prophylactic measures, but the surgeon brings everything off with his customary finesse. Genghis Mao grins approval when all is over. “Good show,” he tells Warhaftig. “Two ears and the tail!”

Shadrach makes off with the Khan’s discarded abdominal aorta. He tells Warhaftig, not that Warhaftig cares, that he intends to run some tests on it, but what tests would tell him anything about this drooping length of ancient tissue, this tired hose, that he doesn’t already know? He covets it because it’s an authentic piece of the body of the authentic Genghis II Mao IV Khan, and Shadrach has the collector’s itch: this will be an ornament to his little museum of medical memorabilia. A relic of one of history’s most famous patients. There is a tale Shadrach knows, probably apocryphal, of how the doctor who performed the autopsy on Napoleon removed the imperial penis and kept it as a souvenir of the late emperor, bequeathing it to a fellow physician who ultimately sold it at an immense price, and so on and on, passing from one doctor’s collection to another, until it disappeared altogether during the confusions of some twentieth-century war. Similar stories, he knows, have been told of odd scraps of Hitler, Stalin, George Washington, Catherine the Great. Shadrach regrets that he attained his present post too late to collect some of the really significant organs of Genghis Mao — a kidney, say, or a lung, the liver, the pancreas — but all of them were gone long before Shadrach’s time, the native organs of the Khan’s body removed and replaced, sometimes several times over, with transplanted substitutes. Shadrach does not see much value in preserving Genghis Mao’s fourth liver in his collection, his eighth spleen, his thirteenth kidney, though he recognizes that these temporary residents of the Khan are more intimate artifacts of Genghis Mao than, say, his bedroom slippers or his wristwatch. But he prefers the genuine somatoplasm, and a piece of authentic aorta is the best he can do just now.

There’s the aneurysm, big and ripe, ready to pop. Another few days and it might have ruptured, poof! and no more Genghis Mao. The Chairman and Mangu might have shared the same funeral, come Saturday, if Shadrach hadn’t felt odd twitterings in the circulatory-system sensors and correctly guessed their import. So I have saved the Khan’s life, not for the first time and he is once more restored to perfect health. Fine. Fine. May he live five hundred years, and may I be his physician always!