Shadrach in the Furnace

8

He is weary of Karakorum after his encounter with Buckmaster, and he sees now how this whole long day has drained his vigor and glazed his soul; if he could he would stagger to the tube-train and let himself be whisked off to Ulan Bator and his hammock and a night of — at last — deep, satisfying sleep. But Crowfoot, eerily exultant, glows now with insistent lusts, and he does not feel strong enough to confront her disappointment if he denies her now. Arm in arm, therefore, they go to the lovers’ hospice at the north end of the pleasure grounds, a bright-skinned orange-and-green geodesic dome, and with a touch of his thumb against the credit plate he rents a three-hour room.

Not much of a room. Bed, washstand, clothes rack, within a little slope-ceilinged segment of the vast dome, annoying bluish purple granular-finish walls, but the place suffices. It suffices. Nikki whips off the golden-mesh robe that is her only garment and from her nude body, four meters away across the room, comes such a rush of seductive energy, such a flow of force oscillating cracklingly up and down the whole electroerotic spectrum, that Shadrach’s fatigue is swept away, Cotopaxi and Buckmaster recede into ancient history, and he swoops joyously toward her. Mouth seeking mouth, hands rising to breasts. She embraces him, then darts away, prudently offering her left hip to the contraception next to the washstand: presses the switch, receives the benevolent bath of sterilizing soft radiation, and returns to him. The tattooed no-preg symbol on her tawny flank, a nine-pointed star, glows in brilliant chartreuse, telling them that the irradiation has done its job. She strips him and claps hands in glee at the sight of his rigid maleness. This is not Joan of Arc he is bedding, oh, no; a warrior perhaps but a maiden no. They tumble to the bed. With hands nearly as skilled as those of Warhaftig the surgeon, he diligently commences the customary foreplay, but she lets him know by a quick wordless flip of her shoulders that he can skip it and get down to the main event; and he enters the taut hidden harbor between her thighs with a sudden unsparing thrust that brings grunts of pleasure from them both. Some things never change. There is a man only four hundred kilometers to the east who has had four livers and seven kidneys thus far, and in a tent just a few hundred meters from this bed they sell a drug that lets one be an eyewitness to the betrayal of the Savior, and there is a machine in Ulan Bator that flashes instantaneous pictures of virtually everything that is happening anywhere in the world, and all of these things would have been deemed miracles only two generations ago, but nevertheless in this miracle-infested world of 2012 there have been no significant technological improvements on the act of love. Oh, there are cunning drugs that are said to enhance the sensations, and there are clever devices that suppress fertility, and there are some other little biomechanical gimmicks that the sophisticated sometimes employ, but all of these are simply updated versions of peripheral equipment that has been in use since medieval days. The basic operation has not yet been digitalized or miniaturized or randomized or otherwise futurized, but remains what it was in the days of the australopithecines and the pithecanthropoids; that is, something that mere naked people do, pressing their humble natural-born bodies one against the other. The bodies press, copper clasping ebony, acting out the ancient rite, Shadrach surprising himself with the intensity of his passions. He is not sure whether this energy comes from Nikki, via some mysterious telepathic transfer, or from some unexpected reservoir within himself, but he is grateful for it whatever the source, and rides it to an agreeable conclusion. Afterward he slips easily into a sound sleep, awakening only when the mellow but inescapable beeper tone signals the approaching end of their three-hour rental period. He finds himself cozily pillowed against Nikki’s breasts. She is awake and evidently has been for sometime, but her smile is beatific and no doubt she would have cradled him like that all night, an appealing idea. The night is well-nigh gone, in any case. They allow themselves a brief cuddle, rise, wash, dress, go forth with hands lightly touching into the chilly moon-dappled darkness. Like children unwilling to leave the playground, they drift into a gaming parlor, a wine house, a light studio, all three packed with raucous debauched-looking fun-seekers, but they stay no more than a few minutes in each place, drifting out as aimlessly as they went in, and finally they admit to each other that they have had enough for one night. To the tube-train station, then. Dawn will be here soon. From the ceiling above the station platform dangles a huge glowing green globe, a public telescreen showing a late-night news program, and wearily Shadrach peers at it: the face of Mangu looks back at him, sincere and earnest and deplorably youthful. Mangu is making a speech, so it seems. Gradually, for he is very tired, Shadrach perceives that it is the classic Roncevic Antidote speech, the one which Genghis Mao traditionally makes every five or six months and which now apparently has been delegated to the heir-apparent. “. . . major laboratory breakthroughs,” Mangu is saying. “… encouraging progress… fundamental qualitative transformations of the manufacturing technology … the unceasing efforts of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee … the diligent and persevering leadership of our beloved Chairman Genghis Mao… there can be no doubt any longer… large-scale distribution of the drug throughout the world… the scourge of organ-rot driven from our midst … stockpiles increasing daily… a time is approaching when … a happy, healthy humanity . . .”

A florid, goggle-eyed man standing a few meters farther down the platform says in a loud harsh whisper to the woman who accompanies him, “Certainly. In only ninety to one hundred years.”

“Quiet, Bel á!” his companion cries, sounding genuinely alarmed.

“But it is the truth. He lies when he says the stockpiles are increasing daily. I have seen the figures. I tell you, I have seen reliable figures.”

Mordecai finds this interesting. The florid man is Belá Horthy, a dour but volatile Hungarian physicist, creator of the great fusion plant at Bayan Hongor that supplies power for most of northeastern Asia. He also happens to be minister of technology for the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, and it is a little odd to hear so formidably well-connected a government leader uttering such scandalous subversion in public. Of course, this is Karakorum, and Horthy, looking boneless and out of focus just now, is obviously adrift on some potent hallucinogen, but still, but still—

“The Antidote stockpiles are stable at best, or even decreasing slightly,” Horthy continues, framing his words with the exaggerated precision of the extremely intoxicated. “What Mangu tells us is a lie intended to pacify the populace. He thinks that telling them such things will make them happy and induce them to love him. Pfaugh!” The woman tries desperately to quiet him. She is short and compact, efficiently constructed with her center of gravity close to the ground; her face is partly obscured by an ornate, flamboyant green domino, but Shadrach, after a moment, recognizes her as Donna Labile, no less a mogul than Horthy himself, in fact minister of demography for the Committee, whose responsibility it is to maintain a reasonable balance between births and deaths. Masked or not, it is she, no mistaking that ferocious jaw, and Shadrach observes that Horthy too has a mask, dangling from his left hand. Perhaps he thinks he still wears it. She struggles with him, taking the mask from his limp hand and attempting to fasten it in place, but be brushes her aside, and, lurching toward Shadrach Mordecai, greets the doctor with so grandiose a bow that he nearly pitches himself from the platform. Donna Labile, flapping his discarded mask about, flutters around him like an angry insect. “Ah, Dr. Mordecai!” Horthy bellows. “Our leader’s devoted Aesculapius! I greet you!”

“… the climax of our unending struggle against…” Mangu says from the glowing globular screen.

Horthy jerks a thumb at the image of the heir-apparent. “Do you believe that trash, Mordecai?”

Shadrach has his own suspicions about the sincerity of the Khan’s oft-expressed plan for universal distribution of the Ron-cevic Antidote, but they are suspicions rather less than half formed, and in any case this is no place to voice them. Softly he says, “I’m not a member of the Committee, Dr. Horthy. The only inside information I have concerns such things as the endocrine balance of Genghis Mao.”

“But you have an opinion, haven’t you?”

“My opinion’s an uninformed one, and therefore worthless.”

“Such a diplomat you are!” Horthy says in contempt.

“Pay no attention,” Donna Labile begs. “He’s had too much tonight. Eating kot and yipka like so much candy, drugging himself crazy, now risking his whole career—”

“It seems to be the night for it,” Shadrach remarks.

“A filthy hoax,” Horthy says heavily, shaking his fist at the screen. He is trembling, ashen-faced beneath his florid glow, sweating profusely. “Cruel, sinister, bestial—” and he lapses into a series of unintelligible sibilant expletives, presumably Magyar, toward the end of which he begins to sob. Donna Labile, meanwhile, has disappeared. After a moment she returns leading two tall men who wear the gray-and-blue uniform of the Citizens’ Peace Brigade. It is odd to find a couple of Citpols here, for Shadrach thinks of Karakorum as an open city, naturally monitored by secret spy-eyes and the usual audio bugs but otherwise unpoliced; and these two are more man ordinarily repellent even for Citpols, for they look like identical ugly twins, gray-faced and gray-eyed, with flat heads and stiff close-cropped hair and strange malproportioned bodies, all legs and no middle. They walk in a weird clucking stride, like a couple of poorly programmed robots, but they appear to be human, more or less: perhaps the Committee, finding volunteers scarce, is raising a clone of monsters to serve as policemen. They surround Horthy and speak to him in low, urgent tones. One of them takes the domino from Donna Labile and with curiously fussy, almost mincing, gestures, affixes it over the bridge of Morthy’s nose.

Then, slipping their arms gently under those of the minister of technology, they lead him, lifting him a bit so that his feet are dragging, toward a gray enameled door at the far end of the platform. Shadrach Mordecai is uncertain whether they are arresting him at Donna Labile’s instigation or — more likely — are hauling him up to some behind-the-scenes sobering-up facility before he can compromise himself further.

“… a glorious epoch in the splendid history of the human race …” Mangu booms.

The tube-train arrives. The survivors of the night’s revelries at Karakorum move slowly, sleepily aboard.