Robert Silverberg - Shadrach in the Furnace

He says, “There’ve been almost three hundred arrests so far. Ninety-seven sent to the organ farms. Last week Roger Buckmaster was alive, healthy, his own master as much as any of us is. Tomorrow we may be using his aorta to patch Genghis Mao’s. And still the arrests continue.”

“So I gather. Avogadro’s men bring them in, day and night. When will the Khan be satisfied?”

“When he decides that all the conspirators have been caught, I suppose.”

“Conspirators!” Katya says scathingly. For a moment she has the old frightening intensity again. “What conspirators? What conspiracy? The whole thing is insane. Mangu killed himself.”

“You think it was suicide too, then?”

“ Think? I know it was,” she says in a low voice, turning away from the Grand Tower as though to avoid cameras that might read her lips.

“You talk as if you were there when he jumped.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“How can you know it was suicide, then?”

“I know. I know.”

“ Were you there when he—”

“Of course not,” Lindman says.

“Then why are you so sure you’re right?”

“Good reasons. Sufficient reasons.”

“You know something that the security people don’t?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Then why don’t you speak up about it, before Avogadro arrests the whole world?”

She is silent a moment. “No,” she says at last. “I can’t. It would destroy me.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You would if I told you the story.” She studies him. “If I told you, would it stop with you?”

“If that’s what you wanted.”

“I feel I should tell someone. I’d like to tell you. I trust you, Shadrach. But I’m afraid.”

“If you’d rather not—”

“No. No. I’ll tell you. Walk with me across the plaza. Keep your back to the tower.”

“There are cameras everywhere. It doesn’t matter which way we face. But they can’t pick up everything, I guess.”

They start across the plaza. Lindman raises her arm, holding it across her face as though to scratch her nose with the back of her wrist, and says, mouth covered, voice muffled, “I saw Mangu the night before he jumped. We talked about Project Avatar. I told him be was going to be the donor.”

“Oh, Jesus. You didn’t!”

She nods grimly. “I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer. It was a Monday night, just before Genghis Mao’s liver transplant, right? Yes. Mangu had made a speech that night, something about worldwide distribution of the Antidote. Then he and I went for drinks somewhere. He was afraid Genghis Mao might die during the operation and he’d have to take charge of things — I’m not ready, Mangu kept saying, I’m not ready. And then we started talking about the three projects, and he began to speculate about Avatar. What his role would likely be in the government if they transplanted Genghis Mao’s mind into some other body. Whether Genghis Mao would still want him as viceroy after the transition, things like that. It was so sad, Shadrach, so fucking sad, so filthy sad, the way he kept poking at it, trying to figure out what was in store for him, working up all sorts of hypotheses and scenarios. Finally I couldn’t stand it and I told him to stop worrying about it, that he was wasting his time, that after the transition he wasn’t going to be around, that Genghis Mao was going to use his body as the donor.”

Shadrach is stunned by this confession. He can barely speak; his legs tremble, his skin is chilled. He says, “How could you have done it?”

“The words just came out. I mean, here was this man, this pitiful doomed man trying to understand his future, trying to see what his role would be, and I knew that he had no future. Not if Project Avator worked out. We all knew it, all but him. And I couldn’t hold it back any longer.”

“What happened than?”

“His face seemed to cave in. His eyes went dead — blank — empty. He sat for a long time and didn’t say anything. Then he asked me how I knew. I said it was known to a lot of people. He asked if you knew and I said I thought so. I want to talk to Nikki Crowfoot, he said. She’s at Karakorum with Shadrach, I told him. Then he asked me if I thought Avatar really would work out, and I said I didn’t know, I had a lot of faith in my own project, with any luck Talos would head Avatar off. It’s all a matter of time, I said. Avatar’s ahead of Talos now, and if anything serious happens to Genghis Mao in the next few months they might have to activate Avatar, because the Talos automation needs at least a year of further development work and Project Pheonix isn’t getting anywhere. He thought about that. He said it didn’t matter to him whether he actually became the donor or not, the thing was that Genghis Mao had let him think he was the heir-apparent while secretly approving what amounted to his murder. That was what hurt, he said, not the idea of dying, not the idea of giving up his body to Genghis Mao, but being tricked, being treated like a simpleton. And then he got up, he said goodnight, he went out. Walking very slowly. After that I don’t know. I suppose he spent the whole night thinking things over. Thinking about how he had been duped. The prize lamb, fattened for the slaughter. And in the morning he jumped.”

“And in the morning he jumped,” Shadrach says. “Yes. Yes. It sounds right. Some truths can’t be faced.”

“So there are no conspirators. The conspiracy exists only in Genghis Mao’s paranoia. Those three hundred arrested people are innocent. How many sent to the organ farms so far? Ninety-seven? Innocent. All innocent. I’ve watched it happen, but there’s nothing I can do. I can’t speak out. They say the Khan refuses even to consider the suicide hypothesis.”

“He wants there to have been a conspiracy, yes,” Shadrach says. “He enjoys punishing the guilty.”

“And if I told him what I’ve just told you, the Khan would have me killed.”

“You’d be in the organ farm tomorrow. Yes. Or else maybe he’d pick you as the new Avatar donor.”

“No,” Katya says. “That isn’t likely.”

“It would suit his philosophy. It would be very centripetal, wouldn’t it? Your loose tongue costs him Mangu’s body, so you become Mangu’s replacement. Very fitting. Very neat.”

“Don’t be foolish, Shadrach. It’s unimaginable. He’s a barbarian, isn’t he? He’s a Mongol. He thinks he’s the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. He’d never let himself be transplanted into a woman’s body.”

“Why not? The old Mongol khans weren’t sexists, Katya. As I recall, the Mongols let themselves be ruled by female regents now and then when the male line gave out. Of course, there are problems of adaptation he’d have, changing sexes, all the bodily reflexes, all the million little masculine things that he’d have to unlearn—

“Stop it, Shadrach. It isn’t a serious possibility, the Khan’s taking my body.”

“But it’s amusing to consider—”

“It doesn’t amuse me.” She halts and swings around to face him. She is pale, drawn, tense. “What can we do? How can we stop these hideous arrests?”

“There’s no way. The thing has to run its course.”

“Suppose an anonymous tip is sent to the Khan, telling him merely that Mangu had learned what was in store for him, that some unnamed person had revealed to him that he would be used for—”

“No. Either Genghis Mao will ignore it, or else he’ll begin a vast and bloody interrogation of everybody who might have had knowledge of the Avatar plan.”

“What if the arrests don’t stop though?”

Shadrach says, “Avogadro’s running out of suspects. It’s almost over.”

“And the prisoners awaiting sentence?”