Robert Silverberg: Shadrach in the Furnace

“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.”