Shadrach in the Furnace

5

And so, in early evening, the day’s work done and his Hippocratic responsibilities well discharged, it is off to Karakorum, the playground of this weary world’s ruling class, for Shadrach Mordecai, with Nikki Crowfoot as his playmate. He picks her up three hours after the operation in the Project Avatar laboratory on the seventh level of the Grand Tower of the Khan. A great green-walled barn of a place it is, experimental animals caged everywhere, crazy animals, cockadoodling hawks and tree-climbing gorillas, and colossal banks of testing equipment wherever there are no cages. There is a laboratory stink to the air down here, a stink Mordecai remembers well from his Harvard Med days, a mix of Lysol and formaldehyde and ethyl alcohol and mouse shit and Bunsen-burner fumes and burned insulation and what-all else. Most of the Avatar staff has left for the day, but Crowfoot, in gray lab smock and battered sandals, is busy at a five-meter-high agglomeration of computers and playback heads and television screens when he comes in. She stands with her back to the door, watching pyrotechnic bursts of green, blue, and red erupt and wiggle wildly across the face of a gigantic oscilloscope. Shadrach slips up behind her and, sliding his hands under her arms, cups her breasts through the smock. Her back goes rigid at the first touch of his fingers, but then she relaxes immediately, and does not turn around.

“Idiot,” she says, but there is only affection in her voice. “Don’t distract me. I’m running a triple simulation. That’s a real Genghis Mao tape down there, the green, and the blue above it is our April seven persona-construct, and—”

“Forget it. Genghis Mao died on the table when we pulled his liver out. The revolution started an hour ago. The city—”

She squirms in his embrace, pulling around, staring wide-eyed at him, aghast.

“—is in flames, and if you listen you can hear the explosions where they’re blowing up the statues—”

She sees his expression and begins to laugh, “Idiot! Idiot!” “Actually, he’s doing fine, even though Warhaftig put the new liver in upside down.”

“Stop it, Shadrach.”

“All right. He really is in good shape. He took ten minutes off to recuperate and now he’s leading Mongol-style square-dancing in Committee Vector One.”

“Shadrach—”

“I can’t help it. I’m in my postoperative manic phase.”

“Well, I’m not. It’s been a garbage day here.” Indeed her depression is obvious, once he slows down long enough to perceive it: her eyes are strained, her face is tense, her shoulders are uncharacteristically slumped.

“Your tests came out bad?”

“We blew them altogether. Hit a feedback loop and wiped three key tapes before we knew what was happening. I’m trying to salvage what’s left. We’ve been set back a month, a month and a half.”

“Poor Nikki. Is there any way I can help?”

“Just get me out of here,” she says. “Amuse me. Distract me. Make funny faces. How did the operation go?”

“Flawless. Warhaftig’s a wizard. He could do a nuclear implant on an amoeba with his thumbs and bring it off.”

“The great man rests well?”

“Beautifully,” Mordecai says. “It’s almost obscene, the way an eighty-seven-year-old man bounces back from major surgery like this every five or six weeks.”

“Is that what he is, eighty-seven?”

Shadrach shrugs. “That’s what the official figure is. There are stories that he’s older, perhaps a lot older, ninety, ninety-five, even past a hundred, they say. Rumors that he served in World War II. What we’re talking about, of course, is the brain, the epidermal integument, and the skeletal structure. The rest of him’s been cobbled together relatively recently out of fresh parts. A lung here, a kidney there, dacron arteries, ceramic hip joints, a plastic esophagus, a molybdenum-chromium shoulder, a new liver every few years — how it all hangs together I don’t know. But he just gets younger and younger, stronger and stronger, wilier and wilier. You ought to hear his vital signs ticking away in here.”

Grinning, Nikki Crowfoot puts her hands to Shadrach’s thighs as though to feel the sensor implants. “Ye-es. He’s doing marvelously well for his age. At the moment he’s fornicating a nurse. Wait, Wait. I think he’s coming! No, it’s a sneeze. And now I pick up audio input. Gezundheit, she just said. How is Genghis Mao’s sex life, anyway?”

“I try not to ask.”

“Doesn’t your inner machinery tell you?”

“Honi soit qui mal y pense,” Mordecai says. “Doubtless he’s got a splendid sex life. Probably more active than mine.”

“You didn’t have to sleep alone last night.”

“My vocation demanded it of me.” He gestures toward the door. “Karakorum?”

“Karakorum, yes. But first I need to wash and change.”

They go to her apartment, forty stories higher in the building. All important members of Genghis Mao’s staff have lodgings in the tower; but a research-group director has far less prestige than the Chairman’s personal physician, and Crowfoot’s suite is not nearly as opulent as Shadrach Mordecai’s, just three rooms, plain furnishings, floors of common wood, no balcony, a sliver of a view. Shadrach settles into a webfoam lounger while Nikki strips and heads for the shower. Her bare body is strikingly beautiful, and desire stirs in him at the sight of her heavy dark-tipped breasts, her powerful thighs, her flat hard belly. She is long and lean, with strong shoulders, a narrow waist, sudden flaring hips, sleek muscular buttocks; a dense flood of thick black hair descends to the middle of her back. Unclothed she sheds the laboratory aura, the tense and fatigued look of the dissatisfied scientist, and becomes something primitive, barbaric, primordial — Pocahontas, Sacajawea, moon-begotten Nokomis. Once when he made such feverish comparisons when they were in bed together she became embarrassed and self-conscious, and mockingly, defensively, called him Othello and Ras Tafari and Chaka Zulu; never again has he overtly romanticized her savage ancestry, for he does not like to be twitted about his own, but the feeling persists, whenever she bares herself to him, that she is a princess of a fallen nation, high priestess of the great plains, red Amazon of the pagan night. She emerges and dons a floor-length robe of openwork golden mesh, blatantly provocative, the antithesis of her epicene lab smock. Chocolate nipples show through, hints of the blue-black wire-stiff pubic triangle, flashes of haunch and thigh. He would gladly bed her this moment, but he knows she is tired and hungry, still preoccupied with the failures of the day, not yet at all in the mood for making love, and in any case she usually dislikes afternoon couplings, preferring to let erotic tensions build through the evening. So he contents himself with a light playful kiss and an appreciative smile, and out they go, down to the depths of the tower, to the loading ramp of the Karakorum tube-train.

Karakorum lies four hundred kilometers west of Ulan Bator. Five years ago a nuclear-powered subterrene drilled a wide tunnel connecting the two cities beneath the Central Gobi, its invincible thermal-stress penetrator slicing serenely through the resistant deep-lying Paleozoic granites and schists. Now high-speed trains on silent inertialess tracks sweep between the ancient capital and the modern one, making the journey in less than an hour. Shadrach Mordecai and Nikki Crowfoot join the pleasure-bound throngs on the platform; the next train is due to depart in just a few minutes. Several people greet them but no one comes close. There is something formidable and intimidating about a truly impressive-looking couple, something that seals them within a zone of chilly unapproachability, and Shadrach knows he and Nikki are impressive, tall slender black man and tall sturdy copper-skinned woman, handsome of form and face, elegantly dressed, Othello and Pocahontas out for a night on the town. But there is another isolating factor at work — Dr. Mordecai’s professional proximity to the Khan: these people are aware that he has face-to-face access to Genghis Mao, one of the very few, and some of the Chairman’s aura has been transferred to him, a contagion of awesomeness, making Mordecai one not to be approached casually. He dislikes this but there is little he can do about it.

The tube-train pulls in. Off now to Karakorum go Shadrach and Nikki.

Karakorum. Founded eight hundred years ago by Genghis Khan. Transformed into a majestic capital by Genghis’s son Ogodai. Abandoned a generation later by Genghis’s grandson Kublai, who preferred to rule from Cambaluc in China. Destroyed by Kublai Khan when his rebellious younger brother attempted to make it the seat of his revolt. Rebuilt eventually, abandoned again, allowed to fall into decay, forgotten entirely. Its site rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century by archaeologists of the Mongolian People’s Republic and the Soviet Union. And now much restored by decree of Genghis II Mao IV Khan, self-anointed successor to one ancient empire and one modern one, who wishes to remind the world of the greatness of Genghis I and to make it forget the centuries of Mongol slumber that followed the decline of the Khans.

Karakorum by night glitters with an unearthly brightness, a stunning lunar glow. Mordecai and Crowfoot, leaving the tube train station, behold the excavated ruins of old Karakorum to their left — a solitary stone tortoise in a field of yellowed grass, the outlines of some brick walls, a shattered pillar. Nearby are gray stone stupas, monuments to holy lamas, erected in the sixteenth century; in the distance, against the parched hills, are the white stucco buildings of Karakorum State Farm, a grandiose project of the defunct Mongolian People’s Republic, a vast agricultural enterprise occupying half a million hectares of grassland. Between the farm buildings and the stupas lies the Karakorum of Genghis Mao, a flamboyant reconstruction of the original city, the great many-columned walled palace of Ogodai Khan imagined anew, the splendid observatory with its heaven-stabbing turrets, the mosques and churches, the gaudy silken tents of the nobility, the somber brick houses of the foreign merchants, all testifying to the might and magnificence of the latter-day Prince of Princes, Genghis Mao, who, according to a half-suppressed legend, had once had a humbler Mongol name, Choijamise or Ochirbal or Gombojab — the tales vary according to the teller — and had been a minor functionary, a very insignificant apparatchik, in the bureaucracy of the old People’s Republic in the vanished Marxist-Leninist days, before the world fell apart and a new Mongol empire was constructed on its relict. The resurrected Karakorum is not merely a sterile monument to antiquity, though: by Genghis Mao’s decree it is an amusement park, a place of revelry and pleasures, a twenty-first-century Xanadu blazing with frantic energy. In these black and yellow and scarlet tents one may dine, drink, gamble; the latest hallucinations are for sale here; here one may find willing sexual partners of all kinds; those who indulge in the popular cults of the moment — dream-death, transtemporalism, and carpentry are the fashionable ones just now — have facilities for their rituals in Karakorum. Shadrach is a carpentry-cultist himself; Nikki Crowfoot goes in for transtemporalism, and he has dabbled in that too, though not lately. Once he came to Karakocum with Karya Lindman, and that fierce, intense woman urged him to try dream-death with her, but he refused, and she scorned him for his timidity for days afterward. Not with words. Little castrating scowls; sudden harsh flickers of her furious eyes. Mocking quiverings of her elegant nostrils.

As they pass the dream-death pavilion now, neither of them giving it more than a casual glance, Mordecai forcing the image of Katya Lindman’s bare blazing body out of his mind, Crowfoot says, “Isn’t it risky, your going this far from Ulan Bator only a few hours after he’s had major surgery?”

“Not especially. In fact, I always go out the evening after a transplant. A little bonus I give myself after a hard day’s work. If anything, it’s a better time for a Karakorum trip than most.”

“Why so?”

“He’s in an intensive-care support system tonight. If any complications set in, alarms will go off all over the place and one of the low-echelon medics will respond instantly. You know, my job doesn’t require me to hold the boss’s hand twenty-five hours a day. It isn’t needed and he doesn’t want it.”

Fireworks abruptly explode overhead. Wheels of gold and crimson, spears coursing across the night. Shadrach imagines he sees the face of Genghis Mao filling the sky, but no, but no, just self-deception, the pattern is plainly abstract. Plainly.

“If an emergency comes up, they’ll summon you, won’t they?” Nikki asks.

“They won’t need to,” Mordecai tells her. Out of the dream-death pavilion comes a weird discordant music, bagpipes gone awry. He thinks of Katya Lindman crooning in Swedish an hour before the dawn one snowy night, and shivers. He pats his thigh where the implants are and says, “I’m getting the full broadcast, remember?”

“Even out here?”

He nods. “The telemetering range is about a thousand kilometers. I’m picking him up clearly right this minute. He’s resting very comfortably, dozing, I’d say, temperature about a degree above normal, pulse very slightly high, new liver integrating itself nicely and already making positive changes in his general metabolic state. If anything starts deteriorating, I’ll know about it immediately, and if necessary I can always get back to him in ninety minutes or so. Meanwhile I’m covered and I’m free to amuse myself.”

“Always aware of the state of his health.”

“Yes. Always. Even while I sleep, the information ticks into me.”

“Your implants fascinate me philosophically,” she says. They pause at a sweets-vendor’s booth to buy some refreshments. The vendor, a squat thick-nosed Mongol, offers them airag, the ancient Mongol beverage of fermented mare’s milk, and, shrugging, Mordecai takes a flask for her and one for himself. She makes a face, but drinks, and says, “What I mean is, looking at you and the Chairman in strict cybernetic terms, it’s hard to see where the boundaries of your individuality end and his begin. You and he amount to a single self-corrective information-processing unit, practically a single life system.” “That’s not exactly how I see it,” Mordecai tells her. “There may be a constant flow of metabolic information from his body to mine, and the information I receive from him has some impact on the course of my actions and I suppose ultimately on his, but he remains an autonomous being, the Chairman of the PRC, no less, with all the tremendous power that that entails, and I am only—”

“No. Look at it with a total-systems approach,” Crowfoot urges impatiently. “Let’s say you’re Michelangelo, trying to turn a huge block of marble into the David. The figure is within the marble: you must liberate it with your mallet and chisel, right? You strike the block; a chip of marble is knocked off. You strike it again. Another chip. A few more chips and perhaps the outline of an arm begins to emerge. The angle of the chisel is slightly different for each stroke, isn’t it? And maybe the intensity of the force you use to hit the chisel with the mallet is different, too. You constantly modify and correct your strokes according to the information you’re receiving from the cul face of the marble block — the emerging shape, the right cleavage planes, and soon. Do you see the total system? The process of creating Michelangelo’s David isn’t one in which you, Michelangelo, simply act on a passive lump of stone. The marble’s an active force too, part of the circuit, in a sense part of the mind system that is Michelangelo-as-sculptor. Because—”

“I don’t—”

“Let me finish. Let me trace the whole circuit for you. A change in the outline of the marble is perceived by your eye and is evaluated by your brain, which transmits instructions to the muscles of your arm having to do with the force and angle of the next blow, and this causes a change in your neuromuscular response as you strike the next blow, producing further change in the marble that causes further perception of change in the eye and a further alteration of program within the brain, leading to another correction of neuromuscular response for the next stroke, and so on, on and on around the loop until the statue is done. The process of carving the statue is a process of perceiving and responding to change, to stroke-by-stroke difference; and the block of marble is an essential part of the total system.”

“It didn’t ask to be,” Shadrach says mildly. “It doesn’t know it’s part of a system.”

“Irrelevant. View the system as a closed universe. The marble is changing and its changes produce changes within Michelangelo that lead to further changes in the marble. Within the closed universe of sculptor-and-tools-and-marble, it’s incorrect to view Michelangelo as the ‘self,’ the actor, and the marble as a ‘thing,’ the acted-upon. Sculptor and tools and marble together make up a single network of causal pathways, a single thinking-and-acting-and-changing entity, a single person, if you will. Now, you and Genghis Mao—”

“Are different persons,” Mordecai insists. “The feedback’s not the same. If his kidney conks out, I react to the extent that I perceive the malfunction and treat it and arrange for a kidney replacement, but I won’t get sick myself. And if something goes wrong with my kidneys, it won’t affect him in any way.”

Crowfoot shrugs. “True but trivial. Don’t you see that the causal interlock between the two of you is much more intimate? Your whole daily routine is controlled by the transmissions you get from Genghis Mao: you sleep alone or sleep with me depending on his health, you go to Karakorum or stay by his bedside, you experience somatic anxieties if the signal from him starts going critical, you have a whole constellation of life-choices and life-responses that are governed almost entirely by his metabolism. You’re an extension of Genghis Mao. And what about him? He lives or dies at your option. He may be Chairman of the PRC, but he would be just another dead man next week if you fail to pick up some key symptom or fail to take the proper corrective action. You’re essential to his survival, and he controls many of your movements and actions. One system, Shadrach, one constantly resonating circuit, you and Genghis Mao, Genghis Mao and you!”

Still Shadrach Mordecai shakes his head. “The analogy’s close, but not close enough to convince me. Not quite close enough. I’m equipped with some extraordinary diagnostic devices, sure, but they’re not all that special; my implants help me respond faster to emergencies than an ordinary doctor might respond to an ordinary patient, but that’s all. It’s only a quantitative difference. You can define any doctor-patient unit as a single self-corrective information-processing system, of sorts, but I don’t think the hookup between Genghis Mao and myself creates any kind of significant difference in that type of system. If I got sick when he got sick, the point would be valid, but—”

Nikki Crowfoot sighs. “Let it pass, Shadrach. It isn’t worth all this palaver. In the Avatar lab we constantly have to deal with the principle that the popular notion of self is pretty meaningless, that it’s necessary to think in terms of larger information-handling systems, but maybe I’m extending the principle into areas where it doesn’t need to go. Or maybe you and I simply aren’t communicating very well right now.” She closes her eyes for a moment and clenches her jaws as if trying to discharge some jangling current pulsing through her brain. Another barrage of fireworks lights up the sky with garish purple and green streaks. Savage thorny music, all snarls and shrieks, pierces the air. After a moment Crowfoot relaxes, grins, points to the shimmering tent of the transtemporalists a few meters in front of them. “Enough talk,” she says. “Now some excitement.”