Robert Silverberg - Shadrach in the Furnace

Shadrach Mordecai sighs. “We can’t help them. They are lost. Nothing can be done, Katya. One way or another, we’re all awaiting sentence.”

He is haunted all afternoon by the vision of Mangu, pitiful deluded Mangu, stripped of all delusions, confronted at last by frosty reality. Why had Lindman tipped him to his true fate? Out of compassion? Did she really think she was helping him, for God’s sake? Had she thought that receiving such knowledge could do Mangu any good? Could she have failed to see how cruel, how merciless, she was being? No. She must have known that a man like Mangu, genial, shallow, unquestioning, a man who was living an impossible fantasy of eventual succession to the world’s most powerful office, believing he enjoyed the esteem, even the love, of Genghis Mao, would collapse totally if that structure of fantasy was ripped away. She must have known.

Of course. An hour after lunching with Katya Lindman, Shadrach finally grasps the pattern. Lindman, good chessplayer that she is, had foreseen all the consequences of her move. Tell Mangu the truth, pretending compassion and claiming a compulsion to frankness. Mangu — out of humiliation, chagrin, fear, even vengefulness, whatever — reacts by putting his body beyond Genghis Mao’s reach. No Mangu, and Project Avatar is dealt a mighty blow. Nikki, Lindman’s rival, is discomfited; Avatar, set back by many months, loses its primacy to Lindman’s Project Talos; Shadrach, already mysteriously estranged from Nikki, is drawn inevitably closer to Katya as her star rises. Of course. Of course. And all the rest, Katya’s pretense of concern for the hapless victims of the mass arrests, Katya’s show of grief for poor pathetic Mangu — all part of the game. Shadrach shivers. Even in the harsh and perverse climate of the Grand Tower of the Khan, this seems monstrous, and Lindman a baleful and alien figure, malevolent enough to make a suitable consort for Genghis Mao himself. Or, if not a mate, then a fitting housing for the old ogre’s devious and sinister mind. Yes! For a moment Shadrach does seriously consider urging the Khan to take Lindman’s body in place of Mangu’s: An appropriate choice, sir, very centripetal, very apt. Though he is puzzled by one still-obscure motive: why has Lindman revealed all this to him? If she is so calculating a monster, would she not have calculated the likelihood that he would sooner or later come to see her for what she is? Can that have been her ultimate aim? Why? He is dizzied by the multiplicity of speculations.

He wants to turn to Nikki, but Nikki has continued to hold herself aloof, and he has not even spoken to her by telephone for two or three days. He phones her now, on the pretext that he needs an update on Project Avatar progress, but one of her assistants appears on the screen, a Dr. Eis from Frankfurt. Eis, classically Teutonic, pale blue eyes and soft golden hair, does an odd little take of — surprise? dismay? distaste? — at the sight of Shadrach, forehead furrowing and corner of mouth pulling in, but he recovers quickly and gives him a cool, formal greeting. Shadrach says, “May I speak with Dr. Crowfoot, please?”

“I’m sorry. Dr. Crowfoot is not here. Perhaps I can be of assis—”

“Will she be back this afternoon?”

“Dr. Crowfoot has left for the day. Dr. Mordecai.”

“I need to reach her.”

“She is in her apartment, Doctor. An illness. She has asked that she not be disturbed.”

“Sick? What’s me matter?”

“A mild upset. A fever, headaches. She has asked me to tell you, if you called the laboratory, that we are still studying the recalibration problem, but that at present there is nothing to report, no—”

“Danke, Dr. Eis.”

“Bitte, Dr. Mordecai,” Eis replies crisply, as Shadrach blanks the screen.

He starts to phone Nikki’s apartment. No. He’s had enough of evasions, excuses, procrastinations, deflections. It’s too easy for her to run numbers like that when he calls. He’ll simply go down there and ring the doorbell, uninvited.

She lets him stand in the hallway a long time before she responds, though she must know, from her doorscreen, who’s there. Then she says, “What do you want, Shadrach?”

“Eis told me you were ill.”

“It’s nothing serious. Just a bad case of the lousies.”

“May I come in?”

“I’m trying to take a nap, Shadrach.”

“I won’t stay long.”

“But I feel so awful. I’d rather not have visitors.”

He starts to turn away from the door, but, although he knows his maniac persistence can do him no good, he finds it loo painful to leave without seeing her. Helplessly he hears himself saying, ” At least let me see if I can prescribe something for you, Nikki. I am a doctor, after all.”

Long silence. Desperately he prays that no one he knows will come upon him here, out in the hall like a lovesick Romeo pleading to be let in.

The door opens, at last.

She is in bed, and she really does look sick, face flushed and feverish, eyes bloodshot. The air in the bedroom has that stale sickroom quality, stuffy and congested. He goes at once to open the window; Crowfoot shivers and asks him not to, but he ignores her. He sees when she sits up that she is naked under her blanket. “I’ll find your pajamas for you if you’re cold,” he says.

“No. I hate wearing pajamas. I don’t know if I’m cold or hot.”

“May I examine you?”

“I’m not all that sick, Shadrach.”

“Even so, I’d like to make certain.”

“You think I’m coming down with organ-rot?”

“There’s no harm in checking things out, Nikki. It’ll take only a moment.”

“Pity you can’t diagnose me the way you do Genghis Mao, just by reading your own internal gadgets. Without having to bother me at all.”

“No, I can’t,” he says. “But this’ll be quick.”

“All right,” she tells him. She has not once met his eyes during this interchange, and that bothers him. “Go ahead. Play doctor with me, if you have to.”

He uncovers her, and finds himself curiously reticent about exposing her body this way, as though their recent estrangement has somehow deprived him of a doctor’s traditional privileges. But of course he has had only one patient in his career, having gone straight from medical school to the service of Genghis Mao, having done nothing but gerontological research until being elevated to serve as the Khan’s personal physician, and he has never developed the practicing doctor’s traditional indifference to flesh: this is no anonymous patient, this is Nikki Crowfoot whom he loves, and her naked body is more than an object to him. After a moment he attains some impersonality, though, transforms her breasts into mere globes of meat, her thighs into sexless columns of flesh and muscle, and checks her over without further unsettling himself, reading her pulse, tapping her chest, palpating her abdomen, all the routine things. Her self-diagnosis turns out to have been accurate: no incipient organ-rot, just a trifling upset, some fever, nothing remarkable. Plenty of fluids, rest, a couple of pills, and she’ll be back to normal in a day or so.

“Satisfied?” she asks mockingly.

“Is it so hard for you to accept the fact lhat I worry about you, Nikki?”

“I told you I didn’t have anything serious.”

“I still worried.”

“So examining me was really therapy for you?”

“I suppose,” he admits.

“And if you hadn’t rushed over to give me the benefit of your high-powered medical skills, I might be asleep now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“All right, Shadrach.”

She turns away from him, curling up sullenly under the bedclothes. He stands by the bed, silent, wanting to ask a thousand unaskable questions, wanting to know what shadow has fallen between them, why she has become so mysteriously remote, so cool, why she will not even look straight at him when she speaks to him. After a moment he says, instead, “How’s the project going?”