IN THE FURNACE
                 ROBERT SILVERBERG

  For Norbert Slepyan



  Copyright © 1976 by Robert Silverberg



   It is nine minutes before sunrise in the great city of Ulan Bator, capital
of the reconstituted world. For some time now Dr. Shadrach Mordecai has
lain awake, restless and tense in his hammock, staring somberly at
aglowing green circlet in the wall that is the shining face of his data
screen. Red letters on the screen announce the new day:




                               MONDAY
                                 14 May
                                   2012


   As usual, Dr. Mordecai has been unable to get more than a few hours of
sleep. Insomnia has plagued him all year; his wakefulness must be some
kind of message from his cerebral cortex, but so far he has been unable to
decipher it. Today, at least, he has some excuse for awakening early,
because great challenges and tensions lie ahead. Dr. Mordecai is personal
physician to Genghis II Mao IV Khan, Prince of Princes and Chairman of
Chairmen—which is to say, ruler of the earth —and on this day the aged
Genghis Mao is due to undergo a liver transplant, his third in seven years.
  The world leader sleeps less than twenty meters away, in a suite
adjoining Mordecai's. Dictator and doctor occupy residential chambers on
the seventy-fifth floor of the Grand Tower of the Khan, a superb
onyx-walled needle of a building that rises breathtakingly from the dusty
brown Mongolian tableland. Just now Genghis Mao sleeps soundly, eyes
unmoving beneath the thick lids, spine enviably relaxed, respiration slow
and even, pulse steady, hormone levels rising normally. Mordecai knows
all this because he carries, surgically inlaid in the flesh of his arms, thighs,
and buttocks, several dozen minute perceptor nodes that constantly
provide him with telemetered information on the stale of Genghis Mao's
vital signs. It took Mordecai a year of full-time training to learn to read
the input, the tiny twitches and tremors and flickers and itches that are
the analogue-coded equivalents of the Chairman's major bodily processes,
but by this time it is second nature for him to perceive and comprehend
the data. A tickle here means digestive distress, a throb there means
urinary sluggishness, a pricking elsewhere tells of saline imbalance. For
Shadrach Mordecai it is something like living in two bodies at once, but
he has grown accustomed to it. And so the Chairman's precious life is
safeguarded by his vigilant physician. Genghis Mao is officially said to be
eighty-seven years old and may be even older, though his body, a
patchwork of artificial and transplanted organs, is as strong and
responsive as that of a man of fifty. It is the Chairman's wish to postpone
death until his work on earth is complete—which is to say, never to die.
  How sweetly he rests now! Mordecai runs automatically through the
readings again and again: respiratory, digestive, endocrine, circulatory, all
the autonomic systems going beautifully. The Chairman, dreamless (the
motionless eyes), lying as customary on his left side (faint aortal pressure),
emitting gentle hhnnorrking snores (reverberations in the rib cage),
obviously feels no apprehension about the coming surgery. Mordecai
envies him his calmness. Of course, organ transplants are an old story to
Genghis Mao.
   At the precise moment of dawn the doctor leaves his hammock,
stretches, walks naked across his bedchamber's cool stone floor to the
balcony, and steps outside. The air, suffused now with early blue to the
east, is clear, crisp, cold, with a sharp wind blowing across the plains, a
strong southerly breeze racing through Mongolia from the Great Wall
toward Lake Baikal. It ruffles the black flags of Genghis Mao in Sukhe
Baior Square, the capital's grand plaza, and stirs the boughs of the
pink-blossomed tamarisks. Shadrach Mordecai inhales deeply and studies
the remote horizon, as if looking for meaningful smoke signals out of
China. No signals come; only the little throbs and tingles of the implant
disks, caroling the song of Genghis Mao's irrepressible good health.
  All is quiet below. The whole city sleeps, save for those who must be
awake to work; Mongols are not given to insomnia. Mordecai is; but then,
Mordecai isn't a Mongol. He is a black man, dark with an African
darkness, though he is no African either; slender, long-limbed, tall—some
two hundred centimeters in height—with dense woolly hair, large wide-set
eyes, full lips, a broad though high-bridged nose. In this land of sturdy
golden-skinned folk with sharp noses and glossy straight hair. Dr.
Mordecai is a conspicuous figure, more conspicuous, perhaps, than he
would like to be.
   He squats, straightens, squats, straightens, jackknifing his arms out
and in, out and in. He starts every morning with a calisthenic routine on
the balcony, naked in the chilly air: he is thirty-six years old, and even
though his post in the government gives him guaranteed access to the
Roncevic Antidote, even though he is thus spared the fear of organ-rot
that obsesses most of the world's two billion inhabitants, thirty-six is
nevertheless an age when one must begin conscientiously to take measures
to protect the body against the normal unravelings time brings. Metis
sana in corpore sano; yes, keep on bending and twisting, Shadrach; make
the juices flow; let the old yin balance the yang. He is in perfect health,
and his bodily organs are the ones that were in him when he popped from
the womb one frosty day in 1976. Up, down, up, down, unsparing of self.
Sometimes it seems odd to him that his vigorous, violent morning
exercises never awaken Genghis Mao, but of course the flow of telemetered
data runs only in one direction, and as Mordecai puts himself through his
fierce balcony workout, the Chairman snores placidly on, unaware.
  Eventually, panting, perspiring, shivering lightly, feeling alive and open
and receptive, hardly worrying at all about the coming surgical ordeal,
Mordecai decides he has had enough of a workout. He washes, dresses,
punches for his customary light breakfast, and sets about his morning
routine of duties.
   So, then, the doctor confronts Interface Three, through which he daily
enters the residential suite of his master the Khan. It is a ponderous
diamond-shaped doorway, two and a half meters high. From its
silken-smooth bronze surface jut a dozen and a half warty cylindrical
snouts, three to nine centimeters high. Some of them are scanners and
sensors, some are audio conduits, some are weapons of ineluctable
lethality; and Shadrach Mordecai has no idea which is which. Most likely,
what serves as a scanner today may well be a laser cannon tomorrow; with
such random shifts of function does Genghis Mao contrive to confuse the
faceless assassins he so vividly dreads.
  "Shadrach Mordecai to serve the Khan," Mordecai says in a clear firm
voice into what he hopes is today's audio pickup.
   Interface Three, now emitting a gentle hum, subjects Mordecai's
announcement to voiceprint analysis. At the same time, Mordecai's body
is being checked for thermal output, mass, postural stress, olfactory
texture, and much more. If any datum should fall beyond the established
Mordecai-norm, he could find himself immobilized by loops of suddenly
spurting webfoam while the guards are summoned to investigate;
resistance at that point might lead to his immediate destruction. Five of
these interfaces protect the five entrances to Chairman Genghis Mao's
chambers, and they are the wiliest doors ever devised. Daedalus himself
could not have forged more clever barriers to guard King Minos.
   In a microsecond Mordecai is recognized to be himself, rather than
some cunning lifelike simulacrum on a king-slaying errand. With a
smooth hiss of perfectly machined joints and a gentle nimble of flawless
bearings the interface's outer slab glides open. This admits the doctor to a
stone-walled inner holding chamber hardly larger than himself. No
welcome vestibule for claustrophobes, this. Here he must halt another
microsecond while the entire surveillance is repeated, and only after he
passes this second muster is he allowed to enter the imperial residence
proper.
   "Redundancy," Chairman Genghis Mao has declared, "is our main
avenue of survival." Mordecai agrees. The intricate business of crossing
these interfaces is a trifle to him, part of the normal order of the universe,
no more bothersome than the need to turn a key in a lock. The room just
on the far side of Interface Three is a cavernous sphere known as
Surveillance Vector One. It is, in a literal sense, Genghis Mao's window on
the world. Here a dazzling array of screens, each five square meters in
area, rises in overwhelming tiers from floor to ceiling, offering a constantly
shifting panorama of televised images relayed from thousands of spy-eyes
everywhere on the planet. No great public building is without its secret
eyes; scanners look down on all major streets; a corps of government
engineers is constantly employed in shifting the cameras from place to
place and in installing new ones in previously unspied-upon places. Nor
are all the eyes in fixed positions. So many spy-satellites streak through
the nearer reaches of space that if their orbits were turned to silk they
would swathe the earth in a dense cocoon. At the center of Surveillance
Vector One is a grand control panel by means of which the Khan, sitting
for hours at a time in an elegant thronelike seat, is able to control the flow
of data from all these eyes, calling in signals with quick flutters of his
fingertips so that he may look at will into the doings of Tokyo and
Bangkok, New York and Moscow, Buenos Aires and Cairo. So sharp is the
resolution of the Khan's myriad lenses that they can show Genghis Mao
the color of a man's eyes at a distance of five kilometers.
   When the Chairman is not making use of Surveillance Vector One, the
hundreds of screens continue to function without interruption as the
master mechanism sucks in data randomly from the innumerable pickup
points. Images come and go, sometimes flitting across a screen in a
second or two, sometimes lingering to provide consecutive sequences
many minutes in length. Shadrach Mordecai, since he must pass through
this room every morning on his way to his master, has formed the habit of
pausing for a few minutes to watch the gaudy, dizzying stream of pictures.
Privately he refers to this daily interlude as "Checking the Trauma Ward,"
the Trauma Ward being Mordecai's secret name for the world in general,
that great vale of sorrow and bodily corruption.
  He stands in mid-room now, observing the world's griefs.
   The flow is jerkier than usual today; whatever giant computer operates
this system is in a twitchy mood, it seems, its commands moving restlessly
from eye to eye, and pictures wink on and off in a frenzied way. Still, there
are isolated flashes of clarity. A limping woebegone dog moves slowly
down a dirt-choked street. A big-eyed, big-bellied Negroid child stands
naked in a dust-swept ravine, gnawing her thumb and crying. A
sag-shouldered old woman, carrying carefully wrapped bundles through
the cobbled plaza of some mellow European city, gasps and clutches at her
chest, letting her packages tumble as she falls. A parched Oriental-faced
man with wispy white beard and tiny green skullcap emerges from a shop,
coughs, and spits blood. A crowd—Mexicans? Japanese?—gathers around
two boys dueling with carving knives; their arms and chests are bright
with red cuts. Three children huddle on the roof of a torn-away house
rushing swiftly downstream on the white-flecked gray breast of a flooding
river. A hawk-faced beggar stretches forth an accusing clawlike hand. A
young dark-haired woman kneels at a curb, bowed double in pain, head
touching the pavement, while two small boys look on. A speeding
automobile veers crazily from a highway and vanishes in a bushy gulley.
Surveillance Vector One is like some vast tapestry of hundreds of
compartments, each with a story to tell, a fragmentary story, tantalizing,
defying comprehension. Out there in the world, out in the great big wide
Trauma Ward that is the world, the two billion subjects of Genghis II Mao
IV Khan are dying hour by hour, despite the best efforts of the Permanent
Revolutionary Committee. Nothing new about that—everyone who has
ever lived has died hour by hour all through his life—but the modes of
death are different in these years following the Virus War; death seems
ever so much more immediate when so many people are so conspicuously
rotting within all at once; and the general decay out there is that much
more poignant because there are these innumerable eyes to see it in its
totality. The scanners of the Khan capture everything, making no
comment, offering no judgment, merely filling these walls with a
staggering, baffling portrait of the revised postwar
early-twenty-first-century version of the human condition.
   The room is a touchstone of character, drawing revealing responses
from every viewer. To Mordecai the whirling stream of scenes is
fascinating and repelling, a crazy mosaic of decomposition and defeat,
courage and endurance; he loves and pities the sufferers who flash so
quickly across the screens, and if he could he would embrace them all—lift
that old woman to her feet, put coins in the beggar's gnarled hand, stroke
that child's distended belly. But Mordecai is, by inclination and
profession, a healer. To others the brutal theater that is Surveillance
Vector One serves only as a reminder of their own good fortune: how wise
of them it was to attain high governmental rank and steady supplies of the
Roncevic Antidote, to enjoy the favor of Chairman Genghis Mao and live
free of pain and hunger and organ-rot, insulated from the nightmare of
real life! To others the screens are unbearable, arousing not a sense of
smug superiority but rather a feeling of intolerable guilt that they should
be here, safe, while they are out there. And to others the screens are
merely boring: they show dramas without plot, transactions without
discernible purpose, tragedies without moral significance, mere stray
snatches of life's scratchy fabric. What Genghis Mao's own reactions to
Surveillance Vector One may be is impossible to determine, for the Khan
is, in this as in so many other things, wholly inscrutable as he manipulates
the controls. But he does spend hours in there. Somehow the room feeds
him. Shadrach Mordecai takes his time this morning, giving the huge
room five minutes, eight, ten. Genghis Mao still sleeps, after all. The
implanted monitors tell Mordecai that. In this world no one escapes
surveillance; while the many eyes of Genghis Mao scan the globe, the
slumbering Khan is himself scanned by his physician. Mordecai, standing
quite motionless beside the Chairman's upholstered throne, receives a
flood of data within and without, Genghis Mao's metabolic output
twanging and tweaking the doctor's implants, the flowing shimmer of the
screens assailing his eyes. He starts to leave, but just then a screen high up
and to his left shows him a glimpse of what is certainly Philadelphia,
unmistakably Philadelphia, and he halts, riveted. His native city: he was a
Bicentennial baby, entering the world in Ben Franklin's own town, coming
forth high up in Hahnemann Hospital when the United States of America
was four months short of its two hundredth birthday. And there is
Philadelphia now, turning in the gyre of some ineffably keen
satellite-mounted eye; the familiar childhood totems, City Hall,
Independence Hall, Penn Center, Christ Church. It is years since he last
was there. For a decade now, Shadrach Mordecai has lived in Mongolia.
Once it was hard for him to believe that there really was such a place as
Mongolia, fabled land of Prester John and Genghis Khan, but by this time
it is Philadelphia that has started to seem a place of fable to him. And the
United States of America? Do those syllables still have meaning? Who
could imagine that the Constitution of Jefferson and Madison would be
forgotten, and America pledge allegiance to a Mongol overlord? But that
overstates the case: America, Mordecai knows, is governed like all other
nations by a local wing of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, that
alliance of radical and reactionary groups functioning through a series of
vestigial quasi-democratic institutions; and the aged recluse Genghis Mao
is merely the Chairman of the Committee, a remote and semimythical
figure who governs indirectly and has no immediate consequence in the
daily lives of Dr. Mordecai's former countrymen. Probably no one in
America pauses to consider Genghis Mao the embodiment of the
authority of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, and thus the true
master of the body politic, any more than one considers the chairman of
the board of the local electric company to be the source and controller of
the power that flows when the switch is thrown. But he is. Not that many
Americans would be disturbed to learn that they owed fealty to a Mongol.
The whole world has abdicated; the game of politics is ended; Genghis
Mao rules by default, rules because no one cares, because in an exhausted,
shattered world dying of organ-rot, there is general relief that someone,
anyone, is willing to play the role of global dictator.
   Philadelphia vanishes from the screen and is replaced by an idyllic
tropical scene, pink-white half-moon beach, feathery palm fronds,
flowering hibiscus in scarlet and yellow, no people in view. Mordecai
shrugs and moves on.
   The imperial chambers are circular in layout, occupying the entire top
story of the Grand Tower of the Khan except for the five wedge-shaped
apartments, such as the one where Mordecai lives, that notch into the
suite equidistantly around its rim. As the doctor crosses Surveillance
Vector One he comes to three massive doorways, spaced some eight
meters apart along the side of the room farthest from the interface
through which he entered. The left-hand doorway leads to the bedroom of
Genghis Mao, but Mordecai does not take it—best to let the Chairman
have all the sleep he needs, today—nor does he choose the central doorway,
which goes to the Chairman's private office. Instead he approaches the
right-hand doorway, the one that opens into the room known as
Committee Vector One, through which he must pass to reach his own
office.
   He waits briefly while the door scans and approves him. All the inner
rooms of the imperial suite are divided one from another by such
impermeable barriers, smaller in scope than the main doors at the five
interfaces but similarly suspicious: no one is allowed to range freely here
from room to room. After a moment the door grants him entry to
Committee Vector One. This is a large, brightly lit room, spherical like all
the major rooms of Genghis Mao's suite. It occupies the physical center of
the apartment, the locus around which all else turns, and in a less literal
sense it is the nerve center of the planetary governing structure, the
Permanent Revolutionary Committee. Here, day and night, arrive urgent
communiques from Committee cadres in every city; and here, day and
night. Committee potentates sit in front of intricate switchboards
glistening with terminals, making policy and communicating it to the
lesser satraps in the outer provinces. All applications for Roncevic
Antidote treatments are routed through this room; all requests for organ
transplants, regeneration therapy, and other vital medical services are
considered in Committee Vector One; all jurisdictional disputes within the
regional Committee leadership are settled here according to the principles
of centripetal depolarization, Genghis Mao's chief philosophical gift to
humanity. Shadrach Mordecai is not a political man and he has little
concern with the events that take place in Committee Vector One, but
since the floor plan of the building requires him to cross the room many
times a day, he does occasionally pause to observe the bureaucrats at their
labors, the way he might stop to examine the behavior of bizarre insects in
a crumbling log.
  Not much seems to be going on here now. At times of high crisis all
twelve of the switchboard seats are occupied, and Genghis Mao himself,
seated at his own elaborate desk at the very center of everything, fiercely
manipulating his formidable battery of sophisticated communications
devices, directs the course of strategy. But these are quiet days. The only
conspicuous crisis in the world is the one in the Chairman's liver, and that
will soon be remedied. For weeks now Genghis Mao has not bothered to
take up his post in Committee Vector One, preferring to discharge his
sovereign responsibilities from his smaller private office adjoining his
bedroom. And only three of the switch-boards are in use this morning,
operated by weary-looking vice-chairmen, one male and two female, who
yawn and slouch as they take incoming messages and formulate
appropriate replies.
   Mordecai is halfway across the room and walking briskly when someone
calls his name. He turns and sees Mangu, the heir-apparent to Genghis
Mao, heading toward him from the direction of the Chairman's private
office.
  "Do they operate on the Khan today?" Mangu asks worriedly.
  Mordecai says, nodding, "In about three hours."
   Mangu frowns. He is a sleek, handsome young Mongol, unusually tall for
his kind, nearly as tall as Mordecai himself.
  His face is round; his features are symmetrical and pleasing; his eyes
are bright and alert. At the moment he seems tense, jangled,
  "Will it go well, Shadrach? Are there any risks?"
   "Don't worry. You won't become Khan today. It's only a liver transplant,
after all."
  "Only!"
  "Genghis Mao's had plenty of those."
 "But how much more surgery can he stand? Genghis Mao is an old
man."
  "Better not let him hear you say that!"
   "He's probably listening right this minute," says Mangu casually. Some
of the tension goes from him. He grins. "The Khan never takes what I say
seriously, anyway. I believe he sometimes thinks I'm a bit of a fool."
   Mordecai smiles guardedly. He also sometimes thinks Mangu is a bit of
a fool, and perhaps more than a bit. He remembers Dr. Crowfoot of
Project Avatar, Nikki Crowfoot, his Nikki with whom he would have spent
this past night but for Genghis Mao's operation, telling him months ago of
the dismal fate reserved for Mangu. Mordecai knows, as Mangu almost
certainly does not, that Genghis Mao plans to be his own successor,
through the vehicle of Mangu's strong, healthy young body. If Project
Avatar is carried to a successful conclusion, and the auguries are favorable
for it, the fine sturdy figure of Mangu will indeed someday sit upon the
throne of Genghis Mao, but Mangu himself won't be there to enjoy the
occasion. To Mordecai, anyone who marches as blithely toward his own
destruction as Mangu is doing, perceiving nothing, suspecting nothing,
fearing nothing, is a fool and worse than a fool.
  "Where will you be during the operation?" Mordecai asks.
  Mangu gestures broadly toward the main command desk of Committee
Vector One. "Over there, pretending to run the show."
  "Pretending?"
  "You know there are many things I still have to learn, Shadrach. I'm not
going to be ready to take over for years. That's why I wish he wouldn't
undergo all these transplants."
  "He doesn't do it for the exercise," Mordecai says. "The present liver's
been failing for weeks. It's got to come out. But I tell you: don't worry."
    Mangu smiles and grips Mordecai's forearm for a brief, affectionate,
surprisingly painful squeeze. "I won't. I have faith in you, Shadrach. In the
whole medical team that keeps the Khan alive. Let me know the moment
it's over, will you?"
 He strides away, toward the main command post, to play at being
monarch of the world.
   Mordecai shakes his head. Mangu is an attractive figure, genial and
charming and even charismatic. In a dark time lit only by ghastly jagged
flashes of nightmare-light, Mangu is something of a popular hero. In the
past ten months or so he has become the Chairman's public surrogate,
appearing in Genghis Mao's place at formal functions, dam dedications,
Committee congresses and the like, and the dashing, gallant
prince-in-waiting, so disarming, so unpretentious, so accessible to the
populace, is beloved in a way that Genghis Mao never has been, never for
an instant. Those who have observed Mangu at close range are aware that
he is essentially a hollow man, all image and no substance, shallow and
plump-souled, an amiable athlete living an implausible charade; but
though Mangu is trivial, he is far from contemptible, and Mordecai feels
genuine compassion for him. Poor Mangu, fretting over the possibility
that he might succeed the Khan this day, with his apprenticeship not yet
finished! Does it ever occur to Mangu that he will never—not in a year, not
in ten years, not in a thousands—be a fit successor to Genghis Mao, that
he is fundamentally incapable of wielding the terrible power which he is
ostensibly being groomed to inherit? Apparently not. Or else Mangu,
knowing his own limits, would gave begun to wonder what plan Genghis
Mao really had for him, why the Chairman had picked as his successor a
mere handsome boy, his own opposite in all important respects. To train
him to be supreme sovereign? No. No. To be a puppet, merely; to dance
before the people and win their love. And then, one day, to have his
identity scooped out and thrown away, so that his body might become a
dwelling for the wily mind and dark soul of Genghis Mao, when the
Chairman's own ancient patched hull can no longer be repaired. Poor
Mangu. Mordecai shivers. He hurries on into his own office, closes the
door, seals it.
  There is a sudden sharp twanging in his left thigh, close to the hip, the
place where he receives Genghis Mao's cerebral output. Four rooms away,
the Khan is awakening.



                                     2

   Mordecai's office is an island of tranquility for him within the
tumultuous intensity of life atop the Grand Tower of the Khan. The room,
a sphere ten meters in diameter, has many entrances, but they are
programmed to open only for himself or Genghis Mao. One is the door
through which he has just come, out of Committee Vector One. Another
goes to the Khan's private dining room, and another, on the far side, to a
seldom-used heavy-insulation study known as the Khan's Retreat. The last
door is Interface Five, connecting the doctor's office to the two-story-high
Surgery that occupies one of the five outer wedges of the tower.
   In the sanctuary of his office Shadrach Mordecai enjoys a few moments
of peace before proceeding on his voyage into the turmoils of the day.
Though Genghis Mao is up, there is no need to hurry. Mordecai's implants
tell him—by now, he can equate every trifling inner signal with some
concrete aspect of the Khan's activities—that the imperial servitors have
entered Genghis Mao's bedchamber, have helped the Khan to his feet, are
walking him through the series of mild arm-swinging chest-stretching
exercises that the old man, at Dr. Mordecai's insistence, performs every
morning. Next they will bathe him, then they will shave him, finally they
will dress him and bring him forth. Though there will be no breakfast for
Genghis Mao today, because of the impending operation, Shadrach
Mordecai has at least an hour before he must attend the Khan.
  Simply being in the office buoys him. The dark, rich paneling, the
subdued lighting, the curving uncluttered desk of strange exotic woods,
the splendid bookcase of crystalline rods and thin travertine slabs in
which he keeps his priceless library of classic medical texts, the elegant
armoires that house his extensive collection of antique medical
instruments—it is an ideal environment for him, a perfect enclosure for
the doctor he would like to be and occasionally is able to believe he is, the
master of the Hippocratic arts, the prince of healers, the preserver and
prolonger of life. Not that this room is a place for the practice of medicine.
The only medical tools here are ancient ones, romantic and quaint
apparatus, odd beakers and scalpels and lancets, bloodletting knives and
cauterizing irons, ophthalmoscopes and defibrillators, early and
inaccurate anatomical models, chirurgical saws, sphygmomanometers,
electrical invigorators, flasks of discredited antitoxins, trephines,
microtomes, relics of more innocent times. He has acquired these things
eagerly in the past five years, by way of establishing his professional
kinship with the great physicians of yesterday. The books, too, rare and
auspicious, landmarks of medical history, talismans of scientific progress:
the Fabrica of Vesalius, De Motu Cordis of Harvey, Boerhaave's
Institutiones, Laennec on auscultation, Beaumont on digestion—with what
joy be has collected them, with what reverence he has fondled them! Not
without some guilt, too, for in this battered and deflated era it is all too
easy for those few who have power and wealth to take advantage of those
who have not; and Mordecai, so close to the throne, has accumulated his
treasures cheaply, catching them as they slip from the grasp of older,
unluckier, perhaps more worthy possessors. Still, had these things not
descended to him they might have been lost altogether in the chaos that
surges freely through the world beyond the Grand Tower of the Khan.
   Mordecai's actual medical work is done elsewhere, in the Surgery
beyond Interface Five, which serves not only for actual surgical operations
but also for any other medical attention Genghis Mao may need.
Mordecai's office is a place for research and reflection only. Just to the
right of his desk are keyboards, compact data terminals, giving him
instant access to entire libraries of medical knowledge; he need only touch
a finger to a key or even speak a coded word, cite symptomata, facies,
tentative diagnosis, and back will come, in neatly codified form, extracts
from the accumulated scientific wisdom of the eons, the relevant distillate
of everything from the Smith Papyrus and Hippocrates and Galen down
through the latest findings of the microbiologists and immunologists and
endocrinologists who labor in the laboratories of the Khan. It is all here:
encephalitis and endocarditis, gastritis and gout, nephritis, nephrosis,
neuroma, nystagmus, aspergillosis and bilharzia, uremia and
xanthochromia, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Time
was when doctors were shamans in feathers and paint, bravely pounding
drums to frighten away frightening demons, doing solitary battle against
unfathomable causes and unaccountable effects, gamely piercing veins
and ventilating skulls, grubbing for roots and leaves of purely magical
merit. Alone against the dark spirits of disease, no guide but one's stock of
inherited supernatural lore and one's intuition. And now! Here! The
answer machine! A touch of the finger and behold: etiology, pathology,
symptomatology, pharmacology, contraindications, prophylaxis,
prognosis, sequelae, the whole miraculous scroll of diagnosis and
treatment and cure and convalescence unrolling at a command! In
moments of lull Shadrach Mordecai enjoys testing his wits against the
computer, setting hypothetical problems for himself, postulating
symptoms and proposing diagnoses; he is eleven years out of Harvard
Medical School and still a student, ever a student.
  Today allows few lulls. He swings to his left and taps out the telephone
number of the Surgery. "Warhaftig," he says crisply.
   A moment, and there the screen shows the flat, homely face of Nicholas
Warhaftig, surgeon to the Khan, veteran of a hundred critical transplant
operations. The camera picks up a sweeping view of the operating room
behind him, boards glittering with measuring dials and control panels, the
laser bank, the anesthesiologist's spidery maze of needles and tubes and
pipes, and, only partly visible, the main surgical stage itself, dais and bed
and lights and instruments, white linens and dazzling chrome-steel
fixtures, everything awaiting the imperial patient.
  "The Khan's awake," Mordecai says.
  "We're on schedule, than," says Warhaftig.
  He is sixty years old, silver-haired, phlegmatic. He was already the
supreme organ-transplant man when Shadrach Mordecai was an
idol-worshipping undergraduate, and though Mordecai is technically his
superior on Genghis Mao's staff now, there is no doubt in either man's
mind about which one of them actually holds the greater professional
authority. This makes their relationship an uncomfortable one for
Mordecai.
  Warhaftig says, "Will you get him to me by 0900 sharp?"
  "I'll try."
  "Try hard," Warhaftig replies dryly, mouth quirking. "We begin
perfusion at 0915. The liver's still on ice, but coordinating defrost is
always tricky. How's he feeling?"
  "As usual. The strength of ten men."
  "Can you give me quick readings on blood glucose and fibrinogen
production?"
  "A moment," Mordecai says. Those are not factors on which he receives
direct telemetering from Genghis Mao's body; but he has become skillful
in deducing hundreds of the Chairman's lesser body functions from clues
given by the main metabolic responses. He says shortly, "Glucose doing
fine, within the expected reduced levels caused by the general hepatic
necrosis. It's harder to get the fibrinogen reading, but my feeling is that all
the plasma proteins are on the low side. Probably the fibrinogen not as
bad as the heparin."
  "And bile?"
  "Off sharply since Friday. Down some more this morning. No critical
breakdowns of any function yet."
   "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 sü sser 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.



                                      3

   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.
  She smiles tenderly. "Did you sleep well, Shadrach?" Her strength, and
the strength of her concern for him, radiates glowingly from the screen.
She is a stalwart woman, an athlete, a huntress, tawny-skinned,
big-breasted, nearly 190 centimeters tall, with a strong heavy-boned face,
wide-set eyes, wide-lipped mouth, assertive high-bridged nose. Her
parents on both sides were Amerindians, Navajo mother, detribalized
Assiniboin father. She and Shadrach Mordecai have been lovers for four
months, friends for more than a year. Mordecai hopes Genghis Mao knows
nothing of their affair, but he suspects it is a naive hope.
  He says, "I slept well for a while, anyway."
  "Worrying about the Chairman's operation?"
  "I suppose. Or, maybe just worrying in general."
  "I could have helped you relax," she says with a sly grin.
   "Probably you could. But I've always abstained the night before the
Chairman undergoes surgery. Like a prizefighter, like an opera singer. To
keep the concentration absolutely clear, the mind unblurred. I know it's
silly, Nikki, but it's something I do."
  "All right. All right. I was only teasing. Anyway, we can make up for it
tonight."
  "Tonight, yes. Or this afternoon. We'll have him off the table by 0230
hours. How would you like to take the tunnel to Karakorum with me?"
   Nikki Crowfoot sighs. "Can't. Don't tempt me. Critical tests this
afternoon. Do you want to hear my report?"
   Dr. Crowfoot's work overlaps, in some respects, both the other projects,
for Project Avatar's goal is to develop a personality-transfer technique that
will permit Genghis Mao—his soul, his spirit, his persona, his anima, but
no actual physical part of him—to move to another, younger body. Like
Project Talos, Avatar strives to reduce the patterns of Genghis Mao's
mental responses to digital—therefore programmable, therefore
reproducible—codings; like Project Phoenix, Avatar intends to give the
Chairman a new and healthy body in which to dwell. But where Talos
would house the digital-coded analogue of Genghis Mao in a mechanical
construct. Avatar would use a real body of flesh and blood; and where
Phoenix would give the Chairman new vitality by rejuvenating his own
body, Avatar would place him in one formerly inhabited by someone else,
specifically Mangu. On the one hand Crowfoot's project would avoid the
inhumanity of creating a robot Khan, on the other it would sidestep the
problem of brain-cell deterioration by instilling the intangible and
abstract essence of Genghis Mao in a young and vigorous brain. Despite
the areas of overlap, the three projects conduct their research altogether
independently of one another, and no attempts are made at exchanges of
ideas. Redundancy, after all, is our main avenue of survival.
   Shadrach Mordecai, because he is privy to the work of all three, is
perhaps the only one who really knows where they stand in relation to one
another. He knows that Katya Lindman's team is attempting something
that is probably hopeless—instilling the soul of a man into a machine will
not produce a convincing and politically viable duplicate of the original,
machines ordinarily being incapable of transcending their
machinehood—and that Irayne Sarafrazi' s group, though it is pursuing
the most plausible route toward giving Genghis Mao the eternal life he
hungers for, is destined to be blocked by the apparently insoluble
brain-decay difficulty. He knows, too, that Nikki Crowfoot's approach to
personality coding has been more fruitful than Lindman's, and that in a
matter of months it may be possible for the scientists of Project Avatar to
infuse the essence of Genghis Mao like a pervasive coating of paint over
the mind of a donor body whose previous occupant has been obliterated
by electroencephalographic mindpick techniques. Poor Mangu. Poor
hopeful tragic princeling, destined to be nothing better than a tabula
rasa for the Khan.
   Mangu's fate will not be long delayed. Mordecai listens in chilly
fascination to Nikki's recitation of the latest wonders. They have reached
the stage where they can code the souls of animals, abstracting from them
the unique electrical patterns of their minds, transforming those
waveforms into numbers, using the numbers to replicate the electrical
patterns within the brains of donor beasts. They have coded a rooster and
pumped its soul into a mindpicked hawk; hawk no longer flies, but runs
cock-a-doodling around the chicken coop, clumsily fluttering its
magnificent wings and crazily mounting the terrified hens. They have
coded a gibbon and housed its mind in a gorilla's body; gorilla has turned
berserkly arboreal, brachiating in wild desperation through the treetops,
while its evicted gorilla-essence now resides within a former gibbon that
struts ponderously at ground level, leaning on its flexed knuckles and
pausing occasionally to pound its scrawny chest. And so on, and so on;
they are getting ready to attempt the first human transfers, within a
matter of weeks. Mordecai does not ask Crowfoot where she intends to
obtain her experimental subjects. There are confusing problems of ethics
as it is in this whole business of serving Genghis Mao; he would rather not
load his conscience with his beloved's deeds.
  "Call me when the operation's over," Nikki Crowfoot tells him
  "Won't that interrupt your critical tests?"
  "Not critically. Call me. I'll see you tonight."
  "Tonight, yes," Shadrach says faintly.
  The time is 0855 hours. He must convey Genghis Mao now to the
Surgery.



                                       4

    The liver, the body's largest gland, is a useful and complex organ
weighing a kilogram and a half—about two percent of the total body
weight —that performs hundreds of significant biochemical functions. The
liver produces bile, a green liquid essential to digestion. Through the liver
passes exhausted venous blood en route to the heart, blood which the liver
filters to remove bacteria, poisons, drugs, and other noxious impurities.
To the blood the liver adds the plasma proteins it manufactures, among
them the clotting agent fibrinogen and the anticoagulant heparin. From
the blood the liver takes sugar, which it converts to glycogen and stores
until the body's energy needs require it. The liver is responsible also for
the conversion of fats and proteins into carbohydrates, the storage of
fat-soluble vitamins, the manufacture of antibodies, the destruction of
outworn red blood cells, and much else.
  So many metabolic purposes does the liver serve that no vertebrate can
survive more than a few hours without one. So central is it to life that it
has extraordinary regenerative powers: if three quarters of the liver is
removed, the remaining cells will multiply so rapidly that the gland will
regain its original dimensions within two months. Even if ninety percent
of the liver is destroyed, it continues to produce bile at the normal rate.
Redundancy is our main avenue of survival. Nevertheless the liver is
subject to many dysfunctions—the various jaundices, the various necroses,
septicemia, dysenteric abscesses, cancer of the bile passages, and so forth.
The liver's totipotence enables it to withstand such dysfunctions for
prolonged periods, but its powers of recuperation diminish, like most
other things, with age.
  Genghis Mao suffers from chronic liver trouble. To sustain his life and
the life of the assorted artificial and transplanted organs within him, the
Chairman must pour oceans of medication through his system each day,
and even the most durable of livers would be hard pressed to handle the
constant assault of high-powered chemicals it is asked to filter from
Genghis Mao's bloodstream. Then, too, the presence of so many alien
organs sets up biochemical interaction phenomena within the body that
the liver must counteract, and the strain is telling. The Chairman's
beleaguered liver is in a perpetually morbid state, aggravated by his great
age and the unnatural intricacy of his composite internal structure, and
periodically it must be replaced. That time has again come.
   Two burly aides lift Genghis Mao's short, slight figure onto a gurney
and the familiar trip from the imperial bedchamber to the operating table
commences. The Khan is cheerful, feverish and frail and beady-eyed
though he looks; he nods and winks to the aides as they position him,
telling them that he is comfortable; he chuckles, he even essays a quip or
two. Mordecai is astounded, as always, by the Khan's incredible calmness
at such a moment, as evidenced by the telemetered data reaching his
implanted sensors. Surely Genghis Mao knows that there is a significant
chance of his dying during the operation, but his somatic output registers
no apparent awareness of that—as though the Chairman's spirit is so
neatly balanced between love of life and hunger for death that it floats in
perfect metabolic equilibrium. At any rate Shadrach is much less relaxed
than his employer, perhaps because he regards the risks of a liver
transplant operation as distinctly nontrivial and is far from ready to
confront the personal uncertainties of a post-Genghis Mao world.
   On silent pneumatic treads the gurney bearing the Chairman glides
from the imperial bedchamber to the imperial office, thence via the
private dining room into Shadrach Mordecai's office, and—after an
eternity of suspicious scanning—through Interface Five into the Surgery.
This is a magnificent tetrahedral enclosure extending through the
uppermost two stories of the Grand Tower of the Khan and subtending
some thirty degrees of arc along the skin of the elongated conical building.
A cruciform cluster of chromed fixtures at the room's summit floods it
with brilliant but not glaring light. A platform midway between floor and
ceiling juts from the wall opposite the interface, dividing the great room
almost in half on its far side, and atop this platform rests the dazzling
aseptic transparent bubble within which the actual surgery is performed;
beneath the platform that supports the bubble is the surgical stage's
environment-support apparatus: a huge sinister hooded cube of dull green
metal, housing what Mordecai imagines to be pumps, filters, heating
ducts, reservoirs of sterilizing chemicals, humidifiers, and other
equipment. On the other side of the room is a ziggurat of supplementary
machinery rising step by step on smooth blue-green benches for some
thirty meters—a squat brick-colored power unit at the bottom, an array of
metering devices, an autoclave, a laser bank, the anesthesia console, a
camera boom and associated playback screens to enable consulting
doctors to follow the events inside the bubble, and much other materiel,
some of it wholly baffling to Mordecai.
   He does not need to understand what functions all this equipment
serves. He will perform no actual surgery. His role in the operation is as
part of the auxiliary equipment—for, with his capability to monitor,
evaluate, and report on the moment-by-moment physiological changes
within Genghis Mao's body, he is a kind of supercomputer, far more
supple and perceptive than any medical machine could be. The
Chairman's condition will, of course, be monitored by the usual machinery
as well (redundancy is our main avenue . . .) but Shadrach, standing at
Warhaftig's elbow and receiving direct bulletins from the Khan's interior,
will be able to interpret and recommend with an intuitive and deductive
wisdom that no machine could attempt. He is neither flattered nor
insulted by his function as a supercomputer: it is merely what he is here to
do. The gurney waddles onto the operating stage and positions itself next
to the table. The table's own octopuslike, power-driven, glittering steel
arms, extending telescopically, embrace Genghis Mao, lift him, and make
the transfer; the gurney marches away. Mordecai, Warhaftig, and
Warhaftig's two assistants, all properly scrubbed and gowned, enter the
aseptic bubble; it is sealed behind them and will not open again until the
operation is over. Now a soft hissing: the atmosphere of the bubble is
being withdrawn and replaced by a surgically clean environment.
  Genghis Mao, supine but still conscious and in high spirits, darts
bright, keen glances everywhere, alertly observing each phase of the
preparations. The assistants lay bare the Chairman's small hard
torso—Genghis Mao is light-framed but muscular, with little
subcutaneous fat and sparse body hair; the fine scars of innumerable
operations crisscross his yellow-bronze skin—and begin the laborious
process of connecting the terminals of the monitoring devices. Warhaftig
thoughtfully palpates the Khan's abdomen and adjusts the cutting angle of
the surgical laser. The anesthesiologist, whose post is outside the bubble,
runs off preliminary acupuncture combinations on his keyboard. "Hook
up the perfusion," Warhaftig mutters absently to Shadrach Mordecai, who
is pleased to have something to do.
   Since Genghis Mao will be liverless for four to six hours, an artificial
liver must be used to sustain him during the operation. But no wholly
artificial liver has ever been perfected, not even now, after more than fifty
years of organ-transplant technology. The squat cubical device Warhaftig
employs is a mechano-organic composite: pipes, tubes, pumps, and
electrodialytic filters keep the patient's blood properly pure, but the basic
biochemical functions of the liver, having thus far proven impossible to
duplicate mechanically, are performed by the naked liver of a dog, resting
in a bath of warm fluid at the core of the apparatus. Mordecai deftly slides
two needles into Genghis Mao's upper arm, one tapping a vein, the other
entering an artery. The arterial line seems to encounter some resistance
and Shadrach hesitates. The Chairman winks. This is old stuff to him. "Go
ahead," he murmurs. "I'm all right." Mordecai completes the hookup and
nods to an assistant. Shortly the Chairman's blood is traveling toward the
dialyzing coils, perfusing thereafter through the moist red lobes of the
canine liver, and returning to the Chairman's body. Shadrach keeps
careful check on Genghis Mao's telemeter reports: fine, fine, everything
fine. "Immunosuppressives," Warhaftig orders. For several weeks, in
anticipation of the operation, Mordecai has been dosing the Khan with
antimetabolitic drugs, gradually raising the level in order to damp out
Genghis Mao's normal graft-rejecting immune response. By now the
Khan's antigenic structure has been so weakened that the chance of a
graft rejection is slight, but no risks will be run: Genghis Mao receives a
last jolt of antimetabolites now, as well as a dose of corticosteroids, and an
aide outside the bubble activates a node that will irradiate the blood
passing through the liver-surrogate, thus destroying the
rejection-inducing lymphocyte corpuscles. Redundancy, redundancy, ever
redundancy! The Khan's heart beats strongly. Everything is at normal
throb, Mordecai perceives: blood pressure, pulse, body temperature,
peristaltic rhythm, muscle tonus, pupil dilation, muscular reflexes.
"Anesthesia," Warhaftig says.
   The anesthesiologist, perched high on the far wall at the keyboard of an
instrument more complicated than a concert synthesizer, begins his
virtuoso performance. A touch of his sensitive fingertips and the shining
retractable claws of the operating table unfold and hover over the
Chairman's body. The anesthesiologist seeks the acupuncture points,
maneuvering the claws into place by remote control, probing with little
sonic blurts until he finds the precise conduits of neural energy; when he
has arranged his metal fingers to his satisfaction, he activates the
ultrasonic generators and beams of sonic force rush from the hovering
fingers into the Khan's relaxed, motionless body. No acupuncture needles
penetrate Genghis Mao, merely a laminar flow of high-frequency sound
entering the acupuncture meridians. Warhaftig, using epidermal
electrodes, tests the Khan's reactions, confers with the anesthesiologist,
tests again, asks Mordecai for a reading, runs a deeper test, gets no wince
of pain from Genghis Mao. The steel digits of the sonipuncture equipment
sparkle in the bright light of the operating chamber; they surround
Genghis Mao like the bristly organs of insects, palps or stings or
ovipositors. Genghis Mao never permits a general anesthetic to be
administered to him—loss of consciousness is too much like death—and
Warhaftig dislikes all chemical anesthetics, general or local, so
sonipuncture is the method of choice both for doctor and for patient. Fully
conscious still, terrifyingly alert, Genghis Mao offers reports on his
deepening loss of sensation. At last Warhaftig and the anesthesiologist
deem the process complete.
  "We begin now," the surgeon declares.
   There is a momentary dip in the illumination as all surgical devices and
support systems are activated at once. Mordecai imagines a throb passing
through the entire building under the sudden power demand. To the left
of the operating table is the perfusion machine, quietly pumping blood
from Genghis Mao and forcing it through the dialysis coils. To the right
waits the new liver, which has been stored in an iced saline solution since
its removal from the donor and now is being bathed by warm fluids
bringing it to body temperature. Warhaftig checks his laser bank one last
time and, with a quick jab of a long bony finger against the control stud,
causes a flash of dazzling purple light to leap forth and cut a thin red
incision in Genghis Mao's abdomen. The Khan remains entirely
motionless. The surgeon glances at Shadrach, who says, "All systems
placid. Keep going."
  Deftly, Warhaftig slices deeper. As he makes each cut, scanners record
the epidermal stratifications down to the cellular level, so that all joins will
be perfect when the abdominal cavity is resealed. Bright steel retractors
move automatically into place to hold the widening incision. The Khan
watches the early phases with deep fascination, but, as his internal organs
are laid bare, he turns his head away and stares toward the domed ceiling.
Perhaps he finds the sight of his viscera frightening or repellent, Mordecai
thinks, but more likely the Chairman is merely bored with them, having
been cut open so many times.
   Now the dark diseased liver is visible, heavy, spongy, sullen in color.
Warhaftig, fingers moving like unerring spindles, clamps the arteries and
veins connected to it. With quick daredevil flicks of his laser scalpel he
severs the portal vein, the hepatic artery, the inferior vena cava, the
ligamentum teres, and the bile duct. "Done," he murmurs, and Genghis
Mao's third liver is lifted from his abdomen. Away for biopsy; the fourth
waits close by, large and plump and healthy, resting within a crystalline
jewel-case.
   The surgeon and his team commence the most taxing part of the
operation. Any pigsticker can make an incision, but only an artist can
execute perfect sutures. Warhaftig seals flesh to flesh with a different
laser, one that welds rather than cuts. Slowly, showing no sign of fatigue,
he connects the closed-off arteries, veins, and bile duct to the new liver.
Genghis Mao is limp, almost comatose now, eyes glazed, lips slack:
Shadrach Mordecai has seen this response before and understands it well.
It is a sign neither of exhaustion nor of shock. It is no more than a kind of
yogic exercise by which the Chairman disassociates himself from the
boredom of his long ordeal. His vital signs are still high, with a
preponderance of alpha rhythms in the cerebral output. Warhaftig toils
on. The liver has been installed. The Khan's pulse rate rises and corrective
measures must be taken, but this is to be expected; no cause for alarm.
Meticulously Warhaftig rejoins peritoneum and muscular layers and
dermis and epidermis, collaborating in this process with the computer
that feeds him the stratification data. Every join is flawless. Scar
formation will be minimal. Now the abdominal wall is closed. Warhaftig
steps back, cool, self-satisfied, and lesser beings take over. The transplant
has been accomplished in exactly five hours. Mordecai leans forward to
study Genghis Mao's face. The Chairman sleeps, so it would seem, facial
muscles relaxed, eyes quiescent, chest rising and falling evenly; but no, but
no, the mere shadow of Shadrach seems to register on the Khan's
consciousness, for his thin lips pull back in a frosty smile; his left eye
opens and performs an unmistakable wink.
  "Well, that's another one over with," Genghis Mao says, his voice firm
and clear.



                                      5

   And so, in early evening, the day's work done and his Hippocratic
responsibilities well discharged, it is off to Karakorum, the playground of
this weary world's ruling class, for Shadrach Mordecai, with Nikki
Crowfoot as his playmate. He picks her up three hours after the operation
in the Project Avatar laboratory on the seventh level of the Grand Tower of
the Khan. A great green-walled barn of a place it is, experimental animals
caged everywhere, crazy animals, cockadoodling hawks and tree-climbing
gorillas, and colossal banks of testing equipment wherever there are no
cages. There is a laboratory stink to the air down here, a stink Mordecai
remembers well from his Harvard Med days, a mix of Lysol and
formaldehyde and ethyl alcohol and mouse shit and Bunsen-burner fumes
and burned insulation and what-all else. Most of the Avatar staff has left
for the day, but Crowfoot, in gray lab smock and battered sandals, is busy
at a five-meter-high agglomeration of computers and playback heads and
television screens when he comes in. She stands with her back to the door,
watching pyrotechnic bursts of green, blue, and red erupt and wiggle
wildly across the face of a gigantic oscilloscope. Shadrach slips up behind
her and, sliding his hands under her arms, cups her breasts through the
smock. Her back goes rigid at the first touch of his fingers, but then she
relaxes immediately, and does not turn around.
  "Idiot," she says, but there is only affection in her voice. "Don't distract
me. I'm running a triple simulation. That's a real Genghis Mao tape down
there, the green, and the blue above it is our April seven
persona-construct, and—"
  "Forget it. Genghis Mao died on the table when we pulled his liver out.
The revolution started an hour ago. The city—"
  She squirms in his embrace, pulling around, staring wide-eyed at him,
aghast.
  "—is in flames, and if you listen you can hear the explosions where
they're blowing up the statues—"
  She sees his expression and begins to laugh, "Idiot! Idiot!"
  "Actually, he's doing fine, even though Warhaftig put the new liver in
upside down."
  "Stop it, Shadrach."
  "All right. He really is in good shape. He took ten minutes off to
recuperate and now he's leading Mongol-style square-dancing in
Committee Vector One."
  "Shadrach—"
  "I can't help it. I'm in my postoperative manic phase."
   "Well, I'm not. It's been a garbage day here." Indeed her depression is
obvious, once he slows down long enough to perceive it: her eyes are
strained, her face is tense, her shoulders are uncharacteristically slumped.
  "Your tests came out bad?"
   "We blew them altogether. Hit a feedback loop and wiped three key
tapes before we knew what was happening. I'm trying to salvage what's
left. We've been set back a month, a month and a half."
  "Poor Nikki. Is there any way I can help?"
  "Just get me out of here," she says. "Amuse me. Distract me. Make
funny faces. How did the operation go?"
  "Flawless. Warhaftig's a wizard. He could do a nuclear implant on an
amoeba with his thumbs and bring it off."
  "The great man rests well?"
   "Beautifully," Mordecai says. ''It's almost obscene, the way an
eighty-seven-year-old man bounces back from major surgery like this
every five or six weeks."
  "Is that what he is, eighty-seven?"
   Shadrach shrugs. "That's what the official figure is. There are stories
that he's older, perhaps a lot older, ninety, ninety-five, even past a
hundred, they say. Rumors that he served in World War II. What we're
talking about, of course, is the brain, the epidermal integument, and the
skeletal structure. The rest of him's been cobbled together relatively
recently out of fresh parts. A lung here, a kidney there, dacron arteries,
ceramic hip joints, a plastic esophagus, a molybdenum-chromium
shoulder, a new liver every few years—how it all hangs together I don't
know. But he just gets younger and younger, stronger and stronger, wilier
and wilier. You ought to hear his vital signs ticking away in here."
  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?"
   "Not especially. In fact, I always go out the evening after a transplant. A
little bonus I give myself after a hard day's work. If anything, it's a better
time for a Karakorum trip than most."
  "Why so?"
   "He's in an intensive-care support system tonight. If any complications
set in, alarms will go off all over the place and one of the low-echelon
medics will respond instantly. You know, my job doesn't require me to
hold the boss's hand twenty-five hours a day. It isn't needed and he doesn't
want it."
   Fireworks abruptly explode overhead. Wheels of gold and crimson,
spears coursing across the night. Shadrach imagines he sees the face of
Genghis Mao filling the sky, but no, but no, just self-deception, the pattern
is plainly abstract. Plainly.
  "If an emergency comes up, they'll summon you, won't they?" Nikki
asks.
   "They won't need to," Mordecai tells her. Out of the dream-death
pavilion comes a weird discordant music, bagpipes gone awry. He thinks
of Katya Lindman crooning in Swedish an hour before the dawn one
snowy night, and shivers. He pats his thigh where the implants are and
says, "I'm getting the full broadcast, remember?"
  "Even out here?"
   He nods. "The telemetering range is about a thousand kilometers. I'm
picking him up clearly right this minute. He's resting very comfortably,
dozing, I'd say, temperature about a degree above normal, pulse very
slightly high, new liver integrating itself nicely and already making
positive changes in his general metabolic state. If anything starts
deteriorating, I'll know about it immediately, and if necessary I can always
get back to him in ninety minutes or so. Meanwhile I'm covered and I'm
free to amuse myself."
  "Always aware of the state of his health."
  "Yes. Always. Even while I sleep, the information ticks into me."
   "Your implants fascinate me philosophically," she says. They pause at a
sweets-vendor's booth to buy some refreshments. The vendor, a squat
thick-nosed Mongol, offers them airag, the ancient Mongol beverage of
fermented mare's milk, and, shrugging, Mordecai takes a flask for her and
one for himself. She makes a face, but drinks, and says, "What I mean is,
looking at you and the Chairman in strict cybernetic terms, it's hard to see
where the boundaries of your individuality end and his begin. You and he
amount to a single self-corrective information-processing unit, practically
a single life system."
  "That's not exactly how I see it," Mordecai tells her. "There may be a
constant flow of metabolic information from his body to mine, and the
information I receive from him has some impact on the course of my
actions and I suppose ultimately on his, but he remains an autonomous
being, the Chairman of the PRC, no less, with all the tremendous power
that that entails, and I am only—"
   "No. Look at it with a total-systems approach," Crowfoot urges
impatiently. "Let's say you're Michelangelo, trying to turn a huge block of
marble into the David. The figure is within the marble: you must liberate
it with your mallet and chisel, right? You strike the block; a chip of marble
is knocked off. You strike it again. Another chip. A few more chips and
perhaps the outline of an arm begins to emerge. The angle of the chisel is
slightly different for each stroke, isn't it? And maybe the intensity of the
force you use to hit the chisel with the mallet is different, too. You
constantly modify and correct your strokes according to the information
you're receiving from the cul face of the marble block—the emerging
shape, the right cleavage planes, and soon. Do you see the total system?
The process of creating Michelangelo's David isn't one in which you,
Michelangelo, simply act on a passive lump of stone. The marble's an
active force too, part of the circuit, in a sense part of the mind system that
is Michelangelo-as-sculptor. Because—"
  "I don't—"
   "Let me finish. Let me trace the whole circuit for you. A change in the
outline of the marble is perceived by your eye and is evaluated by your
brain, which transmits instructions to the muscles of your arm having to
do with the force and angle of the next blow, and this causes a change in
your neuromuscular response as you strike the next blow, producing
further change in the marble that causes further perception of change in
the eye and a further alteration of program within the brain, leading to
another correction of neuromuscular response for the next stroke, and so
on, on and on around the loop until the statue is done. The process of
carving the statue is a process of perceiving and responding to change, to
stroke-by-stroke difference; and the block of marble is an essential part of
the total system."
  "It didn't ask to be," Shadrach says mildly. "It doesn't know it's part of a
system."
   "Irrelevant. View the system as a closed universe. The marble is
changing and its changes produce changes within Michelangelo that lead
to further changes in the marble. Within the closed universe of
sculptor-and-tools-and-marble, it's incorrect to view Michelangelo as the
'self,' the actor, and the marble as a 'thing,' the acted-upon. Sculptor and
tools and marble together make up a single network of causal pathways, a
single thinking-and-acting-and-changing entity, a single person, if you
will. Now, you and Genghis Mao—"
   "Are different persons," Mordecai insists. "The feedback's not the same.
If his kidney conks out, I react to the extent that I perceive the
malfunction and treat it and arrange for a kidney replacement, but I won't
get sick myself. And if something goes wrong with my kidneys, it won't
affect him in any way."
   Crowfoot shrugs. "True but trivial. Don't you see that the causal
interlock between the two of you is much more intimate? Your whole daily
routine is controlled by the transmissions you get from Genghis Mao: you
sleep alone or sleep with me depending on his health, you go to
Karakorum or stay by his bedside, you experience somatic anxieties if the
signal from him starts going critical, you have a whole constellation of
life-choices and life-responses that are governed almost entirely by his
metabolism. You're an extension of Genghis Mao. And what about him?
He lives or dies at your option. He may be Chairman of the PRC, but he
would be just another dead man next week if you fail to pick up some key
symptom or fail to take the proper corrective action. You're essential to
his survival, and he controls many of your movements and actions. One
system, Shadrach, one constantly resonating circuit, you and Genghis
Mao, Genghis Mao and you!"
   Still Shadrach Mordecai shakes his head. "The analogy's close, but not
close enough to convince me. Not quite close enough. I'm equipped with
some extraordinary diagnostic devices, sure, but they're not all that
special; my implants help me respond faster to emergencies than an
ordinary doctor might respond to an ordinary patient, but that's all. It's
only a quantitative difference. You can define any doctor-patient unit as a
single self-corrective information-processing system, of sorts, but I don't
think the hookup between Genghis Mao and myself creates any kind of
significant difference in that type of system. If I got sick when he got sick,
the point would be valid, but—"
   Nikki Crowfoot sighs. "Let it pass, Shadrach. It isn't worth all this
palaver. In the Avatar lab we constantly have to deal with the principle
that the popular notion of self is pretty meaningless, that it's necessary to
think in terms of larger information-handling systems, but maybe I'm
extending the principle into areas where it doesn't need to go. Or maybe
you and I simply aren't communicating very well right now.'' She closes
her eyes for a moment and clenches her jaws as if trying to discharge some
jangling current pulsing through her brain. Another barrage of fireworks
lights up the sky with garish purple and green streaks. Savage thorny
music, all snarls and shrieks, pierces the air. After a moment Crowfoot
relaxes, grins, points to the shimmering tent of the transtemporalists a
few meters in front of them. "Enough talk," she says. "Now some
excitement."



                                    6

   "I shall explain the method of our rite, if you wish," says the
transtemporalist. Deep slurred Mongol voice, monolithic face, all nose and
cheekbones, the eyes hidden in shadows.
  "Not necessary," Mordecai tells him. "I've been here before."
 "Ah. Of course." An obsequious little bow. "I was not sure of that, Dr.
Mordecai."
   Shadrach is accustomed to being recognized. Mongolia is full of
foreigners but very few of them are black. The sound of his own name,
therefore, gives him only the most fleeting jab of surprise. Still, he would
have welcomed more anonymity here. The transtemporalist kneels and
beckons to him to do the same. They are in a private little cubicle, formed
by thick carpets draped over ropes, within the vast dim tent. A thick
yellow candle set in a pewter cup on the earthen floor flickers between
them sending a heavy spiral of dark sour smoke toward the tent's sloping
top. In Mordecai's nostrils are all sorts of primeval Mongol odors, the reek
of shaggy goatskin walls, the stench of what might well be a cow-dung fire
somewhere nearby. The floor is densely strewn with soft wood shavings, a
luxury in this land of few trees. The transtemporalist is busy at the
chemistry of his vocation, mixing fluids in a tall pewter beaker, an oily
blue one and a thin scarlet one, stirring them around with an ivory swizzle
stick that makes lively swirl patterns, adding now a sprinkle of a green
powder and a yellow one. Hocus-pocus, all of it: Mordecai suspects that
only one of these substances is the true drug, the others being mere
decoration. But rites demand mystery and color, and these dour priests,
claiming all of time and space for their province, must heighten their
effects as best they can. Shadrach wonders how far from him Nikki is now.
They were parted at the entrance to the transtemporalists' maze of a tent,
each led separately into the shadows by silent acolytes. The time voyage is
a journey that one must take alone.
   The Mongol concludes his pharmaceutics and, holding the cup tenderly
in both hands, passes it above the candle's sputtering flame to Shadrach
Mordecai.
   "Drink," he says, and, feeling a bit like Tristan, Shadrach drinks.
Surrenders the cup. Sits back on his haunches, waiting. "Give me your
hands," the transtemporalist murmurs. Shadrach extends them, palms
upward. The Mongol covers them with his own short-fingered
wide-spanned hands and intones some gibberish prayer, unintelligible
except for scattered Mongol words that have no contextual coherence, A
faint dizziness is beginning in Shadrach Mordecai now. This will be his
third transtemporal experience, the first in nearly a year. Once he visited
the court of King Baldwin of Jerusalem in the guise of a black prince of
Ethiopia, a Christian Moor at the swaggering feasts of the Crusaders; and
once he found himself atop a stone pyramid in Mexico, robed all in white,
slashing with an obsidian dagger at the breast of a writhing Spaniard
spread-eagled on the sacrificial altar of Huitzilopitchli. And now? He will
have no choice in his destination. The transtemporalist will choose it for
him according to some unfathomable whim, aiming him with a word or
two, a skillful suggestion as he is cut loose from his moorings by the drug
and sent adrift into the living past. His own imagination and historical
knowledge, coupled with, perhaps— who knows?—whispered cues from
the transtemporalist as his drugged body lies on the floor of the tent—will
do the rest.
   Mordecai sways now. Everything whirls. The transtemporalist leans
close and speaks, and it is a struggle to comprehend the words, but
Shadrach must comprehend, he needs to hear—
  "It is the night of Cotopaxi," the Mongol whispers. "Red sun, yellow
sky."
  The tent disappears and Shadrach is alone.
  Where is he? A city. Not Karakorum. This place is unfamiliar,
subtropical, narrow streets, steep hills, iron-grilled doorways, twining
red-flowered vines, cool clear air, grand fountains in spacious plazas,
white-fronted houses with wrought-iron balconies. A Latin city, intense,
hectic, busy.
  —¡Barato aqui! Barato!
  — Yo tengo un hambre canina.
  Honking horns, barking dogs, the shouts of children, the cries of
vendors. Women roasting bits of meat over charcoal braziers in the
cobbled streets. A thousand strident people-sounds. Where is there a city
with such vigorous life? Why does no one show signs of the organ-rot?
They are all so healthy here, even the beggars, even the paupers. There are
no such cities. No more, no more. Ah. Naturally. He is dreaming a city
mat no longer exists. This is a city of yesterday.
  —Le telefonear é un dia de estos.
  —Hasta la semana que viene.
  He has never spoken Spanish. And yet he recognizes the words, and yet
he understands them.
  —¿Donde esta el tel éfono?
  —¡Vaya de prisa! ¡Tenga cuidado! — ¡Maric éa!
  —No es verdad.
   Standing in the middle of a busy street at the top of a broad hill, he is
stunned by the view. Mountains! They rim the city, great snowcapped
cones, gleaming in the midday sun. He has lived too long on the
Mongolian plateau; mountains such as these have become unfamiliar and
alien to him. Shadrach stares in awe at the immense glaciered peaks, so
huge they seem top-heavy, they seem about to rumble from the sky to
crush the bustling city. And is that a plume of smoke rising from the crest
of that most enormous one? He is not sure. At such a distance— at least
fifty kilometers—is it possible to see smoke? Yes. Yes. Beyond any doubt,
smoke. He remembers the last words he heard before the dizziness took
him: "It is the night of Cotopaxi. Red sun, yellow sky." The great
volcano—is that it? A flawless cone, swathed in snow and pumice, its base
hidden in clouds, its summit outlined in numbing majesty against the
darkening sky. He has never seen such a mountain.
  He halts a boy who darts past him.
  —Por favor.
  The boy is wide-eyed, terrified, but yet he stops, looks up.
  —¿Si, Señor?
  —¿Como se llama esta monta ñ a?
   Shadrach points toward the colossal snowcapped volcano. The boy
smiles and relaxes. His fear is gone; obviously he is pleased by the notion
of knowing something that this tall dark-skinned stranger does not. He
says:
  —Cotopaxi.
  Cotopaxi. Of course. The transtemporalist has given him a front row
ticket to the great catastrophe. This is the city of Quito, then, in Ecuador,
and that trailing smoke to the southeast is Cotopaxi, the world's loftiest
active volcano, and this day must be the nineteenth of August, 1991, a day
that everyone remembers, and Shadrach Mordecai knows that before the
sun touches the Pacific tonight the world will be shaken as it rarely has
been shaken in all the time of mankind, and an era will end and a reign of
fire will be loosed upon civilization. And he is the only person on earth
who knows this, and here he stands below great Cotopaxi and he can do
nothing. Nothing. Nothing but watch, and tremble, and perhaps perish
with the half million who will perish here tonight. Can one die, he
wonders, while one is traveling this way? Is it not only a dream, a dream, a
dream, and can dreams kill? Even if he dreams an eruption, even if he
dreams tons of lava and brimstone descending on his broken body?
  The boy is still standing there, staring at him.
  —Gracias, amigo.
  —De nada, se ñ or.
   The boy waits, perhaps for a coin, but Shadrach has none to give him,
and after a moment he runs off, pausing after ten paces to look back and
stick out his tongue, then running again, sprinting into an alleyway,
disappearing.
   And a moment later there is a terrible noise from Cotopaxi and a white
column at least a hundred meters thick rises straight up like a scepter
from a secondary cone on the volcano's sloping flank.
   Immediately all movement halts in the city. Everyone freezes; every
head turns toward Cotopaxi. The white column, pouring from the vent
with incredible velocity, rising already to a height of at least a thousand
meters above Cotopaxi's summit, is spreading now, filling the sky like a
broad plume of feathers, a cloak of live steam. Mordecai perceives a low
droning rumbling sound, as of a train passing through the city, but a train
for giants, a titanic train that makes lanterns sway and potted plants
topple from balconies. The cloud of steam has turned gray on top, with
tinges of red and yellow toward its outer edges.
  —¡Aie! ¡El fin del mundo!
  —¡Madre de dios! ¡La monta ñ a!
  —¡Ayuda! ¡Ayuda! ¡Ayuda!
  And the flight from Quito begins. Nothing has happened yet, nothing
but a roar and a hiss and a column of steam rushing skyward, but
nevertheless the people of the city abandon their houses, carrying little or
nothing, grasping perhaps a crucifix or a child or a cat or a handful of
clothes, crowding into the streets, shuffling somberly downhill, northward,
long lines of people moving with hunched shoulders, no one looking back,
everyone heading out of the city, heading away from Cotopaxi, from the
frightening crimson cloud that now looms over the mountain, from the
death that soon will come to Quito. These are people wise in the way of
volcanoes, and they do not care to stay for the show. Shadrach Mordecai is
swept along in the human tide. He towers over these folk as the volcano
does over the city, and they glance strangely at him and some tug at his
arms in a kind of appeal, as if they think he is a black deity come to lead
them to safety. But he is leading no one. He is following, he is fleeing
helplessly with all the rest. Unlike them he does look over his shoulder
every few minutes. Whenever he can, whenever the press of refugees is not
too powerful, he pauses and turns to see what is happening. The volcano
now is spurting little bursts of pumice and light ash, wind-borne powdery
stuff that changes the color of the air, staining it yellow, deepening the
sun's hues to an orange-red. The earth seems to be groaning. The whole
city shakes. Automobiles laden with well-dressed citizens move slowly
through the streets, unable to make headway in the throngs of shuffling
pedestrians; there are collisions, shouts, quarrels. Soon the cars have
halted altogether and their passengers, quirky-lipped and disdainful,
shoulder their way into the lines of humbler folk. Shadrach has been
marching for an hour or two now, perhaps three, mechanically pushing
himself along; the air has grown thin and chilly, with an acrid reek of
brimstone in it, and though it is only the middle of the afternoon the
falling ash has so obscured the light that the street lamps have come on—
the ash is accumulating like fine snow in the streets, already
ankle-deep—and still Cotopaxi roars and hisses, and still the people
straggle northward. Mordecai knows what will happen soon. With the
eerie double-edged vision of the time traveler, he looks forward as well as
back, remembering the future. Before long there will be the explosion that
will be heard thousands of miles away, the earthquake, the clouds of
poisonous gas, the lunatic outpouring of tons of volcanic ash that will blot
out the sun all over the world, and on this night of Cotopaxi the ancient
gods will be let loose on earth and empires will crumble. He has lived
through this night once already, but not with the knowledge he now has.
Somewhere far away at this moment is fifteen-year-old Shadrach, all arms
and legs and huge eyes, doing his lessons and dreaming of medical school,
and he will hear the explosion too, dull and muffled though it will sound
after spanning the planet from Quito to Philadelphia, and he will think it
is a terrorist's bomb, perhaps, going off downtown, but in the morning he
will see the sky tinted yellow and the swollen sun gone all red, and then the
fine dust will fall for days, bringing early twilights on these summer
evenings, and news will trickle out of South America of the terrible
eruption, the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. What that young
Shadrach does not know, what no one knows except the stranger striding
through the northern outskirts of Quito under a dirty crimson cloud, is
that the eruption of Cotopaxi is more than a natural event: it signals a
political apocalypse, the fall of the nations about to begin, the time of
Genghis Mao about to arrive.
  —¡El fin del mundo!
  Yes. Yes. The end of the world. And now the explosion comes.
   It happens in stages, first five quick sharp reports like cannon-fire; then
a long moment of total silence when even the persistent rumble that has
gone on for hours abruptly halts; then a violent shaking of the earth and a
single monstrous booming sound, the loudest sound Mordecai has ever
heard, a sound that breaks windows and splits walls; then silence again;
then the rumbling once more; then more cannonfire, bang bang bang,
quick hard pops; then a second great boom, five times as powerful as the
first, that drops people to their knees, clutching at their ears; then silence,
an ominous, sinister, nerve-tightening silence; and then the sound of
sounds, the sound of a planet splitting apart at its core, an unending
grotesque avalanche of sound that makes the neck snap and the arms jerk
wildly and the eyes jiggle in then-sockets, a sound that rolls over Quito like
the trampling foot of an angry god. And the sky turns black and a torrent
of red fire spills out of Cotopaxi and burns with a hideous glare on the
horizon. The mountain appears to be ripping open. Shadrach can see huge
chunks of its crest, slabs of rock that must be the size of great buildings,
flying loose and soaring slowly and grandly toward Quito. The perfect
cone, once as graceful as Mount Fuji's, is a ruin now; a shattered wreck,
dimly visible through the dense clouds of ash and the flying balls of
pumice; it is only a stump, irregular and ghastly. The air itself is burning.
People still struggle onward, moving even more slowly, dragging
themselves along on leaden legs toward a salvation that is not to be
reached, but they vomit, they clutch at their throats, they gasp, they
choke, they fall.
  —Ayuda. Ayuda.
   But there is no help to be had. They are dying here in the early
afternoon of this sparkling day, sparkling no longer.
  Shadrach, trying to breathe an atmosphere that is half ash and half
carbon monoxide, falls himself, gets up, falls again, forces himself to rise.
He remembers that he is a doctor and kneels beside a fallen woman, a girl,
really, whose face is distorted and nearly as black as his own from
asphyxiation.
  — Yo soy un m édico.
  —Gracias, se ñ or. Gracias.
    Her eyes flutter. She looks to him for aid, medicine, a drink of water,
anything. How can he help her? He is a doctor, yes, but can he teach the
dying to breathe poisoned air? She gags, shivers, and
then—strangely—yawns. She is falling asleep in his arms. But it is a deadly
drowsiness, and she will not wake. He releases her. He moves onward,
handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Useless. Useless. He falls again and
does not rise, he lies in a heap of weeping murmuring victims, a victim
himself. So this is how it was on the night of Cotopaxi. Night and ash,
flight and death. That saucy boy, those women roasting bits of meat, the
shopkeepers and the bankers, the cab drivers and the policemen, that fall
black-skinned stranger, all dying together now, the hours of frenzied flight
a waste, and Cotopaxi's ashy ejecta filling the heavens, giving all the world
a blood-red twilight. El fin del mundo, yes. Shadrach claws at the ashes
filling his mouth. There is another explosion, a lesser one now— for what
could equal that last unimaginable apocalyptic blast?— and another,
another, and he knows that the booms will continue in diminishing
intensity for many hours, even for days. No one will sleep tonight in
Ecuador, in Colombia, Venezuela, in all of Central America, even in
Mexico; the dread thunder of Cotopaxi will resound in Canada, in
Patagonia, it will reach far across both oceans, and by dawn, the
dust-choked dawn, the black dawn through which no light can penetrate,
the first revolution will be under way, the putsch in Brazil, the
insurrectionists taking advantage of the strange darkness and the
universal terror to launch their long-awaited coup; and then the chain
reaction, the uprisings triggered by the Brazilian one in Argentina,
Nicaragua, Algeria, Indonesia, one bloodbath providing the cue for the
next, and all spurred by Cotopaxi, by the great symbol-freighted upheaval
of the volcano; the economic crises of the 1970s and the repressions and
shortages of the impoverished 1980s leading inexorably to the worldwide
chaos of 1991, the global revolution, the long Walpurgisnacht touched off
in some incalculable way by the eruption.
  So this is how it was on the night of Cotopaxi. The angry gods shaking
the world and bringing the nations into destruction. Shadrach bows his
head, closes his eyes, surrenders to the soft warm fragrant ash that drifts
peacefully upon him. This is the night of Cotopaxi, yes, el fin del mundo,
the sounding of the last trump, the opening of the seventh seal, and he has
been part of it, he has tasted the pumice of the volcano. And now he
sleeps.



                                      7

   He stands in the gravel-strewn walk outside the tent of the
transtemporalists, dazed, the sulphurous taste of Cotopaxi somehow still
in his mouth. Nikki has not yet emerged. Other people he knows wander
by, members of Genghis Mao's staff, flowing past him down the midway
toward the garish cluster of gaming pavilions at the western end of the
pleasure complex: there goes Frank Ficifolia, the jowly little
communications man who designed Surveillance Vector One, and after
him a Mongol military aide-de-camp, Gonchigdorge, all ribbons and
medals in his comic-book uniform, and then two of the Committee
vice-chairmen, a pallid Turk named Eyuboglu and a burly Greek named
Ionigylakis. Each, as he passes, greets Shadrach in characteristic style,
Ficifolia warm and effusive, Gonchigdorge offhanded and remote,
Eyuboglu wary, Ionigylakis boisterous. Shadrach Mordecai manages a nod
and a glassy smile in return, no more. Yo soy un m édico. He still feels the
earth rumbling. He wishes everyone would let him alone. In Karakorum
one deserves a little privacy. Especially right now. The significant sectors
of his consciousness are still in the suburbs of Quito, sinking under tons of
fine hot ash. Coming out of transtemporalism is always something of a
shock, but this is too much, it is as bad as eviction from the womb; he is
vulnerable and fuddled, unable to cope with the social rituals. Those rough
globules of airy pumice, that scent of brimstone, that inescapable
sleepiness; above all, that crushing sense of transition, that feeling of one
world falling apart and a new, strange one being formed.— Out of the
transtemporalists' tent now comes a short pigeon-breasted man with
crooked teeth and astonishing bushy red eyebrows. He is Roger
Buckmaster, British, a microengineering expert, competent and usually
sullen, a man whom few people seem to know well. He plants himself near
the exit of the tent, a few meters from Shadrach Mordecai, and digs both
feet firmly, flatfootedly, into the gravel as though he is uncertain about his
balance. He has the stunned look of a man who has just been thrown out
of a pub after five beers too many.
  Mordecai, though he has only a distant acquaintance with Buckmaster
and just now has especially little interest in a conversation with him,
knows all too well how confusing the first moments outside the tent can
be, and is sympathetic. He feels impelled to meet Buckmaster's wobbly
gaze with some sort of polite gesture; he smiles and says hello, thinking
that he will now retreat into his own confusion and fatigued meditations.
   Buckmaster, though, blinks and glares aggressively. "It's the black
bahstard!" he says. His voice is thick, phlegmy, high-pitched, not at all
friendly. "The black bahstard himself!"
  "Black bahstard?" Mordecai repeats wonderingly, mimicking the
accent, "Black bahstard? Man, did you call me—"
  "Bahstard. Black."
  "That's what I thought you said."
  "Black bahstard. Evil as the ace of spades."
  This is ludicrous.
  "Roger, are you all right?"
  "Evil. Black and evil."
   "I heard you, yes," Shadrach says. A miserable throbbing begins along
the left side of his skull. He regrets having acknowledged Buckmaster's
presence; he wishes Buckmaster would disappear. The racial slur itself is
more grotesque than insulting to him, for he has never had any reason to
feel defensive about his color, but he is puzzled by the gratuitousness of
the attack and he remains too deeply under the spell of his own powerful
transtemporal experience to want any sort of interaction with a truculent
clown like Buckmaster, not now, above all not now. Perhaps the thing to
do is ignore him. Shadrach folds his arms and steps back against a
light-pillar.
  But Buckmaster says into Shadrach's silence, "You don't feel covered
with shame, Mordecai?"
  "Look, Roger—"
  "Drenched with guilt for every filthy act of your treacherous life?"
  "Come on. What have you been drinking in there, man?"
  "The same as everyone else. Just the drug, the drug, the time-drug,
whatever they give you. D'ye think they fed me hashish? D'ye think I'm
high on whiskey? Oh, no, just the time-drink, and it opened my eyes, let
me tell you, it opened them wide!" Buckmaster advances until he stands
no more man thirty centimeters from Shadrach Mordecai, glaring up at
him, shouting The pain in Shadrach's skull is that of a spike being
hammered deep. "I've seen Judas sell Him out!" Buckmaster roars. "I was
there, in Jerusalem, at the Supper, watching them eat. Thirteen at the
table, eh? I poured the wine with my own hands, you black devil, I
watched Judas smirking, saw him whispering in His ear, even, and then
out into the garden, y'know. Gethsemane, there in the darkness—"
  "Would you like a trank, Roger?"
  "Keep off me with your filthy pills!"
  "You're getting overwrought. You ought to try to calm yourself."
  "Listen to him doctoring me. Me. No, you won't dope me, and you'll pay
heed while I tell you—"
  "Some other time," Shadrach says. He is pinned between Buckmaster
and the light-pillar, but he slips aside and makes broad swimming
gestures in the air between them, as though Buckmaster is a noxious
vapor he'd like to blow away. "I'm tired now. I've had a heavy trip in there
myself. I can't handle any of this at the moment, Buckmaster, if you don't
mind. All right?"
   "You bloody well will handle it. I saw it, everything, Judas coming up to
Him and kissing Him in the garden, and saying, Master, master, just as it
is in the Book, and then the Roman soldiers closing in and arresting
him—oh, the bloody betraying bahstard. I saw it, I was there, I understand
now what guilt means. Do you? You don't. And you're as guilty as he was,
in a different way but the same kind, Mordecai."
  "I'm a Judas?" Shadrach shakes his head wearily. Drunks irritate him,
even if they are drunk only on the transtemporalists' drug. "I don't
understand any of this. Who is it I'm supposed to have betrayed?"
  "Everyone. All of mankind."
  "And you say you aren't drunk."
   "Never been more sober. Oh, my eyes are open now! Who is it who
keeps him alive, answer me that? Who's there by his side, giving him
injections, medicines, pills, yelling for the bloody surgeon every time he
needs a new kidney or a new heart, eh? Eh?"
  "You want the Chairman to die?"
  "Damn right I do!"
   Shadrach gasps. Buckmaster has obviously been driven insane by his
transtemporal experience; Shadrach can no longer be annoyed with him.
The angry little man must be protected against himself. "You'll be arrested
if you go on this way," Shadrach says. "He might be listening to us right
now."
   "He's flat on his back, half dead from the operation," Buckmaster
retorts. "Don't you think I know that? You put a new liver into him today."
  "Even so, there are spy-eyes everywhere, recording instruments—you
designed some of them yourself, Buckmaster."
  "I don't care. Let him hear me."
  "So now you're a revolutionary?"
   "My eyes are open. I've had a revelation in that tent. Guilt,
responsibility, evil—"
  "You think the world would be better off with Genghis Mao dead?"
   Fiercely Buckmaster cries, "Yes! Yes! He's draining us all so he can live
forever. He's turned the world into a madhouse, into a bloody zoo! Look,
Mordecai, we could be rebuilding, we could be passing around the
Antidote and healing the whole world, not just the favored few, we could
go back to what we had before the War, but no, no, we're ruled by a bloody
Mongol Khan, can you imagine that? A hundred-year-old Mongol Khan
who wants to live forever! And he'd have been dead five years ago but for
you."
   Shadrach sees where Buckmaster is heading, and he presses his hands
to his temples in dismay. He wants more desperately than ever to escape
from this conversation. Buckmaster is a fool, and his onslaught is cheap
and obvious. Shadrach has thought all this through, long ago, considered
the moral problems, and dismissed them. Of course serving an evil
dictator is wrong. No job for a nice sincere dedicated black boy from
Philadelphia who wants to do good. But is Genghis Mao evil? Are there
any alternatives to his rule, other than chaos? If Genghis Mao is
inevitable, like some natural force, like the rising of the sun or the falling
of the rain, then no guilt attaches to serving him: one does what seems
appropriate, one lives one's life, one accepts one's karma, and if one is a
doctor then one heals, without considering the ramifications of one's
patient's identity. To Shadrach this is no glib rationalization, but rather a
statement of acceptance of destiny. He refuses to assume burdens of guilt
that have no meaning to him, and he will not let Buckmaster, of all people,
flagellate him over absurdities nor accuse him of misplacing his loyalties.
  He notices that Nikki Crowfoot has come out of the transtemporalist's
tent and is standing to one side, hands on her hips, waiting for him, and
he says to Buckmaster, "Excuse me. I have to go now."
   Nikki seems transfigured. Her eyes are aglow, her face glistens with
ecstatic sweat, her whole body seems to gleam. As Shadrach strides
toward her, she acknowledges him with a mere tilt of her head, but she is
far away, still lost in her hallucination.
   "Let's go," he says. "Buckmaster's a little crazy tonight and he's making
a nuisance of himself."
  He reaches for her hand.
  "Wait!" Buckmaster yells, running toward them. "I'm not through with
you. I've got more to tell you, you black bahstard!"
 Mordecai shrugs and says, ''All right. You can have one more minute.
What do you want me to do, exactly?"
  "Leave off tending him."
  "I'm a doctor, Buckmaster. He's my patient."
   "Precisely. And that's why I call you a guilty bahstard. Billions of people
to care for in the world, and he's the one you choose to look after.
Dooming us all to decades more of Genghis Mao."
  "Someone else would serve him if I didn't," Shadrach says gently.
  "But you do. You. And I must hold you responsible."
  Astonished, baffled by the force and persistence of Buckmaster's attack,
Shadrach says, "Responsible for what?"
   "For the way the world is. The whole bleeding mess. The continued
threat of universal organ-rot twenty years after the Virus War. The
hunger, the poverty. Oh, don't you have any shame, Mordecai? You with
your legs full of machinery that tell you every twitch of his blood pressure
so you can run to him even faster?"
  Shadrach glances at Nikki, appealing to her to do something to rescue
him. But she still has that far-off look; she does not appear to be aware of
Buckmaster at all.
  Angrily Mordecai says, "Who designed that machinery, Roger?"
   Buckmaster recoils. He has been hit where it hurts. His cheeks blaze;
his eyes glisten with furious tears. "I! I did! You bah-stard, I admit it, I
built your dirty implants. Don't you think I know I share the guilt? Don't
you think I understand that now? But I'm getting out. I won't bear the
responsibility any longer."
  "This is suicidal, the way you're carrying on." Shadrach Mordecai
points to shadowy figures on the periphery of the path, high staffers who
hover in the darkness, unwilling to come within range of possible spy-eyes
while they enjoy Buckmaster's juicy lunatic outburst. "There'll be a report
of all this on the Chairman's desk tomorrow, Roger, more likely than not.
You're destroying yourself."
  "I'll destroy him. The bloodsucker. He holds us all for ransom, our
bodies, our souls, he'll let us rot if we don't serve."
   "Don't be melodramatic. We serve Genghis Mao because we have skills
and this is the proper place to employ them," Mordecai says crisply. "It's
no fault of ours that the world is as it is. If you'd rather have been out in
Liverpool or Manchester living in some stinking cellar with your intestines
full of holes, you could have been."
  "Don't goad me, Mordecai."
  "But it's true. We're lucky to be here. We're doing the only sane thing
possible in a crazy world. Guilt is a luxury we can't afford. You want to
walk out now, go ahead, go, Roger. But you won't want to leave the Khan
when you calm down in the morning."
  "I refuse to have you patronize me."
  "I'm trying to protect you. I'm trying to get you to shut up and stop
shouting dangerous nonsense."
  "And I'm trying to get you to pull the plug and free us from Genghis
Khan Mao," Buckmaster wails, flushed and wild-eyed.
  "So you think we'd be better off without him?" Shadrach asks. "What
are your alternatives, Buckmaster? What kind of government would you
suggest? Come on. I'm serious. You've been calling me a lot of unpleasant
names, now let's have some rational discussion. You've become a
revolutionary, right? Okay. What's your program? What do you want?"
  Buckmaster is beyond the moment for philosophical discourse,
however. He glowers at Mordecai in barely controlled loathing, framing
words that will not leave his throat except as incoherent guttural growls;
he clenches and unclenches his fists, he sways alarmingly, his reddened
cheeks turn scarlet. Shadrach, all sympathy long gone, turns from him and
reaches toward Nikki Crowfoot again. As they begin to walk away together
Buckmaster rushes forward in a clumsy flailing lunge, clamping his hands
on Shadrach's shoulders and trying to pull him down. Shadrach pivots
gracefully, bends slightly to slip free of Buckmaster's grasp, and, when
Buckmaster hurls himself at him, seizes him about the ribs, spins him
around, and holds him immobile. Buckmaster squirms, kicks, spits,
sputters, but Shadrach is much too strong for him. "Easy," Shadrach
murmurs. "Easy. Relax. Let go of it, Roger. Let go of everything." He holds
Buckmaster as one might hold a hysterical child, until at length he feels
Buckmaster go slack, all the frenzy leaving him. Mordecai releases him
and steps back, hands poised at chest level, ready for a new lunge, but
Buckmaster is spent. He backs away from Mordecai in the slinking
heavy-shouldered walk of a beaten man, pausing after a few paces to scowl
and mutter, "All right, Mordecai. Bahstard. Stay with Genghis Mao. Wipe
his decrepit arse for him. See what happens to you! You'll finish in she
furnace, Shadrach, in the furnace, in the bloody furnace!"
   Shadrach laughs. The tension is broken. "The furnace. I like that. Very
literary, Buckmaster."
  "The furnace for you, Shadrach!"
  Mordecai, smiling, takes Crowfoot's arm. She still looks radiant,
ecstatic, lost in transcendental raptures. "Let's go," he says. "I can't take
any more of this."
  Softly, in a dream-furry voice, she says, "What did he mean by that,
Shadrach? About the furnace?"
  "Biblical reference. Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego."
  "Who?"
  "You don't know of it?"
   "No. Shadrach, it's such a lovely night. Let's go somewhere and make
love."
   "Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego. In the Book of Daniel. Three Hebrews
who refused to worship Nebuchadnezzar's golden idol, and the king cast
them into a burning fiery furnace, and God sent an angel to walk with
them in there, and they were unharmed. Strange you don't know the
story."
  "What happened to them?"
  "I told you, love. They were unharmed, not a hair of their heads singed,
and Nebuchadnezzar called them forth, and told them that their God was
a mighty god, and promoted them to high office in Babylon. Poor
Buckmaster. He ought to realize that a Shadrach wouldn't be afraid of
furnaces. Did you have a good trip, love?"
  "Oh, yes, yes, Shadrach!"
  "Where did they send you?"
  "Joan of Arc's execution. I watched her burning, and it was beautiful,
the way she smiled, the way she looked toward heaven." Nikki presses
close against him as they walk. Her voice still comes to him out of some
realm of dream; that bonfire has left her stoned. "The most inspiring trip I
ever had. The most deeply spiritual. Where can we go now, Shadrach?
Where can we be alone?"



                                      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.



                                     9

   Before he heads for his hammock, Shadrach Mordecai visits the Khan.
Though the implants tell him all is well, he feels obligated after his outing
to make a personal call on his patient. It is early morning, and Genghis
Mao lies in blissful sleep: through the electroencephalographic node in
Mordecai's haunch travel the slow rhythmic quivers of the Chairman's
peaceful delta waves. All the telemetered data reaching Shadrach is
encouraging: blood pressure good, lungs clear of fluid, temperature back
to normal, cardiac activity fine, bile production excellent. The newly
installed liver has obviously established itself already and has begun to
undo the deteriorations of the recent weeks. Shadrach passes through the
interface and enters the bedroom where the Chairman rests within the
intricate cocoon of the intensive-care support system. The biometer
readings on the support system's instrument panel instantly confirm
Shadrach's long-distance diagnosis: the Chairman is doing amazingly well.
None of the emergency equipment has been needed, neither the oxygen
tent nor the electrodialysis machine nor the heart-lung respirator nor the
twelve or fourteen other instruments. There he lies, relaxed, a faint smile
on his thin lips, this man of ninety years or so, only sixteen hours out of
major surgery and already nearly strong enough to resume the stress of
normal life. But of course there is nothing normal about Genghis Mao's
body, reconstructed so many times out of so many healthy borrowed
parts: like the cannibal chieftain, he has feasted on the flesh of heroes, and
their strength has become his strength. And, Shadrach suspects, there is
some quality of the mind within that tapering triangular skull that will not
admit bodily weakness, that banishes it altogether from his metabolic
cycle. The doctor stands for a few moments by the bedside, admiring
Genghis Mao's toughness of constitution, half expecting Genghis Mao to
wink at him, but the Khan's sleep holds him utterly.
   Off to his own, then. With Genghis Mao in such fine shape, Shadrach
feels free to sleep until sleep is done with him, even if that is
midafternoon. Crowfoot already lies curled and dozing in his hammock; he
strips, snuggles in beside her, delicately coils his belly and thighs against
her back and buttocks, and lets consciousness go from him.
   He is awakened some hours later by an internal jolt that nearly throws
him from the hammock. A geyser of adrenalin floods his bloodstream; his
heart begins to pound, his limbs tremble, all systems switching on in a
violent alarm reaction. Automatically he begins a process of self-diagnosis,
considering and rejecting within the first fraction of a second such
possibilities as a coronary thrombosis, a cerebral hemorrhage, pulmonary
edema; a moment later, as the thunderous tachycardia begins to subside
and his breathing starts to return to normal, he realizes that it is nothing
more serious than an episode of shock leading into a classic fight-or-flight
syndrome; and an instant after that he becomes aware that it is all purely
vicarious, that there is nothing wrong with him at all but that he is getting
an intense overload via the telemetering system that links him to Genghis
Mao.
  He leaps from the hammock, sending it swinging Wildly. "Shadrach?"
Nikki asks, her voice groggy and dim. "Shadrach, what's happening?"
   Catching the hammock for a moment to stabilize it, he mutters an
apology. ''Trouble with the Khan," he says, groping along the floor for his
casually discarded clothing. He is fully awake now, but his body is so
saturated with the hormonal outpourings engendered by surprise and
alarm that his hands shake and his jangled mind refuses to focus on the
simple tasks of dressing. Has the Chairman's life-support system
malfunctioned? Have assassins broken into Genghis Mao's bedroom? The
Chairman still lives—the telemetering leaves no doubt of that—and
whatever it was that gave Genghis Mao so severe a shock seems already to
be over, for his biophysical output is settling back toward normal, though
there are ample indications of continuing neurasthenic hyperesthesia and
associated cardiovascular and vasomotor distress.
   Wearing only his trousers and still feeling wobbly—never before, in all
the time he has worn the implants, have the signals from Genghis Mao
had such an impact on him—he approaches the interface. "Shadrach
Mordecai to serve the Khan," he says, and waits, and nothing happens for
nearly a minute. Dr. Mordecai repeats the password, more urgently. Still
the door remains shut. "Come on!" he snaps. "The Khan might be dying in
there, and I have to get to him, you idiot machine!" Lights flash, scanners
scan, but nothing else occurs. Shadrach realizes that the interface system
must have gone into emergency mode, under which the flow of personnel
to and from the inner chambers is even more strictly controlled than
usual. This supports the hypothesis of an assassination attempt. Shadrach
shouts, gesticulates, pounds the interface with his fists, even makes faces
at it; but the security system is obviously concerned with other matters,
and it will not let him in. By the time the door finally does open, he
estimates, four or five minutes have elapsed. The data coming from
Genghis Mao holds firm, at least: the Khan's signals indicate that he is
still disturbed and overexcited but that he is slowly recovering from his
moment of alarm.
   Maddeningly, Shadrach is kept another minute or so in the inner
holding chamber; at last it yields, and he lopes swiftly through
Surveillance Vector One, which is deserted, to Genghis Mao's bedroom.
Here the secondary door scanner delays him no more than the usual
microsecond, and he bursts in to find Genghis Mao alive and awake,
sitting up in bed, surrounded by five or six servants and a dozen or more
members of the Committee, all milling about in a frenzied excitement very
much contraindicated at this phase of the Chairman's recuperation.
Mordecai sees General Gonchigdorge, Vice-Chairman Ionigylakts,
Security Chief Avogadro, even Belá Horthy, looking horribly liverish and
hung over after his excessive night in Karakorum. And more people are
constantly arriving. Shadrach is appalled. He can hear the voice of
Genghis Mao, clear but weak, cutting through the overall hubbub, but
there is such a mob around the bed that Mordecai is unable to reach the
Khan's side.
   "Terrible, terrible,'' Ionigylakis says, shaking his head from side to side
like a wounded bear.
  Shadrach turns to him. "What's going on?"
  "Mangu," Ionigylakis blurts. "Assassinated!"
  "What? How?"
  "Out the window. Off the balcony." Ponderously the big Greek
pantomimes the action with great sweeps of his arm—the open window,
trie draperies fluttering in the breeze, the curve of The body as it executes
its swooping seventy-five-story descent, the abrupt ghastly termination of
the graceful dive, the hideous impact at plaza level, the tiny final
rebounding motion of the crumpled body.
  Shadrach shudders. "When was this?"
  "Ten, fifteen minutes ago. Horthy was just arriving at the tower. He saw
the whole thing."
  "Who notified the Khan? Horthy?"
  Ionigylakis shrugs. "How would I know?"
  "They should have waited. The shock of news like that—"
   "First I heard of it, I was at my desk in Committee Vector One and the
lights flash emergency mode. Then people running around everywhere,
crazy. Then everyone running in here."
   "Which is even crazier," Shadrach says, scowling. "Making a lot of
noise, upsetting the Khan's nervous system, filling the room with
potentially infectious bacteria—doesn't anyone have any sense? We're
jeopardizing his life in this chaos. Help me clear the room."
  "But the Khan has sent for these people!"
  "Doesn't matter. He doesn't need tham all. I'm responsible for his
health, and I want everybody out of here except, oh, Avogadro and
Gonchigdorge and maybe Eyuboglu."
  "But—"
   "No buts. The rest of you ought to return to Committee Vector One so
you can handle more trouble if more trouble comes. What if this is the
start of a worldwide revolutionary uprising? Who's going to face the crisis
if you're all in here? Go.
  "Go. I want to clear the room. Get everybody out, will you? That's an
order."
  Ionigylakis still looks doubtful, but after a moment's hesitation he nods
and begins pushing people enthusiastically toward the door, bellowing at
them that they must leave, while Shadrach, catching the attention of the
security chief, tells him to post his men in the hall to keep visitors out.
   Shadrach approaches the bed. Genghis Mao looks drawn and tense, his
forehead moist, shiny, his skin tone pallid and grayish. He is breathing
shallowly and his eyes, always restless, move now with manic intensity.
The life-support system has activated itself and is feeding the Khan a
steady flow of glucose, sodium chloride, and blood plasma; Shadrach,
glancing quickly at the readings on the instrument panel and integrating
them with his own telemetered inputs, assesses Genghis Mao's level of
blood potassium and plasma magnesium, his capillary permeability, his
arteriolar vasoconstriction, and his venous pressure, and makes manual
adjustments in the rate of medication. "Try to relax," he tells Genghis
Mao. "Sit back. Let your limbs go limp."
  "They killed him," the Khan says hoarsely. "Have you heard? They threw
him from his window."
  "Yes. I know. Lie back, please, sir."
  "The killers must still be somewhere inside this building. I'll supervise
the investigation myself. Wheel me into Surveillance Vector One,
Shadrach."
  "That won't be possible. You'll have to remain here, sir."
  "Don't talk that way to me. Avogadro! Avogadro! Help me into the
wheelchair!"
   "I'm sorry, sir," Shadrach murmurs, signaling frantically behind his
back to Avogadro to ignore the command of Genghis Mao. At the same
time Shadrach nudges a pedal that sends a flow of tranquilizing
9-pordenone into the Chairman's body. "It could be fatal for you to leave
the bed now, sir. Do you understand me? It could kill you."
   Genghis Mao understands that. He sinks back against the pillow,
looking almost relieved at being overruled, and as the drug takes effect his
face relaxes, his demeanor becomes far less intense. Genghis Mao is much
weaker, Shadrach realizes, than the instruments indicate. "They killed
him," the Khan says again, ruminatingly, absent-voicedly. "Only a boy and
they killed him. He had no enemies." And to Shadrach's amazement the
old man's lips begin to quiver and his eyes fill with tears, Eh? What's this?
A show of some genuine emotion by Genghis Mao? A kind of
quasi-paternal grief seizing the old man? But how can that be, considering
the bleak fate Genghis Mao had himself intended for Mangu? Either
yesterday's surgery has so enfeebled the Khan that he has grown
uncharacteristically sentimental, suddenly entering an inconceivable
dotage, or else Mordecai is misreading the signs: not grief but fear,
cognizance of personal peril, awareness that if assassins could reach
Mangu they might well find a way into the sanctum of Genghis Mao. That
must be it. The Khan is angry and afraid, but because he is so diminished
physically by his operation, his anger and fear momentarily take the form
of sorrow. And indeed, after a few moments more Genghis Mao grows
calm again, and says, in a low, controlled, newly resonant voice. "This is
the first successful attack against our rule that we have experienced. It is
unprecedented and must be met with force to demonstrate that we have
lost none of our vigor and that our authority will not be undermined." He
beckons Avogadro to his bedside and begins to dictate plans for mass
arrests, wholesale interrogation of suspected subversives, tightened
security measures both within the Grand Tower and in Ulan Bator in
general. He sounds now less like a bereaved elder than a threatened
despot. The loss of Mangu, it quickly becomes clear, means little or
nothing to him personally, Mangu having been such a cipher, but it is a
frightening omen of a breach in the power of his regime, and will require a
reign of terror.
  In the midst of these grim plans Genghis Mao suddenly looks up at
Shadrach as if noticing him for the first time that morning, and says
amiably, "You have nothing on but your trousers, Doctor. Why is that?"
   "I came here in a hurry. I got a tremendous jolt from the implants,
strong enough to wake me up, and I knew there must be trouble."
  "Yes. When Horthy brought me news of the assassination I became
quite agitated."
  "Your damned doors kept me waiting for five minutes, though. We
ought to do something about that. Someday it'll be a critical matter for
me to get to you in time, and Interface Three will give me the business
again and it'll be too late."
   "Mmm. We'll talk about that." The Khan eyes Shadrach's bare torso
with some amusement and, it would seem, admiration, surveying the
pronounced ridges of muscle down his belly, the long lean arms, the wide
powerful shoulders. It is a pleasing body, Shadrach knows, trim and
shapely and covered all over with smooth lovely chocolate skin, an athletic
and graceful body, not much changed from the days nearly twenty years
ago when he was a respectable college sprinter and passable basketball
player, but nevertheless there is something weird and unnerving about
this close inspection. After a moment the Khan says, sounding almost
jolly, "You look very healthy, Shadrach."
  "I try to keep in shape, sir."
  "A wise doctor you are. So many of your profession worry about
everyone's health except their own. But why were you still in bed at this
hour of the morning?"
  "I was in Karakorum late last night," Shadrach confesses.
  Genghis Mao laughs explosively. "Dissipation! Debauchery! So that's
how you keep in shape, is it?"
  "Well—"
   "At ease. I'm not serious." The Chairman's mood has changed
astonishingly in these few minutes. This badgering banter, this light
teasing—it is hard to believe that he was weeping for dead Mangu just a
moment ago. "You can go and get your shirt, if you like. I think I can spare
you for a few minutes, Shadrach."
  "I'd prefer to stay a while longer, sir. It's not chilly this way."
   "As you wish." Genghis Mao seems to lose interest in him. He turns
back to Avogadro, still waiting by the bedside, and rattles off half a dozen
more repressive measures to be put into effect at once. Then, dismissing
the security chief, the Chairman summons Vice-Chairman Eyuboglu and
outlines, seemingly impromptu, an elaborate program for the virtual
canonization of Mangu: a colossal state funeral, a prolonged period of
global mourning, the renaming of highways and cities, the erection of
costly and imposing memorial monuments in every major capital. All this
for such a trifling boy? Why? Shadrach wonders. This is an outpouring of
mortuary energy worthy of a demigod, an Augustus Caesar, a Siegfried,
even an Osiris. Why? Why, if not that Mangu was a symbolic extension of
Genghis Mao himself, his link to tomorrow, his hope of bodily
reincarnation? Yes, Shadrach decides. In ordering this bizarrely
inappropriate posthumous inflation of the murdered man, Genghis Mao
must be mourning not Mangu but himself.



                                      10

   Was Mango really murdered, though? Avogadro, waiting for Mordecai
in the hallway when the doctor finally leaves Genghis Mao, is not so sure of
that. The security chief, a big-boned, thick-bodied, quick-witted man with
cool eyes and a wide, quizzical mouth, draws Shadrach aside near the
entrance to Surveillance Vector One and says softly. "Is he on any
medication that might be making him mentally unstable?"
  "Not particularly. Why?"
  "I've never seen him as upset as this before."
  "He's never had his viceroy assassinated before, either."
  "What leads you to think there's been an assassination?"
  "Because I—because Ionigylakis said—because—" Shadrach pauses,
confused. "Wasn't there one?"
   "Who knows? Horthy says he saw Mangu fall out the window. Period.
He didn't see anyone pushing him. We've already run playback checks on
all personnel scanners and there's no record of any unauthorized
individual entering or leaving the entire building this morning, let alone
having reached the seventy-fifth floor."
  "Perhaps somebody was hiding up here overnight," Shadrach suggests.
  Avogadro sighs. He looks faintly amused. "Spare me the amateur
detective work. Doctor. Naturally, we've looked through yesterday's
records too."
  "I'm sorry if I—"
   "I didn't mean to be sarcastic. My point is simply that we've considered
most of the obvious possibilities. It's not easy for an assassin to get inside
this building, and I don't seriously believe that any assassins did.
Naturally, that doesn't rule out the chance that Mangu was pushed by
someone whose presence within the building would not seem unusual, as
for example General Gonchigdorge, or you, or me—"
  "Or Genghis Mao," Shadrach offers. "Tiptoeing from his bed and
tossing Mangu through the window."
   "You get the idea. What I'm saying is that anyone up here might have
killed Mangu. Except that there's no evidence that anyone did. You know,
whenever someone passes through a door up here, it's recorded. No one
entered Mangu's bedroom this morning, either on the interface side or the
elevator side. The tracking cores are absolutely blank. The last one to go in
was Mangu himself, about midnight. Preliminary inspection indicates no
traces of intruders in the room, no strange fingerprints, no flecks of
someone else's dandruff, no stray hairs, no bits of lint. And no sign of a
struggle. Mangu was a strong man, you know. He wouldn't have been easy
to overpower."
  "You're suggesting it was probably suicide?" Shadrach asks.
  "I am. Obviously. No one on my staff takes any other theory at all
seriously at this point. But the Chairman is certain it was an
assassination, and you should have seen him before you got here. Almost
hysterical, wild-eyed, raving. You know, it doesn't look good for me and
my men if he believes there's been an assassination. We're supposed to
make assassinations impossible up here. But it goes beyond whether I lose
my job, Doctor. There's this whole fantastic purge that he's instituting, the
arrests, the interrogations, restrictive measures, a tremendously messy
and unpleasant and expensive enterprise, all of it, so far as I can see,
absolutely useless. What I want to know," Avogadro says, "is whether you
think there's some chance the Chairman will be willing to take a more
rational attitude toward Mangu's death when he's further along in his
recovery."
  "I don't know. But I don't think so. I've never seen him change his mind
about anything."
  "But the operation—"
   "Has weakened him, sure. Physically and psychologically. But it hasn't
greatly affected his reason in any way that I can perceive. He's always had
this thing about assassins, of course, and obviously he's assuming Mangu
was murdered because it fulfills some kind of inner need for him, some
fantasy projection, something very dark and intricate. I think he'd have
made the same assumption even if he'd been in perfect health when
Mangu went out the window. So his recovery per se isn't going to be a
factor in getting him to reevaluate Mangu's death. All I can suggest is that
you wait three or four days until he's strong enough to be getting back on
the job and go in there with the findings of your completed investigation,
show him conclusively that there's no evidence whatsoever of murder, and
count on his basic sanity to bring him to an acceptance of the fact that
Mangu killed himself."
  "Suppose I bring him the report this afternoon?"
   "He's not really ready for all this stress. Besides, is such a speedy
investigation going to be plausible to him? No, I'd recommend waiting at
least three days, preferably four or five."
  "And meanwhile," Avogadro says, "suspects will be rounded up, minds
will be pried into, the innocent will suffer, my staff will be wasting its
energies on a foolish pursuit of a nonexistent assassin—"
  "Can't you delay the purge a few days, then?"
  "He ordered us to start at once, Doctor."
  "Yes, I know, but—"
  "He ordered us to start at once. We've done so."
  "Already?"
 "Already. I understand the meaning of an order from the Chairman.
Within the past ten minutes the first arrests have taken place. I can try to
stretch out the process of interrogation so that as little harm as possible
will come to the prisoners before I can bring my findings on Mangu's
death to the Chairman, but I have no authority to sidetrack his
instructions altogether." Quietly Avogadro adds, "I wouldn't want to risk
it, either."
  "Then there'll be a purge," Shadrach says, shrugging. "I regret that as
much as you do, I suppose. But there's no way to stop it now, eh? And no
real hope that you'll persuade Genghis Mao to swallow the suicide theory,
not this afternoon or tomorrow or next week, not if he wants to think
Mangu was murdered. I'm sorry."
  "I am also," Avogadro says. "Well. Thanks for your time, Doctor." He
begins to move away; then, pausing, he gives Shadrach a deep,
uncomfortably appraising look, and says, "Oh, one more thing. Doctor. Is
there any reason you might know of for Mangu to have wanted to kill
himself?" Shadrach frowns. He considers things.
  "No," he answers after a moment. "No. Not that I'm aware of."
   He goes on into Surveillance Vector One. The big room is crowded with
high staff personnel. He begins to feel a little odd, wandering around
headquarters without a shirt. General Gonchigdorge sits at Genghis Mao's
ornate throne, jabbing with stubby fingers at the enormous keyboard that
controls the whole vast spy-eye apparatus. As the general pounds the
buttons, images of life out there in the Trauma Ward swing jerkily in and
out of focus, zooming into view and vanishing rapidly. The scene on the
screens looks just as dizzyingly random as when the machine is left to its
own whims; not surprising, for Gonchigdorge really does seem to be
tapping the keys without system, without purpose, in a kind of sullen
petulance, as though he hopes to uncover a revolutionary cadre ouf there
by some stochastic process of nondirected scoops—dipping down into the
world here and there until he comes upon a band of desperados waving a
banner, we are conspirators. But the screens reveal only the usual human
story, people working, walking, suffering, quarreling, dying.
   Horthy, appearing silently at Mordecai's left elbow, says, with a certain
glee, "The arrests have already begun."
  "I know. Avogadro told me."
  "Did he tell you that they have a prime suspect?"
  "Who?"
  Horthy delicately prods his thumbs into the corners of his bulging,
bloodshot eyes. A psychedelic effluvium still hovers about him. "Roger
Buckmaster," he says. "The microengineering man, you know."
  "Yes. I know. I've worked with him."
  "Buckmaster was heard making wild statements at Karakorum last
night," Horthy says. "Calling for the overthrow of Genghis Mao, yelling
subversion at the top of his lungs. The Citpols picked him up, finally, but
they decided he was just drunk and let him go."
  In a low voice Shadrach says, "Is that what happened to you?"
  "Me? To me? I don't understand what you mean."
  "At the tube-train station. I saw you there, remember? While they were
running the tape of Mangu's speech. You made some remarks about the
Antidote distribution program, and then the Citpols—"
  "No," Horthy says. "You must be mistaken." His eyes fix on Shadrach's
and lock there. They are intimidating eyes, cold and hostile, despite all
their dissipated bleariness. With great precision Horthy says, "It was
someone else you saw at Karakorum, Dr. Mordecai."
  "You weren't there last night?"
  "It was someone else."
   Shadrach chooses to take the crude hint, and decides not to press the
issue. "My apologies. Tell me about Buckmaster. Why do they think he's
the one?"
  "His eccentric behavior last night was suspicious."
  "Is that all?"
  "You'll have to ask the security people for the rest."
  "Was he found near Mangu's apartment at the time of the murder?"
  "I couldn't say. Dr. Mordecai."
   "All right." On the surveillance screens, in repellent close-up, the image
of a girl vomiting. It is the crimson puke of organ-rot, in glistening lifelike
color. Horthy seems almost to smile at the sight, as though nothing horrid
is alien to him. Shadrach says, "One more thing. You saw Mangu fall,
didn't you?"
  "Yes."
  "And then you notified Genghis Mao?"
  "I notified the guards in the lobby first."
  "Of course."
   "And then I went to the seventy-fifth floor. The security people had
already sealed it, but I was able to enter."
  "Going straight to the Chairman's bedroom?"
  Horthy nods. "Which was under triple guard. I obtained admittance
only by insisting on my ministerial privileges."
  "Was Genghis Mao awake?"
  "Yes. Reading PRC reports."
  "What would you say was his general state of health?"
  "Quite good. He looked pale and weak, but not unusually so, considering
that he had just had a major operation. He greeted me and saw from my
expression that something was wrong, and asked me, and I told him what
had happened."
  "Which was?"
  "What else?" Horthy says snappishly. "That Mangu had fallen from his
window, naturally."
  "Is that how you put it? 'Mangu has fallen from his window'?"
  "Something like that."
  "Did you talk about his being pushed, maybe?"
  "Why are you interrogating me. Dr. Mordecai?"
  "Please. This is important. I need to know whether the Khan arrived at
the idea that Mangu was assassinated by himself, or if you inadvertently
put the suggestion in his mind."
   Horthy stares balefully up at Shadrach Mordecai. "I told him exactly
what I saw: Mangu falling from the window. I drew no conclusions about
how it had happened. Even if someone had thrown him, how much could I
have seen, four hundred meters below? At that distance Mangu himself
was no bigger man a speck against the sky, a doll. I didn't recognize him
until he had nearly reached the ground." A disconcerting gleam appears in
Horthy's eyes. He leans close to Shadrach and says, almost crooning, "He
looked so serene. Dr. Mordecai! Floating there above me—his eyes wide
open, his hair straight out behindhim, his lips drawn back—he was
smiling, I think. Smiling! And then he hit."
  Ionigylakis, who has evidently been eavesdropping, interjects abruptly,
"That's strange. If someone had just flung him from the window, would he
have looked so cheerful?"
  Shadrach shakes his head. "I doubt that Mangu was conscious at all by
the time Horthy could see his face. That serene expression was probably
just acceleration stupor."
  "Perhaps," Horthy says crisply.
   "Go on," Shadrach tells him. "You informed the Khan that Mangu had
fallen. Then what happened?"
   "He sat up so sharply that I thought he would break the medical
machinery all around him. He turned red in the face and began to
perspire. His breath came in gasps. Oh, it was very bad, Dr. Mordecai. I
thought he would die from overexcitement. He started to wave his arms,
to shout about assassins—suddenly he sank back against the pillow, he put
his hands to his chest—"
   "You thought he would die from overexcitement," Shadrach says. "But
it never occurred to you beforehand that it might be unwise to trouble
him with news like that, in his state of health."
  "One doesn't think clearly at a time like that."
  "One ought to, if one is in a position of high responsibility,"
   "One's judgment is not always perfect," Horthy retorts. "Especially when
one has nearly been killed oneself a few minutes before by a body
plummeting from the sky. And when one realizes that the dead man is
such an important figure in the government, in fact the viceroy. And when
one suspects that his death may be murder, assassination, the beginning
of revolution. And when—"
  "All right," Shadrach says. "All right. He managed to survive the
unnecessary shock. But what you did was very risky, Horthy. Worse: it was
dumb. Extremely dumb." He frowns. "You think there's some conspiracy,
eh?"
  "I have no idea. Clearly it's a possibility."
  "So is suicide, though."
  Ionigylakis says, "You think so, Shadrach?"
  "Avogadro certainly does."
  "But Avogadro's men have arrested Buckmaster."
  "I've heard. The poor crazy devil. I pity him."
   Gonchigdorge is still jabbing buttons. The screens are full of weirdly
distorted faces, as though the spy-eye lenses are getting much too close to
their targets. Donna Labile, from the far side of the room, calls to Horthy,
who gives Shadrach a frosty incomprehensible look and stalks away.
Shadrach is altogether unable to make sense out of Horthy, but suddenly
it does not matter. Nothing matters. This room is a madhouse, through
which he wanders, bare-chested and feeling a bit of a chill, baffled by all
the frantic activity around him. He feels too sane, too mundane, for this
environment. The screens of Surveillance Vector One suddenly go blank,
and then grow bright with wild jagged streaks of blue and green and red.
General Gonchigdorge, in his heavy-handed pursuit of conspirators, has
broken something.
  “Fricifolia!" the general yells. "Get Frank Ficifolia up here! The machine
has to be repaired!"
   Ficifolia is already present, though. Cursing softly, he shoulders through
the crowd toward the enthroned general. As he passes Shadrach he pauses
to murmur, "Your friend Buckmaster's in the quiz room right now. I
suppose you won't weep over that."
  "On the contrary. Buckmaster wasn't in his right mind when he was
hassling me last night. And now he'll pay for it."
  "Avogadro himself is interrogating, I hear."
  "Avogadro thinks it was suicide."
  "So do I," Ficifolia says, and keeps going.
   Shadrach has had enough. He heads for the interface. As he reaches it,
he looks back at the turmoil, the blaring jags of color on the screens,
Gonchigdorge shouting like an angry child, Horthy and Labile deep in
some mysterious intense discussion punctuated by fierce Italo-Magyar
gesticulations, Ionigylakis looming above everyone and announcing his
confusions in booming tones, Frank Ficifolia squatting by an open panel
to insert a long slender wrench into a turbulent spaghetti of
bubble-circuits. While somewhere in the depths of this huge building
Avogadro, who does not believe a murder was committed, is nevertheless
preparing to administer torture to Roger Buckmaster, suspected of having
committed that murder, even though Buckmaster almost certainly could
not have been capable of murdering anyone this morning. And in the
great bedchamber of the Khan that old, old man, his near-fatal episode of
shock all but over according to the tickety-tock pulsations and quivers
running through Shadrach Mordecai's body, lies in bed scheming with
calm crazy dedication how best to make sacred the memory of the
departed viceroy and how to destroy his supposed slayers. Enough,
enough. More than enough: too much. Shadrach requests exit from the
interface, which opens with blessed promptness and admits him to the
holding chamber, and then, quickly, to his own apartment on the far side.
   How peaceful it is here! Crowfoot is awake and out of the hammock; she
has just taken a shower, and stands, bare, beautiful, in the middle of the
room, drying herself, droplets of moisture still glittering on her smooth
sleek skin, nipples puckered and taut in the coolness of the air. "I'm going
to be awfully late getting to the lab today," she says casually. "What's been
happening?"
  "Everything. Mangu's dead, the Khan nearly had apoplexy when he
found out, they've arrested Buckmaster, a general purge of subversives has
been ordered, Horthy is—"
  "Wait," she cries, blinking. "Dead? Mangu? How?"
  "Fell out the window. Pushed or jumped."
  "Oh." A little sucking intake of breath. "Oh, God. When was this?"
  "Half an hour ago, more or less."
  She crumples her towel into a ball, hurls it into a corner, and begins to
pace the room, striding like a splendid perplexed tigress. Whirling on him,
she demands, "Which window?"
  "His own," he tells her, mystified by the drift of her question.
   "Fell from the top of the building? His body must have been smashed to
a ruin."
  "I imagine so. But what—"
  "Oh, Shadrach! My project!"
  "What about it?"
  "This sounds terribly inhuman, doesn't it? But what will happen to my
project now? Without Mangu—"
  "Oh," he says dully. "I hadn't considered that." "He was intended for—"
  "Yes. Don't say it."
  "It's awful of me to have that reaction."
  "Was the entire project built about Mangu as the specific particular
one—the recipient?"
  "Not necessarily. But—oh, to hell with the project!" She crouches near
the floor, folding her arms across her breasts. She is shivering. "I don't
understand. Who would kill Mangu, anyway? What's going on? Is there
going to be a revolution, Shadrach?"
  "Mangu may have killed Mangu," he tells her. "No one knows yet.
Avogadro's men didn't detect any sign of forced entry to his apartment."
  "Yet they've arrested Buckmaster?"
   "Because of the nonsense he was spouting last night in Karakorum, I
suppose. But they haven't arrested Horthy, who was being just as
subversive. Horthy's right next door in Surveillance Vector One, He was
the one who brought the news about Mangu to Genghis Mao. Damn near
killed him with the shock of it."
  Nikki, looking up somberly, says, "Perhaps that's what he wanted to
do."



                                     11

   Things grow calmer. The messages from the interior of Genghis Mao
indicate that the medical crisis is past. The Khan is healing, the morning's
upheavals will have no serious impact. Here at noon, Shadrach Mordecai
at last dresses for the day, neutral gray doctor's clothes. He feels rootless,
disoriented: too much sleep, after all these months of insomnia, the nap in
Nikki's arms in Karakorum and then the long, emergency-interrupted
spell in the hammock, and now his mind is foggy. But he'll fake it through
the day, somehow.
  Heading for his office, he passes as usual through Surveillance Vector
One, much quieter now than it was fifteen or twenty minutes before. The
high panjandrums are gone, Gonchigdorge and Horthy and Labile and
that crowd, and no one remains, except three underlings, a Citpol man
and a couple of Avogadro's lieutenants, who stare moodily at the jumpy
mosaic flitting across the hundreds of screens. Their eyes are glazed.
Informational overkill, it is. They see so much that they know not what
they see.
   Bypassing Committee Vector One—Shadrach has no yearning to intrude
on the politicos this tense morning—he takes the long route to his office,
via Genghis Mao's own vacant office and the Khan's majestic dining room.
It is, as always, comforting to be among his familiar talismans, his books,
his collection of medical instruments. He wanders from case to case,
getting himself together. Picks up his devaricator, sinister splay-elbowed
forceps used to pry open wounds. Thinks of Mangu, splattered against the
terrazzo pavement; banishes the thought. Examines the hacksaw with
which some eighteenth-century surgeon accomplished amputations.
Thinks of Genghis Mao, livid, beady-eyed, ordering mass arrests. Off with
their heads! That may be next; why not? Fondles a fifteenth-century
anatomical doll from Bologna, elegant ivory homunculus, female— what is
the feminine of homunculus, he wonders? Homuncula? Feminacula?—the
belly and breasts of which lift away at the push of a fingertip, revealing
heart, lungs, abdominal organs, even a fetus crouching in the uterus like a
kangaroo in the pouch. And the books, oh, yes, the precious musty books,
formerly _ owned by great doctors of Vienna, Montreal, Savannah, New
Orleans. Valesco de Tarania's Philonium Pharmaceutieum et
Cheirurgicum, 1599! Martin Schurig's Gynaecologia Historico Medica,
1730, rich with details of defloration, debauchery, penis captivus, and
other wonders! Here is old Rudolf Virchow's Die Cellularpathologie, 1852,
proclaiming that every living organism is "a cell state in which every state
is a citizen," that a disease is "a conflict of citizens in this state, brought
about by the action of external forces." Aux armes, citoyens! What would
Virchow have said of transplanted livers, borrowed lungs? He'd call them
hired mercenaries, no doubt: the Hessians of medical metaphor. At least
they fight fair in the cellular wars, no sneaky defenestrations, no snipers
on the overpass. And this huge book: Grootdoorn, Iconographies
Medicalis, luscious old engravings—see, here. Saints Cosmas and Damian
in the sixteenth-century portrait, shown grafting the dead Moor's leg to
the cancer victim's stump. Prophetic. Transplant surgery circa 500 A.D.,
performed posthumously, no less, by the saintly surgeons. If I ever find the
original of that print, Shadrach thinks, I'll give it to Warhaftig for
Hanukkah.
   He spends half an hour updating Genghis Mao's medical file, dictating
a report on the liver operation, adding a postscript about this morning's
brief alarm. Someday the printout of the Genghis Mao dossier is going to
be a medical classic, ranking with the Smith Papyrus and the Fabrica,
and he toils conscientiously over it, preparing his place in the history of
his art. Just as he finishes the account of the current episode, Katya
Lindman phones him.
  "Can you come down to the Talos lab?" she asks. "I'd like to show you
our latest mock-up."
  "I suppose so. You've heard about Mangu?"
  "Of course."
  "You don't sound very concerned."
  "What was Mangu? Mangu was an absence. Now the absence is absent.
His death was more of an event than his whole existence."
  "I doubt that he saw things that way himself."
  "You are so compassionate, Shadrach," she says in the flat voice that he
knows she reserves for mockery. "I wish I shared your love of mankind."
  "I'll see you in fifteen minutes, Katya."
  Her laboratory is on the ninth floor of the Grand Tower, a cluttered
place festooned with cables, connectors, buses, coaxials, crates of
bubble-chips, enough electronic gear to throttle a brontosaur. Out of this
chaotic maze of materiel Lindman materializes, coming toward him in her
customary slashing headlong stride. She is all business, very much the
bustling woman of science. She wears a white blouse, a lavender lab jacket
open at the throat, a short brown tweed skirt. The effect is severe, stark,
and harsh, mitigated neither by the bare thighs nor the tightness of the
skirt nor the exposed cleft of her breasts. Lindman is not a woman who
works at projecting sexuality. Nor does she need to, with Shadrach; she
holds a malign physical authority over him, the source of which he does
not comprehend. He feels always when he is with her that he must be on
guard— against what, he is not sure.
  "Look," she says triumphantly, with a broad sweeping gesture.
   He follows her pointing arm halfway across the laboratory to the one
uncluttered place, a kind of dais, on which, under a dazzling spotlight, the
current working model of the Genghis Mao automaton sits enthroned. A
single thick yellow-and-red cable runs to it from a power unit. The
automaton is half again as large as life, a massive imitation of the
Chairman, plastic skin over metal armature; the face is an altogether
convincing replica, the shoulders and chest look plausibly human, but
below the diaphragm the robot Genghis Mao is an incomplete thing of
struts and wires and bare circuitry, skinless and lacking even the internal
mechanical musculature that fills its upper half. As Shadrach watches, the
ersatz Chairman extends its right arm toward him and, with an altogether
human impatient little flip of its hand, beckons him forward. "Go ahead,"
Katya Lindman says. He advances. When he is three or four meters away
he halts and waits. The robot's head slowly turns to face him. The lips pull
back in a cruel grimace—no, a grin, unmistakably a grin, the bleak and
terrible grin of Genghis Mao, that self-congratulatory smirk, slowly
forming at the corners of the leathery cheeks, a regal grin, a monstrous
overbearing grin. Imperceptibly the features rearrange themselves,
without apparent transition; the robot now is scowling, and the wrath of
Genghis Mao darkens the room. Off with their heads, yes, indeed. And
then a smile. A cold one, for there is no other sort from Genghis Mao, but
yet it is a smile that puts one at one's ease, Arctic though it is; and the
smile of the robot is an uncanny replica of the smile of Genghis Mao. And,
lastly, the wink, the famous wink of the Khan, that sly, disarming dip of
the eyelid that cancels all the seeming ferocity, that communicates a
redeeming sense of perspective, of self-appraisal: Don't take me so
seriously, friend, I may not be the megalomaniac you think I am. And
then, just as the wink has achieved its effect and the terror that Genghis
Mao can generate with a glance has subsided, the face returns to its
original expression, icy, remote, alien. "Well?" Lindman asks, after some
while.
  "Doesn't he speak?"
   "Not yet. The audio is trivial to accomplish. We aren't bothering with it
just now."
  "That's the whole show, then?"
  "That's it. You sound disappointed."
  "Somehow I expected more. I've seen him do the grin already."
  "But not the wink. The wink is new."
  "Even so, Katya—you add a feather here and there, but you still don't
have an eagle."
   "What did you think I'd show you? A walking, talking Genghis Mao?
The complete simulacrum overnight?" His disappointment has angered
her, obviously: her mouth works tensely, the lips drawing back from the
gums again and again, baring those pointed carnivorous incisors. "We still
are in preliminary stages here. But I thought you would like the wink. I
like the wink. I rather do like the wink, Shadrach." Her voice grows
lighter, her features soften; he can almost hear the gears shifting within
her. "I'm sorry I wasted your time. I was pleased with the wink. I wanted
to share it with you."
  "It's a fantastic wink, Katya."
   "And, you know, Project Talos will become much more important with
Mangu gone. Everything that Dr. Crowfoot has been doing was aimed
toward integrating the Chairman's personality with the neural responses
of Mangu's living mind and body, and that's over with, now, that whole
approach must be discarded."
   Shadrach knows enough about Nikki's work to know that this is not
literally so; apparently Mangu was indeed the template against which the
Avatar personality-coding program was being plotted, but there was
nothing inexorable about the use of Mangu; with the appropriate
adjustments the project can readily be reshaped around some other body
donor. But there is no need to tell Lindman that, if she wants to feel that
her project, peripheral so far, has suddenly become Genghis Mao's prime
hope of postmortem survival. She has made an obvious effort in the past
minute or two to be less intimidating, less abrasive, and he prefers her
that way; he will do nothing that might spur new tension and
defensiveness in her.
   In fact her mood has eased so much that she seems almost coquettish.
Chattering in a shrill, girlish, wholly unKatyaesque way, she leads him on
a hectic and gratuitous tour of the laboratory, displaying circuit diagrams,
boxes of memory chips, prototypes for the pelvis and spine of the next
model of Genghis Mao, and other bits of Project Talos that are of no
conceivable significance just now; and he realizes, after a time, that her
only pretext for doing all this is to detain him, to have a few minutes more
of his company. It puzzles him. Lindman's usual manner is aggressive and
peremptory, but now she is coy, flirtatious, sidling up unsubtly to him,
plenty of heavy breathing and forthright eye contact, actually grazing his
elbow with her breasts as they stand close together rummaging through a
table full of schematics. Does she think that such stuff will make him
snort, sweat, paw the ground with his hooves, fling himself upon her
throbbing body? He has no idea what she thinks. He rarely does. Nor is he
going to find out now, for whatever she is organizing here is truncated
abruptly by a squeaky summons from his pocket beeper, tracking him
through the building. He activates his portable telephone. Avogadro is
calling.
  "Can you come to Security Vector One, Doctor?"
  "Now?"
  "If you would."
  "What's happening?" Shadrach asks.
  "We've been interrogating Buckmaster. Your name has—"
  "Oh. Ok. Am I a suspect too, now?"
  "Hardly. A witness, perhaps. Can we expect you in five minutes?"
  Shadrach looks at Katya, who is flushed, excited. "I have to go," he says.
"Avogadro. Something about the Mangu inquiry. It sounds urgent."
  Her face darkens. Her lips compress. But she says only that she hopes to
see him again soon, and, hiding her disappointment behind a mask of
detachment, she releases him. As he leaves the laboratory he feels his
entire body expand, as though it had been held under great pressure while
he was with her.
  Security Vector One is on the sixty-fourth floor. Mordecai has never had
occasion to go there, and he has little idea what to expect, other than
standard police paraphernalia —magnifying glasses and fingerprint pads
all over the place, no doubt, photos of known subversives mounted on
tacky boards, sheafs of dossiers and transcripts, rows of tap-terminals and
fiber-eyes, whatever things detectives would be likely to use in protecting
the physical persons of Genghis Mao and the PRC, Perhaps such things
are there, but Shadrach gets no glimpse of them. A feline, soft-voiced
young man, Oriental but too sinuous to be a Mongol, probably Chinese,
greets him at the reception desk and guides him through a labyrinth of
blank-walled hallways, past a nest of tiny offices where weary-looking
bureaucrats sit at desks heaped wish paper. The place could be the
headquarters of an insurance company, a bank, a brokerage house. Only
when he is ushered into the interrogation cell where Avogadro and
Buckmaster are waiting for him does he feel that he is among the
enforcers of the law.
   The room is artfully claustrophobic, rectangular and window-less, with
dirty green walls and a low, oppressive ceiling from which short-stalked
spotlights dangle at the ends of jointed metal arms. The spotlights are
trained on the forehead of Roger Buckmaster, who sits uncomfortably
slouched in a squat, hard narrow chair with broad aluminum armpieces
and a high backrest. Electrodes are taped to Buckmaster's wrists and
temples; their leads disappear into the recesses of the backrest.
Buckmaster looks unnaturally pale, sweaty, blotchy-faced; his eyes are
glassy; his lips are slack. Clearly Avogadro has been working him over for
some while.
   Avogadro, who is standing next to Buckmaster as Shadrach enters,
looks little better—grim, harried, frayed. "A madhouse," he mutters. "Fifty
arrests in the first hour. We have every interrogation cell full and they're
still coming in. Lunatics, beggars, thieves, all the riffraff of Ulan Bator.
And the radicals, of course. I go from cell to cell, cell to cell. And for what?
For what?" A rough-edged laugh. "There'll be plenty of meat for the organ
farms before this is over." Slowly, moving his heavy frame as though
doubled gravity drags it down, he turns to the man in the chair. "Well,
Buckmaster? You have a visitor. Do you recognize him?"
  Buckmaster stares at the floor. "You know bloody well I do."
  "Let me be."
 "Tell me his name," Avogadro urges in a tone that is tired but
menacing.
  "Mordecai. Shadrach Bloody Mordecai. Em Dee."
  "Thank you, Buckmaster, Now tell me when you last saw Dr. Mordecai."
  "Last night," Buckmaster says, his voice a feeble fluting thing, barely
audible.
  "Louder?"
  "Last night."
  "Where?"
  "You know where, Avogadro!"
  "I want you to tell me yourself."
  "I already have."
  "Again. In front of Dr. Mordecai. Tell me."
  "Why don't you just carve me up and be done with it?"
   "You're making this hard for yourself, Buckmaster. You're also making
it hard for me."
  "Pity."
  "I have no choice about this," Avogadro says.
   Lifting his head, Buckmaster manages a cold, sullen, furious glare. "Do
I? Do I? Oh, I know the game. You'll question me for a while, you"ll find
me guilty of conspiracy, you'll sentence me to death, and off I go to the
organ farm, right? Right? And there I lie, a corpse that isn't dead, so that
whenever Genghis Mao needs a lung, a kidney, a heart, someone can come
and cut out mine, right? While I lie there, dead, warm, breathing and
meta-metabolizing, part of the stockpile."
  "Buckmaster—"
   Buckmaster chuckles. "Genghis Mao thinks the stocks are getting low,
and he can't use the miserable organ-rotted people out there, so he turns
on us, he tosses a few dozen of his own people to the farms, right? Very
well, take me away! Turn me into cannibal food! But let's end this farce
fast, shall we? Stop asking me idiotic questions."
  Avogadro sighs. "To continue. You saw Dr. Mordecai at—"
  "Timbuktu."
   Avogadro lifts his left hand. A security man sitting at a table in the
farthest corner does something to a control console in front of him;
Buckmaster jerks and twitches and the left side of his face goes into a brief
ugly spasm. "You saw him where?"
  "Piccadilly Circus."
   Again the left hand, higher. Again the touching of controls; again the
facial spasm, much worse. Shadrach Mordecai shifts his weight uneasily
from foot to foot. In a low voice he says, "Possibly it isn't necessary to—"
   "It's necessary, yes," Avogadro tells him. "The forms must be observed."
To Buckmaster he says, "I'm prepared to keep this up all day. It bores me,
but it's my job, and if I have to hurt you, I'll hurt you, and if you make me
cripple you, I'll cripple you, because I have no choice. Do you understand?
I have no choice. Now, again: you met Dr. Mordecai in—"
  "Karakorum."
  "Where in Karakorum?"
  "Outside the transtemporalists' tent."
  "About what time?"
  "I don't know. Late, but it was before midnight."
  "Dr. Mordecai, is this correct? Your answers will be recorded."
  "It's all correct so far," Shadrach says.
  "Good. Go on, Buckmaster. Tell me what you told me before. You
encountered Dr. Mordecai and you said what to him?"
  "I spoke a lot of bloody nonsense."
  "What kind of nonsense, Buckmaster?"
  "Foolish talk. The transtemporalists jumbled my mind with their
drugs."
  "What exactly did you say to the doctor?"
  Buckmaster, silent, stares at the floor. The right hand of Avogadro rises
almost to his shoulder. The controls are adjusted. Buckmaster leaps in his
seal as though speared. His right arm thrashes about like an infuriated
snake. "Tell me, Buckmaster. Please."
  "I accused him of doing evil."
  "Go on."
  "I called him a Judas."
  "And a black bastard," Shadrach says.
  Avogadro, with a gentle nudge, indicates to Shadrach that his
prompting is unwelcome.
  "Specifically, Buckmaster, what did you accuse Dr. Mordecai of doing?"
  "Of doing his job."
  "Meaning what?"
  "His job is keeping the Chairman alive. I said he's responsible for
keeping Genghis Mao from having died five years ago."
  Avogadro says, "Is that correct, Dr. Mordecai?"
  Shadrach hesitates. He doesn't particularly want to cooperate in
sending Buckmaster to the organ farm. But it would be folly to try to
protect the little man now. The truth about last night's incident in
Karakorum has already been drawn forth and recorded, he knows.
Buckmaster is condemned out of his own mouth. No lie can save him, but
only imperil the liar. "It is," he says.
  "So. Buckmaster, do you regret that Genghis Mao didn't die five years
ago?"
  "Let me be, Avogadro."
  "Do you? Do you truly want the Chairman to be dead? Is that your
position?"
  "I had the drug in my head!"
   "You don't have the drug in your head now, Buckmaster. What are your
feelings about Genghis Mao at this moment?"
  "I don't know. I simply don't know."
  "Hostile?"
 "Perhaps. Look, Avogadro, don't force any more out of me. You have
me, you'll give me to the cannibals tonight, isn't that enough for you?"
  "We can end this as soon as you cooperate."
  "Very well," Buckmaster says. He pulls himself upright, finding some
remaining resource of dignity. "I don't care for the regime of Genghis
Mao. I am not in general agreement with the policies of the PRC. I regret
having devoted so much effort to their service. I was overwrought last
night and I said a lot of foul things to Dr. Mordecai for which I feel shame
today. But. But, Avogadro! But I have never done anything disloyal. And I
don't know a thing about the death of Mangu. I swear I had no part in it."
  Avogadro nods. "Dr. Mordecai. did the prisoner mention Mangu last
night?"
  "I don't think he did."
  "Can you be more positive about that?"
  Shadrach considers. "No," he says finally. "To the best of my
recollection, he said nothing about Mangu."
  "Did the prisoner make any threats against the life of Genghis Mao?"
  "Not that I recall."
  "Try to remember. Doctor."
  Shadrach shakes his head. "You have to understand, I had just come
out of the transtemporaltsts' tent myself. My mind was still elsewhere
during most of Buckmaster's tirade. He did speak critically of the
government, yes, quite strongly, but I don't think there were any direct
threats. No."
   "I should refresh your memory, then," Avogadro says, gesturing to his
assistant in the corner. There is a hissing sound, and then, from an
invisible speaker, the sound of a voice, strangely familiar but oddly
strange. His own.
   This is suicidal, the way you're carrying on. There'll be a report of all
this on the Chairman's desk tomorrow, Roger, more likely than not.
You're destroying yourself.
  —I'll destroy him. The bloodsucker. He holds us all for ransom, our
bodies, our souls—
  "Again," Avogadro says. "That last bit."
  —I'll destroy him. The bloodsucker. He holds us all for—
  "Do you recognize those voices, Doctor?"
  "Mine. Buckmaster's."
  "Thank you. The identification is important. Who was it who said, 'I'll
destroy him'?"
  "Buckmaster."
  "Yes. Thank you. Buckmaster, was that your voice?"
  "You know it was."
  "Making a threat against the life of Genghis Mao?"
  "I was overwrought. I was making a rhetorical point."
  "Yes," Shadrach Mordecai says. "That's how it seemed to me, I urged
him not to shout nonsense. I can't see it as any kind of serious threat. You
have a tape of the whole conversation?''
   "The whole thing," Avogadro says. "Many conversations are taped, you
know. And automatically screened for subversion. The computers brought
this to our attention early this morning. The voiceprints told us it was you
and Buckmaster, but of course direct corroboration is useful—"
  "As though you'll have a trial, a jury, lawyers," Buckmaster says bitterly.
"As though I won't be meat by nightfall!"
  "He didn't say anything about Mangu to me last night, did he?"
Shadrach asks.
  "No. Nothing on the tape."
  "As I thought. Then why hold him?"
   "Why defend him, Doctor? According to the tape, he was insulting and
offensive to you."
   "I haven't forgotten. Nevertheless, I hold no grudges. He was a nuisance
to me last night, but being a nuisance shouldn't be enough to make me
want to see him sent to the organ farms."
  "Tell him again!" Buckmaster cries. "Oh, God, tell him!"
   "Please," Avogadro says. Buckmaster's outburst appears to give him
pain. He signals to his man, and Buckmaster is unstrapped, freed of the
electrodes, helped to his feet, led from the room. At the door Buckmaster
pauses and looks back, face bleary, distorted with fear. His lips tremble; in
a moment he will be sobbing. "I'm not the one!" he cries, and the security
aides haul him away.
  "He isn't," Shadrach says. "I'm sure of that. He was out of his mind last
night, ranting and screaming, but he's no assassin. A malcontent, maybe.
But no assassin."
   Avogadro, sinking limply into the interrogation chair, plays with the
electrodes, winding the snaky leads around his fingers. "I know that," he
says.
  "What will happen to him?"
  "The organ farm. Probably before morning."
  "But why?"
  "Genghis Mao's reviewed the tape. He regards Buckmaster as
dangerous."
  "Christ!"
  "Go argue with Genghis Mao."
  "You sound so calm about it," Shadrach says.
  "It's out of my hands. Doctor."
  "We can't just let him be murdered!"
  "We can't?"
  "I can't."
  "If you want to try to save him, go ahead. I wish you well."
  "I might try. I might just."
  "The man called you a black bastard," Avogadro says. "And a Judas."
  "For that I should let him be vivisected?"
  "You aren't letting anything. It's just happening. It's Buckmaster's
problem. Not mine, not yours."
  "No man's an island, Avogadro."
  "Haven't I heard that before somewhere?"
  Shadrach stares. "Aren't you at all concerned? Don't you give a damn
about justice?"
  "Justice is for lawyers. Lawyers are an extinct species. I'm only a
security officer."
  "You don't believe that, Avogadro."
  "Don't I?"
  "Christ. Christ. Don't come on with that I'm-just-a-cop routine. You're
too intelligent to mean it. And I'm too intelligent to take it at face value."
   Avogadro sits up. He has coiled two of the leads around his throat in a
bizarre clownish way, and his head is tilted to one side, like that of a
hanged man. "Do you want me to play you the Buckmaster tape? There's a
place on it where you tell him that it's not our fault the world is the way it
is, that we accept our karma, that we all serve Genghis Mao because he's
the only game in town. The alternative is organ-rot, nez-pah? Therefore we
dance to the Khan's tune, and we don't ask questions of morality, neither
do we unduly search our souls over matters of guilt and responsibility."
  "I—"
  "Wait. You said it. It's on tape, Dottore. Now I say to you. I've forfeited
the luxury of having personal feelings about the righteousness of sending
Bucky to the organ farm. By entering the Khan's service I've given up the
privilege of having qualms."
  "Have you ever seen an organ farm?"
  "No," Avogadro says. "But I hear—"
  "I've seen them. Long quiet room, like a hospital ward, but very quiet.
Except for the burble of the life-support machinery. Double row of open
tanks, wide aisle between them. One body in each tank, floating in warm
blue-green fluid, a nutrient bath. Intravenous tubes all over the floor, like
pink spaghetti. Dialysis machines between each pair of tanks. Before they
put a body in its tank, they kill the brain—spike through the foramen
magnum, zap—but the rest stays alive, Avogadro. Vegetable in animal
form. God knows what it perceives, but it lives, it needs to be fed, it
digests and excretes, the hair grows, the fingernails, the nurses shave and
groom the bodies every few weeks, and there they lie, arranged neatly by
blood type and tissue type, available, gradually being stripped of limbs
and organs, a kidney this week, a lung the next, sliced down to torsos in
easy stages, the eyes, the fingers, the genitalia, eventually the heart, the
liver—"
   "So? What's your point, Doctor? That organ farms aren't pretty places?
I know that. But it's an efficient way to maintain organs awaiting
transplant. Isn't it better to recycle bodies than to waste them?"
   "And turn an innocent man into a zombie? Whose only purpose is to be
a living storage depot for spare organs?"
  "Buckmaster isn't innocent."
  "What's he guilty of?"
   "Guilty of bad judgment. Guilty of bad luck. His number's up, Doctor."
Avogadro, rising, lays his hand lightly on Shadrach's arm. "You're a man
of conscience, aren't you, Dottore? Buckmaster thought you were a cynical
fiend, a soulless servant of the Antichrist, but no, no, you're a decent sort,
caught in a nasty time, doing your best. Well, Doctor, so am I. I quote your
own words of last night: Guilt is a luxury we can't afford. Amen! Now go.
Stop worrying about Buckmaster. Buckmaster's done himself in. If you
hear the bell tolling, remember, it tolls for him, and it doesn't diminish
you or me at all, because we've already diminished ourselves as much as
possible." Avogadro's smile is warm, almost pitying. "Go, Doctor. Go and
relax. I have work to do. I have a dozen more suspects to question before
dinner."
  "And the real murderer of Mangu—"
   "Was Mangu himself, nine to one. What's that to me? I'll continue to
find his killer and interrogate him and ship him to the organ farms until
I'm told to stop. Go, now. Go. Go."



                                     12
   Word circulates, the next day, that thirteen conspirators have been sent
to the organ farms, including Roger Buckmaster, the ringleader. Such
rumors generally have a way of being accurate, but Shadrach Mordecai,
still finding the idea unpalatable, goes to the extent of keying into the
master personnel register to find out where Buckmaster is. He tries the
engineering department code, but is told by the master computer that
Buckmaster has been reassigned to Department 111. Shadrach tries that
code next, though he knows what it is likely to be, and yes. Department 111
is the euphemism for the organ farms. Buckmaster has joined the human
stockpile. Spike through the foramen magnum, zap. Poor silly red-faced
fool.
  Dr. Mordecai chooses not to bring up the subject of Buckmaster when
he pays his morning call on the Chairman. Buckmaster's fate seems beside
the point now.
  "The conspiracy is crushed!" Genghis Mao declares vehemently as
Shadrach enters. "The guilty have been punished. The threat to our
regime has been met. The principles of centripetal depolarization will not
be challenged." His eyes gleam with lunatic satisfaction. His ancient
patchwork body throbs with triumphant good health, reverberating in
Shadrach's implants as furious freshets of resurgent energy.
   Shadrach takes blood samples, administers medicines, checks reflexes;
the Khan pays no more heed to him than if he were an orderly changing
the bed linens. He is altogether preoccupied, it appears, with his
proliferating schemes for the deification of Mangu. Already blueprints for
Mangu monuments have been drawn up, and they are spread everywhere
in rustling heaps across the Chairman's bed, over his bony upjutting knees
and on both sides of him and tumbling to the floor. Humming tunelessly,
Genghis Mao turns the documents this way and that, nodding, scribbling
marginal notes, muttering private observations. "Hah! I like this!"
Genghis Mao exclaims sharply. "Patterned after the Great Pyramid of
Gizeh, but twice the size, with statues of Mangu twenty meters high rising
out of each of the four faces. What do you think?" He shoves the blueprint
toward Mordecai. "It's Ionigylakis's idea. He's trying to improve on
antiquity, like everyone else. How do you like it, Shadrach?"
  "The statues, sir. They—ah—tend to break the line of the pyramid,
wouldn't you say?"
  "What's wrong with that?"
  "Pyramids are so graceful," Shadrach says. "So compact."
   "The original pyramid is an exhausted concept," the Chairman snaps.
"What I like about this is the contrast in angles, the slope of the pyramid's
face versus the upright statue working against it, do you see? Mangu is
rising upward, outward, away from the center—it's centripetal, Shadrach!
Do you see?"
  "Centrifugal, I'd say, sir."
  Genghis Mao gapes as though his doctor has struck him. "Centrifugal?
Centrifugal? Are you serious?" He breaks into frantic laughter. "A joke!
My earnest Shadrach makes a joke! Tell me: do you think Mangu was in
great pain?"
  "He must have died instantly. I doubt that he was conscious as he fell.
The acceleration—"
   "Yes. Look at this one, will you? A helical spire, it says here, nine
hundred meters high, a great metal coil through which a magnetic field
flows, and a perpetual bolt of lightning flickering at the tip—"
  "Sir, if you would, the tritetrazol injection—"
  "Later, Shadrach."
  "The absorption levels are already slightly above optimum. If I could
have your arm—"
  "—and here, yes, I like this. A giant sarcophagus of alabaster, inlaid
with onyx—"
  "—clench your fist, sir—"
  "—build a tomb worthy of—"
  "—if you'd hold your breath, count to five—"
  "—a scale befitting Alexander the Great, Tut-ankh-Amen, even Genghis
Khan himself. Yes, why not? Mangu—"
  "—and relax now, sir—"
  "—Ch'in Shih Huang Ti! There's our prototype! Do you know him,
Shadrach?"
  "Sir?"
  "—Ch'in Shih Huang Ti."
  "I'm afraid I—"
  "The First Emperor of China, the Unifier, the builder of the Great Wall.
Do you know how they buried him?" Genghis Mao scrabbles through the
documents on his bed and comes up with a sheaf of pale green printouts,
which he brandishes wildly in Shadrach's face. "Agreat hill of sand, south
of the River Wei, at the foot of Mount Li. Or was it Mount Wei, River Li?
Wei. Li. In the mound a palace, and the palace contained a relief map of
China modeled in bronze, depicting the rivers, mountains, valleys, plains.
The Yangtze and the Huang Ho had channels four meters deep, filled with
quicksilver. Models of cities and palaces along their banks, and a great
dome of bright copper overhead, yes, with the moon and the constellations
engraved on it. The coffin of the First Emperor, then, floated on one of the
quicksilver rivers, Shadrach! An endless journey across China. Silent,
slippery—oh, bathe me in quicksilver, Shadrach, let me sleep on
quicksilver! Do you see the coffin? And a powerful bow mounted at the
coffin's side, ready to hurl an arrow at any intruder. Trapdoors and hidden
knives waiting for the grave-robbers, too, and thunder-making machines
—and hundreds of slaves and artisans buried in the mound with Ch'in
Shih Huang Ti to serve him, yes. Grandeur! What do you think? Should I
build this for Mangu?" The Khan blinks, frowns, moistens his lips.
Shadrach Mordecai perceives changes in skin temperature and blood
pressure. "On the other hand—if I build such a tomb for Mangu, what
could I provide for myself? Surely I deserve something finer. But
what—what—" Genghis Mao breaks into a broad grin. "There's time to
plan it! Twenty, fifty years! Why should I think now of tombs for Genghis
Mao? It's Mangu we bury. I'll give him the finest!" The old man pushes the
blueprints into a heap. "Forty-one guilty conspirators to the organ farms
so far, Shadrach."
  "I had heard thirteen."
    "Forty-one, and we're not finished. I've told Avogadro to bring in at
least a hundred. Think of the livers going into storage! The kilometers of
intestine. How beautiful the farms are, Shadrach. I hate waste of all kinds.
You know that. To conserve. It's a kind of poetry. Forty-one more tanks
filled. And the threat to the government is put down." Genghis Mao's voice
grows dark, hollow. "But Mangu—what have they done to Mangu? My
other self—my self-in-waiting—my prince, my viceroy—"
  "Sir, perhaps you're becoming overexcited."
  "I feel fine. Shadrach."
  "But some rest—"
   "Rest? I don't need to rest. I could get out of bed now and run from here
to Karakorum. Rest, for what? Are you worried about me, Shadrach?" The
Chairman's laughter bursts forth, booming, resonant. "I feel fine. Never
better. Stop worrying. What an old woman you are, Shadrach. Are you a
Christian?"
  "Sir?" Shadrach says blankly.
   "A Christian. A Christian. Do you accept the Only Begotten Son of God
as your Savior? What? Can't you hear? The ears going bad? I'll ask
Warhaftig to give you new eardrums. I asked you, Are you a Christian?"
  Baffling. "Well—"
  "You know. You know. Pater noster qui art in heaven. Ave Maria full of
grace. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has life eternal, and I
will raise him up on the last day, says the Lord. Yes? You know of this?
Lamb of God you take away the sins of the world, Ite missa est. Well?"
  "Well, my parents sometimes took me to church, but I can't really say
that I—"
  "Too bad. Not a believer?"
  "In the narrow sense of the word, perhaps, but—"
  "There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me."
  "I don't think I'm a believer, then."
  "Well, hallowed be thy name. Would you like to be Pope anyway?"
  "Sir?"
   "Is that all you can say? Sir? Sir?" Genghis Mao mimics his
obsequiousness with devastating ferocity. The Khan's pulse is rising; his
face is flushed. "The kingdom and the power. Oh, and the glory. You
Christians, you understand. I am the way, the truth, and the life, says the
Lord; no one comes to the Father, except through me." This manic
volatility disturbs Dr. Mordecai, who surreptitiously boosts the Khan's
tranquilizer intake, hitting the 9-pordenone pedal while pretending to
examine the base of the life-support system. Genghis Mao, sitting up,
shouting now, cries, "Answer yes, answer no, but no more sirs! Pope! I
asked you, would you like to be Pope? The Pope is dead in Rome, old
Benedict. The cardinals will meet this summer. I am invited to offer a
nominee. I'll send them the name of my doctor, my beautiful black doctor,
yes? Le Pape Noir. Il Papa Negro. There have been black saints, why not a
black Pope? Pick your own regnal name. It's one of the idle dividends of
the power and the glory. What do you say to Papa Legba? Eh? Eh?"
Genghis Mao claps his hands. "Papa Legba! Papa Legba!"
 The new liver, Shadrach thinks. Could it have been the liver of a
madman?
  He says mildly, "I'm not Roman Catholic, sir."
  "You could become one. Is that so hard? A week of coaching and you'd
know how to mumble the right words. Kyrie eleison. Credo in unum
deum. Om mani padme hum."
    There is something ominous in all this crazy talk of poping. Genghis
Mao's lightning shifts of subject, his hectic flow of fantasies, his volcanic
verbal outpour, do not inspire confidence in Genghis Mao's mental
stability. This is the man who rules the world, Shadrach reflects. Such that
it is.
  Shadrach says, "If I became Pope, who would be your doctor?"
  "Why, you would, Shadrach."
  "From Rome?"
  "We'd move the Vatican to Ulan Bator."
  "Even so, I don't think I could do justice to both jobs, sir."
  "A young man like you? Of course you could. What are you, thirty-five
years old, thirty-eight, something like that? You'd be a splendid Pope. I'd
become Catholic myself, and you could hear my confession. Don't refuse
the offer, Shadrach. I think you don't have enough to do as things are now.
You need distractions. You spend too much of your time doctoring me,
because your days are otherwise idle. You fill me with needless medicines.
Why are you staring at me like that?"
  "I'd prefer not to become Pope, sir."
  "Final decision?"
  "Final."
  "All right. I'll name Avogadro."
  "At least he's Italian."
  "You think I'm insane, Shadrach?"
  "Sir, I think you're overtaxing yourself. I prescribe two hours of total
rest. May I give you a sleep tab?"
   "You may not. You may leave and amuse yourself in Karakorum.
Gonchigdorge will be Pope, yes, a Mongol, do you like that? I like that.
You, up there, sainted old Father Genghis, old Temujin, do you like that?
Leave me, Shadrach. You annoy me today. I am not insane. I am not
overtaxing myself. The death of Mangu distresses me. I grieve for Mangu.
I will make the world remember Mangu forever. Forty-one to the farms,
and it's only morning! Will you take yourself to Karakorum?"
   The metabolic levels are rising on a dozen fronts. Shadrach is alarmed.
He manipulates the tranquilizer pedal once again. The old man must be
awash in 9-pordenone now, but somehow Genghis Mao overrides it,
remaining in the manic mode despite the drug. It is at last taking effect,
though. At last, some sign of calming. The Khan subsides. Shadrach
departs, troubled, but confident that the Khan's temperament will
stabilize for a time. As he goes out, Genghis Mao calls after him, "Or King
of England! What do you say? There'll be a vacancy in Windsor soon.”



                                    13

   He goes to Karakorum with Katya Lindman. Ordinarily he spends his
free evenings with Nikki Crowfoot, but not always; they are not husband
and wife, there is no monogamy between them. He loves Crowfoot, or
believes he does, which amounts to the same thing for him. But he has
never been able to escape Lindman for long. Now she is in the ascendant,
like baleful Saturn rising into the house of Aquarius. This night will be
hers. Nikki is elsewhere, anyway, he knows not where; he is free,
accessible, vulnerable.
  "You'll do the dreams with me tonight?"
   Why not? Her harsh forceful contralto has maimed his will. He shall
allow himself finally to be indoctrinated into the mysteries of
dream-death. Her dark eyes sparkle with savage succubal glee as he nods
his agreement.
   The dream-death pavilion is a wide many-poled tent, black cloth with
trim of rusty orange stripes. Over its entrance is mounted a great jutting
image of a ram's head, heavy, glowering, aggressive, spearing the chilly
spring air with massive superprepotent coiled homs. Shadrach knows the
ram is Amon-Re, lord of fear, king of the sun, patron of dream-death; for
this cult is said to be derived from Pharaonic Egypt, secret rites never lost
since first they were practiced along the shores of the sluggish, sweltering
Nile in the time of the Fifth Dynasty. Within the tent, surprisingly, all is
light. The place is ablaze with glowing fixtures from floor to
ceiling—hanging lamps, floor-poles, spots, cascading lavalieres of
radiance, so that the air burns with a numbing blue-while brightness and
all shadows are obliterated. Shadrach, remembering the murky
atmosphere of the transtemporalists' tent, is taken aback by this intense
luminosity. But in the realm of Amon-Re a solar brilliance must prevail.
   A costumed figure approaches, a slender Oriental female who wears
nothing but a twist of white linen around her hips and a huge gilded
lioness-mask that rests ponderously on her slim shoulders. Between her
dainty breasts hangs a pendant, the crux ansata, in fiery gold. She does
not speak; but with expressive gestures she leads Mordecai and Lindman
through the crowded tent, past scores of sleepers who lie on fluffy
mattresses of white cotton surrounded by high barriers of golden rope
strung through ebony stanchions, to a vacant cubicle that is to be theirs.
Within the ring of rope lie two thick mattresses side by side, a neatly
folded dreaming costume beside each one, and an ornate wooden trunk
which, their guide indicates, is for their street clothes. Katya immediately
begins to strip, and Shadrach, after a moment, does the same. The guide
stands aside, showing no interest in their nakedness. Shadrach feels
foolish in his costume—a single handkerchief-sized square of linen to cover
his loins and thighs, a beaded belt with which to fasten it around his hips,
and two narrow strips of cloth, one green, one blue, which the guide helps
him fasten crosswise over his chest.
   Katya smiles at him. He feels heavy lust, unleavened by love or even by
joy, as she removes her clothes. That dense dark pubic thatch, broad and
curling, spilling into the corners of her thighs, exerts a terrible pull: he
longs with weird intensity to bury his sex in it, to plunge like a hatchet to
her hot unforgiving depths and stay there, motionless. Lindman dons a
one-piece loincloth similar to his and a looped-cross pendant identical to
the guide's. These enhance, rather than mask, her nakedness. As always,
her body disturbs him: wide-hipped, heavy-rumped, a peasant-woman's
body, the center of gravity quite low, the navel deep, hidden in smooth
slabs of belly fat, the breasts full and somewhat elongated. It is a strong
and voluptuous body, powerful without being at all athletic, as
exaggeratedly female as those primordial Venuses out of the Cro-Magnon
caves. What bothers Shadrach most, he suspects, is the contrast between
that robustly sexual earth-mother body and those thin, predatory lips,
those sharp, threatening teeth. Katya's mouth is untrue to the archetype
that the rest of her body projects, and that contradiction makes her a
mystery to Shadrach. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, perhaps.
  The lioness-headed one invites them to kneel on their mattresses and
hands each of them a polished metal talisman. It seems at first to be no
more than a mirror, a bright blank planchet with quasi-Egyptian motifs
around its rim, small engravings of the Horushawk, serpents, scorpions,
scarabs, bees, the ibis of Thoth, interspersed with tiny portentous-looking
hieroglyphs; but as he stares Shadrach begins to perceive a dizzying
pattern of almost invisible dotted lines spiraling around the middle of the
amulet; these lines, he realizes, may be seen only when the angle at which
he holds the talisman in relation to a certain brilliant lamp over his head
is just right; and, by moving the device ever so slightly, he can make the
lines appear to move, to swirl in a counterclockwise eddy, to create a
vortex—
  —sucking him toward the center of the disk—
   So they work by hypnotism here rather than by drugs, he thinks, feeling
smug, scientific, Shadrach the scholar, the detached observer of all human
phenomena, and then he feels an irresistible tug, he finds himself caught,
drawn helplessly inward, a mere speck blown on the cosmic winds, a mote,
a phantasm—
  —one moment kneeling here admiring the cleverness of the mechanism
and a moment later gripped, held, pulled, altogether incapable of objective
considerations, animate vagula blandute hospes comesque corporis—
   As he goes under, the priestess, for so he must think of her, begins a
rhythmic chant, fragmentary and elusive, a mingling of English words and
Mongol and bits of what might well be Pharaonic Egyptian, invocations of
Set, Hathor, Isis, Anubis, Bast. Figures out of myth surround him in the
sudden shadows, the hawk-headed god, the great jackal, the dog-faced
ape, the vast clicking scatabaeus, desiccated deities exchanging knowing
comments in opaque tongues, nodding, pointing. Here is Father Amon,
bright as solar fire, turbulent as the skin of the sun, beckoning to him.
Here is the beast with no face, radiating streams of siarflame. Here is the
dwarf-god, the buffoon, the protector of the dead, capering and guffawing.
Here is the goddess with a woman's body and the heads of three snakes.
The gods dance, laugh, pass water, spit, weep, clap hands. Still the
priestess chants. Her words, chasing one another round and round, seize
and control him. He can barely comprehend anything any longer, all
structures having dissolved and become formless, but yet he is remotely
aware that he is being programmed, being propelled, being given by this
slim naked yellow girl who speaks in impassive sing-song certain attitudes
toward death and life that will shape his experience in the hours just
ahead. She has him, she leads him, she guides and aims him as he tosses
on the eschatological breeze.
  He is being pulled apart. Something is gently and painlessly severing
him from himself. He has never fell anything like this before, not in the
tent of the transtemporalists, not when taking any of the traditional
psychedelics, not on kot, not on yipka: this is new, this is unique, a
shedding of mass, a dropping away of the flesh, a liberation into
weightlessness. He knows he is—
  —dying?—
   Yes, dying. that's the commodity offered here, death, the actual
experience of departing from life, of having life depart from oneself. He
can no longer feel his body. He is beyond all exterior sensation. This is the
true death, that ultimate sundering toward which his life has moved
throughout all its days; no simulation, no hypnotic trick, but real and
actual death, the going-forth of Shadrach Mordecai. Of course, on a
deeper level he knows it is only a dream, a night's amusement purchased
for sport; but under that awareness lies the realization that he may be
dreaming that he is dreaming, dreaming the talisman and the tent and
the lioness-girl, that he may really have fallen through the illusion of an
illusion and really is dying here tonight. It does not matter.
   How easy dying is! There is a cool moist gray mist about him, and
everything dissolves in it, Anubis and Thoth, Katya and the priestess, the
tent, the amulet, Shadrach himself, invaded and interpenetrated by the
grayness until he is part of it. He floats toward the center of the void. Is
this what Genghis Mao fears so much? To be a balloon and nothing but a
balloon, so much helium surrounded by a nonexistent skin, to put aside all
responsibility and, liberated wholly, to float and float? Genghis Mao is so
heavy. He carries so much weight. It may be hard to relinquish that. Not
for Shadrach. He passes through the center and emerges on the far side,
congealing nicely out of the mist and resuming his human form. He is
altogether naked now, not even a scrap at the waist. Katya, naked also,
stands beside him. At their feet lie their discarded bodies, relaxed, limp,
seemingly asleep, even giving the appearance of slow rhythmic breathing,
but not so: they are actually dead, truly and really dead. Shadrach
Mordecai beholds his own corpse. "How quiet it is here," Katya says. "And
clean. They've washed the world for us."
  "Where shall we go?"
  "Anywhere."
  "The circus? The bullfight? The marketplace? Anywhere?"
  "Anywhere," Shadrach says. "Yes. Let's go anywhere."
   Effortlessly they float into the world. The lioness waves farewell. The air
is mild and balmy. The trees are in bloom, fireflowers, little cups of flame
spouting at the tips of the branches; they break loose and drift down, swirl
about, approach them, touch them, sink sweetly into their bodies.
Shadrach watches the passage of a blazing red blossom through Katya's
breastbone; it emerges between her shoulders, falls lightly to the ground,
goes to seed, sprouts. A skinny sapling rises and bursts into flaming
flower. They laugh like children. Together they stride across the continent.
The sands of the Gobi sparkle. The Great Wall stretches before them, a
wriggling stone serpent humping its back.
   "Why, it's Nigger Jim and Little Nell!" cries Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, who
stands atop the Wall. He does a little dance of joy, doffing his silken black
skullcap, letting his long elaborate pigtails wave about.
  "Chop-chop," Shadrach says. "Kung po chi ding!"
  "Which way to the egress?" Katya asks.
  "There," says the First Emperor. "Past the chains, over the spikes."
   They go through the gate. On the far side of the Great Wall are flooded
rice paddies glittering in rosy sunlight. Women in black pajamas and
broad coolie hats move slowly through ankle-deep water, stooping,
planting, stooping, planting. Invisible chorus off screen. Swelling
crescendo of celestial sound. Katya scoops rich yellow mud and hurls it at
him. Glop! He throws mud at her. Glip! They plaster each other with it
and embrace, slippery and wriggling. What sweet slime! They laugh; they
romp; they tumble and topple, landing in the rice paddy with a splash,
and the Chinese women dance around them. Huang! Ho! Lindman legs
grasp his hips. Thighs like clamps. She reaches for him. They couple to the
mud like rutting buffalo. Gripping one another, rolling over and over.
Snorting. Slapping flesh. Wallowing in the primeval ooze. Very gratifying.
Nostalgia for the mud. Belly to belly. He does not perceive his rigid organ
as anything that particularly belongs to him, but rather as something
shared, an independent connecting rod that passes back and forth in swift
reciprocations between their clasped bodies. Without reaching a climax
they rise, bathe, move on to New York. A hot wind blows through this city
of sky-stabbing towers. Confetti showers down upon them; it stings, it
burns. Cheers of the inhabitants. Everyone has organ-rot here, but it is
accepted; it causes no alarm. The bodies of the New Yorkers are
transparent, and Shadrach sees the red lesions within, the zones of
corruption and decay, the eruptions and erosions and suppurations of
intestines, lungs, vascular tissue, peritoneum, pericardium, spleen, liver,
pancreas. The disease announces itself in radiating waves of low-spectrum
electromagnetic pulsations, hammering dully at his soul, red red red.
These people are full of holes from fetlock to gunwale and yet they are
happy, as why should they not be? Shadrach and Katya do a
buck-and-wing down Fifth Avenue. Shadrach's skin is white. His lips are
thin. His hair is straight and long; it blows across his face, momentarily
blinding him, and when he clears it he sees that Katya now is black. Flat
broad flanged nose, splendid steatopygous ass, yards of chocolate skin.
Ruby lips, sweeter than wine. "Poon!" she cries.
  "Tang!" he replies. "Hot!"
  "Cha!"
   They dance on swords. They dance on pineapples. He sells her into
slavery and redeems her with his first-born. "Are we dead?" he asks her.
  "Really and truly dead?"
  "Is it supposed to be this much fun?"
  "Are you having fun?" she asks.
   They are in Mexico. Frangipani, flamboyans. It is spring: the cacti are
in bloom. Towering spiny green poles topped by crazy clusters of fragrant
yellow petals. Loops and whorls of thotni-ness exploding in gaudy
firecracker bursts of red and white. They sleepwalk through the prickly
pears. They somnambulate among the pitahayas. The pace is frantic but
restful. Often they make love. He could waltz all night. Crossing the
Pyrenees, they meet Pancho Sanchez, squat and greasy, who offers them
green wine out of a leather bota and giggles shrilly when they spill it on
themselves. Pancho licks wine from Katya's breasts. She gives him a merry
shove and he somersaults into Andorra. They follow. Commemorative
coins of high denomination are struck in their honor by the adoring
populace. "I thought death would be more serious," Shadrach says.
  "It is."
   Dead, they can go anywhere, and they do. But the journey is an empty
one and the food at the feast is mere spun air, less sweet than cotton
candy. He wishes for more substance and the servants bring him stones.
He is black again, and so is Genghis Mao, enthroned in a seat of glistening
jade ten meters overhead. Ficifolia is black, Buckmaster, Avogadro, Nikki
Crowfoot; Mangu is the blackest of all; but the black of their skins is not
Negro-black, not African-black, it is black-black, ebony-black, the color of
a dark closet, the color of the air between the worlds. Black as the pit.
They look like beings from some other galaxy. Shadrach goes among them,
slapping palms, touching elbows. They speak nigger-Mongol to one
another, they laugh and sing, they shuffle and shake. Ficifolia is on guitar,
Buckmaster on Jew's harp, Avogadro on banjo; Shadrach plays the
bongos, Katya the tambourine.
Drop your body off
Step outside your bones.
So—easy to die—
Such—a groovy trip—
Man, man, man, man.


  "It isn't really this good," Shadrach tells Katya. "We're fooling
ourselves."
  "It has its points."
  "I can't help feeling suspicious."
  "Even dead you can't really let yourself go, can you?"
   She takes him by the wrist and pulls him along with her, through a
desert of sparkling sands, through a river of leaping white water, through
a thicket of dense aromatic brambles, into the ocean, the great salty
mother, and they lie on their backs, looking up into the sun. He is utterly
becalmed.
  "How long does it go on?" be asks.
  "Forever."
  "When does it end?"
  "It doesn't."
  "Really?"
   "Nature of the state. Death is nothing but a continuation of life by
different means."
  "I don't believe it. Dopo la morte, nulla."
  "Then where are we now?"
  "Dreaming," he says.
  "Sharing the same dream? Don't be a fool."
   The snouts of sharks poke through the gentle surface of the sea. Toothy
jaws gape. Shadrach practices fearlessness. These beasts can do him no
harm. He is, after all, dead. He is also a doctor of medicine. He gulps
ocean until the shining sandy floor is laid bare and the sharks, beached,
morosely flop about, munching on crabs and starfish. Shadrach laughs.
Death is real, death is earnest! Out of the north come frosty winds, roaring
down the flanks of the Himalayas. Indefatigably they continue the ascent
of the North Cwm, clawing up the rocky face piton by piton, staring
constantly at the formidable tapering peak rising like a giant whelk at the
head of the valley. They shiver in their parkas; they clutch their ice-axes
with weary hands; their oxygen tanks press inexorably against their
aching shoulders; and still they climb, now into that giddy realm above
seven thousand meters, where only the splay-footed snowmen dare to go.
The summit is in sight. Vast crevasses loom, but they have no meaning;
where crampons and pitons will not serve, Shadrach and Katya simply
launch themselves into great sky-spanning leaps. It is too easy. He had not
thought death to be so frivolous a place. Indeed now the sky is darkening,
the pace is slowing; he hears solemn music, he experiences a lessening of
the frenetic urges that have driven him thus far, he settles into a glacial
calm, an Egyptian timelessness. He is one with Ptah and Osiris. He is a
twanging Memnon beside the mighty river, waiting out the eons. Katya
winks at him and he scowls his disapproval. Death is serious business, not
a holiday. Ah, yes, now he has it, the proper pace, He is wholly absorbed
by the task of being dead. He does not move. Vital signs nil; intellection
nil; he has reached the core of the event. Hic jacet. Nascentes morimur,
finisque ab origine pendet. Mors omnia solvit. Let there be trombones,
please. Missa pro defunctis. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. It is
very quiet here. When they speak at all, they speak in Sanskrit, Aramaic,
Sumerian, or, of course, Latin. Thoth himself speaks Latin. Doubtless
other tongues too, but the gods themselves have whims. How sweet it is to
be immobile and to think, if at all, only in languages one no longer
understands! Nullum est jam dictum quod non dictum est prius. What a
good sound that has! If you would, a little more volume on the basset
horns:


Dies irae, dies illa
Solvet saeclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sybilla.


   Gradually the voices diminish. The music becomes subdued and
abstract as it fades; the sound of the instruments now is hollow, a mere
outline of sound, blank within, the idea of sound rather than sound itself,
and the chorus, far away, sings the terrible words of the ancient prayer in
a faint, cluttering, rustling, elegant tone, poignant and penetrating:


Quantus tremor esti futurus
Quando Judex est venturus
Cuncta stricte discussurus!


  And then all is silent. Now he is at peace. He has reached the essence of
the dream-death, an end to striving, an end to seeking.
  The chase is over. He could go, if he wished, to Bangkok, Addis Ababa,
San Francisco, Bagdad, Jerusalem, traveling with no more effort than it
takes to blink an eye, but there is no reason to go anywhere, for all places
have become one, and it is better to remain here, at the still point,
motionless, swaddled in the soft sweet woolly fleece of the grave.
Consummation est. He is in perfect equilibrium. He is finally, truly dead.
He knows he will sleep forever.



   Instantly he wakes. His mind is clear, tingling, painfully alert. Passion
inflames his penis, passion or else the blind force that comes over men in
dreams; at any rate it juts shamelessly against his loincloth, making a
little pyramid out of his lap. Katya lies not far away, propped up on her
elbows, watching him. Her smile is sphinxlike. He sees her broad fleshy
bareback, her firm meaty buttocks, and instantly the tranquility of
dream-death is gone; lust rules him. "Let's go," he says hoarsely.
  "All right."
  "It isn't far to the lovers' hospice."
  "No. Not there." She has already begun to dress. The lioness-guide is
across the aisle, greeting newcomers. The brightness of the air leaves
Shadrach dazzled. Anubis and Thoth still lurk somewhere nearby, he is
convinced. He struggles to regain that vanished equilibrium, to find his
way back to the still point, but he knows it will take many more
dream-death sessions before he can reach that calm place on his own.
  "Where?" he says.
  "At the tower. I hate making love in rented rooms. Didn't you know
that?"
   So he must stifle his longings another hour or two. Perhaps that's the
lesson of dream-death: delay gratification, purify the spirit. Or perhaps
not. It is a jolt, stepping from the radiant ambiance of the dream-death
tent to the darkness without, and the night is cold, very cold even for the
Mongolian May, just a hint of snow in the air, a few hard little flakes
whipping on the breeze. Riding the tube-train back they say almost
nothing to each other, but as they approach the Ulan Bator station he
says, "Were you really there?"
  "In your dream?"
  "Yes. When we met Pancho Sanchez. And the First Emperor. And when
we went to Mexico."
  "That was your dream," she says. "I was having other dreams."
  "Oh. Oh. I wondered. It seemed very real, talking to you, having you
beside me."
  "The dreams always seem that way."
  "But I'm surprised at how playful it was. Frivolous, even."
  "Is that how it was for you?"
  "Until the end," he says. "It got solemn then. When things grew calm.
But before then—"
  "Frivolous?"
  "Very frivolous, Katya."
  "For me it was solemn all the time. A great quietness."
  "Is it different for everybody?"
  "Of course," she says. "What did you think?"
  "Oh."
  "You thought, when you met me in your dream, that I was actually
there, talking with you, sharing your experiences?"
  "I confess that I did."
  "No. I wasn't there."
  "No. I suppose not." He laughs. "All right. I wasn't thinking. For you it
was somber. For me it was all games. What does that say about you, about
me?"
  "Nothing, Shadrach."
  "Really?"
  "Nothing at all."
  "We don't express something about our inner selves in the dreams we
choose for ourselves?"
  "No," she says.
  "How can you be so sure?"
  "The dreams are chosen for us. By a stranger. I don't know more than
that, but the woman in the mask told us what to dream. The broad
outlines. The tone."
  "And we have no choice about the content?"
   "Some. Her Instructions are filtered through our sensibilities. But
still—still—"
  "Is your dream always the same?"
  "In content? In tone?"
  "Tone."
  "The dream is always different, " Katya says. "And yet the flavor is the
same, for death is always the same. Different things happen each time, but
the dream brings you always to the same place, in the same way, at the
end."
  "To the still point?"
  "You could call it that. Yes. Yes."
  "And the meaning of what I dreamed—"
  "No," she says. "Don't talk about meaning. Dream-death gives no
oracular wisdom. The dream is without meaning."
  The tube-train has reached Ulan Bator. "Come," Katya says.
    They go to her suite, two floors below Nikki Crowfoot's, a dark place,
three small rooms furnished with stark, heavy hangings. Once more they
are naked before one another, once more he feels the overwhelming pull of
Katya's thick sturdy body; he moves stiffly toward her, embraces her, digs
the tips of his fingers into the deep flesh of her shoulders and back. But he
cannot bring himself to kiss that terrifying mouth. He thinks of the joyous
couplings he shared with her in dream-death, the rice paddy, the fragrant
Mexican nights, and he tugs her down with him to the bed; but, though he
fills his hands with her breasts, though he imprisons his head between her
smooth cool thighs, though he drives himself urgently against her flesh, he
is altogether unmanned by her physical presence, helpless, limp. Not for
the first time, either: their sporadic lovemaking has always been marked
by such difficulties, which he rarely experiences with other women. Katya
is not bothered by this: calmly she pushes him back against the pillow
with a thump of her knuckles on his chest, and then, bending forward, she
goes to work on him with her mouth, her sinister and ferocious
sharp-fanged mouth, lovingly engulfing him, and he feels lips and tongue,
lips and tongue, warm and wet, no hint of teeth at all, and under her
cunning ministrations he relaxes, he puts aside his fear of her, he grows
stiff at last. Deftly she slides upward over him—it is a maneuver she has
clearly practiced often—and, with a sudden startling thrust, drives herself
downward, impaling herself on him. She squats astraddle, peasant-strong,
above him, knees flexed, buttocks taut, body rocking. He looks at her and
sees her face distorted by the early spasms of ecstasy, nostrils flared, eyes
tight shut, lips pulled back in a fierce grimace; then he closes his own eyes
and gives himself up fully to their union. An awesome energy courses
through her. She rides him, now squatting high so that their only contact
is at their loins, now pressing herself full length against his body, but
always remaining above him, always staying in command. He does not
object to this. She writhes, grinds, pushes, twists, suddenly rears back and
breaks into bizarre laughter; it is, he knows, her signal, and he seizes her
breasts and joins her in the final climax.
   Afterward he dozes, and wakes to find her quietly sobbing. How
strange, how unlike her! He had never imagined Lindman to be capable of
tears.
  "What's wrong?"
  She shakes her head.
  "Katya?"
  "Nothing. Please."
  "What is it?"
  Sullenly, face against pillow, she says, "I'm afraid for you."
  "Afraid? Why? What about?"
   She looks toward him and shakes her head again. She clamps her lips.
Suddenly her mouth looks not at all fierce. A child's mouth. She is
frightened.
  "Katya?"
  "Please, Shadrach."
  "I don't understand."
  She says nothing. She shakes her head. She shakes her head.



                                     14
   Over a week goes by before Shadrach sees Nikki Crowfoot again. She
claims she is very busy in the laboratory—problems of recalibration,
necessary compensatory adjustments in the Avatar persona-transplant
system now that the donor body will not be Mangu's—and therefore she is
too tired in the evenings to want company. But he suspects she is avoiding
him. Crowfoot has always been at her most sociable when she is most
overworked; it is her escape from pressure. Shadrach does not know why
she would want to avoid him. Surely the night he spent with Katya
Lindman has nothing to do with it. He has been to bed with Lindman
before, and with others; Crowfoot too has had other partners; such things
have never mattered between them. It baffles him. When they speak by
telephone Nikki is wary and aloof. Beyond doubt something has gone
wrong in their relationship, but he has no theories.
   A new Genghis Mao crisis distracts him briefly from these matters. For
the past several days the Khan has been leaving his bed to work in his
office, to visit Surveillance Vector One, to direct the Committee activities
from the headquarters room. His recuperation was proceeding so
smoothly that there seemed no reason to confine him. But now Dr.
Mordecai's sensitive implants are picking up early warnings of
trouble—epigastric pulsations, faint systolic murmur, general circulatory
stress. Too much activity too soon? Shadrach goes to the Chairman's office
to discuss the problem. But Genghis Mao, still busy with his Mangu
monuments and his roundup of assassins, does not feel like conferring
with his doctor, does not want to talk about symptoms. He brushes
Shadrach's queries aside with a brusque declaration that he has rarely felt
better. Then he turns back to his desk. The arrests, he tells Mordecai
proudly, now total two hundred eighty-two. Of these, ninety-seven have
already been found guilty and sent to the organ farms. "Soon," the Khan
says, "the lungs and kidneys and intestines of these criminals will serve to
extend the lives of loyal members of the government. Is there not poetic
justice in that? All things are centripetal, Shadrach. All opposites are
reconciled."
  "Two hundred eighty-two conspirators?" Shadrach asks. "Did it take
that many to push one man out one window?"
  "Who knows? The actual crime perhaps required no more than two or
three perpetrators. But a great network of subordinate plotters must have
been needed. Security devices had to be altered, guards distracted,
cameras deflected. We believe it may have taken a dozen conspirators
simply to remove the bodies of the killers from the plaza after they
jumped."
  "To do what?"
   Genghis Mao smiles blandly. "We believe," he says, "that the assassins,
after hurling Mangu from the window, deliberately jumped from the same
window themselves to keep from being captured in the building.
Confederates in the plaza immediately gathered up their bodies and drove
off with them, while others removed all signs of their deaths from the
pavement."
  Shadrach stares. "Horthy saw only one man falling, sir."
  "Horthy did not remain in the plaza to observe further developments."
  "Even so—"
  "If the killers of Mangu did not leap after him," the Khan says, eyes
bright with the brightness of reason triumphant, "what did become of
them? No suspicious persons were found in the tower after the crime."
   Shadrach is unable to find an appropriate reply to this. No comment he
might make, he suspects, would be constructive. After a pause he says,
clearing his throat, "Sir, if we could talk about your health again for a
moment—"
  "I told you. I feel fine."
  "The symptoms I've begun to detect are fairly serious ones, sir.”
  "Symptoms of what?" Genghis Mao snaps.
   Shadrach suspects that the Khan may be developing an aneurysm of the
abdominal aorta—a defect in the wall of the great vessel that conveys
blood from the heart. He asks Genghis Mao if he has felt any unusual
discomfort, and the Chairman grudgingly admits recent sharp pains in
the back and sides. Dr. Mordecai does not point out how this contradicts
Genghis Mao's claim of being in good health; but the admission does give
Shadrach the upper hand, and he orders the Chairman back to bed for
rest.
   Peering through the eye of a fiber probe extending into Genghis Mao's
catheterized aorta, Shadrach confirms his diagnosis. The recent liver
surgery, perhaps, has released emboli into the Chairman's bloodstream,
and one has somehow made its way against the arterial flow, lodging in
the abdominal aorta and causing infection. Or perhaps not, but at any
rate a tumor is taking form, and more surgery will be necessary. If it were
anyone else, the risks of an operation so soon after a major organ
transplant might be even greater than the risks of letting the aneurysm
expand. But Shadrach has become amazingly casual about delivering up
his venerable patient to the knife. Genghis Mao's resilient body has been
opened so often that it accepts frequent surgery as the natural state.
Besides, the aneurysm is not far from the liver, and Warhaftig will be able
to enter through the recent incision, which is only now beginning to heal.
   The news annoys Genghis Mao. "I have no time for surgery now," he
says, irritated. "We're still finding new conspirators everyday. I must give
my full attention to the problem. And next week is Mangu's stale funeral,
at which I intend to preside in person, I—"
  "The danger is critical, sir."
  "You always tell me that. I think you enjoy telling me that. You're too
insecure, Shadrach. Even if you didn't manage to find some new crisis
every few weeks I'd still keep you on the payroll. I like you, Shadrach."
  I don't invent the crises, sir."
  "Even so. Can't this wait a month or two?"
  "We'd have to make a fresh cut in healed tissue then."
  "What of it? What's one more slice?"
  "Aside from that, the risks—"
   "Yes," Genghis Mao says. "The risks. What risks do I run by letting this
thing sit?"
  "Do you know what an aneurysm is, sir?"
  "More or less."
  "It's a tumor containing blood or a blood clot, in direct contact with the
wall of an artery and causing deteriorative changes in the tissue
surrounding it. Think of it as a balloon, gradually being inflated. When
balloons get too big, they explode."
  "Ah."
   "Eventually this aneurysm could rupture—into the intestines, the
peritoneum, the pleura, or the retroperitoneal tissues. Or it might cause
an embolism of the superior mesenteric artery, producing intestinal
infarction. The aorta itself could rupture spontaneously. There are several
other possibilities. All fatal."
  "Fatal?"
  "Invariably fatal. Agonizing pain, death usually within minutes."
  "Ah," Genghis Mao says. "Ah. I see."
  "It could come at almost any time."
  "Ah."
  "Without warning."
  "I see."
  "We'd be helpless, once the aneurysm goes. No way of saving you, sir."
  "Ah. I see. Ah."
   Does he see? Yes. Certainly, visions of erupting aneurysms are floating
before Genghis Mao's basilisk eyes. The lean leathery cheeks contract in
profound speculation; somber frowns furrow the bronze forehead. The
Khan is troubled. He had not planned on being confronted with potential
extinction this morning. Now, obviously, he contemplates the going of
Genghis II Mao IV Khan from the world, and likes the idea no more than
ever. The Permanent Revolution that has transformed the aching world
requires a Permanent Leader; though Genghis Mao has often said,
echoing Mao I's similar words, that when one participates in a revolution
one attains revolutionary immortality, one transcends the death of the
individual by living on indefinitely within the permanent revolutionary
ferment one has helped to create, it is plain that Genghis Mao prefers the
other, less metaphorical species of immortality for himself. He glowers. He
sighs. He gives his consent to this latest surgical interruption of his
revolutionary labors.
   Warhaftig is summoned. There are conferences; schedules are
rearranged; details of the surgery are explained to the Khan. The blood
vessels will be clamped above and below the aneurysm to arrest
circulation temporarily while Warhaftig removes the aneurysm and
installs a dacron or teflon prosthesis.
   "No," the Khan says. "Not a prosthesis. You can use a tissue graft, can't
you? There's not much of a rejection problem with arterial tissue. It's like
stitching in a length of hose."
  Warhaftig says, "But dacron and teflon have proven perfectly —"
   "No. I have enough plastic in me already. And the organ banks are
overflowing with new material. Give me real aorta.'' Genghis Mao's eyes
gleam. "Give me aorta from one of the recently convicted conspirators."
  Warhaftig looks at Shadrach Mordecai, who shrugs.
  "As you wish," the surgeon says.
   Shadrach has lunch soon afterward with Katya Lindman. When they
have eaten, they stroll in Sukhe Bator Square. He has spent more time
than usual with Lindman since the night they went to Karakorum,
although he has not slept with her again. He finds her more gentle, less
threatening now, and is not sure whether she has changed or simply his
attitude toward her; waking up and finding her sobbing may have had
something to do with it. Certainly she has become warm and friendly, so
much so that he suspects and fears she may even be falling in love with
him; yet there is something reserved at her core, some ineluctable holding
back, a zone of silence within her that strikes him as the enemy of love.
There never were such sealed places in Nikki Crowfoot when Shadrach's
relationship with her was going well.
   The midday sun is bright, the air soft, the day warm; golden flowers
gleam in the terra-cotta tubs of shrubbery that decorate the plaza. Katya
walks close to him, but their bodies do not touch. She has already heard of
the new crisis. News of all sorts travels inordinately swiftly through the
Grand Tower of the Khan, but especially news of the health of Genghis
Mao. "Tell me what an aneurysm is," she says. He gives her an elaborate
explanation and describes the operation that will be performed. They are
standing near the place where Mangu fell. When he finishes, Shadrach
looks up and tries to imagine two or three assassins plummeting in
Mangu's wake, while lurking confederates spring forth to sweep up the
shattered bodies and escape with them. Madness, Shadrach thinks. And
this is the carefully considered theory propounded in all seriousness by the
ruler of the world. Madness. Madness.
   He says, "There've been almost three hundred arrests so far.
Ninety-seven sent to the organ farms. Last week Roger Buckmaster was
alive, healthy, his own master as much as any of us is. Tomorrow we may
be using his aorta to patch Genghis Mao's. And still the arrests continue."
  "So I gather. Avogadro's men bring them in, day and night. When will
the Khan be satisfied?"
  "When he decides that all the conspirators have been caught, I
suppose."
   "Conspirators!" Katya says scathingly. For a moment she has the old
frightening intensity again. "What conspirators? What conspiracy? The
whole thing is insane. Mangu killed himself."
  "You think it was suicide too, then?"
  " Think? I know it was," she says in a low voice, turning away from the
Grand Tower as though to avoid cameras that might read her lips.
  "You talk as if you were there when he jumped."
  "Don't be silly."
  "How can you know it was suicide, then?"
  "I know. I know."
  " Were you there when he—"
  "Of course not," Lindman says.
  "Then why are you so sure you're right?"
  "Good reasons. Sufficient reasons."
  "You know something that the security people don't?"
  "Yes," she says.
  "Then why don't you speak up about it, before Avogadro arrests the
whole world?"
  She is silent a moment. "No," she says at last. "I can't. It would destroy
me."
  "I don't follow."
   "You would if I told you the story." She studies him. "If I told you, would
it stop with you?"
  "If that's what you wanted."
  "I feel I should tell someone. I'd like to tell you. I trust you, Shadrach.
But I'm afraid."
  "If you'd rather not—"
  "No. No. I'll tell you. Walk with me across the plaza. Keep your back to
the tower."
  "There are cameras everywhere. It doesn't matter which way we face.
But they can't pick up everything, I guess."
  They start across the plaza. Lindman raises her arm, holding it across
her face as though to scratch her nose with the back of her wrist, and says,
mouth covered, voice muffled, "I saw Mangu the night before he jumped.
We talked about Project Avatar. I told him be was going to be the donor."
  "Oh, Jesus. You didn't!"
   She nods grimly. "I couldn't keep it to myself any longer. It was a
Monday night, just before Genghis Mao's liver transplant, right? Yes.
Mangu had made a speech that night, something about worldwide
distribution of the Antidote. Then he and I went for drinks somewhere. He
was afraid Genghis Mao might die during the operation and he'd have to
take charge of things—I'm not ready, Mangu kept saying, I'm not ready.
And then we started talking about the three projects, and he began to
speculate about Avatar. What his role would likely be in the government if
they transplanted Genghis Mao's mind into some other body. Whether
Genghis Mao would still want him as viceroy after the transition, things
like that. It was so sad, Shadrach, so fucking sad, so filthy sad, the way he
kept poking at it, trying to figure out what was in store for him, working
up all sorts of hypotheses and scenarios. Finally I couldn't stand it and I
told him to stop worrying about it, that he was wasting his time, that after
the transition he wasn't going to be around, that Genghis Mao was going
to use his body as the donor."
   Shadrach is stunned by this confession. He can barely speak; his legs
tremble, his skin is chilled. He says, "How could you have done it?"
  "The words just came out. I mean, here was this man, this pitiful
doomed man trying to understand his future, trying to see what his role
would be, and I knew that he had no future. Not if Project Avator worked
out. We all knew it, all but him. And I couldn't hold it back any longer."
  "What happened than?"
   "His face seemed to cave in. His eyes went dead—blank— empty. He sat
for a long time and didn't say anything. Then he asked me how I knew. I
said it was known to a lot of people. He asked if you knew and I said I
thought so. I want to talk to Nikki Crowfoot, he said. She's at Karakorum
with Shadrach, I told him. Then he asked me if I thought Avatar really
would work out, and I said I didn't know, I had a lot of faith in my own
project, with any luck Talos would head Avatar off. It's all a matter of
time, I said. Avatar's ahead of Talos now, and if anything serious happens
to Genghis Mao in the next few months they might have to activate
Avatar, because the Talos automation needs at least a year of further
development work and Project Pheonix isn't getting anywhere. He thought
about that. He said it didn't matter to him whether he actually became
the donor or not, the thing was that Genghis Mao had let him think he
was the heir-apparent while secretly approving what amounted to his
murder. That was what hurt, he said, not the idea of dying, not the idea of
giving up his body to Genghis Mao, but being tricked, being treated like a
simpleton. And then he got up, he said goodnight, he went out. Walking
very slowly. After that I don't know. I suppose he spent the whole night
thinking things over. Thinking about how he had been duped. The prize
lamb, fattened for the slaughter. And in the morning he jumped."
   "And in the morning he jumped," Shadrach says. "Yes. Yes. It sounds
right. Some truths can't be faced."
 "So there are no conspirators. The conspiracy exists only in Genghis
Mao's paranoia. Those three hundred arrested people are innocent. How
many sent to the organ farms so far? Ninety-seven? Innocent. All innocent.
I've watched it happen, but there's nothing I can do. I can't speak out.
They say the Khan refuses even to consider the suicide hypothesis."
  "He wants there to have been a conspiracy, yes," Shadrach says. "He
enjoys punishing the guilty."
   "And if I told him what I've just told you, the Khan would have me
killed."
   "You'd be in the organ farm tomorrow. Yes. Or else maybe he'd pick you
as the new Avatar donor."
  "No," Katya says. "That isn't likely."
  "It would suit his philosophy. It would be very centripetal, wouldn't it?
Your loose tongue costs him Mangu's body, so you become Mangu's
replacement. Very fitting. Very neat."
  "Don't be foolish, Shadrach. It's unimaginable. He's a barbarian, isn't
he? He's a Mongol. He thinks he's the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. He'd
never let himself be transplanted into a woman's body."
   "Why not? The old Mongol khans weren't sexists, Katya. As I recall, the
Mongols let themselves be ruled by female regents now and then when the
male line gave out. Of course, there are problems of adaptation he'd have,
changing sexes, all the bodily reflexes, all the million little masculine
things that he'd have to unlearn—
  "Stop it, Shadrach. It isn't a serious possibility, the Khan's taking my
body."
  "But it's amusing to consider—"
  "It doesn't amuse me." She halts and swings around to face him. She is
pale, drawn, tense. "What can we do? How can we stop these hideous
arrests?"
  "There's no way. The thing has to run its course."
  "Suppose an anonymous tip is sent to the Khan, telling him merely that
Mangu had learned what was in store for him, that some unnamed person
had revealed to him that he would be used for—"
  "No. Either Genghis Mao will ignore it, or else he'll begin a vast and
bloody interrogation of everybody who might have had knowledge of the
Avatar plan."
  "What if the arrests don't stop though?"
  Shadrach says, "Avogadro's running out of suspects. It's almost over."
  "And the prisoners awaiting sentence?"
  Shadrach Mordecai sighs. "We can't help them. They are lost. Nothing
can be done, Katya. One way or another, we're all awaiting sentence."
   He is haunted all afternoon by the vision of Mangu, pitiful deluded
Mangu, stripped of all delusions, confronted at last by frosty reality. Why
had Lindman tipped him to his true fate? Out of compassion? Did she
really think she was helping him, for God's sake? Had she thought that
receiving such knowledge could do Mangu any good? Could she have failed
to see how cruel, how merciless, she was being? No. She must have known
that a man like Mangu, genial, shallow, unquestioning, a man who was
living an impossible fantasy of eventual succession to the world's most
powerful office, believing he enjoyed the esteem, even the love, of Genghis
Mao, would collapse totally if that structure of fantasy was ripped away.
She must have known.
   Of course. An hour after lunching with Katya Lindman, Shadrach finally
grasps the pattern. Lindman, good chessplayer that she is, had foreseen all
the consequences of her move. Tell Mangu the truth, pretending
compassion and claiming a compulsion to frankness. Mangu—out of
humiliation, chagrin, fear, even vengefulness, whatever—reacts by putting
his body beyond Genghis Mao's reach. No Mangu, and Project Avatar is
dealt a mighty blow. Nikki, Lindman's rival, is discomfited; Avatar, set
back by many months, loses its primacy to Lindman's Project Talos;
Shadrach, already mysteriously estranged from Nikki, is drawn inevitably
closer to Katya as her star rises. Of course. Of course. And all the rest,
Katya's pretense of concern for the hapless victims of the mass arrests,
Katya's show of grief for poor pathetic Mangu—all part of the game.
Shadrach shivers. Even in the harsh and perverse climate of the Grand
Tower of the Khan, this seems monstrous, and Lindman a baleful and
alien figure, malevolent enough to make a suitable consort for Genghis
Mao himself. Or, if not a mate, then a fitting housing for the old ogre's
devious and sinister mind. Yes! For a moment Shadrach does seriously
consider urging the Khan to take Lindman's body in place of Mangu's: An
appropriate choice, sir, very centripetal, very apt. Though he is puzzled
by one still-obscure motive: why has Lindman revealed all this to him? If
she is so calculating a monster, would she not have calculated the
likelihood that he would sooner or later come to see her for what she is?
Can that have been her ultimate aim? Why? He is dizzied by the
multiplicity of speculations.
  He wants to turn to Nikki, but Nikki has continued to hold herself aloof,
and he has not even spoken to her by telephone for two or three days. He
phones her now, on the pretext that he needs an update on Project Avatar
progress, but one of her assistants appears on the screen, a Dr. Eis from
Frankfurt. Eis, classically Teutonic, pale blue eyes and soft golden hair,
does an odd little take of—surprise? dismay? distaste?—at the sight of
Shadrach, forehead furrowing and corner of mouth pulling in, but he
recovers quickly and gives him a cool, formal greeting. Shadrach says,
"May I speak with Dr. Crowfoot, please?"
  "I'm sorry. Dr. Crowfoot is not here. Perhaps I can be of assis—"
  "Will she be back this afternoon?"
  "Dr. Crowfoot has left for the day. Dr. Mordecai."
  "I need to reach her."
  "She is in her apartment, Doctor. An illness. She has asked that she not
be disturbed."
  "Sick? What's me matter?"
  "A mild upset. A fever, headaches. She has asked me to tell you, if you
called the laboratory, that we are still studying the recalibration problem,
but that at present there is nothing to report, no—"
  "Danke, Dr. Eis."
  "Bitte, Dr. Mordecai," Eis replies crisply, as Shadrach blanks the screen.
   He starts to phone Nikki's apartment. No. He's had enough of evasions,
excuses, procrastinations, deflections. It's too easy for her to run numbers
like that when he calls. He'll simply go down there and ring the doorbell,
uninvited.
  She lets him stand in the hallway a long time before she responds,
though she must know, from her doorscreen, who's there. Then she says,
"What do you want, Shadrach?"
  "Eis told me you were ill."
  "It's nothing serious. Just a bad case of the lousies."
  "May I come in?"
  "I'm trying to take a nap, Shadrach."
  "I won't stay long."
  "But I feel so awful. I'd rather not have visitors."
    He starts to turn away from the door, but, although he knows his
maniac persistence can do him no good, he finds it loo painful to leave
without seeing her. Helplessly he hears himself saying, " At least let me see
if I can prescribe something for you, Nikki. I am a doctor, after all."
  Long silence. Desperately he prays that no one he knows will come upon
him here, out in the hall like a lovesick Romeo pleading to be let in.
  The door opens, at last.
   She is in bed, and she really does look sick, face flushed and feverish,
eyes bloodshot. The air in the bedroom has that stale sickroom quality,
stuffy and congested. He goes at once to open the window; Crowfoot
shivers and asks him not to, but he ignores her. He sees when she sits up
that she is naked under her blanket. "I'll find your pajamas for you if
you're cold," he says.
  "No. I hate wearing pajamas. I don't know if I'm cold or hot."
  "May I examine you?"
  "I'm not all that sick, Shadrach."
  "Even so, I'd like to make certain."
  "You think I'm coming down with organ-rot?"
 "There's no harm in checking things out, Nikki. It'll take only a
moment."
  "Pity you can't diagnose me the way you do Genghis Mao, just by
reading your own internal gadgets. Without having to bother me at all."
  "No, I can't," he says. "But this'll be quick."
   "All right," she tells him. She has not once met his eyes during this
interchange, and that bothers him. "Go ahead. Play doctor with me, if you
have to."
   He uncovers her, and finds himself curiously reticent about exposing
her body this way, as though their recent estrangement has somehow
deprived him of a doctor's traditional privileges. But of course he has had
only one patient in his career, having gone straight from medical school to
the service of Genghis Mao, having done nothing but gerontological
research until being elevated to serve as the Khan's personal physician,
and he has never developed the practicing doctor's traditional indifference
to flesh: this is no anonymous patient, this is Nikki Crowfoot whom he
loves, and her naked body is more than an object to him. After a moment
he attains some impersonality, though, transforms her breasts into mere
globes of meat, her thighs into sexless columns of flesh and muscle, and
checks her over without further unsettling himself, reading her pulse,
tapping her chest, palpating her abdomen, all the routine things. Her
self-diagnosis turns out to have been accurate: no incipient organ-rot, just
a trifling upset, some fever, nothing remarkable. Plenty of fluids, rest, a
couple of pills, and she'll be back to normal in a day or so.
  "Satisfied?" she asks mockingly.
  "Is it so hard for you to accept the fact lhat I worry about you, Nikki?"
  "I told you I didn't have anything serious."
  "I still worried."
  "So examining me was really therapy for you?"
  "I suppose," he admits.
  "And if you hadn't rushed over to give me the benefit of your
high-powered medical skills, I might be asleep now."
  "I'm sorry."
  "All right, Shadrach."
   She turns away from him, curling up sullenly under the bedclothes. He
stands by the bed, silent, wanting to ask a thousand unaskable questions,
wanting to know what shadow has fallen between them, why she has
become so mysteriously remote, so cool, why she will not even look
straight at him when she speaks to him. After a moment he says, instead,
"How's the project going?"
  "Didn't Eis speak to you? We're recalibrating. It'll take us a while to
gear up for a new donor. The whole thing's a colossal pain in the ass."
  "How much of a setback is it, actually?"
  She shrugs. "A month, if we're lucky. Or three.Or six. It all depends."
  "On what?"
   "On—on—oh, Christ! Look, Shadrach, I don't really want to talk shop
right now. I feel sick. Do you know what being sick means? My head hurts.
My belly hurts. My skin tingles. I want to get some rest. I don't want to
discuss my current research problems."
  "I'm sorry," he says again.
  "Will you go now?"
  "Yes. Yes. I'll phone you in the morning to see how you're coming along,
okay?"
  She mutters something into her pillow.
  He starts to leave. But he makes one last attempt to reach her before he
goes. At the door he says tamely, "Oh—have you heard the newest rumor
making the rounds? About Mangu's death?"
   She groans stoically. "I haven't heard anything. But go on. Go on. What
is it?"
  He frames his words carefully, so that he will not feel he is breaching
Katya Lindman's confidence: "The story that's going around is that Mangu
committed suicide because somebody connected with Project Talos tipped
him that he was to be the Avatar donor."
  Nikki sits upright, eyes wide, face animated, cheeks blazing in
excitement.
  "What? What? I hadn't heard that!"
  "It's just a story."
  "Who's the one who's supposed to have tipped him?"
  "They don't say."
  "Lindman herself, was it?" Nikki demands.
  "It's only a rumor, Nikki. Nobody specific has been named. Anyway,
Katya wouldn't do anything so unprofessional."
  "Oh no?"
  "I don't think so. If it happened at all, it was probably some ambitious
underling, some third-echelon programmer. If it happened at all. There
may not be a shred of truth to it."
   "But it sounds right," she says. Her breasts are heaving, her skin is
glossy with new sweat. "What better way could Lindman find to sabotage
my work? Oh, why didn't I think of it! How could I not have seen—"
  "Stay calm, Nikki. You aren't well."
  "When I get hold of her—"
  "Please," Shadrach says. "Lie down. I wish I hadn't said a word. You
know what sort of wild rumors go floating around this building. I
absolutely don't believe that Katya would—"
   "We'll see," she says ominously. She grows more calm. "You may be
right. Even so. Even so. We should have had much tighter security.
However many people knew that Mangu was the donor, five, six, ten
people, that was too many. Much too many. For the next donor—"
Crowfoot coughs. She turns away again, huddling into her pillow. "Oh,
Shadrach, I feel lousy! Go away! Please go away! Now you've got me all
stirred up over something altogether new, and I—oh, Shadrach—"
  "I'm sorry," he says once more. "I didn't mean—"
  "Goodbye, Shadrach."
  "Goodbye, Nikki."
   He bolts from the apartment. He plunges through the hall, fetching up
finally against a stanchion near the stairs. He grasps it, steadies himself.
The visit to Nikki has hardly improved his state of mind. Her attitude
toward him, he realizes, ranged from indifferent to irritated; never once
did she express any pleasure that he had come to see her. He was tolerated
at best.
  And now, he knows, he must hurry back to Katya.
   She seemed surprised to see him again so soon. She greets him warmly,
unsubtly, as though automatically assuming he has come here to make
love. His mood is far from sexual, though. He disengages himself from her
embrace as soon as is politic, and gently but firmly establishes a psychic
distance between them. In quick earnest blurts he reports the essence of
his conversation with Nikki, stressing that the "rumor" he had invented
did not in any way incriminate Katya herself in the tipping off of Mangu.
  "But of course Crowfoot immediately guessed I was the one, right?"
   "I'm afraid so. I argued that it was inconceivable you'd do any such
thing, but she—"
  "Now she knows I did, and will hold the grudge against me forever, and
will do whatever she can to pay me back. Thanks a lot."
  Quietly Shadrach says, "If she's angry, you can't entirely blame her. You
have to admit there was an aspect of sabotaging Avatar in your passing
the word to Mangu."
  "I passed the word to Mangu out of pity for him," Lindman says flintily.
  "Pity and nothing but pity? You didn't consider at all that he might
react in a way that would upset the Avatar program, and that that would
create problems for Nikki Crowfoot?" Katya is silent for some while.
   At length she says, in a more yielding voice, "I suppose that that crossed
my mind too. But it was very secondary. Very very secondary. Mainly I
couldn't bear to face Mangu any more, listening to him talking about his
future and knowing what I knew. I had to warn him or I'd saddle myself
with full responsibility for what was going to happen to him, Can you
believe that, Shadrach? How evil do you think I am? Do you think my life
begins and ends with these insane projects of Genghis Mao's? Do you
think that the only motivations that operate in me are Talos motivations,
how I can push my own career, how I can wreck Nikki Crowfoot's? Do
you?"
  "I don't know. I suppose not."
  "You suppose?"
  "I don't think you're like that, no."
 "Fine. Splendid. Thank you. And what happens now? Will she denounce
me to Genghis Mao?"
   "There's no proof you ever said anything to Mangu," Shadrach
Mordecai replies. "She knows that. She knows also that whatever
accusations she makes against you will be discounted as professional
jealousy. I don't think she'll take any action at all, actually. Except that she
did say she'd maintain tighter security on the identity of the next Avatar
donor, so that there'd be no chance the same thing would—"
  "It's too late," Lindman says.
  "The next donor's already been picked?"
  "Yes."
  "And you know his name?"
  “Yes.”
  "I don't suppose you'd care to tell me," Shadrach says.
  "I don't think I should."
  "Are you planning to tell him?"
  "Would you say it was sabotage again if I did?"
  "It depends on the circumstances, I guess. Who is he?"
  Katya Lindman trembles. Her lips quiver.
  "You," she says.



                                      15

   It seems like a joke, and not a very good joke. He is unable to accept it
at all, despite the strident note of conviction in Katya's voice, that shrill,
almost desperate note of certainty that Shadrach had also heard when
Roger Buckmaster was trying to deny his complicity in Mangu's death,
that tone that says. You won't believe this no matter how heavy an oath I
swear, but what I'm telling you is true, is true, is true, is true!
  Yet if he has been selected as the new donor, it would explain why Nikki
has been avoiding him, why she is remote and short-tempered when they
speak, why her eyes will not meet his—
  "No," he says. "I don't believe you."
  "So don't believe me."
  "It's absurd, Katya."
   "Undoubtedly it's absurd. And it'll be just as absurd the day they come
for you and put the electrodes on your head and obliterate every trace of
Shadrach Mordecai and pour the soul of Genghis Mao into your pretty
brown body."
   "My pretty brown body," Shadrach says, "is full og complicated and
irreplaceable medical devices that register every twitch of Genghis Mao's
metabolism. It took Roger Buckmaster a couple of years to design and
build that system, it took Warhaftig weeks to implant it in me, it took me
a year to learn how to use it. Using it, I can protect Genghis Mao's health
in a way that was never before possible in medical history. With all the
warm bodies Avatar has to choose from, do you think Genghis Mao would
let them choose the one body that's indispensable to his—"
   "Think, Shadrach, think. Avatar won't be activated unless Genghis
Mao's present body is on the threshold of death. He won't need all your
fancy implants once he moves into your body. He won't need you as his
doctor; he won't really need a full-time doctor at all, not for many years.
And he can find another doctor. He can find another Buckmaster to build
a new set of implants when the time comes. He's probably got a
replacement for you in training already, somewhere in Bulgaria or
Afghanistan. Remember what he always says about redundancy,
Shadrach? The avenue of survival. Genghis Mao understands survival very
well. Better than you, I'm afraid."
  Shadrach Mordecai's mouth opens. Says nothing. Closes.
  "If Avatar is activated," Katya says, "you go. I swear it."
  "When was this decided?"
   "More than a week ago. I found out about it a few hours before we left
for Karakorum."
   Which was just about the time Nikki Crowfoot began finding excuses
for not keeping company with him, Shadrach reflects. He remembers
waking up in this very room, Katya's room, the night of the dream-death
excursion, and discovering Katya sobbing beside him in bed, and hearing
her tell him that she was afraid for him, without offering further
explanation. Yes. And he remembers all that lunatic talk of Genghis Mao's
about nominating him for Pope, for King of England—what was that
about? Disguised and displaced intimations of the real nomination? He
remembers, too, and the memory chills him, running shirtless into
Genghis Mao's bedroom just after the news of Mangu's death had broken,
remembers seeing the Khan eyeing his bare torso with interest, with
admiration, Genghis Mao saying. You look very healthy, Shadrach. Yes.
Shopping for a new body already, was he, minutes after learning of the
loss of Mangu?
  He thinks of Buckmaster screaming, You'll finish in the furnace,
Shadrach, in the furnace, in the bloody furnace!
  No. No. No.
  "I can't believe this," he says.
  "Start learning how."
  "It makes no sense to me. I literally can't grasp the meaning of the
whole thing."
  "Doesn't it frighten you, Shadrach?"
  "No. Not at all." He holds out his hands. Steady. As steady as
Warhaftig's. “See? I'm entirely calm. I am without affect. It doesn't
register on me. It's unreal."
  "But it isn't, Shadrach."
  "Nikki knows?"
  "Of course."
  "She's not the one who picked me, is she?"
  "Genghis Mao picked you."
   "Yes. That figures. Yes." He laughs. "Do you notice how I begin to talk
as though I believe this? As though I accept it, on some level?"
  "What will you do, Shadrach?"
  "Do? Do? What should I do? Should I do what Mangu did?"
  "You're not Mangu."
   "No," he says. "Even if I had absolute proof, even if they came to me
with an engraved scroll signed by Genghis Mao, nominating me for
Avatar, I wouldn't choose Mangu's way. I'm not in the least a suicidal
person. Maybe it sets in later, Katya. First I have to feel something. I don't
feel anything yet. I don't feel betrayed, I don't feel endangered, I don't
think I even feel surprised."
  "Could it be that you want to be the Avatar donor?"
  "I want to be Dr. Shadrach Mordecai. I want to go on being him for a
long time."
   "Then keep Genghis Mao healthy. So long as his body is functioning, he
won't need yours. Meanwhile, it'll be my task to make Avatar altogether
superfluous by bringing Talos quickly to perfection. You know, Genghis
Mao may actually prefer the Talos idea. I think it suits his particular
brand of paranoia to be transferred into a machine, an imperishable,
flawless machine. After all, even your beautiful body is going to decay and
crumble. He knows that. He knows he might have twenty or thirty good
years in you, and then it'll be the same route all over again, organ
transplants, drugs, constant surgery, whereas the Talos simulacrum will
spare him all that. So Avatar is just a contingency plan for him, a
redundancy that he hopes not to have to use, and that's why he can pick
people he values as the donors— Mangu, you—a kind of honor, in its way,
the blessing of the Khan, not at all the jeopardy that it might be thought
to be. I tried to tell that to Mangu, too, that Avatar wouldn't necessarily
happen, but he—"
  "Why did you tell me about this, Katya?"
  "For the same reason I told Mangu."
  "To help wreck Avatar?"
  Her eyes flash the old Lindman fire. "Don't be a bastard. Do you think I
want you to jump out a window too?"
  "What good is it, telling me?"
  "I want you to be on guard, Shadrach. I want you to know what danger
you're in now. So long as there's even a slight likelihood that Avatar will
have to be used, you—"
  "What does it matter to you, though ? A sore conscience? You don't like
hanging out with men who you know are secretly earmarked for
destruction?"
  "That's part of it," Katya says quietly. "I hate living a lie."
  "What's the rest?"
  "I love you," she says.
  He stares with glassy eyes. "What?"
  "I'm not capable of it? I'm good only for building automations, is that
it? I have no emotions?”
  "I didn't mean that. But—you seemed so cold all the time, so
businesslike, so matter-of-fact. Even when—" He pauses, decides to finish.
"Even when we would have sex. I never felt any emotional warmth from
you; only, well, physical passion."
  "You were Nikki's. Getting involved with you would only have been
painful to me. You didn't want me except for the occasional fling in
Karakorum, except for the occasional meaningless screw."
  "And now?"
   "Do you still love Nikki? She helped sell you out, you know. She went to
Genghis Mao, she heard him select you for Avatar, she probably tried to
get him to change his mind—we ought to give her that much credit—and
she failed, and then she accepted the order. Her career comes before your
life. She could have come to you and said. This is what Genghis Mao
wants to do, but I can't do it, I rebel, let's both get out of this hideous
place. She didn't, though, did she? She simply started keeping away from
you. Because of the guilt she felt, right? Not out of love, but out of guilt,
out of shame."
  Numbly Shadrach shakes his head.
  "This is unreal, Katya."
  "I have told you no lies today."
  "But Nikki—"
   "Is afraid of Genghis Mao. As am I, as are you, as is everyone in this
city, everyone in the world. That's the measure of her love for you: her fear
of that crazy old man is greater. If I'd been in her position, I might have
made the same choice. But it's not my project. I'm not faced with the
option of betraying you versus defying the Khan. I'm free to go behind his
back, to warn you, to let you make your own decisions. But it's strange,
isn't it? The warm tall beautiful loving Nikki agrees to sell you out. And
the bitter vengeful squat ugly Katya risks her life to warn you."
  "You aren't ugly," he murmurs.
   Katya laughs. “Come here,'' she says. She sits on the edge of the bed,
tugs him down beside her, roughly presses his head against her breasts.
"Rest. Think. Make plans, Shadrach. You're lost if you don't." She caresses
his aching forehead.
  They sit that way in silence for a long while. Then, shakily, he rises, he
removes his clothes, he gestures to her, and she disrobes as well. He must
operate on the Khan tomorrow, but for once he does not let that matter to
him. He reaches for her. He covers her strangely submissive body with his
own, locking his long lean dark-skinned arms around her wide meaty
shoulders, pushing his thin bony chest into the soft cushion of her bosom,
and her legs open and he plunges deep within her, and stays like that,
immobile, gathering strength, pasting himself together, until at last he is
ready to move.



   The next day is the day of Genghis Mao's aorta transplant. Shadrach,
after the usual brief fitful sleep, awakens, exercises, breakfasts, dresses,
negotiates passage through Interface Three, pauses to inspect the doings
in the Trauma Ward by means of Surveillance Vector One—the standard
morning routine. The dancing lenses display for him the world's two
billion, perhaps twenty percent of them stricken with organ-rot, the
walking dead, shambling about with perforations and lesions and
corruptions, and most of the others who are still whole living in the
shadow of the universal disease, going through a semblance of ordinary
life with sullen courage, waiting for the spitting of blood and the fire in the
guts, looking toward the demigods of Ulan Bator in envy and
bewilderment. While he, light-footed Shadrach Mordecai, the pretty
doctor of the Khan, has nothing worse to worry about than being evicted
from his own nimble body, being kicked out on his black ass so that a
Mongol usurper can move into his skull. Other than that, Shadrach,
everything's fine, right? Right. Yassuh, boss.
   Shadrach wonders, as he goes to fetch Genghis Mao for the traditional
and familiar gurney ride from the imperial bedchamber to the Surgery,
how he will react when he comes face to face with the Khan. Surely his
expression will betray his new knowledge; surely Genghis Mao, nearly
ninety years canny, will see at once that his designated victim is in on the
scheme. But Shadrach discovers that his mysterious tranquility of spirit
does not desert him even when he is eye to eye with the Khan. He feels
nothing, neither fear nor anger nor resentment: the Chairman is the
patient, he is the doctor, the sensors are twitching away, loading him with
information, and that's all, no change in their relation-ship. He looks at
Genghis Mao and thinks, You have secretly plotted to steal my body, and
there is no effect, none. It remains unreal to him.
  "And how am I this morning, Shadrach?" Genghis Mao booms jovially.
  "Splendid, sir. Never better."
  "Going to cut out my heart, are you?"
  "Only the aorta this time," Shadrach says. He signals to the attendants.
They wheel the Chairman away.
  And there they all are once more gathered in the Surgery—the
Chairman, the physician, the chief surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the
nurses and other miscellaneous medical spear-carriers, everyone scrubbed
and gowned and masked, the bright lights gleaming, the transparent
aseptic bubble sealed, the filters and pumps pumping and filtering, the
computers flashing green and red and yellow like gaudy movie props, the
new aortal section— Buckmaster's?—sitting in its container, fresh and
plump, ready to be installed in Genghis Mao's abdomen.
   Warhaftig, confident, serene, prepares once more to open the spare,
slight body of Genghis Mao.
  "Blood pressure?" he asks.
  "Normal," Shadrach says.
  "Respiration?"
  "Normal."
  "Platelet count?"
  "Normal. Normal. Everything normal."
   Shadrach is aware that if Genghis Mao should die on the operating
table, there would be no Project Avatar to menace him: none of the three
projects is ready yet to be put into effect, and if the Khan does not survive
the transplant, that will be the end of him, without hope of reincarnation,
perhaps even the end of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, the
entire fragile society of centripetal depolarization polarizing and
centrifuging into chaos the instant the legendary figure of Genghis Mao
vanishes from the scene. It would not be hard to manage it. Jostle
Warhaftig's elbow, maybe, as he aims the surgical laser at the Chairman's
guts; apologize profusely afterward, but the damage will be done. Or, more
subtly, feed the operating team misleading information, cockeyed reports
from Genghis Mao's ostensible interior: they trust Dr. Mordecai, they will
follow his data without bothering to check it against the numbers on the
scopes and meters, and he could probably cause irreversible injury to the
Chairman, fatal oxygen shortage or the like, before Warhaftig realizes
what is taking place. And then the apologies, I simply can't understand
why my readings were off so badly. He has no need to worry about a
malpractice suit: topple the Khan and the whole fabric comes apart, every
man for himself in the aftermath. But he will not. No harm will come to
Genghis Mao by way of Shadrach Mordecai today, not even if he knows
the Khan intends to activate Project Avatar before next Tuesday. Dr.
Mordecai, in peril or not, is nevertheless a doctor, a dedicated doctor, still
young and naive enough to take his Hippocratic oath seriously. He was
sworn to keep pure and holy both his life and his art. He has vowed to help
the sick and to abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm. So be
it. Shadrach Mordecai, MD, Harvard '01, is no traducer of sacred trusts.
Genghis Mao is his patient; Genghis Mao will not die at Shadrach
Mordecai's hands this day. Perhaps this is foolishness, but there is also a
certain grace in it.
   The operation proceeds smoothly. Snip, and the weakened section of
Genghis Mao's aorta comes out. Stitch stitch, and the replacement is
grafted in. Heart-lung machines keep the circulation bubbling. The Khan
watches, conscious and beady-eyed, through the whole thing, now and
again nodding to himself as Warhaftig executes some particularly
admirable veronicas and entrechats and passades. He seems to know what
is going on; he has spent more time observing surgeons at their trade than
I have, Shadrach realizes, and can probably do the job pretty well by
himself by now. Warhaftig's elegant fingers elegantly close the incision.
The tissues are raw and reddening, having been cut into for the liver
transplant less than two weeks earlier, and this calls for some special
prophylactic measures, but the surgeon brings everything off with his
customary finesse. Genghis Mao grins approval when all is over. "Good
show," he tells Warhaftig. "Two ears and the tail!"
   Shadrach makes off with the Khan's discarded abdominal aorta. He
tells Warhaftig, not that Warhaftig cares, that he intends to run some
tests on it, but what tests would tell him anything about this drooping
length of ancient tissue, this tired hose, that he doesn't already know? He
covets it because it's an authentic piece of the body of the authentic
Genghis II Mao IV Khan, and Shadrach has the collector's itch: this will be
an ornament to his little museum of medical memorabilia. A relic of one
of history's most famous patients. There is a tale Shadrach knows,
probably apocryphal, of how the doctor who performed the autopsy on
Napoleon removed the imperial penis and kept it as a souvenir of the late
emperor, bequeathing it to a fellow physician who ultimately sold it at an
immense price, and so on and on, passing from one doctor's collection to
another, until it disappeared altogether during the confusions of some
twentieth-century war. Similar stories, he knows, have been told of odd
scraps of Hitler, Stalin, George Washington, Catherine the Great.
Shadrach regrets that he attained his present post too late to collect some
of the really significant organs of Genghis Mao—a kidney, say, or a lung,
the liver, the pancreas—but all of them were gone long before Shadrach's
time, the native organs of the Khan's body removed and replaced,
sometimes several times over, with transplanted substitutes. Shadrach
does not see much value in preserving Genghis Mao's fourth liver in his
collection, his eighth spleen, his thirteenth kidney, though he recognizes
that these temporary residents of the Khan are more intimate artifacts of
Genghis Mao than, say, his bedroom slippers or his wristwatch. But he
prefers the genuine somatoplasm, and a piece of authentic aorta is the
best he can do just now.
   There's the aneurysm, big and ripe, ready to pop. Another few days and
it might have ruptured, poof! and no more Genghis Mao. The Chairman
and Mangu might have shared the same funeral, come Saturday, if
Shadrach hadn't felt odd twitterings in the circulatory-system sensors and
correctly guessed their import. So I have saved the Khan's life, not for the
first time and he is once more restored to perfect health. Fine. Fine. May
he live five hundred years, and may I be his physician always!



                                    16

   Alone in his office, ruminating over his medical treasures, his books and
old instruments and now this bit of bottled aorta, Shadrach feels safe and
comfortably entrenched. This Avatar disturbance will blow over. The
Khan, after all, is conservative; he will cling to his own Mongol body, the
well-loved and sturdy patchwork carcass, as long as he can, whatever the
temptations may be for him to jump into Shadrach's strong, young, and
vital frame. So there will be no precipitous exit for Shadrach, and in the
months or perhaps years ahead he can try to shift the Khan's fantasies
entirely away from Project Avatar and toward Project Talos. Which will
mean aborting the researches of Nikki Crowfoot, but Shadrach can't feel
too guilty about that, all things considered.
   He gives the aorta pride of place on his shelves. Centuries from now it
may be sacred, enshrined in a reliquary of ivory and platinum, and the
groveling faithful will chant thanks to the sainted Shadrach Mordecai for
having saved for posterity this shred of divine meat. Who knows? There is
an apocryphal story that many of Genghis Mao's original organs are
preserved in some labyrinthine secret tunnel, kept in cold storage or
perhaps maintained in vivo, for eventual use in cloning the Khan.
Shadrach doubts this. If Genghis Mao had any serious interest in being
cloned, huge budgetary appropriations would be going to support
tissue-culture research, and, so far as Shadrach knows, not much is going
on in that area. Or, more likely, there would already be a battalion of
genetically perfect duplicates of Genghis Mao lying in suspension tanks on
five or six continents, waiting to be summoned into life.
   Mordecai has often thought of writing a scientific monograph on his
patient, a medical biography of Genghis Mao, a full record of the myriad
transplants and implants, the infinity of surgical jugglements, that are
responsible for the Khan's longevity and perhaps for his terrifying vitality.
There would be nothing in the literature to compare with it, not even
Beaumont on Alexis St. Martin's digestive tract, not even Lord Moran on
Churchill: had ever there been so single-minded and long-sustained a
medical effort, spanning so many decades, to keep one human being alive
and well? Already the achievement verges on the miraculous, but the real
miracles stilllie ahead, as Genghis Mao, ageless and eternally renewed,
lives on to be a hundred, a hundred ten, a hundred twenty. There is
another, greater temptation—to write not merely a medical study but a
full-scale account of Genghis Mao's life. No biography of the Chairman
exists, other than vague, sanitized publicity pamphlets, mere recitals of
his political accomplishments and other exterior events, avoiding all
details of his private life. It is as though the Khan has a superstitious fear
of having his soul captured on paper. And so Shadrach's impulsive
fantasy: to nail the Khan in words, to pin him down with literary juju: It is
one means of gaining control over the world's most powerful man, at least
in a metaphorical way.
   The trouble is, no source material is available. The computer banks of
Ulan Bator are gorged with intimate data about every human being
alive—except Genghis Mao. Press the right button and platoons of facts
march forth—but none about Genghis Mao. The facts of his life are
unknown and may be unknowable, beyond the most elementary public
milestones, his promulgation of the philosophy of centripetal
depolarization, his founding of the PRC, his election to the Chairmanship.
All the rest has been suppressed, even obliterated. When was he bom? In
what obscure village? What was his childhood like, what were his boyhood
ambitions? What was his original name, in the old People's Republic days
before he proclaimed himself to be Genghis Mao? What was the early
course of his career? What sort of education did he have? Did he ever
travel abroad? Was he ever married? A father? Yes, that's a good question
—are there, somewhere in Mongolia, middle-aged men and women who
are in fact the blood children of Genghis Mao, and, if so, do they know
who their father is? No one can answer these questions. No one can
answer any questions about Genghis Mao except with hearsay, apocrypha,
and myth. He has very carefully covered his traces, so carefully that the
utter success of the attempt at total concealment argues a kind of
madness.
   But is anyone, even Genghis Mao, really willing to expunge from the
world all traces of his private self? Criminals are said to return
compulsively to the scene of the crime; possibly those who seek to shroud
themselves in mystery tend also to undo their own mystifications by
burying, for history's sake, a full account of all they have tried to hide. Is
there no place where Genghis Mao has secreted a concealed record of
everything he has kept from the knowledge of his subjects? Say, a diary, an
intimate and revealing diary, a repository for the essence of Genghis Mao's
masked soul. Shadrach imagines himself stumbling across such a
document among the Khan's effects—a single billion-bit bubble-chip,
smaller than a fingertip, on which is implanted the raw red stuff of
Genghis Mao's life, his confessions, his unvarnished memoirs, out of which
the faithful doctor Shadrach Mordecai will construct the first and only
true account of the strange and sinister man who came to dominate the
dying civilization of the early twenty-first century.
   Of course there is no such diary. Ordinary thieves and felons may
compulsively jeopardize their own safety, but Shadrach knows Genghis
Mao well enough to realize that if he wants to live in secrecy, he will leave
no hidden memoirs around for others to find. The private Genghis Mao is
just as secretive as the public one: open one empty box and another, even
more empty, lies within. No matter. In his fantasy role as the biographer
of Genghis Mao, Shadrach will fantasize the Khan's memoirs as well,
inventing the source material that Genghis Mao has neglected to provide.
He closes his eyes. He lets his imagination slip free of the leash. Recreates
the diary of the Khan within the crucible of his own throbbing brain.



  November 11, 2010.
   My birthday. Genghis Mao is eighty-five today. No. No. Genghis Mao
is—what—twenty years old? About that. It's Dashiyin Choijamste who is
eighty-five today. Dashiyin Choijamste, whom I carry about within me
like an internal twin. Who remembers him, that fat little babe in his
proud father's arms? So long ago, in the village of Dalan-Dzadagad on a
snowy night in 1925. That's down in the province of Southern Gobi,
Dalan-Dzadagad. I haven't been there in fifteen years. My birthplace,
but who knows that? Who knows anything? I know. Dashiyin
Choijamste is eighty-five today. How many others are still alive, of those
born on 11 November 1925? Not many, no. And those who remain are
ancient doddering wrecks. Whereas I am still in my prime, I Dashiyin
Choijamste of Dalan-Dzadagad, son of Yumihaghiyin Choijamste,
director of the camel-breeding station at Bogdo-Goom. I Genghis Mao. I
feel strong today, oh, yes, eighty-five and robust. Not altogether because
of the transplants, either. It's heredity that does it. The good old Tatar
blood. Don't forget, you were almost seventy when the Virus War broke
out, and yet not at all old, tremendous vigor, all your teeth, jet-black
hair, twenty-kilometer hikes every week; you hadn't had any
transplants yet. You were still Dashiyin Choijamste then. Strange
syllables, awkward now on the tongue, though that was your name for
more than six decades. And I lived right through the Virus War
untouched by the rot. People fell apart all around me. Sickening to
behold. I didn't go in for transplants until later, much later, natural
ravages of time, eventually, but not until after the power had come to
me. The power. I have attained the highest power. And now clever
doctors aid my natural Tatar vigor. I might live another fifty years.
  I might live much longer than that.
   Do I remember my childhood? How much snow piles up in eighty-five
years! I think I can see my father's face, lean like mine, strong eyebrows,
strong cheekbones. Yumzaghiyin Choijamste of the camel-breeding
station at Bogdo-Goom, Hero of the Order of Lenin, later. Wounded at
the battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939, afterward third secretary of the
Agricultural Agency— see, Father, I remember, I remember! The father
of Genghis Mao killed in 1948 in a plane crash, between Moscow and
Ulan Bator, coming home from a wheat conference. Those miserable
Soviet jets, forever falling from the sky. Or was it a jet? So long ago: The
jets were already in service then, weren't they, the Ilyushins, the
Tupolevs? I could look it up. You are dead sixty-two years,
Yumzhaghiyin Choijamste. Babies born the night your plane fell are old
people now. And I am still here, Father. I am Genghis Mao. I remember
you at the camel station. I am standing in new snow and my father tugs
on a camel's halter. The camel looms above me like a mountain, long
homely face, rubbery lips, sweet dull eyes with undertones of subtle
contempt. The camel leans toward me and its enormous tongue slurps
across my cheeks, my lips. A kiss! Its sour breath. My father's laughter.
He scoops me in his arms, gives me a crushing hug. How huge he is!
Bigger than the camel, to me. I am three, four years old.
  And my mother? My mother? I never knew her. Trampled by yaks in
a wild snowstorm when I was an infant. I have forgotten your name,
Mother. I could look it up, But where... where...?



   Shadrach pauses, reflects, reconsiders. Is it plausible? Does it have
internal consistency? The tone is right, but what about the "facts"? He will
test them. Shall he alter some significant details? Will that make any
difference? Let's see—



  October 17, 2012.
   My birthday. Genghis Mao is ninety-two today, though officially I am
said to be a mere eighty-seven. On the other hand, some of them believe
I'm well over one hundred. Meaning that I was born in 1905 or so. Can
they believe that? Isn't 1920 bad enough? Wilson, Clemenceau, Henry
Ford, General Pershing, Lloyd George, Lenin, Trotsky, Sukhe Bator...
men of my time. And I am still here, anno domini 2012, I, the former
Namsan Gombojab, born in Sain-Shanda, youngest son of the
yak-herder Khorloghiyin Gombojab, who—



   No. Changing the details is trivial. Let his original name be Choijamste,
Gombojab, Ochirbal, whatever; let him have been born in 1925, 1920,
1915, even 1910; let him have spent his career in the Ministry of Defense,
the Agency for Agrarian Redistribution, the Commissariat of
Telecommunications; slather on any kind of factual decoration you like;
none of it will make any difference. The essential patterns of the soul of
Genghis Mao run deep and heavy, and they, his perceptions, his world
view, are your subject, Shadrach. Not the trivia of time and place.



  May 14, 2012.
   Just two hours ago the liver transplant was finished, and here lies
Genghis Mao, old and leathery, not dead yet, no, not by much; he is
alert, full of energy, wide awake. I am proud of him. The unquenchable
vitality of him. The insufferable resilience of him. I hail you, Genghis
Mao! Ha! I feel pain in my abdomen, but it's nothing to moan about.
Pain is the signal that we live, we feel, we respond to stimuli. The
heaviness that came over me when the old liver began to fail is already
going. I feel my system flushing itself clean. It is as if I float two meters
above my own bed. Hovering over all the beautiful machinery that
pumps healing fluids into my earthly husk. How beautiful is the pain.
That throb, low and to one side... boom, boom, boom, a bell tolling within
old Genghis Mao, urging him on to long life. Ten thousand years to the
Emperor! My clever doctors triumph again. Warhaftig, Mordecai.
   My doctors. Warhaftig is a mere machine. He bores me, but he is
perfect. I love to see his hands disappear into the hole in my belly. And
come forth grasping some limp red lump full of disease, throw it aside,
stitch a new organ into its place. Warhaftig never fails. But he is ugly,
with that flat nose, those downturned lips. Sick dead white skin. A
genius, but ugly and boring, a mere machine. Was Warhaftig ever
young? Crouching behind a bush to spy on the naked women bathing in
a stream? Not him. Oh, no, not him. Laughing, tumbling on the grass?
Warhaftig? Never!
   Shadrach is more interesting. Graceful, witty, a fine strong body, a
clear cool mind. He is pleasing to look at. His black skin. I never saw a
black until I was forty and a delegation from Guinea visited my
department. Their shiny faces, almost purple, their dense knotty hair,
their tribal robes. Dazzling white eyes, pink palms like gorillas, deep
voices, strange, strange. They spoke French. Shadrach is not like those
Africans except that he has the same sort of keen, serious intelligence. He
is brown, not black, very tall, very American, nothing of the jungle about
him. Sometimes he lectures me as if I am a child, a naughty babe.
Always worrying about my health. Conscientious, he is, earnest,
dedicated, boyish. He is too sane for us here. He lacks— what? Darkness,
can I say that of him? Yes. Interior darkness is what he lacks: there are
no demons in him. Or do I underestimate him? There must be demons in
everyone, even the robot Warhaftig, even the calm and good-humored
Shadrach Mordecai. He is very young. I like that. He is at least fifty
years younger than I am, and yet we are contemporaries, we are both
men of the present moment, both of us unknown until relatively recently,
though I waited so long to become who I am and he became himself so
young. He smiles well. There is nothing cynical about him yet. He has
lived through the Virus War and all the ugly things that followed and yet
he is tranquil, he has faith in the future, he thinks only of healing people.
He would heal those who enslaved his ancestors, even. Whereas I would
avenge myself against the oppressors a thousand times over; but then, I
am of Tatar stock, and we are fierce, we are Gobi wolves, while he is the
child of placid jungle farmers. Every morning he goes into Surveillance
Vector One and stares at the rotting people all over the world. Thinks I
don't know. I watch him watching. His lean mobile face, his sad
intelligent eyes. He feels such sorrow for the rotting ones. A man of
compassion. Childlike. Not saintly, but he has the stuff of martyrs in him.



  January 23, 2012.
   The Committee in plenary session. Horthy, Labile, Ionigylakis,
Eyuboglu, Lapostolle, Farinosa, Parlator, Blount. All the finest
bureaucrats. Drone, drone, drone, and I listened, not listening, to it all.
They are machines. The Committee itself is a machine which I have
constructed, a delicate and useless mechanism, like a clock without
hands. When I die it will fall apart, if I die when I die. I allowed Mangu
to preside. Bit by bit I ease him into the pretense of responsibility, the
shadow of authority. He is fascinated by that mob of dreary
bureaucrats, those apparatchiks, as a boy is fascinated by the buzzing of
dung-flies, and never mind the dung. Was this what I had in mind when
I seized the reins of the world, that I would father upon it a Permanent
Revolutionary Committee of dung-flies? Revolutionaries! Lapostolle
sleeps; Farinosa longs for Karakorum and sits twitching his long nose;
Ionigylakis's belly rumbles. I should have named more Mongols to the
Committee; these white foreigners have no fire. But I need my Mongols
elsewhere. I should not let them turn into drones. Snore, snore, snore! It
snows again today. I could slip from the Committee room, out of the
building, secretly into the snow, lie in it, roll in it, throw handfuls in the
air. Summon a horse and ride all night, no saddle, hooves silent on the
whiteness, man and beast crossing the steppe without a pause, crust of
bread for me, a goatskin full o fairag to gulp along the way —aye, I'm
still a boy, I who am so ancient, and they are old men! But of course
Shadrach would forbid it. I rule the world, he rules me. What if I
insisted? Must I endure these droning flies when there is fresh snow on
the Gobi?
   You can replace a crumbled kidney, I will tell him; surely you can
repair an old man's frostbit nose. Yes. Yes. I will go. I will. I must escape
from this boredom.
  Is this what I had in mind when I seized the reins ?
   What did I have in mind?Did I have anything in mind, except that
everything was falling apart, and It was my task to hold it together? I
think that was it. The world had descended into chaos. How I abhor
disorder! Such turmoil, such confusion: the dying people, the dead
nations, hordes of wild men sweeping across the land, nothing simple, all
simplicity gone from the world. I love simplicity, a neatly organized
structure, harmonious and satisfying, one nation, one government, one
code of laws, everything one, onward to the horizon, I was seventy-three
years old, and strong. The world was millions of years old, and weak. I
could not bear the chaos. I think all those who have ruled the world were
basically haters of chaos rather than mere lovers of power. Napoleon,
Attila, Alexander, great Genghis, even poor crazy Hitler, all of them
wanted things to be neat, to be simple, they had a vision of order, that is,
and saw no other way to attain that order except to impose it themselves
upon the world. As did I. Of course, most of them eventually spawned
more chaos than they were removing, and they had to be removed
themselves. Hitler, for example. I have not made that mistake. To the
end, I do battle against entropy, I offer myself , Genghis II Mao IV. as the
symbol of oneness, the focus of worldwide energy, the crystal of
simplicity. But oh, Father Genghis, these plenary sessions, this droning,
these dung-flies. Father Genghis, did you have a Horthy to harangue you
? Did you sit idle, dreaming of a swift horse and an icy wind, listening to
a Partator and a Blount? Oh! Oh! Was it for this that I took upon myself
the chaos of the crumbling rotting world?



  Shadrach rises. He can sit here in reverie no longer; he has
responsibilities, obligations, reports to file, projects to oversee.
   To begin with, he must update the Genghis Mao dossier with a concise
account of today's aorta transplant, which means collating a vast sheaf of
printouts and selecting from that mass of raw and fragmentary data the
significant outlines of a useful medical profile. Very well. He taps keys,
summoning the outtakes of this morning's operation. But as he works, he
finds his mind invaded at times by the spurious voice of Genghis Mao,
dictating stray shreds of imaginary memoir:



  May 27, 1998.
   The People's Republic is leaderless this morning and I think the
government will collapse before noon. Shirendyb, the fifth prime
minister in the past six weeks, succumbed to the organ-rot late last
night. No one is left in the politburo; the presidium has been decimated;
the streets of Ulan Bator are choked with refugees, a slow steady stream
of oxcarts and dilapidated trucks heading— where? It is the same
everywhere. The old society is dying. Only ten years ago I thought
fundamental change was impossible; then came the volcano, the terror,
the uprising, the Virus War, the organ-rot, and three billion human
beings are dead and institutions are crumbling like shoddy buildings
struck by earthquakes. I will not lea ve Ulan Bator. I think my time is at
last at hand. But the government I will proclaim will not be called a
people's republic.



  November 16, 2008.
   To celebrate the tenth year of my reign I journeyed to Karakorum and
dedicated the new pleasure complex. They invited me to experience the
amusements they call "dream-death" and "transtemporalism. " I chose
dream-death. The irresistible fascination of the morbid. Especially the
illusion of the morbid. It takes place in a tent full of pseudo-Egyptian
motifs. The ugly old monster-gods hovering like gargoyles over the
place; you can practically smell the reek of Nile mud, hear the buzzing of
the flies. Attendants with masks. Bright lights. Much fuss made over me.
Naturally I was the only one having the experience at that time. I
allowed myself to be hypnotized behind a phalanx of picked security
guards. A sensation as of dying, very convincing, I think. (What does any
of us know about it?) And then a dream. But in my dream the world was
exactly as it is when I am awake. They promised me gaudy illusions and
surreal fantasies. None. Have they deceived me? Are they afraid to let
Genghis Mao taste the true experience?



  June 4, 2010.
   Today the new physician began his duties. Shadrach Mordecai, a
strange name. American, bright, earnest. He is terrified of me but that
may pass. He holds himself so stiffly when he is with me! His training is
in gerontology and he has been on the staff of Project Phoenix for several
years. I told him this morning: "We make a deal, you and I. You keep me
healthy, I keep you healthy, all right?" He smiled but behind that he was
plainly upset. Too heavy-handed of me, I suppose.



  Somehow Shadrach finishes dictating the profile and moves along to
the next task, which is to look over a project report from Irayne Sarafrazi.
Nothing much new there; her project continues to wrestle with the
brain-cell-deterioration problem and, as Shadrach has foreseen, is getting
nowhere. All the same, he must read the report through and find some
encouraging comment to make. Still the insidious voice resonates in his
head, distracting him with bursts of fantasy. Doggedly he works on, trying
to ignore the mental static.



  May 15, 2012.
  The most terrible news. Assassins have murdered Mangu. Comes now
Horthy, bleating hysterically about falling bodies. How could this have
happened? Into Mangu's bedchamber, silently, seize him, to the window,
out! Oh, my fury. Oh, my bitter grief. What will I do now? My plans for
Mangu thwarted. Shadrach tells me Project Phoenix is stymied,
probably forever, on biological problems. Project Talos moves slowly,
and Talos I have never really liked. Which leaves Avatar, and Avatar
without Mangu is—
  Ah. I will use Shadrach. A fine body— I'll be happy in it. And black. A
novelty. I should experience all the varieties of humanity. Perhaps when
Shadrach's body is old I should move on into a white one—even a
woman, perhaps—perhaps a giant someday, or a dwarf—all possibilities
—
   Shadrach has been a good doctor and a pleasant companion. But
there are other doctors, and companionship becomes ever less important
to me. Shall I feel guilty about snuffing him out? For a while, perhaps a
day, two days. But I must put myself beyond such feelings.



  May 16, 2012.
  More thoughts on the choice of Shadrach to replace Mangu. Obviously
some residual guilt lurking in me. But why? I propose not to murder him
but to ennoble him by making his body the vehicle for immense power.
Of course he might object that what I propose for him is, if not murder
outright, then at best a form of slavery, and his kind has endured slavery
enough. But no: Shadrach is not his ancestors, and all old debts have
been canceled by the Virus War, which destroyed slaves and masters
indiscriminately, struck down generals as well as babes, and left those
who survived in the condition of pure survivors, pastless, liberated into a
new dispensation in which history is born fresh and virgin each day.
What do the sins of the slavemasters mean to anyone today? The society,
the network of relationships, that evolved under the stimulus of slavery
and its consequences, even of emancipation and its consequences, is
wholly gone. And I am Genghis Mao and I require his body. I need not
vex myself with the guilt of others. I am not German; I can send Jews to
the oven if the need arises, without making apologies for past sins. I am
not white; therefore I am free to enslave a black. The past is dead.
History is blank pages now. Besides, if historical imperatives do still
exist, I am a Mongol: my forefathers enslaved half the world. Can I do
less? I will have his body.



  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.



                                      17

   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."
  "Maybe."
  "Not maybe. And I'd end up in the organ farm. And you'd still become
the Avatar donor."
  Shadrach considers that scenario. "You're telling me that it wouldn't
have mattered whether you had warned me or not?"
   "Not to you," Nikki replies. "It would have mattered to me. One way I
lose my job and maybe my skin. The other way I get to survive a little
longer."
  "I still wish you had been the one to tell me."
  "Instead of Katya?"
  "When did I say Katya was the one?"
  Nikki smiles. "You didn't need to, love."



  August 19, 2009
   A mild summer day in Ulan Bator. Across half the world it is summer
now. The time of lovers. Surveillance Vector One shows me the lovers
going arm in arm through the streets of Paris, London, San Francisco,
Tokyo. The fond gazes, the little kisses, the nudges of hip against hip.
Even the ones with organ-rot shuffling along together, slowly dying but
still doing the dance of love. Fools! I think I remember how that dance
goes, though it's forty or fifty years behind me. Yes, yes, the first
meeting, the preliminary tensions and assessments, theprobing
andparrying, the spark of contact, the dissolving of barriers, the first
embrace, the tender words, the pledges, the sense of conspiracy, two
against the world, the assumption that all this will last forever, the
discovery that it will not, the falling apart, the falling out, the parting,
the healing, the forgetting—oh, yes, the man who is Genghis Mao once
danced that dance, long before he was Genghis Mao, he once played that
game. Long ago. What purpose does it serve? An anesthetic for the
aching ego. A lubricant for the biological necessities. A diversion, a
distraction, a foolishness. When I saw it for what it was I renounced it,
and no regrets. Look at them strolling together. “Eternal love.'' As if
anything's eternal, but love? Love? It's an unstable state, thermodynamic
nonsense, two energy sources, two suns, trying to establish orbits
around one another, each one striving to give light and heat to the other.
How pretty it sounds, how implausible. Naturally the system breaks
down under gravitational stress sooner or later, and one pulls the other
to pieces, or they spiral into collision, or they go tumbling away from
one another. A waste of energy, a futile spilling of the life-force. Love?
Abolish it! If only I could.
  January 4, 1989
  The text of my doctrine is complete, and when the appropriate
moment comes I will reveal it to the world. Today, as I finished the last
passages, a name for it came to me: centripetal depolarization. Defined
as the forging of a consensus of irreconcilables through the illusion of the
attainment of everyone's mutually exclusive goals. And it will sweep the
world as irresistibly as once did the hordes of old Father Genghis.



   Shadrach takes momentary refuge in carpentry. Until now that
fashionable cult has been mere amusement for him, a source of relaxation
and release rather than the quasi-mystical focus that it is for many of its
adherents, but now, frayed and desperate, no longer the calm and
detached Shadrach of yore, he surrenders to its full intensity. The world
has tightened around him. Ostensibly, all is as it has been, and is not
going to change; his routines will continue, his doctoring and his
calisthenics and his collecting and his trips to Karakorum; but in these
past two days, aware now of the dread subtraction of self that Genghis
Mao has covertly ordained for him, Shadrach finds the familiar and
comfortable rhythms of life no longer enough to keep him together. Fear
and pain have begun to seep into his soul, and the only antidote he knows
for that is submission to some force greater than himself, greater even
than Genghis Mao, some all-encompassing power. If he can, he will make
carpentry the vehicle of that submission. With hammer and nails, then,
with chisel and adze, with plane and saw and awl, he seeks, if not
salvation, then at least temporary freedom from anguish.
   Usually Shadrach attends the large and majestic carpentry chapel in
Karakorum. But there is always a carnival atmosphere in Karakorum, and
that tends to trivialize whatever he does there, be it carpentry or
dream-death or transtemporalism or mere fornication. Now, in genuine
spiritual need, he wants not the fanciest chapel but the one most readily
accessible, the one that will enable him most quickly to find surcease from
pain, and he goes to a place here in Ulan Bator, down by the Tuula River,
in one of those streets of formidable blocky white-stucco buildings
constructed in the latter days of the Mongolian Peoples Republic.
   It is a starkly functional no-nonsense sort of chapel, lacking in any
religious or pseudoreligious iconography. Big bare rooms, sputtering
fluorescent lights, the smell of sawdust and lemon oil—it could be an
ordinary carpenters' shop, but for the silence and the peculiar
concentration with which the men and women at the benches are going
about their tasks. Shadrach pays a fee at the entrance—strictly a service
charge, covering the cost of tool rental, lumber, and maintenance, never a
fee for worship itself—and is shown to a locker where he exchanges his
street clothes for clean coveralls. Then he selects a vacant bench. Shining
well-oiled tools have been arranged along and around it with an eye for
symmetry and neatness that is positively Japanese: chisels of many sizes
in a precisely ordered row, an assortment of hammers and mallets, a
cluster of gauges, augers, pincers, compasses, bevels, files, try squares, and
rules. The equipment is deliberately varied and copious, to impress upon
the worshipper the hieratic nature of the craft, the ancient lineage of its
practice, the complexity of its scope.
   No one speaks to him. No one looks at him. No one will; those who
enter here must remain alone with their tools and their wood. A strange
solemnity steals over him as he makes ready to enter the customary initial
stale of meditation. In the past, having come to the chapel for nothing
more than a relaxing couple of hours of cutting and joining, seeing the
whole experience as an amusement on the same level as a round of golf or
a game of billiards, he has approached this stage of the ceremony in a
casual and amiable way, accepting it as part of the tradition, something
that one does merely to get into the spirit of the thing, the equivalent of a
golfer's ritualized practice swings or a billiards player's careful chalking of
the cue; but this time, as he presses both hands flat against the workbench
and bows his head, he feels neither flippant nor stagily ostentatious; he is
aware of a numinous presence all about him, and he grows somber and
reflective as it enters his soul.
   In the meditation one first must consider the tools, their form and
divine essence. One must visualize them and name them: this is a tenon
saw, this a dovetail saw, this a gimlet, this a brad-awl. One then must
dwell on their purpose, which requires one to imagine each tool in action,
and this in turn calls for contemplation of certain basic techniques of
carpentry and joinery: the making of mortises and tenons, the
construction of joists and frames, the fitting of veneers, the setting of
braces and struts and wedging. This phase of the meditation is the most
prolonged and the most intense. Shadrach has heard that some adherents
to the cult devote the entire energy of their worship to it, and never
actually take tools and wood into their hands, but carry out a completely
satisfying communion in their minds alone. Until today he has never really
understood how this could be accomplished, but now, scribing and
mitring and butting as he sits with closed eyes, menially fitting tenon into
mortise and tongue into groove, he sees that actual manual labor can be
extraneous to this experience if one is able fully to enter into the
meditative phase.
   He perceives this, but he moves on anyway into the terminal stage of
the meditation, which is the entry into the wood, the mother-stuff. This
too is a highly structured exercise, which one must begin by imagining
trees, not merely any trees but specific timber trees of one's own choice,
ordinarily pine or spruce or fir for Shadrach, occasionally more exotic
woods, according to his whim, ebony, palisander, mahogany, teak. One
must see the tree; one must imagine it felled; one must carry it onward to
be milled and seasoned; one must at last behold the finished board, and
contemplate its grain, its texture, its moisture content, its vulnerability to
shrinkage and warpage, all its characteristics and special beauties. And
then, only then, when one can taste the wood on one's tongue, when one
feels the tool hot and eager in one's hand, then does one rise and go to the
bin and select one's lumber and begin at last to work.
   Shadrach knows, by the time he has reached this stage, exactly what the
form of his worship will be today. He will do no fancy joinery this day, but
simple heavy carpentry, simple but pure, a job that strikes to the essence
of form: he will construct the centering for a brick arch. It has sprung
entire into his mind, the ribs and ties, the braces and struts, the laggings,
the wedges; he has calculated the curvature, the span, the height of the
crown, the springing line, all in one rush of inner vision, and now he need
only cut and fit and hammer, and when he is done he will disassemble
everything, carry out the ceremonial burning of the sawdust, and depart,
drained and eased of tension.
   He works quickly. A kind of wild feverish energy has come over him. He
hastens from bin to bench, from bin to bench; his mouth bristles with
nails of half a dozen lengths; he does not pause for an instant. Yet there is
nothing rushed about his labor. To rush would be folly; the point here is to
attain calmness of spirit. The work should be accomplished swiftly but
without haste. Serenely Shadrach builds. The work contains its own
purpose and has none beyond the immediate spiritual fulfillment, for one
never uses anything one constructs in the carpentry chapel, one never
takes anything away that one has put together, any more than one would
bring in one's own tools. This is not a substitute for the home workshop,
after all. The idea here is solely to exercise skill in joining, and thus to
experience the fundamental connectivity of the universe; what one
actually makes is incidental, a means to a higher end, and must not be
allowed to become a goal in itself. Shadrach has never fully understood
that part of it before today, either. He has enjoyed the physicality of the
work, the hammering and the sweat, and he has enjoyed the aesthetic
reward, the pleasure of watching something sturdy and attractive take
shape under his hands, and he has always felt mildly distressed at the
necessary disassembling that follows; because he has never seen the
carpentry cult as anything more profound than tennis or golf or bicycle
riding, he has never attained those farther reaches of the spirit which he
has heard are available to the communicants here. Now he does attain
those reaches, at least their nearer fringes, and, penetrating unexpected
realms, he finds that his fears and resentments fall away, and he is
purified. So it must have been for the Creator, shaping worlds on quiet
afternoons, experiencing a total sense of identification with the task, a
sense of utter selflessness, of being no more than a conduit for the great
shaping force that flows through the universe. No doubt one can just as
readily attain ihe same tranquil place through tennis or golf or bicycle
riding, Shadrach realizes. The means is unimportant; only the state of
consciousness toward which one journeys matters. He sees his arch
acquiring form; it is not his arch but the arch, the prototype of all arches,
the ideal arch, the arch on which the vault of the heavens rests, and he and
the arch have become one, and he, Shadrach Mordecai of Utan Bator,
bears all the weight of the cosmos and feels no burden. Does an arch
complain of the load? The arch, if the arch is a proper arch, merely
transmits the weight to the earth, and the earth does not complain either,
but imparts the thrust of its burden to the stars, which accept it
unprotestingly, for there is no burden, there is no weight, there is simply
the ebb and flow of substance between the joined members of the one
great entity that is the matrix of everything; and when one has perceived
that, can it be such a serious matter that one's body, which at the moment
houses a pattern of responses that calls itself "Shadrach Mordecai," may
soon house instead something calling itself "Genghis Mao"? Such
transformations are meaningless. Change does nor occur; there are only
transfers, not transformations: the only reality is the reality of eternal flux.
He is purged of all discord and all dismay.
  The arch is done. Shadrach briefly admires its perfection of form; then,
calmly, he knocks it apart and carries the pieces to the salvage bin.
   Does the arch no longer exist, simply because its components have been
dismembered? No. The arch exists, shining as brightly in his mind as
when he first conceived it. The arch will always exist. The arch is
indestructible. Shadrach restores his tools to their original immaculate
order, and gathers his sawdust, and makes the ceremonial pyre of it in the
urn in the aisle. When his bench is as clean as he first found it, he kneels,
bows his head, and remains that way a minute or two, altogether
untroubled, mind blank, a tabula rasa, healed and made whole. Then he
goes out.
   Images of Mangu are everywhere in the streets, the handsome Mongol
face looking down from the facade of every building and staring out from
great banners strung from lampposts high above the roadways. At the
intersection of three grand boulevards workmen are diligently erecting the
armature for what is undoubtedly going to be a vast statue of the dead
viceroy. The process of canonization is well advanced; day by day,
departed Mangu is thrust more visibly into the consciousness of the
citizens of the world capital, and doubtless everywhere else as well. Mangu
dead has taken on a power and a presence never possessed by Mangu
alive: he has indeed become a fallen demigod, he is Baldur, Adonis, Osiris,
the slaughtered promise of spring, and he is due to rise again.
   Shadrach, cool and bouncy, wanders toward the river, whistling some
lush romantic melody—a tune out of Rachmaninoff, he suspects. He is
being followed, he realizes, by a man who emerged from the carpentry
chapel a moment after he did. This does not worry him. For the moment,
nothing worries him. He is charmed by everything: the steppe, the hills,
the faintly chilly spring air, the idea of being followed. He is charmed even
by the silly ubiquity of Mangu, whose bland symmetrical features have
been plastered to everything, and sprout from mailboxes, from trashbins,
from the low smooth white wall of the promenade that runs along the
river; there are Mangu pennants and streamers hanging all around, and
everything is done to a background of the Mongol mourning color, which
is yellow and lends an oddly bright and festive tone to the display, as
though there is shortly to be a parade in Mangu's honor, followed by the
viceroy's glorious second coming. Shadrach smiles. He leans his long body
over the promenade wall to admire the lovely turbulent flow of the river,
quickened by its spring freshets and humming along with rare energy,
swirling and dancing. He imagines filaments and tendrils of tributary
streams spreading outward from the channel below him, lacing this arid
land together, carrying water joyously from the mountains, sweeping it to
the river and thence to the sea, a vast arterial system serving the living,
throbbing entity that is the earth, and the image pleases the doctor in
him. If he listens carefully, he tells himself, he can hear the breathing of
the planet, and even the rhythms of its heart, tub-dub, tub-dub. The man
who has been following him appears now on the promenade and takes up
a position just to Shadrach's left. Side by side they watch the river in
silence. After a moment Shadrach risks a furtive glance and discovers that
the man is Frank Ficifolia, the communications expert, the designer of
Surveillance Vector One. Ficifolia is a short, rotund, capable man, perhaps
fifty years old, good-natured and talkative, and his uncharacteristic
silence now is significant. Upon entering the carpentry chapel Shadrach
had had a glimpse of someone he thought might be Ficifolia, but the
etiquette of the cult had kept him from taking a second look; his guess is
now confirmed. But a different etiquette controls Shadrach here. In the
bugged and spy-eyed world of Genghis Mao, one is frequently approached
by people who wish to talk without outwardly seeming to be holding a
conversation. Many times Shadrach has carried on long interchanges with
someone who is staring in another direction, even with someone whose
back is to him. He continues, therefore, to study the rushing flow of the
river, offering Ficifolia no greeting, and waiting. Eventually Ficifolia says,
apropos of nothing and without looking at Shadrach, "I don't understand
why you're still hanging around here."
  "Pardon me?"
  "In Ulan Bator. Waiting for the ax to fall. If I were you I'd go into
hiding, Shadrach."
  "So you know about—"
  "I know, yes. Several people know. What are you going to do?"
  "I'm not sure. Stay put for a while, I guess, and think things over.
There's a lot I have to evaluate."
   "Evaluate? Evaluate? Of course you'd say something like that!" Ficifolia,
though plainly trying to be unobtrusive, cannot control his emotions; he
raises his voice; he gesticulates passionately. "You know, man, you never
belonged in this town. You aren't crazy enough to qualify. You're so calm,
so reasonable, you always want to think things out, you want to stop and
evaluate when they've got the knife to your throat—how did you ever land
here, anyway? This is a place for madmen. I mean that seriously,
Shadrach. The lunatics are running the asylum, and the head lunatic is
the craziest one of all, and you just don't fit in. Can you think of anything
crazier than a world full of rotting people governed by a few thousand
Antidote-filled bureaucrats and ruled by a ninety-year-old Mongol warlord
who's planning to live forever? This is sanity? This is the logical outcome
of five hundred years of Western imperialism? And the spy-eyes
everywhere? The surveillance vectors taping my very words right now and
feeding them to God knows what kind of machine where they may not be
digested and acted upon for three thousand years? The robot policemen?
The organ farms? Anyone who begins to take this world at face value has
to be a madman, and that's what we are, all of us, top to bottom,
Avogadro, Horthy, Lindman, Labile, me, the whole crew. Except you. So
solemn, so contained, so accepting. Doing your job, doing your job, you
and Warhaftig, stitching the new liver into the Khan, never cracking a
smile, never saying to each other. This is a crazy way of making a living,
never even perceiving the craziness because you're so fundamentally
sane—not Warhaftig, he's either a robot or a lunatic, but you, Shadrach,
deadpan, full of weird microelectronic gear and even that doesn't upset
you. Don't you ever want to scream and rant? Do you have to accept
everything? Do you even accept the idea that Genghis Mao is going to
evict you from your own fucking head? Do you—" Abruptly Ficifolia checks
himself, reining himself in with a little shudder and a quick series of
jerking ticks of the facial muscles. More calmly, in an entirely different
voice, he says, "Really, Shadrach, you're in big trouble. You ought to
disappear while you still can."
  Shadrach shakes his head. "Hiding's not my style."
  "Is dying?"
  "Not particularly. But I won't hide. That's not like me. My people are
done with hiding. The old Underground Railway days are gone forever."
   " 'My people are done with hiding,' " Ficifolia says, doing his mimicry
in a harsh, high-pitched tone. "Jesus. Jcsus! Maybe I underestimated you.
Maybe you're as crazy as the rest of us here. Genghis Mao has fingered you
for doom, has put the old black spot right on you, and you put racial pride
ahead of survival. Bravo, Shadrach! Very noble. Very dumb."
  "Where could I go? The Khan's spy gadgets will find me anywhere.
Gadgets that you helped invent for him."
  "There are ways."
  "Disguise myself? Paint my skin white? Wear a blond wig?"
  "You could disappear the way Buckmaster did."
  Shadrach coughs. "I don't need sick jokes just now, Frank."
   "I'm not talking about organ farms. I mean disappearing. We
disappeared Buckmaster. We could do the same for you."
  "Buckmaster isn't dead?"
  "Alive and well. We altered the master personnel register the day he was
sentenced. Transposed half a dozen binary digits and the records show
that Roger Buckmaster went to the organ farms on such-and-such day and
was duly carved up. Once it's in the record, it's realer than real. Machine
reality is a higher order of reality than reality reality. If Buckmaster shows
upon any of the Khan's scanners now, the computer will reject the data as
nonsense, because Buckmaster is known to be dead, and dead men by
definition aren't found walking around."
  "Where is he?"
  "That's not important now. What's important is that we saved him, and
we can save you."
  "We? Who's 'we'?"
  "That's not important either."
  "Should I believe any of this, Frank?"
   "No. Of course not. It's all lies. Actually, I'm spying for the Khan, trying
to trap you. Jesus, Shadrach, use your head! Do you think I'm trying to get
you into trouble? You are in trouble. I'm risking my ass to—"
  "All right. Let me think, Frank."
  "So think, already."
   "You do your hocus-pocus and I disappear. Now I'm without an identity
and without a profession. Can I practice medicine if I'm hiding out in
some cellar? I was meant to be a doctor. Maybe not Genghis Mao's doctor,
but somebody's doctor, Frank. If I'm not working at that, I'm nobody, I'm
a waste of skills and talent. In my own eyes I'll be nothing. Is there any
point in disappearing into that kind of life? And how long would I have to
stay underground? If I'm going to spend the rest of my life locked up in a
cellar, I wouldn't be a whole lot worse off letting Genghis Mao use me for
Avatar. Better off, maybe."
   "You might have to stay out of sight until Genghis Mao dies. But
afterward—"
  "Afterward? What afterward? Genghis Mao might live another hundred
years. I won't."
   "He won't either," Ficifolia says, strange undertones of menace in his
voice. Shadrach stares in wonder. He is not sure he believes a syllable of
this. Buckmaster alive? Ficifolia a subversive? Conspiratorial plans afoot
to do away with the Khan? Questions bubble in him, and he hungers for a
thousand answers; but from the corner of his eye he perceives men in gray
and blue, two Citpols on patrol. So there will be no answers now. Ficifolia
sees them too and nods ever so slightly and says, “Think about it. Do your
evaluating, let me know what you warn to do."
  "All right."
  "Have you ever seen the river as high us this?"
  "It was an unusually snowy winter," Shadrach says, as the Citpols
saunter past.



                                     18

  May 27, 2012
   Troublesome dreams last night. Mouth full of cobwebs, fingers
growing roots. Premonitions of death. Is the end of Genghis Mao
drawing nigh? Morbid, morbid, morbid. To wake and not to be there.
The great crash of silence. It pains me. To wake and not to be there. To
have gone somewhere else. Or to have gone nowhere at all, the big black
hole. The longer one lives, the tighter one grasps life: living becomes a
habit that's hard to break. How empty the world would be if I were to
leave it. Poof, no more Genghis Mao. Such a vacuum! Tornado.
Hurricane.
  Oh I love to dwell on death.
  Dying can be so instructive. Dying can tell you so very much about
your true self. Dying can even be pleasurable, I imagine. Dying as a
healing experience, yes, the battered old body gladly giving up the ghost!
For some people, I imagine, it is the sharpest ecstasy they have ever
known.
  Oh I dread it.
   How shall I die, what will the manner of my going be? I think I fear
assassins most of all. To leave the world is one thing, natural and
inevitable; to be sent from it is altogether other, an affront to the self, an
insult to the ego. I will not be able to bear that awareness of dismissal.
Or the sense of transition, the moments just before the going, the
confrontation with the killer, the contemplation of loss as he moves
toward me with his knife or his gun or whatever. Let it be a bomb, if it
comes. Let it be instant poison in my soup. But there will be no assassins.
I am guarded too well. The mistake was in not protecting Mangu the
same way. Still, Mangu wasn't Genghis Mao: his loss was not to him
what my loss will be to me. The idea of dying is alien to me. I am too
large of spirit, I occupy too great a place in the consciousness of
mankind; the subtraction of me from the world is more than the world
can accept. Certainly more than I can accept.
   But why all this morbidity ? Strange, considering how healthy I feel.
Tremendous surge of vitality since the aortal transplant. I thrive on
surgery. I should get some sort of organ work done every week. Change
kidneys the first of every month, new spleen on the fifteenth. Yes.
Meanwhile, healthy though I am, death plays games with my soul as I
sleep. I think that it is an amusement, a delicious sport, to toy with
fantasies of death. We require some tension in our lives to relieve that
unbearable onwardness of existence. That flow of event, day following
day, sunrise, noon, sunset, dark, it can be crushing, it can stultify. And
so. The delight of dwelling on the end of all perception, that is, the end of
all things. There is joy in thinking about the dismal. Especially though
not exclusively as it applies to others. There is a German term,
schadenfreude, the joy of gloom, the pleasure to be had from the
contemplation of the misfortunes of others. This sorry century has been
the golden age of schadenfreude. We have known the ectasy of living at
the end of an era, we have shared many blessed moments of decline and
collapse. The shelling of the cathedrals in 1914, the English troops dying
in the mud, the Soviet massacres, the first great economic disaster, the
war that followed it, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the time of the
assassinations, the toppling of the governments, the Virus War, the
organ-rot, so much to weep about, though of course always it was others
who suffered more than one's self, which makes the weeping sweeter;
nine dark decades and I have tasted them all, and why not now achieve
a bit of interior distance and turn the principle inward, why not weep
for the death of Genghis Mao? There is more pleasure in mourning than
in dying. Let me in fantasy savor my own lamentable passing. How
much I regret my going! I am my own most grief stricken mourner. I
love these fantasies; I feel so exquisitely sorry for myself. But am I in fact
dying ? I summon Shadrach. He tells me my morning readings.
Everything normal, everything healthy. I am a phenomenon. I will not
go from the world today. Long life to the Khan! Ten thousand years to
the Khan!



  Belá Horthy seeks him out in a corridor on one of the lower floors of the
Grand Tower of the Khan and says, pretending not to be looking at him,
"Frank tells me that you intend to stay here."
  "For the time being," Shadrach says. "I need to think."
  "Thinking is useful, yes. But why do your thinking in Ulan Bator?"
  "It's where I live."
   "For the time being," says Horthy. He swings around and looks straight
at Shadrach—boldly, daringly. His wild hyperthyroid eyes arc veiled with
concern. He must be one of the conspirators too, Shadrach realizes, and
that doesn't seem terribly surprising at all. Horthy says softly, "Run,
Shadrach."
  "What's the use? They'll catch me."
  "Are you sure? They haven't caught Buckmaster yet."
  "Aren't you afraid to say things like that? When there might be—"
  "Scanners in the walls?"
  "Yes."
   "Everything gets scanned. Everything gets taped. So what? Who can run
through all the tapes? The Citpols are drowning in data. Every spy-channel
is choked with rivers of conspiracy, most of it insane and imaginary.
There's no filtering system to eliminate the useless noise." Horthy winks.
"Go. As Buckmaster went."
  "Useless."
  "I don't think so. I advise running. I strongly advise running. You know,
some people think better when they're on the run."
  Horthy smiles. He takes Shadrach's hand for a moment. As Horthy
walks away, Shadrach calls after him, "Hey, are you part of it too?"
  "Part of what?" Horthy asks, and laughs.



  May 28, 2012
   More dark dreams. I went down to Sukhe Bator Square and found
they had erected a statue of me in the center of the plaza, a colossus, at
least a hundred meters high, made of bronze that was already
developing a green patina. My arms outspread in benediction. My face
looked awful: wrinkled, cavernous, hideous, the face of a man five
hundred years old. And the statue had no legs. It ended at mid-thigh,
Genghis Mao on stumps, but the statue floated in mid-air, as though the
legs had once been there but had been chopped away and the statue had
remained at its original height. There was an old workman, sweeping up
faded flowers, and I said to him, "Is Genghis Mao dead?" and he said,
"Dead and gone, they sent the pieces back to Dalan-Dzadagad, and good
riddance." The pieces. They sent the pieces back. I don't like this. There is
too much death in my head these days. The game has lost its savor. I
must take steps.
   After breakfast I decided to make an inspection of the project
laboratories. When preoccupied with death, drop in on those who would
help you live forever. Wise idea. Immediately felt better. First personal
visit in months. Should go more often.
    Called on Phoenix first, the dainty Sarafrazi woman in charge,
marvelous eyes, beautiful face. Terrified of me. Showed me her monkeys,
her bubbling vats of chemicals, her pickled brains in bell jars. Optimistic
forecasts from her, delivered in tense throaty voice. She'll make me
young again, so she claims. Am not so sure of that but told her to keep at
it. Paralyzed with awe, she was. I thought she was almost going to kneel
as I left. Went from there to Talos. Came in unannounced, but the
Lindman woman cool as ice anyway. The report is that she's Shadrach's
new lover. Can't understand what he sees in her. Something about her
mouth I don't like, spoils her face. Looks like the mouth of some ferocious
gnawing creature. She's got a plastic Genghis Mao in her lab, very large,
nothing finished below the waist, fust framework there, no legs. No legs.
The Genghis Mao Memorial Statue. ”Finish the legs,'' I told her. She gave
me a peculiar look. Told me the legs were the final job, more important
now to get the internal engineering done. Knows her own mind, won't
take nonsense from me. Even if I am Chairman of the Permanent
Revolutionary Committee. I Genghis II Mao IV Khan do command—no.
Her robot can wink, smile, wave its arms. Gonchigdorge was with me
and said, "It's just like you, sir, a remarkable likeness," but I can't agree.
Ingenious but mechanical. I wouldn't want it to succeed me, I will not
terminate Project Talos, not yet at any rate, but I don't think it's going to
be able to produce what I need.
   Went on to Nikki Crowfoot's lab. Avatar. Ah! Yes!Beautiful woman,
though tense, depressed, withdrawn, these days. Guilty about Shadrach,
I imagine. She ought to be. But she remains a loyal servant of the Khan.
Is this a good thing? "When will you be ready to make the transfer?" I
asked her. She said, "It's just a matter of months.'' I felt such a surge of
excitement at that that Shadrach phoned from upstairs to find out if I
was all right. Told him to mind his own business. But I am his own
business. Anyway, Avatar gives me hope. Soon I will put on new healthy
flesh. Before the first snows come I will speak to the world with
Shadrach's lips, I will breathe the air with Shadrach's lungs.



  Entering the Project Avatar laboratory unannounced in midafternoon,
Shadrach is confronted immediately by Manfred Eis, Nikki Crowfoot's
chief assistant, who emerges out of a maze of equipment and strides
purposefully toward him like Thor on the warpath, halting with a
crispness just short of a heel-click.
      "We are very busy just now," Eis announces, making a challenge out of
it.
      "I'm glad to hear it."
      "'You have come because—?"
  "A routine inspection visit," Shadrach answers mildly. "To check on
progress. I haven't been here for a while."
   In fact it is several weeks since he was last in the Avatar lab, not since
just before Mangu's death, and the rhythm of his schedule has usually
brought him to each project af least once a month. But Eis hardly makes
him feel welcome now. He is a cold-mannered, humorless man at best, a
cliche-Teuton, stiff and square-jawed and square-shouldered and very
Nordic, with frosty blue eyes, pearly teeth, long yellow hair, everything but
the dueling scar. Shadrach is accustomed to Dr. Eis's Aryan brusqueness,
but today there is something new in his manner, something gratuitously
hostile, almost patronizing, vaguely contemptuous, that Shadrach finds
disturbing because he suspects it has to do with his own suddenly
significant personal involvement in the destinies of Project Avatar.
   Eis is pleased that Shadrach has been chosen. Eis is gratified. Eis
thinks it altogether proper that Shadrach should be the one. That's it.
Perhaps it was Eis who actually sold Genghis Mao on the idea of selecting
Shadrach. No, no, an underling like Eis would never have had access to the
Chairman; but still, Eis most have rejoiced, seems still to be rejoicing
right now. Shadrach does not like being gloated over. He wonders if it is
possible to find some appropriate experimental use for Eis's fine Nordic
body.
   Nevertheless, Shadrach is nominally in charge here, and Eis must give
ground. Busy though the lab is, he will have to let Shadrach make his
inspection. The place really is busy, too, frantic, all sorts of experiments
with all sorts of animals under way, while electronic gear is hauled from
room to room by sweating, cursing technicians, and men and women in
lab smocks run around wild-eyed, brandishing sheafs of printouts— a real
circus, altogether manic and comic, mad scientists at work, desperately
striving to square the circle before the onrushing deadline arrives.
  It makes Shadrach queasy to realize that he is the circle they must
square. He is the patsy, the sucker, the victim, whose life is eventually
going to be swallowed by all this equipment, and the manic tone of the
current Avatar operations is entirely the result of the need to convert
everything, fast, from Mangu-parameters to Shadrach-parameters.
Probably a dozen people here know as much about his body, his
brain-wave patterns and his neural circuitry and his serotonin levels, as he
does himself. Quite likely he has been under covert scrutiny for days. (Do
they steal nail parings? Hair clippings?) Shadrach wonders how many of
these technicians know of the host substitution. He imagines that they all
do, that they are eyeing him with secret fascination even as they rush to
and fro—that they are sizing him up, comparing the authentic actual
Shadrach Mordecai to the clusters of abstract and synthetic
Shadrach-simulation pulsations that they have been working with. But
maybe not. Apparently only a few of the Avatar people knew that Mangu
was going to be the body donor in the first place, and most likely even
fewer have been allowed to learn the identity of Mangu's replacement.
   Nikki, at any rate, is not caught up in the general manic mood.
Summoned by Eis, she greets Shadrach quite calmly. The project, she tells
him, is making steady progress. Her gaze is steady, her voice is centered
and composed. "Progress," in this laboratory, can only mean the daily
process of bringing Shadrach closer to destruction, and certainly she is
aware that he will put that interpretation on it; but it seems that she has
decided not to feel guilty or act evasive any longer. They have already had
their showdown; she has admitted that she was willing to betray her lover
for the sake of Genghis Mao; now life continues—for however long—and
she has her job to do. All this passes between them within the space of
ninety seconds, and none of it is communicated in words, only in tone of
voice and expression of eyes. Shadrach is relieved. He does not enjoy
making people feel guilty; it makes him feel obscurely guilty himself. "I
should look at the equipment," Shadrach says.
  "Come."
   She takes him on a guided tour. She demonstrates for him the zoo of
metempsychosized animals, the latest triumphs of electronic
transmigration: here is a dog with rhe soul of a raccoon, diligently dipping
its dinner in a pan of wafer, and here is an eagle with a coded
peacock-construct in its skull to make it strut and preen and spread its
wings, and here they have slipped the essential sheepness of a sheep into a
young lioness, who sits placidly munching fodder, to the probable
detriment of her digestive system. All these reborn beasts have a trapped,
bewildered look, as though they are being gnawed from within by some
insatiable parasite, and Shadrach asks Nikki if this is going to be a
characteristic of human avatars as well, if the expunged soul of the body
donor will not linger as a miasma to complicate the life of his supplanter.
   "We don't think so," Nikki says. "Remember, all the animals I've shown
you have undergone implant codings across species lines, in fact across
generic lines. A peacock is never going to be comfortable in an eagle's
body, or a sheep in a lion's. Eventually the animal gets the hang of
operating its new body, but it'll always tend to keep reverting to the old
reflex patterns."
  "Then why bother with transgeneric switches? What's the point, other
than showing off how clever you are?"
   "The point is that the disparities between the implanted entity and the
host are so gross that we can instantly confirm the success of the implant.
If we put a spaniel's mind into another spaniel's body, if we put a chimp
into a chimp, a goat into a goat, how do we know if we've accomplished
anything? The goat can't tell us. The spaniel can't tell us."
   Shadrach frowns. "Surely the electrical pattern of one spaniel's brain is
different from another's, and that can readily be detected. If brain-wave
patterns aren't unique to the individual, what's your whole project all
about?"
   "Of course the patterns are unique," Crowfoot says. "But we need
confirmation on gross behavioral level. We have done intraspecies coding
and implants, plenty of them, but the behavioral differences after the
implant are too subtle to prove very much when we put one chimp into
another, say, and the brainwave changes that we can detect are, for all we
know, just artifacts of our own meddling. Whereas if we code a sheep and
feed her into a lioness, and the lioness is thereupon transformed into a
grazing animal, we have very dramatic confirmation that we've achieved
something. Yes?"
  "But it would be very much more dramatic, naturally, if the minds you
were switching around were human ones. And much easier to confirm
that a switch has actually been induced."
  "Naturally."
  "Only you haven't done any of that,"
  "Not yet," Nikki says. "Next week, I think, we'll tackle our first human
implant."
  Shadrach feels a faint chill. He has managed an admirable
impersonality thus far on this tour, he has carried on this conversation
exactly as though his interest in Project Avatar is a purely professional
one; but it is not that easy to escape an awareness of the ultimate
consequences of all this painstaking research, that he and Crowfoot have
begun talking of moving human minds from one body to another. He is
unable to ignore the final goal of Avatar, the transmigration of tiger into
gazelle: Genghis Mao is the tiger, and he himself the hapless gazelle. What
becomes of the. gazelle when the tiger invades? Shadrach examines,
briefly, one avenue of escape that he had not previously considered: if they
can move sheep-mind to lioness-body and Genghis Mao-mind to
Shadrach-body, they can just as easily move Shadrach-mind to some other
body, and leave him to proceed from there. But the fantasy fades in the
instant of its birth. He does not want to move to another body. He wants
to keep his own. How like a dream this is, he thinks. Except that there is
no awakening from it.
  "How long will you do experiments in human implants,” Shadrach asks,
"before you'll be ready to—to—"
  "To transplant the Chairman?"
  "Yes."
   Shrugging, Nikki says, "That's hard to answer. It depends on the
problems we encounter in the early human transplants. If there are
unexpectedly difficult problems of psychological adaptation, if transplant
leads to psychotic freak-outs or cerebral breakdown or identity
bleed-throughs or anything like that, it might be months or even years
before we dare shift Genghis Mao to a new body. Our animal experiments
haven't indicated that such things are going to happen, but human minds
are more complex than spaniel minds, and we have to allow for the
possibility that complex minds will react in complicated ways to
something as traumatic as a shift of bodies. So we'll proceed cautiously.
Unless, of course, the imminent bodily death of Genghis Mao makes an
emergency mind-transplant necessary, in which case, I suppose, we'll just
have to plunge ahead and see what happens. We're not eager to do that, of
course."
  "Of course," Shadrach echoes dryly.
  "We'd much rather be orderly about it. A period of experimentation
with human subjects, and then, if all goes smoothly there, we'd like to do
two or three preliminary Genghis Mao transplants before we—"
  "What?"
  "Yes. Insert the Genghis Mao construct into several temporary host
bodies, simply to find out how the Chairman reacts when transplanted,
what adaptations may be required in order to—"
  "And what will you do with all these extra Genghis Maos?" Shadrach
asks. "It's beautiful redundancy, I know, to keep a stockpile of them
around. But if they all start giving orders at once we might—"
  "Oh, no," Crowfoot says. "We don't intend to let the Genghis Mao
material remain in any of the experimental subjects. That sort of
redundancy is absolutely not wanted here. We'd expunge each subject
once we were done testing him. We'd do a complete mindpick after we've
run our tests."
  "Ah. Yes. Assuming the subject will let you."
  "What do you mean?"
  "Remember, you won't be dealing with a helpless flunky, once you've
done your transplant. You'll be dealing with Genghis Mao wearing a new
body. You'll be up against the dominant spirit of the age. You might have
problems."
  "I doubt it," Nikki says breezily. "We'll take precautions. Come this way,
will you?"
   She leads him forward, to a vast computer bank, a wall of gray-green
metal studded with incomprehensible apparatus. In here, she tells him,
the coded essence of Genghis Mao is stored, everything that has been
recorded so far, a nearly complete digital persona-construct that is
capable of responding to stimuli precisely as the living Genghis Mao
would, to a probability of seven or eight decimal places. Nikki offers to
demonstrate the constructs Genghis Mao-ness with a few quick
simulation runs, but Shadrach, suddenly disheartened, shows little
interest; she marches him on to some of the other Avatar wonders, to
which he reacts with no greater enthusiasm, and, as though at last
noticing that Shadrach has ceased to pretend to be delighted by her
technological miracles, she ushers him into her private office and locks the
door.
   They stand facing each other, less than a meter apart, and he feels
sudden surprising excitement, physical, intense. The intensity astounds
him. He had thought all desire for her had gone from him forever, once he
discovered how she had betrayed him. But no. Still there, strong as ever.
The lore of her sleek tawny body, the memory of her fragrance, the glitter
of her huge piercing dark eyes. His Indian princess, Pocahontas.
Sacajawea. Even now he is drawn to her, even now. He ceases to see the
ingenious woman of science whose ingenuity has altogether undone him;
he sees only the woman, beautiful, passionate, irresistible. He feels the pull
of her body and he is sure she feels the pull of his.
  It ought not to be such a surprise. Here they are, man and woman; they
have been lovers for many months; they are alone, the door is locked. Why
should desire not come over them, despite everything? But still, this
sudden shifting of gears into the erotic mode amazes him. Somehow sex,
unexpectedly obtruding itself against this background of betrayal,
depression, impending doom, seems irrelevant and inappropriate, bizarre
and unwelcome. He pretends he feels nothing. He makes no move.
   "How are you managing, Shadrach?" she asks tenderly, after a moment.
"Is it very bad?"
  "I'm holding on."
  "Are you frightened?"
  "A little. More angry than frightened, I guess."
  "Do you hate me?"
  "I don't hate anyone. I'm not a hater."
  "I still love you, you know."
  "Quit it, Nikki."
  "I do. That's what's been ripping me apart for weeks."
  The force of Crowfoot's concern for him is like a tangible presence in the
small office.
  "I don't want to hear about it," he says.
  "You do hate me."
  "No. I'm just not interested in your remorse."
  "Or my love?"
  "Such that it is."
  "Such that it is."
   "I don't know," he says. "I don't want my head messed up any more than
it already has been."
  "What will you do, Shadrach?"
  "What do you mean, what will I do?"
  "You aren't going to stay in Ulan Bator."
  "Everybody's been telling me to run."
  "Yes."
  "It wouldn't do any good."
  "You could save yourself," Crowfoot tells him.
  He shakes his head. "I wouldn't get away. The whole planet's bugged,
Nikki. Watch Surveillance Vector One for fifteen minutes and you'll realize
that. You know that already. You've told me yourself that escape's
impossible. There's a tracer on everyone. Anyway, it would spoil your
project again if I disappeared."
  "Oh, Shadrach!"
  "I mean, I'm the key man, right?"
  "Don't be an idiot."
  "You'd have to find another host for Genghis Mao. Then you'd have to
recalibrate all over again. You—"
  "Stop it. Please."
  "All right," he says. "At any rate, it's futile to try to escape from the
Khan."
  "You won't even try?"
  "I won't even try."
  Crowfoot regards him levelly for a long silent moment. Then she says, "I
should feel relieved about that, I suppose."
  "Why?"
  "If you won't take responsibility for saving yourself, then I don't have to
take responsibility for—for—"
  "For what's going to happen to me if I stay here?"
  "Yes."
  "That's right. You don't need to feel any guilt at all. I've had fair
warning, and nevertheless I freely choose to stay and face the music.
You're absolved, Nikki. Your hands are washed of my blood."
  "Are you being sarcastic, Shadrach?"
  "Not particularly."
  "I can never tell when you're being sarcastic."
  "Not this time."' he says.
  They stare at each other strangely again. He still feels that mysterious
sexual tension, that grotesque and inappropriate lust. He suspects that if
he reached for her and dragged her down on the carpeted floor, down
between the desk and the filing cabinets, he could have her right here,
right now, in her own office, one last crazy and frantic screw. Then he
thinks of Eis and his colleagues running around on the other side of the
locked office door, busy with their computers and their chimps, doing
simulated transfers of the persona of Genghis Mao into the bodily hull of
Shadrach Mordecai, and his ardor cools a little. But only a little. Nikki
laughs.
  "What's funny?" he asks.
   "Do you remember," she says, "that time we spoke about the concept of
you and Genghis Mao being one life system, one self-corrective
information-processing unit? That was before any of this happened.
Mangu was still alive, I think. I talked about how the chisel and the mallet
and the stone are aspects of the sculptor, or, more precisely, that the
sculptor and his tools and materials together make up a single thinking
and acting entity, a single person, and how you and Genghis Mao—"
  "Yes. I remember."
    "It's going to be even truer now, won't it? In the most literal sense. That
seems awfully ironic to me. Your nervous system and his, entwined,
interlocked, indistinguishable. When we spoke then, you said no, it wasn't
a true analogy, that Genghis Mao can send data to you but you can't send
it to him, so that there's a limitation on the information flow, a discrete
boundary. That'll change, now. It'll be impossible to tell where one of you
leaves off and the other begins. But even then, I wanted to tell you that you
weren't really grasping the idea—that the marble can't design a sculpture
but is nevertheless part of the total sculpture-making system, and that you
can't feed metabolic data into Genghis Mao but are nevertheless part of
the total Genghis Mao system; there is an interaction, there is a feedback
relationship that links you to him and he to you, there is—'' She has been
talking very rapidly, a torrential flow of words. Now she halts and in an
altogether different voice says, "Oh, Shadrach, why don't you want to hide
yourself?"
  "I told you. It's useless. I keep telling people that, but they don't seem to
want to believe me."
   He thinks about himself as part of the total Genghis Mao system. He
considers the analogies. No doubt of it, his sensors and implants link him
to the Khan in a very special way. But he is no more—and no
less—important to the total Genghis Mao system than Michelangelo's
lump of marble was to the total statue-making system. Michelangelo, if he
fell that a given lump of marble was no longer necessary to the needs of
the total system, would casually discard it and introduce another into the
system.
  Nikki is trembling.
  "If you won't try to save yourself," she says, "then nobody else can do
anything for you."
   After he and Genghis Mao come to share one body, they will truly be an
integrated information-processing unit. Of course, such a unit needs only
one biocomputer, one brain, one mind, one self. And that self will not be
the self of Shadrach Mordecai.
   He says, "I know that. We've already discussed that. I take full
responsibility."
  "Don't you care?"
  "Maybe not. Not any longer. I don't know."
  "Shadrach—"
   She starts to reach toward him, a tentative gesture, perhaps sexual,
perhaps merely some sort of reflexive grab at a sinking man. He pulls
back. There is a wall between them, an impermeable barrier of words and
fears and doubts and hesitations and guilts. He does not mind that. He
takes refuge behind that wall. But still there is that sexual pull between
them, that taut hot line of erotic tension, spanning the barrier, drilling
through it, eroding it, breaching it. And then the barrier is gone. He loves
her, he hates her, he wants her, he loathes her. He makes a tentative
gesture toward her and halts. They are like two adolescents, absurdly
unsure of themselves, feinting foolishly, making silly false starts and
finicky nervous withdrawals. He smiles tensely. So does she. She is
obviously as conscious as he is of the minute shifts of balance that are
rapidly occurring within them and between them. It is as though they are
voyagers aboard an ocean liner that is struggling through turbulent,
stormy waters, and they are trapped together in a tiny cabin with a
massive metal safe that slides wildly about, careening across the floor with
every convulsion of the waves, crashing into the walls as they jump about,
threatening to crush them if they do not succeed in scampering out of its
way as it bears down on them. There is something undeniably comic
about their predicament, but the peril is real, too, and not at all funny.
How much longer can they hold out? The safe is so heavy, the sea so
rough, the cabin so small, and they are getting weary—
  And suddenly they come together, embracing, grappling, mouth seeking
mouth, fingers digging furiously into flesh. He is terrified by the power of
the blind, irrational force that has been unleashed in him, that he has
unleashed in himself. "No," he mutters, even as he claws at her clothes,
even as he pushes himself against her, even as he finds the fullness of her
breasts beneath the sexless lab smock. "No," she whimpers, seemingly
equally appalled. But neither of them resists. They stumble about
ridiculously, sway, topple to the floor. On the carpet, between the desk and
the filing cabinet.
   Neither of them undresses. Down with zipper, up with skirt; this is no
tender act of love, this is not even a display of sexual athleticism, this is
mere savage coupling, a desperate and unsophisticated cleaving-together
of flesh. His hands slide along the smooth firm columns of her thighs and
his fingers find and probe the secret slit between them, already hot and
moist, and she gasps and thrusts her pelvis at him and, quickly, blindly, he
drives himself into her. There is barely room for their bodies to move on
the floor; she tilts herself upward, feet pointed at the ceiling, and he
reaches below to grasp her buttocks, supporting her, and rams himself
against her with lunatic vigor. Almost at once, so it seems to him, she
comes with unfamiliar little shivers and giggles, and moments later so
does he, in wild galvanic spasms that wrench a hoarse strained cry from
him. Inelegantly Shadrach slumps down on her chest, exhausted, and she
holds him tightly, with loving rocklike patience, as if she would be willing
to hold him this way for hours or weeks, but after two or three minutes he
pulls free, stunned, dazed, hardly believing what has just passed between
them.
  They look at each other. He blinks; so does she. There are thin faint
smiles of embarrassment.
   Shakily he rises. Nikki lies there, her legs lowered now but still spread
wide, her rumpled skirt pushed up around her hips, her face shiny with
sweat, her eyes bloodshot, unfocused. Shadrach averts his glance from her
body in peculiar fastidiousness: he is not exactly repelled by the sight of
her exposed loins, but somehow he does not want to look. Perhaps he is
frightened by the power that that dark hairy humid cavern has over him,
the primordial female chasm, irresistible, all-engulfing. At any rate he
adjusts his clothes, coughs self-consciously, stoops to offer Nikki a helping
hand. She shakes him off gently and gets to her feet unaided, and they
stand facing each other. He has nothing to say. It is a sticky moment, but
she rescues them from it by taking his hand, by giving him a warm loving
smile, by pulling him toward her for a quick chaste kiss, lips lightly
brushing lips, a kiss that simultaneously acknowledges the intensity of
what has just taken place and brings down a curtain on it. It is time for
him logo.
  "Save yourself," she whispers. "No one can do it for you."
  "I need to think about things some more."
  "Go, then. Do your thinking. I love you, Shadrach."
  He knows what he is supposed to reply to that, but the words are
impossible. He squeezes her fingers instead. And swiftly leaves.



                                    19

  He has been saying for days that he will not run away. He has said it to
Ficifolia, to Horthy, to Nikki, to Katya, to all of the well-meaning friends
who want him to try to save himself. But then he decides to get out of Ulan
Bator after all.
   It is not exactly an escape attempt, for Shadrach still believes there is
no way ultimately of avoiding the spy-eyes of Genghis Mao. He will not try
to be secretive about it: he intends even to notify the Chairman himself
that he is going. No, it is more like a holiday trip, a vacation. Shadrach is
going to go because of that remark of Horthy's—some people think better
when they're on the run—and because Nikki, once again bringing up her
notion that he and Genghis Mao constitute a single system, has given him
some ideas. He is not sure how useful the ideas may be, and he needs to
consider them at length. Perhaps he really will think better on the run. He
will go, at any rate. He looks forward to the trip. It will be a diverting
entertainment, and possibly instructive as well. He feels buoyant and
cheerful. Shadrach the Glorious, striding splendidly from continent to
continent in what may very well be the last great adventure of his life.
   In the evening he visits Genghis Mao. The Khan is making his usual
magnificent recovery from his latest surgery. He looks a little feverish, a
trifle flushed, his keen narrow eyes unnaturally glossy, but generally he
appears hale, vigorous, alert. He has spent much of the day going over the
plans for the spectacular state funeral of Mangu, postponed on account of
the aortal transplant and now scheduled for ten days hence. As Shadrach
runs through his brisk diagnostic routines, the palpation and the
auscultation and all the rest, Genghis Mao, shuffling documents and
paying no attention to his physician's earnest probings, speaks with
bubbling boyish enthusiasm of the great occasion. "Fifty thousand troops
massed in the plaza, Shadrach! Rockets going back and forth overhead,
flights of military planes, a thousand flags, six separate marching bands.
Lights, color, excitement. The whole Committee on the dais under a
tremendous purple-and-gold spotlight. The catafalque drawn by thirteen
wild Mongol mares. Platoons of archers, a canopy of fiery arrows. An
immense pyre on the very spot where Mangu fell. Teams of gymnasts
who—" The Khan pauses. "You aren't going to find something new to slice
out of me, are you? I don't want any more surgery just now. The funeral
mustn't be postponed a second time."
  "I see no reason why it should be, sir."
   "Good. Good. It's going to be an event to be remembered for centuries.
Whenever a great man dies, they'll talk about giving him a funeral as great
as the funeral of Mangu. You'll sit beside me on the dais, Shadrach. At my
right hand. A special mark of my favor, and everyone will know it."
  Shadrach takes a deep breath. This may be difficult.
  "With your permission, sir, I intend not to be in Ulan Bator when the
funeral takes place."
  The imperial eyebrows lift in surprise, but only for a moment.
  "Oh?" says Genghis Mao, finally.
   "I want to get away for a while," Shadrach tells him. "I've been under a
lot of stress lately."
  "You do look pale," The Khan says dryly.
  "Very tense. Very tired."
  "Yes. Poor Shadrach. How devoted you are."
  "You've grown much stronger since the liver transplant, sir. You won't
be needing me on a day-by-day basis in the weeks just ahead. And of
course I could get back to Ulan Bator in a hurry if there's any emergency."
   The beady eyes study him calmly. The Khan is oddly undisturbed by
Shadrach's announcement, it would seem. There is something mildly
disquieting about that. Shadrach does not want to be indispensable, with
all the burdens that indispensability entails, but on the other hand he
wishes the Khan would think of him as indispensable. His only salvation
now lies in indispensability.
  "Where will you go?" Genghis Mao asks.
  "I haven't decided that yet."
  "Not even tentatively?"
  "Not even tentatively. Away from here, that's all I know."
  "I see. And for how long?"
  "A few weeks. A month, at most."
  "It will be strange, not having you at my side."
  "Then I have your permission to go, sir?"
   "You have my permission. Of course." The Khan smiles serenely, as if
very satisfied with his own graciousness. And then a sudden mercurial
shift, a darkening of the face, furrowing of the forehead, a tense fretful
gleam coming into the eyes. Second thoughts? Yes. "But what if I do fall
ill? Suppose I have a stroke. Suppose my heart. My stomach."
  "Sir, I can return at once if—"
   "It worries me, Shadrach. Not having you close by." The Khan's voice is
hoarse, ragged, almost panicky now. "If organ rejection starts. If there's
some intestinal obstruction. If my kidneys begin to fail. You know of
trouble so soon, you react so swiftly. If—" The Khan laughs. His mood
seems to be shifting again; the fears of a moment ago vanish abruptly, and
a strange blank smile plays across his face. In a new, sweet voice he says,
almost crooning, "Sometimes I hear voices, Shadrach, did you know that?
Like the saints, like the prophets. Invisible advisers come to me.
Whispering, Whispering. They always have, in time of need. To warn me,
to guide me."
  "Voices, sir?"
  Genghis Mao blinks. "Did you say something?"
  "Voices, I said. You were telling me that you sometimes hear voices.”
   "I said that? I said nothing about voices. What voices? What are you
talking about, Shadrach?" Genghis Mao laughs again, a low, harsh,
baffling laugh. "Voices! What madness! Well, let's not trouble ourselves
with such foolishness.'' He cranes his neck and peers straight up at
Shadrach. "So you'll be having a vacation from the old man and his
complaints soon, will you?"
  Shadrach is sweating. Shadrach is terrified. Is this some kind of
psychotic break, or merely one of Genghis Mao's games?
  "A short vacation, yes, sir," he says uncertainly.
  The Chairman looks momentarily wistful. "Yes. But to miss the funeral,
though—such a pity—"
  "I regret that," Shadrach says. "But I do need to get away,"
  "Yes. Yes. By all means. Take your trip, Shadrach. If you do need to get
away. If you do. Need to get away."
  There. Done. Shadrach sighs. An uneasy moment or two, but he has his
permission to depart. Strange. That wasn't really so difficult at all.



  May 29, 2012
  Such a long face on Shadrach when he came out with the business
about his vacation. Terrified of me. Afraid I'd refuse, I guess. What
would he have done if I'd said no? Go anyway? He might. He seems
desperate. Had that look in his eye, trapped man fighting in a corner.
One must always be wary of those. Control your opponent, yes, but don't
trap him in corners. Give him plenty of space. That way you give
yourself plenty of space, too.
  I wonder why he's going.
   Tired, he said. Tense. Well, maybe so. But there's more to it than that.
It has to have something to do with Avatar. Is he thinking of
disappearing? He's too bright for that. Must know he can't disappear.
What then? Rebelliousness? Wants to see what happens if he walks in
and tells the old man he's taking off for a month to points unknown?
Naturally I wouldn't refuse. Much more interesting to let him go and see
what he does.
  First flicker of independence poor Shadrach's ever shown. About time,
too.
  What if I get seriously ill while he's gone? Heart. Liver. Lungs.
Kidneys. Cerebral hemorrhage. Pleurisy. Acute pericarditis.
Toxicuremia. So fragile, so flimsy, so vulnerable, this body, just chunks of
meat strung together. Capable of falling apart overnight.
  Mustn't worry about that. I feel fine. I feel fine. I feel fine. I am in
extraordinarily good health.
  I am not dependent on Shadrach Mordecai.
  I am not dependent on Shadrach Mordecai.
   And what if he knows some way of actually disappearing? I suppose
there's at least a slight chance of that. What becomes of Avatar then?
Find another donor? But I want him. Whenever I see him, I think of how
fine his body is, how agile, how elegant. I mean to wear that body
someday, oh, yes!
  Should I therefore let him get out of my sight?
  No one can get out of my sight. Right.
  Anyway, I know Shadrach. It doesn 't worry me, this trip of his. He'll
go, he'll have his fling, and then he'll come back to me. Of his own free
will. He'll come back, all right. Yes. Of his own free will.



   It is time to think of the choosing of destinations. Shadrach can go
anywhere in the world, and no concern for the cost; he is a member of the
ruling elite, is he not, Antidote-blessed, an aristocrat in a world of rotting
pieces. But where shall he go? He heads for Surveillance Vector One to
consider his options. Though he has often paused before the screens of
Surveillance Vector One for a random dip into the activities of the outer
world that he calls the Trauma Ward, this is the first time that Shadrach
has actually seated himself in the imperial throne from which the great
spy-eye apparatus is controlled. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of colored
buttons confront him: a bank of red ones, a wedge of green ones, yellow,
blue, violet, orange. His hands hover above them like those of a novice
organist approaching a full keyboard for the first time. Nothing is labeled.
Is there a system? All about the room, images whirl and flit on the myriad
screens, zipping by at unfathomable variable rates. Shadrach pokes a
green button. Has anything been accomplished? The screens still seem
random. He covers dozens of green buttons with both palms outstretched.
Ah. Now there seems to be a detectable pattern of response. One slice of
screens high up and to his right is showing unmistakably European
cities—Paris, London, maybe Prague, Vienna, Stockholm. The
color-coding, then, may be keyed to continents.
   Leaving the green keys depressed, Shadrach punches a bunch of orange
ones. A systematic search through the whirling madness of the blinking
screens shows him, eventually, a bloc of North American scenery far to his
left—glimpses of Los Angeles, surely, and New York, and Chicago, Boston,
Pittsburgh. So. Yes.
   Half an hour of patient, absorbing work and he has mastered the
system; he is a quick study. Violet is Africa, yellow is Asia, red is Latin
America, and so on. He discovers, also, that there are certain master
buttons—the red of red, so to speak, the blue of blues—which, when
punched, wipe from the screens all data on continents other than the one
covered by keys of that color, so that one need not contend with the crazy
oversufficiency of information that the whole of Surveillance Vector One is
capable of supplying. He learns, also, how to summon images of particular
cities: the keys within each color group are arranged in a geographical
analogue of their actual positions, and by activating a screen at his left
elbow he can call for maps, divided into grids that show him which
buttons to push. And then he systematically examines the Trauma Ward
to see where he wants to go.
   The famous cities of the world, yes. The ancient capitals. Rome? Of
course. He punches for it. The Colosseum flashes by, the Forum, the
Spanish Steps. Yes. And Jerusalem, yes, one glimpse is enough. He
considers Egypt and punches for Cairo, but rejects it when he sees the
beggars shambling about the base of the Great Pyramid, their blind eyes
crusted with swarming flies. He has heard rumors about Egypt, and they
seem to be true: organ-rot does not frighten him, but he has no antidotes
for the ghastly trachoma, for the endemic bilharziasis, for the thousand
other Cairene plagues that the screens show him. The healer in him might
be willing enough to go to Egypt for a laying on of hands, a spraying on of
medicines, but this is meant to be a holiday, he is going abroad not as a
doctor but as an anti-doctor, and he shies from that challenge. No Egypt.
But he chooses Istanbul after a view of the plump mosques rising from the
hills; he picks London; bypasses his native Philadelphia and, with a
shudder, New York; elects San Francisco; and finally Peking. The grand
tour. The great adventure.
    He sleeps alone that night, and for a change he sleeps well, as if the
prospect of world-girdling travel has perversely calmed his restless spirit.
Before dawn he awakens, does some perfunctory calisthenics, packs
quickly, taking little with him. The green face of the data screen tells him
it is

                                FRIDAY
                             1 June, 2012


  He does not bother with farewells. Just as the sun breaks the horizon he
summons a car and is taken to the airport.



  June 1, 2012
   I did tell him about the voices after all. Despite earlier resolves. Should
I have told him? But he didn't take me seriously. Do I take me seriously?
Do I take them seriously? Perhaps they are symptoms of some grave
mental disorder. But were the saints mad too, then? The voices whisper
to me. They have always come to me in times of crisis. During the Virus
War I heard them most dearly. One voice said, I am Temujin Genghis
Khan, and you are my son, and you shall be Genghis II. A voice of
thunder, though he only whispered. And I am Mao, another voice said,
smooth as silk. You are my son, Mao said, and you shall be Mao II. But
we had already had a Mao II, nasty little coward, completely destroved
his country with his idiocies, and there was even a Mao III, briefly,
during the days just before the outbreak of the Virus War, so I answered
Mao, I told him he was behind the times, it was too late for me to be Mao
II, I must become Mao IV. He understood. So they blessed me and
anointed me. Genghis II Mao IV, I became. So my voices dubbed and
ordained and anointed me. And they have guided me. Is it a sign of
schizoid disturbance to hear disembodied voices? It could be. Am I
schizoid, then? Very well, I am schizoid. But I am also Genghis II Mao IV,
and I rule the world.



                                    20

   No flights are due to depart that morning, Shadrach learns, for
Jerusalem, Istanbul, Rome, or any plausible connecting points to those
destinations. There is a flight to Peking soon, but Peking is too close to
Ulan Bator and Chinese look too much like Mongols; just now he needs a
total change of scene. There is a flight a little later on to San Francisco,
but San Francisco is awkwardly placed in respect to the rest of his
itinerary. And there is a flight leaving almost immediately for Nairobi.
Somehow Shadrach had not considered going to Nairobi at all, nor any
other black African city, despite the vaguely felt ancestral ties. But
spontaneity, he tells himself, is good for the soul. Right at this moment the
idea of going to Nairobi seems oddly appealing. Impulsively,
unhesitatingly, he boards the plane.
  He has not left Mongolia for two and a half years, not since the time
Genghis Mao unexpectedly decided to preside in person over a vast and
meaningless Committee congress being held at the dilapidated old United
Nations headquarters in New York. Shadrach was not yet the Khan's
personal physician then—a shrewd, diplomatic Portuguese internist
named Teixeira had that job—but Teixeira was placidly dying of leukemia
and Shadrach was being phased in slowly as his replacement. Ostensibly
Shadrach went to New York as a mere junior medic, a spear carrier in the
Khan's huge retinue, but when Genghis Mao came down with a
hypertensive attack afier delivering a six-hour harangue from the podium
of the former General Assembly chamber, it was Shadrach who coped with
the problem while Teixeira lay doped and useless in his suite. Genghis
Mao, having subsequently invented Mangu to handle such ceremonial
chores as Committee congresses, had stayed close to Ulan Bator ever since.
So has Shadrach. But now he finds himself watching through the porthole
of a supersonic transport plane as the bleak Mongol steppe rapidly
retreats far below. In just a few hours he will be in Africa.
   Africa! Already the telemetered signals from Genghis Mao blur and fade
as Shadrach approaches the thousand-kilometer boundary. He still picks
up data, feeble clicks and bleats and pops out of the implant system, but
as the plane streaks south-westward it becomes harder and harder for
Shadrach to translate them into comprehensible analogues of the
Chairman's bodily processes: Genghis Mao, his kidneys and liver and
pancreas, his heart and lungs, his arteries, his intestines, have become
remote, are becoming unreal. And soon the signals are gone altogether,
dropping below the threshold and leaving Shadrach suddenly, amazingly,
alone in his own body. That crash of silence! That absence of subliminal
input! He had forgotten what it was like, not to have those steady burbling
pulses of information flowing through his consciousness, and in the first
moments after leaving telemeter range he feels almost bereft, as if he has
lost one of his major senses. Then the inner silence begins to seem normal
and he relaxes.
    The plane is comfortable—a wide rump-gripping cushion of a seat,
plenty of leg room. Probably it is about twenty years old; certainly it is
pre-Virus War. Many industries have disappeared since the War, and the
aircraft industry is one of them. The greatly reduced postwar population
can easily make do, given a proper maintenance program, with the planes
it inherited from the crowded, hectic world of the 1980s, when the old
industrial economy was going through its last great period of convulsive
expansion amid, paradoxically, dreadful shortages and dislocations. Not
that the War and the organ-rot have brought an end to technological
progress: in Shadrach's time fusion power has rescued the world from its
energy crisis, subterrene borers have created an entirely new
mass-transit-tunnel system for most urban areas, communications
systems have become immensely sophisticated, the computerization of
civilization has been well-nigh completed, and so on. Progress continues.
Things are different but not utterly different. Even corporations and stock
exchanges have survived. There has not been a total break with the old
days, merely because two thirds of the former population has perished and
a wholly new quasi-dictatorial political structure has been imposed upon
the remnant. But this is a contracting society, daily diminished by the
inroads of organ-rot and oppressed by a certain sense of stagnation and
futility that the regime of Genghis Mao does not appear to know how to
dispel, and such a society does not need new jet transports while the old
ones still can fly.



  June I, continued
   If the ruler of the world is schizoid, doesn't this have serious
consequences for his subjects? I think not. I've studied history closely.
Throughout all of history people have gotten the rulers they deserved,
the appropriate rulers. A sovereign mirrors the spirit of his times and
expresses the deepest traits of his people—Hitler, Napoleon, Attila,
Augustus, Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, Genghis Khan, Robespierre: none of
them accidents or anomalies, all of them organic outgrowths of the needs
of the time. Even when a ruler imposes his will by conquest, as I have
not, the historical imperative is at work: those people wanted to be
conquered, needed to be conquered, or they would not have fallen to him.
So too now. Schizoid times demand schizoid government. The people of
the world are dying lingering deaths of organ-rot; an antidote exists but
we do not put it into widespread distribution; the people of the world
accept this situation. I define that as madness. A mad government, then,
for a mad citizenry, a government that offers promises of antidotes but
never delivers. Of course there isn't enough of the Antidote to go around.
But there's some to spare. We do not give priority to expanding the
supply. We offer hope but no injections, and this somehow sustains our
subjects. Madness. A world that destroys itself with cloud-borne antigens
is mad; one that gives itself over to an oligarchy of strangers is mad;
fitting then that the oligarchs themselves are mad.
   But are we? Am I? I have done more research into the symptoms of
schizophrenia this morning, consulting Shadrach's medical library in
Shadrach's absence. Here I have a text that says that two of the most
common symptoms are delusions and hallucinations. "A delusion," I am
told, "is a persistently held belief, contrary to reality as it is perceived by
most people, that is not dispelled by logical arguments. Delusions in
schizophrenia often hove a grandiose or a persecutory theme: the
individual may express a belief that he is Jesus Christ or that he is the
object of a worldwide search by a supersecret organization.”
  I have never expressed the belief that I am Jesus Christ. I do frequently
believe with great conviction that I am Genghis II Mao IV Khan. Is this
belief delusive? I believe that this belief is congruent with reality as it is
perceived by most people. I believe that my belief in this belief is founded
in reality. I believe I genuinely am Genghis II Mao IV Khan, or that at
least I have genuinely become Genghis II Mao IV Khan, and that
therefore this belief is not schizophrenic, not delusive. On the other hand,
I also believe I am in imminent danger of assassination, that there is a
worldwide conspiracy against my life. Classic schizoid delusion? But
Mangu is really dead. They pushed Mangu from a window seventy-five
stories above the ground. Do I imagine Mangu's death? Mangu is really
dead. Do I misconstrue it? I know there are those who believe he
committed suicide. This is delusive. Mangu was murdered. They might
come for me at any time. Despite all my precautions. Am I deluded?
Then I accept my delusions. As appropriate to my position in history.
And if the danger is real, how wise of me to have barricaded myself
behind the interfaces!
   Let us go on. Hallucinations. "A hallucination is a perception of sight,
sound, smell, or touch that is not 'real.' In schizophrenia, hallucinations
most frequently take the form of voices." Aha!' “A patient may be
tormented by voices ordering him to jump out of a window or accusing
him of heinous crimes." What's this about windows? Could Mangu have
been schizoid too? No. No. It doesn't apply. Mangu wasn't intelligent
enough to be schizoid. I'm the one who hears voices, and my voices don't
advise lunacy. "Sometimes the hallucination consists only of noises or
isolated words, or the patient may seem to 'hear his thoughts.' Other
hallucinations include frightening visions, strange smells, and odd bodily
sensations. "
   I think this applies. If so, I accept it freely. But there's more. "Delusions
and hallucinations are not limited to schizophrenia," it says. "They may
occur in a wide range of organic conditions (e.g., infections of the brain
substance or a decreased flow of blood to the brain caused by
arteriosclerosis).'' Is that the explanation? When Father Genghis
whispers to me, it's nothing but a bug in my cerebellum ? When Mao
whispers in my ear, it's merely a clotted artery? I should speak to
Shadrach about this when he returns. He worries about my arteries. He
might want to do another transplant. After all, I still have some of my
own original blood vessels, and they're getting old. I'm, what,
eighty-seven years old? Eighty-nine, ninety-three? Yes, perhaps
ninety-three. So hard to keep the numbers straight. But old, very old.
Great Father Genghis, am I old!
   In Nairobi the air is clear, dry, cool, not at all tropical although the city
is only a degree or so from the equator, just about the same latitude,
indeed, as fiery Cotopaxi and ravaged Quito. Quito, high in mountainous
country, was cool also, but that was only a dream, a transtemporal
illusion. Whereas Shadrach actually is, so far as anything is actual, in
Nairobi. "We are much above sea level," explains the taxi driver. "It is
never too hot here." The taxi man is hearty, outgoing, talkative: a Kikuyu.
he says, this being his tribe. He wears huge dark sunglasses and a blue
uniform that looks fifty years old. He seems healthy, although Shadrach
had been half expecting to find everyone outside Ulan Bator afflicted with
organ-rot. "I speak six languages," the driver announces. "Kikuyu, Masai,
Swahili, German, French, English. You are British from England?"
 "American," Shadrach says, though the label sounds odd in his ears.
What else is he to answer, though? Mongol?
   "American? Ah! New York? Los Angeles? Once we had plenty
Americans here. Before the big death, you know? That plane they come in,
it was big, too big, it was always full, all those Americans! They come to
see the animals, you know? Out in the bush. With cameras. Not any more.
Long time, no Americans here. No anybody here." He laughs. "Different
times, now. Too bad, these times. Except for the animals. Good times for
the animals. You see, there, by the road? Hyena. Right by the road!"
   Yes, Shadrach sees: a lumpy, sinister beast, like a small ungainly bear,
squatting at the edge of the highway. The driver tells him that there are
wild animals everywhere now, ostriches strutting down Nairobi's main
streets, lions and cheetahs preying on the suburban farmers, gazelles
moving in huge fluttery herds across the university campus. "Because
there are not enough people now," he says. "And most of them too sick.
Not much hunting now. Last week, big elephant, ripped up thorn tree in
front of New Stanley Hotel. Very old thorn tree, very famous. Very big
elephant." Of course. With the world's population cut back now to early
nineteenth-century levels, the animals would be starting to reclaim their
domain. The Virus War had left them unscathed, even the primates
closest to man: only the unlucky human chromosomes could harbor the
rot.
   On the way to the city he sees more animals, two stunning zebras, some
wart-hogs, and a group of heavy-humped spindle-shanked antelopes; these
are wildebeests, the driver informs him. It pleases Shadrach to observe
this resurgence of nature, but the pleasure is tainted by sadness, for if
wildebeests graze on the margins of great highways and grass grows in
city streets, it is because the time of man is coming to its end, and
Shadrach is not ready for that.
    Actually not much grass is growing in the streets of Nairobi, at least not
on the broad, elegant boulevard on which the taxi enters town. Flowering
shrubs erupt in beauty on all sides. After monochromatic Ulan Bator,
Nairobi is a visual delight. Bougainvillea, red and purple and orange,
cascades over every wall; some creeping succulent with densely packed
lavender blossoms carpets the islands in the roadway; thick,
many-tentacled aloe trees stand like sentinels at street corners; he
recognizes hibiscus and jacaranda, but most of the bushes and trees that
fill the streets with such gaudy masses of color are unknown to him. The
effect is gay and sparkling and unexpectedly moving: who could feel
despair, he wonders, in a world that offers such intensity of beauty? But in
that moment of transcendent joy that the glowing flowers of neatly
manicured Nairobi create comes its own instant negation, for Shadrach
asks himself also how, having been turned loose in this beautiful world, we
could have contrived to make such a woeful mess out of so much of it.
Nevertheless this serendipitous city inspires more pleasure than gloom in
him.
   Through flowery sun-loved Nairobi rides Shadrach Mordecai in an old
rump-sprung taxi to his hotel, the Hilton, an aging cavernous place where
he may well be the only guest. The hotel staff treats him with
extraordinary deference, as though he is some visiting prince. In a way he
is, to these people. They know he lives at the capital and travels on a PRC
passport; probably they conclude from that that he must sit at the right
hand of Genghis Mao, which in truth he does, though he is not a part of
the government at all. Yet even those who have not seen his passport
regard him with awe, here. They pause at their work in corridors, and
turn and look. They whisper among themselves. They nod, they point,
Shadrach is reminded again of what he tends often to forget: that he is a
man of great presence and dignity, capable and self-assured and of
striking physical appearance, who radiates an aura that leads others to
defer to him. It is hard, living in the shadow of Genghis Mao, to remember
that one is a person oneself, even a considerable person, and not merely an
extension of the Chairman. In Nairobi he learns it.
   Strolling about the city half an hour after checking in, he makes another
discovery of the obvious: everyone here is black. Almost everyone, at any
rate. He notices a few Chinese shopkeepers, a couple of Indians, a few
elderly whites, but they are exceptions, and they stand out as clearly as he
does in Ulan Bator. Why should the negritude here surprise him? This is
Africa; this is where people are black. And it was the same, really, when he
was a boy in Philadelphia—whites rarely ventured into his neighborhood,
and at least in early childhood it was easy for him to assume that the
ghetto was the world, that black was the norm, that those occasional
creatures with pink faces and blue eyes and loose, lank hair were freakish
rarities, like the giraffes in his picture book. But this is no ghetto. It is a
nation, a universe, where the policemen and the schoolteachers and the
Committee delegates and the firemen are black, the engineers at the
fusion plant are black, the brain surgeons and the optometrists are black,
black through and through. Brothers and sisters everywhere, and yet he is
apart from them, he feels not kinship but surprise at the universality of
the blackness. Possibly he has lived in Mongolia too long. Living in that
polyglot multiracial amalgam that surrounds Genghis Mao, he has lost
some degree of his own racial identity; and, living amid millions of
Mongols, he has developed some heightened sense of himself as outsider,
as freak, that leaves him alienated even among his own kind. If these
people, speakers of Swahili, intimates of ostrich and cheetah, bloodlines
undiluted by slavemaster genes, can be said to be his own kind.
   He discovers yet another obviousness: that Nairobi is not just beautiful
boulevards and clear vibrant air, not just bowers of bougainvillea and
hibiscus. This place is, however lovely it may be, still very much a part of
the Trauma Ward, and he does not need to walk far from the precincts of
his hotel to find the sufferers. They straggle through the streets, scores of
them, in all phases of the disease, some merely pallid and sluggish,
showing the first bafflement at the onrushing crumbling of their bodies,
and some bowed and shrunken and dazed, some already hemorrhaging,
dizzy with pain and flecked with the shiny sweat of imminent death. Those
in the late stages travel in solitary orbits, each shambling alone through
the streets, God knows why, struggling with incomprehensible
determination to reach some unattainable destination before the final
breakdown overtakes them. Often the organ-rot victims pause and stare at
Shadrach, as if they know he is immune and want from him some gift of
strength, some charismatic infusion that will clothe them in the same
immunity, that will heal their lesions and make their bodies whole. But
there is nothing particularly reproachful or envious in their gaze: it is the
calm, steady, equable look that one sometimes gets from grazing cattle,
unreadable but not threatening, with no hint in it that they hold you guilty
of the slaughterhouse.
  At first Shadrach cannot meet that level stare. He was taught, long ago,
that a doctor must be able to look at a patient without feeling apologetic
for his own good health, but this is a different case. They are not his
patients, and he is healthy only because his political connections give him
access to protection they cannot have. He is curious about organ-rot—it is
the great medical phenomenon of the age, the latter-day Black Death, the
most terrible plague in history, and he studies its effects wherever he
encounters them—but neither his curiosity nor his medical detachment is
enough lo let him look straight at these people. He gives them only darting
sidewise glances until he realizes that his feelings of guilt are irrelevant.
These lurching wrecks don't care if he looks at them. They are beyond
caring about anything. They are dying, right out here in public; their
bellies are ablaze, their minds are fogged; what does it matter to them if
some stranger stares? They look at him; he looks at them. Invisible
barriers screen him from them.
   Then the barriers are breached. Shadrach turns away momentarily
from the procession of the damned to investigate the window of a curio
shop—grotesque wood carvings, zebra-skin drums, elephant's-foot
ashtrays, Masai spears and shields, all manner of native artifacts
mass-produced for the tourists who no longer come—and someone gives
his elbow a sharp stinging blow. He whirls, instantly on guard. The only
person at all near him is a small withered old man, chalky-skinned,
rag-clad, white-haired, fleshless, who is moving back and forth in front of
him in an erratic semicircle, making little harsh clicking noises deep in his
throat.
   A terminal case. Eyes blotched and dim, belly distended. The disease
eats slowly through epithelial tissue, indiscriminately ulcerating any flesh
in its path; the lucky ones are those whose vital organs are pierced quickly,
but only a few are lucky. Eighteen years have passed since the Virus War
launched the organ-rot upon mankind; Shadrach has read that many who
were infected in the first onslaught are still waiting for the end to come.
This man looks like one of those eighteen-year cases, but he can't have
long to wait now. Every interior mechanism must be seared and corroded;
he must be nothing but a mass of holes held together by frail ropes of
living fabric, and the next erosion, wherever it strikes, will surely be fatal.
   He seems to want Shadrach's attention, but he is unable to come to a
halt in the proper place. Like a robot with rusty contacts he keeps
overshooting, going by Shadrach in jerky convulsive motions, stopping,
clashing internal gears, pivoting with a wild flapping of slack dangling
arms, coming back for another try. At last on one desperate pass he
succeeds in clapping his hand around Shadrach's forearm and anchors
himself that way, standing close by him, leaning on him, rocking gently in
place.
  Shadrach does not pull away. If he can do no more for this maimed
creature than give him support, he will at least do that.
  In a terrible apocalyptic caw of a voice, a sort of whispered shriek, the
old man says something to him that appears to be of high importance.
  "I'm sorry," Shadrach murmurs. "I can't understand you."
  The old man leans closer, straining to reach his face up to Shadrach's,
and repeats his words with even greater urgency.
  "But I don't speak Swahili," Shadrach says sadly. "Is that Swahili? I
don't understand."
   The old man searches for a word, wrinkled lips moving, throat bobbing,
face taut with concentration. There is a sweet, dry odor about him, the
odor of faded lilies. A lesion in one cheek seems nearly to go completely
through the flesh from inside to out; probably he could thrust the tip of
his tongue through it.
 "Dead," the old man says finally, in English, delivering the word like a
monstrous weight that he drops ai Shadrach's feet.
  "Dead?"
  "Dead. You—make—me—dead—"
  The words fall one after another from the ravaged throat without
expression, without inflection, without emphasis. You. Make. Me. Dead. Is
he accusing me of having given him the disease, Shadrach wonders, or is
he asking for euthanasia?
   "Dead! You! Make! Me! Dead!" Then more Swahili. Then some strained
rheumy coughs. Then tears, amazingly copious, flooding in deep channels
down the dusty cheeks. The hand that grips Shadrach's forearm tightens
with sudden incredible strength, crushing bone against bone and wringing
a sharp yelp of pain from him. Then the unexpected pressure is
withdrawn; the old man stands free for a moment, tottering; from him
comes a hoarse clucking noise, an unmistakable death rattle, and life
leaves him so instantly and completely that Shadrach has a
quasi-hallucinatory vision of a skull and bones within the old man's
tattered clothes. As the body falls Shadrach catches it and eases it to the
pavement. It weighs no more than forty kilos, he guesses.
  What now? Notify the authorities? Which authorities? Shadrach looks
about for a Citpol, but the street, busy a few minutes ago, is mysteriously
empty. He feels responsible for the body.
   He can't simply abandon it where it dropped. He enters the curio shop
to find a telephone.
   The proprietor is a sleek, plump Indian, sixty years old or so, with large
liquid eyes and thick dark silver-flecked hair. He wears an old-fashioned
business suit and looks dapper and prosperous. Evidently he has witnessed
the little curbside drama, for he bustles forward now, palms pressed
together, lips clamped in a fussy oh-dear expression.
  "How regrettable!" he declares. "That you should be troubled in this
way! They have no decency, they have no sense of—"
  "It was no trouble," Shadrach says quietly. "The man was dying. He
didn't have time to think about decency."
  "Even so. To importune a stranger, a visitor to our—"
   Shadrach shakes his head. "It's all right. Whatever he wanted from me,
I couldn't provide it, and now he's dead. I wish I could have helped. I'm a
doctor," he confides, hoping the disclosure will have the right effect.
  It does. "Ah!" the shopkeeper cries. "Then you understand these things."
The sensibilities of doctors are not like those of ordinary beings. It no
longer embarrasses the proprietor that one of his shabby countrymen has
had the poor taste to inflict his death on a tourist.
  "What shall we do about the body?" Shadrach asks.
  "The Citpols will come. Word gets around."
  "I thought we might telephone someone—"
  A shrug. "The Citpols will come. There is no importance. The disease is
not contagious, I understand. That is, we are all infected from the days of
the War, but we have nothing to fear from those who display actual
symptoms. Or from their bodies. Is this not true?"
   "It's true, yes," Shadrach says. He glances uncomfortably at the small
sprawled corpse, lying like a discarded blanket on the sidewalk outside the
store. “Perhaps we ought to phone anyway, though."
   "The Citpols will come shortly,'' the shopkeeper says again, as if
dismissing the subject. "Will you have tea with me? I rarely have the
opportunity to entertain a visitor. I am Bhishma Das. You are American?"
  "I was born there, yes. I live abroad now."
  "Ah."
  Das busies himself behind the counter, where he has a hotplate and
some packets of tea. His indifference to the body on the street continues to
distress Shadrach; but Das does not seem to be an unintelligent or
insensitive man. Perhaps it is the custom, out here in the Trauma Ward,
to pay as little attention as possible to these reminders of the universal
mortality.
   In any event Das is right: the Citpols do indeed arrive swiftly, three
black-skinned men in the standard uniforms, riding in a long somber
hearselike vehicle. Two of them load the body into the car; the third peers
through the shop window, staring long and intently at Shadraeh and
nodding to himself in an unfathomable, oddly disturbing way. The Citpols
finally drive away.
   Das says, "We will all die of the organ-rot sooner or later, is this not
true? We and our children as well? We are all infected, they say. Is this not
true?"
   "True, yes," Shadrach replies. Even he carries the killer DNA enmeshed
in his genes. Even Genghis Mao. "Of course, there's the Antidote—"
  "The antidote. Ah. Do you believe there is indeed an antidote?"
  Shadrach blinks. "You doubt it?"
   "I have no certain knowledge of these things. The Chairman says there
is an antidote, and that it will soon be given to the people. But the people
continue to die. Ah, the tea is ready! Is there, then, an antidote? I have no
idea. I am not sure what to believe."
   "There is an antidote," says Shadrach, accepting a delicate porcelain
cup from the merchant. "Yes, truly there is. And one day it will be given to
all the people."
  "You know this to be fact?"
  "I know it, yes."
  "You are a doctor. You would know."
  “Yes.”
   "Ah," Bhishma Das says, and sips his tea. After a long pause he says, "Of
course, many of us will die of the rot before the antidote is given. Not only
those who lived in the days of the War, but even our children. How can
this be? I have never understood this. My health is excellent, my sons are
strong—and yet we carry the plague within us too? It sleeps within us,
waiting its moment? It sleeps within everyone?"
   "Everyone," Shadrach says. How can he explain? If he talks of the
structural similarities between the organ-rot virus and the normal human
genetic material, if he describes how the virus liberated during the
long-ago war was capable of integrating itself into the nucleic acid, into
the germ plasm itself, becoming so intimately entwined with the human
genetic machinery that it is passed from generation to generation with
normal cellular genes, a deadly packet of DNA that can turn lethal at any
time, how much of this will Bhishma Das comprehend? Can Shadrach
speak of the inextricability of the lethal genetic material, the inexorable
way in which it must be incorporated into the genetic endowment of any
child conceived since the Virus War, and get the meaning across? The
intrusive organ-rot gene has become as intimate a part of the human
heritage as the gene that puts hair on the scalp or the one that puts
calcium in the bones: our tissues now are automatically programmed at
birth to deteriorate and slough off when some unknown inner signal is
given. But to Bhishma Das this may be as baffling as the dreams of
Brahma. Shadrach says at last, after a moment's pause, "Everyone who
was alive when they turned the virus loose absorbed it into his body, into
the part of his body that determines what he transmits to his children. It
can't be eradicated once it enters that part. And so we pass the virus along
to our sons and daughters the way we do the color of our skins, the color of
our eyes, the texture of our hair—"
  "A dreadful legacy. How sad. And the antidote, Doctor? Would the
antidote free us from this legacy?"
   "The antidote they have now," Shadrach says, "keeps the virus from
having a harmful effect on the body. It neutralizes it, stabilizes it, holds it
in a state of latency. You follow me?"
  "Yes, yes, I understand. In the deep freeze!"
  "So to speak. Those who receive the antidote have to take a new dose
every six months, at present. To hold the virus in check, to keep the
organ-rot from breaking out in them."
  "More tea, Doctor?"
  "Please."
  "You have received this antidote yourself?"
  Shadrach replies uneasily, after a moment's consideration. "Yes. I
have."
  "Ah. Because you are a doctor. Because we must keep the healers alive. I
understand. It seemed to me you must have the antidote. There is
something about you; you are like a man apart from us. You do not wake
up every day wondering if this is the day when the rot will start in you. Ah.
And someday we will have the antidote too."
  "Yes. Someday. The government is working on increasing the supply."
The lie sours his mouth. "I wish you could have your first injection today."
   "It is not important for me," Das says calmly. "I am old and I have
enjoyed good health, and my life has been a happy one even in the most
troubled times. If the rot begins in me tomorrow, I will be ready for it. But
my sons, and the sons of my sons, I would spare them. What do old wars
mean to them? Why should they die horrible deaths for the sake of nations
that were forgotten before they were born? I want them to live. My family
has been in Kenya for a hundred fifty years, since we first came from
Bombay, and we have been happy here, and why should we perish now?
Sad, Doctor, sad. This curse on mankind. Will we ever cleanse ourselves of
what we have done to ourselves?"
   Shadrach shrugs. There is no way to comb the murderous new gene out
of the genetic package; but in theory a permanent antidote is possible, a
hybrid DNA that can be integrated into the contaminated genes to absorb
or detoxify the lethal genetic material. Somewhere in the PRC
organization they are at work on such an antidote, Shadrach has been
told. Of course, the rumor may be false. The research group may be only a
myth. The permanent antidote itself may be only a myth.
   He says, "I think these last twenty years have been a purge that
mankind necessarily had to undergo. A punishment for accumulated
idiocies and foolishnesses, perhaps. The whole history of the twentieth
century is like an arrow pointing straight to the Virus War and its
aftermath. But I believe we'll survive the ordeal."
  "And things will be again as they once were?"
   Shadrach smiles. "I hope not. If we go back to where we were, we'll only
arrive again eventually at the same place we've reached now. And we may
not survive the next version of the Virus War. No, I think we'll build a
better world out of the ruins, a quieter, less greedy world. It'll take time.
I'm not sure how we're going to accomplish it. Many bad things will
happen first. Millions will die needless, horrible deaths. But eventually—
eventually—the suffering will be over, the dying will be done, and those
who remain will live in happiness again,"
  "How refreshing to hear such optimism."
  "Am I an optimist? I've never thought of myself that way. A realist,
maybe. But not an optimist. How strange suddenly to find myself an
apostle of faith and good cheer!"
   "Your eyes were glowing when you said what you said. You were already
living in that better world as you spoke. Do you want to withdraw your
prophecy? Please, no. You believe that that happier world will come."
  "I hope it'll come," Shadrach says soberly.
  "You know it will."
   "I'm not sure. Perhaps I sounded sure a moment ago, but—" He shakes
his head. He makes a determined effort to recapture that unexpected
strain of positive thinking that had come so surprisingly from him a
moment ago. "Yes," he says. "Things will gel better." Already there is
something forced about it, but he goes on. " No trend continues downward
forever. The organ-rot can be defeated. The smaller population that exists
now will be able to live comfortably in a world that couldn't support the
numbers of people who lived before the War. Yes. A purge, an ordeal by
fire, a necessary corrective to old abuses, leading to better things. Dawn
after the long darkness."
  "Ah. You are an optimist!"
  "Perhaps I am. Sometimes."
  "I would like to see a man like you as the leader of that new world,"
Bhishma Das exclaims rapturously.
  Shadrach recoils. "No, not me. Let me live in that world, yes. But don't
ask me to govern it."
   "You will change your mind when the moment comes. They will offer
you the government, Doctor, because you are wise and good, and you will
accept. Because you are wise and good." Das pours more tea. His naive
faith is touching. Shadrach takes a sip; then he has a sudden morbid
vision of Bhishma Das, a year or iwo from now, crying out in surprise and
delight as the new Chairman of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee
appears for the first time on his television screen, and the face of the new
Chairman is the finely wrought brown-skinned face of that wise and good
American doctor who once visited his store. Shadrach coughs and sputters
and nearly spills his cup. The face will be the face of Dr. Mordecai, yes, but
the mind behind the warm searching eyes will be the cold dark mind of
Genghis Mao.
  Shadrach has almost managed to forget Project Avatar, this day in
Nairobi. Almost.
   "I should be going," Shadrach says. "It's late in the day. You'll want to
close the shop."
  "Stay awhile. There is no hurry." Then: "I invite you to my home for
dinner this evening."
  "I'm afraid I can't—"
   "Another engagement? Oh, how regrettable. We would provide a fine
curry in your honor. We would open a fine wine. Some close friends—the
most stimulating members of the Hindu community, professional people,
teachers, philosophers—intelligent conversation—ah, yes, yes, a delightful
evening, if you would grace our home!"
   A temptation. Shadrach will dine alone, otherwise, at his hotel, a
stranger in this strange city, lonely and in peril. But no: impossible. One of
those stimulating Hindu professional persons will surely ask him where he
lives, what kind of doctoring he does, and either he must lie, which is
repugnant to him, or he must let it all spill out—member of privileged
dictatorial elite, physician to the terrifying Genghis Mao, etc., etc., and so
much for his new reputation as a humanitarian benefactor: the truth
about him will sicken the friends of Bhishma Das and humiliate poor Das
himself. Shadrach mumbles sincere-sounding excuses and regrets. As he
edges to the door, Das follows him, saying, "At least accept a gift from me,
a remembrance of this charming hour." The merchant glances hastily
about his shelves, searching among the spears, the beaded necklaces, the
wooden statuettes, everything apparently too crude, too flimsy, too
inexpensive, or too awkwardly large to make a fitting offering for such a
distinguished guest, and it seems for an instant that Shadrach will get out
of the place ungifted; but at the last moment Das snatches up a small
antelope horn in which a hole has been drilled at the pointed end and
plugged with wax. A cupping horn, Das explains, used by a tribe near the
southern border to draw pain and evil spirits from the bodies of the sick:
one applies the cup to the skin, sucks, creates a vacuum, seals it with the
wax plug. He urges it on Shadrach, saying it is an appropriate gift for a
healer, and Shadrach, after a conventional show of reluctance, accepts
gladly. He has no East African medical devices in his collection. "They still
use these," Das informs him. "They use them very much just now, to draw
forth the organ-rot spirit." He bows Shadrach from the store, telling him
again and again what an honor his visit has been, what pleasure has come
from hearing the doctor's words of hope.
  On the seven-block journey back to the hotel Shadrach counts four dead
bodies in the streets, and one that is not quite dead, but will be soon. "



                                     21
  In the morning he flies onward, toward Jerusalem. He is aware of the
curve of the planet below him, the enormous belly of the world, and he is
amazed anew by its complexity, its richness, this globe that holds Athens
and Samarkand, Lhasa and Rangoon, Timbuktu, Benares, Chartres,
Ghent, all the fascinating works of vanishing mankind, and all the natural
wonders, the Grand Canyon, the Amazon, the Himalayas, the Sahara—so
much, so much, for one small cosmic lump, such variety, such magnificent
multitudinousness. And it is all his, for whatever time remains before
Genghis Mao calls upon him to yield up the world and go.
   He is not, like Bhishma Das, ready to go whenever his marching orders
arrive. The world, now that he is again out in the midst of it, seems very
beautiful, and he has seen so little of it. There are mountains to climb,
rivers to cross, wines to taste. He who has been spared from organ-rot
does not want to succumb to another man's lust for immortality.
Shadrach's passivity has fallen from him: he does not accept the fate in
store for him. Bhishma Das called him an optimist, a wise and good man
whose face glows when he speaks of the better days that are coming, and
though that was not how Shadrach had ever seen himself, he is pleased
that Das saw him that way, pleased that those unexpectedly hopeful words
tumbled from his lips. It is agreeable to be thought of as a man of sunny
spirit, to be a source of hope and faith. He tries the image on and likes the
fit. It is a little like smiling when one is not in a smiling mood, and feeling
the smile work its way inward from the facial muscles to the soul: why not
smile, why not live in the hope of a glorious resurrection? It costs nothing.
It makes others happier. If one is proven wrong, as no doubt one will be,
one has at least had the reward of having dwelled for a time in a warm
little sphere of inner light rather than in dank dark despair.
  But it is hard to put much conviction into one's optimism when the
threat of immediate doom hangs over one. I must deal somehow with the
problem of Project Avatar, Shadrach resolves.



  December 8, 2001
   So I am not to suffer the organ-rot after all. Today I had my first dose
of Roncevic's drug. They say that if your smears have shown no trace of
the virus in its active state before your first injection, you are safe, but
the antidote can do nothing for you if the thing has already entered into
the lethal phase. My smears were clean: I am safe. I never doubted that I
would be spared. I was not meant to perish in the Virus War, but rather
to endure, to survive the general holocaust and enter into my own true
time. Which now has come. ''You will live a hundred years,” Roncevic
said to me this morning. Does he mean a hundred more years? Or a
hundred all told? In which case I have only about twenty-five years left.
Not enough, not enough.
   No matter what, I'll outlive poor Roncevic. He has the rot already. It
glistens and blazes in his belly. How hard he worked to develop his drug,
how eager he was to save himself! But not in time. The disease went
active in him too soon, and he will go. He goes, I stay: he plays his
appointed role in the drama and leaves the stage. While I live on,
perhaps another hundred years. My physical vitality has always been
extraordinary. No doubt my bodily energies are of superior order, for
here I am, past seventy, with the vigor of a young man. Resisting
disease, deflecting fatigue. They say that Chairman Mao, when he was
past seventy, swam eight miles in the Yangtze in an hour and five
minutes. Swimming is of no interest to me; yet I know that if there were
need, I could swim ten miles in those sixty-five minutes; I could swim
twenty.



   Jerusalem is colder than Shadrach expects—almost as chilly as Ulan
Bator on this late spring morning—and smaller, too, amazingly compact
for a place where so much history has been made. He settles in at the
International, a sprawling old mid-twentieth-century hotel stunningly
located high on the Mount of Olives. From his balcony he has a superb
view of the old walled city. Awe and excitement rise in him as he looks out
upon it. Those two great glittering domes down there—his map tells him
the huge gold one is the Dome of the Rock, on the site of Solomon's
Temple, and the silver one is the Aqsa Mosque—and that formidable
battlemented wall, and the ancient stone towers, and the tangle of winding
streets, all speak to him of human endurance, of the slow steady tides of
history, the arrivals and departures of monarchs and empires. The city of
Abraham and Isaac, of David and Solomon, the city Nebuchadnezzar
destroyed and Nehemiah rebuilt, the city of the Maccabees, of Herod, the
city where Jesus suffered and died and rose from the dead, the city where
Mohammed, in a vision, ascended into heaven, the city of the Crusaders,
the city of legend, of fantasy, of pilgrimages, of conquests, of layer upon
layer of event, layers deeper and more intricate than those of Troy—that
little city of low buildings of tawny stone just across the swooping valley
from him counsels him that apocalyptic hours are followed by rebirth and
reconstruction, that no disaster is eternal. The mood that came upon him
when he was with Bhishma Das has survived the journey out of Africa.
Jerusalem is truly a city of light, a city of joy. He remembers his
hymn-singing great-aunts Ellie and Hattie clapping their hands and
chanting—


Jerusalem, my happy home
When shall I come to thee?
When shall my sorrows have an end?
Thy joys when shall I see?


   —and suddenly he is again a boy of six or seven, wearing tight blue
trousers and a starched white shirt, standing between those two colossal
black women in their Sunday finery, singing with them, clapping his
hands, humming or making up words where he does not know the right
ones, oh, yes, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, lead me unto Jerusalem, Lord! That
promised land, long ago, far away, that city of prophets and kings,
Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest, and here he is at its
gates, trembling with anticipation. He calls for a cab.
   But when he actually enters the city, passing through St. Stephen's Gate
and stepping forth onto the Via Dolorosa, that romance and fantasy
begins unexpectedly to evaporate, and he wonders how he could have
babbled so blithely to Das of the good times a-coming. Jerusalem is
undeniably picturesque, yes—but to call a place picturesque is to damn
it—with its narrow steep streets and sturdy age-old masonry, its crowded
stalls piled high with pots and pans, fish and apples, pastries and flayed
lambs, its scents of strange spices, its hawk-faced old men in Bedouin
regalia, but a cold wind whistles through the filthy alleyways and everyone
he sees, children and beggars and merchants and shoppers and porters
and workmen alike, has that same look of dull despair, that same
hollow-eyed broken-souled expression that is the mark not of endurance
but of anticipated defeat and surrender: The Assyrians are coming, the
Romans are coining, the Persians are coming, the Saracens are coming,
the Turks are coming, the organ-rot is coming, and we will be crushed,
we will be everlastingly annihilated.
   It is impossible to escape the twenty-first century even within these
medieval walls. Climbing toward Golgotha, Shadrach sees the standard
mourning poster of Mangu pasted up all over, the bland young face
against the brilliant yellow background. Mangu's presence was not absent
from Nairobi, naturally, but in that spacious and airy city the posters were
less oppressive, easily obscured by the dazzle of the bougainvilleas and the
jacarandas. Here the heavy stone walls sweat garish images of Mangu over
passageways barely wide enough for three to go abreast, yellow blotches
impossible to escape, and, seeing them, one feels the malign hand of
Genghis Mao passing over the city, imposing on it an unfelt grief for the
dead viceroy. Genghis Mao is more immediately present, too, the familiar
sinister leathery features glowering from breeze-bellied banners at every
major intersection. The natives take these alien images as casually as, no
doubt, they once took the posters and banners of Nebuchadnezzar,
Ptolemy, Titus, Chosroes, Saladin, Suleiman the Magnificent, and all the
other transient intruders, but to Shadrach these reduplicated Mongol
faces loll against his consciousness like so many leaden bells counting out
his dwindling hours.
   Then too the organ-rot is here. Not as conspicuously as in Nairobi,
perhaps, for on the broad avenues of that city the terminal cases walked
alone, stumbling and lurching through private zones of vacant space. Old
Jerusalem is too congested for that. But there is no scarcity of victims,
shivering and sweating and groping along the Via Dolorosa. Occasionally
one halts, sags against a wall, digs his fingers between the stones for
support. The Stations of the Cross are indicated by marble plaques set
into walls: here Jesus received the cross, here He fell the first time, here
He encountered His Mother, and so on. And here, up the Via Dolorosa, go
the dying, lost in their own crucifixions. As in Nairobi, they stare without
seeming to see. But a few stretch their hands toward him as if imploring
his blessing. This is a town where miracles have not been uncommon, and
the black stranger is a man of dignity and stature: who knows, perhaps a
new Savior walks these streets? But Shadrach has no miracles to offer,
none. He is helpless. He is as much a dead man as they are, though he still
walks about. As they do.
   He feels much too conspicuous, too tall, too black, too alien, too healthy.
Beggars, mostly children, cluster about him like flies. "Dol-lar," they
implore. "Dol-lar, dol-lar, dol-lar!" He carries no coins—he uses a
government credit planchet to cover all expenses—and so there is no way
he can get rid of them. He scoops one five-year-old into the air, hoping to
make a piggyback ride serve in lieu of baksheesh, but the expression of
terror in the child's huge eyes is so pitiful that Shadrach quickly puts him
down, and kneels, trying to give comfort. The child's fright passes at once:
"Dol-lar," he demands. Shadrach shrugs and the child spits at him and
runs. There are too many children here, too many everywhere, unattended,
running in packs through the cities of the world. They are orphans,
running wild, a feral generation. Shadrach has seen Donna Labile's
demographic surveys: the worst impact of the organ-rot has fallen upon
those who would now be between the ages of twenty-five and forty,
Shadrach's own contemporaries, those who were children during the Virus
War. Slower to succumb than their parents were, they survived into
adulthood—just long enough, most of them, to marry and bring forth
young; then they died, having seeded the world with little savages. The
PRC has begun to establish camps for these abandoned children, but they
are not much more attractive than prisons, and the system is not working
well.
   It is too much for Shadrach—the fierce children, the woeful staggerers,
the dirt, the unfamiliar density of the populace that throngs this tiny
walled city. There is no way to escape the overwhelming sadness of the
place. He should never have entered it; it would have been better by far to
look out from his hotel balcony and think romantic thoughts of Solomon
and Saladin. He is pushed, prodded, pawed, and elbowed; harsh-sounding
things are said to him in languages he does not understand; he is
beleaguered by offers to buy his clothing, to sell him jewelry, to take him
on tours of the great religious sites. Without the help of guides he makes
his way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a grimy and graceless
building, but he does not go in, for some kind of pitched battle seems to be
under way at its main entrance between priests of different sects, who
shout and shake fists and tug one another's beards and shred one
another's cassocks. Turning aside, he finds, just back of the church, a busy
bazaar—more accurately a flea market—where sherds and tatters of the
former era are for sale: broken radios, antique television tubes, outboard
engines, a miscellany of gears and wheels and cameras and electric
shavers and telephones and pumps and gyroscopes and vacuum cleaners
and batteries and lasers and gauges and tape recorders and calculators
and microscopes and phonographs and washing machines and prisms and
amplifiers, all the debris of the affluent twentieth century washed up on
this strange shore. Everything is seemingly broken or defective, but the
traders are doing a brisk business anyway. Shadrach is unable even to
guess what uses these remnants and fragments may now be finding in the
Palestinian hinterlands. He actually spies something he wants for his own
medical collection, a gleaming little ultramicrotome once used to prepare
tissue sections for the electron microscope, but when he produces his
credit planchet rather than haggle, the trader merely gives him a blank,
sullen stare. The PRC has decreed that government planchets must be
accepted as legal tender everywhere, but the old Arab, after examining the
glossy strip of plastic without much interest, hands it silently back to
Shadrach and turns away. There is a Citpol at the edge of the marketplace
who appears to be watching the aborted transaction. Shadrach could call
the policeman over and get him to make the trader honor the planchet,
but he decides against it; perhaps there will be unforeseeable
complications, even dangers, and he does not want to attract attention in
this place. He abandons the microtome and walks off to the south,
through quieter streets, a residential district.
  In a few minutes he comes to steps that lead downward to a great
opened space, a cobblestoned plaza, at the far end of which stands an
immense wall made of titanic blocks of roughhewn stone. Shadrach
ambles across the plaza, heading toward the wall as he studies his map
and tries to get his bearings. He remembers turning left, then left again at
the Street of the Chain—perhaps he is in the old Jewish Quarter, heading
back toward the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa, in which case— "You
should cover your head in this place," says a quiet voice at his right elbow.
"You stand on holy ground."
   A small compact man, seventy years old or more, tanned and
vigorous-looking, has approached him. He wears a round black skullcap,
and, with a courteous but insistent gesture, has produced another from
his pocket which he extends toward Shadrach.
  "Isn't this whole city holy ground?" Shadrach asks, taking the skullcap.
  "Every inch is holy to someone, yes. The Arabs have their places, the
Copts, the Greek Orthodox, the Armenians, the Syrian Christians,
everyone. But this is ours. Don't you know the Wall?" There is no
mistaking the capital letter in his voice.
  "The Wall," Shadrach says, embarrassed, staring at the great stone
blocks, then at his map. "Oh. Of course. You mean this is the Wailing
Wall? I didn't realize—"
   "The Western Wall, we called it, after the reconquest in 1967, when the
wailing stopped for a time. Now it is the Wailing Wall again. Though I
myself do not believe much in wailing, even in times such as these." The
little man smiles. "Under whatever name, it is for us Jews a holy of holies.
The last remnant of the Temple." Again the capital letter.
  "Solomon's Temple?"
  "No, not that one. The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple,
twenty-seven hundred years ago. This is the wall of the Second Temple,
Herod's Temple, leveled by the Romans under Titus. The Wall is all that
the Romans left standing. We revere it because it is for us a symbol not
only of persecution but of endurance, of survival. This is your first time in
Jerusalem?"
  "Yes."
  "American?"
  "Yes," Shadrach says.
   "I am also. So to speak. My father brought me here when I was seven.
To a kibbutz in the Galilee. Just after the proclamation of the State of
Israel, you know?—in 1948. I fought in the Sinai in '67, the Six Day War,
and I was here to pray at the Wall in the first days after the victory, and I
have lived in Jerusalem ever since. And the Wall to me is still the center of
the world. I come here every day. Even though there is no longer really a
State of Israel. Even though there are no longer any states at all, any
dreams, any—" He pauses. "Forgive me. I talk too much. Would you like to
pray at the Wall?"
  "But I'm not Jewish," Shadrach says.
  "What does that matter? Come with me. You are a Christian?"
  "Not particularly."
  "No religion at all?"
  "No official religion. But I would like to go to the Wall."
   "Come, then." They stride across the plaza, the short old man and the
tall young one. Shadrach's companion says suddenly, "I am Meshach
Yakov."
  "Meshach?"
  "Yes. It is a name from the Bible, The Book of Daniel. He was one of the
three Jews who defied Nebuchadnezzar when the king ordered them to—"
  "I know," Shadrach cries, "I know!" He is laughing. Delight bubbles in
him. It is a delicious moment. "You don't have to tell me the story. I'm
Shadrach!"
  "Pardon me?"
  "Shadrach. Shadrach Mordecai. It's my name."
  "Your name," says Meshach Yakov. He laughs too. "Shadrach. Shadrach
Mordecai. It is a beautiful name. It could be a fine Israeli name. With a
name like that you aren't Jewish?"
  "The wrong genes, I think. But I suppose that if I converted I wouldn't
need to bother changing my name."
  "No. No. A beautiful Jewish name. Shalom, Shadrach!"
  "Shalom, Meshach!"
   They laugh together. It is almost a vaudeville routine, Shadrach thinks.
That Citipol lurking over there—is he Abednego? They are right by the
Wall, now, and the laughter goes from them. The enormous
weatherbeaten blocks seem incredibly ancient, as old as the Pyramids, as
old as the Ark. Meshach Yakov closes his eyes, leans forward, touches his
forehead to the Wall as though greeting it. Then he looks at Shadrach.
"How shall I pray?" Shadrach asks.
   "How? How? Pray any way you want to pray! Speak with the Lord! Tell
Him things. Ask Him things. Do I need to tell a grown man how to pray?
What can I tell you? Only this: it is better to give thanks than to ask
favors. If you can. If you can."
   Shadrach nods. He turns toward the Wall. His mind is empty. His soul
is empty. He glances at Meshach Yakov. The Israeli, eyes closed, is rocking
gently back and forth, murmuring to himself in what Shadrach assumes is
Hebrew. No prayers come to Shadrach's lips. He can think only of the wild
 children, the organ-rot, the blank despondent faces along the Via
Dolorosa, the posters of Mangu and Genghis Mao. This journey of his has
been a failure. He has learned nothing, he has achieved nothing. He might
as well get himself back to Ulan Bator tomorrow and face what must be
faced. But the moment he articulates those thoughts, he rejects them.
What of that sudden upwelling of optimism as he sipped tea with
Bhishma Das? What of the moment of delight, of warm fellow-feeling, that
he experienced on first hearing Meshach Yakov's name? These two old
men, the Hindu, the Jew, both so sturdy of soul, so patient and steady
under the weight of the world catastrophe—has nothing of their strength
rubbed off on him?
   He stands a long while, listening to the silence within his body that is
the absence of Genghis Mao's outputs, and decides that it is not yet time
to return to Ulan Bator. He will go onward. He will complete his tour.
    He says, under his breath, too self-conscious to let Meshach Yakov hear
it. "Thank you, Lord, for having made this world and for having let me live
in it as long as I have." Better to give thanks than to ask favors. Even so,
asking favors is not forbidden. To himself Shadrach adds, "And let me stay
in it awhile longer, Lord. And show me how I can help make it more like
the place you meant it to be." The prayer sounds foolish to him, mawkish,
ingenuous. And yet not contemptible. And yet not contemptible. If it were
given to him to live this one moment over, he would not revise that prayer,
although he would not like to admit to anyone, either, that he had uttered
it. When they are done at the Wall, Meshach Yakov invites Shadrach to
dinner; and Shadrach, who has come to regret having refused Bhishma
Das's invitation, accepts. Yakov lives in the modern sector of Jerusalem,
far to the west of the old city, out beyond the parliament buildings and the
university campus, in a high-rise atop a bare lofty hill. The apartment
house, one of a complex of twenty or so, has the glossy, glassy look favored
in the late twentieth century, but the marks of decay are all over it.
Windows are dusty, even broken, doors are out of true, the balconies are
splotched with rust, the elevator creaks and groans. The place is more
than half empty, Yakov tells him. As the population dwindles and services
deteriorate, people have deserted these once-choice suburbs to live closer
to the center of town. But he has been here forty years, he says proudly,
and he intends to stay another forty, at the very least.
   Yakov's apartment itself is small, well kept, furnished sparsely in a
tasteful, old-fashioned way. "My sister Rebekah," he says. "My
grandchildren, Joseph, Leah." He tells them Shadrach's name, and they all
have a hearty laugh over the coincidence, the close biblical association.
The sister is in her seventies, Joseph about eighteen, Leah twelve or
thirteen. There are black-framed photographs on the wall—Yakov's wife,
Shadrach assumes, and three grown children, probably all victims of the
organ-rot. Yakov does not say, Shadrach does not ask.
  "Are you Jewish?" Leah demands.
  Shadrach smiles, shakes his head.
  "There are black Jews," she says. "I know. There are even Chinese Jews."
   "Genghis Mao is a Jew," Joseph says, and bursts into wild laughter. But
he laughs alone. Meshach Yakov glares at him; Yakov's sister looks
shocked, Leah embarrassed. Shadrach finds himself shaken by the sudden
intrusion of that alien name into this serene self-contained household.
  Stiffly Yakov says to the boy, "Don't talk nonsense."
  "I didn't mean anything," Joseph protests.
  "Then save your breath," Yakov snaps. To Shadrach he says, "We are
not great admirers of the Chairman here. But I would not like to discuss
such things. I apologize for the boy's silliness. "
  "It's all right," Shadrach says.
  Leah says, "Why do you have a Jewish name?"
  "My people often took first names from the Bible,'' Shadrach tells her.
"My father's father was a minister, a religious scholar. He suggested it. I
have an uncle named Absalom. Had. And cousins named Solomon and
Saul."
  "But the last name," the girl persists. "That's what I mean. It's Jewish
too. There once was a great rabbi named Mordecai, in Germany, long ago.
We heard about him in school. Do black people pick their own last names
too?"
  "They were given to us, by our owners. My family must once have been
owned by someone named Mordecai."
  "Owned?"
  "When they were slaves," Joseph whispers harshly.
  "You were slaves too?" the girl says. "I didn't know. We were slaves in
Egypt, you know. Thousands of years ago."
  Shadrach smiles. "We were slaves in America. More recently."
  "And your owner was a Jew? I don't believe a Jew would own slaves, not
ever."
   Shadrach wants to explain that the slavemaster Mordecai, if ever he
existed and gave his name to his blacks, was not necessarily Jewish, but
might have been, for even Jews were not beyond owning slaves in the days
of the plantation; but the discussion is making Meshach Yakov
uncomfortable, apparently, and with such abruptness that the children
are left gaping he changes the subject, asking his sister whether dinner
will be ready soon.
   "Fifteen minutes," she says, heading for the kitchen. As though heeding
an unspoken warning to leave the guest in peace, Joseph and Leah
withdraw to a couch and begin a stilted, awkward conversation about
events in school—a worldwide holiday has been proclaimed, it seems, for
the day of Mangu's funeral, and Joseph, who is at the university, will be
deprived of a field trip to the Dead Sea, which annoys him. Leah cites
some remark made by Jerusalem's PRC chief about the importance of
paying respect to the fallen viceroy, bringing a derisive hoot from Rebekah
in the kitchen and a brusque comment about the official's intelligence and
sanity, and soon things degenerate into a noisy, incomprehensible
discussion of local political matters, involving all four Yakovs in a fierce
bilingual shouting match. Meshach, at the outset, attempts to explain to
Shadrach something about the cast of characters and the background, but
as the dispute goes along he becomes too embroiled in it to keep up his
running commentary. Shadrach, baffled but amused, watches these
articulate and spirited people wrangle until the arrival of dinner brings a
sudden halt to the debate. He has no idea what the battle was about—it
has to do with the replacement of a Christian Arab by a Moslem on the
city council, he thinks— but it cheers him to see such a display of energy
and commitment. In Ulan Bator, bugged and spy-eyed to an ultimate
degree, he has never witnessed such furious clashes of opinion; but
perhaps the spy-eyes have nothing to do with it, perhaps it is only because
he has lived outside the framework of the nuclear family for so long that
he has forgotten what real conversation is like.
   The advent of dinner is worrisome—should he don the skullcap? What
other customs are there that he does not know?—but no problems arise.
Neither Meshach nor his grandson wears a skullcap; there is no prayer
before eating, only a moment of silent grace observed by the two old
people; the food is rich and plentiful, and Shadrach does not notice any
special dietary customs in force at the Yakov table. Afterward Joseph and
Leah retire to their rooms to study, and Shadrach, warmed by red Israeli
wine and strong Israeli brandy, settles down with old Yakov to study maps
of the vicinity, for they have agreed at dinner to go on a sightseeing tour in
the morning. The old city, certainly, its towers and churches and
marketplaces, and the supposed tomb of Absalom in the Kidron Valley
nearby, and the tomb of King David on Mount Zion, and the
archaeological museum, and the national museum where yhe Dead Sea
scrolls are kept, and—
  "Wait," Shadrach says. "All this in one day?"
  "We'll take two, then," Meshach says.
  "Even so. Can we really cover so much ground so fast?"
  "Why not? You look healthy enough. I think you can keep up with me."
And the old man laughs.



                                     22

   In Istanbul a few days later he has no guide, and he wanders that
intricate city of many levels alone, confused, defeated by the complexities
of getting from one place to another, wishing that some Meshach Yakov
would discover him here, some Bhishma Das. But none does. The map he
gets at his hotel is useless, for there are few street signs, and whenever he
veers off a main boulevard he immediately gets lost in a maze of
anonymous alleyways. There are taxis, but the drivers seem to speak only
Turkish, tourism having perished during the Virus War; they can follow
self-evident instructions—"Haghia Sophia" —"Top-kapi"—but when he
wants to go to the ancient Byzantine ram-pan on the outskirts of the city
he is unable to make any driver understand, and in the end he has to
resort to asking to be taken to the Kariya Mosque on the city's outskirts,
and getting from there to the nearby wall on foot, by guesswork.
   Istanbul is gritty, grimy, archaic, alien, and irritating. Shadrach is
fascinated by its architectural mix, the opulent Ottoman palaces and the
glorious many-minareted mosques and the eighteenth-century wooden
houses and the sweeping twentieth-century avenues and the battered
fragments of old Constantinople that jut like broken teeth from the earth,
bits of aqueducts and cisterns and basilicas and stadiums. But the city is
too chaotic for him. It depresses and repels him despite the powerful
appeal of its rich-textured history. Even now more than a million people
live here, and Shadrach finds it hard to cope with such a density of
humanity. There are the usual dismaying organ-rot tragedies on display in
the streets, and an extraordinary number of feral children, some only
three or four years old, trooping like desperate scavengers everywhere.
And there are Citpols moving in wary pairs wherever he turns. Watching
him, he is convinced. Is it just paranoia? He doesn't think so. He thinks
that Genghis Mao, unhappy over having given his physician leave to roam
the world, is keeping him under surveillance so that he can be brought
back to Ulan Bator at the Khan's whim. Shadrach had not expected to be
able to vanish totally—indeed, returning to Ulan Bator is definitely central
to his emerging plan of action, though he still does not know when the
right moment to go back will arrive—but he does not like the idea of being
spied upon. After two days in Istanbul, a perfunctory tour of the standard
sights, he flies abruptly to Rome.
   He spends a week there, making his headquarters in an ancient hotel,
mellow and luxurious, a few blocks from the Baths of Diocletian. Rome too
is densely populated, and its urban pace is frenetic, but for some reason
there are fewer scars of the Virus War and its nightmare aftermath here,
and Shadrach begins to relax, to ease himself into a comfortable
Mediterranean rhythm of life: he strolls the splendid streets, he sips
aperitifs at sidewalk cafes, he gorges himself on pasta and young white
wine at obscure trattorias, and all the traumas of the Trauma Ward
become insignificant. Truly this is the Eternal City, capable of absorbing
all of time's heaviest blows and never losing its resilience. He sees, of
course, the imperial monuments, the Arch of Titus that commemorates
the Roman sacking of Jerusalem, the temples and palaces of the
Capitoline and Palatine, the magnificent jumble that is the Forum, the
haunted wreck of the Colosseum. He visits St. Peter's, and, looking up
toward the Vatican, muses on Genghis Mao's mocking, corrosive offer to
make him Pope. He does the Sistine Chapel, the Etruscan collection in the
Villa Giulia, the Borghese gallery, and a dozen of the best baroque
churches. His energies seem to grow rather than flag as he pursues the
infinite antiquities of Rome. Oddly, he finds himself responding most
intensely not to the celebrated classic monuments but to the ancient gray
tenements, steep and gaunt, in Trastevere and the Jewish quarter. Are
these the very tenements of Caesar's time, mansions once, slums now? Is it
possible that they are still inhabited after two thousand years? Why not?
The old Romans knew how to build six stories high, and even higher, and
built of durable stone. And it would not have been hard, despite the
sackings and the fires and the revolutions, to keep those buildings intact,
to rebuild, replaster, patch the old and make it new, constantly to
refurbish and restore. So these gray towers may once have housed the
subjects of Tiberius and Caligula, and Shadrach gets a pleasant little
shiver from the thought that they have been continuously occupied across
the ages. On second thought, it probably is not so; nothing, he decides,
endures that long in daily use. These are more likely twelfth-century
buildings, fourteenth-, even seventeenth-. Old enough but not truly
ancient. Except in the sense that anything that antedates the rise of
Genghis Mao, that has survived out of that former world, that prediluvian
epoch, is ancient.
   He wishes he could stay in Rome forever. A pity, he thinks, that Genghis
Mao wasn't serious about the papacy. But after a week Shadrach resolves
to go onward. It is too pleasant here, too comfortable; besides, as he
downs a Strega at his favorite cafe one warm humid evening, he notices
two Citpols at a table at a cafe on the opposite corner, not drinking, not
talking, merely watching him. Are they closing in, tightening their net?
Will they pick him up tomorrow or the day after and tell him he must
return to his master in Ulan Bator? He buys a ticket to London, cancels it
at the last moment, and boards a plane that is about to leap over the pole
to California.
   And suddenly he is in San Francisco. A toy city, white and precious,
rising on formidable hills and girdled by a sparkling bay. He has never
been here before. Odd how he expects famous cities to be gigantic; this
one, like Jerusalem, is surprisingly small. Drop it down in Rome, in
Nairobi, in crazy sprawling Istanbul, and it would vanish altogether.
Surprisingly cold, too. California to him has always been a place of
swimming pools and palm trees, of football games played in bright warm
sunshine on wondrous January afternoons, but that California of the mind
must be somewhere else, probably down by Los Angeles; San Francisco in
June has a sullen late-winter feel, with sharp insistent winds and gray,
clinging fogs. Even when the fog burns away in the afternoon and the city
glitters in brilliant light under an intense cloudless sky, the air still carries
thechill of the ocean breezes, and Shadrach huddles into his inadequate
summer jacket.
   There are no ancient palaces to see here, no gazelles and ostriches
running wild, no medieval ramparts or baroque churches. But there are
elegant streets of Victorian houses, from grand mansions down to wooden
bungalows, all of them delicately ornamented with scrollwork and cornices
and friezes and gables and spires and even some stained-glass windows,
most of the buildings in fine preservation, survivors of fire, earthquake,
insurrection, biochemical warfare, and the collapse of the United States of
America itself. There are trees and shrubs everywhere, many in bloom;
this city, chilly or not, is nearly as flowery as Nairobi, and he looks with
delight on trees that are great blazing masses of red blossoms, on giant
tree ferns and contorted wind-sculpted cypresses, on hillsides dark with
fragrant groves of eucalyptus. One long day he walks clear across the city
from the bay to the ocean, emerging out of a lush dreamlike park to stand
at the edge of the Pacific, staring toward Mongolia. Somewhere thousands
of kilometers to the northwest Genghis Mao is awakening and beginning
his morning exercises. Shadrach wonders about the current kidney
functions of Genghis Mao, his pulse rate, his calcium-phosphate levels, his
endocrine balances, all the myriad twitching bits of information he was so
accustomed to receiving. He realizes that he has begun to miss the
broadcasts from Genghis Mao's body. He misses the daily challenge of
sustaining the Chairman's indomitable but increasingly vulnerable inner
mechanisms.He may even miss Genghis Mao himself. Ah, strange, dark,
mysterious! Ah, the Hippocratic compulsions!
   How goes it with the Khan? The Khan still lives and thrives, judging by
the newspaper Shadrach buys—the first he has bothered to look at in all
the weeks of his journey—which is strewn with photographs of Mangu's
funeral, held last week with Pharaonic pomp and majesty. There is
Genghis Mao himself, in full mourning regalia, riding in the vast
procession. There he is again, benevolently blessing the millions crammed
into Sukhe Bator Square. (Millions? Well, so it says. Thousands, more
likely.) And again, and again, the Khan doing this, the Khan doing that,
the Khan orchestrating all the remaining energies of this bedraggled
planet in a global outpouring of grief. Ulan Bator, Shadrach discovers, is
to be renamed Altan Mangu, "Golden Mangu." This seems comically
excessive to Shadrach, but he supposes he will get used to the new name
in time; the old one, which means "Red Hero,'' has been obsolete anyway
since the fall of the People's Republic in 1995, and Genghis Mao has been
thinking for years of changing it to something more appropriate. Well,
Altan Mangu will do well enough, Shadrach decides. A noise in place of a
noise. Pages and pages of coverage of the funereal rites! Not even a
President of the United States would have received such a spread. And the
funeral was last week; have they been running batches of photos like this
every day since then? Probably. Probably. The funeral is the big story of
the month, bigger even than the news of Mangu's death, which happened
too quickly, which lacked the linear extension in time that makes for really
big news. What other news is there, anyway? That people are dying of
organ-rot? That the Committee is nobly endeavoring to insure a major
increase in the supplies of the Antidote, real soon now? That the
Chairman's personal physician is loose on an aimless jaunt around the
world while, in some corner of his woolly skull, he plots ways to thwart the
Chairman's scheme to take possession of his body? Funeral pictures are
much more interesting than any of that.
   So much fuss, in an American newspaper, about a funeral in Mongolia.
Shadrach finds himself thinking about the final president of the United
States —someone named Williams, he thinks, or maybe Richards, at any
rate a first name turned into a last name—and what sort of funeral he had.
Seven mourners and a muddy grave on a rainy day, most likely. (Roberts?
Edwards? The name has slipped through his memory, beyond recapture.)
There still were presidents of the United States when Shadrach was a boy,
even a living ex-president or two. He tries to remember who the president
was when he was born. A man named Ford, wasn't it? Yes, Ford. Most
people liked Ford, Shadrach remembers. Before him there was one named
Nixon, whom people did not like, and one named Kennedy, who was shot,
and Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Roosevelt—resonant names, sturdy
American-sounding names. Our leaders, our great men. What is the name
of our leader now? Genghis II Mao IV Khan. Who would believe that, in
the old United States before the Virus War? Would George Washington
have believed it? Would Lincoln? The final year before the PRC took over
there were seven presidents, some of them simultaneously. It used to be
that the country needed thirty or forty years to run through seven
presidents, but there were seven all in one year, in 1995. There used to be
emperors in Rome, too, and Augustus or Hadrian would probably have
been surprised at the quality and racial origin of some of them toward the
end of the imperial era, the ones who were Goths and the ones who were
boys and the ones who were madmen and the ones who ruled six days
before their own palace guards strangled them in disgust. Well, Lincoln
would have been surprised to find Americans accepting someone named
Genghis II Mao IV Khan as their leader. Or maybe not. Lincoln might have
believed that people get the governments they deserve, and that we must
have deserved Genghis Mao. Lincoln might even have liked the gaudy old
monster.
   San Francisco is a fine city for walking. The scale of the place is modest
and human, so that one can move from one neighborhood to another,
from the mansions of Pacific Heights to the sunny fantasy-Mediterranean
of the Marina, from Russian Hill to the Wharf, from the Mission to the
Haight, in a single short brisk jaunt, with a constantly changing and
always agreeable urban texture all the way. Neither wind nor fog nor
steepness of hill is a serious handicap in such an amiable environment.
And the city is alive. There are shops, restaurants, coffeehouses; the
waterfront districts offer half a dozen big carpentry chapels of competing
sects, a dream-death house, a den of transtemporalists; the people in the
streets give the illusion of good health and high spirits, and though
Shadrach knows it must be only an illusion, it is a persuasive one. The only
thing wrong with San Francisco is the profusion of Citpols.
   There are more policemen here than he has ever seen in any one place,
more even than in Ulan Bator itself. It is as though every ninth San
Franciscan has enrolled in the Citizens' Peace Brigade. Maybe it is only a
delusion of his troubled mind, or maybe the unusual vitality of this city
requires a correspondingly unusual quota of policing: at any rate, there
are gray-and-blue uniforms everywhere, everywhere, usually in pairs but
not infrequently in clumps of three, four, five. Most of them have the
mechanical insectoid look that seems to be characteristic of their kind,
that makes Shadrach suspect that Citpols are not born and trained but
rather are stamped out in some ghastly factory deep in the Caucasus. And
they all are watching him. Watching, watching, watching—it can't be
mere paranoia. Can it? Those dull gray watchful eyes, hard, stupid,
purposeful, studying him from all angles as he strides through the city?
Why are they looking at him so intently? What do they want to know?
They are going to arrest me soon, Shadrach tells himself. He is certain
that he has been under surveillance since his departure. He is positive that
Avogadro is receiving information on his movements and is filing daily
reports with Genghis Mao; and—is it his own growing tension that makes
it seem that way, or is the tension in Genghis Mao?—the intensity of the
surveillance appears to have been increasing, from Nairobi to Jerusalem,
from Jerusalem to Istanbul, from Istanbul to Rome, first a casual Citpol or
two glancing offhandedly at him, then more overt scrutiny, then teams of
them following him about, hovering, staring, conferring, charting his
movements, until, perhaps in San Francisco, perhaps not until he reaches
Peking, they get the orders from the capital and make their move, dozens
of them on the housetops, in doorways, on street-corners: All right,
Mordecai, come quietly and you won't get hurt—
   And then, when he is at Broadway and Grant, about to turn downhill
into teeming Chinatown and speculating darkly about the three Cirpols
clustered outside an Oriental grocery store across the street, someone
shouts at him from the far side of Broadway, "Mordecai? Hey, Shadrach
Mordecai!"
  At the sound of his name Shadrach freezes, impaled in mid-fantasy,
knowing that the game is up, that the moment he has feared is at hand.
   But the man approaching him, moving in awkward dragging lurches
through the traffic, is no Citpol. He is a burly, balding man with a seamed
weary face and a thick unkempt gray-streaked beard, who is clad in
threadbare green overalls, a heavy plaid shirt, a faded red cloak. When he
reaches Shadrach's side he puts his hand on Shadrach's forearm in a way
that seems to be asking for support as much as for attention, and thrusts
his face close to Shadrach's, assuming intimacy so brazenly that Shadrach
does not resist the encroachment. The man's eyes are watery and swollen:
one of the organ-rot sympiomata. But he is still capable of smiling.
"Doctor," he says. His voice is warm, furry, insinuating, "Hey, Doctor,
how's it going?"
 A drunk. Probably not dangerous, though there is a vague sense of
menace about him, "I didn't know I was such a celebrity here."
  "Celebrity. Celebrity. Yeah, you're fucking famous. At least to me you
are. I spotted you from all the way across Broadway. Not that you 've
changed so much.'' The man is definitely drunk. He has that heavy, overly
ingratiating warmth; he is practically hanging from Shadrach's arm. "You
don't recognize me, do you?"
  "Should I?"
  "Depends. You knew me pretty well once."
  Shadrach searches the jowly, ravaged face. Distantly familiar, but no
name comes to mind. "Harvard," he guesses. "It must have been Harvard.
Right?"
  "Two points. Keep going."
  "Medical school?"
  "Try the college."
  "That's harder. That goes back better than fifteen years."
  "Take fifteen years off me. And about twenty kilos. And the beard. Shit,
you haven't changed at all. Of course you live an easy life. I know what
you've been doing." The man shuffles his feet and, without relinquishing
his grip on Shadrach's arm, twists away, coughs, hawks, spits. Bloody
sputum. He grins. "Piece of my gut there, eh? Lose a little more every day.
You really don't recognize me. What the hell, all us white boys look alike."
  "Want to give me more hints?"
  "Big one. We were on the track team together."
  "Shotput," Shadrach says instantly, feeling the datum rise out of God
knows what recess of his memory banks and certain that it is correct.
  "Two points. Now the name."
   "Not yet. I'm groping for it." He transforms this ruin into a young man,
beardless, brawn where he has fat today, in T-shirt and shorts, hefting the
gleaming metal globe, going into the bizarre little wind-up dance of the
shotputter, making his heave—
   "The NCAA meet, Boston, '95. Our sophomore year. You won the
sixty-meter sprint in six seconds even. Very nice. And I took the shotput at
twenty-one meters. Our pictures in all the newspapers. Remember? The
first big track event after the Virus War, a sign that things were getting
back to normal. Hah. Normal. You were one hell of a runner, Shadrach. I
bet you still are. Shit, I couldn't even lift the shot now. What's my name?"
  "Ehrenreich," Shadrach says immediately. "Jim Ehrenreich."
   "Six points! And you're the big man's doctor now. You said you'd be of
some use to humanity, you weren't going into medicine just to make a
buck, eh? And you were right on. Serving humanity, keeping our glorious
leader alive. Why do you look so surprised ? You think nobody knows the
name of the Chairman's doctor?"
  "I don't try to get much publicity," Shadrach says.
   "True. But we know a little about what goes on in Ulan Bator. I was
Committee, you know. Until last year. Where are you heading?
Chinatown? Let's walk together. Standing still like this, it's bad for my
legs, the varicose veins. I was Committee, third from the top in Northern
California, even had a vector-access rating. Of course they dropped me.
But don't worry: you won't get into trouble talking to me. Even with those
Citpols standing over there watching. I'm not a fucking pariah, you know.
I'm just ex-Committee. I'm allowed to taik to people."
  "What happened?"
  "I was dumb. I had this friend, she was Committee too, very low
echelon, and her brother caught the rot. She said to me, Can you jigger the
computer, get a bigger requisition of the Antidote, save my brother? Sure,
I said, I would, I'll do it, only for you, kid. I knew this computer man. He
could jigger the numbers. So I asked him, and he did it, at least I thought
he was doing it, but it was only a trap, a sucker deal, pure
entrapment—the Citpols stepped in, asked me to account for the extra
Antidote allotment I had requested—'' Ehrenreich blinks cheerfully, "They
sent her to the organ farm. Her brother died. Me they simply dropped, no
further punishment. Very fucking lucky. On account of my years of
devoted service to the Permanent Revolution. I even get a little allowance,
enough to keep me in vodka. But it was a waste, Shadrach, a stupid waste.
They should have sent me to the organ farm too, while I was still whole.
Because now I'm dying. You know that, don't you?"
  "They say that if you've been on the Antidote, and you go off it, you
generally get the rot right away. It's like the pent-up force of the disease
busts loose and conquers you."
  "I've heard that, yes," Shadrach says.
  "How long do I have? You can tell that, can't you?"
  "Not without examining you. Maybe not even then. I'm not exactly an
expert on the rot."
  "No. No. You wouldn't be. Not in Ulan Bator. You don't get enough
exposure there. I've had it six months. My beard was black when I got it. I
had all my hair then. I'm going to die, Shadrach."
  "We're all going to die. Except maybe for Genghis Mao."
  "You know what I mean. I'm not even thirty-seven years old and I'm
going to die. I'm going to rot and die. Because I was dumb, because I
wanted to help the brother of a friend. I had it made, I was home safe, the
Antidote in my arm every six months.”
  "You really were dumb," Shadrach tells him. "Because nothing you
could have done would have helped your friend's brother."
  "Eh?"
  "The Antidote doesn't cure. It immunizes. Once the lethal stage sets in,
that's it. The disease can't be reversed. Didn't you know that? I thought
everybody knew that."
  "No. No."
  "You smashed your career for nothing. Threw away your life for
nothing."
  "No," Ehrenreich says. He looks stunned. "It can't be true. I don't
believe it."
  "Look it up."
  "No," he says. "I want you to save me, Shadrach. I want you to prescribe
the Antidote for me."
  "I just told you—"
  "You knew what I was going to ask. You were trying to head me off."
  "Please, Jim—"
  "But you could get the stuff. You're probably traveling with a hundred
ampoules in your little black bag. Shit, man, you're Genghis Mao's own
doctor! You can do anything. It's not like being third from the top in a
regional office. Look, we were on the same team, we won trophies
together, we had our pictures in the paper—"
  "It wouldn't work, Jim."
  "You're afraid to help me."
   "I ought to be, after what you just told me. You got dropped for illegal
diversion of the Antidote, you say, and then you turn around and ask me
to do the same thing."
  "It's different. You're the doctor of—"
   "Even so. There's no point in giving you the Antidote, for reasons that
I've just explained. But even if there were, I couldn't get any for you. I'd
never get away with it."
  "You don't want to risk your ass. Even for an old friend."
  "No, I don't. And I don't want to be made to feel guilty for refusing to do
something that doesn't make any sense.'' There is nothing gentle in
Shadrach's voice. "The Antidote is useless to you now. Absolutely entirely
useless. Get that straight and keep it straight."
  "You wouldn't even try some on me? Just for an experiment?"
  "It's useless. Useless."
   After a long pause Ehrenreich says, “You know what I wish, old buddy?
That you find yourself in bad trouble someday, that you find yourself right
on the edge of the cliff and you're hanging on by your fingernails. And
some old buddy of yours comes along, and you yell out to him, Save me,
save me, the shits are killing me! And he tromps on your hand and keeps
on walking. That's what I wish. So you'd find out what it's like. That's what
I wish."
  Shadrach shrugs. He can feel no anger toward a dying man. Nor does he
choose to talk about his own problems. He says simply, "If I could heal
you, I would. But I can't."
  "You won't even try."
  "There's nothing I can do. Will you believe that?"
 "I was sure you'd be the one. You if anybody. Didn't even remember me.
Won't lift a finger."
  Shadrach says, "Have you ever done any carpentry, Jim?"
  "You mean, in the chapels? Never interested me."
   "It might help you. It won't cure what you have, but it might make it
easier for you to live with it. Carpentry shows you patterns that you can't
necessarily see for yourself. It helps you sort what's real and important
from what doesn't matter much."
  "So you're a carpentry nut?"
  "I go now and then. Whenever things cut too close. There are some
chapels down by Fisherman's Wharf. I wouldn't mind going now. Suppose
you come down there with me. It'll do you some good."
  "There's a bar at Washington and Stockton that I go to a lot. Suppose
we go there instead. Suppose you buy me some drinks on your PRC card.
Do me even more good,"
  "Bar first, then chapel?"
  "We'll see," Ehrenreich says.
  The bar is dark, musty, a forlorn place. The bartender is an automatic:
card in slot, thumb to identification plate, punch for drinks. They order
martinis. Ehrenreich's truculence subsides after his second drink; he
grows morose and maudlin, but he is less bitter now. "I'm sorry I said
what I did, man," he multers.
  "Forget it."
  "I really thought you'd be the one."
  "I wish I could be."
  "I don't wish any trouble on you."
   "I'm in trouble already," Shadrach says. "Hanging on by my
fingernails." He laughs. A new round of drinks comes from the machine.
He lifts his glass. "Never mind. Cheers, friend."
  "Cheers, man."
  "After this one we'll go to the chapel, right?"
  Ehrenreich shakes his head. "Not me. It's not for me, you know? Not
now. Not right now. You go without me. Don't nag me about it, just go
without me."
  "All right," Shadrach says.
   He finishes his drink, touches Ehrenreich's arm lightly in farewell—the
man is glassy-eyed, inarticulate—and finds a cab to take him down to the
Wharf. But the chapel gives Shadrach no ease today. His fingers tremble,
his eyes will not focus, he is unable to slip into the meditative state. After
half an hour he leaves. He sees a car full of Citpols in a lot up the block.
They're still watching him. There is a bearded man in street clothes in the
car, also. Ehrenreich? Is that possible? At this distance he can't make out
faces, but the heavy shoulders look about right, the thinning hair is
familiar. Shadrach scowls. He hails a taxi, goes back to his hotel, packs,
heads for the airport. Three hours later he is on his way to Peking.



                                     23

   In Peking, ensconced at the Hundred Gates Hotel in the old legation
quarter adjoining the Forbidden City district, where Kublai Khan and
Ch'ien-lung once held court, Shadrach begins once more to detect
emanations from Genghis Mao. He is still some twelve hundred or thirteen
hundred kilometers from Ulan Bator, he calculates—beyond the optimum
telemetering range, and so the incoming impulses are blurred and faint.
Then, too, after these weeks of separation Shadrach is no longer as much
in concord with the broadcast from Genghis Mao's body as he had been.
But when he sits very still, when he tunes his attention perfectly to the
task, he finds himself able to read the old warlord's biodata with gradually
sharpening clarity.
   The gross functions come in best, of course: heartbeat, blood pressure,
respiration, body temperature. The Khan's major systems all seem to be
thundering along at their usual level of irrepressible vitality. Liver and
kidney action register in their normal range. Basal metabolic expenditure
normal. Neuromus-cular responses normal. It never ceases to amaze
Shadrach how healthy, how strong, the old man is. He takes a certain
vicarious pride in Genghis Mao's heroic durability and resilience.
  Some unexpected puzzles begin to develop, though, as Shadrach
extends his reach and starts to bring in the subtler, more refined data.
These tend to contradict some of the gross indications. The muscle-firing
responses do not seem quite right— phosphate breakdown appears weak,
enzyme activity off. Blood viscosity is lower than normal and blood pH is
nudging slightly toward the alkaline. Intestinal absorption is minutely
down, cholesterol accumulation up, perspiration a trifle above normal.
None of these things is cause for real alarm in a man of the Chairman's
age who has recently undergone so much radical surgery—it is hardly
reasonable to expect htm to be in perfect health—but the combination of
factors is peculiar. Shadrach wonders how much of what he is reading is
simply an artifact of distance and noise on the line: he is straining for
some of these inputs, and he may not be getting them accurately. Still, the
distortions, if distortions they are, are remarkably consistent. He gets the
same reading whenever he returns to any sensor.
  And a hypothesis is starling to take shape.
  Diagnosis at more than a thousand kilometers' range is tricky.
Shadrach misses his medical library and his computers. But he has an
idea of what the problem may be, and he knows what data he needs to
confirm his theory. What he does not know is whether Buckmaster's
implant system is good enough to transmit analogues of such small-scale
phenomena across so great a distance.
   If blood viscosity is down and blood pH is alkaline, plasma protein levels
are probably subnormal, and osmotic pressure, which draws fluids from
the tissues to the capillaries, is going to be low. If the hydrostatic blood
pressure is normal, as the gross function modulator is telling him, and the
osmotic blood pressure is off, Genghis Mao's tissues may be building up
an accumulation of excess fluids—not serious, not dangerous, not yet, but
such fluid accumulations may be leading toward the development of
edemas, of watery swellings, and edemas can be symptomatic of
impending failure in the kidneys, the liver, perhaps the cardiac system.
Bearing down in intense concentration, Shadrach roves Genghis Mao's
body in search of signs of excess fluid. The lymphatic-system checkpoints
give him nothing but normal levels, though. The reports from the
pericardial, pleural, and peritoneal outposts are positive. Renal and
hepatic functions, as before, are fine. Nothing seems to be wrong.
Shadrach begins to abandon his hypothesis. Perhaps the Khan is not in
difficulties. Those few negative indications were probably just noise on the
line, and therefore—
 But then Shadrach notices that something is not quite right in Genghis
Mao's skull. Intracranial pressure is unusually high.
   The implant monitors in the Chairman's cranium are not as
comprehensive as they are elsewhere. Genghis Mao has no history of
stroke or other cerebrovascular events, and surgeons have never had
reason to invade the imperial skull. Since most of the telemetering
equipment in Genghis Mao has been installed during the course of routine
corrective surgery, Shadrach must make do with relatively skimpy
coverage of the state of the Chairman's brain. But he does have a sensor
that reports to him on intracranial pressure, and, as he makes his total
scan of Genghis Mao's body, the rise in that pressure catches his
attention. Is that where the fluid buildup is taking place?
  Struggling, stretching for the data, Shadrach pulls in whatever
correlative information he can grab. Osmotic pressure of the cranial
capillaries? Low. Hydrostatic pressure? Normal. Meningeal distension?
High. Condition of the cerebral ventricles? Congested. Something is awry,
very marginally awry, in the system that drains cerebrospinal fluid from
the interior of Genghis Mao's brain to the subarachnoid space, next to the
skull wall, whereit normally passes into the blood.
   What this means, at the moment, is that Genghis Mao probably has
been having bad headaches for a few days, that he will have worse ones if
Shadrach Mordecai does not return to Ulan Bator at once, and that he
may suffer brain damage—possibly fatal—if prompt corrective action is
not taken. It means, also, that Shadrach's holiday is at its end. He will not
do the sightseeing tour of Peking. Not for him the visit to the Forbidden
City, the historical museum, the Ming tombs, the Great Wall, the temple
of Confucius, the Working People's Palace of Culture. Those things are
unimportant to him now: this is the moment for which he was waiting
during his wanderings from continent to continent. The unstable system
that is Genghis II Mao IV Khan has, in the absence of the devoted
physician, begun to break down. Shadrach's indispensability has been
made manifest. He is needed. He must go to his patient immediately. He
must take the appropriate actions. He has his Hippocratic obligations to
fulfill. He has his own survival to think about, besides.



   Shadrach descends to the hotel lobby to arrange for a seat aboard the
next flight to Ulan Bator—there is one that evening, he learns, leaving in
two and a half hours—and to check out of the room he so recently checked
into. The clerk, a gaunt young Chinese who is unable to contain his
fascination with the color of Shadrach's skin, staring and staring with
surreptitious sideways glances, comments on the brevity of his stay in
Peking.
   "Change of plan," Shadrach declares resonantly. "Urgent business. Must
return at once."
   He glances down the length of the lobby—a dim, fragrant space, like the
vestibule of some enormous Chinese restaurant, cluttered with mahogany
screens and porcelain urns and huge lacquer bowls on rosewood
pedestals—and sees, towering above a pair of porters, the husky, hulking
figure of Avogadro. Their eyes meet and Avogadro smiles, nods bis head in
salute, waves a hand. He has just arrived at the hotel, it seems. Shadrach
is not at all surprised to discover the security chief here. It was inevitable,
he decides, that Avogadro would show up to make the arrest in person.
   Neither of them remarks on the coincidence of their presence in this
exotic place. Avogadro asks amiably, "How have you been enjoying your
travels, Doctor?"
  "I've seen a great deal of the world. Most interesting."
   "That's the best word you can choose? Interesting? Not overwhelming,
illuminating, transcendental?"
  "Interesting," Shadrach repeats deliberately. "A very interesting trip.
And how is Genghis Mao bearing up in my absence?"
  "Not too badly."
   "He's well looked after. He likes to think I'm indispensable, but the relief
staff is quite capable of handling most of what's likely to come up."
  "Probably so."
  "But he's been having headaches, hasn't he?"
  Avogadro looks mildly startled. "You know that, do you?"
  "I'm just at the edge of the telemetering range here."
  "And you can detect his headaches?"
  "I can pick up certain causal factors," Shadrach says, "and deduce a
headache from them."
   "How clever that system is. You and the Khan are practically one
person, wouldn't that be so? Connected the way you are. He aches and you
feel it."
   "Well put," Shadrach says. "Actually, Nikki was the first one to make
that point to me. Genghis Mao and I are one person, yes, one united
information-processing unit. Comparable to the sculptor and the marble
and the chisel."
  The analogy does not appear to register with Avogadro. He continues to
smile the fixed, determinedly affable smile that he has been smiling since
they first approached one another in the lobby.
  "But not united closely enough," Shadrach goes on. "The system could
be linked even more tightly. I plan to talk to the engineers about building
some modifications into it, when I get back to Ulan Bator."
  "Which will be when?"
  "Tonight," Shadrach tells him. "I'm booked on the next flight out."
   Avogadro's eyebrows rise. "You are? How convenient Saves me the
trouble of—"
  "Asking me to return?"
  “Yes.”
  "I thought you might have had something like that in mind."
   "The truth is that Genghis Mao misses you. He sent me down here to
talk to you."
  "Of course."
  "To ask you to come back."
   "He sent you to ask me that. Not to bring me, but to ask me. If I would
return. Of my own free will."
  "To ask, yes."
   Shadrach thinks of the Citpols keeping tabs on him all around the
world, huddling, conferring, passing bulletins on to their colleagues in
distant cities. He knows, and he is sure that Avogadro knows that he
knows, that the real situation is not as casual as Avogadro would have him
believe. By buying that ticket on this evening's flight, he has spared
Avogadro the embarrassment of having to take him into custody and
return him to Ulan Bator under duress. He hopes Avogadro is properly
grateful for that.
  He says, "How bad are the Khan's headaches?"
  "Pretty bad, I'm told."
  "You haven't seen him?"
  Avogadro shakes his head. "Only on the telephone. He looked drawn.
Tired."
  "How long ago was this?"
  "The night before last. But there's been talk in the tower all week about
the Chairman's headaches."
   "I see," Shadrach says. "I thought it might be like that. That's why I've
decided to go back ahead of schedule." His eyes rest squarely on
Avogadro's. "You understand that, don't you? That I bought my return
ticket as soon as I realized the Khan was in discomfort? Because it was my
responsibility to my patient. My responsibility to my patient is always the
controlling factor in my actions. Always. Always. You're aware of that,
aren't you?"
  "Naturally," Avogadro says.



  June 23, 2012
   What if I had died before my work was done? Not an idle question at
all. I am important to history. I am one of the great reconstituters of
society. Subtract me from the scene in 1995, in 1998, even as late as
2001, and everything tumbles into chaos. I am to this society as
Augustus was to the Roman world, as Ch'in Shih Huang Ti was to China.
What kind of world would exist today if I had perished ten years ago? A
thousand warring principalities, no doubt, each with its own pathetic
army, its own legislature, currency, passports, border guards, customs
levies. A host of petty aristocracies, feudal overlords, secret cabals of
malcontents, constant little revolutions—chaos, chaos, chaos. New
outbreaks of virus warfare, very likely. And ultimately the extinction of
mankind. All this if you subtract Genghis Mao at the critical moment in
history. I am the world-savior.



   It sounds obscenely boastful. World-savior! Culture-hero, myth-figure,
I, Hrishna, I, Quetzalcoatl, I, Arthur, I, Genghis Mao. And yet it is true,
truer for me than for any of them, for without me all of mankind might
be dead today, and that is new in the history of the savior-myth. To end
the strife, to seal away the virus, to sponsor Roncevic's work—yes, no
doubt of it, this could have been a dead planet by now if I had gone into
the tomb ten years ago. As history will recognize. And yet, and yet, what
does it matter? I will not be forgotten when I die—I will never be
forgotten—but I will die. Sooner, later, my subterfuges will exhaust
themselves. Neither Talos nor Phoenix nor Avatar can sustain me
indefinitely. Something will fail, or boredom will conquer me and I will
terminate my own systems, and I will die, and then what will it have
meant to have saved the world? What I have done is ultimately
meaningless to me. The power I have attained is ultimately empty. Not
immediately empty—here I sit, do I not, among splendor and comfort?—
but ultimately empty. I pretend that there is meaning in empire, but
there is none, no meaning anywhere. This is a philosophy common
among the very young, and, I suppose, among the very old. I must
pretend that power is important to me. I must pretend that the
reckoning of history is the all-consoling consolation. But I am too old to
care. I have forgotten why it mattered to me to do what I have done. I
am playing out a foolish game, unwilling to let it reach its end, but
unsure of the nature of the winning gambit. And so I go on and on and
on. I, Genghis II Mao IV Khan, savior of the world, taking care to conceal
from those around me the profound and paralyzing vacancy that lies
beneath the subcellars of my spirit. I think I have lost the thread of my
own argument. I am tired. I am bored. My head hurts. My head hurts.



  "Shadrach!" Genghis Mao roars. "This filthy headache! Fix me,
Shadrach!"
   The old buccaneer forces a grin. He sits propped up against triple
pillows, looking weary and frayed. His jaws are set in a rigid grimace; his
ryes have a harsh glare and they waver frantically as though he is
struggling to keep them in focus. At this close range Shadrach can easily
detect a dozen different symptoms of the pressure building up in the
recesses of the Chairman's brain. Already there are many tiny signs of
deterioration in Genghis Mao's cerebral functions. No doubt of the
diagnosis now. No doubt of it.
   "You were away too long," the Khan mutters. "Enjoying yourself? Yes.
But the headache, Shadrach, the miserable hideous headache—I shouldn't
have let you go. Your place is here. Beside me. Watching me. Healing me.
It was like sending my right hand on a voyage around the world. You won't
go away again, will you, Shadrach? And you'll fix my head? It frightens
me. The throbbing. Like something trying to escape in there."
  "There's no reason to worry, sir. We'll fix you soon enough."
  Genghis Mao rolls his eyes in torment. "How? Chop a hole in my skull?
Let the demon escape like a whiff of foul gas?"
  "This isn't the Neolithic," Shadrach says. "The trephine is obsolete. We
have better methods." He touches the tips of his fingers to the Khan's
cheeks, probing for the sharp, upthrusting bones. "Relax, sir. Let the
muscles go slack." It is late at night, and Shadrach is exhausted, having
flown this day from San Francisco to Peking, from Peking to Ulan Bator,
having gone at once to Genghis Mao's bedside without pausing even for
fresh clothing. His mind is a muddle of time zones and he is not sure
whether he is in Saturday, Sunday, or Friday. But there is a sphere of utter
crystalline clarity at the core of his spirit. "Relax," he croons. "Relax. Let
the tension flow out of your neck, out of your shoulders, out of your back.
Easy, now, easy—"
  Genghis Mao scoffs. "You aren't going to cure this with massages and
soothing talk."
  "But we can ease the symptoms this way. We can palliate, sir."
  "And then?"
  "If necessary, there are surgical remedies."
  "You see? You will chop open my skull!"
   "We'll be neat about it, I promise." Shadrach moves around behind
Genghis Mao, so he will not be distracted by the need to maintain eye
contact with the fierce old man, and concentrates on diagnostic
perceptions. Hydrostatic imbalance, yes; roeningeal congestion, yes; some
accumulation of metabolic wastes about the brain, yes. The situation is far
from critical—action could be deferred for weeks, perhaps for many
months, without great risk—but Shadrach intends to deal swiftly with the
problem. And not only for Genghis Mao's sake.
  Genghis Mao says, "It's good to have you back."
  "Thank you, sir."
   "You should have been here for the funeral. You would have had a
front-row seat. It was magnificent, Shadrach. Did you watch the funeral
on television?"
  "Of course," Shadrach lies. "In—ah—in Jerusalem. I think I was in
Jerusalem then. Yes. Magnificent. Yes."
   "Magnificent," says Genghis Mao, dwelling lovingly on the word. "It will
never be forgotten. One of history's great spectacles. I was proud of it. The
Assyrians couldn't have done better for old Sardanapalus." The Khan
laughs. "If one can't attend one's own funeral, Shadrach, one can at least
satisfy the urge by staging a splendid funeral for someone else. Eh? Eh?"
  "I wish I could have been there, sir."
  "But you were in Jerusalem. Or was it Istanbul?"
   "Jerusalem, I think, sir." He touches Genghis Mao's temples, pressing
lightly but firmly. The Chairman winces. When Shadrach presses the sides
of Genghis Mao's neck, just below and behind the ears, the Chairman
grunts. "Tender there," Genghis Mao says.
  "Yes."
  "How bad is it, really?"
  "It's not good. No immediate danger, but there's definitely a problem in
there."
  "Explain it to me."
   Shadrach moves out where Genghis Mao can see him. "The brain and
spinal cord," he says, "float, literally float, in a liquid we call cerebrospinal
fluid, which is manufactured in hollow chambers within the brain known
as ventricles. It protects and nourishes the brain and, when it drains into
the spaces surrounding the brain, it carries off the metabolic wastes
resulting from the brain's activity. Under certain circumstances the
passageways from the ventricles to these meningeal spaces become
blocked, and cerebrospinal fluid accumulates in the ventricles."
  "Is that what's happening to my head?"
  "So it seems."
  "Why?"
  Shrugging, Shadrach replies, "It's usually caused by infection or by a
tumor at the base of the brain. Occasionally it comes on spontaneously,
without observable lesion. A function of aging, maybe."
  "And what are the effects?"
   "In children, the skull enlarges as the ventricles swell. That's the
condition known as hydrocephalus, water on the brain. The adult cranium
isn't capable of expansion, of course, so the brain must bear all the
pressure. Severe headaches are the first symptom, naturally. Followed by
failure of physical coordination, vertigo, facial paralysis, gradual loss of
eyesight, periods of coma, general impairments of cerebral functions,
epileptic seizures—“
  "And death?"
  "Death, yes. Eventually."
  "How long from first to last?"
   "It depends on the degree of the blockage, the vigor of the patient, and a
lot of other factors. Some people live for years with mild or incipient
hydrocephalic conditions and aren't even aware of it. Even acute cases can
drag on for years, with long periods of remission. On the other hand, it's
possible to go from first congestion to mortality in a matter of months,
and sometimes much more quickly even than that, if something like a
medullary edema develops, an intracranial swelling that disrupts the
autonomic systems."
   These recitals of symptomatology and prognosis have always fascinated
Genghis Mao, and intense interest is evident in his eyes now. But there is
something else, a haunted look, a flashing look of dismay verging on
terror, that Shadrach has never observed in him before.
  The Chairman says, "And in my case?"
  "We'll have to run a full series of tests, of course. But on the basis of
what the implants are telling me, I'm inclined toward quick corrective
surgery."
  "I've never had brain surgery."
  "I know that, sir."
  "I don't like the whole idea. A kidney or a lung is trivial. I don't want
Warhaftig's lasers inside my head. I don't want pieces of my mind cut
away."
  "There's no question of our doing that."
  "What will you do, then?"
  "It's strictly a decompressive therapy. We'll install valved tubes to shunt
the excess fluid directly into the jugular system. The operation is relatively
simple and much less risky than an organ transplant."
   Genghis Mao smiles icily. "I'm accustomed to organ transplants,
though. I think I like organ transplants. Brain surgery is something new
for me."
  Shadrach, as he prepares a sedative for the Chairman, says cheerfully,
"Perhaps you'll come to like brain surgery as well, sir."



  In the morning he seeks out Frank Ficifolia at the main
communications nexus deep in the service core of the tower. "I heard
you'd returned," Ficifolia says. "I heard it, but I didn't believe it. For
Christ's sake, why'd you come back?"
   Shadrach eyes the banks of screens and monitors warily. "Is it safe to
talk here?"
  "Jesus, do you think I'd bug my own office?"
  "Someone might have done it without telling you about it."
  "Talk," Ficifolia says. "It's safe here."
  "If you say so."
  "I say so. Why didn't you stay where you were?"
  "The Citpols knew where I was, every minute. Avogadro himself
dropped in on me in Peking."
  "What did you expect? Taking commercial transport all around the
world. There are ways of hiding, but—did Avogadro make you come back
here, then?"
  "I had already bought my ticket."
  "Jesus, why?"
  "I came back because I saw a way of saving myself."
  "The way to save yourself is to go underground."
  "No," Shadrach says emphatically. "The way to save yourself is to return
and continue to carry out my functions as the Chairman's doctor. You
know that the Chairman is ill?"
  "Bad headaches, they tell me."
  "Dangerous headaches. We'll need to operate."
  "Brain surgery?"
  "That's right."
  Ficifolia compresses his lips and studies Shadrach's face as though
examining a map of El Dorado. "I once told you that you weren't crazy
enough to survive in this city. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe you're plenty
crazy. You have to be crazy if you think you can intentionally bungle an
operation on Genghis Mao and get away with it. Don't you think
Warhaftig will notice what you're doing and stop you? Or turn you in, if
you actually do pull it off? What good is killing the Khan if you end up in
the organ farms yourself? How—"
  "Doctors don't kill their patients, Frank."
  "But—"
   "You're jumping to conclusions. Projecting your own fantasies, perhaps.
I'm simply going to operate. And cure the Chairman's headaches. And see
to it that he stays in good health." Shadrach smiles. "Don't ask questions.
Just help me."
  "Help you how?"
   "I want you to find Buckmaster for me. There's a special piece of
equipment I'll need, and he's the right man to build it. Then I'll want you
to help me rig the telemetering circuits to run it.”
  "Buckmaster? Why Buckmaster? There are plenty of capable
microengineering people right here on the staff."
  "Buckmaster's the one I want for this job. He's the best in his field, and
he happens to be the one who built my implant system. He's the one who
ought to build any additions to that system.'' Shadrach's gaze is
uncompromising. "Will you get me Buckmaster?"
  Ficifolia, after a moment, blinks and brusquely nods. "I'll take you to
him," be says. "When do you want to go?"
  "Now."
  "Right now? Right this literal minute?"
  "Now," Shadrach says. "Is he very far from here?"
  "Not really."
  "Where is he?"
   "Karakorum," Ficifolia replies. "We hid him among the
transtemporalists."



  January 2, 2009
   I insisted, and they allowed me to sample the transtemporal
experience. Much talk of risks, of side effects, of my responsibilities to the
commonwealth. I overruled them. It is not often that I have to insist. It is
rare that I can speak of being allowed. But this was a struggle. Which of
course I won, but it was work. Visited Karakorum after midnight, light
snow falling. The tent was cleared. Guards posted. Teixeira had given
me a full checkup first. Because of the drugs they use. Clean bill of health:
I can handle their most potent potions. And so, into the tent. Dark place,
foul smell. I remember that smell from my childhood-burning cow-chips,
uncured goathides. Little slump-backed lama comes forth, very
unimpressed with me, no awe at all—why be awed by Genghis Mao, I
guess, when you can gulp a drug and visit Caesar, the Buddha, Genghis
Khan?—and mixes his brews for me. Oils, powders. Gives me the cup to
drink. Sweet, gummy, not a good taste. Takes my hands, whispers things
to me, and I am dizzy and then the tent becomes a cloud and is gone and
I find myself in another tent, wide and low, white flags and brocaded
hangings, and there he is before me, thick-bodied, short, a man of middle
years or more long dark mustache, small eyes, strong mouth, stink of
sweat coming from him as if he hasn't bathed in years, and for the first
time in my life I want to sink to my knees before another human being,
for this is surely Temujin, this is the Great Khan, this is he, the founder,
the conqueror.
   I do not kneel, except within myself. Within myself I fall at his feet. I
offer him my hand. I bow my head.
  "Father Genghis," I say. "Across nine hundred years I come to do you
homage."
  He regards me without great interest. After a moment he hands me a
bowl. "Drink some airag, old man."
  We shared the bowl, I first, then the Great Khan. He is dressed simply,
no scarlet robes, no ermine trim, no crown, just a warrior's leather
costume. The top of his head is shaven and in back his hair reaches his
shoulders. He could kill me with a slap of his left hand.
  "What do you want?" he asks.
  "To see you."
  "You see me. What else?"
  "To tell you that you will live forever."
  "I will die like any man, old one."
  "Your body will die, Father Genghis. Your name will live in the ages."
   He considers that. "And my empire? What of that? Will my sons rule
after me?"
  "Your sons will rule over half the world."
   "Half the world," Genghis Khan says softly. "Only half? Is this the
truth, old man?"
  "Cathay will be theirs—"
  “Cathay is already mine."
  "Yes, but they will have it all, down to the hot jungles. And they will
rule the high mountains, and the Russian land, and Turkestan,
Afghanistan, Persia, everything as far as the gates of Europe. Half the
world. Father Genghis!"
  The Khan of Khan grunts.
  "And I tell you this, also. Nine hundred years from now a khan named
Genghis will rule everything from sea to sea, from shore to shore, all
souls upon this world naming him master."
  "A khan of my blood?"
  "A true Tatar," I assure him.
  Genghis Khan is silent a long while. It is impossible to read his eyes.
He is shorter than I would have thought, and his smell is bad, but he is a
man of such strength and purpose that I am humbled, for I thought I
was of his kind, and in a way I am, and yet he is more than I could ever
have been. There is no calculation about him; he is altogether solid,
unhesitating, a man who lives in the moment, a man who must never
have paused for a second thought and whose first thought must always
have been right. He is only a barbarian prince, a mere wild horseman of
the Gobi, to whom every aspect of my ordinary daily life would seem the
most dazzling magic: yet put him down in Ulan Bator and he would
understand the workings of Surveillance Vector One in three hours. A
barbarian he is, yes, but not a mere barbarian, not a mere anything,
and though I am his superior in some ways, though my life and my
power are beyond his comprehension, I am second to him in all the ways
that matter. He awes me. As I expected him to do. And, seeing him, I
come close to a willingness to yield up all my authority over men, for,
next to him, I am not worthy. I am not worthy.
   "Nine hundred years," he says at last, and the shadow of a smile
crosses his face. "Good. Good." He claps for a servant. "More airag," he
calls. We share another drink. Then he says he must depart; it is time to
ride out from Karakorum to the camp of his son Chagadai, where the
royal family is to hold a tourney today. He does not invite me to join
him. He has no interest in me, though I come from out of the realm of
distant time, though I bring him bright tales of Mongol empires to come.
I am unimportant to him. I have told him all he cares to know; now I am
forgotten. Only the tourney matters now. He leaps to his mare; he rides
away, followed by the warriors of his court, and only the servant and I
remain.



                                   24

  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.
   Thinking of Buckmaster's newfound tranquility allows Shadrach to find
a glimmering of it himself. This time he sustains it, voyaging inward to
that clear bright place beyond the reach of storms. Buckmaster
disappears; Genghis Mao disappears; Shadrach disappears. For hours he
works peacefully at his bench, wholly at one with his tools, his lumber.
When he departs from the chapel late in the day he is in a state near
ecstasy.



  He reaches Ulan Bator an hour after nightfall. As soon as he arrives he
phones Katya Lindman. "I want to see you," he says.
  "I was hoping you'd call. I knew you were back."
   They meet in a recreation lounge on the fiftieth floor, a rendezvous
favored by middle-echelon staffers. Service is discreet there. The room is a
dazzling high-vaulted oval, decorated with shining golden metallic
streamers only a few molecules thick that dangle from the ceiling and twirl
gently in the currents of air. A giant portrait of Genghis Mao occupies the
entice east wall of the lounge, and there is one of Mangu at the other end.
   Katya is wearing what is, for Katya, an unusually slinky costume, a
clinging tight-woven wrap of some soft rust-colored fabric, low-cut to
display her strong broad shoulders and her heavy breasts. She may even
have used perfume. Shadrach has never seen her make the slightest
concession to conventional femininity, and he is surprised and
disappointed to see her opting for such unsubtle seductiveness now. It is
not at all in character for her, and not at all necessary. But perhaps Katya
is weary of staying in character, hard eyes, sharp teeth, cruel mouth, cool
efficient mind, brisk and capable woman of science. She has already
confessed her love for him; perhaps now she wants to play at being the
sort of woman for whom love is a plausible event. Foolish of her, if that's
her game: he much prefers the Katya he knows. Or thinks he knows. Love
is not a costume party.
  She says, "I didn't think you'd ever come back."
   "I never intended not to. I wasn't trying to disappear. Only to get away
for a while and think things out."
  "And did you succeed?"
  "I hope so. I'll know soon enough."
  "I won't ask."
  "No. Don't."
  She smiles. "I'm glad you're back. Except that I worry about the danger
you're in."
  "If I'm not worrying, why should you?"
   "I don't need to answer that." Her voice is husky, almost stagy. She
leans forward and says, "I missed you, Shadrach. It amazed me how much
I missed you. You don't like me to say things like that, do you?
  "What gives you that idea?"
   "Your face. You look so uncomfortable. You don't want to hear soft
words from me. You don't think it's proper for mean, tough Dr. Lindman
to talk that way."
  "I'm just not used to you that way. It's a side of you that's unfamiliar to
me."
  "You probably don't even like the way I'm dressed tonight. But I can be
the other Katya again, if you want. Wait. I'll go and change into my lab
smock." She sounds almost serious.
  "Stop it," he says. He takes her hand. "You look lovely tonight."
  "Thank you." Her voice is steely. She withdraws the hand.
  "Well, you do. And I'm supposed to say so, and I did; that's how the
game is played. Now you're supposed to say —"
  "Let's not play any more games, Shadrach, Okay?"
  "Okay. Did you dress like that for me or for you?"
  "For both of us."
  "Ah. Just for the hell of it, right? Because you just felt like coming on
sexy. Right?"
  "Right," she says. "Okay?"
  "Okay. Okay."
   "Is it okay to tell you that I missed you? Don't force me to be some kind
of machine, Shadrach. Don't make me be whatever your image of me is.
I'm not asking you to tell me you missed me. But give me the right to
express what I feel. Give me the right to be silly once in a while, to be soft,
to be inconsistent, if I want to be. Without worrying about which one the
real Katya is. I'm always the real Katya, whoever I am at the moment.
Okay?"
  "Okay," he says, and takes her hand again, and she does not pull it
away. After a moment he says, "What's been happening here while I was
gone?"
  "You know about the Khan's headaches, I assume."
   "Sure. That's why I came back when I did. The moment I picked up the
telemetering impulses from him, in Peking,"
  "Is it something serious?"
  "We're going to have to operate," he says. "As soon as some special
equipment I've ordered is ready."
  "Is brain surgery especially risky?"
   "Not as risky as you might think. But the Khan doesn't like the idea of it
at all, lasers poking into his skull, et cetera, et cetera. I've never seen him
look so spooked about an operation. But he'll be all right. What else has
been going on here?"
  "There was the funeral."
  "Yes. I know. I was in Jerusalem then, or Istanbul. I saw some
photographs later."
   "It was monstrous," Karya tells him. "It went on for days and days. God
knows how much it must have cost. Everything stopped, practically, while
we had the speeches, the parades, the brass bands, the planes flying in
formation, all kinds of rituals and celebrations. And Genghis Mao sitting
in the middle of the plaza drinking everything in."
  "What a pity I missed it."
  "I'm sure you were heartbroken."
  "Yes. Terribly."
  They laugh. He is beginning to think he rather likes the way she looks in
that dress.
  He says, "What else? How's your project going?"
 "Very well. Seventeen kinesic traits are equivalent now. We've made
more progress in the past three weeks than in the previous three months."
  "Good. I want to see that automaton of yours finished fast. I want your
project to be the first one ready to go."
  "Have you talked to Nikki since you've been back?"
  "No," he says. "Not yet."
  "I hear that Avatar's been moving fast too. They say that they're
practically done converting from Mangu's parameters to—to those of the
new donor. Weeks ahead of schedule. It scares me, Shadrach."
  "It shouldn't."
  "I can't help thinking—what if—if they ever actually do—"
   "They won't," he says. "It's not going to happen. I'm much too valuable
to Genghis Mao as I am."
  " 'Redundancy is our main avenue of survival,' remember. How many
other doctors do you think he has waiting? Complete with telemeter
implants and everything?"
  "None."
  "Can you be sure?"
  "Buckmaster would know if a duplicate set of implants had ever been
built. He never heard anything about that."
  "Buckmaster's dead, Shadrach."
  He lets the point pass. "I know that there's no duplicate Shadrach
Mordecai waiting somewhere to take over when I go. I realize now how
dependent Genghis Mao is on me, exclusively on me, irreplaceable me.
And I have a notion I'm going to be a lot less redundable in the near
future, a lot more indispensable. I'm not worrying about Avatar, Katya."
  "I hope you know what you're doing."
  "So do I," he says. He gestures toward the lounge exit, just below the
vast blank-eyed portrait of sad silly Mangu. "Let's go upstairs," he
suggests, and she smiles and nods.



   Now it is the morning of the operation. Genghis Mao lies face down
upon the operating table, awake, fully conscious, occasionally turning his
head to stare sourly at the doctors assembled about him—Shadrach,
Warhaftig, and Warhaftig's neurological consultant, an Israeli named
Malin. There is no mistaking the Khan's look: he is frightened. He is trying
to cover his fear with his usual swagger, but he is not succeeding. In ten
minutes the surgical lasers will be drilling into his skull, and the prospect
does not charm him. But for the headaches—whose effects are visible now,
as imperial grimaces and winces—none of this would be happening.
   The Chairman's head has been shaved. Without his thick black mane he
looks, strangely, much younger, more vigorous: that sturdy knob of a skull,
bare, speaks of the immense strength of the man, the intensity of the
driving forces within him. The musculature of his scalp is powerful and
conspicuous, hills and valleys outlined in bold relief, a rugged landscape of
cords and ridges nurtured and developed through nearly ninety years of
ferocious talking, thinking, biting, chewing. The surgeons' angles of entry
have been marked on his skin in luminous ink.
   Warhaftig is ready to make the first incision. The strategy of the
operation has evolved during three days of conferences. They will not go
near the cerebral centers. The skull is to be opened high on the occipital
curve, and the drainage device is to be inserted in the brain stem, the
pons, just below the fourth ventricle near the medulla oblongata. This,
everyone has agreed, is the optimum site for the valve, and not
incidentally will keep the lasers away from the seat of reason—though any
surgical slip could do damage to the medulla, which controls vasomotor
and cardiac functions and other vital autonomic responses. But Warhaftig
is not one who slips.
  The surgeon glances at Shadrach. "Is all well?"
  "Fine. Go when ready."
  Warhaftig lightly touches Genghis Mao's neck. The Khan does not react,
nor does a sharp pinch at the base of his skull bring any response from
him. He is under local anesthesia, induced as customary through
sonipuncture. "Now," Warhaftig says. "We begin." He makes the initial
cut.
   Genghis Mao closes his eyes—but, Shadrach's inner monitors tell him,
the Khan is still at full awareness, tense, poised like a wary leopard on a
high branch. The skin is peeled back and clamped by retractors.
Warhaftig steps aside and allows Malin to make the cranial incision. The
neurosurgeon's touch is not as deft as Warhaftig's, but Malin has spent
thirty years slicing into skulls, and he knows as Warhaftig cannot possibly
know just how much margin for error his cuts can have. There, now: there
is a window into the Khan's head. Shadrach, peering on tiptoes, stares in
awe at the very brain that conceived the theories of centripetal
depolarization, that hatched the Permanent Revolutionary Committee,
that carried mankind out of the chaos of fhe Virus War. There, there, right
there, in that mysterious gray lump, it all was spawned, yes.
    They are searching now for a site for the drainage valve. Warhaftig has
resumed command. Instead of a laser, he uses at this point a hollow needle
filled with liquid nitrogen, cryostatically cooled to a temperature of -160°
C. The needle, sliding to the depths of the Khan's brain stem, freezes the
brain cells on contact, and if contact is prolonged it will kill them. While
Malin calls off instrument readings and Shadrach supplies telemetering
data on the state of Genghis Mao's autonomic activities, Warhaftig,
reassured that he is not destroying vital neural centers, opens a space for
insertion of the drainage device. Everything goes smoothly. The Khan
continues to breathe, to pump blood, to generate the normal array of
electroencephalographic waves. There is lodged within him now a tube to
shunt excess cerebrospinal fluid into his circulatory system, a valve
through which the fluid can be drawn, and a telemetering implant that
will relay to his physician constant reports on the functioning of that valve
and the fluid levels of his cranial ventricles. Bone and skin are restored to
place; the Khan, haggard and pallid but smiling now, is wheeled to the
recovery station.
   Warhaftig turns to Shadrach. "As long as we have everything set up,
let's proceed to the next operation immediately. Yes?" He reaches for
Shadrach's left hand. "You want the telemetering implant to go here, is
that correct? Embedded in the thenar muscles. But not at the base of the
thumb, eh? Over here, closer to the center of the palm, do I have it? All
right, Let's scrub you up and get along with it, then."
   Shadrach and Nikki, meeting for the first time since his return, are ill
at ease with each other. He tries to smile, but he doubts that his face is
doing a very good job of it, and her cordiality seems equally forced.
  "How is the Khan?" she asks finally.
  "Healing," Shadrach says. "As per usual."
  She glances at his bandaged left hand. "And you?"
  "A little sore. This implant was larger than the others. More complex.
Another day or two and I'll be fine."
  "I'm glad everything went well."
  "Yes. Thank you."
  They go through the ritual of forced smiles again. "It's good to see you,"
he says. "Yes. Very good to see you."
   They are silent. But though the conversation has faltered, neither begins
to depart. He is surprised how unmoved he is by her beauty today: she is
as splendid as ever, but he feels nothing, nothing at all, only a kind of
abstract admiration, as he might feel for a marble statue or a spectacular
sunset. He tests it. He summons memories. The coolness of her thighs
against his lips. The solidity of her breasts cupped in his hands. The little
grunt as he thrusts himself into her. The fragrance of her dark torrent of
hair. Nothing. The all-night conversations, when there was so much to tell
each other. Nothing. Nothing. Thus does treason carbonize love. But she is
still beautiful.
  "Shadrach—"
  He waits. She is groping for words. He suspects he knows what she
wants to say: to tell him once more that she is sorry, that she had no
choice, that although she betrayed him it was only out of a sense of the
inevitability of what would befall. It is an endless awkward moment.
  At last she says, "We're doing well on the project."
  "So I've been told."
   "I have to go on with it, you know. There's no other way for me. But I
want you to realize that I hope it never is used. I mean, it's valuable
research, it's a tremendous breakthrough, but I want it to remain just a
laboratory achievement, just a—a—" She falters.
   "That's all right," he tells her, and hears an odd tenderness creeping
into his voice. "Don't torment yourself about it, Nikki. Do your work, do it
well. That's all you need to think about. Do your work." For an instant,
only an instant, he feels a flicker of what he once felt for her. "Don't worry
about me," he says gently. "I'm going to be all right."



  On the third day the bandage comes off his hand. There is only a faint
pink line to mark the place where the implant was inserted, a barely
perceptible furrow against the darker pink of his palm. Like his master,
Shadrach is a swift healer. He flexes his hand—slight muscular soreness,
he notes—but is careful not to clench it into a fist. He is not ready to test
the new device.



   At the end of the week, with Genghis Mao rapidly mending, Shadrach
allows himself an evening in Karakorum. He goes alone, on a mild summer
night with the scent of new blossoms and the hint of rain in the air, and
hires a cubicle in the dream-death pavilion, strips and dons the loincloth
and the chest bands, takes the polished talisman from the lioness-headed
guide, looks upon the pattern of spiraling lines, disappears into the
hallucination. Once more he dies. He gives up hope and fear and striving
and dismay and anxiety and need, he gives up breath and life, he dies to
the world and is reborn in another place, rising above his hollow outworn
husk, looking down upon it, that long brown empty form with its spidery
sprawl of limbs hanging out uselessly, and floats out, out into the fragrant
void, where time and space are cut loose from their moorings. Everything
is accessible to him, for he is dead. He enters a city of ox carts and
aileyways and low wooden buildings strung out in rambling impenetrable
mazes, a place of picturesque squalor and medieval filth, and sees the
lords and ladies in their green and scarlet brocaded robes tumbling in the
unpaved streets, howling, sobbing, trembling, sweating, crying to the
Lord, clutching at the throbbing swollen places under their arms and
between their legs. Yes, yes, the Black Death, and Shadrach goes among
them saying, I am Shadrach the healer, come from the land of the dead to
save you, and he touches their fiery swellings and lifts them to their feet
and sends them forth into life, and they sing hymns to his name. And he
moves on to another city, a place of bamboo and silk, of gardens rich with
chrysanthemums and junipers and small contorted pines, and in the
stillness of the day a fireball bursts in the sky, a great mushroom cloud
bellies toward the roof of heaven, houses break into flame, the people rush
into the blazing streets, small folk, almond-eyed, yellow-skinned, and
Shadrach, standing like an ebony tower among them, tells them in soft
tones not to be afraid, that it is only a dream that afflicts them, that pain
and even death may yet be rejected, and he spreads forth his hands to
them, soothing them, draining the fire from them. The sky fills with ash
and soot and pumice and it is the night of Cotopaxi once more, the
volcano rumbles and hisses and drones, the air turns to poison, and the
young black doctor kneels in the streets, breathing in the mouths of the
fallen, raising them, comforting them. And he moves on. The howling
Assyrian hordes ride through the streets of Jerusalem, slashing without
mercy, and Shadrach patiently sews together the sundered bodies of the
fallen, saying. Rise, walk, I am the Healer. The great woolly beasts flee as
the glacial snows melt beneath the suddenly colossal sun, and the people of
the caves grow thin and feeble, and Shadrach teaches them to eat grasses
and seeds, to collect the berries of the newly sprouted thickets, to string
weirs across the streams to snare the frisky fishes, and they worship him
and paint his image on the walls of the holy cave. He takes Jesus from the
cross when the Roman soldiers go off to the tavern, slinging the limp body
over one shoulder and hurrying into a dark hut, where he wipes the blood
from the maimed hands and feet, he applies ointments and unguents, he
mixes a healing draft of herbs and juices and gives it to Him to drink,
telling Him, Go. Walk. Live. Preach. He seines the fragments of Osiris
from the Nile, he rejoins the severed members, he breathes life into the
fallen god and summons Isis, saying, Here is Osiris. I, Shadrach, restore
him to you. The sky grows green with strange cloudbursts, and the Virus
War breaks above the cities of mankind, and the alien rot enters the
bodies of mankind, and as the people groan and fall. Shadrach raises
them, saying, Fear nothing. Death is transient. Life awaits you. And in the
heavens is the smiling face of Genghis Mao. Shadrach drifts across the
centuries, moving freely in space and time, and gradually he becomes
aware that he is no longer alone, that there is a woman beside him,
plucking at his sleeve, trying to tell him something. He ignores her. He
hears celestial choirs singing his name: "Shadrach! Shadrach!" And the
heavenly voices cry, "O Shadrach! You are the true healer, you are the
prince of princes! Shadrach who was, Genghis to be! All hail Shadrach!"
And a voice like thunder cries out, "You henceforth shall be known as
Genghis III Mao V Khan!"
   And the woman plucks at his sleeve, and he sees that she is Katya, and
he says, "What do you want?" She says, It's too late. He says, "The next
donor's already been picked?" Yes. "I don't suppose you'd care to tell me
his name." I don't think! should. "Who is he?" You, she says.The world
erupts in flame and flood. The laughter of Genghis Mao rolls through the
heavens, shattering mountains. Shadrach awakens. He sits up. He
clenches his fist and holds it tightly clenched. Out of Ulan Bator, four
hundred kilometers to the east, comes the terrible jolt of Genghis Mao's
agony, the silent scream of the sensors reporiing the wave of pain that is
sweeping through the Khan.



 Shadrach approaches Interface Three and announces, "Shadrach
Mordecai to serve the Khan."
  He is scanned. He is approved. He is admitted.
   It is close to midnight. Shadrach goes at once to the Khan's bedroom,
but Genghis Mao is not there. Shadrach frowns. The Khan has been strong
enough to leave his bed for the past several days, but it is odd that he
should be wandering around this late at night. Shadrach finds a servitor
who tells him that the Khan has spent most of the evening in the secluded
study known as the Khan's Retreat, on the far side of the seventy-five-story
compound, and is probably there now.
   Onward, then. Into the Khan's office—he is not there—and thence to the
private imperial dining room, empty, and then Shadrach goes into his
own office, where he pauses a moment, collecting himself amid his
familiar and beloved possessions, his sphygmomanometers and scalpels,
his microtomes and trephines. Here, in a flask, is the authentic abdominal
aorta of Genghis II Mao IV Khan. Surely a treasure of medical history,
that one. And here, the newest addition to Shadrach's museum, is a lock of
Genghis Mao's thick, rank, preternaturally dark hair, an exhibit perhaps
more fitting for a museum of witchcraft and voodoo than one of medicine,
but yet appropriate, for it was removed in the course of preparations for
brain surgery carried out successfully in the celebrated patient's ninetieth
(or eighty-fifth, or ninety-fifth, or whatever) year of life. And so. Onward.
He presents himself to the door of the Khan's Retreat and asks entry.
  The door rolls back.
   The Khan's Retreat is the room least used on the floor, accessible only
through Shadrach's office and insulated against the intrusion of even the
loudest external distractions. Its ceiling is low, its lights are dim, its
furnishings are ornate and oriental, running toward thick draperies and
elaborate carpets. Genghis Mao lies on a cushioned divan along the
left-hand wall. Already his shaven scalp is coveted by a thin black stubble.
The vitality of the man is irrepressible. But he looks shaken, even dazed.
  "Shadrach," he says. His voice is thick and scratchy. "I knew you'd get
here. You felt it, didn't you? About an hour and a half ago. I thought my
head was going to explode."
  "I felt it, yes."
   "You told me you were putting a valve in me. To drain off the fluid, you
said."
  "We did, sir."
  "Doesn't it work right?"
  "It works perfectly, sir," Shadrach says mildly.
    Genghis Mao looks confused. "Then what made my head hurt so much a
litlle while ago?"
  "This did," says Shadrach. He smiles and stretches forth his left hand
and clenches his fist.
   For a moment nothing happens. Then Genghis Mao's eyes widen in
shock and amazement. He growls and clamps his hands to his temples. He
bites his lip, he bows his naked head, he drives his knuckles against his
eyes, he mutters anguished guttural curses. The implanted sensors that
report on the bodily functions of the Khan tell Shadrach of the intense
reactions within Genghis Mao: pulse and respiration rates climbing
alarmingly, blood pressure dropping, intracranial pressure severe.
Genghis Mao coils into a huddled ball, shivering, groaning. Shadrach lets
his fingers relax. Gradually the pain recedes from Genghis Mao, the tense
crumpled body uncoils, and Shadrach ceases to feel the broadcast of shock
symptoms. Genghis Mao looks up. He stares at Shadrach for a long
moment.
  "What have you done to me?" Genghis Mao asks in a harsh whisper.
   "Installed a valve in your skull, sir. To drain away the dangerous
accumulations of cerebrospinal fluid. However, I should tell you that the
action of the valve has been designed to be reversible. Upon telemetered
command it can be made to pump fluid into the cranial ventricles instead
of draining it from them. I control the action of the valve, here, by a
piezoelectric crystal implanted in my palm. A twitch of my hand and the
fluid ceases to drain. A harder twitch and I can pump it upward. I can
interrupt your life processes. I can cause you instant pain of the kind you
have now experienced twice, and in a surprisingly short span of time I
could cause your death."
  Genghis Mao's facial expression is entirely opaque. He considers
Shadrach's declaration in silence.
  Eventually he says, "Why have you done this to me, Shadrach?"
  "To protect myself, sir."
  The Khan manages a glacial smile. "You thought I would use your body
for Project Avatar?"
  "I was certain of it, sir."
   "Wrong. It wouldn't ever have happened. You're too important for me
as you are, Shadrach."
  "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
   "You think I'm lying. I tell you that there was never any possibility we
would have activated Project Avatar with you as the donor. Don't
misunderstand me, Shadrach. I'm not pleading with you now. I'm simply
telling you how things really stand."
   "Yes, sir. But I know your teachings concerning redundancy, sir. I
feared I was about to be made dispensable, I have made myself
indispensable now, I think."
  "Would you kill me?" Genghis Mao asks.
  "If I felt my life was in danger, yes."
  "What would Hippocrates say about that?"
  "The right of self defense is allowed even to physicians, sir."
   Genghis Mao's smile grows warmer. He seems to be enjoying this
discussion. There is no trace of anger on his face.
   He says calmly, merely raising a speculative hypothesis, "Suppose I have
you seized by stealth, immobilized before you can clench your fist, and put
to death?"
   Shadrach shakes his head, "The implant in my hand is keyed to the
electrical output of my brain. If I die, if I'm mindpicked in any way, if
there's any sort of significant interruption in my brain waves, the valve
automatically begins pumping cerebro-spinal fluid to your medulla. The
moment of my death is the automatic prelude to your own, sir. Our fates
are joined. Guard my life, sir, for your own sake."
   "And if I have the valve removed from my head and replaced by one that
isn't quite as—ah—versatile?"
  "No, sir. There's no way you could enter surgery without my implant
system notifying me of it. I'd take defensive action, naturally, at the first
moment. No. We have become one entity in two bodies, sir. And we'll
remain that way forever."
  "Very clever. Who built this mechanical marvel for you?"
  "Buckmaster did, sir."
  "Buckmaster? But he's been dead since May. You couldn't have known
then—"
  "Buckmaster is still alive, sir," Shadrach says softly.
   Genghis Mao considers that. He grows extremely thoughtful. He is
silent for a long while. "Still alive. Strange."
  "Yes."
 "I don't understand. " Shadrach makes no reply. After a time Genghis
Mao says, "You've planted a bomb in me.”
  "So to speak, sir, I have."
  "I have power over all of mankind. And you have power over me,
Shadrach. Do you realize what that makes you? You are the true Khan
now! All hail, Genghis III Mao V!" Genghis Mao laughs savagely. "Do you
understand that? Do you know what you have achieved?"
  "The thought has crossed my mind," Shadrach admits.
   "You could force my resignation. You could compel me to name you as
my successor. You could kill me and assume the Chairmanship, perfectly
legitimately. You see that? Of course you see that. Is that what you mean
to do?"
  "No, sir. The last thing in the world I want is to be Chairman."
  "Go ahead. Wiggle your hand at me, stage a coup d'etat. Take power,
Shadrach. I'm old, tired, bored, crumbling. I'm willing to be overthrown. I
admire your shrewdness. I'm fascinated by what you've done. No one has
ever fooled me so thoroughly before, do you know that? You've
accomplished what thousands of enemies have utterly failed to do. Quiet
Shadrach, loyal Shadrach, dependable Shadrach—you have me beaten.
You own me. I am your puppet now, do you see that? Go on. Make yourself
Chairman. You've earned it, Shadrach."
  "It's not what I want."
  "What do you want, then?"
  "To continue as your physician. To protect your health and strive to
extend your life. To remain by your side and serve you according to my
oath."
  "That's all?"
  "That's all. No, there's one thing more, sir."
  "Let's hear it."
  "I request a place on the Committee, sir."
  "Ah."
  "Specifically, I want authority in the sphere of public health.
Government medical policy."
  "Ah. Yes."
   "Control over distribution of the Antidote, sir. I mean to develop a
program for immediate worldwide treatment of the healthy population,"
Shadrach says. "And expansion of whatever programs currently exist for
research into a permanent cure for the organ-rot. That is, a total reversal
of what I undersiand is existing PRC policy."
  "Ah!" Genghis Mao begins to laugh. "Now it emerges! You do intend to
be Khan, then! I keep the Chairmanship, but you call the tunes. Is that it,
Shadrach? Is that what you've engineered? Very well. You have me. I'm
yours, Shadrach. You'll join the Committee at the next meeting. Draw up
your policy statements and submit them." He glances somberly at
Shadrach's left hand. "All hail," the Chairman cries, "Genghis III Mao V!"



   When he leaves the Khan's Retreat, Shadrach's route back to his own
suite takes him through his office, through Committee Vector One, and
into Surveillance Vector One, where he halts awhile, as is his habit, to
watch the show on the winking screens. All is quiet in the Grand Tower of
the Khan. It is the depth of night; all Asia sleeps. But across the planet, out
there in the Trauma Ward, life goes on, and also death. Shadrach stands
before the multitude of screens, following the random flow, the suffering,
the striving, the struggling, the dying. The walking dead, wandering the
streets of Nairobi, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Rome, San Francisco, Peking,
shambling across all the continents, the procession of the damned, the
lost, the tortured, the condemned. Somewhere out there is Bhisma Das.
Somewhere, Meshach Yakov. Somewhere, Jim Ehrenreich. Shadrach
wishes them joy and good health for such of life as is left to them. To all,
joy! To all, good health!
  He thinks of the laughter of Genghis Mao. How amused the Khan
seemed at his predicament! How relieved, almost, at having the ultimate
authority stolen from him! But the Khan is beyond comprehension; the
Khan is alien, mysterious, unfathomable, ultimately inscrutable. Shadrach
does not really know what will happen now. He cannot imagine what
counterploy Genghis Mao may already have conceived, what traps he is
even now devising. Shadrach will walk warily and hope for the best. He
has planted a bomb in Genghis Mao, yes, but he has also seized a tiger by
the tail, and he must be careful lest he stumble between the metaphors
and be destroyed.
   He stands mesmerized before the dazzling dance of the screens of
Surveillance Vector One. It is the fourth of July, 2012. Wednesday. Gentle
rain is falling in Ulan Bator, which next week shall be renamed Altan
Mangu in honor of the slain viceroy, who already has been forgotten by
most of mankind. In this night death will travel the globe, harvesting his
thousands; but in the morning, Shadrach Mordecai vows, things will
begin to change. He stretches forth his left hand. He studies it as though it
be a thing of precious jade, of rarest ivory. Tentatively he closes it, almost
but not quite clenching his fist. He smiles. He touches the tips of his
fingers to his lips and blows a kiss to all the world.