Shadrach in the Furnace

19

He has been saying for days that he will not run away. He has said it to Ficifolia, to Horthy, to Nikki, to Katya, to all of the well-meaning friends who want him to try to save himself. But then he decides to get out of Ulan Bator after all.

It is not exactly an escape attempt, for Shadrach still believes there is no way ultimately of avoiding the spy-eyes of Genghis Mao. He will not try to be secretive about it: he intends even to notify the Chairman himself that he is going. No, it is more like a holiday trip, a vacation. Shadrach is going to go because of that remark of Horthy’s — some people think better when they’re on the run — and because Nikki, once again bringing up her notion that he and Genghis Mao constitute a single system, has given him some ideas. He is not sure how useful the ideas may be, and he needs to consider them at length. Perhaps he really will think better on the run. He will go, at any rate. He looks forward to the trip. It will be a diverting entertainment, and possibly instructive as well. He feels buoyant and cheerful. Shadrach the Glorious, striding splendidly from continent to continent in what may very well be the last great adventure of his life.

In the evening he visits Genghis Mao. The Khan is making his usual magnificent recovery from his latest surgery. He looks a little feverish, a trifle flushed, his keen narrow eyes unnaturally glossy, but generally he appears hale, vigorous, alert. He has spent much of the day going over the plans for the spectacular state funeral of Mangu, postponed on account of the aortal transplant and now scheduled for ten days hence. As Shadrach runs through his brisk diagnostic routines, the palpation and the auscultation and all the rest, Genghis Mao, shuffling documents and paying no attention to his physician’s earnest probings, speaks with bubbling boyish enthusiasm of the great occasion. “Fifty thousand troops massed in the plaza, Shadrach! Rockets going back and forth overhead, flights of military planes, a thousand flags, six separate marching bands. Lights, color, excitement. The whole Committee on the dais under a tremendous purple-and-gold spotlight. The catafalque drawn by thirteen wild Mongol mares. Platoons of archers, a canopy of fiery arrows. An immense pyre on the very spot where Mangu fell. Teams of gymnasts who — ” The Khan pauses. “You aren’t going to find something new to slice out of me, are you? I don’t want any more surgery just now. The funeral mustn’t be postponed a second time.”

“I see no reason why it should be, sir.”

“Good. Good. It’s going to be an event to be remembered for centuries. Whenever a great man dies, they’ll talk about giving him a funeral as great as the funeral of Mangu. You’ll sit beside me on the dais, Shadrach. At my right hand. A special mark of my favor, and everyone will know it.”

Shadrach takes a deep breath. This may be difficult.

“With your permission, sir, I intend not to be in Ulan Bator when the funeral takes place.”

The imperial eyebrows lift in surprise, but only for a moment.

“Oh?” says Genghis Mao, finally.

“I want to get away for a while,” Shadrach tells him. “I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”

“You do look pale,” The Khan says dryly.

“Very tense. Very tired.”

“Yes. Poor Shadrach. How devoted you are.”

“You’ve grown much stronger since the liver transplant, sir. You won’t be needing me on a day-by-day basis in the weeks just ahead. And of course I could get back to Ulan Bator in a hurry if there’s any emergency.”

The beady eyes study him calmly. The Khan is oddly undisturbed by Shadrach’s announcement, it would seem. There is something mildly disquieting about that. Shadrach does not want to be indispensable, with all the burdens that indispensability entails, but on the other hand he wishes the Khan would think of him as indispensable. His only salvation now lies in indispensability.

“Where will you go?” Genghis Mao asks.

“I haven’t decided that yet.”

“Not even tentatively?”

“Not even tentatively. Away from here, that’s all I know.”

“I see. And for how long?”

“A few weeks. A month, at most.”

“It will be strange, not having you at my side.”

“Then I have your permission to go, sir?”

“You have my permission. Of course.” The Khan smiles serenely, as if very satisfied with his own graciousness. And then a sudden mercurial shift, a darkening of the face, furrowing of the forehead, a tense fretful gleam coming into the eyes. Second thoughts? Yes. “But what if I do fall ill? Suppose I have a stroke. Suppose my heart. My stomach.”

“Sir, I can return at once if—”

“It worries me, Shadrach. Not having you close by.” The Khan’s voice is hoarse, ragged, almost panicky now. “If organ rejection starts. If there’s some intestinal obstruction. If my kidneys begin to fail. You know of trouble so soon, you react so swiftly. If — ” The Khan laughs. His mood seems to be shifting again; the fears of a moment ago vanish abruptly, and a strange blank smile plays across his face. In a new, sweet voice he says, almost crooning, “Sometimes I hear voices, Shadrach, did you know that? Like the saints, like the prophets. Invisible advisers come to me. Whispering, Whispering. They always have, in time of need. To warn me, to guide me.”

“Voices, sir?”

Genghis Mao blinks. “Did you say something?”

“Voices, I said. You were telling me that you sometimes hear voices.”

“I said that? I said nothing about voices. What voices? What are you talking about, Shadrach?” Genghis Mao laughs again, a low, harsh, baffling laugh. “Voices! What madness! Well, let’s not trouble ourselves with such foolishness.” He cranes his neck and peers straight up at Shadrach. “So you’ll be having a vacation from the old man and his complaints soon, will you?”

Shadrach is sweating. Shadrach is terrified. Is this some kind of psychotic break, or merely one of Genghis Mao’s games?

“A short vacation, yes, sir,” he says uncertainly.

The Chairman looks momentarily wistful. “Yes. But to miss the funeral, though — such a pity—”

“I regret that,” Shadrach says. “But I do need to get away,” “Yes. Yes. By all means. Take your trip, Shadrach. If you do need to get away. If you do. Need to get away.”

There. Done. Shadrach sighs. An uneasy moment or two, but he has his permission to depart. Strange. That wasn’t really so difficult at all.

May 29, 2012

Such a long face on Shadrach when he came out with the business about his vacation. Terrified of me. Afraid I’d refuse, I guess. What would he have done if I’d said no? Go anyway? He might. He seems desperate. Had that look in his eye, trapped man fighting in a corner. One must always be wary of those. Control your opponent, yes, but don’t trap him in corners. Give him plenty of space. That way you give yourself plenty of space, too.

I wonder why he’s going.

Tired, he said. Tense. Well, maybe so. But there’s more to it than that. It has to have something to do with Avatar. Is he thinking of disappearing? He’s too bright for that. Must know he can’t disappear. What then? Rebelliousness? Wants to see what happens if he walks in and tells the old man he’s taking off for a month to points unknown? Naturally I wouldn’t refuse. Much more interesting to let him go and see what he does.

First flicker of independence poor Shadrach’s ever shown. About time, too.

What if I get seriously ill while he’s gone? Heart. Liver. Lungs. Kidneys. Cerebral hemorrhage. Pleurisy. Acute pericarditis. Toxicuremia. So fragile, so flimsy, so vulnerable, this body, just chunks of meat strung together. Capable of falling apart overnight.

Mustn’t worry about that. I feel fine. I feel fine. I feel fine. I am in extraordinarily good health.

I am not dependent on Shadrach Mordecai.

I am not dependent on Shadrach Mordecai.

And what if he knows some way of actually disappearing? I suppose there’s at least a slight chance of that. What becomes of Avatar then? Find another donor? But I want him. Whenever I see him, I think of how fine his body is, how agile, how elegant. I mean to wear that body someday, oh, yes!

Should I therefore let him get out of my sight? No one can get out of my sight. Right.

Anyway, I know Shadrach. It doesn’t worry me, this trip of his. He’ll go, he’ll have his fling, and then he’ll come back to me. Of his own free will. He’ll come back, all right. Yes. Of his own free will.

It is time to think of the choosing of destinations. Shadrach can go anywhere in the world, and no concern for the cost; he is a member of the ruling elite, is he not, Antidote-blessed, an aristocrat in a world of rotting pieces. But where shall he go? He heads for Surveillance Vector One to consider his options. Though he has often paused before the screens of Surveillance Vector One for a random dip into the activities of the outer world that he calls the Trauma Ward, this is the first time that Shadrach has actually seated himself in the imperial throne from which the great spy-eye apparatus is controlled. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of colored buttons confront him: a bank of red ones, a wedge of green ones, yellow, blue, violet, orange. His hands hover above them like those of a novice organist approaching a full keyboard for the first time. Nothing is labeled. Is there a system? All about the room, images whirl and flit on the myriad screens, zipping by at unfathomable variable rates. Shadrach pokes a green button. Has anything been accomplished? The screens still seem random. He covers dozens of green buttons with both palms outstretched. Ah. Now there seems to be a detectable pattern of response. One slice of screens high up and to his right is showing unmistakably European cities — Paris, London, maybe Prague, Vienna, Stockholm. The color-coding, then, may be keyed to continents.

Leaving the green keys depressed, Shadrach punches a bunch of orange ones. A systematic search through the whirling madness of the blinking screens shows him, eventually, a bloc of North American scenery far to his left — glimpses of Los Angeles, surely, and New York, and Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh. So. Yes.

Half an hour of patient, absorbing work and he has mastered the system; he is a quick study. Violet is Africa, yellow is Asia, red is Latin America, and so on. He discovers, also, that there are certain master buttons — the red of red, so to speak, the blue of blues — which, when punched, wipe from the screens all data on continents other than the one covered by keys of that color, so that one need not contend with the crazy oversufficiency of information that the whole of Surveillance Vector One is capable of supplying. He learns, also, how to summon images of particular cities: the keys within each color group are arranged in a geographical analogue of their actual positions, and by activating a screen at his left elbow he can call for maps, divided into grids that show him which buttons to push. And then he systematically examines the Trauma Ward to see where he wants to go.

The famous cities of the world, yes. The ancient capitals. Rome? Of course. He punches for it. The Colosseum flashes by, the Forum, the Spanish Steps. Yes. And Jerusalem, yes, one glimpse is enough. He considers Egypt and punches for Cairo, but rejects it when he sees the beggars shambling about the base of the Great Pyramid, their blind eyes crusted with swarming flies. He has heard rumors about Egypt, and they seem to be true: organ-rot does not frighten him, but he has no antidotes for the ghastly trachoma, for the endemic bilharziasis, for the thousand other Cairene plagues that the screens show him. The healer in him might be willing enough to go to Egypt for a laying on of hands, a spraying on of medicines, but this is meant to be a holiday, he is going abroad not as a doctor but as an anti-doctor, and he shies from that challenge. No Egypt. But he chooses Istanbul after a view of the plump mosques rising from the hills; he picks London; bypasses his native Philadelphia and, with a shudder, New York; elects San Francisco; and finally Peking. The grand tour. The great adventure.

He sleeps alone that night, and for a change he sleeps well, as if the prospect of world-girdling travel has perversely calmed his restless spirit. Before dawn he awakens, does some perfunctory calisthenics, packs quickly, taking little with him. The green face of the data screen tells him it is

He does not bother with farewells. Just as the sun breaks the horizon he summons a car and is taken to the airport.

June 1, 2012

I did tell him about the voices after all. Despite earlier resolves. Should I have told him? But he didn’t take me seriously. Do I take me seriously? Do I take them seriously? Perhaps they are symptoms of some grave mental disorder. But were the saints mad too, then? The voices whisper to me. They have always come to me in times of crisis. During the Virus War I heard them most dearly. One voice said, I am Temujin Genghis Khan, and you are my son, and you shall be Genghis II. A voice of thunder, though he only whispered. And I am Mao, another voice said, smooth as silk. You are my son, Mao said, and you shall be Mao II. But we had already had a Mao II, nasty little coward, completely destroved his country with his idiocies, and there was even a Mao III, briefly, during the days just before the outbreak of the Virus War, so I answered Mao, I told him he was behind the times, it was too late for me to be Mao II, I must become Mao IV. He understood. So they blessed me and anointed me. Genghis II Mao IV, I became. So my voices dubbed and ordained and anointed me. And they have guided me. Is it a sign of schizoid disturbance to hear disembodied voices? It could be. Am I schizoid, then? Very well, I am schizoid. But I am also Genghis II Mao IV, and I rule the world.