Shadrach in the Furnace

7

He stands in the gravel-strewn walk outside the tent of the transtemporalists, dazed, the sulphurous taste of Cotopaxi somehow still in his mouth. Nikki has not yet emerged. Other people he knows wander by, members of Genghis Mao’s staff, flowing past him down the midway toward the garish cluster of gaming pavilions at the western end of the pleasure complex: there goes Frank Ficifolia, the jowly little communications man who designed Surveillance Vector One, and after him a Mongol military aide-de-camp, Gonchigdorge, all ribbons and medals in his comic-book uniform, and then two of the Committee vice-chairmen, a pallid Turk named Eyuboglu and a burly Greek named Ionigylakis. Each, as he passes, greets Shadrach in characteristic style, Ficifolia warm and effusive, Gonchigdorge offhanded and remote, Eyuboglu wary, Ionigylakis boisterous. Shadrach Mordecai manages a nod and a glassy smile in return, no more. Yo soy un médico. He still feels the earth rumbling. He wishes everyone would let him alone. In Karakorum one deserves a little privacy. Especially right now. The significant sectors of his consciousness are still in the suburbs of Quito, sinking under tons of fine hot ash. Coming out of transtemporalism is always something of a shock, but this is too much, it is as bad as eviction from the womb; he is vulnerable and fuddled, unable to cope with the social rituals. Those rough globules of airy pumice, that scent of brimstone, that inescapable sleepiness; above all, that crushing sense of transition, that feeling of one world falling apart and a new, strange one being formed. — Out of the transtemporalists’ tent now comes a short pigeon-breasted man with crooked teeth and astonishing bushy red eyebrows. He is Roger Buckmaster, British, a microengineering expert, competent and usually sullen, a man whom few people seem to know well. He plants himself near the exit of the tent, a few meters from Shadrach Mordecai, and digs both feet firmly, flatfootedly, into the gravel as though he is uncertain about his balance. He has the stunned look of a man who has just been thrown out of a pub after five beers too many.

Mordecai, though he has only a distant acquaintance with Buckmaster and just now has especially little interest in a conversation with him, knows all too well how confusing the first moments outside the tent can be, and is sympathetic. He feels impelled to meet Buckmaster’s wobbly gaze with some sort of polite gesture; he smiles and says hello, thinking that he will now retreat into his own confusion and fatigued meditations.

Buckmaster, though, blinks and glares aggressively. “It’s the black bahstard!” he says. His voice is thick, phlegmy, high-pitched, not at all friendly. “The black bahstard himself!”

“Black bahstard?” Mordecai repeats wonderingly, mimicking the accent, “Black bahstard? Man, did you call me—”

“Bahstard. Black.”

“That’s what I thought you said.”

“Black bahstard. Evil as the ace of spades.”

This is ludicrous.

“Roger, are you all right?”

“Evil. Black and evil.”

“I heard you, yes,” Shadrach says. A miserable throbbing begins along the left side of his skull. He regrets having acknowledged Buckmaster’s presence; he wishes Buckmaster would disappear. The racial slur itself is more grotesque than insulting to him, for he has never had any reason to feel defensive about his color, but he is puzzled by the gratuitousness of the attack and he remains too deeply under the spell of his own powerful transtemporal experience to want any sort of interaction with a truculent clown like Buckmaster, not now, above all not now. Perhaps the thing to do is ignore him. Shadrach folds his arms and steps back against a light-pillar.

But Buckmaster says into Shadrach’s silence, “You don’t feel covered with shame, Mordecai?”

“Look, Roger—”

“Drenched with guilt for every filthy act of your treacherous life?”

“Come on. What have you been drinking in there, man?”

“The same as everyone else. Just the drug, the drug, the time-drug, whatever they give you. D’ye think they fed me hashish? D’ye think I’m high on whiskey? Oh, no, just the time-drink, and it opened my eyes, let me tell you, it opened them wide!” Buckmaster advances until he stands no more man thirty centimeters from Shadrach Mordecai, glaring up at him, shouting The pain in Shadrach’s skull is that of a spike being hammered deep. “I’ve seen Judas sell Him out!” Buckmaster roars. “I was there, in Jerusalem, at the Supper, watching them eat. Thirteen at the table, eh? I poured the wine with my own hands, you black devil, I watched Judas smirking, saw him whispering in His ear, even, and then out into the garden, y’know. Gethsemane, there in the darkness—”

“Would you like a trank, Roger?”

“Keep off me with your filthy pills!”

“You’re getting overwrought. You ought to try to calm yourself.”

“Listen to him doctoring me. Me. No, you won’t dope me, and you’ll pay heed while I tell you—”

“Some other time,” Shadrach says. He is pinned between Buckmaster and the light-pillar, but he slips aside and makes broad swimming gestures in the air between them, as though Buckmaster is a noxious vapor he’d like to blow away. “I’m tired now. I’ve had a heavy trip in there myself. I can’t handle any of this at the moment, Buckmaster, if you don’t mind. All right?”

“You bloody well will handle it. I saw it, everything, Judas coming up to Him and kissing Him in the garden, and saying, Master, master, just as it is in the Book, and then the Roman soldiers closing in and arresting him — oh, the bloody betraying bahstard. I saw it, I was there, I understand now what guilt means. Do you? You don’t. And you’re as guilty as he was, in a different way but the same kind, Mordecai.”

“I’m a Judas?” Shadrach shakes his head wearily. Drunks irritate him, even if they are drunk only on the transtemporalists’ drug. “I don’t understand any of this. Who is it I’m supposed to have betrayed?”

“Everyone. All of mankind.”

“And you say you aren’t drunk.”

“Never been more sober. Oh, my eyes are open now! Who is it who keeps him alive, answer me that? Who’s there by his side, giving him injections, medicines, pills, yelling for the bloody surgeon every time he needs a new kidney or a new heart, eh? Eh?”

“You want the Chairman to die?”

“Damn right I do!”

Shadrach gasps. Buckmaster has obviously been driven insane by his transtemporal experience; Shadrach can no longer be annoyed with him. The angry little man must be protected against himself. “You’ll be arrested if you go on this way,” Shadrach says. “He might be listening to us right now.”

“He’s flat on his back, half dead from the operation,” Buckmaster retorts. “Don’t you think I know that? You put a new liver into him today.”

“Even so, there are spy-eyes everywhere, recording instruments — you designed some of them yourself, Buckmaster.”

“I don’t care. Let him hear me.”

“So now you’re a revolutionary?”

“My eyes are open. I’ve had a revelation in that tent. Guilt, responsibility, evil—”

“You think the world would be better off with Genghis Mao dead?”

Fiercely Buckmaster cries, “Yes! Yes! He’s draining us all so he can live forever. He’s turned the world into a madhouse, into a bloody zoo! Look, Mordecai, we could be rebuilding, we could be passing around the Antidote and healing the whole world, not just the favored few, we could go back to what we had before the War, but no, no, we’re ruled by a bloody Mongol Khan, can you imagine that? A hundred-year-old Mongol Khan who wants to live forever! And he’d have been dead five years ago but for you.”

Shadrach sees where Buckmaster is heading, and he presses his hands to his temples in dismay. He wants more desperately than ever to escape from this conversation. Buckmaster is a fool, and his onslaught is cheap and obvious. Shadrach has thought all this through, long ago, considered the moral problems, and dismissed them. Of course serving an evil dictator is wrong. No job for a nice sincere dedicated black boy from Philadelphia who wants to do good. But is Genghis Mao evil? Are there any alternatives to his rule, other than chaos? If Genghis Mao is inevitable, like some natural force, like the rising of the sun or the falling of the rain, then no guilt attaches to serving him: one does what seems appropriate, one lives one’s life, one accepts one’s karma, and if one is a doctor then one heals, without considering the ramifications of one’s patient’s identity. To Shadrach this is no glib rationalization, but rather a statement of acceptance of destiny. He refuses to assume burdens of guilt that have no meaning to him, and he will not let Buckmaster, of all people, flagellate him over absurdities nor accuse him of misplacing his loyalties.

He notices that Nikki Crowfoot has come out of the transtemporalist’s tent and is standing to one side, hands on her hips, waiting for him, and he says to Buckmaster, “Excuse me. I have to go now.”

Nikki seems transfigured. Her eyes are aglow, her face glistens with ecstatic sweat, her whole body seems to gleam. As Shadrach strides toward her, she acknowledges him with a mere tilt of her head, but she is far away, still lost in her hallucination.

“Let’s go,” he says. “Buckmaster’s a little crazy tonight and he’s making a nuisance of himself.”

He reaches for her hand.

“Wait!” Buckmaster yells, running toward them. “I’m not through with you. I’ve got more to tell you, you black bahstard!”

Mordecai shrugs and says, “All right. You can have one more minute. What do you want me to do, exactly?”

“Leave off tending him.”

“I’m a doctor, Buckmaster. He’s my patient.”

“Precisely. And that’s why I call you a guilty bahstard. Billions of people to care for in the world, and he’s the one you choose to look after. Dooming us all to decades more of Genghis Mao.”

“Someone else would serve him if I didn’t,” Shadrach says gently.

“But you do. You. And I must hold you responsible.”

Astonished, baffled by the force and persistence of Buckmaster’s attack, Shadrach says, “Responsible for what?”

“For the way the world is. The whole bleeding mess. The continued threat of universal organ-rot twenty years after the Virus War. The hunger, the poverty. Oh, don’t you have any shame, Mordecai? You with your legs full of machinery that tell you every twitch of his blood pressure so you can run to him even faster?”

Shadrach glances at Nikki, appealing to her to do something to rescue him. But she still has that far-off look; she does not appear to be aware of Buckmaster at all.

Angrily Mordecai says, “Who designed that machinery, Roger?”

Buckmaster recoils. He has been hit where it hurts. His cheeks blaze; his eyes glisten with furious tears. “I! I did! You bah-stard, I admit it, I built your dirty implants. Don’t you think I know I share the guilt? Don’t you think I understand that now? But I’m getting out. I won’t bear the responsibility any longer.”

“This is suicidal, the way you’re carrying on.” Shadrach Mordecai points to shadowy figures on the periphery of the path, high staffers who hover in the darkness, unwilling to come within range of possible spy-eyes while they enjoy Buckmaster’s juicy lunatic outburst. “There’ll be a report of all this on the Chairman’s desk tomorrow, Roger, more likely than not. You’re destroying yourself.”

“I’ll destroy him. The bloodsucker. He holds us all for ransom, our bodies, our souls, he’ll let us rot if we don’t serve.”

“Don’t be melodramatic. We serve Genghis Mao because we have skills and this is the proper place to employ them,” Mordecai says crisply. “It’s no fault of ours that the world is as it is. If you’d rather have been out in Liverpool or Manchester living in some stinking cellar with your intestines full of holes, you could have been.”

“Don’t goad me, Mordecai.”

“But it’s true. We’re lucky to be here. We’re doing the only sane thing possible in a crazy world. Guilt is a luxury we can’t afford. You want to walk out now, go ahead, go, Roger. But you won’t want to leave the Khan when you calm down in the morning.”

“I refuse to have you patronize me.”

“I’m trying to protect you. I’m trying to get you to shut up and stop shouting dangerous nonsense.”

“And I’m trying to get you to pull the plug and free us from Genghis Khan Mao,” Buckmaster wails, flushed and wild-eyed.

“So you think we’d be better off without him?” Shadrach asks. “What are your alternatives, Buckmaster? What kind of government would you suggest? Come on. I’m serious. You’ve been calling me a lot of unpleasant names, now let’s have some rational discussion. You’ve become a revolutionary, right? Okay. What’s your program? What do you want?”

Buckmaster is beyond the moment for philosophical discourse, however. He glowers at Mordecai in barely controlled loathing, framing words that will not leave his throat except as incoherent guttural growls; he clenches and unclenches his fists, he sways alarmingly, his reddened cheeks turn scarlet. Shadrach, all sympathy long gone, turns from him and reaches toward Nikki Crowfoot again. As they begin to walk away together Buckmaster rushes forward in a clumsy flailing lunge, clamping his hands on Shadrach’s shoulders and trying to pull him down. Shadrach pivots gracefully, bends slightly to slip free of Buckmaster’s grasp, and, when Buckmaster hurls himself at him, seizes him about the ribs, spins him around, and holds him immobile. Buckmaster squirms, kicks, spits, sputters, but Shadrach is much too strong for him. “Easy,” Shadrach murmurs. “Easy. Relax. Let go of it, Roger. Let go of everything.” He holds Buckmaster as one might hold a hysterical child, until at length he feels Buckmaster go slack, all the frenzy leaving him. Mordecai releases him and steps back, hands poised at chest level, ready for a new lunge, but Buckmaster is spent. He backs away from Mordecai in the slinking heavy-shouldered walk of a beaten man, pausing after a few paces to scowl and mutter, “All right, Mordecai. Bahstard. Stay with Genghis Mao. Wipe his decrepit arse for him. See what happens to you! You’ll finish in she furnace, Shadrach, in the furnace, in the bloody furnace!”

Shadrach laughs. The tension is broken. “The furnace. I like that. Very literary, Buckmaster.”

“The furnace for you, Shadrach!”

Mordecai, smiling, takes Crowfoot’s arm. She still looks radiant, ecstatic, lost in transcendental raptures. “Let’s go,” he says. “I can’t take any more of this.”

Softly, in a dream-furry voice, she says, “What did he mean by that, Shadrach? About the furnace?”

“Biblical reference. Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego.”

“Who?”

“You don’t know of it?”

“No. Shadrach, it’s such a lovely night. Let’s go somewhere and make love.”

“Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego. In the Book of Daniel. Three Hebrews who refused to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s golden idol, and the king cast them into a burning fiery furnace, and God sent an angel to walk with them in there, and they were unharmed. Strange you don’t know the story.”

“What happened to them?”

“I told you, love. They were unharmed, not a hair of their heads singed, and Nebuchadnezzar called them forth, and told them that their God was a mighty god, and promoted them to high office in Babylon. Poor Buckmaster. He ought to realize that a Shadrach wouldn’t be afraid of furnaces. Did you have a good trip, love?”

“Oh, yes, yes, Shadrach!”

“Where did they send you?”

“Joan of Arc’s execution. I watched her burning, and it was beautiful, the way she smiled, the way she looked toward heaven.” Nikki presses close against him as they walk. Her voice still comes to him out of some realm of dream; that bonfire has left her stoned. “The most inspiring trip I ever had. The most deeply spiritual. Where can we go now, Shadrach? Where can we be alone?”