Robert Silverberg - Shadrach in the Furnace

So this is how it was on the night of Cotopaxi. The angry gods shaking the world and bringing the nations into destruction. Shadrach bows his head, closes his eyes, surrenders to the soft warm fragrant ash that drifts peacefully upon him. This is the night of Cotopaxi, yes, el fin del mundo, the sounding of the last trump, the opening of the seventh seal, and he has been part of it, he has tasted the pumice of the volcano. And now he sleeps.

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?”