Robert Silverberg: Shadrach in the Furnace

Grinning, Nikki Crowfoot puts her hands to Shadrach’s thighs as though to feel the sensor implants. “Ye-es. He’s doing marvelously well for his age. At the moment he’s fornicating a nurse. Wait, Wait. I think he’s coming! No, it’s a sneeze. And now I pick up audio input. Gezundheit, she just said. How is Genghis Mao’s sex life, anyway?”

“I try not to ask.”

“Doesn’t your inner machinery tell you?”

“Honi soit qui mal y pense,” Mordecai says. “Doubtless he’s got a splendid sex life. Probably more active than mine.”

“You didn’t have to sleep alone last night.”

“My vocation demanded it of me.” He gestures toward the door. “Karakorum?”

“Karakorum, yes. But first I need to wash and change.”

They go to her apartment, forty stories higher in the building. All important members of Genghis Mao’s staff have lodgings in the tower; but a research-group director has far less prestige than the Chairman’s personal physician, and Crowfoot’s suite is not nearly as opulent as Shadrach Mordecai’s, just three rooms, plain furnishings, floors of common wood, no balcony, a sliver of a view. Shadrach settles into a webfoam lounger while Nikki strips and heads for the shower. Her bare body is strikingly beautiful, and desire stirs in him at the sight of her heavy dark-tipped breasts, her powerful thighs, her flat hard belly. She is long and lean, with strong shoulders, a narrow waist, sudden flaring hips, sleek muscular buttocks; a dense flood of thick black hair descends to the middle of her back. Unclothed she sheds the laboratory aura, the tense and fatigued look of the dissatisfied scientist, and becomes something primitive, barbaric, primordial — Pocahontas, Sacajawea, moon-begotten Nokomis. Once when he made such feverish comparisons when they were in bed together she became embarrassed and self-conscious, and mockingly, defensively, called him Othello and Ras Tafari and Chaka Zulu; never again has he overtly romanticized her savage ancestry, for he does not like to be twitted about his own, but the feeling persists, whenever she bares herself to him, that she is a princess of a fallen nation, high priestess of the great plains, red Amazon of the pagan night. She emerges and dons a floor-length robe of openwork golden mesh, blatantly provocative, the antithesis of her epicene lab smock. Chocolate nipples show through, hints of the blue-black wire-stiff pubic triangle, flashes of haunch and thigh. He would gladly bed her this moment, but he knows she is tired and hungry, still preoccupied with the failures of the day, not yet at all in the mood for making love, and in any case she usually dislikes afternoon couplings, preferring to let erotic tensions build through the evening. So he contents himself with a light playful kiss and an appreciative smile, and out they go, down to the depths of the tower, to the loading ramp of the Karakorum tube-train.

Karakorum lies four hundred kilometers west of Ulan Bator. Five years ago a nuclear-powered subterrene drilled a wide tunnel connecting the two cities beneath the Central Gobi, its invincible thermal-stress penetrator slicing serenely through the resistant deep-lying Paleozoic granites and schists. Now high-speed trains on silent inertialess tracks sweep between the ancient capital and the modern one, making the journey in less than an hour. Shadrach Mordecai and Nikki Crowfoot join the pleasure-bound throngs on the platform; the next train is due to depart in just a few minutes. Several people greet them but no one comes close. There is something formidable and intimidating about a truly impressive-looking couple, something that seals them within a zone of chilly unapproachability, and Shadrach knows he and Nikki are impressive, tall slender black man and tall sturdy copper-skinned woman, handsome of form and face, elegantly dressed, Othello and Pocahontas out for a night on the town. But there is another isolating factor at work — Dr. Mordecai’s professional proximity to the Khan: these people are aware that he has face-to-face access to Genghis Mao, one of the very few, and some of the Chairman’s aura has been transferred to him, a contagion of awesomeness, making Mordecai one not to be approached casually. He dislikes this but there is little he can do about it.

The tube-train pulls in. Off now to Karakorum go Shadrach and Nikki.

Karakorum. Founded eight hundred years ago by Genghis Khan. Transformed into a majestic capital by Genghis’s son Ogodai. Abandoned a generation later by Genghis’s grandson Kublai, who preferred to rule from Cambaluc in China. Destroyed by Kublai Khan when his rebellious younger brother attempted to make it the seat of his revolt. Rebuilt eventually, abandoned again, allowed to fall into decay, forgotten entirely. Its site rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century by archaeologists of the Mongolian People’s Republic and the Soviet Union. And now much restored by decree of Genghis II Mao IV Khan, self-anointed successor to one ancient empire and one modern one, who wishes to remind the world of the greatness of Genghis I and to make it forget the centuries of Mongol slumber that followed the decline of the Khans.

Karakorum by night glitters with an unearthly brightness, a stunning lunar glow. Mordecai and Crowfoot, leaving the tube train station, behold the excavated ruins of old Karakorum to their left — a solitary stone tortoise in a field of yellowed grass, the outlines of some brick walls, a shattered pillar. Nearby are gray stone stupas, monuments to holy lamas, erected in the sixteenth century; in the distance, against the parched hills, are the white stucco buildings of Karakorum State Farm, a grandiose project of the defunct Mongolian People’s Republic, a vast agricultural enterprise occupying half a million hectares of grassland. Between the farm buildings and the stupas lies the Karakorum of Genghis Mao, a flamboyant reconstruction of the original city, the great many-columned walled palace of Ogodai Khan imagined anew, the splendid observatory with its heaven-stabbing turrets, the mosques and churches, the gaudy silken tents of the nobility, the somber brick houses of the foreign merchants, all testifying to the might and magnificence of the latter-day Prince of Princes, Genghis Mao, who, according to a half-suppressed legend, had once had a humbler Mongol name, Choijamise or Ochirbal or Gombojab — the tales vary according to the teller — and had been a minor functionary, a very insignificant apparatchik, in the bureaucracy of the old People’s Republic in the vanished Marxist-Leninist days, before the world fell apart and a new Mongol empire was constructed on its relict. The resurrected Karakorum is not merely a sterile monument to antiquity, though: by Genghis Mao’s decree it is an amusement park, a place of revelry and pleasures, a twenty-first-century Xanadu blazing with frantic energy. In these black and yellow and scarlet tents one may dine, drink, gamble; the latest hallucinations are for sale here; here one may find willing sexual partners of all kinds; those who indulge in the popular cults of the moment — dream-death, transtemporalism, and carpentry are the fashionable ones just now — have facilities for their rituals in Karakorum. Shadrach is a carpentry-cultist himself; Nikki Crowfoot goes in for transtemporalism, and he has dabbled in that too, though not lately. Once he came to Karakocum with Karya Lindman, and that fierce, intense woman urged him to try dream-death with her, but he refused, and she scorned him for his timidity for days afterward. Not with words. Little castrating scowls; sudden harsh flickers of her furious eyes. Mocking quiverings of her elegant nostrils.

As they pass the dream-death pavilion now, neither of them giving it more than a casual glance, Mordecai forcing the image of Katya Lindman’s bare blazing body out of his mind, Crowfoot says, “Isn’t it risky, your going this far from Ulan Bator only a few hours after he’s had major surgery?”