Robert Silverberg: Shadrach in the Furnace

“All right,” Warhaftig says. He gestures brusquely to someone beyond camera range. The surgeon’s hands are formidable, long and muscular, fingers like elongated pliable wands, incredible octave-devouring fingers of extraordinary power and delicacy. Shadrach Mordecai, although he is no surgeon, has strong and graceful hands himself, but the sight of Warhaftig’s always make him think of his own as coarse and stumpy, butcher-fingered hands. “We’re moving well here. I’ll expect you at 0900. Anything else?”

“I just wanted you to know the Khan was awake,” Mordecai answers, a little sharply, and breaks the contact.

Next he phones the Chairman’s bedchamber and talks briefly with one of the Khan’s valets. Yes, Genghis Mao is awake, he has bathed, he is readying himself for the operation. He will begin his morning meditation in a moment. Does the doctor wish to speak with the Khan before that? The doctor does. The screen goes blank, and there is a lengthy pause during which Mordecai feels his adrenalin levels beginning to rise: not yet, not even after all this time, has the fear and awe that Genghis Mao inspires in him begun to ebb. He forces himself into calmness with a quick centering exercise, and none too soon, for abruptly the head and shoulders of Genghis II Mao IV Khan appear on the telephone screen.

The Chairman is a lean, leathery-looking man with a narrow triangular skull, powerful cheekbones, heavy brows, fierce eyes, thin harsh lips. His skin is more brown than yellow in tone; his hair is thick, black, combed back straight from his forehead and descending almost to his shoulders. His face is one that readily and obviously evokes dread, but also, oddly, trust; he seems omniperceptive and omnicompetent, a man to whom all the burdens of the world can be given and who will uncomplainingly and effectually assume them. The recent deterioration of his current liver has had visible effect on him — a bronzing of his skin beyond its normal deep hue, some blotches of pigment on his cheeks, an uncharacteristic feverish brightness of the eyes — but still he seems a man of regal bearing and inexhaustible strength, a man designed by nature to endure and to rule.

“Shadrach,” he says. His voice is deep, grating, with a narrow dynamic range, not really a good demagogue’s voice. “How am I this morning?”

It is an old joke between them. The Khan laughs; Mordecai manages a bilious smile.

The doctor replies, “Strong, well rested, a little low on blood sugar, but everything generally as expected. Warhaftig is waiting for you. He’d like you in the Surgery by 0900 hours. Mangu’s at the Committee Vector One desk. It’s a quiet day so far.”

“This will be my fourth liver.”

“Your third, sir,” Mordecai says gently. “I’ve been over the records. First transplant in 2005, the second in 2010, and now—”

“I was born with one also, Shadrach. We should count that. I’m human, eh, Shadrach? We mustn’t forget the set of organs I was born with.” Genghis Mao’s inescapable eyes pierce the uneasy Mordecai. Human, yes, one must always try to keep that in mind; the Chairman is human, though his pancreas is a tiny plastic disk and his heart is constantly spurred by electric jolts delivered through fine silver needles and his kidneys were grown in bodies other than his own and his spleen his lungs his corneas his colon his esophagus his pharynx his thymus his pulmonary artery his stomach his yes oh yes human he is human but sometimes it is hard to remember that — and sometimes, looking into those irresistible terrifying glacial eyes, one sees not the godlike flash of supreme authority, but something else, an opaque look of fatigue or perhaps terror, a look that seems at once to reveal an overwhelming fear of death and to offer warm welcome to it. Genghis Mao is death-haunted, certainly, a man whose grasp on life is so ferocious after nine decades that he will submit to any bodily torment in order to buy another month, another year; he lives in morbid dread of death and his eyes proclaim it; but he is death-loving, too, obsessed with the termination that he constantly postpones, as much so as a man who is obsessed with the orgasm he strives so fiercely to delay. Mordecai has heard Genghis Mao speak of the purity of not-being. Not for him the coming of süsser Tod, no, never, and yet how he savors the tempting sweetness of it even as he averts his lips from it. Mordecai suspects that only such a man, death-haunted, death-obsessed, would want to make himself master of the sort of place this world has become. But how can Genghis Mao, brooding dreamily on the delicate beauties of death, nevertheless also yearn to live forever?

“Come for me at 0900,” the Chairman tells him.

Mordecai nods to a dead screen.

In the time remaining before he must go to fetch the Khan, Shadrach Mordecai discharges one of his regular bureaucratic responsibilities: receiving the daily progress reports from the directors of the three great research schemes in which Genghis Mao has much of the resources of the government mobilized, Project Talos, Project Phoenix, and Project Avatar. As Genghis Mao’s physician, Shadrach is ex-officio head of all three projects, and he confers each morning with the project leaders whose laboratories are located in the lower levels of the Grand Tower of the Khan.

Katya Lindman of Project Talos comes on screen first. “We coded the eyelids yesterday,” she tells him at once. “It’s one of the biggest steps so far in our analogue-to-digital conversion program. As of now we have seven of Genghis Mao’s three hundred basic kinesic traits fully graphed and equivalented.” She is a short, wide-shouldered woman, a Swede, formidably intelligent, dark-haired and easily angered, a woman of considerable beauty despite or perhaps because of her thin-lipped, sharp-toothed, oddly feral and menacing mouth. Her project is the most farfetched of the three, an attempt to develop a mechanical Genghis Mao, an analogue-entity through which he can continue to rule after bodily death — a puppet, a simulacrum, but one with a sustaining Genghis Mao-like life of its own. The technology for building such an automaton already exists, of course; the problem is to create something that transcends the Walt Disney robots that Mordecai remembers from his youth, the cunning Abe Lincoln and Thomas Edison and Christopher Columbus machines, so lifelike in their skin tones and movements and manner of speaking. Disney machines are not sufficient to the present need. A Disneyed Abe Lincoln can deliver the Gettysburg Address flawlessly, eight times an hour, but it would never be able to deal with a delegation of angry Reconstructionist congressmen; and a Genghis Mao of metal and plastic might spout the tenets of centripetal depolarization with hypnotic eloquence, but what value would that be in meeting the crises of a constantly changing, challenging society? No, they must capture the essence of the living Genghis Mao, code it, make from it a program that will continue to grow and react. Shadrach Mordecai is skeptical of success. He asks Katya Lindman, as he does every few weeks, how her department is coming on the task of digitalizing Genghis Mao’s mental processes, which is rather more difficult than working out digital programs for his facial expressions and habits of posture. The question is threatening to her, and her eyes briefly flash with familiar fire; but all she says is, “We continue to attack the problem. Our best people are constantly at work on it.”

“Thank you,” Shadrach says, and switches to Irayne Sarafrazi’s channel. The head of Project Phoenix is a young Persian gerontologist, a slight, almost fragile-looking person, with huge dark eyes, full solemn lips, black hair pulled back starkly from her forehead. Her group seeks a body-renewal technique that will allow rejuvenation of the living cellular matter of Genghis Mao, so that he may be reborn in his own skin when he no longer has the strength and resilience to accept further organ transplants. The prime obstacle here is the unwillingness of the brain to regenerate the cells it daily sloughs off; reversing the decline of the other organs and making them young again is a relatively simple matter of nucleic-acid reprogramming, but no one has found a way to halt, let alone to recoup, the constant death of the brain. Already in Genghis Mao’s long life the estimated weight of his brain has declined by ten percent, with a corresponding loss in mnemonic function and neural response time; nevertheless he is far from senile, but what hideous decline into idiocy might not overtake him if he were given a further century or two of residence in his present cerebro-cerebellar equipment? Hundreds of hapless primates have surrendered their cranial contents to Irayne Sarafrazi’s research, and their brains live in bell jars on her laboratory benches, alive and responsive while she seeks ways of tickling their neurons into new growth, but no progress has been made. This morning she seems discouraged. Her glittering Achaemenid eyes look dull and strained. The disembodied brain of Pan, a chimpanzee, has suddenly undergone a fatal deterioration, just when it appeared that some actual cellular growth was beginning. “We’re about to begin the autopsy,” Irayne Sarafrazi says dismally, “but we think Pan’s death may mean our whole cerebral stimulation program is a mistake. I’m thinking of switching our emphasis away from actual brain regeneration and toward redundancy activation. What do you think, Shadrach?” Mordecai shrugs. Of course he knows that the human brain has vast redundant areas, billions of cells whose only apparent function is to be an emergency reserve; he knows, too, what has been accomplished by way of rehabilitating the victims of strokes and other cerebral damage through redirecting the neural channels into the redundant areas. But more efficient utilization of existing brain tissue only delays, does not remove, the threat of senile degeneracy. So long as cells daily die, Genghis Mao will tumble eventually into senility in his rejuvenated body, fifty or seventy or ninety years from now, a drooling Struldbrug of the mind trapped in a sturdy requickened frame. “Redundancy is a short-term measure,” Shadrach tells her. “Without brain regeneration, the risks are too high. An old brain in a young body won’t work. Let me see the autopsy report on the chimp tomorrow and maybe I’ll have some ideas.” Unable to bear the sight of her stricken face, he tunes Sarafrazi out and gets Nikki Crowfoot of Project Avatar on his screen.