Shadrach in the Furnace

2

Mordecai’s office is an island of tranquility for him within the tumultuous intensity of life atop the Grand Tower of the Khan. The room, a sphere ten meters in diameter, has many entrances, but they are programmed to open only for himself or Genghis Mao. One is the door through which he has just come, out of Committee Vector One. Another goes to the Khan’s private dining room, and another, on the far side, to a seldom-used heavy-insulation study known as the Khan’s Retreat. The last door is Interface Five, connecting the doctor’s office to the two-story-high Surgery that occupies one of the five outer wedges of the tower.

In the sanctuary of his office Shadrach Mordecai enjoys a few moments of peace before proceeding on his voyage into the turmoils of the day. Though Genghis Mao is up, there is no need to hurry. Mordecai’s implants tell him — by now, he can equate every trifling inner signal with some concrete aspect of the Khan’s activities — that the imperial servitors have entered Genghis Mao’s bedchamber, have helped the Khan to his feet, are walking him through the series of mild arm-swinging chest-stretching exercises that the old man, at Dr. Mordecai’s insistence, performs every morning. Next they will bathe him, then they will shave him, finally they will dress him and bring him forth. Though there will be no breakfast for Genghis Mao today, because of the impending operation, Shadrach Mordecai has at least an hour before he must attend the Khan.

Simply being in the office buoys him. The dark, rich paneling, the subdued lighting, the curving uncluttered desk of strange exotic woods, the splendid bookcase of crystalline rods and thin travertine slabs in which he keeps his priceless library of classic medical texts, the elegant armoires that house his extensive collection of antique medical instruments — it is an ideal environment for him, a perfect enclosure for the doctor he would like to be and occasionally is able to believe he is, the master of the Hippocratic arts, the prince of healers, the preserver and prolonger of life. Not that this room is a place for the practice of medicine. The only medical tools here are ancient ones, romantic and quaint apparatus, odd beakers and scalpels and lancets, bloodletting knives and cauterizing irons, ophthalmoscopes and defibrillators, early and inaccurate anatomical models, chirurgical saws, sphygmomanometers, electrical invigorators, flasks of discredited antitoxins, trephines, microtomes, relics of more innocent times. He has acquired these things eagerly in the past five years, by way of establishing his professional kinship with the great physicians of yesterday. The books, too, rare and auspicious, landmarks of medical history, talismans of scientific progress: the Fabrica of Vesalius, De Motu Cordis of Harvey, Boerhaave’s Institutiones, Laennec on auscultation, Beaumont on digestion — with what joy be has collected them, with what reverence he has fondled them! Not without some guilt, too, for in this battered and deflated era it is all too easy for those few who have power and wealth to take advantage of those who have not; and Mordecai, so close to the throne, has accumulated his treasures cheaply, catching them as they slip from the grasp of older, unluckier, perhaps more worthy possessors. Still, had these things not descended to him they might have been lost altogether in the chaos that surges freely through the world beyond the Grand Tower of the Khan.

Mordecai’s actual medical work is done elsewhere, in the Surgery beyond Interface Five, which serves not only for actual surgical operations but also for any other medical attention Genghis Mao may need. Mordecai’s office is a place for research and reflection only. Just to the right of his desk are keyboards, compact data terminals, giving him instant access to entire libraries of medical knowledge; he need only touch a finger to a key or even speak a coded word, cite symptomata, facies, tentative diagnosis, and back will come, in neatly codified form, extracts from the accumulated scientific wisdom of the eons, the relevant distillate of everything from the Smith Papyrus and Hippocrates and Galen down through the latest findings of the microbiologists and immunologists and endocrinologists who labor in the laboratories of the Khan. It is all here: encephalitis and endocarditis, gastritis and gout, nephritis, nephrosis, neuroma, nystagmus, aspergillosis and bilharzia, uremia and xanthochromia, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Time was when doctors were shamans in feathers and paint, bravely pounding drums to frighten away frightening demons, doing solitary battle against unfathomable causes and unaccountable effects, gamely piercing veins and ventilating skulls, grubbing for roots and leaves of purely magical merit. Alone against the dark spirits of disease, no guide but one’s stock of inherited supernatural lore and one’s intuition. And now! Here! The answer machine! A touch of the finger and behold: etiology, pathology, symptomatology, pharmacology, contraindications, prophylaxis, prognosis, sequelae, the whole miraculous scroll of diagnosis and treatment and cure and convalescence unrolling at a command! In moments of lull Shadrach Mordecai enjoys testing his wits against the computer, setting hypothetical problems for himself, postulating symptoms and proposing diagnoses; he is eleven years out of Harvard Medical School and still a student, ever a student.

Today allows few lulls. He swings to his left and taps out the telephone number of the Surgery. “Warhaftig,” he says crisply.

A moment, and there the screen shows the flat, homely face of Nicholas Warhaftig, surgeon to the Khan, veteran of a hundred critical transplant operations. The camera picks up a sweeping view of the operating room behind him, boards glittering with measuring dials and control panels, the laser bank, the anesthesiologist’s spidery maze of needles and tubes and pipes, and, only partly visible, the main surgical stage itself, dais and bed and lights and instruments, white linens and dazzling chrome-steel fixtures, everything awaiting the imperial patient.

“The Khan’s awake,” Mordecai says.

“We’re on schedule, than,” says Warhaftig.

He is sixty years old, silver-haired, phlegmatic. He was already the supreme organ-transplant man when Shadrach Mordecai was an idol-worshipping undergraduate, and though Mordecai is technically his superior on Genghis Mao’s staff now, there is no doubt in either man’s mind about which one of them actually holds the greater professional authority. This makes their relationship an uncomfortable one for Mordecai.

Warhaftig says, “Will you get him to me by 0900 sharp?”

“I’ll try.”

“Try hard,” Warhaftig replies dryly, mouth quirking. “We begin perfusion at 0915. The liver’s still on ice, but coordinating defrost is always tricky. How’s he feeling?”

“As usual. The strength of ten men.”

“Can you give me quick readings on blood glucose and fibrinogen production?” “A moment,” Mordecai says. Those are not factors on which he receives direct telemetering from Genghis Mao’s body; but he has become skillful in deducing hundreds of the Chairman’s lesser body functions from clues given by the main metabolic responses. He says shortly, “Glucose doing fine, within the expected reduced levels caused by the general hepatic necrosis. It’s harder to get the fibrinogen reading, but my feeling is that all the plasma proteins are on the low side. Probably the fibrinogen not as bad as the heparin.”

“And bile?”

“Off sharply since Friday. Down some more this morning. No critical breakdowns of any function yet.”

“All right,” Warhaftig says. He gestures brusquely to someone beyond camera range. The surgeon’s hands are formidable, long and muscular, fingers like elongated pliable wands, incredible octave-devouring fingers of extraordinary power and delicacy. Shadrach Mordecai, although he is no surgeon, has strong and graceful hands himself, but the sight of Warhaftig’s always make him think of his own as coarse and stumpy, butcher-fingered hands. “We’re moving well here. I’ll expect you at 0900. Anything else?”

“I just wanted you to know the Khan was awake,” Mordecai answers, a little sharply, and breaks the contact.

Next he phones the Chairman’s bedchamber and talks briefly with one of the Khan’s valets. Yes, Genghis Mao is awake, he has bathed, he is readying himself for the operation. He will begin his morning meditation in a moment. Does the doctor wish to speak with the Khan before that? The doctor does. The screen goes blank, and there is a lengthy pause during which Mordecai feels his adrenalin levels beginning to rise: not yet, not even after all this time, has the fear and awe that Genghis Mao inspires in him begun to ebb. He forces himself into calmness with a quick centering exercise, and none too soon, for abruptly the head and shoulders of Genghis II Mao IV Khan appear on the telephone screen.

The Chairman is a lean, leathery-looking man with a narrow triangular skull, powerful cheekbones, heavy brows, fierce eyes, thin harsh lips. His skin is more brown than yellow in tone; his hair is thick, black, combed back straight from his forehead and descending almost to his shoulders. His face is one that readily and obviously evokes dread, but also, oddly, trust; he seems omniperceptive and omnicompetent, a man to whom all the burdens of the world can be given and who will uncomplainingly and effectually assume them. The recent deterioration of his current liver has had visible effect on him — a bronzing of his skin beyond its normal deep hue, some blotches of pigment on his cheeks, an uncharacteristic feverish brightness of the eyes — but still he seems a man of regal bearing and inexhaustible strength, a man designed by nature to endure and to rule.

“Shadrach,” he says. His voice is deep, grating, with a narrow dynamic range, not really a good demagogue’s voice. “How am I this morning?”

It is an old joke between them. The Khan laughs; Mordecai manages a bilious smile.

The doctor replies, “Strong, well rested, a little low on blood sugar, but everything generally as expected. Warhaftig is waiting for you. He’d like you in the Surgery by 0900 hours. Mangu’s at the Committee Vector One desk. It’s a quiet day so far.”

“This will be my fourth liver.”

“Your third, sir,” Mordecai says gently. “I’ve been over the records. First transplant in 2005, the second in 2010, and now—”

“I was born with one also, Shadrach. We should count that. I’m human, eh, Shadrach? We mustn’t forget the set of organs I was born with.” Genghis Mao’s inescapable eyes pierce the uneasy Mordecai. Human, yes, one must always try to keep that in mind; the Chairman is human, though his pancreas is a tiny plastic disk and his heart is constantly spurred by electric jolts delivered through fine silver needles and his kidneys were grown in bodies other than his own and his spleen his lungs his corneas his colon his esophagus his pharynx his thymus his pulmonary artery his stomach his yes oh yes human he is human but sometimes it is hard to remember that — and sometimes, looking into those irresistible terrifying glacial eyes, one sees not the godlike flash of supreme authority, but something else, an opaque look of fatigue or perhaps terror, a look that seems at once to reveal an overwhelming fear of death and to offer warm welcome to it. Genghis Mao is death-haunted, certainly, a man whose grasp on life is so ferocious after nine decades that he will submit to any bodily torment in order to buy another month, another year; he lives in morbid dread of death and his eyes proclaim it; but he is death-loving, too, obsessed with the termination that he constantly postpones, as much so as a man who is obsessed with the orgasm he strives so fiercely to delay. Mordecai has heard Genghis Mao speak of the purity of not-being. Not for him the coming of süsser Tod, no, never, and yet how he savors the tempting sweetness of it even as he averts his lips from it. Mordecai suspects that only such a man, death-haunted, death-obsessed, would want to make himself master of the sort of place this world has become. But how can Genghis Mao, brooding dreamily on the delicate beauties of death, nevertheless also yearn to live forever?

“Come for me at 0900,” the Chairman tells him.

Mordecai nods to a dead screen.