Catching the hammock for a moment to stabilize it, he mutters an apology. ''Trouble with the Khan," he says, groping along the floor for his casually discarded clothing. He is fully awake now, but his body is so saturated with the hormonal outpourings engendered by surprise and alarm that his hands shake and his jangled mind refuses to focus on the simple tasks of dressing. Has the Chairman's life-support system malfunctioned? Have assassins broken into Genghis Mao's bedroom? The Chairman still lives—the telemetering leaves no doubt of that—and whatever it was that gave Genghis Mao so severe a shock seems already to be over, for his biophysical output is settling back toward normal, though there are ample indications of continuing neurasthenic hyperesthesia and associated cardiovascular and vasomotor distress.
Wearing only his trousers and still feeling wobbly—never before, in all the time he has worn the implants, have the signals from Genghis Mao had such an impact on him—he approaches the interface. "Shadrach Mordecai to serve the Khan," he says, and waits, and nothing happens for nearly a minute. Dr. Mordecai repeats the password, more urgently. Still the door remains shut. "Come on!" he snaps.  Lights flash, scanners scan, but nothing else occurs. Shadrach realizes that the interface system must have gone into emergency mode, under which the flow of personnel to and from the inner chambers is even more strictly controlled than usual. This supports the hypothesis of an assassination attempt. Shadrach shouts, gesticulates, pounds the interface with his fists, even makes faces at it; but the security system is obviously concerned with other matters, and it will not let him in.  The data coming from Genghis Mao holds firm, at least: the Khan's signals indicate that he is still disturbed and overexcited but that he is slowly recovering from his moment of alarm.
Maddeningly, Shadrach is kept another minute or so in the inner holding chamber; at last it yields, and he lopes swiftly through Surveillance Vector One, which is deserted, to Genghis Mao's bedroom. Here the secondary door scanner delays him no more than the usual microsecond, and he bursts in to find Genghis Mao alive and awake, sitting up in bed, surrounded by five or six servants and a dozen or more members of the Committee, all milling about in a frenzied excitement very much contraindicated at this phase of the Chairman's recuperation. Mordecai sees General Gonchigdorge, Vice-Chairman Ionigylakts, Security Chief Avogadro, even Belá Horthy, looking horribly liverish and hung over after his excessive night in Karakorum. And more people are constantly arriving. Shadrach is appalled. He can hear the voice of Genghis Mao, clear but weak, cutting through the overall hubbub, but there is such a mob around the bed that Mordecai is unable to reach the Khan's side.
"Terrible, terrible,'' Ionigylakis says, shaking his head from side to side like a wounded bear.
Shadrach turns to him. "What's going on?"
"Mangu," Ionigylakis blurts. "Assassinated!"
"What? How?"
"Out the window. Off the balcony." Ponderously the big Greek pantomimes the action with great sweeps of his arm—the open window, trie draperies fluttering in the breeze, the curve of The body as it executes its swooping seventy-five-story descent, the abrupt ghastly termination of the graceful dive, the hideous impact at plaza level, the tiny final rebounding motion of the crumpled body.
Shadrach shudders. "When was this?"
"Ten, fifteen minutes ago. Horthy was just arriving at the tower. He saw the whole thing."
"Who notified the Khan? Horthy?"
Ionigylakis shrugs. "How would I know?"
"They should have waited. The shock of news like that—"
"First I heard of it, I was at my desk in Committee Vector One and the lights flash emergency mode. Then people running around everywhere, crazy. Then everyone running in here."
"Which is even crazier," Shadrach says, scowling. "Making a lot of noise, upsetting the Khan's nervous system, filling the room with potentially infectious bacteria—doesn't anyone have any sense? We're jeopardizing his life in this chaos. Help me clear the room."
"But the Khan has sent for these people!"
"Doesn't matter. He doesn't need tham all. I'm responsible for his health, and I want everybody out of here except, oh, Avogadro and Gonchigdorge and maybe Eyuboglu."
"But—"
"No buts. The rest of you ought to return to Committee Vector One so you can handle more trouble if more trouble comes. What if this is the start of a worldwide revolutionary uprising? Who's going to face the crisis if you're all in here? Go.
"Go. I want to clear the room. Get everybody out, will you? That's an order."
Ionigylakis still looks doubtful, but after a moment's hesitation he nods and begins pushing people enthusiastically toward the door, bellowing at them that they must leave, while Shadrach, catching the attention of the security chief, tells him to post his men in the hall to keep visitors out.
Shadrach approaches the bed. Genghis Mao looks drawn and tense, his forehead moist, shiny, his skin tone pallid and grayish. He is breathing shallowly and his eyes, always restless, move now with manic intensity. The life-support system has activated itself and is feeding the Khan a steady flow of glucose, sodium chloride, and blood plasma; Shadrach, glancing quickly at the readings on the instrument panel and integrating them with his own telemetered inputs, assesses Genghis Mao's level of blood potassium and plasma magnesium, his capillary permeability, his arteriolar vasoconstriction, and his venous pressure, and makes manual adjustments in the rate of medication. "Try to relax," he tells Genghis Mao. "Sit back. Let your limbs go limp."
"They killed him," the Khan says hoarsely. "Have you heard? They threw him from his window."
"Yes. I know. Lie back, please, sir."
"The killers must still be somewhere inside this building. I'll supervise the investigation myself. Wheel me into Surveillance Vector One, Shadrach."
"That won't be possible. You'll have to remain here, sir."
"Don't talk that way to me. Avogadro! Avogadro! Help me into the wheelchair!"
"I'm sorry, sir," Shadrach murmurs, signaling frantically behind his back to Avogadro to ignore the command of Genghis Mao. At the same time Shadrach nudges a pedal that sends a flow of tranquilizing 9-pordenone into the Chairman's body. "It could be fatal for you to leave the bed now, sir. Do you understand me? It could kill you."
Genghis Mao understands that. He sinks back against the pillow, looking almost relieved at being overruled, and as the drug takes effect his face relaxes, his demeanor becomes far less intense. Genghis Mao is much weaker, Shadrach realizes, than the instruments indicate. "They killed him," the Khan says again, ruminatingly, absent-voicedly. "Only a boy and they killed him. He had no enemies." And to Shadrach's amazement the old man's lips begin to quiver and his eyes fill with tears, Eh? What's this? A show of some genuine emotion by Genghis Mao? A kind of quasi-paternal grief seizing the old man? But how can that be, considering the bleak fate Genghis Mao had himself intended for Mangu? Either yesterday's surgery has so enfeebled the Khan that he has grown uncharacteristically sentimental, suddenly entering an inconceivable dotage, or else Mordecai is misreading the signs: not grief but fear, cognizance of personal peril, awareness that if assassins could reach Mangu they might well find a way into the sanctum of Genghis Mao. That must be it. The Khan is angry and afraid, but because he is so diminished physically by his operation, his anger and fear momentarily take the form of sorrow. And indeed, after a few moments more Genghis Mao grows calm again, and says, in a low, controlled, newly resonant voice. "This is the first successful attack against our rule that we have experienced. It is unprecedented and must be met with force to demonstrate that we have lost none of our vigor and that our authority will not be undermined." He beckons Avogadro to his bedside and begins to dictate plans for mass arrests, wholesale interrogation of suspected subversives, tightened security measures both within the Grand Tower and in Ulan Bator in general. He sounds now less like a bereaved elder than a threatened despot. The loss of Mangu, it quickly becomes clear, means little or nothing to him personally, Mangu having been such a cipher, but it is a frightening omen of a breach in the power of his regime, and will require a reign of terror.
In the midst of these grim plans Genghis Mao suddenly looks up at Shadrach as if noticing him for the first time that morning, and says amiably, "You have nothing on but your trousers, Doctor. Why is that?"
"I came here in a hurry. I got a tremendous jolt from the implants, strong enough to wake me up, and I knew there must be trouble."
"Yes. When Horthy brought me news of the assassination I became quite agitated."
"Your damned doors kept me waiting for five minutes, though. We ought to do something about that. Someday it'll be a critical matter for me to get to you in time, and Interface Three will give me the business again and it'll be too late."
"Mmm. We'll talk about that." The Khan eyes Shadrach's bare torso with some amusement and, it would seem, admiration, surveying the pronounced ridges of muscle down his belly, the long lean arms, the wide powerful shoulders. It is a pleasing body, Shadrach knows, trim and shapely and covered all over with smooth lovely chocolate skin, an athletic and graceful body, not much changed from the days nearly twenty years ago when he was a respectable college sprinter and passable basketball player, but nevertheless there is something weird and unnerving about this close inspection. After a moment the Khan says, sounding almost jolly, "You look very healthy, Shadrach."
"I try to keep in shape, sir."
"A wise doctor you are. So many of your profession worry about everyone's health except their own. But why were you still in bed at this hour of the morning?"
"I was in Karakorum late last night," Shadrach confesses.
Genghis Mao laughs explosively. "Dissipation! Debauchery! So that's how you keep in shape, is it?"
"Well—"
"At ease. I'm not serious." The Chairman's mood has changed astonishingly in these few minutes. This badgering banter, this light teasing—it is hard to believe that he was weeping for dead Mangu just a moment ago. "You can go and get your shirt, if you like. I think I can spare you for a few minutes, Shadrach."
"I'd prefer to stay a while longer, sir. It's not chilly this way."
"As you wish." Genghis Mao seems to lose interest in him. He turns back to Avogadro, still waiting by the bedside, and rattles off half a dozen more repressive measures to be put into effect at once. Then, dismissing the security chief, the Chairman summons Vice-Chairman Eyuboglu and outlines, seemingly impromptu, an elaborate program for the virtual canonization of Mangu: a colossal state funeral, a prolonged period of global mourning, the renaming of highways and cities, the erection of costly and imposing memorial monuments in every major capital. All this for such a trifling boy? Why? Shadrach wonders. This is an outpouring of mortuary energy worthy of a demigod, an Augustus Caesar, a Siegfried, even an Osiris. Why? Why, if not that Mangu was a symbolic extension of Genghis Mao himself, his link to tomorrow, his hope of bodily reincarnation? Yes, Shadrach decides. In ordering this bizarrely inappropriate posthumous inflation of the murdered man, Genghis Mao must be mourning not Mangu but himself.
Was Mango really murdered, though? Avogadro, waiting for Mordecai in the hallway when the doctor finally leaves Genghis Mao, is not so sure of that. The security chief, a big-boned, thick-bodied, quick-witted man with cool eyes and a wide, quizzical mouth, draws Shadrach aside near the entrance to Surveillance Vector One and says softly. "Is he on any medication that might be making him mentally unstable?"
"Not particularly. Why?"
"I've never seen him as upset as this before."
"He's never had his viceroy assassinated before, either."
"What leads you to think there's been an assassination?"
"Because I—because Ionigylakis said—because—" Shadrach pauses, confused. "Wasn't there one?"
"Who knows? Horthy says he saw Mangu fall out the window. Period. He didn't see anyone pushing him. We've already run playback checks on all personnel scanners and there's no record of any unauthorized individual entering or leaving the entire building this morning, let alone having reached the seventy-fifth floor."
"Perhaps somebody was hiding up here overnight," Shadrach suggests.
Avogadro sighs. He looks faintly amused. "Spare me the amateur detective work. Doctor. Naturally, we've looked through yesterday's records too."
"I'm sorry if I—"
"I didn't mean to be sarcastic. My point is simply that we've considered most of the obvious possibilities. It's not easy for an assassin to get inside this building, and I don't seriously believe that any assassins did. Naturally, that doesn't rule out the chance that Mangu was pushed by someone whose presence within the building would not seem unusual, as for example General Gonchigdorge, or you, or me—"
"Or Genghis Mao," Shadrach offers. "Tiptoeing from his bed and tossing Mangu through the window."
"You get the idea. What I'm saying is that anyone up here might have killed Mangu. Except that there's no evidence that anyone did. You know, whenever someone passes through a door up here, it's recorded. No one entered Mangu's bedroom this morning, either on the interface side or the elevator side. The tracking cores are absolutely blank. The last one to go in was Mangu himself, about midnight. Preliminary inspection indicates no traces of intruders in the room, no strange fingerprints, no flecks of someone else's dandruff, no stray hairs, no bits of lint. And no sign of a struggle. Mangu was a strong man, you know. He wouldn't have been easy to overpower."
"You're suggesting it was probably suicide?" Shadrach asks.
"I am. Obviously. No one on my staff takes any other theory at all seriously at this point. But the Chairman is certain it was an assassination, and you should have seen him before you got here. Almost hysterical, wild-eyed, raving. You know, it doesn't look good for me and my men if he believes there's been an assassination. We're supposed to make assassinations impossible up here. But it goes beyond whether I lose my job, Doctor. There's this whole fantastic purge that he's instituting, the arrests, the interrogations, restrictive measures, a tremendously messy and unpleasant and expensive enterprise, all of it, so far as I can see, absolutely useless. What I want to know," Avogadro says, "is whether you think there's some chance the Chairman will be willing to take a more rational attitude toward Mangu's death when he's further along in his recovery."
"I don't know. But I don't think so. I've never seen him change his mind about anything."
"But the operation—"
"Has weakened him, sure. Physically and psychologically. But it hasn't greatly affected his reason in any way that I can perceive. He's always had this thing about assassins, of course, and obviously he's assuming Mangu was murdered because it fulfills some kind of inner need for him, some fantasy projection, something very dark and intricate. I think he'd have made the same assumption even if he'd been in perfect health when Mangu went out the window. So his recovery per se isn't going to be a factor in getting him to reevaluate Mangu's death. All I can suggest is that you wait three or four days until he's strong enough to be getting back on the job and go in there with the findings of your completed investigation, show him conclusively that there's no evidence whatsoever of murder, and count on his basic sanity to bring him to an acceptance of the fact that Mangu killed himself."
"Suppose I bring him the report this afternoon?"
"He's not really ready for all this stress. Besides, is such a speedy investigation going to be plausible to him? No, I'd recommend waiting at least three days, preferably four or five."
"And meanwhile," Avogadro says, "suspects will be rounded up, minds will be pried into, the innocent will suffer, my staff will be wasting its energies on a foolish pursuit of a nonexistent assassin—"
"Can't you delay the purge a few days, then?"
"He ordered us to start at once, Doctor."
"Yes, I know, but—"
"He ordered us to start at once. We've done so."
"Already?"
"Already. I understand the meaning of an order from the Chairman. Within the past ten minutes the first arrests have taken place. I can try to stretch out the process of interrogation so that as little harm as possible will come to the prisoners before I can bring my findings on Mangu's death to the Chairman, but I have no authority to sidetrack his instructions altogether." Quietly Avogadro adds, "I wouldn't want to risk it, either."
"Then there'll be a purge," Shadrach says, shrugging. "I regret that as much as you do, I suppose. But there's no way to stop it now, eh? And no real hope that you'll persuade Genghis Mao to swallow the suicide theory, not this afternoon or tomorrow or next week, not if he wants to think Mangu was murdered. I'm sorry."
"I am also," Avogadro says. "Well. Thanks for your time, Doctor." He begins to move away; then, pausing, he gives Shadrach a deep, uncomfortably appraising look, and says, "Oh, one more thing. Doctor. Is there any reason you might know of for Mangu to have wanted to kill himself?" Shadrach frowns. He considers things.
"No," he answers after a moment. "No. Not that I'm aware of."
He goes on into Surveillance Vector One. The big room is crowded with high staff personnel. He begins to feel a little odd, wandering around headquarters without a shirt. General Gonchigdorge sits at Genghis Mao's ornate throne, jabbing with stubby fingers at the enormous keyboard that controls the whole vast spy-eye apparatus. As the general pounds the buttons, images of life out there in the Trauma Ward swing jerkily in and out of focus, zooming into view and vanishing rapidly. The scene on the screens looks just as dizzyingly random as when the machine is left to its own whims; not surprising, for Gonchigdorge really does seem to be tapping the keys without system, without purpose, in a kind of sullen petulance, as though he hopes to uncover a revolutionary cadre ouf there by some stochastic process of nondirected scoops—dipping down into the world here and there until he comes upon a band of desperados waving a banner, we are conspirators. But the screens reveal only the usual human story, people working, walking, suffering, quarreling, dying.
Horthy, appearing silently at Mordecai's left elbow, says, with a certain glee, "The arrests have already begun."
"I know. Avogadro told me."
"Did he tell you that they have a prime suspect?"
"Who?"
Horthy delicately prods his thumbs into the corners of his bulging, bloodshot eyes. A psychedelic effluvium still hovers about him. "Roger Buckmaster," he says. "The microengineering man, you know."
"Yes. I know. I've worked with him."
"Buckmaster was heard making wild statements at Karakorum last night," Horthy says. "Calling for the overthrow of Genghis Mao, yelling subversion at the top of his lungs. The Citpols picked him up, finally, but they decided he was just drunk and let him go."
In a low voice Shadrach says, "Is that what happened to you?"
"Me? To me? I don't understand what you mean."
"At the tube-train station. I saw you there, remember? While they were running the tape of Mangu's speech. You made some remarks about the Antidote distribution program, and then the Citpols—"
"No," Horthy says. "You must be mistaken." His eyes fix on Shadrach's and lock there. They are intimidating eyes, cold and hostile, despite all their dissipated bleariness. With great precision Horthy says, "It was someone else you saw at Karakorum, Dr. Mordecai."
"You weren't there last night?"
"It was someone else."
Shadrach chooses to take the crude hint, and decides not to press the issue. "My apologies. Tell me about Buckmaster. Why do they think he's the one?"
"His eccentric behavior last night was suspicious."
"Is that all?"
"You'll have to ask the security people for the rest."
"Was he found near Mangu's apartment at the time of the murder?"
"I couldn't say. Dr. Mordecai."
"All right." On the surveillance screens, in repellent close-up, the image of a girl vomiting. It is the crimson puke of organ-rot, in glistening lifelike color. Horthy seems almost to smile at the sight, as though nothing horrid is alien to him. Shadrach says, "One more thing. You saw Mangu fall, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"And then you notified Genghis Mao?"
"I notified the guards in the lobby first."
"Of course."
"And then I went to the seventy-fifth floor. The security people had already sealed it, but I was able to enter."
"Going straight to the Chairman's bedroom?"
Horthy nods. "Which was under triple guard. I obtained admittance only by insisting on my ministerial privileges."
"Was Genghis Mao awake?"
"Yes. Reading PRC reports."
"What would you say was his general state of health?"
"Quite good. He looked pale and weak, but not unusually so, considering that he had just had a major operation. He greeted me and saw from my expression that something was wrong, and asked me, and I told him what had happened."
"Which was?"
"What else?" Horthy says snappishly. "That Mangu had fallen from his window, naturally."
"Is that how you put it? 'Mangu has fallen from his window'?"
"Something like that."
"Did you talk about his being pushed, maybe?"

"Please. This is important. I need to know whether the Khan arrived at the idea that Mangu was assassinated by himself, or if you inadvertently put the suggestion in his mind."
Horthy stares balefully up at Shadrach Mordecai. "I told him exactly what I saw: Mangu falling from the window. I drew no conclusions about how it had happened. Even if someone had thrown him, how much could I have seen, four hundred meters below? At that distance Mangu himself was no bigger man a speck against the sky, a doll. I didn't recognize him until he had nearly reached the ground." A disconcerting gleam appears in Horthy's eyes. He leans close to Shadrach and says, almost crooning, "He looked so serene. Dr. Mordecai! Floating there above me—his eyes wide open, his hair straight out behindhim, his lips drawn back—he was smiling, I think. Smiling! And then he hit."
Ionigylakis, who has evidently been eavesdropping, interjects abruptly, "That's strange. If someone had just flung him from the window, would he have looked so cheerful?"
Shadrach shakes his head. "I doubt that Mangu was conscious at all by the time Horthy could see his face. That serene expression was probably just acceleration stupor."
"Perhaps," Horthy says crisply.
"Go on," Shadrach tells him. "You informed the Khan that Mangu had fallen. Then what happened?"
"He sat up so sharply that I thought he would break the medical machinery all around him. He turned red in the face and began to perspire. His breath came in gasps. Oh, it was very bad, Dr. Mordecai. I thought he would die from overexcitement. He started to wave his arms, to shout about assassins—suddenly he sank back against the pillow, he put his hands to his chest—"
"You thought he would die from overexcitement," Shadrach says. "But it never occurred to you beforehand that it might be unwise to trouble him with news like that, in his state of health."
"One doesn't think clearly at a time like that."
"One ought to, if one is in a position of high responsibility,"
"One's judgment is not always perfect," Horthy retorts. "Especially when one has nearly been killed oneself a few minutes before by a body plummeting from the sky. And when one realizes that the dead man is such an important figure in the government, in fact the viceroy. And when one suspects that his death may be murder, assassination, the beginning of revolution. And when—"
"All right," Shadrach says. "All right. He managed to survive the unnecessary shock. But what you did was very risky, Horthy. Worse: it was dumb. Extremely dumb." He frowns. "You think there's some conspiracy, eh?"
"I have no idea. Clearly it's a possibility."
"So is suicide, though."
Ionigylakis says, "You think so, Shadrach?"
"Avogadro certainly does."
"But Avogadro's men have arrested Buckmaster."
"I've heard. The poor crazy devil. I pity him."
Gonchigdorge is still jabbing buttons. The screens are full of weirdly distorted faces, as though the spy-eye lenses are getting much too close to their targets. Donna Labile, from the far side of the room, calls to Horthy, who gives Shadrach a frosty incomprehensible look and stalks away. Shadrach is altogether unable to make sense out of Horthy, but suddenly it does not matter. Nothing matters. This room is a madhouse, through which he wanders, bare-chested and feeling a bit of a chill, baffled by all the frantic activity around him. He feels too sane, too mundane, for this environment. The screens of Surveillance Vector One suddenly go blank, and then grow bright with wild jagged streaks of blue and green and red. General Gonchigdorge, in his heavy-handed pursuit of conspirators, has broken something.
“Fricifolia!" the general yells. "Get Frank Ficifolia up here! The machine has to be repaired!"
Ficifolia is already present, though. Cursing softly, he shoulders through the crowd toward the enthroned general. As he passes Shadrach he pauses to murmur, "Your friend Buckmaster's in the quiz room right now. I suppose you won't weep over that."
"On the contrary. Buckmaster wasn't in his right mind when he was hassling me last night. And now he'll pay for it."
"Avogadro himself is interrogating, I hear."
"Avogadro thinks it was suicide."
"So do I," Ficifolia says, and keeps going.
Shadrach has had enough. He heads for the interface. As he reaches it, he looks back at the turmoil, the blaring jags of color on the screens, Gonchigdorge shouting like an angry child, Horthy and Labile deep in some mysterious intense discussion punctuated by fierce Italo-Magyar gesticulations, Ionigylakis looming above everyone and announcing his confusions in booming tones, Frank Ficifolia squatting by an open panel to insert a long slender wrench into a turbulent spaghetti of bubble-circuits. While somewhere in the depths of this huge building Avogadro, who does not believe a murder was committed, is nevertheless preparing to administer torture to Roger Buckmaster, suspected of having committed that murder, even though Buckmaster almost certainly could not have been capable of murdering anyone this morning. And in the great bedchamber of the Khan that old, old man, his near-fatal episode of shock all but over according to the tickety-tock pulsations and quivers running through Shadrach Mordecai's body, lies in bed scheming with calm crazy dedication how best to make sacred the memory of the departed viceroy and how to destroy his supposed slayers. Enough, enough. More than enough: too much. Shadrach requests exit from the interface, which opens with blessed promptness and admits him to the holding chamber, and then, quickly, to his own apartment on the far side.
How peaceful it is here! Crowfoot is awake and out of the hammock; she has just taken a shower, and stands, bare, beautiful, in the middle of the room, drying herself, droplets of moisture still glittering on her smooth sleek skin, nipples puckered and taut in the coolness of the air. "I'm going to be awfully late getting to the lab today," she says casually. "What's been happening?"
"Everything. Mangu's dead, the Khan nearly had apoplexy when he found out, they've arrested Buckmaster, a general purge of subversives has been ordered, Horthy is—"
"Wait," she cries, blinking. "Dead? Mangu? How?"
"Fell out the window. Pushed or jumped."
"Oh."  "Oh, God. When was this?"
"Half an hour ago, more or less."
She crumples her towel into a ball, hurls it into a corner, and begins to pace the room, striding like a splendid perplexed tigress. Whirling on him, she demands, "Which window?"
"His own," he tells her, mystified by the drift of her question.
"Fell from the top of the building? His body must have been smashed to a ruin."
"I imagine so. But what—"
"Oh, Shadrach! My project!"
"What about it?"
"This sounds terribly inhuman, doesn't it? But what will happen to my project now? Without Mangu—"
"Oh," he says dully. "I hadn't considered that." "He was intended for—"
"Yes. Don't say it."
"It's awful of me to have that reaction."
"Was the entire project built about Mangu as the specific particular one—the recipient?"
"Not necessarily.  She crouches near the floor, folding her arms across her breasts. She is shivering. "I don't understand. Who would kill Mangu, anyway? What's going on? Is there going to be a revolution, Shadrach?"
"Mangu may have killed Mangu," he tells her. "No one knows yet. Avogadro's men didn't detect any sign of forced entry to his apartment."
"Yet they've arrested Buckmaster?"
"Because of the nonsense he was spouting last night in Karakorum, I suppose. But they haven't arrested Horthy, who was being just as subversive. Horthy's right next door in Surveillance Vector One, He was the one who brought the news about Mangu to Genghis Mao.
Nikki, looking up somberly, says, "Perhaps that's what he wanted to do."
Things grow calmer. The messages from the interior of Genghis Mao indicate that the medical crisis is past. The Khan is healing, the morning's upheavals will have no serious impact. Here at noon, Shadrach Mordecai at last dresses for the day, neutral gray doctor's clothes. He feels rootless, disoriented: too much sleep, after all these months of insomnia, the nap in Nikki's arms in Karakorum and then the long, emergency-interrupted spell in the hammock, and now his mind is foggy.
Heading for his office, he passes as usual through Surveillance Vector One, much quieter now than it was fifteen or twenty minutes before. The high panjandrums are gone, Gonchigdorge and Horthy and Labile and that crowd, and no one remains, except three underlings, a Citpol man and a couple of Avogadro's lieutenants, who stare moodily at the jumpy mosaic flitting across the hundreds of screens. Their eyes are glazed. Informational overkill, it is. They see so much that they know not what they see.
Bypassing Committee Vector One—Shadrach has no yearning to intrude on the politicos this tense morning—he takes the long route to his office, via Genghis Mao's own vacant office and the Khan's majestic dining room. It is, as always, comforting to be among his familiar talismans, his books, his collection of medical instruments. He wanders from case to case, getting himself together. Picks up his devaricator, sinister splay-elbowed forceps used to pry open wounds. Thinks of Mangu, splattered against the terrazzo pavement; banishes the thought. Examines the hacksaw with which some eighteenth-century surgeon accomplished amputations. Thinks of Genghis Mao, livid, beady-eyed, ordering mass arrests. Off with their heads! That may be next; why not? Fondles a fifteenth-century anatomical doll from Bologna, elegant ivory homunculus, female— what is the feminine of homunculus, he wonders? Homuncula? Feminacula?—the belly and breasts of which lift away at the push of a fingertip, revealing heart, lungs, abdominal organs, even a fetus crouching in the uterus like a kangaroo in the pouch. And the books, oh, yes, the precious musty books, formerly _ owned by great doctors of Vienna, Montreal, Savannah, New Orleans. Valesco de Tarania's Philonium Pharmaceutieum et Cheirurgicum, 1599!  Here is old Rudolf Virchow's Die Cellularpathologie, 1852, proclaiming that every living organism is "a cell state in which every state is a citizen," that a disease is "a conflict of citizens in this state, brought about by the action of external forces." Aux armes, citoyens! What would Virchow have said of transplanted livers, borrowed lungs? He'd call them hired mercenaries, no doubt: the Hessians of medical metaphor. At least they fight fair in the cellular wars, no sneaky defenestrations, no snipers on the overpass. And this huge book: Grootdoorn, Iconographies Medicalis, luscious old engravings—see, here. Saints Cosmas and Damian in the sixteenth-century portrait, shown grafting the dead Moor's leg to the cancer victim's stump. Prophetic. Transplant surgery circa 500 A.D., performed posthumously, no less, by the saintly surgeons. If I ever find the original of that print, Shadrach thinks, I'll give it to Warhaftig for Hanukkah.
He spends half an hour updating Genghis Mao's medical file, dictating a report on the liver operation, adding a postscript about this morning's brief alarm. Someday the printout of the Genghis Mao dossier is going to be a medical classic, ranking with the Smith Papyrus and the Fabrica, and he toils conscientiously over it, preparing his place in the history of his art. Just as he finishes the account of the current episode, Katya Lindman phones him.
"Can you come down to the Talos lab?" she asks. "I'd like to show you our latest mock-up."
"I suppose so. You've heard about Mangu?"
"Of course."
"You don't sound very concerned."
"What was Mangu? Mangu was an absence. Now the absence is absent. His death was more of an event than his whole existence."
"I doubt that he saw things that way himself."
"You are so compassionate, Shadrach," she says in the flat voice that he knows she reserves for mockery. "I wish I shared your love of mankind."
"I'll see you in fifteen minutes, Katya."
Her laboratory is on the ninth floor of the Grand Tower, a cluttered place festooned with cables, connectors, buses, coaxials, crates of bubble-chips, enough electronic gear to throttle a brontosaur. Out of this chaotic maze of materiel Lindman materializes, coming toward him in her customary slashing headlong stride. She is all business, very much the bustling woman of science.  The effect is severe, stark, and harsh, mitigated neither by the bare thighs nor the tightness of the skirt nor the exposed cleft of her breasts. Lindman is not a woman who works at projecting sexuality. Nor does she need to, with Shadrach; she holds a malign physical authority over him, the source of which he does not comprehend. He feels always when he is with her that he must be on guard— against what, he is not sure.
"Look," she says triumphantly, with a broad sweeping gesture.
He follows her pointing arm halfway across the laboratory to the one uncluttered place, a kind of dais, on which, under a dazzling spotlight, the current working model of the Genghis Mao automaton sits enthroned. A single thick yellow-and-red cable runs to it from a power unit. The automaton is half again as large as life, a massive imitation of the Chairman, plastic skin over metal armature; the face is an altogether convincing replica, the shoulders and chest look plausibly human, but below the diaphragm the robot Genghis Mao is an incomplete thing of struts and wires and bare circuitry, skinless and lacking even the internal mechanical musculature that fills its upper half. As Shadrach watches, the ersatz Chairman extends its right arm toward him and, with an altogether human impatient little flip of its hand, beckons him forward. "Go ahead," Katya Lindman says. He advances. When he is three or four meters away he halts and waits. The robot's head slowly turns to face him.  Imperceptibly the features rearrange themselves, without apparent transition; the robot now is scowling, and the wrath of Genghis Mao darkens the room. Off with their heads, yes, indeed. And then a smile. A cold one, for there is no other sort from Genghis Mao, but yet it is a smile that puts one at one's ease, Arctic though it is; and the smile of the robot is an uncanny replica of the smile of Genghis Mao. And, lastly, the wink, the famous wink of the Khan, that sly, disarming dip of the eyelid that cancels all the seeming ferocity, that communicates a redeeming sense of perspective, of self-appraisal: Don't take me so seriously, friend, I may not be the megalomaniac you think I am. And then, just as the wink has achieved its effect and the terror that Genghis Mao can generate with a glance has subsided, the face returns to its original expression, icy, remote, alien. "Well?" Lindman asks, after some while.
"Doesn't he speak?"
"Not yet. The audio is trivial to accomplish. We aren't bothering with it just now."
"That's the whole show, then?"
"That's it. You sound disappointed."
"Somehow I expected more. I've seen him do the grin already."
"But not the wink. The wink is new."
"Even so, Katya—you add a feather here and there, but you still don't have an eagle."
"What did you think I'd show you? A walking, talking Genghis Mao? The complete simulacrum overnight?" His disappointment has angered her, obviously: her mouth works tensely, the lips drawing back from the gums again and again, baring those pointed carnivorous incisors. "We still are in preliminary stages here. But I thought you would like the wink. I like the wink. I rather do like the wink, Shadrach." Her voice grows lighter, her features soften; he can almost hear the gears shifting within her. "I'm sorry I wasted your time. I was pleased with the wink. I wanted to share it with you."
"It's a fantastic wink, Katya."
"And, you know, Project Talos will become much more important with Mangu gone. Everything that Dr. Crowfoot has been doing was aimed toward integrating the Chairman's personality with the neural responses of Mangu's living mind and body, and that's over with, now, that whole approach must be discarded."
Shadrach knows enough about Nikki's work to know that this is not literally so; apparently Mangu was indeed the template against which the Avatar personality-coding program was being plotted, but there was nothing inexorable about the use of Mangu; with the appropriate adjustments the project can readily be reshaped around some other body donor. But there is no need to tell Lindman that, if she wants to feel that her project, peripheral so far, has suddenly become Genghis Mao's prime hope of postmortem survival. She has made an obvious effort in the past minute or two to be less intimidating, less abrasive, and he prefers her that way; he will do nothing that might spur new tension and defensiveness in her.
In fact her mood has eased so much that she seems almost coquettish. Chattering in a shrill, girlish, wholly unKatyaesque way, she leads him on a hectic and gratuitous tour of the laboratory, displaying circuit diagrams, boxes of memory chips, prototypes for the pelvis and spine of the next model of Genghis Mao, and other bits of Project Talos that are of no conceivable significance just now; and he realizes, after a time, that her only pretext for doing all this is to detain him, to have a few minutes more of his company. It puzzles him. Lindman's usual manner is aggressive and peremptory, but now she is coy, flirtatious, sidling up unsubtly to him, plenty of heavy breathing and forthright eye contact, actually grazing his elbow with her breasts as they stand close together rummaging through a table full of schematics. Does she think that such stuff will make him snort, sweat, paw the ground with his hooves, fling himself upon her throbbing body? He has no idea what she thinks. He rarely does. Nor is he going to find out now, for whatever she is organizing here is truncated abruptly by a squeaky summons from his pocket beeper, tracking him through the building. He activates his portable telephone. Avogadro is calling.
"Can you come to Security Vector One, Doctor?"
"Now?"
"If you would."
"What's happening?" Shadrach asks.
"We've been interrogating Buckmaster. Your name has—"
"Oh. Ok. Am I a suspect too, now?"
"Hardly. A witness, perhaps. Can we expect you in five minutes?"
Shadrach looks at Katya, who is flushed, excited. "I have to go," he says. "Avogadro. Something about the Mangu inquiry. It sounds urgent."
Her face darkens. Her lips compress. But she says only that she hopes to see him again soon, and, hiding her disappointment behind a mask of detachment, she releases him. As he leaves the laboratory he feels his entire body expand, as though it had been held under great pressure while he was with her.
Security Vector One is on the sixty-fourth floor. Mordecai has never had occasion to go there, and he has little idea what to expect, other than standard police paraphernalia —magnifying glasses and fingerprint pads all over the place, no doubt, photos of known subversives mounted on tacky boards, sheafs of dossiers and transcripts, rows of tap-terminals and fiber-eyes, whatever things detectives would be likely to use in protecting the physical persons of Genghis Mao and the PRC, Perhaps such things are there, but Shadrach gets no glimpse of them. A feline, soft-voiced young man, Oriental but too sinuous to be a Mongol, probably Chinese, greets him at the reception desk and guides him through a labyrinth of blank-walled hallways, past a nest of tiny offices where weary-looking bureaucrats sit at desks heaped wish paper. The place could be the headquarters of an insurance company, a bank, a brokerage house. Only when he is ushered into the interrogation cell where Avogadro and Buckmaster are waiting for him does he feel that he is among the enforcers of the law.
The room is artfully claustrophobic, rectangular and window-less, with dirty green walls and a low, oppressive ceiling from which short-stalked spotlights dangle at the ends of jointed metal arms. The spotlights are trained on the forehead of Roger Buckmaster, who sits uncomfortably slouched in a squat, hard narrow chair with broad aluminum armpieces and a high backrest. Electrodes are taped to Buckmaster's wrists and temples; their leads disappear into the recesses of the backrest. Buckmaster looks unnaturally pale, sweaty, blotchy-faced; his eyes are glassy; his lips are slack. Clearly Avogadro has been working him over for some while.
Avogadro, who is standing next to Buckmaster as Shadrach enters, looks little better—grim, harried, frayed. "A madhouse," he mutters. "Fifty arrests in the first hour. We have every interrogation cell full and they're still coming in. Lunatics, beggars, thieves, all the riffraff of Ulan Bator. And the radicals, of course. I go from cell to cell, cell to cell. And for what? For what?" A rough-edged laugh. "There'll be plenty of meat for the organ farms before this is over." Slowly, moving his heavy frame as though doubled gravity drags it down, he turns to the man in the chair. "Well, Buckmaster? You have a visitor. Do you recognize him?"
Buckmaster stares at the floor.
"Let me be."
"Tell me his name," Avogadro urges in a tone that is tired but menacing.
"Mordecai. Shadrach Bloody Mordecai. Em Dee."

"Last night," Buckmaster says, his voice a feeble fluting thing, barely audible.
"Louder?"
"Last night."
"Where?"
"You know where, Avogadro!"
"I want you to tell me yourself."
"I already have."
"Again. In front of Dr. Mordecai. Tell me."

"You're making this hard for yourself, Buckmaster. You're also making it hard for me."
"Pity."
"I have no choice about this," Avogadro says.
Lifting his head, Buckmaster manages a cold, sullen, furious glare. "Do I? Do I? Oh, I know the game. You'll question me for a while, you"ll find me guilty of conspiracy, you'll sentence me to death, and off I go to the organ farm, right? Right? And there I lie, a corpse that isn't dead, so that whenever Genghis Mao needs a lung, a kidney, a heart, someone can come and cut out mine, right? While I lie there, dead, warm, breathing and meta-metabolizing, part of the stockpile."
"Buckmaster—"
Buckmaster chuckles. "Genghis Mao thinks the stocks are getting low, and he can't use the miserable organ-rotted people out there, so he turns on us, he tosses a few dozen of his own people to the farms, right? Very well, take me away! Turn me into cannibal food! But let's end this farce fast, shall we?
Avogadro sighs. "To continue. You saw Dr. Mordecai at—"
"Timbuktu."
Avogadro lifts his left hand.  "You saw him where?"
"Piccadilly Circus."
Again the left hand, higher. Again the touching of controls; again the facial spasm, much worse. Shadrach Mordecai shifts his weight uneasily from foot to foot. In a low voice he says, "Possibly it isn't necessary to—"
"It's necessary, yes," Avogadro tells him. "The forms must be observed." To Buckmaster he says, "I'm prepared to keep this up all day.   I have no choice. Now, again: you met Dr. Mordecai in—"
"Karakorum."
"Where in Karakorum?"
"Outside the transtemporalists' tent."
"About what time?"
"I don't know. Late, but it was before midnight."
"Dr. Mordecai, is this correct? Your answers will be recorded."
"It's all correct so far," Shadrach says.
"Good. Go on, Buckmaster. Tell me what you told me before. You encountered Dr. Mordecai and you said what to him?"

"What kind of nonsense, Buckmaster?"
"Foolish talk. The transtemporalists jumbled my mind with their drugs."
"What exactly did you say to the doctor?"
Buckmaster, silent, stares at the floor. The right hand of Avogadro rises almost to his shoulder. The controls are adjusted. Buckmaster leaps in his seal as though speared. His right arm thrashes about like an infuriated snake. "Tell me, Buckmaster. Please."
"I accused him of doing evil."
"Go on."
"I called him a Judas."
"And a black bastard," Shadrach says.
Avogadro, with a gentle nudge, indicates to Shadrach that his prompting is unwelcome.
"Specifically, Buckmaster, what did you accuse Dr. Mordecai of doing?"
"Of doing his job."
"Meaning what?"
"His job is keeping the Chairman alive. I said he's responsible for keeping Genghis Mao from having died five years ago."
Avogadro says, "Is that correct, Dr. Mordecai?"
Shadrach hesitates. He doesn't particularly want to cooperate in sending Buckmaster to the organ farm. But it would be folly to try to protect the little man now. The truth about last night's incident in Karakorum has already been drawn forth and recorded, he knows. Buckmaster is condemned out of his own mouth.  "It is," he says.
"So.
"Let me be, Avogadro."
"Do you? Do you truly want the Chairman to be dead? Is that your position?"
"I had the drug in my head!"
"You don't have the drug in your head now, Buckmaster. What are your feelings about Genghis Mao at this moment?"
"I don't know. I simply don't know."
"Hostile?"
"Perhaps. Look, Avogadro, don't force any more out of me. You have me, you'll give me to the cannibals tonight, isn't that enough for you?"
"We can end this as soon as you cooperate."
"Very well," Buckmaster says. He pulls himself upright, finding some remaining resource of dignity. "I don't care for the regime of Genghis Mao. I am not in general agreement with the policies of the PRC. I regret having devoted so much effort to their service. I was overwrought last night and I said a lot of foul things to Dr. Mordecai for which I feel shame today. But. But, Avogadro! But I have never done anything disloyal. And I don't know a thing about the death of Mangu. I swear I had no part in it."
Avogadro nods. "Dr. Mordecai. did the prisoner mention Mangu last night?"
"I don't think he did."
"Can you be more positive about that?"
Shadrach considers. "No," he says finally. "To the best of my recollection, he said nothing about Mangu."
"Did the prisoner make any threats against the life of Genghis Mao?"
"Not that I recall."
"Try to remember. Doctor."
Shadrach shakes his head. "You have to understand, I had just come out of the transtemporaltsts' tent myself. My mind was still elsewhere during most of Buckmaster's tirade. He did speak critically of the government, yes, quite strongly, but I don't think there were any direct threats. No."
"I should refresh your memory, then," Avogadro says, gesturing to his assistant in the corner. There is a hissing sound, and then, from an invisible speaker, the sound of a voice, strangely familiar but oddly strange. His own.
This is suicidal, the way you're carrying on. There'll be a report of all this on the Chairman's desk tomorrow, Roger, more likely than not. You're destroying yourself.
—I'll destroy him. The bloodsucker. He holds us all for ransom, our bodies, our souls—
"Again," Avogadro says. "That last bit."
—I'll destroy him. The bloodsucker. He holds us all for—
"Do you recognize those voices, Doctor?"
"Mine. Buckmaster's."
"Thank you. The identification is important. Who was it who said, 'I'll destroy him'?"
"Buckmaster."
"Yes. Thank you. Buckmaster, was that your voice?"
"You know it was."
"Making a threat against the life of Genghis Mao?"
"I was overwrought. I was making a rhetorical point."
"Yes," Shadrach Mordecai says. "That's how it seemed to me, I urged him not to shout nonsense. I can't see it as any kind of serious threat. You have a tape of the whole conversation?''
"The whole thing," Avogadro says. "Many conversations are taped, you know. And automatically screened for subversion. The computers brought this to our attention early this morning. The voiceprints told us it was you and Buckmaster, but of course direct corroboration is useful—"
"As though you'll have a trial, a jury, lawyers," Buckmaster says bitterly. "As though I won't be meat by nightfall!"
"He didn't say anything about Mangu to me last night, did he?" Shadrach asks.
"No. Nothing on the tape."
"As I thought. Then why hold him?"
"Why defend him, Doctor? According to the tape, he was insulting and offensive to you."
"I haven't forgotten. Nevertheless, I hold no grudges.
"Tell him again!" Buckmaster cries. "Oh, God, tell him!"
"Please," Avogadro says. Buckmaster's outburst appears to give him pain. He signals to his man, and Buckmaster is unstrapped, freed of the electrodes, helped to his feet, led from the room. At the door Buckmaster pauses and looks back, face bleary, distorted with fear. His lips tremble; in a moment he will be sobbing. "I'm not the one!" he cries, and the security aides haul him away.
"He isn't," Shadrach says. "I'm sure of that. He was out of his mind last night, ranting and screaming, but he's no assassin. A malcontent, maybe. But no assassin."
Avogadro, sinking limply into the interrogation chair, plays with the electrodes, winding the snaky leads around his fingers. "I know that," he says.
"What will happen to him?"
"The organ farm. Probably before morning."
"But why?"
"Genghis Mao's reviewed the tape. He regards Buckmaster as dangerous."
"Christ!"
"Go argue with Genghis Mao."
"You sound so calm about it," Shadrach says.
"It's out of my hands. Doctor."
"We can't just let him be murdered!"
"We can't?"
"I can't."
 I wish you well."
"I might try. I might just."
"The man called you a black bastard," Avogadro says. "And a Judas."
"For that I should let him be vivisected?"
"You aren't letting anything. It's just happening. It's Buckmaster's problem. Not mine, not yours."
"No man's an island, Avogadro."
"Haven't I heard that before somewhere?"
Shadrach stares. "Aren't you at all concerned?
"Justice is for lawyers.  I'm only a security officer."
"You don't believe that, Avogadro."
"Don't I?"
"Christ. Christ. Don't come on with that I'm-just-a-cop routine. You're too intelligent to mean it. And I'm too intelligent to take it at face value."
Avogadro sits up. He has coiled two of the leads around his throat in a bizarre clownish way, and his head is tilted to one side, like that of a hanged man.  There's a place on it where you tell him that it's not our fault the world is the way it is, that we accept our karma, that we all serve Genghis Mao because he's the only game in town. The alternative is organ-rot, nez-pah? Therefore we dance to the Khan's tune, and we don't ask questions of morality, neither do we unduly search our souls over matters of guilt and responsibility."
"I—"
"Wait. You said it. It's on tape, Dottore.  I've forfeited the luxury of having personal feelings about the righteousness of sending Bucky to the organ farm. By entering the Khan's service I've given up the privilege of having qualms."
"Have you ever seen an organ farm?"
"No," Avogadro says. "But I hear—"
"I've seen them. Long quiet room, like a hospital ward, but very quiet. Except for the burble of the life-support machinery. Double row of open tanks, wide aisle between them. One body in each tank, floating in warm blue-green fluid, a nutrient bath. Intravenous tubes all over the floor, like pink spaghetti. Dialysis machines between each pair of tanks.  Vegetable in animal form. God knows what it perceives, but it lives, it needs to be fed, it digests and excretes, the hair grows, the fingernails, the nurses shave and groom the bodies every few weeks, and there they lie, arranged neatly by blood type and tissue type, available, gradually being stripped of limbs and organs, a kidney this week, a lung the next, sliced down to torsos in easy stages, the eyes, the fingers, the genitalia, eventually the heart, the liver—"
"So? What's your point, Doctor? That organ farms aren't pretty places? I know that. But it's an efficient way to maintain organs awaiting transplant. Isn't it better to recycle bodies than to waste them?"
"And turn an innocent man into a zombie? Whose only purpose is to be a living storage depot for spare organs?"
"Buckmaster isn't innocent."
"What's he guilty of?"
"Guilty of bad judgment. Guilty of bad luck. His number's up, Doctor." Avogadro, rising, lays his hand lightly on Shadrach's arm. "You're a man of conscience, aren't you, Dottore?  Well, Doctor, so am I. I quote your own words of last night: Guilt is a luxury we can't afford. Amen! Now go. Stop worrying about Buckmaster. Buckmaster's done himself in. If you hear the bell tolling, remember, it tolls for him, and it doesn't diminish you or me at all, because we've already diminished ourselves as much as possible." Avogadro's smile is warm, almost pitying. "Go, Doctor. Go and relax. I have work to do. I have a dozen more suspects to question before dinner."
"And the real murderer of Mangu—"
"Was Mangu himself, nine to one. What's that to me? I'll continue to find his killer and interrogate him and ship him to the organ farms until I'm told to stop. Go, now. Go. Go."
Word circulates, the next day, that thirteen conspirators have been sent to the organ farms, including Roger Buckmaster, the ringleader. Such rumors generally have a way of being accurate, but Shadrach Mordecai, still finding the idea unpalatable, goes to the extent of keying into the master personnel register to find out where Buckmaster is. He tries the engineering department code, but is told by the master computer that Buckmaster has been reassigned to Department 111. Shadrach tries that code next, though he knows what it is likely to be, and yes. Department 111 is the euphemism for the organ farms. Buckmaster has joined the human stockpile. Spike through the foramen magnum, zap.  Buckmaster's fate seems beside the point now.
"The conspiracy is crushed!" Genghis Mao declares vehemently as Shadrach enters. "The guilty have been punished. The threat to our regime has been met. The principles of centripetal depolarization will not be challenged." His eyes gleam with lunatic satisfaction. His ancient patchwork body throbs with triumphant good health, reverberating in Shadrach's implants as furious freshets of resurgent energy.
Shadrach takes blood samples, administers medicines, checks reflexes; the Khan pays no more heed to him than if he were an orderly changing the bed linens. He is altogether preoccupied, it appears, with his proliferating schemes for the deification of Mangu. Already blueprints for Mangu monuments have been drawn up, and they are spread everywhere in rustling heaps across the Chairman's bed, over his bony upjutting knees and on both sides of him and tumbling to the floor. Humming tunelessly, Genghis Mao turns the documents this way and that, nodding, scribbling marginal notes, muttering private observations. "Hah! I like this!" Genghis Mao exclaims sharply. "Patterned after the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, but twice the size, with statues of Mangu twenty meters high rising out of each of the four faces. What do you think?" He shoves the blueprint toward Mordecai. "It's Ionigylakis's idea. He's trying to improve on antiquity, like everyone else. How do you like it, Shadrach?"
"The statues, sir. They—ah—tend to break the line of the pyramid, wouldn't you say?"
"What's wrong with that?"
"Pyramids are so graceful," Shadrach says. "So compact."
"The original pyramid is an exhausted concept," the Chairman snaps. "What I like about this is the contrast in angles, the slope of the pyramid's face versus the upright statue working against it, do you see? Mangu is rising upward, outward, away from the center—it's centripetal, Shadrach! Do you see?"
"Centrifugal, I'd say, sir."
Genghis Mao gapes as though his doctor has struck him. "Centrifugal? Centrifugal? Are you serious?" He breaks into frantic laughter. "A joke! My earnest Shadrach makes a joke! Tell me: do you think Mangu was in great pain?"
"He must have died instantly. I doubt that he was conscious as he fell. The acceleration—"
"Yes. Look at this one, will you? A helical spire, it says here, nine hundred meters high, a great metal coil through which a magnetic field flows, and a perpetual bolt of lightning flickering at the tip—"
"Sir, if you would, the tritetrazol injection—"
"Later, Shadrach."
"The absorption levels are already slightly above optimum. If I could have your arm—"
"—and here, yes, I like this.  Yes, why not? Mangu—"
"—and relax now, sir—"
"—Ch'in Shih Huang Ti! There's our prototype! Do you know him, Shadrach?"
"Sir?"
"—Ch'in Shih Huang Ti."
"I'm afraid I—"
"The First Emperor of China, the Unifier, the builder of the Great Wall. Do you know how they buried him?" Genghis Mao scrabbles through the documents on his bed and comes up with a sheaf of pale green printouts, which he brandishes wildly in Shadrach's face. "Agreat hill of sand, south of the River Wei, at the foot of Mount Li. Or was it Mount Wei, River Li? Wei. Li. In the mound a palace, and the palace contained a relief map of China modeled in bronze, depicting the rivers, mountains, valleys, plains. The Yangtze and the Huang Ho had channels four meters deep, filled with quicksilver. Models of cities and palaces along their banks, and a great dome of bright copper overhead, yes, with the moon and the constellations engraved on it. The coffin of the First Emperor, then, floated on one of the quicksilver rivers, Shadrach! An endless journey across China. Silent, slippery—oh, bathe me in quicksilver, Shadrach, let me sleep on quicksilver! Do you see the coffin? And a powerful bow mounted at the coffin's side, ready to hurl an arrow at any intruder. Trapdoors and hidden knives waiting for the grave-robbers, too, and thunder-making machines —and hundreds of slaves and artisans buried in the mound with Ch'in Shih Huang Ti to serve him, yes. Grandeur! What do you think? Should I build this for Mangu?" The Khan blinks, frowns, moistens his lips. Shadrach Mordecai perceives changes in skin temperature and blood pressure. "On the other hand—if I build such a tomb for Mangu, what could I provide for myself? Surely I deserve something finer. But what—what—" Genghis Mao breaks into a broad grin. "There's time to plan it! Twenty, fifty years! Why should I think now of tombs for Genghis Mao? It's Mangu we bury. I'll give him the finest!" The old man pushes the blueprints into a heap. "Forty-one guilty conspirators to the organ farms so far, Shadrach."
"I had heard thirteen."
"Forty-one, and we're not finished. I've told Avogadro to bring in at least a hundred. Think of the livers going into storage! The kilometers of intestine. How beautiful the farms are, Shadrach.  You know that. To conserve. It's a kind of poetry. Forty-one more tanks filled. And the threat to the government is put down." Genghis Mao's voice grows dark, hollow. "But Mangu—what have they done to Mangu? My other self—my self-in-waiting—my prince, my viceroy—"
"Sir, perhaps you're becoming overexcited."
"I feel fine. Shadrach."
"But some rest—"
"Rest? I don't need to rest. I could get out of bed now and run from here to Karakorum. Rest, for what? Are you worried about me, Shadrach?" The Chairman's laughter bursts forth, booming, resonant. "I feel fine. Never better. Stop worrying.  Are you a Christian?"
"Sir?" Shadrach says blankly.
"A Christian. A Christian.  What? Can't you hear? The ears going bad? I'll ask Warhaftig to give you new eardrums. I asked you, Are you a Christian?"
Baffling. "Well—"
"You know. You know. Pater noster qui art in heaven. Ave Maria full of grace.  Yes? You know of this? Lamb of God you take away the sins of the world, Ite missa est. Well?"
"Well, my parents sometimes took me to church, but I can't really say that I—"
"Too bad. Not a believer?"
"In the narrow sense of the word, perhaps, but—"
"There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me."
"I don't think I'm a believer, then."
"Well, hallowed be thy name. Would you like to be Pope anyway?"
"Sir?"
"Is that all you can say? Sir? Sir?" Genghis Mao mimics his obsequiousness with devastating ferocity. The Khan's pulse is rising; his face is flushed. "The kingdom and the power. Oh, and the glory. You Christians, you understand. I am the way, the truth, and the life, says the Lord; no one comes to the Father, except through me." This manic volatility disturbs Dr. Mordecai, who surreptitiously boosts the Khan's tranquilizer intake, hitting the 9-pordenone pedal while pretending to examine the base of the life-support system. Genghis Mao, sitting up, shouting now, cries, "Answer yes, answer no, but no more sirs! Pope! I asked you, would you like to be Pope? The Pope is dead in Rome, old Benedict. The cardinals will meet this summer. I am invited to offer a nominee. I'll send them the name of my doctor, my beautiful black doctor, yes? Le Pape Noir. Il Papa Negro.  Pick your own regnal name. It's one of the idle dividends of the power and the glory. What do you say to Papa Legba? Eh? Eh?" Genghis Mao claps his hands. "Papa Legba! Papa Legba!"
The new liver, Shadrach thinks. Could it have been the liver of a madman?
He says mildly, "I'm not Roman Catholic, sir."
"You could become one. Is that so hard? A week of coaching and you'd know how to mumble the right words. Kyrie eleison. Credo in unum deum. Om mani padme hum."
There is something ominous in all this crazy talk of poping. Genghis Mao's lightning shifts of subject, his hectic flow of fantasies, his volcanic verbal outpour, do not inspire confidence in Genghis Mao's mental stability. This is the man who rules the world, Shadrach reflects. Such that it is.
Shadrach says, "If I became Pope, who would be your doctor?"
"Why, you would, Shadrach."
"From Rome?"
"We'd move the Vatican to Ulan Bator."
"Even so, I don't think I could do justice to both jobs, sir."
"A young man like you? Of course you could. What are you, thirty-five years old, thirty-eight, something like that? You'd be a splendid Pope. I'd become Catholic myself, and you could hear my confession. Don't refuse the offer, Shadrach. I think you don't have enough to do as things are now. You need distractions.  You fill me with needless medicines. Why are you staring at me like that?"
"I'd prefer not to become Pope, sir."
"Final decision?"
"Final."
"All right. I'll name Avogadro."
"At least he's Italian."
"You think I'm insane, Shadrach?"
"Sir, I think you're overtaxing yourself. I prescribe two hours of total rest. May I give you a sleep tab?"
"You may not. You may leave and amuse yourself in Karakorum. Gonchigdorge will be Pope, yes, a Mongol, do you like that? I like that. You, up there, sainted old Father Genghis, old Temujin, do you like that? Leave me, Shadrach. You annoy me today. I am not insane. I am not overtaxing myself. The death of Mangu distresses me. I grieve for Mangu. I will make the world remember Mangu forever. Forty-one to the farms, and it's only morning! Will you take yourself to Karakorum?"
The metabolic levels are rising on a dozen fronts. Shadrach is alarmed. He manipulates the tranquilizer pedal once again. The old man must be awash in 9-pordenone now, but somehow Genghis Mao overrides it, remaining in the manic mode despite the drug. It is at last taking effect, though. At last, some sign of calming. The Khan subsides. Shadrach departs, troubled, but confident that the Khan's temperament will stabilize for a time. As he goes out, Genghis Mao calls after him, "Or King of England! What do you say? There'll be a vacancy in Windsor soon.”
He goes to Karakorum with Katya Lindman. Ordinarily he spends his free evenings with Nikki Crowfoot, but not always; they are not husband and wife, there is no monogamy between them. He loves Crowfoot, or believes he does, which amounts to the same thing for him. But he has never been able to escape Lindman for long. Now she is in the ascendant, like baleful Saturn rising into the house of Aquarius. This night will be hers. Nikki is elsewhere, anyway, he knows not where; he is free, accessible, vulnerable.
"You'll do the dreams with me tonight?"
Why not? Her harsh forceful contralto has maimed his will. He shall allow himself finally to be indoctrinated into the mysteries of dream-death. Her dark eyes sparkle with savage succubal glee as he nods his agreement.
The dream-death pavilion is a wide many-poled tent, black cloth with trim of rusty orange stripes. Over its entrance is mounted a great jutting image of a ram's head, heavy, glowering, aggressive, spearing the chilly spring air with massive superprepotent coiled homs. Shadrach knows the ram is Amon-Re, lord of fear, king of the sun, patron of dream-death; for this cult is said to be derived from Pharaonic Egypt, secret rites never lost since first they were practiced along the shores of the sluggish, sweltering Nile in the time of the Fifth Dynasty. Within the tent, surprisingly, all is light. The place is ablaze with glowing fixtures from floor to ceiling—hanging lamps, floor-poles, spots, cascading lavalieres of radiance, so that the air burns with a numbing blue-while brightness and all shadows are obliterated. Shadrach, remembering the murky atmosphere of the transtemporalists' tent, is taken aback by this intense luminosity. But in the realm of Amon-Re a solar brilliance must prevail.
 Between her dainty breasts hangs a pendant, the crux ansata, in fiery gold. She does not speak; but with expressive gestures she leads Mordecai and Lindman through the crowded tent, past scores of sleepers who lie on fluffy mattresses of white cotton surrounded by high barriers of golden rope strung through ebony stanchions, to a vacant cubicle that is to be theirs.  Katya immediately begins to strip, and Shadrach, after a moment, does the same. The guide stands aside, showing no interest in their nakedness. Shadrach feels foolish in his costume—a single handkerchief-sized square of linen to cover his loins and thighs, a beaded belt with which to fasten it around his hips, and two narrow strips of cloth, one green, one blue, which the guide helps him fasten crosswise over his chest.
Katya smiles at him. He feels heavy lust, unleavened by love or even by joy, as she removes her clothes.  Lindman dons a one-piece loincloth similar to his and a looped-cross pendant identical to the guide's. These enhance, rather than mask, her nakedness. As always, her body disturbs him: wide-hipped, heavy-rumped, a peasant-woman's body, the center of gravity quite low, the navel deep, hidden in smooth slabs of belly fat, the breasts full and somewhat elongated. It is a strong and voluptuous body, powerful without being at all athletic, as exaggeratedly female as those primordial Venuses out of the Cro-Magnon caves. What bothers Shadrach most, he suspects, is the contrast between that robustly sexual earth-mother body and those thin, predatory lips, those sharp, threatening teeth. Katya's mouth is untrue to the archetype that the rest of her body projects, and that contradiction makes her a mystery to Shadrach. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, perhaps.
The lioness-headed one invites them to kneel on their mattresses and hands each of them a polished metal talisman. It seems at first to be no more than a mirror, a bright blank planchet with quasi-Egyptian motifs around its rim, small engravings of the Horushawk, serpents, scorpions, scarabs, bees, the ibis of Thoth, interspersed with tiny portentous-looking hieroglyphs; but as he stares Shadrach begins to perceive a dizzying pattern of almost invisible dotted lines spiraling around the middle of the amulet; these lines, he realizes, may be seen only when the angle at which he holds the talisman in relation to a certain brilliant lamp over his head is just right; and, by moving the device ever so slightly, he can make the lines appear to move, to swirl in a counterclockwise eddy, to create a vortex—
—sucking him toward the center of the disk—
So they work by hypnotism here rather than by drugs, he thinks, feeling smug, scientific, Shadrach the scholar, the detached observer of all human phenomena, and then he feels an irresistible tug, he finds himself caught, drawn helplessly inward, a mere speck blown on the cosmic winds, a mote, a phantasm—
—one moment kneeling here admiring the cleverness of the mechanism and a moment later gripped, held, pulled, altogether incapable of objective considerations, animate vagula blandute hospes comesque corporis—
As he goes under, the priestess, for so he must think of her, begins a rhythmic chant, fragmentary and elusive, a mingling of English words and Mongol and bits of what might well be Pharaonic Egyptian, invocations of Set, Hathor, Isis, Anubis, Bast. Figures out of myth surround him in the sudden shadows, the hawk-headed god, the great jackal, the dog-faced ape, the vast clicking scatabaeus, desiccated deities exchanging knowing comments in opaque tongues, nodding, pointing. Here is Father Amon, bright as solar fire, turbulent as the skin of the sun, beckoning to him. Here is the beast with no face, radiating streams of siarflame. Here is the dwarf-god, the buffoon, the protector of the dead, capering and guffawing. Here is the goddess with a woman's body and the heads of three snakes. The gods dance, laugh, pass water, spit, weep, clap hands. Still the priestess chants. Her words, chasing one another round and round, seize and control him. He can barely comprehend anything any longer, all structures having dissolved and become formless, but yet he is remotely aware that he is being programmed, being propelled, being given by this slim naked yellow girl who speaks in impassive sing-song certain attitudes toward death and life that will shape his experience in the hours just ahead. She has him, she leads him, she guides and aims him as he tosses on the eschatological breeze.
He is being pulled apart. Something is gently and painlessly severing him from himself. He has never fell anything like this before, not in the tent of the transtemporalists, not when taking any of the traditional psychedelics, not on kot, not on yipka: this is new, this is unique, a shedding of mass, a dropping away of the flesh, a liberation into weightlessness. He knows he is—
—dying?—
Yes, dying. that's the commodity offered here, death, the actual experience of departing from life, of having life depart from oneself. He can no longer feel his body. He is beyond all exterior sensation. This is the true death, that ultimate sundering toward which his life has moved throughout all its days; no simulation, no hypnotic trick, but real and actual death, the going-forth of Shadrach Mordecai. Of course, on a deeper level he knows it is only a dream, a night's amusement purchased for sport; but under that awareness lies the realization that he may be dreaming that he is dreaming, dreaming the talisman and the tent and the lioness-girl, that he may really have fallen through the illusion of an illusion and really is dying here tonight. It does not matter.
How easy dying is! There is a cool moist gray mist about him, and everything dissolves in it, Anubis and Thoth, Katya and the priestess, the tent, the amulet, Shadrach himself, invaded and interpenetrated by the grayness until he is part of it. He floats toward the center of the void. Is this what Genghis Mao fears so much? To be a balloon and nothing but a balloon, so much helium surrounded by a nonexistent skin, to put aside all responsibility and, liberated wholly, to float and float? Genghis Mao is so heavy. He carries so much weight. It may be hard to relinquish that. Not for Shadrach. He passes through the center and emerges on the far side, congealing nicely out of the mist and resuming his human form. He is altogether naked now, not even a scrap at the waist. Katya, naked also, stands beside him.  Shadrach Mordecai beholds his own corpse. "How quiet it is here," Katya says. "And clean. They've washed the world for us."
"Where shall we go?"
"Anywhere."
"The circus? The bullfight? The marketplace? Anywhere?"
"Anywhere," Shadrach says. "Yes. Let's go anywhere."
Effortlessly they float into the world. The lioness waves farewell. The air is mild and balmy. The trees are in bloom, fireflowers, little cups of flame spouting at the tips of the branches; they break loose and drift down, swirl about, approach them, touch them, sink sweetly into their bodies. Shadrach watches the passage of a blazing red blossom through Katya's breastbone; it emerges between her shoulders, falls lightly to the ground, goes to seed, sprouts. A skinny sapling rises and bursts into flaming flower.  Together they stride across the continent. The sands of the Gobi sparkle. The Great Wall stretches before them, a wriggling stone serpent humping its back.
"Why, it's Nigger Jim and Little Nell!" cries Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, who stands atop the Wall. He does a little dance of joy, doffing his silken black skullcap, letting his long elaborate pigtails wave about.
"Chop-chop," Shadrach says. "Kung po chi ding!"
"Which way to the egress?" Katya asks.
"There," says the First Emperor. "Past the chains, over the spikes."
They go through the gate. On the far side of the Great Wall are flooded rice paddies glittering in rosy sunlight. Women in black pajamas and broad coolie hats move slowly through ankle-deep water, stooping, planting, stooping, planting. Invisible chorus off screen. Swelling crescendo of celestial sound. Katya scoops rich yellow mud and hurls it at him. Glop! He throws mud at her. Glip! They plaster each other with it and embrace, slippery and wriggling. What sweet slime! They laugh; they romp; they tumble and topple, landing in the rice paddy with a splash, and the Chinese women dance around them. Huang! Ho! Lindman legs grasp his hips. Thighs like clamps. She reaches for him. They couple to the mud like rutting buffalo. Gripping one another, rolling over and over. Snorting. Slapping flesh. Wallowing in the primeval ooze. Very gratifying. Nostalgia for the mud. Belly to belly. He does not perceive his rigid organ as anything that particularly belongs to him, but rather as something shared, an independent connecting rod that passes back and forth in swift reciprocations between their clasped bodies. Without reaching a climax they rise, bathe, move on to New York. A hot wind blows through this city of sky-stabbing towers. Confetti showers down upon them; it stings, it burns. Cheers of the inhabitants. Everyone has organ-rot here, but it is accepted; it causes no alarm. The bodies of the New Yorkers are transparent, and Shadrach sees the red lesions within, the zones of corruption and decay, the eruptions and erosions and suppurations of intestines, lungs, vascular tissue, peritoneum, pericardium, spleen, liver, pancreas. The disease announces itself in radiating waves of low-spectrum electromagnetic pulsations, hammering dully at his soul, red red red.  Shadrach and Katya do a buck-and-wing down Fifth Avenue. Shadrach's skin is white. His lips are thin. His hair is straight and long; it blows across his face, momentarily blinding him, and when he clears it he sees that Katya now is black.  Ruby lips, sweeter than wine. "Poon!" she cries.
"Tang!" he replies. "Hot!"
"Cha!"
They dance on swords. They dance on pineapples. He sells her into slavery and redeems her with his first-born. "Are we dead?" he asks her.
"Really and truly dead?"
"Is it supposed to be this much fun?"
"Are you having fun?" she asks.
They are in Mexico. Frangipani, flamboyans. It is spring: the cacti are in bloom. Towering spiny green poles topped by crazy clusters of fragrant yellow petals. Loops and whorls of thotni-ness exploding in gaudy firecracker bursts of red and white. They sleepwalk through the prickly pears. They somnambulate among the pitahayas. The pace is frantic but restful. Often they make love. He could waltz all night. Crossing the Pyrenees, they meet Pancho Sanchez, squat and greasy, who offers them green wine out of a leather bota and giggles shrilly when they spill it on themselves. Pancho licks wine from Katya's breasts. She gives him a merry shove and he somersaults into Andorra. They follow. Commemorative coins of high denomination are struck in their honor by the adoring populace. "I thought death would be more serious," Shadrach says.
"It is."
Dead, they can go anywhere, and they do. But the journey is an empty one and the food at the feast is mere spun air, less sweet than cotton candy. He wishes for more substance and the servants bring him stones.  Ficifolia is black, Buckmaster, Avogadro, Nikki Crowfoot; Mangu is the blackest of all; but the black of their skins is not Negro-black, not African-black, it is black-black, ebony-black, the color of a dark closet, the color of the air between the worlds. Black as the pit. They look like beings from some other galaxy. Shadrach goes among them, slapping palms, touching elbows. They speak nigger-Mongol to one another, they laugh and sing, they shuffle and shake. Ficifolia is on guitar, Buckmaster on Jew's harp, Avogadro on banjo; Shadrach plays the bongos, Katya the tambourine.
Drop your body off
Step outside your bones.
So—easy to die—
Such—a groovy trip—
Man, man, man, man.
"It isn't really this good," Shadrach tells Katya. "We're fooling ourselves."
"It has its points."
"I can't help feeling suspicious."
"Even dead you can't really let yourself go, can you?"
She takes him by the wrist and pulls him along with her, through a desert of sparkling sands, through a river of leaping white water, through a thicket of dense aromatic brambles, into the ocean, the great salty mother, and they lie on their backs, looking up into the sun. He is utterly becalmed.
"How long does it go on?" be asks.
"Forever."
"When does it end?"
"It doesn't."
"Really?"
"Nature of the state.
"I don't believe it. Dopo la morte, nulla."
"Then where are we now?"
"Dreaming," he says.
"Sharing the same dream?
The snouts of sharks poke through the gentle surface of the sea. Toothy jaws gape. Shadrach practices fearlessness. These beasts can do him no harm. He is, after all, dead. He is also a doctor of medicine. He gulps ocean until the shining sandy floor is laid bare and the sharks, beached, morosely flop about, munching on crabs and starfish. Shadrach laughs. Death is real, death is earnest! Out of the north come frosty winds, roaring down the flanks of the Himalayas. Indefatigably they continue the ascent of the North Cwm, clawing up the rocky face piton by piton, staring constantly at the formidable tapering peak rising like a giant whelk at the head of the valley. They shiver in their parkas; they clutch their ice-axes with weary hands; their oxygen tanks press inexorably against their aching shoulders; and still they climb, now into that giddy realm above seven thousand meters, where only the splay-footed snowmen dare to go. The summit is in sight. Vast crevasses loom, but they have no meaning; where crampons and pitons will not serve, Shadrach and Katya simply launch themselves into great sky-spanning leaps. It is too easy. He had not thought death to be so frivolous a place. Indeed now the sky is darkening, the pace is slowing; he hears solemn music, he experiences a lessening of the frenetic urges that have driven him thus far, he settles into a glacial calm, an Egyptian timelessness. He is one with Ptah and Osiris. He is a twanging Memnon beside the mighty river, waiting out the eons. Katya winks at him and he scowls his disapproval. Death is serious business, not a holiday. Ah, yes, now he has it, the proper pace, He is wholly absorbed by the task of being dead. He does not move. Vital signs nil; intellection nil; he has reached the core of the event. Hic jacet. Nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet. Mors omnia solvit. Let there be trombones, please. Missa pro defunctis. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. It is very quiet here. When they speak at all, they speak in Sanskrit, Aramaic, Sumerian, or, of course, Latin. Thoth himself speaks Latin. Doubtless other tongues too, but the gods themselves have whims. How sweet it is to be immobile and to think, if at all, only in languages one no longer understands! Nullum est jam dictum quod non dictum est prius. What a good sound that has! If you would, a little more volume on the basset horns:
Dies irae, dies illa
Solvet saeclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sybilla.
Gradually the voices diminish. The music becomes subdued and abstract as it fades; the sound of the instruments now is hollow, a mere outline of sound, blank within, the idea of sound rather than sound itself, and the chorus, far away, sings the terrible words of the ancient prayer in a faint, cluttering, rustling, elegant tone, poignant and penetrating:
Quantus tremor esti futurus
Quando Judex est venturus
Cuncta stricte discussurus!
And then all is silent. Now he is at peace. He has reached the essence of the dream-death, an end to striving, an end to seeking.
The chase is over. He could go, if he wished, to Bangkok, Addis Ababa, San Francisco, Bagdad, Jerusalem, traveling with no more effort than it takes to blink an eye, but there is no reason to go anywhere, for all places have become one, and it is better to remain here, at the still point, motionless, swaddled in the soft sweet woolly fleece of the grave. Consummation est. He is in perfect equilibrium. He is finally, truly dead. He knows he will sleep forever.
Instantly he wakes. His mind is clear, tingling, painfully alert. Passion inflames his penis, passion or else the blind force that comes over men in dreams; at any rate it juts shamelessly against his loincloth, making a little pyramid out of his lap. Katya lies not far away, propped up on her elbows, watching him. Her smile is sphinxlike. He sees her broad fleshy bareback, her firm meaty buttocks, and instantly the tranquility of dream-death is gone; lust rules him. "Let's go," he says hoarsely.
"All right."
"It isn't far to the lovers' hospice."
"No. Not there." She has already begun to dress. The lioness-guide is across the aisle, greeting newcomers. The brightness of the air leaves Shadrach dazzled. Anubis and Thoth still lurk somewhere nearby, he is convinced. He struggles to regain that vanished equilibrium, to find his way back to the still point, but he knows it will take many more dream-death sessions before he can reach that calm place on his own.
"Where?" he says.
"At the tower. I hate making love in rented rooms. Didn't you know that?"
So he must stifle his longings another hour or two. Perhaps that's the lesson of dream-death: delay gratification, purify the spirit. Or perhaps not. It is a jolt, stepping from the radiant ambiance of the dream-death tent to the darkness without, and the night is cold, very cold even for the Mongolian May, just a hint of snow in the air, a few hard little flakes whipping on the breeze. Riding the tube-train back they say almost nothing to each other, but as they approach the Ulan Bator station he says, "Were you really there?"
"In your dream?"
"Yes. When we met Pancho Sanchez. And the First Emperor. And when we went to Mexico."
"That was your dream," she says. "I was having other dreams."
"Oh. Oh. I wondered. It seemed very real, talking to you, having you beside me."
"The dreams always seem that way."
"But I'm surprised at how playful it was. Frivolous, even."
"Is that how it was for you?"
"Until the end," he says. "It got solemn then. When things grew calm. But before then—"
"Frivolous?"
"Very frivolous, Katya."
"For me it was solemn all the time. A great quietness."
"Is it different for everybody?"
"Of course," she says. "What did you think?"
"Oh."

"I confess that I did."
"No. I wasn't there."
"No. I suppose not." He laughs. "All right. I wasn't thinking. For you it was somber. For me it was all games. What does that say about you, about me?"
"Nothing, Shadrach."
"Really?"
"Nothing at all."
"We don't express something about our inner selves in the dreams we choose for ourselves?"
"No," she says.
"How can you be so sure?"
"The dreams are chosen for us. By a stranger. I don't know more than that, but the woman in the mask told us what to dream. The broad outlines. The tone."
"And we have no choice about the content?"
"Some. Her Instructions are filtered through our sensibilities. But still—still—"
"Is your dream always the same?"
"In content? In tone?"
"Tone."
"The dream is always different, " Katya says. "And yet the flavor is the same, for death is always the same. Different things happen each time, but the dream brings you always to the same place, in the same way, at the end."
"To the still point?"
"You could call it that. Yes. Yes."
"And the meaning of what I dreamed—"
"No," she says. "Don't talk about meaning. Dream-death gives no oracular wisdom. The dream is without meaning."
The tube-train has reached Ulan Bator. "Come," Katya says.
They go to her suite, two floors below Nikki Crowfoot's, a dark place, three small rooms furnished with stark, heavy hangings. Once more they are naked before one another, once more he feels the overwhelming pull of Katya's thick sturdy body; he moves stiffly toward her, embraces her, digs the tips of his fingers into the deep flesh of her shoulders and back.  He thinks of the joyous couplings he shared with her in dream-death, the rice paddy, the fragrant Mexican nights, and he tugs her down with him to the bed; but, though he fills his hands with her breasts, though he imprisons his head between her smooth cool thighs, though he drives himself urgently against her flesh, he is altogether unmanned by her physical presence, helpless, limp. Not for the first time, either: their sporadic lovemaking has always been marked by such difficulties, which he rarely experiences with other women. Katya is not bothered by this: calmly she pushes him back against the pillow with a thump of her knuckles on his chest, and then, bending forward, she goes to work on him with her mouth, her sinister and ferocious sharp-fanged mouth, lovingly engulfing him, and he feels lips and tongue, lips and tongue, warm and wet, no hint of teeth at all, and under her cunning ministrations he relaxes, he puts aside his fear of her, he grows stiff at last. Deftly she slides upward over him—it is a maneuver she has clearly practiced often—and, with a sudden startling thrust, drives herself downward, impaling herself on him. She squats astraddle, peasant-strong, above him, knees flexed, buttocks taut, body rocking.  An awesome energy courses through her. She rides him, now squatting high so that their only contact is at their loins, now pressing herself full length against his body, but always remaining above him, always staying in command. He does not object to this. She writhes, grinds, pushes, twists, suddenly rears back and breaks into bizarre laughter; it is, he knows, her signal, and he seizes her breasts and joins her in the final climax.
Afterward he dozes, and wakes to find her quietly sobbing. How strange, how unlike her! He had never imagined Lindman to be capable of tears.
"What's wrong?"
She shakes her head.
"Katya?"
"Nothing. Please."
"What is it?"
Sullenly, face against pillow, she says, "I'm afraid for you."
"Afraid? Why? What about?"
She looks toward him and shakes her head again. She clamps her lips. Suddenly her mouth looks not at all fierce. A child's mouth. She is frightened.
"Katya?"
"Please, Shadrach."
"I don't understand."
She says nothing. She shakes her head. She shakes her head.
Over a week goes by before Shadrach sees Nikki Crowfoot again. She claims she is very busy in the laboratory—problems of recalibration, necessary compensatory adjustments in the Avatar persona-transplant system now that the donor body will not be Mangu's—and therefore she is too tired in the evenings to want company. But he suspects she is avoiding him. Crowfoot has always been at her most sociable when she is most overworked; it is her escape from pressure. Shadrach does not know why she would want to avoid him. Surely the night he spent with Katya Lindman has nothing to do with it. He has been to bed with Lindman before, and with others; Crowfoot too has had other partners; such things have never mattered between them. It baffles him. When they speak by telephone Nikki is wary and aloof. Beyond doubt something has gone wrong in their relationship, but he has no theories.
A new Genghis Mao crisis distracts him briefly from these matters. For the past several days the Khan has been leaving his bed to work in his office, to visit Surveillance Vector One, to direct the Committee activities from the headquarters room. His recuperation was proceeding so smoothly that there seemed no reason to confine him. But now Dr. Mordecai's sensitive implants are picking up early warnings of trouble—epigastric pulsations, faint systolic murmur, general circulatory stress. Too much activity too soon? Shadrach goes to the Chairman's office to discuss the problem. But Genghis Mao, still busy with his Mangu monuments and his roundup of assassins, does not feel like conferring with his doctor, does not want to talk about symptoms. He brushes Shadrach's queries aside with a brusque declaration that he has rarely felt better. Then he turns back to his desk. The arrests, he tells Mordecai proudly, now total two hundred eighty-two. Of these, ninety-seven have already been found guilty and sent to the organ farms. "Soon," the Khan says, "the lungs and kidneys and intestines of these criminals will serve to extend the lives of loyal members of the government. Is there not poetic justice in that? All things are centripetal, Shadrach. All opposites are reconciled."
"Two hundred eighty-two conspirators?" Shadrach asks. "Did it take that many to push one man out one window?"
"Who knows? The actual crime perhaps required no more than two or three perpetrators. But a great network of subordinate plotters must have been needed. Security devices had to be altered, guards distracted, cameras deflected. We believe it may have taken a dozen conspirators simply to remove the bodies of the killers from the plaza after they jumped."
"To do what?"
Genghis Mao smiles blandly. "We believe," he says, "that the assassins, after hurling Mangu from the window, deliberately jumped from the same window themselves to keep from being captured in the building. Confederates in the plaza immediately gathered up their bodies and drove off with them, while others removed all signs of their deaths from the pavement."
Shadrach stares. "Horthy saw only one man falling, sir."
"Horthy did not remain in the plaza to observe further developments."
"Even so—"
"If the killers of Mangu did not leap after him," the Khan says, eyes bright with the brightness of reason triumphant, "what did become of them? No suspicious persons were found in the tower after the crime."
Shadrach is unable to find an appropriate reply to this. No comment he might make, he suspects, would be constructive. After a pause he says, clearing his throat, "Sir, if we could talk about your health again for a moment—"
"I told you. I feel fine."
"The symptoms I've begun to detect are fairly serious ones, sir.”
"Symptoms of what?" Genghis Mao snaps.
Shadrach suspects that the Khan may be developing an aneurysm of the abdominal aorta—a defect in the wall of the great vessel that conveys blood from the heart. He asks Genghis Mao if he has felt any unusual discomfort, and the Chairman grudgingly admits recent sharp pains in the back and sides. Dr. Mordecai does not point out how this contradicts Genghis Mao's claim of being in good health; but the admission does give Shadrach the upper hand, and he orders the Chairman back to bed for rest.
Peering through the eye of a fiber probe extending into Genghis Mao's catheterized aorta, Shadrach confirms his diagnosis. The recent liver surgery, perhaps, has released emboli into the Chairman's bloodstream, and one has somehow made its way against the arterial flow, lodging in the abdominal aorta and causing infection. Or perhaps not, but at any rate a tumor is taking form, and more surgery will be necessary. If it were anyone else, the risks of an operation so soon after a major organ transplant might be even greater than the risks of letting the aneurysm expand. But Shadrach has become amazingly casual about delivering up his venerable patient to the knife. Genghis Mao's resilient body has been opened so often that it accepts frequent surgery as the natural state. Besides, the aneurysm is not far from the liver, and Warhaftig will be able to enter through the recent incision, which is only now beginning to heal.
The news annoys Genghis Mao. "I have no time for surgery now," he says, irritated. "We're still finding new conspirators everyday. I must give my full attention to the problem. And next week is Mangu's stale funeral, at which I intend to preside in person, I—"
"The danger is critical, sir."
"You always tell me that. I think you enjoy telling me that. You're too insecure, Shadrach. Even if you didn't manage to find some new crisis every few weeks I'd still keep you on the payroll.
I don't invent the crises, sir."
"Even so. Can't this wait a month or two?"
"We'd have to make a fresh cut in healed tissue then."
"What of it? What's one more slice?"
"Aside from that, the risks—"
"Yes," Genghis Mao says. "The risks. What risks do I run by letting this thing sit?"
"Do you know what an aneurysm is, sir?"
"More or less."
"It's a tumor containing blood or a blood clot, in direct contact with the wall of an artery and causing deteriorative changes in the tissue surrounding it. Think of it as a balloon, gradually being inflated. When balloons get too big, they explode."
"Ah."
"Eventually this aneurysm could rupture—into the intestines, the peritoneum, the pleura, or the retroperitoneal tissues. Or it might cause an embolism of the superior mesenteric artery, producing intestinal infarction. The aorta itself could rupture spontaneously. There are several other possibilities. All fatal."
"Fatal?"
"Invariably fatal. Agonizing pain, death usually within minutes."
"Ah," Genghis Mao says. "Ah. I see."
"It could come at almost any time."
"Ah."
"Without warning."
"I see."
"We'd be helpless, once the aneurysm goes. No way of saving you, sir."
"Ah. I see. Ah."
Does he see? Yes. Certainly, visions of erupting aneurysms are floating before Genghis Mao's basilisk eyes. The lean leathery cheeks contract in profound speculation; somber frowns furrow the bronze forehead. The Khan is troubled. He had not planned on being confronted with potential extinction this morning. Now, obviously, he contemplates the going of Genghis II Mao IV Khan from the world, and likes the idea no more than ever. The Permanent Revolution that has transformed the aching world requires a Permanent Leader; though Genghis Mao has often said, echoing Mao I's similar words, that when one participates in a revolution one attains revolutionary immortality, one transcends the death of the individual by living on indefinitely within the permanent revolutionary ferment one has helped to create, it is plain that Genghis Mao prefers the other, less metaphorical species of immortality for himself. He glowers. He sighs. He gives his consent to this latest surgical interruption of his revolutionary labors.
Warhaftig is summoned. There are conferences; schedules are rearranged; details of the surgery are explained to the Khan. The blood vessels will be clamped above and below the aneurysm to arrest circulation temporarily while Warhaftig removes the aneurysm and installs a dacron or teflon prosthesis.
"No," the Khan says. "Not a prosthesis. You can use a tissue graft, can't you? There's not much of a rejection problem with arterial tissue. It's like stitching in a length of hose."
Warhaftig says, "But dacron and teflon have proven perfectly —"
"No. I have enough plastic in me already. And the organ banks are overflowing with new material. Give me real aorta.'' Genghis Mao's eyes gleam. "Give me aorta from one of the recently convicted conspirators."
Warhaftig looks at Shadrach Mordecai, who shrugs.
"As you wish," the surgeon says.
Shadrach has lunch soon afterward with Katya Lindman. When they have eaten, they stroll in Sukhe Bator Square. He has spent more time than usual with Lindman since the night they went to Karakorum, although he has not slept with her again. He finds her more gentle, less threatening now, and is not sure whether she has changed or simply his attitude toward her; waking up and finding her sobbing may have had something to do with it. Certainly she has become warm and friendly, so much so that he suspects and fears she may even be falling in love with him; yet there is something reserved at her core, some ineluctable holding back, a zone of silence within her that strikes him as the enemy of love. There never were such sealed places in Nikki Crowfoot when Shadrach's relationship with her was going well.
The midday sun is bright, the air soft, the day warm; golden flowers gleam in the terra-cotta tubs of shrubbery that decorate the plaza. Katya walks close to him, but their bodies do not touch. She has already heard of the new crisis. News of all sorts travels inordinately swiftly through the Grand Tower of the Khan, but especially news of the health of Genghis Mao. "Tell me what an aneurysm is," she says. He gives her an elaborate explanation and describes the operation that will be performed. They are standing near the place where Mangu fell. When he finishes, Shadrach looks up and tries to imagine two or three assassins plummeting in Mangu's wake, while lurking confederates spring forth to sweep up the shattered bodies and escape with them. Madness, Shadrach thinks. And this is the carefully considered theory propounded in all seriousness by the ruler of the world. Madness. Madness.
He says, "There've been almost three hundred arrests so far. Ninety-seven sent to the organ farms. Last week Roger Buckmaster was alive, healthy, his own master as much as any of us is. Tomorrow we may be using his aorta to patch Genghis Mao's. And still the arrests continue."
"So I gather. Avogadro's men bring them in, day and night. When will the Khan be satisfied?"
"When he decides that all the conspirators have been caught, I suppose."
"Conspirators!" Katya says scathingly. For a moment she has the old frightening intensity again. "What conspirators? What conspiracy? The whole thing is insane. Mangu killed himself."
"You think it was suicide too, then?"
" Think? I know it was," she says in a low voice, turning away from the Grand Tower as though to avoid cameras that might read her lips.
"You talk as if you were there when he jumped."
"Don't be silly."
"How can you know it was suicide, then?"
"I know. I know."
" Were you there when he—"
"Of course not," Lindman says.
"Then why are you so sure you're right?"
"Good reasons. Sufficient reasons."
"You know something that the security people don't?"
"Yes," she says.
"Then why don't you speak up about it, before Avogadro arrests the whole world?"
She is silent a moment. "No," she says at last. "I can't. It would destroy me."
"I don't follow."
"You would if I told you the story." She studies him. "If I told you, would it stop with you?"
"If that's what you wanted."
"I feel I should tell someone. I'd like to tell you. I trust you, Shadrach. But I'm afraid."
"If you'd rather not—"
"No. No. I'll tell you. Walk with me across the plaza. Keep your back to the tower."
"There are cameras everywhere. It doesn't matter which way we face. But they can't pick up everything, I guess."
They start across the plaza. Lindman raises her arm, holding it across her face as though to scratch her nose with the back of her wrist, and says, mouth covered, voice muffled, "I saw Mangu the night before he jumped. We talked about Project Avatar. I told him be was going to be the donor."
"Oh, Jesus. You didn't!"
She nods grimly. "I couldn't keep it to myself any longer. It was a Monday night, just before Genghis Mao's liver transplant, right? Yes. Mangu had made a speech that night, something about worldwide distribution of the Antidote. Then he and I went for drinks somewhere. He was afraid Genghis Mao might die during the operation and he'd have to take charge of things—I'm not ready, Mangu kept saying, I'm not ready. And then we started talking about the three projects, and he began to speculate about Avatar. What his role would likely be in the government if they transplanted Genghis Mao's mind into some other body. Whether Genghis Mao would still want him as viceroy after the transition, things like that.  Finally I couldn't stand it and I told him to stop worrying about it, that he was wasting his time, that after the transition he wasn't going to be around, that Genghis Mao was going to use his body as the donor."
Shadrach is stunned by this confession. He can barely speak; his legs tremble, his skin is chilled. He says, "How could you have done it?"
"The words just came out. I mean, here was this man, this pitiful doomed man trying to understand his future, trying to see what his role would be, and I knew that he had no future. Not if Project Avator worked out. We all knew it, all but him. And I couldn't hold it back any longer."
"What happened than?"
"His face seemed to cave in. His eyes went dead—blank— empty. He sat for a long time and didn't say anything. Then he asked me how I knew. I said it was known to a lot of people. He asked if you knew and I said I thought so. I want to talk to Nikki Crowfoot, he said. She's at Karakorum with Shadrach, I told him. Then he asked me if I thought Avatar really would work out, and I said I didn't know, I had a lot of faith in my own project, with any luck Talos would head Avatar off. It's all a matter of time, I said. Avatar's ahead of Talos now, and if anything serious happens to Genghis Mao in the next few months they might have to activate Avatar, because the Talos automation needs at least a year of further development work and Project Pheonix isn't getting anywhere. He thought about that. He said it didn't matter to him whether he actually became the donor or not, the thing was that Genghis Mao had let him think he was the heir-apparent while secretly approving what amounted to his murder. That was what hurt, he said, not the idea of dying, not the idea of giving up his body to Genghis Mao, but being tricked, being treated like a simpleton. And then he got up, he said goodnight, he went out. Walking very slowly. After that I don't know. I suppose he spent the whole night thinking things over. Thinking about how he had been duped. The prize lamb, fattened for the slaughter. And in the morning he jumped."
"And in the morning he jumped," Shadrach says. "Yes. Yes. It sounds right. Some truths can't be faced."
"So there are no conspirators. The conspiracy exists only in Genghis Mao's paranoia. Those three hundred arrested people are innocent. How many sent to the organ farms so far? Ninety-seven? Innocent. All innocent. I've watched it happen, but there's nothing I can do. I can't speak out. They say the Khan refuses even to consider the suicide hypothesis."
"He wants there to have been a conspiracy, yes," Shadrach says. "He enjoys punishing the guilty."
"And if I told him what I've just told you, the Khan would have me killed."
"You'd be in the organ farm tomorrow. Yes. Or else maybe he'd pick you as the new Avatar donor."
"No," Katya says. "That isn't likely."
"It would suit his philosophy. It would be very centripetal, wouldn't it?  Very fitting. Very neat."
"Don't be foolish, Shadrach. It's unimaginable. He's a barbarian, isn't he? He's a Mongol. He thinks he's the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. He'd never let himself be transplanted into a woman's body."
"Why not? The old Mongol khans weren't sexists, Katya. As I recall, the Mongols let themselves be ruled by female regents now and then when the male line gave out. Of course, there are problems of adaptation he'd have, changing sexes, all the bodily reflexes, all the million little masculine things that he'd have to unlearn—
"Stop it, Shadrach. It isn't a serious possibility, the Khan's taking my body."
"But it's amusing to consider—"
"It doesn't amuse me." She halts and swings around to face him. She is pale, drawn, tense. "What can we do? How can we stop these hideous arrests?"
"There's no way. The thing has to run its course."
"Suppose an anonymous tip is sent to the Khan, telling him merely that Mangu had learned what was in store for him, that some unnamed person had revealed to him that he would be used for—"
"No. Either Genghis Mao will ignore it, or else he'll begin a vast and bloody interrogation of everybody who might have had knowledge of the Avatar plan."
"What if the arrests don't stop though?"
Shadrach says, "Avogadro's running out of suspects. It's almost over."
"And the prisoners awaiting sentence?"
Shadrach Mordecai sighs. "We can't help them. They are lost. Nothing can be done, Katya. One way or another, we're all awaiting sentence."
He is haunted all afternoon by the vision of Mangu, pitiful deluded Mangu, stripped of all delusions, confronted at last by frosty reality. Why had Lindman tipped him to his true fate? Out of compassion? Did she really think she was helping him, for God's sake? Had she thought that receiving such knowledge could do Mangu any good? Could she have failed to see how cruel, how merciless, she was being? No. She must have known that a man like Mangu, genial, shallow, unquestioning, a man who was living an impossible fantasy of eventual succession to the world's most powerful office, believing he enjoyed the esteem, even the love, of Genghis Mao, would collapse totally if that structure of fantasy was ripped away. She must have known.
Of course. An hour after lunching with Katya Lindman, Shadrach finally grasps the pattern. Lindman, good chessplayer that she is, had foreseen all the consequences of her move. Tell Mangu the truth, pretending compassion and claiming a compulsion to frankness. Mangu—out of humiliation, chagrin, fear, even vengefulness, whatever—reacts by putting his body beyond Genghis Mao's reach. No Mangu, and Project Avatar is dealt a mighty blow. Nikki, Lindman's rival, is discomfited; Avatar, set back by many months, loses its primacy to Lindman's Project Talos; Shadrach, already mysteriously estranged from Nikki, is drawn inevitably closer to Katya as her star rises. Of course. Of course. And all the rest, Katya's pretense of concern for the hapless victims of the mass arrests, Katya's show of grief for poor pathetic Mangu—all part of the game. Shadrach shivers. Even in the harsh and perverse climate of the Grand Tower of the Khan, this seems monstrous, and Lindman a baleful and alien figure, malevolent enough to make a suitable consort for Genghis Mao himself. Or, if not a mate, then a fitting housing for the old ogre's devious and sinister mind. Yes! For a moment Shadrach does seriously consider urging the Khan to take Lindman's body in place of Mangu's: An appropriate choice, sir, very centripetal, very apt. Though he is puzzled by one still-obscure motive: why has Lindman revealed all this to him? If she is so calculating a monster, would she not have calculated the likelihood that he would sooner or later come to see her for what she is? Can that have been her ultimate aim? Why? He is dizzied by the multiplicity of speculations.
He wants to turn to Nikki, but Nikki has continued to hold herself aloof, and he has not even spoken to her by telephone for two or three days. He phones her now, on the pretext that he needs an update on Project Avatar progress, but one of her assistants appears on the screen, a Dr. Eis from Frankfurt. Eis, classically Teutonic, pale blue eyes and soft golden hair, does an odd little take of—surprise? dismay? distaste?—at the sight of Shadrach, forehead furrowing and corner of mouth pulling in, but he recovers quickly and gives him a cool, formal greeting. Shadrach says, "May I speak with Dr. Crowfoot, please?"
"I'm sorry. Dr. Crowfoot is not here. Perhaps I can be of assis—"
"Will she be back this afternoon?"
"Dr. Crowfoot has left for the day. Dr. Mordecai."
"I need to reach her."
"She is in her apartment, Doctor. An illness. She has asked that she not be disturbed."
"Sick? What's me matter?"
"A mild upset. A fever, headaches. She has asked me to tell you, if you called the laboratory, that we are still studying the recalibration problem, but that at present there is nothing to report, no—"
"Danke, Dr. Eis."
"Bitte, Dr. Mordecai," Eis replies crisply, as Shadrach blanks the screen.
He starts to phone Nikki's apartment. No. He's had enough of evasions, excuses, procrastinations, deflections. It's too easy for her to run numbers like that when he calls. He'll simply go down there and ring the doorbell, uninvited.
She lets him stand in the hallway a long time before she responds, though she must know, from her doorscreen, who's there. Then she says, "What do you want, Shadrach?"

"It's nothing serious. Just a bad case of the lousies."
"May I come in?"
"I'm trying to take a nap, Shadrach."
"I won't stay long."
"But I feel so awful. I'd rather not have visitors."
He starts to turn away from the door, but, although he knows his maniac persistence can do him no good, he finds it loo painful to leave without seeing her. Helplessly he hears himself saying, " At least let me see if I can prescribe something for you, Nikki. I am a doctor, after all."
Long silence. Desperately he prays that no one he knows will come upon him here, out in the hall like a lovesick Romeo pleading to be let in.
The door opens, at last.
 The air in the bedroom has that stale sickroom quality, stuffy and congested. He goes at once to open the window; Crowfoot shivers and asks him not to, but he ignores her. He sees when she sits up that she is naked under her blanket. "I'll find your pajamas for you if you're cold," he says.
"No.  I don't know if I'm cold or hot."
"May I examine you?"
"I'm not all that sick, Shadrach."
"Even so, I'd like to make certain."
"You think I'm coming down with organ-rot?"
"There's no harm in checking things out, Nikki. It'll take only a moment."
 Without having to bother me at all."
"No, I can't," he says. "But this'll be quick."
"All right," she tells him. She has not once met his eyes during this interchange, and that bothers him. "Go ahead. Play doctor with me, if you have to."
He uncovers her, and finds himself curiously reticent about exposing her body this way, as though their recent estrangement has somehow deprived him of a doctor's traditional privileges. But of course he has had only one patient in his career, having gone straight from medical school to the service of Genghis Mao, having done nothing but gerontological research until being elevated to serve as the Khan's personal physician, and he has never developed the practicing doctor's traditional indifference to flesh: this is no anonymous patient, this is Nikki Crowfoot whom he loves, and her naked body is more than an object to him. After a moment he attains some impersonality, though, transforms her breasts into mere globes of meat, her thighs into sexless columns of flesh and muscle, and checks her over without further unsettling himself, reading her pulse, tapping her chest, palpating her abdomen, all the routine things. Her self-diagnosis turns out to have been accurate: no incipient organ-rot, just a trifling upset, some fever, nothing remarkable. Plenty of fluids, rest, a couple of pills, and she'll be back to normal in a day or so.
"Satisfied?" she asks mockingly.
"Is it so hard for you to accept the fact lhat I worry about you, Nikki?"
"I told you I didn't have anything serious."
"I still worried."
"So examining me was really therapy for you?"
"I suppose," he admits.
"And if you hadn't rushed over to give me the benefit of your high-powered medical skills, I might be asleep now."
"I'm sorry."
"All right, Shadrach."
She turns away from him, curling up sullenly under the bedclothes. He stands by the bed, silent, wanting to ask a thousand unaskable questions, wanting to know what shadow has fallen between them, why she has become so mysteriously remote, so cool, why she will not even look straight at him when she speaks to him. After a moment he says, instead, "How's the project going?"
"Didn't Eis speak to you? We're recalibrating. It'll take us a while to gear up for a new donor. The whole thing's a colossal pain in the ass."
"How much of a setback is it, actually?"
She shrugs. "A month, if we're lucky. Or three.Or six. It all depends."
"On what?"
"On—on—oh, Christ! Look, Shadrach, I don't really want to talk shop right now. I feel sick.  My head hurts. My belly hurts. My skin tingles. I want to get some rest. I don't want to discuss my current research problems."
"I'm sorry," he says again.
"Will you go now?"
"Yes. Yes. I'll phone you in the morning to see how you're coming along, okay?"
She mutters something into her pillow.
He starts to leave. But he makes one last attempt to reach her before he goes. At the door he says tamely, "Oh—have you heard the newest rumor making the rounds? About Mangu's death?"
She groans stoically. "I haven't heard anything. But go on. Go on. What is it?"
He frames his words carefully, so that he will not feel he is breaching Katya Lindman's confidence: "The story that's going around is that Mangu committed suicide because somebody connected with Project Talos tipped him that he was to be the Avatar donor."

"What? What? I hadn't heard that!"
"It's just a story."
"Who's the one who's supposed to have tipped him?"
"They don't say."
"Lindman herself, was it?" Nikki demands.
"It's only a rumor, Nikki. Nobody specific has been named. Anyway, Katya wouldn't do anything so unprofessional."
"Oh no?"
"I don't think so. If it happened at all, it was probably some ambitious underling, some third-echelon programmer. If it happened at all. There may not be a shred of truth to it."
"But it sounds right," she says. Her breasts are heaving, her skin is glossy with new sweat. "What better way could Lindman find to sabotage my work? Oh, why didn't I think of it! How could I not have seen—"
"Stay calm, Nikki. You aren't well."
"When I get hold of her—"
"Please," Shadrach says. "Lie down. I wish I hadn't said a word.  I absolutely don't believe that Katya would—"
"We'll see," she says ominously. She grows more calm. "You may be right. Even so. Even so. We should have had much tighter security. However many people knew that Mangu was the donor, five, six, ten people, that was too many. Much too many. For the next donor—" Crowfoot coughs. She turns away again, huddling into her pillow. "Oh, Shadrach, I feel lousy! Go away! Please go away! Now you've got me all stirred up over something altogether new, and I—oh, Shadrach—"
"I'm sorry," he says once more. "I didn't mean—"
"Goodbye, Shadrach."
"Goodbye, Nikki."
He bolts from the apartment. He plunges through the hall, fetching up finally against a stanchion near the stairs. He grasps it, steadies himself. The visit to Nikki has hardly improved his state of mind. Her attitude toward him, he realizes, ranged from indifferent to irritated; never once did she express any pleasure that he had come to see her. He was tolerated at best.
And now, he knows, he must hurry back to Katya.
She seemed surprised to see him again so soon. She greets him warmly, unsubtly, as though automatically assuming he has come here to make love. His mood is far from sexual, though. He disengages himself from her embrace as soon as is politic, and gently but firmly establishes a psychic distance between them. In quick earnest blurts he reports the essence of his conversation with Nikki, stressing that the "rumor" he had invented did not in any way incriminate Katya herself in the tipping off of Mangu.
"But of course Crowfoot immediately guessed I was the one, right?"
"I'm afraid so. I argued that it was inconceivable you'd do any such thing, but she—"
"Now she knows I did, and will hold the grudge against me forever, and will do whatever she can to pay me back. Thanks a lot."
Quietly Shadrach says, "If she's angry, you can't entirely blame her. You have to admit there was an aspect of sabotaging Avatar in your passing the word to Mangu."
"I passed the word to Mangu out of pity for him," Lindman says flintily.
"Pity and nothing but pity? You didn't consider at all that he might react in a way that would upset the Avatar program, and that that would create problems for Nikki Crowfoot?" Katya is silent for some while.
At length she says, in a more yielding voice, "I suppose that that crossed my mind too. But it was very secondary. Very very secondary. Mainly I couldn't bear to face Mangu any more, listening to him talking about his future and knowing what I knew. I had to warn him or I'd saddle myself with full responsibility for what was going to happen to him, Can you believe that, Shadrach? How evil do you think I am? Do you think my life begins and ends with these insane projects of Genghis Mao's? Do you think that the only motivations that operate in me are Talos motivations, how I can push my own career, how I can wreck Nikki Crowfoot's? Do you?"
"I don't know. I suppose not."
"You suppose?"
"I don't think you're like that, no."
"Fine. Splendid. Thank you. And what happens now? Will she denounce me to Genghis Mao?"
"There's no proof you ever said anything to Mangu," Shadrach Mordecai replies. "She knows that. She knows also that whatever accusations she makes against you will be discounted as professional jealousy. I don't think she'll take any action at all, actually. Except that she did say she'd maintain tighter security on the identity of the next Avatar donor, so that there'd be no chance the same thing would—"
"It's too late," Lindman says.
"The next donor's already been picked?"
"Yes."
"And you know his name?"
“Yes.”
"I don't suppose you'd care to tell me," Shadrach says.
"I don't think I should."
"Are you planning to tell him?"
"Would you say it was sabotage again if I did?"
"It depends on the circumstances, I guess. Who is he?"
Katya Lindman trembles. Her lips quiver.
"You," she says.
It seems like a joke, and not a very good joke. He is unable to accept it at all, despite the strident note of conviction in Katya's voice, that shrill, almost desperate note of certainty that Shadrach had also heard when Roger Buckmaster was trying to deny his complicity in Mangu's death, that tone that says. You won't believe this no matter how heavy an oath I swear, but what I'm telling you is true, is true, is true, is true!
Yet if he has been selected as the new donor, it would explain why Nikki has been avoiding him, why she is remote and short-tempered when they speak, why her eyes will not meet his—
"No," he says. "I don't believe you."
"So don't believe me."
"It's absurd, Katya."
"Undoubtedly it's absurd. And it'll be just as absurd the day they come for you and put the electrodes on your head and obliterate every trace of Shadrach Mordecai and pour the soul of Genghis Mao into your pretty brown body."
"My pretty brown body," Shadrach says, "is full og complicated and irreplaceable medical devices that register every twitch of Genghis Mao's metabolism. It took Roger Buckmaster a couple of years to design and build that system, it took Warhaftig weeks to implant it in me, it took me a year to learn how to use it. Using it, I can protect Genghis Mao's health in a way that was never before possible in medical history. With all the warm bodies Avatar has to choose from, do you think Genghis Mao would let them choose the one body that's indispensable to his—"
"Think, Shadrach, think. Avatar won't be activated unless Genghis Mao's present body is on the threshold of death. He won't need all your fancy implants once he moves into your body. He won't need you as his doctor; he won't really need a full-time doctor at all, not for many years. And he can find another doctor. He can find another Buckmaster to build a new set of implants when the time comes. He's probably got a replacement for you in training already, somewhere in Bulgaria or Afghanistan. Remember what he always says about redundancy, Shadrach? The avenue of survival. Genghis Mao understands survival very well. Better than you, I'm afraid."
Shadrach Mordecai's mouth opens. Says nothing. Closes.
"If Avatar is activated," Katya says, "you go. I swear it."
"When was this decided?"
"More than a week ago. I found out about it a few hours before we left for Karakorum."
Which was just about the time Nikki Crowfoot began finding excuses for not keeping company with him, Shadrach reflects. He remembers waking up in this very room, Katya's room, the night of the dream-death excursion, and discovering Katya sobbing beside him in bed, and hearing her tell him that she was afraid for him, without offering further explanation. Yes. And he remembers all that lunatic talk of Genghis Mao's about nominating him for Pope, for King of England—what was that about? Disguised and displaced intimations of the real nomination? He remembers, too, and the memory chills him, running shirtless into Genghis Mao's bedroom just after the news of Mangu's death had broken, remembers seeing the Khan eyeing his bare torso with interest, with admiration, Genghis Mao saying. You look very healthy, Shadrach. Yes. Shopping for a new body already, was he, minutes after learning of the loss of Mangu?
He thinks of Buckmaster screaming, You'll finish in the furnace, Shadrach, in the furnace, in the bloody furnace!
No. No. No.
"I can't believe this," he says.
"Start learning how."
"It makes no sense to me. I literally can't grasp the meaning of the whole thing."
"Doesn't it frighten you, Shadrach?"
"No. Not at all." He holds out his hands. Steady. As steady as Warhaftig's. “See? I'm entirely calm. I am without affect. It doesn't register on me. It's unreal."
"But it isn't, Shadrach."
"Nikki knows?"
"Of course."
"She's not the one who picked me, is she?"
"Genghis Mao picked you."
"Yes. That figures. Yes." He laughs. "Do you notice how I begin to talk as though I believe this? As though I accept it, on some level?"
"What will you do, Shadrach?"
"Do? Do? What should I do? Should I do what Mangu did?"
"You're not Mangu."
"No," he says. "Even if I had absolute proof, even if they came to me with an engraved scroll signed by Genghis Mao, nominating me for Avatar, I wouldn't choose Mangu's way. I'm not in the least a suicidal person. Maybe it sets in later, Katya. First I have to feel something. I don't feel anything yet. I don't feel betrayed, I don't feel endangered, I don't think I even feel surprised."
"Could it be that you want to be the Avatar donor?"
"I want to be Dr. Shadrach Mordecai. I want to go on being him for a long time."
"Then keep Genghis Mao healthy. So long as his body is functioning, he won't need yours. Meanwhile, it'll be my task to make Avatar altogether superfluous by bringing Talos quickly to perfection. You know, Genghis Mao may actually prefer the Talos idea. I think it suits his particular brand of paranoia to be transferred into a machine, an imperishable, flawless machine. After all, even your beautiful body is going to decay and crumble. He knows that. He knows he might have twenty or thirty good years in you, and then it'll be the same route all over again, organ transplants, drugs, constant surgery, whereas the Talos simulacrum will spare him all that. So Avatar is just a contingency plan for him, a redundancy that he hopes not to have to use, and that's why he can pick people he values as the donors— Mangu, you—a kind of honor, in its way, the blessing of the Khan, not at all the jeopardy that it might be thought to be. I tried to tell that to Mangu, too, that Avatar wouldn't necessarily happen, but he—"
"Why did you tell me about this, Katya?"
"For the same reason I told Mangu."
"To help wreck Avatar?"
Her eyes flash the old Lindman fire.
"What good is it, telling me?"
"I want you to be on guard, Shadrach. I want you to know what danger you're in now. So long as there's even a slight likelihood that Avatar will have to be used, you—"
"What does it matter to you, though ? A sore conscience? You don't like hanging out with men who you know are secretly earmarked for destruction?"
"That's part of it," Katya says quietly. "I hate living a lie."
"What's the rest?"
"I love you," she says.
He stares with glassy eyes. "What?"
"I'm not capable of it? I'm good only for building automations, is that it? I have no emotions?”
"I didn't mean that. But—you seemed so cold all the time, so businesslike, so matter-of-fact. Even when—" He pauses, decides to finish. "Even when we would have sex. I never felt any emotional warmth from you; only, well, physical passion."
"You were Nikki's. Getting involved with you would only have been painful to me. You didn't want me except for the occasional fling in Karakorum, except for the occasional meaningless screw."
"And now?"
"Do you still love Nikki? She helped sell you out, you know. She went to Genghis Mao, she heard him select you for Avatar, she probably tried to get him to change his mind—we ought to give her that much credit—and she failed, and then she accepted the order. Her career comes before your life. She could have come to you and said. This is what Genghis Mao wants to do, but I can't do it, I rebel, let's both get out of this hideous place. She didn't, though, did she? She simply started keeping away from you. Because of the guilt she felt, right? Not out of love, but out of guilt, out of shame."
Numbly Shadrach shakes his head.
"This is unreal, Katya."

"But Nikki—"
"Is afraid of Genghis Mao. As am I, as are you, as is everyone in this city, everyone in the world. That's the measure of her love for you: her fear of that crazy old man is greater. If I'd been in her position, I might have made the same choice. But it's not my project. I'm not faced with the option of betraying you versus defying the Khan. I'm free to go behind his back, to warn you, to let you make your own decisions. But it's strange, isn't it? The warm tall beautiful loving Nikki agrees to sell you out.
"You aren't ugly," he murmurs.
Katya laughs. “Come here,'' she says. She sits on the edge of the bed, tugs him down beside her, roughly presses his head against her breasts. "Rest. Think. Make plans, Shadrach. You're lost if you don't." She caresses his aching forehead.