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.  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.  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!
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.  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.  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.
 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.    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.  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.  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.  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.   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.  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.
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.  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.  '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."

"Because I hurt," he says. "Because someone I loved sold me out.
"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.  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.  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.  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'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.   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.  Don't you ever want to scream and rant? Do you have to accept everything?  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.
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."
 "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'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.  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.
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!
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.  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.  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.  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.

"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?"

"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."

"Not particularly."
"I can never tell when you're being sarcastic."
"Not this time."' he says.
They stare at each other strangely again.  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.  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.  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.  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.
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.  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
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?  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.
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.  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.  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.  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.
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.
 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—"