Robert Silverberg: Shadrach in the Furnace

Two robed acolytes bring Roger Buckmaster to Shadrach out of the depths of the tent of the transtemporslists in Karakorum. Buckmaster is robed too, but not in the coarse black horsehair garb of a transtemporalist. He wears a heavy hooded cassock of thick brown wool, smoothly woven. His feet, bare, are clad in open sandals. A massive cruciform pendant dangles at his throat. He pushes back his hood to reveal a tonsured scalp.

Buckmaster has become some sort of monk.

His new asceticism of clothing is not the only change in him. Before, he had been a blurting, impatient, angry man, with some kind of sullen furious energy circulating within him that seemed dammed at every plausible point of exit. Now he is eerily calm, self-contained, a man inhabiting an unfathomable kingdom of solitude and peace. He is pale, very thin, almost spectral. He stands silently before Shadrach, fingering his beads but otherwise motionless, waiting, waiting.

Shadrach says at last, “I never expected to see you alive again.”

“Life brings many surprises, Dr. Mordecai.” Buckmaster’s voice is different too, deeper, sepulchral, more resonant, all the sputter and frenzy burned out of it,

“Word went around that you’d been sent to the organ farm. Dissected, dismembered.”

Piously Buckmaster says, “The Lord chose to spare me.”

His piety is hard for Shadrach to take. “Your friends saved your skin, you mean,” he retorts, instantly regretting his bluntness. Not a wise way to talk to someone whose services you need.

But Buckmaster does not seem offended. “My friends are His agents. As are we all. Dr. Mordecai.”

“Have you been here the whole time?”

“Yes. Since the day after you saw me under interrogation.”

“And the Citpols haven’t come sniffing around for you?”

“I am officially dead, Doctor. My body has officially been distributed to ailing members of the government: the computer will tell you so. The Citpols don’t search for dead men. To them I’m no more man a set of scattered parts — a pancreas here, a liver there, a kidney, a lung. Forgotten.” For a moment mischief gleams in Buckmaster’s oddly solemn face. “If you told them I was here, they would deny it.”

“And what have you been doing?” Shadrach asks.

“The transtemporalists regard me as a holy man. I take their cup each day. Each day I retrace the days of the life of our Lord. I have attended His Passion upon Calvary many times. Doctor. I have walked among the apostles. I have touched the hem of Mary’s robe. I have beheld the miracles: Cana, Capernaum, Lazarus raised at Bethany., I have watched Him betrayed in Gethsemane. I have seen Him brought before Pilate. I have seen it all, Dr. Mordecai, everything of which the Gospels tell. It is all true. It is literally the truth. My eyes bear witness.” The unexpected intensity of conviction in Buckmaster’s eyes, the unearthly sound of Buckmaster’s voice, leave Shadrach speechless a moment. It is impossible not to believe that this scruffy little man has strolled through the Galilee with Jesus and Peter and James, that he has heard the sermons of John the Baptist and the lamentations of the Magdalene. Illusion, hallucination, self-deceit, fraud; no matter. Buckmaster has been transformed. He is radiant.

With deliberate bluntness Shadrach asks, “Can you still do microengineering work?”

The irrelevance of the question catches Buckmaster off balance. He is lost in holy reveries, shrouded in mystic serenity and transcendental joy, and Shadrach’s words bring a gasp of amazement from him, as though he has been jabbed in the ribs. He coughs and frowns and says, obviously baffled, “I suppose I could. It’s never entered my mind.”

“I have work for you now.”

“Don’t be preposterous, Doctor.”

“I’m being altogether serious. I’ve come to you because there’s a job that you and only you can do properly. You’re the only one I’d trust to do it.”

“The world has expelled me, Doctor. I have expelled the world. Here is where I dwell. The concerns of the world are no longer my concerns. ”

“You once were concerned about the injustices perpetrated by Genghis Mao and the PRC.”

“I am beyond justice and injustice now.”

“Don’t say that. It sounds impressive, Roger, but it’s dangerous nonsense. The sin of pride, isn’t it? You were rescued by your fellow men. You owe your life to them. They took risks for you. You have obligations to them.”

“I pray for them daily.”

“There’s something more immediately useful you can do.”

“Prayer is the highest good I know,” Buckmaster says. “Certainly I place it higher than microengineering. I fail to see how any microengineering job you give me can help my fellow men.”

“One job can.”

“I fail to see—”

“Genghis Mao is soon to undergo another operation.”

“What’s Genghis Mao to me? He’s forgotten me. I’ve forgotten him.”

“An operation on his brain,” Shadrach continues. “Fluid now accumulates within his skull. Unless it’s drained, it could kill him. Shortly we’ll install a drainage system with a valve through which the fluid can be removed. At the same time a new telemetering implant will be installed in me. Which I want you to design for me, Roger.”

“What will it do?”

“Allow me to control the action of the valve,” Shadrach says.

Two hours later Shadrach is in the great carpentry chapel at the far end of the Karakorum pleasure complex, surrounded by chisels and mallets and saws, trying to enter into the initial meditative state. He is not doing well at it. Now and then he feels just a bit of it, the beginning of the proper degree of concentration, but he holds it no more than an instant and then, as he congratulates himself for having attained the state at last, he loses it, again and again he loses it. It is Buckmaster’s fault. Buckmaster will not recede from the forefront of Shadrach’s consciousness.

If Buckmaster had had his way, Shadrach would not be among the carpenters at all right now, but rather still would be in the transtemporalists’ tent, lying drugged and limp while his soul journeyed back through the millennia to attend the bloody rite of Calvary. “Take the cup with me,” Buckmaster had urged. “We will visit the Passion together,” But Shadrach had declined. Some other time, he told Buckmaster gently. Transtemporal jaunts consume too much energy; he needs all his strength for the difficult enterprise that lies just ahead. Buckmaster had understood, or at least was willing to forgive him for not caring to make the journey just then. And Shadrach went forth from the tent, with Buckmaster’s promise that he would have the design of the new implant ready in a day or so. And still Buckmaster haunts him.

How astonishing it was to see Buckmaster’s monkishness fall away from him the moment he grasped the implications of Shadrach’s request — his breath quickening, color coming to his cheeks, eyes bright with the old frenzy. Asking a hundred questions, demanding specifications and performance Thresholds, size parameters, preferred bodily placement for the device. Scribbling notes furiously. Half an hour was all it took him to work out the rough schematics. He would need computer assistance to do the final, he said, but that would be no problem: Ficifolia could hook up a telephone relay for him, keying right into Genghis Mao’s own master computer. And Buckmaster laughed stridently. Abruptly his expression shifted. Serenity returned. He had put microengineering aside; suddenly he was a monk again, calm, remote, glacial, saying, “Take the cup with me. We will visit the Passion together.” Poor crazy Buckmaster.

Shadrach, struggling to regain his own serenity, picks up an awl, lays it down, picks up an auger, runs his fingers along the curved blade of a chisel, presses a bastard file against his forehead. Better. A little better. The touch of cool metal soothes him. Poor crazy Buckmaster has drained the cup by now, no doubt. And has gone off on wings of dream to see them put the crown of thorns in place, hammer in the nails, ram home the spear. Crazy? Buckmaster is a happy man. He has placed himself beyond all pain. He has outsmarted the minions of Genghis Mao. He has emerged out of his torment into holiness, and he will walk daily with the apostles and the Savior. To Buckmaster, the Palestine of Jesus is more real than the Mongolia of Genghis Mao, and who can quarrel with that? Shadrach might make the same choice, if he could. Of course, reality will eventually intrude on Buckmaster’s fantasy: a time will come, and come soon, when Buckmaster’s most recent Antidote treatment will cease to be effective, and he is not likely to be able to obtain a booster dose. But plainly he does not worry about that.