Robert Silverberg - Shadrach in the Furnace

So he must stifle his longings another hour or two. Perhaps that’s the lesson of dream-death: delay gratification, purify the spirit. Or perhaps not. It is a jolt, stepping from the radiant ambiance of the dream-death tent to the darkness without, and the night is cold, very cold even for the Mongolian May, just a hint of snow in the air, a few hard little flakes whipping on the breeze. Riding the tube-train back they say almost nothing to each other, but as they approach the Ulan Bator station he says, “Were you really there?”

“In your dream?”

“Yes. When we met Pancho Sanchez. And the First Emperor. And when we went to Mexico.”

“That was your dream,” she says. “I was having other dreams.”

“Oh. Oh. I wondered. It seemed very real, talking to you, having you beside me.”

“The dreams always seem that way.”

“But I’m surprised at how playful it was. Frivolous, even.”

“Is that how it was for you?”

“Until the end,” he says. “It got solemn then. When things grew calm. But before then—”

“Frivolous?”

“Very frivolous, Katya.”

“For me it was solemn all the time. A great quietness.”

“Is it different for everybody?”

“Of course,” she says. “What did you think?”

“Oh.”

“You thought, when you met me in your dream, that I was actually there, talking with you, sharing your experiences?”

“I confess that I did.”

“No. I wasn’t there.”

“No. I suppose not.” He laughs. “All right. I wasn’t thinking. For you it was somber. For me it was all games. What does that say about you, about me?”

“Nothing, Shadrach.”

“Really?”

“Nothing at all.”

“We don’t express something about our inner selves in the dreams we choose for ourselves?”

“No,” she says.

“How can you be so sure?”

“The dreams are chosen for us. By a stranger. I don’t know more than that, but the woman in the mask told us what to dream. The broad outlines. The tone.”

“And we have no choice about the content?”

“Some. Her Instructions are filtered through our sensibilities. But still — still—”

“Is your dream always the same?”

“In content? In tone?”

“Tone.”

“The dream is always different, ” Katya says. “And yet the flavor is the same, for death is always the same. Different things happen each time, but the dream brings you always to the same place, in the same way, at the end.”

“To the still point?”

“You could call it that. Yes. Yes.”

“And the meaning of what I dreamed—”

“No,” she says. “Don’t talk about meaning. Dream-death gives no oracular wisdom. The dream is without meaning.”

The tube-train has reached Ulan Bator. “Come,” Katya says.

They go to her suite, two floors below Nikki Crowfoot’s, a dark place, three small rooms furnished with stark, heavy hangings. Once more they are naked before one another, once more he feels the overwhelming pull of Katya’s thick sturdy body; he moves stiffly toward her, embraces her, digs the tips of his fingers into the deep flesh of her shoulders and back. But he cannot bring himself to kiss that terrifying mouth. He thinks of the joyous couplings he shared with her in dream-death, the rice paddy, the fragrant Mexican nights, and he tugs her down with him to the bed; but, though he fills his hands with her breasts, though he imprisons his head between her smooth cool thighs, though he drives himself urgently against her flesh, he is altogether unmanned by her physical presence, helpless, limp. Not for the first time, either: their sporadic lovemaking has always been marked by such difficulties, which he rarely experiences with other women. Katya is not bothered by this: calmly she pushes him back against the pillow with a thump of her knuckles on his chest, and then, bending forward, she goes to work on him with her mouth, her sinister and ferocious sharp-fanged mouth, lovingly engulfing him, and he feels lips and tongue, lips and tongue, warm and wet, no hint of teeth at all, and under her cunning ministrations he relaxes, he puts aside his fear of her, he grows stiff at last. Deftly she slides upward over him — it is a maneuver she has clearly practiced often — and, with a sudden startling thrust, drives herself downward, impaling herself on him. She squats astraddle, peasant-strong, above him, knees flexed, buttocks taut, body rocking. He looks at her and sees her face distorted by the early spasms of ecstasy, nostrils flared, eyes tight shut, lips pulled back in a fierce grimace; then he closes his own eyes and gives himself up fully to their union. An awesome energy courses through her. She rides him, now squatting high so that their only contact is at their loins, now pressing herself full length against his body, but always remaining above him, always staying in command. He does not object to this. She writhes, grinds, pushes, twists, suddenly rears back and breaks into bizarre laughter; it is, he knows, her signal, and he seizes her breasts and joins her in the final climax.

Afterward he dozes, and wakes to find her quietly sobbing. How strange, how unlike her! He had never imagined Lindman to be capable of tears.

“What’s wrong?”

She shakes her head.

“Katya?”

“Nothing. Please.”

“What is it?”

Sullenly, face against pillow, she says, “I’m afraid for you.”

“Afraid? Why? What about?”

She looks toward him and shakes her head again. She clamps her lips. Suddenly her mouth looks not at all fierce. A child’s mouth. She is frightened.

“Katya?”

“Please, Shadrach.”

“I don’t understand.”

She says nothing. She shakes her head. She shakes her head.

Over a week goes by before Shadrach sees Nikki Crowfoot again. She claims she is very busy in the laboratory — problems of recalibration, necessary compensatory adjustments in the Avatar persona-transplant system now that the donor body will not be Mangu’s — and therefore she is too tired in the evenings to want company. But he suspects she is avoiding him. Crowfoot has always been at her most sociable when she is most overworked; it is her escape from pressure. Shadrach does not know why she would want to avoid him. Surely the night he spent with Katya Lindman has nothing to do with it. He has been to bed with Lindman before, and with others; Crowfoot too has had other partners; such things have never mattered between them. It baffles him. When they speak by telephone Nikki is wary and aloof. Beyond doubt something has gone wrong in their relationship, but he has no theories.

A new Genghis Mao crisis distracts him briefly from these matters. For the past several days the Khan has been leaving his bed to work in his office, to visit Surveillance Vector One, to direct the Committee activities from the headquarters room. His recuperation was proceeding so smoothly that there seemed no reason to confine him. But now Dr. Mordecai’s sensitive implants are picking up early warnings of trouble — epigastric pulsations, faint systolic murmur, general circulatory stress. Too much activity too soon? Shadrach goes to the Chairman’s office to discuss the problem. But Genghis Mao, still busy with his Mangu monuments and his roundup of assassins, does not feel like conferring with his doctor, does not want to talk about symptoms. He brushes Shadrach’s queries aside with a brusque declaration that he has rarely felt better. Then he turns back to his desk. The arrests, he tells Mordecai proudly, now total two hundred eighty-two. Of these, ninety-seven have already been found guilty and sent to the organ farms. “Soon,” the Khan says, “the lungs and kidneys and intestines of these criminals will serve to extend the lives of loyal members of the government. Is there not poetic justice in that? All things are centripetal, Shadrach. All opposites are reconciled.”