Robert Silverberg - Shadrach in the Furnace

“Think, Shadrach, think. Avatar won’t be activated unless Genghis Mao’s present body is on the threshold of death. He won’t need all your fancy implants once he moves into your body. He won’t need you as his doctor; he won’t really need a full-time doctor at all, not for many years. And he can find another doctor. He can find another Buckmaster to build a new set of implants when the time comes. He’s probably got a replacement for you in training already, somewhere in Bulgaria or Afghanistan. Remember what he always says about redundancy, Shadrach? The avenue of survival. Genghis Mao understands survival very well. Better than you, I’m afraid.”

Shadrach Mordecai’s mouth opens. Says nothing. Closes.

“If Avatar is activated,” Katya says, “you go. I swear it.”

“When was this decided?”

“More than a week ago. I found out about it a few hours before we left for Karakorum.”

Which was just about the time Nikki Crowfoot began finding excuses for not keeping company with him, Shadrach reflects. He remembers waking up in this very room, Katya’s room, the night of the dream-death excursion, and discovering Katya sobbing beside him in bed, and hearing her tell him that she was afraid for him, without offering further explanation. Yes. And he remembers all that lunatic talk of Genghis Mao’s about nominating him for Pope, for King of England — what was that about? Disguised and displaced intimations of the real nomination? He remembers, too, and the memory chills him, running shirtless into Genghis Mao’s bedroom just after the news of Mangu’s death had broken, remembers seeing the Khan eyeing his bare torso with interest, with admiration, Genghis Mao saying. You look very healthy, Shadrach. Yes. Shopping for a new body already, was he, minutes after learning of the loss of Mangu?

He thinks of Buckmaster screaming, You’ll finish in the furnace, Shadrach, in the furnace, in the bloody furnace!

No. No. No.

“I can’t believe this,” he says.

“Start learning how.”

“It makes no sense to me. I literally can’t grasp the meaning of the whole thing.”

“Doesn’t it frighten you, Shadrach?”

“No. Not at all.” He holds out his hands. Steady. As steady as Warhaftig’s. “See? I’m entirely calm. I am without affect. It doesn’t register on me. It’s unreal.”

“But it isn’t, Shadrach.”

“Nikki knows?”

“Of course.”

“She’s not the one who picked me, is she?”

“Genghis Mao picked you.”

“Yes. That figures. Yes.” He laughs. “Do you notice how I begin to talk as though I believe this? As though I accept it, on some level?”

“What will you do, Shadrach?”

“Do? Do? What should I do? Should I do what Mangu did?”

“You’re not Mangu.”

“No,” he says. “Even if I had absolute proof, even if they came to me with an engraved scroll signed by Genghis Mao, nominating me for Avatar, I wouldn’t choose Mangu’s way. I’m not in the least a suicidal person. Maybe it sets in later, Katya. First I have to feel something. I don’t feel anything yet. I don’t feel betrayed, I don’t feel endangered, I don’t think I even feel surprised.”

“Could it be that you want to be the Avatar donor?”

“I want to be Dr. Shadrach Mordecai. I want to go on being him for a long time.”

“Then keep Genghis Mao healthy. So long as his body is functioning, he won’t need yours. Meanwhile, it’ll be my task to make Avatar altogether superfluous by bringing Talos quickly to perfection. You know, Genghis Mao may actually prefer the Talos idea. I think it suits his particular brand of paranoia to be transferred into a machine, an imperishable, flawless machine. After all, even your beautiful body is going to decay and crumble. He knows that. He knows he might have twenty or thirty good years in you, and then it’ll be the same route all over again, organ transplants, drugs, constant surgery, whereas the Talos simulacrum will spare him all that. So Avatar is just a contingency plan for him, a redundancy that he hopes not to have to use, and that’s why he can pick people he values as the donors — Mangu, you — a kind of honor, in its way, the blessing of the Khan, not at all the jeopardy that it might be thought to be. I tried to tell that to Mangu, too, that Avatar wouldn’t necessarily happen, but he—”

“Why did you tell me about this, Katya?”

“For the same reason I told Mangu.”

“To help wreck Avatar?”

Her eyes flash the old Lindman fire. “Don’t be a bastard. Do you think I want you to jump out a window too?”

“What good is it, telling me?”

“I want you to be on guard, Shadrach. I want you to know what danger you’re in now. So long as there’s even a slight likelihood that Avatar will have to be used, you—”

“What does it matter to you, though ? A sore conscience? You don’t like hanging out with men who you know are secretly earmarked for destruction?”

“That’s part of it,” Katya says quietly. “I hate living a lie.”

“What’s the rest?”

“I love you,” she says.

He stares with glassy eyes. “What?” “I’m not capable of it? I’m good only for building automations, is that it? I have no emotions?”

“I didn’t mean that. But — you seemed so cold all the time, so businesslike, so matter-of-fact. Even when — ” He pauses, decides to finish. “Even when we would have sex. I never felt any emotional warmth from you; only, well, physical passion.”

“You were Nikki’s. Getting involved with you would only have been painful to me. You didn’t want me except for the occasional fling in Karakorum, except for the occasional meaningless screw.”

“And now?”

“Do you still love Nikki? She helped sell you out, you know. She went to Genghis Mao, she heard him select you for Avatar, she probably tried to get him to change his mind — we ought to give her that much credit — and she failed, and then she accepted the order. Her career comes before your life. She could have come to you and said. This is what Genghis Mao wants to do, but I can’t do it, I rebel, let’s both get out of this hideous place. She didn’t, though, did she? She simply started keeping away from you. Because of the guilt she felt, right? Not out of love, but out of guilt, out of shame.”

Numbly Shadrach shakes his head.

“This is unreal, Katya.”

“I have told you no lies today.”

“But Nikki—”

“Is afraid of Genghis Mao. As am I, as are you, as is everyone in this city, everyone in the world. That’s the measure of her love for you: her fear of that crazy old man is greater. If I’d been in her position, I might have made the same choice. But it’s not my project. I’m not faced with the option of betraying you versus defying the Khan. I’m free to go behind his back, to warn you, to let you make your own decisions. But it’s strange, isn’t it? The warm tall beautiful loving Nikki agrees to sell you out. And the bitter vengeful squat ugly Katya risks her life to warn you.”

“You aren’t ugly,” he murmurs.

Katya laughs. “Come here,” she says. She sits on the edge of the bed, tugs him down beside her, roughly presses his head against her breasts. “Rest. Think. Make plans, Shadrach. You’re lost if you don’t.” She caresses his aching forehead.

They sit that way in silence for a long while. Then, shakily, he rises, he removes his clothes, he gestures to her, and she disrobes as well. He must operate on the Khan tomorrow, but for once he does not let that matter to him. He reaches for her. He covers her strangely submissive body with his own, locking his long lean dark-skinned arms around her wide meaty shoulders, pushing his thin bony chest into the soft cushion of her bosom, and her legs open and he plunges deep within her, and stays like that, immobile, gathering strength, pasting himself together, until at last he is ready to move.