Robert Silverberg - Shadrach in the Furnace

May 27, 2012.

I monitor this week’s conversation tapes and find that Katya Lindman has told Shadrach the truth, that he is the next Avatar donor. Katya talks too much. It wasn’t my intention to have him find that out, but let it go. I will watch him closely, now that he possesses the knowledge. The sufferings of humanity instruct me in the arts of government. Or, to put it more harshly, I enjoy watching them squirm. Is that not ugly? But I have earned the right to indulge in some ugly pastimes, I who have borne the burdens of power for fourteen years. I haven’t been Hitler, have I? I haven’t been Caligula. Yet power does entitle one to certain amusements. By way of compensation for the murderous burden, the awful responsibility. The odd thing is that Shadrach isn’t squirming, yet. He is oddly calm. Doesn’t yet believe that what Katya told him is true, I guess. Doesn’t accept it in the viscera. He will. Wait. Just wait. It’ll hit him, sooner or later.

Suddenly this game is not in the least amusing to Shadrach. There is no fun, any longer, in these subtle exercises in ironic parallax, these experiments in psychological perspective. The distance between himself and what he has been inventing has narrowed abruptly, and indeed it is all suddenly very painful, it cuts much too close to the nerve, it hurts, it hurts with astonishing intensity. He has managed in the last ten minutes to puncture his own affectless equanimity, and he is not merely squirming now, he is bleeding. Pain, fear, and anger assail him. He feels that everyone has conspired to sell him down the river. He — witty, urbane, handsome, humane, dedicated Shadrach Mordecai — is just another expendable nigger, it turns out. If what Katya has told him is true. If. If. Shadrach is in anguish. This, now, here is the furnace, and he is in it for sure. The heavy shadow of Genghis Mao weighs upon him. One day they will come for him, they will put the electrodes to him, they will wipe out his unique and irreplaceable soul, and shortly thereafter they will pump that crafty old Mongol into his skull. Is that how it really will be? Yes, Katya says. And can he believe that? Should he believe that? He trembles. Terror whips through him like a cold gale. He craves peace; he could use a jolt of Genghis Mao’s tranquilizer now, a hefty jolt of 9-pordenone or maybe something stronger. But Shadrach dislikes drugging himself in crisis. He needs his sharpest wits now.

What shall he do?

The first step is one he knows he should have taken yesterday. He will go to Nikki Crowfoot again. And ask her some questions.

She is pale qnd peaked-looking, still in the grip of yesterday’s illness, but on the mend, definitely on the mend. She seems to know why he has come, and it takes only half a dozen harsh words from him to get from her the answer he did not really want to hear. Yes, it is true. Yes. Yes. Shadrach listens for a while to her stammering confession, full of circumlocutions and evasions, and then he says, quietly, reproachfully, “You couldhave told me before this.” He is staring straight at her, and now, finally, she returns his stare: now that it is all out in the open between them, now that she has admitted the monstrous truth, she is at last able to meet his eyes again. “You could have told me,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me, Nikki?”

“I couldn’t. It wasn’t possible.”

“Wasn’t possible? Wasn’t possible? Sure it was possible. All you had to do was open your mouth and let words come out. ‘Shadrach, I think I ought to warn you that you—’ ”

“Stop,” she says. “It didn’t seem that easy to me.”

“When was it decided?”

“The day they sent Buckmaster to the organ farm.”

“Did you have any part in selecting me?”

“Do you think I could have had any part in it, Shadrach?”

He says, “One thing I learned a long time ago is that guilty people have a way of answering a troublesome question with another question.”

But she does not seem wounded by his thrust, and instantly he regrets having made it. She is a strong woman, quite calm now that she has been unmasked by him, and in an altogether steady voice she says, “Genghis Mao chose you all by himself. I wasn’t consulted.”

“Very well.”

“You might as well believe that.”

Shadrach nods. “I believe it.”

“And so?”

“When you learned I was the one, did you make any attempt to change his mind?”

“Has anyone ever changed Genghis Mao’s mind about anything?”

“You notice how you parry my question with a question of your own?”

This time the jab hurts. She loses some of her newly regained poise. Her eyes slip from his, and she says hollowly, “All right. All right. I didn’t try to argue with him, no.”

Shadrach is silent a moment. Then he says, “I thought I knew you pretty well, Nikki, but I was wrong.”

“What does that mean?”

“I believed you were the sort of person who sees human beings as ends, not means. I didn’t think you’d let a — ah — a close friend — be nominated for the junkheap, and not lift a finger to save him, and not even say a word to him about it, no hint of what’s been decreed for him. And start to avoid him, even. As if you had written him off as an unperson the moment he was chosen. As if you were afraid that his bad luck might be contagious.”

“Why are you lecturing me, Shadrach?”

“Because I hurt,” he says. “Because someone I loved sold me out. Because I can’t bring myself to hurt you back in any way that’s real.”

“What would you have wanted me to do?” Nikki asks.

“The right thing.”

“Which was?”

“You could have stood up to Genghis Mao. You could have told him you wouldn’t participate in your lover’s slaughter. You could have let him know that there was a relationship between us, that you weren’t capable of — oh, Christ, Nikki, I shouldn’t have to be explaining all this to you!”

“I’m sure Genghis Mao was quite aware of the relationship between us.”

“And picked me deliberately, by way of testing your loyalty? To find out how you would react if you were made to choose between your lover and your laboratory? One of his little psychological games?”

She shrugs. “That’s entirely conceivable.”

“Maybe you made the wrong choice, then. Maybe he was trying to measure your fundamental humanity rather than your loyalty to Genghis Mao. And now that he sees how coldblooded, soulless, unfeeling you are, he may decide that he can’t take the chance of having a person like you in charge of—”

“Stop it, Shadrach.” She is giving ground under his steady assault, his quiet, measured, remorseless voice; her lips are trembling, she is visibly fighting back tears. “Please,” she says. “Stop. Stop. You’re getting what you want.”

“You think I’m being unkind? You think I’ve got no call being angry with you?”

“There was nothing I could have done.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“What about threatening to resign?”

“He’d have let me resign, then. I’m not indispensable. Redundancy is—”

“And your successor would have continued with the project, using me as the donor.”

“I imagine so.”

“Still, even if it changed nothing at all, wouldn’t you have felt cleaner putting up some kind of resistance?”

“Perhaps,” she says. “But it would have changed nothing at all.”

“You could have warned me, at least. I might have fled from Ulan Bator. We might have fled together, if your resignation got you in trouble with Genghis Mao. Wasn’t worth destroying your career over me, though, was it?”

“Flee? Where to? He’d be watching us. On Surveillance Vector One, or some other spy gadget. In a day or two he’d decide we had had a long enough holiday, and the Citpols would pick us up and bring us back.”