Silverberg, Robert - Shadrach In The Furnace.pdf - Robert Silverberg - chomikbob7

IN THE FURNACE

ROBERT SILVERBERG

For Norbert Slepyan

It is nine minutes before sunrise in the great city of Ulan Bator, capital

of the reconstituted world. For some time now Dr. Shadrach Mordecai has

lain awake, restless and tense in his hammock, staring somberly at

aglowing green circlet in the wall that is the shining face of his data

screen. Red letters on the screen announce the new day:

MONDAY

14 May

2012

As usual, Dr. Mordecai has been unable to get more than a few hours of

sleep. Insomnia has plagued him all year; his wakefulness must be some

kind of message from his cerebral cortex, but so far he has been unable to

decipher it. Today, at least, he has some excuse for awakening early,

because great challenges and tensions lie ahead. Dr. Mordecai is personal

physician to Genghis II Mao IV Khan, Prince of Princes and Chairman of

Chairmen—which is to say, ruler of the earth —and on this day the aged

Genghis Mao is due to undergo a liver transplant, his third in seven years.

The world leader sleeps less than twenty meters away, in a suite

adjoining Mordecai's. Dictator and doctor occupy residential chambers on

the seventy-fifth floor of the Grand Tower of the Khan, a superb

onyx-walled needle of a building that rises breathtakingly from the dusty

brown Mongolian tableland. Just now Genghis Mao sleeps soundly, eyes

unmoving beneath the thick lids, spine enviably relaxed, respiration slow

and even, pulse steady, hormone levels rising normally. Mordecai knows

all this because he carries, surgically inlaid in the flesh of his arms, thighs,

and buttocks, several dozen minute perceptor nodes that constantly

provide him with telemetered information on the stale of Genghis Mao's

vital signs. It took Mordecai a year of full-time training to learn to read

the input, the tiny twitches and tremors and flickers and itches that are

the analogue-coded equivalents of the Chairman's major bodily processes,

but by this time it is second nature for him to perceive and comprehend

the data. A tickle here means digestive distress, a throb there means

urinary sluggishness, a pricking elsewhere tells of saline imbalance. For

Shadrach Mordecai it is something like living in two bodies at once, but

he has grown accustomed to it. And so the Chairman's precious life is

safeguarded by his vigilant physician. Genghis Mao is officially said to be

eighty-seven years old and may be even older, though his body, a

patchwork of artificial and transplanted organs, is as strong and

responsive as that of a man of fifty. It is the Chairman's wish to postpone

death until his work on earth is complete—which is to say, never to die.

How sweetly he rests now! Mordecai runs automatically through the

readings again and again: respiratory, digestive, endocrine, circulatory, all

the autonomic systems going beautifully. The Chairman, dreamless (the

motionless eyes), lying as customary on his left side (faint aortal pressure),

emitting gentle hhnnorrking snores (reverberations in the rib cage),

obviously feels no apprehension about the coming surgery. Mordecai

envies him his calmness. Of course, organ transplants are an old story to

Genghis Mao.

At the precise moment of dawn the doctor leaves his hammock,

stretches, walks naked across his bedchamber's cool stone floor to the

balcony, and steps outside. The air, suffused now with early blue to the

east, is clear, crisp, cold, with a sharp wind blowing across the plains, a

strong southerly breeze racing through Mongolia from the Great Wall

toward Lake Baikal. It ruffles the black flags of Genghis Mao in Sukhe

Baior Square, the capital's grand plaza, and stirs the boughs of the

pink-blossomed tamarisks. Shadrach Mordecai inhales deeply and studies

the remote horizon, as if looking for meaningful smoke signals out of

China. No signals come; only the little throbs and tingles of the implant

disks, caroling the song of Genghis Mao's irrepressible good health.

All is quiet below. The whole city sleeps, save for those who must be

awake to work; Mongols are not given to insomnia. Mordecai is; but then,

Mordecai isn't a Mongol. He is a black man, dark with an African

darkness, though he is no African either; slender, long-limbed, tall—some

two hundred centimeters in height—with dense woolly hair, large wide-set

eyes, full lips, a broad though high-bridged nose. In this land of sturdy

golden-skinned folk with sharp noses and glossy straight hair. Dr.

Mordecai is a conspicuous figure, more conspicuous, perhaps, than he

would like to be.

He squats, straightens, squats, straightens, jackknifing his arms out

and in, out and in. He starts every morning with a calisthenic routine on

the balcony, naked in the chilly air: he is thirty-six years old, and even

though his post in the government gives him guaranteed access to the

Roncevic Antidote, even though he is thus spared the fear of organ-rot

that obsesses most of the world's two billion inhabitants, thirty-six is

nevertheless an age when one must begin conscientiously to take measures

to protect the body against the normal unravelings time brings. Metis

sana in corpore sano; yes, keep on bending and twisting, Shadrach; make

the juices flow; let the old yin balance the yang. He is in perfect health,

and his bodily organs are the ones that were in him when he popped from

the womb one frosty day in 1976. Up, down, up, down, unsparing of self.

Sometimes it seems odd to him that his vigorous, violent morning

exercises never awaken Genghis Mao, but of course the flow of telemetered

data runs only in one direction, and as Mordecai puts himself through his

fierce balcony workout, the Chairman snores placidly on, unaware.

Eventually, panting, perspiring, shivering lightly, feeling alive and open

and receptive, hardly worrying at all about the coming surgical ordeal,

Mordecai decides he has had enough of a workout. He washes, dresses,

punches for his customary light breakfast, and sets about his morning

routine of duties.

So, then, the doctor confronts Interface Three, through which he daily

enters the residential suite of his master the Khan. It is a ponderous

diamond-shaped doorway, two and a half meters high. From its

silken-smooth bronze surface jut a dozen and a half warty cylindrical

snouts, three to nine centimeters high. Some of them are scanners and

sensors, some are audio conduits, some are weapons of ineluctable

lethality; and Shadrach Mordecai has no idea which is which. Most likely,

what serves as a scanner today may well be a laser cannon tomorrow; with

such random shifts of function does Genghis Mao contrive to confuse the

faceless assassins he so vividly dreads.

"Shadrach Mordecai to serve the Khan," Mordecai says in a clear firm

voice into what he hopes is today's audio pickup.

Interface Three, now emitting a gentle hum, subjects Mordecai's

announcement to voiceprint analysis. At the same time, Mordecai's body

is being checked for thermal output, mass, postural stress, olfactory

texture, and much more. If any datum should fall beyond the established

Mordecai-norm, he could find himself immobilized by loops of suddenly

spurting webfoam while the guards are summoned to investigate;

resistance at that point might lead to his immediate destruction. Five of

these interfaces protect the five entrances to Chairman Genghis Mao's

chambers, and they are the wiliest doors ever devised. Daedalus himself

could not have forged more clever barriers to guard King Minos.

In a microsecond Mordecai is recognized to be himself, rather than

some cunning lifelike simulacrum on a king-slaying errand. With a

smooth hiss of perfectly machined joints and a gentle nimble of flawless

bearings the interface's outer slab glides open. This admits the doctor to a

stone-walled inner holding chamber hardly larger than himself. No

welcome vestibule for claustrophobes, this. Here he must halt another

microsecond while the entire surveillance is repeated, and only after he

passes this second muster is he allowed to enter the imperial residence

proper.

"Redundancy," Chairman Genghis Mao has declared, "is our main

avenue of survival." Mordecai agrees. The intricate business of crossing

these interfaces is a trifle to him, part of the normal order of the universe,

no more bothersome than the need to turn a key in a lock. The room just

on the far side of Interface Three is a cavernous sphere known as

Surveillance Vector One. It is, in a literal sense, Genghis Mao's window on

the world. Here a dazzling array of screens, each five square meters in

area, rises in overwhelming tiers from floor to ceiling, offering a constantly

shifting panorama of televised images relayed from thousands of spy-eyes

everywhere on the planet. No great public building is without its secret

eyes; scanners look down on all major streets; a corps of government

engineers is constantly employed in shifting the cameras from place to

place and in installing new ones in previously unspied-upon places. Nor

are all the eyes in fixed positions. So many spy-satellites streak through

the nearer reaches of space that if their orbits were turned to silk they

would swathe the earth in a dense cocoon. At the center of Surveillance

Vector One is a grand control panel by means of which the Khan, sitting

for hours at a time in an elegant thronelike seat, is able to control the flow

of data from all these eyes, calling in signals with quick flutters of his

fingertips so that he may look at will into the doings of Tokyo and

Bangkok, New York and Moscow, Buenos Aires and Cairo. So sharp is the

resolution of the Khan's myriad lenses that they can show Genghis Mao

the color of a man's eyes at a distance of five kilometers.

When the Chairman is not making use of Surveillance Vector One, the

hundreds of screens continue to function without interruption as the

master mechanism sucks in data randomly from the innumerable pickup

points. Images come and go, sometimes flitting across a screen in a

second or two, sometimes lingering to provide consecutive sequences

many minutes in length. Shadrach Mordecai, since he must pass through

this room every morning on his way to his master, has formed the habit of

pausing for a few minutes to watch the gaudy, dizzying stream of pictures.

Privately he refers to this daily interlude as "Checking the Trauma Ward,"

the Trauma Ward being Mordecai's secret name for the world in general,

that great vale of sorrow and bodily corruption.

He stands in mid-room now, observing the world's griefs.

The flow is jerkier than usual today; whatever giant computer operates

this system is in a twitchy mood, it seems, its commands moving restlessly

from eye to eye, and pictures wink on and off in a frenzied way. Still, there

are isolated flashes of clarity. A limping woebegone dog moves slowly

down a dirt-choked street. A big-eyed, big-bellied Negroid child stands

naked in a dust-swept ravine, gnawing her thumb and crying. A

sag-shouldered old woman, carrying carefully wrapped bundles through

the cobbled plaza of some mellow European city, gasps and clutches at her

chest, letting her packages tumble as she falls. A parched Oriental-faced

man with wispy white beard and tiny green skullcap emerges from a shop,

coughs, and spits blood. A crowd—Mexicans? Japanese?—gathers around

two boys dueling with carving knives; their arms and chests are bright

with red cuts. Three children huddle on the roof of a torn-away house

rushing swiftly downstream on the white-flecked gray breast of a flooding

river. A hawk-faced beggar stretches forth an accusing clawlike hand. A

young dark-haired woman kneels at a curb, bowed double in pain, head

touching the pavement, while two small boys look on. A speeding

automobile veers crazily from a highway and vanishes in a bushy gulley.

Surveillance Vector One is like some vast tapestry of hundreds of

compartments, each with a story to tell, a fragmentary story, tantalizing,

defying comprehension. Out there in the world, out in the great big wide

Trauma Ward that is the world, the two billion subjects of Genghis II Mao

IV Khan are dying hour by hour, despite the best efforts of the Permanent

Revolutionary Committee. Nothing new about that—everyone who has

Silverberg, Robert - Shadrach In The Furnace.pdf

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