Robert Silverberg - Shadrach in the Furnace

“Didn’t Eis speak to you? We’re recalibrating. It’ll take us a while to gear up for a new donor. The whole thing’s a colossal pain in the ass.”

“How much of a setback is it, actually?”

She shrugs. “A month, if we’re lucky. Or three.Or six. It all depends.”

“On what?”

“On — on — oh, Christ! Look, Shadrach, I don’t really want to talk shop right now. I feel sick. Do you know what being sick means? My head hurts. My belly hurts. My skin tingles. I want to get some rest. I don’t want to discuss my current research problems.”

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

“Will you go now?”

“Yes. Yes. I’ll phone you in the morning to see how you’re coming along, okay?”

She mutters something into her pillow.

He starts to leave. But he makes one last attempt to reach her before he goes. At the door he says tamely, “Oh — have you heard the newest rumor making the rounds? About Mangu’s death?”

She groans stoically. “I haven’t heard anything. But go on. Go on. What is it?”

He frames his words carefully, so that he will not feel he is breaching Katya Lindman’s confidence: “The story that’s going around is that Mangu committed suicide because somebody connected with Project Talos tipped him that he was to be the Avatar donor.”

Nikki sits upright, eyes wide, face animated, cheeks blazing in excitement.

“What? What? I hadn’t heard that!”

“It’s just a story.”

“Who’s the one who’s supposed to have tipped him?”

“They don’t say.”

“Lindman herself, was it?” Nikki demands.

“It’s only a rumor, Nikki. Nobody specific has been named. Anyway, Katya wouldn’t do anything so unprofessional.”

“Oh no?”

“I don’t think so. If it happened at all, it was probably some ambitious underling, some third-echelon programmer. If it happened at all. There may not be a shred of truth to it.”

“But it sounds right,” she says. Her breasts are heaving, her skin is glossy with new sweat. “What better way could Lindman find to sabotage my work? Oh, why didn’t I think of it! How could I not have seen—”

“Stay calm, Nikki. You aren’t well.”

“When I get hold of her—”

“Please,” Shadrach says. “Lie down. I wish I hadn’t said a word. You know what sort of wild rumors go floating around this building. I absolutely don’t believe that Katya would—”

“We’ll see,” she says ominously. She grows more calm. “You may be right. Even so. Even so. We should have had much tighter security. However many people knew that Mangu was the donor, five, six, ten people, that was too many. Much too many. For the next donor — ” Crowfoot coughs. She turns away again, huddling into her pillow. “Oh, Shadrach, I feel lousy! Go away! Please go away! Now you’ve got me all stirred up over something altogether new, and I — oh, Shadrach—”

“I’m sorry,” he says once more. “I didn’t mean—”

“Goodbye, Shadrach.”

“Goodbye, Nikki.”

He bolts from the apartment. He plunges through the hall, fetching up finally against a stanchion near the stairs. He grasps it, steadies himself. The visit to Nikki has hardly improved his state of mind. Her attitude toward him, he realizes, ranged from indifferent to irritated; never once did she express any pleasure that he had come to see her. He was tolerated at best.

And now, he knows, he must hurry back to Katya.

She seemed surprised to see him again so soon. She greets him warmly, unsubtly, as though automatically assuming he has come here to make love. His mood is far from sexual, though. He disengages himself from her embrace as soon as is politic, and gently but firmly establishes a psychic distance between them. In quick earnest blurts he reports the essence of his conversation with Nikki, stressing that the “rumor” he had invented did not in any way incriminate Katya herself in the tipping off of Mangu.

“But of course Crowfoot immediately guessed I was the one, right?”

“I’m afraid so. I argued that it was inconceivable you’d do any such thing, but she—”

“Now she knows I did, and will hold the grudge against me forever, and will do whatever she can to pay me back. Thanks a lot.”

Quietly Shadrach says, “If she’s angry, you can’t entirely blame her. You have to admit there was an aspect of sabotaging Avatar in your passing the word to Mangu.”

“I passed the word to Mangu out of pity for him,” Lindman says flintily.

“Pity and nothing but pity? You didn’t consider at all that he might react in a way that would upset the Avatar program, and that that would create problems for Nikki Crowfoot?” Katya is silent for some while.

At length she says, in a more yielding voice, “I suppose that that crossed my mind too. But it was very secondary. Very very secondary. Mainly I couldn’t bear to face Mangu any more, listening to him talking about his future and knowing what I knew. I had to warn him or I’d saddle myself with full responsibility for what was going to happen to him, Can you believe that, Shadrach? How evil do you think I am? Do you think my life begins and ends with these insane projects of Genghis Mao’s? Do you think that the only motivations that operate in me are Talos motivations, how I can push my own career, how I can wreck Nikki Crowfoot’s? Do you?”

“I don’t know. I suppose not.”

“You suppose?”

“I don’t think you’re like that, no.”

“Fine. Splendid. Thank you. And what happens now? Will she denounce me to Genghis Mao?”

“There’s no proof you ever said anything to Mangu,” Shadrach Mordecai replies. “She knows that. She knows also that whatever accusations she makes against you will be discounted as professional jealousy. I don’t think she’ll take any action at all, actually. Except that she did say she’d maintain tighter security on the identity of the next Avatar donor, so that there’d be no chance the same thing would—”

“It’s too late,” Lindman says.

“The next donor’s already been picked?”

“Yes.”

“And you know his name?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me,” Shadrach says.

“I don’t think I should.”

“Are you planning to tell him?”

“Would you say it was sabotage again if I did?”

“It depends on the circumstances, I guess. Who is he?”

Katya Lindman trembles. Her lips quiver.

“You,” she says.

It seems like a joke, and not a very good joke. He is unable to accept it at all, despite the strident note of conviction in Katya’s voice, that shrill, almost desperate note of certainty that Shadrach had also heard when Roger Buckmaster was trying to deny his complicity in Mangu’s death, that tone that says. You won’t believe this no matter how heavy an oath I swear, but what I’m telling you is true, is true, is true, is true! Yet if he has been selected as the new donor, it would explain why Nikki has been avoiding him, why she is remote and short-tempered when they speak, why her eyes will not meet his—

“No,” he says. “I don’t believe you.”

“So don’t believe me.”

“It’s absurd, Katya.”

“Undoubtedly it’s absurd. And it’ll be just as absurd the day they come for you and put the electrodes on your head and obliterate every trace of Shadrach Mordecai and pour the soul of Genghis Mao into your pretty brown body.”

“My pretty brown body,” Shadrach says, “is full og complicated and irreplaceable medical devices that register every twitch of Genghis Mao’s metabolism. It took Roger Buckmaster a couple of years to design and build that system, it took Warhaftig weeks to implant it in me, it took me a year to learn how to use it. Using it, I can protect Genghis Mao’s health in a way that was never before possible in medical history. With all the warm bodies Avatar has to choose from, do you think Genghis Mao would let them choose the one body that’s indispensable to his—”