"It was no trouble," Shadrach says quietly. "The man was dying. He didn't have time to think about decency."
"Even so. To importune a stranger, a visitor to our—"
Shadrach shakes his head. "It's all right. Whatever he wanted from me, I couldn't provide it, and now he's dead. I wish I could have helped. I'm a doctor," he confides, hoping the disclosure will have the right effect.
It does. "Ah!" the shopkeeper cries. "Then you understand these things." The sensibilities of doctors are not like those of ordinary beings. It no longer embarrasses the proprietor that one of his shabby countrymen has had the poor taste to inflict his death on a tourist.
"What shall we do about the body?" Shadrach asks.
"The Citpols will come. Word gets around."
"I thought we might telephone someone—"
A shrug. "The Citpols will come. There is no importance. The disease is not contagious, I understand. That is, we are all infected from the days of the War, but we have nothing to fear from those who display actual symptoms. Or from their bodies. Is this not true?"
"It's true, yes," Shadrach says. He glances uncomfortably at the small sprawled corpse, lying like a discarded blanket on the sidewalk outside the store. “Perhaps we ought to phone anyway, though."
"The Citpols will come shortly,'' the shopkeeper says again, as if dismissing the subject. "Will you have tea with me? I rarely have the opportunity to entertain a visitor. I am Bhishma Das. You are American?"
"I was born there, yes. I live abroad now."
"Ah."
Das busies himself behind the counter, where he has a hotplate and some packets of tea. His indifference to the body on the street continues to distress Shadrach; but Das does not seem to be an unintelligent or insensitive man. Perhaps it is the custom, out here in the Trauma Ward, to pay as little attention as possible to these reminders of the universal mortality.
In any event Das is right: the Citpols do indeed arrive swiftly, three black-skinned men in the standard uniforms, riding in a long somber hearselike vehicle. Two of them load the body into the car; the third peers through the shop window, staring long and intently at Shadraeh and nodding to himself in an unfathomable, oddly disturbing way. The Citpols finally drive away.
Das says, "We will all die of the organ-rot sooner or later, is this not true? We and our children as well? We are all infected, they say. Is this not true?"
"True, yes," Shadrach replies. Even he carries the killer DNA enmeshed in his genes. Even Genghis Mao. "Of course, there's the Antidote—"
"The antidote. Ah. Do you believe there is indeed an antidote?"
Shadrach blinks. "You doubt it?"
"I have no certain knowledge of these things. The Chairman says there is an antidote, and that it will soon be given to the people. But the people continue to die. Ah, the tea is ready! Is there, then, an antidote? I have no idea. I am not sure what to believe."
"There is an antidote," says Shadrach, accepting a delicate porcelain cup from the merchant. "Yes, truly there is. And one day it will be given to all the people."
"You know this to be fact?"
"I know it, yes."
"You are a doctor. You would know."
“Yes.”
"Ah," Bhishma Das says, and sips his tea. After a long pause he says, "Of course, many of us will die of the rot before the antidote is given. Not only those who lived in the days of the War, but even our children. How can this be? I have never understood this. My health is excellent, my sons are strong—and yet we carry the plague within us too? It sleeps within us, waiting its moment? It sleeps within everyone?"
"Everyone," Shadrach says. How can he explain? If he talks of the structural similarities between the organ-rot virus and the normal human genetic material, if he describes how the virus liberated during the long-ago war was capable of integrating itself into the nucleic acid, into the germ plasm itself, becoming so intimately entwined with the human genetic machinery that it is passed from generation to generation with normal cellular genes, a deadly packet of DNA that can turn lethal at any time, how much of this will Bhishma Das comprehend? Can Shadrach speak of the inextricability of the lethal genetic material, the inexorable way in which it must be incorporated into the genetic endowment of any child conceived since the Virus War, and get the meaning across? The intrusive organ-rot gene has become as intimate a part of the human heritage as the gene that puts hair on the scalp or the one that puts calcium in the bones: our tissues now are automatically programmed at birth to deteriorate and slough off when some unknown inner signal is given. But to Bhishma Das this may be as baffling as the dreams of Brahma. Shadrach says at last, after a moment's pause, "Everyone who was alive when they turned the virus loose absorbed it into his body, into the part of his body that determines what he transmits to his children. It can't be eradicated once it enters that part. And so we pass the virus along to our sons and daughters the way we do the color of our skins, the color of our eyes, the texture of our hair—"
"A dreadful legacy. How sad. And the antidote, Doctor? Would the antidote free us from this legacy?"
"The antidote they have now," Shadrach says, "keeps the virus from having a harmful effect on the body. It neutralizes it, stabilizes it, holds it in a state of latency. You follow me?"
"Yes, yes, I understand. In the deep freeze!"
"So to speak. Those who receive the antidote have to take a new dose every six months, at present. To hold the virus in check, to keep the organ-rot from breaking out in them."
"More tea, Doctor?"
"Please."
"You have received this antidote yourself?"
Shadrach replies uneasily, after a moment's consideration. "Yes. I have."
"Ah.  Because we must keep the healers alive. I understand. It seemed to me you must have the antidote. There is something about you; you are like a man apart from us. You do not wake up every day wondering if this is the day when the rot will start in you. Ah. And someday we will have the antidote too."
"Yes. Someday. The government is working on increasing the supply." The lie sours his mouth. "I wish you could have your first injection today."
"It is not important for me," Das says calmly. "I am old and I have enjoyed good health, and my life has been a happy one even in the most troubled times. If the rot begins in me tomorrow, I will be ready for it. But my sons, and the sons of my sons, I would spare them. What do old wars mean to them?  I want them to live. My family has been in Kenya for a hundred fifty years, since we first came from Bombay, and we have been happy here, and why should we perish now? Sad, Doctor, sad. This curse on mankind. Will we ever cleanse ourselves of what we have done to ourselves?"
Shadrach shrugs. There is no way to comb the murderous new gene out of the genetic package; but in theory a permanent antidote is possible, a hybrid DNA that can be integrated into the contaminated genes to absorb or detoxify the lethal genetic material. Somewhere in the PRC organization they are at work on such an antidote, Shadrach has been told. Of course, the rumor may be false. The research group may be only a myth. The permanent antidote itself may be only a myth.
He says, "I think these last twenty years have been a purge that mankind necessarily had to undergo. A punishment for accumulated idiocies and foolishnesses, perhaps. The whole history of the twentieth century is like an arrow pointing straight to the Virus War and its aftermath. But I believe we'll survive the ordeal."
"And things will be again as they once were?"
Shadrach smiles. "I hope not. If we go back to where we were, we'll only arrive again eventually at the same place we've reached now. And we may not survive the next version of the Virus War. No, I think we'll build a better world out of the ruins, a quieter, less greedy world. It'll take time. I'm not sure how we're going to accomplish it. Many bad things will happen first.  But eventually— eventually—the suffering will be over, the dying will be done, and those who remain will live in happiness again,"
"How refreshing to hear such optimism."
"Am I an optimist? I've never thought of myself that way. A realist, maybe. But not an optimist. How strange suddenly to find myself an apostle of faith and good cheer!"
"Your eyes were glowing when you said what you said. You were already living in that better world as you spoke. Do you want to withdraw your prophecy? Please, no. You believe that that happier world will come."
"I hope it'll come," Shadrach says soberly.
"You know it will."
"I'm not sure. Perhaps I sounded sure a moment ago, but—" He shakes his head. He makes a determined effort to recapture that unexpected strain of positive thinking that had come so surprisingly from him a moment ago. "Yes," he says. "Things will gel better." Already there is something forced about it, but he goes on. " No trend continues downward forever. The organ-rot can be defeated. The smaller population that exists now will be able to live comfortably in a world that couldn't support the numbers of people who lived before the War. Yes. A purge, an ordeal by fire, a necessary corrective to old abuses, leading to better things. Dawn after the long darkness."
"Ah.
"Perhaps I am. Sometimes."
"I would like to see a man like you as the leader of that new world," Bhishma Das exclaims rapturously.
Shadrach recoils. "No, not me. Let me live in that world, yes. But don't ask me to govern it."
"You will change your mind when the moment comes. They will offer you the government, Doctor, because you are wise and good, and you will accept. Because you are wise and good." Das pours more tea. His naive faith is touching. Shadrach takes a sip; then he has a sudden morbid vision of Bhishma Das, a year or iwo from now, crying out in surprise and delight as the new Chairman of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee appears for the first time on his television screen, and the face of the new Chairman is the finely wrought brown-skinned face of that wise and good American doctor who once visited his store. Shadrach coughs and sputters and nearly spills his cup. The face will be the face of Dr. Mordecai, yes, but the mind behind the warm searching eyes will be the cold dark mind of Genghis Mao.
Shadrach has almost managed to forget Project Avatar, this day in Nairobi. Almost.
"I should be going," Shadrach says. "It's late in the day. You'll want to close the shop."
"Stay awhile. There is no hurry." Then: "I invite you to my home for dinner this evening."
"I'm afraid I can't—"
"Another engagement? Oh, how regrettable. We would provide a fine curry in your honor. We would open a fine wine. Some close friends—the most stimulating members of the Hindu community, professional people, teachers, philosophers—intelligent conversation—ah, yes, yes, a delightful evening, if you would grace our home!"
A temptation. Shadrach will dine alone, otherwise, at his hotel, a stranger in this strange city, lonely and in peril. But no: impossible. One of those stimulating Hindu professional persons will surely ask him where he lives, what kind of doctoring he does, and either he must lie, which is repugnant to him, or he must let it all spill out—member of privileged dictatorial elite, physician to the terrifying Genghis Mao, etc., etc., and so much for his new reputation as a humanitarian benefactor: the truth about him will sicken the friends of Bhishma Das and humiliate poor Das himself. Shadrach mumbles sincere-sounding excuses and regrets. As he edges to the door, Das follows him, saying, "At least accept a gift from me, a remembrance of this charming hour." The merchant glances hastily about his shelves, searching among the spears, the beaded necklaces, the wooden statuettes, everything apparently too crude, too flimsy, too inexpensive, or too awkwardly large to make a fitting offering for such a distinguished guest, and it seems for an instant that Shadrach will get out of the place ungifted; but at the last moment Das snatches up a small antelope horn in which a hole has been drilled at the pointed end and plugged with wax. A cupping horn, Das explains, used by a tribe near the southern border to draw pain and evil spirits from the bodies of the sick: one applies the cup to the skin, sucks, creates a vacuum, seals it with the wax plug. He urges it on Shadrach, saying it is an appropriate gift for a healer, and Shadrach, after a conventional show of reluctance, accepts gladly. He has no East African medical devices in his collection. "They still use these," Das informs him. "They use them very much just now, to draw forth the organ-rot spirit." He bows Shadrach from the store, telling him again and again what an honor his visit has been, what pleasure has come from hearing the doctor's words of hope.
On the seven-block journey back to the hotel Shadrach counts four dead bodies in the streets, and one that is not quite dead, but will be soon. "
In the morning he flies onward, toward Jerusalem. He is aware of the curve of the planet below him, the enormous belly of the world, and he is amazed anew by its complexity, its richness, this globe that holds Athens and Samarkand, Lhasa and Rangoon, Timbuktu, Benares, Chartres, Ghent, all the fascinating works of vanishing mankind, and all the natural wonders, the Grand Canyon, the Amazon, the Himalayas, the Sahara—so much, so much, for one small cosmic lump, such variety, such magnificent multitudinousness. And it is all his, for whatever time remains before Genghis Mao calls upon him to yield up the world and go.
He is not, like Bhishma Das, ready to go whenever his marching orders arrive. The world, now that he is again out in the midst of it, seems very beautiful, and he has seen so little of it. There are mountains to climb, rivers to cross, wines to taste. He who has been spared from organ-rot does not want to succumb to another man's lust for immortality. Shadrach's passivity has fallen from him: he does not accept the fate in store for him. Bhishma Das called him an optimist, a wise and good man whose face glows when he speaks of the better days that are coming, and though that was not how Shadrach had ever seen himself, he is pleased that Das saw him that way, pleased that those unexpectedly hopeful words tumbled from his lips. It is agreeable to be thought of as a man of sunny spirit, to be a source of hope and faith. He tries the image on and likes the fit. It is a little like smiling when one is not in a smiling mood, and feeling the smile work its way inward from the facial muscles to the soul: why not smile, why not live in the hope of a glorious resurrection? It costs nothing. It makes others happier. If one is proven wrong, as no doubt one will be, one has at least had the reward of having dwelled for a time in a warm little sphere of inner light rather than in dank dark despair.
But it is hard to put much conviction into one's optimism when the threat of immediate doom hangs over one. I must deal somehow with the problem of Project Avatar, Shadrach resolves.
December 8, 2001
So I am not to suffer the organ-rot after all. Today I had my first dose of Roncevic's drug. They say that if your smears have shown no trace of the virus in its active state before your first injection, you are safe, but the antidote can do nothing for you if the thing has already entered into the lethal phase. My smears were clean: I am safe. I never doubted that I would be spared. I was not meant to perish in the Virus War, but rather to endure, to survive the general holocaust and enter into my own true time. Which now has come. ''You will live a hundred years,” Roncevic said to me this morning. Does he mean a hundred more years? Or a hundred all told? In which case I have only about twenty-five years left. Not enough, not enough.
No matter what, I'll outlive poor Roncevic. He has the rot already. It glistens and blazes in his belly. How hard he worked to develop his drug, how eager he was to save himself! But not in time. The disease went active in him too soon, and he will go. He goes, I stay: he plays his appointed role in the drama and leaves the stage. While I live on, perhaps another hundred years. My physical vitality has always been extraordinary. No doubt my bodily energies are of superior order, for here I am, past seventy, with the vigor of a young man. Resisting disease, deflecting fatigue. They say that Chairman Mao, when he was past seventy, swam eight miles in the Yangtze in an hour and five minutes. Swimming is of no interest to me; yet I know that if there were need, I could swim ten miles in those sixty-five minutes; I could swim twenty.
Jerusalem is colder than Shadrach expects—almost as chilly as Ulan Bator on this late spring morning—and smaller, too, amazingly compact for a place where so much history has been made. He settles in at the International, a sprawling old mid-twentieth-century hotel stunningly located high on the Mount of Olives. From his balcony he has a superb view of the old walled city. Awe and excitement rise in him as he looks out upon it. Those two great glittering domes down there—his map tells him the huge gold one is the Dome of the Rock, on the site of Solomon's Temple, and the silver one is the Aqsa Mosque—and that formidable battlemented wall, and the ancient stone towers, and the tangle of winding streets, all speak to him of human endurance, of the slow steady tides of history, the arrivals and departures of monarchs and empires. The city of Abraham and Isaac, of David and Solomon, the city Nebuchadnezzar destroyed and Nehemiah rebuilt, the city of the Maccabees, of Herod, the city where Jesus suffered and died and rose from the dead, the city where Mohammed, in a vision, ascended into heaven, the city of the Crusaders, the city of legend, of fantasy, of pilgrimages, of conquests, of layer upon layer of event, layers deeper and more intricate than those of Troy—that little city of low buildings of tawny stone just across the swooping valley from him counsels him that apocalyptic hours are followed by rebirth and reconstruction, that no disaster is eternal. The mood that came upon him when he was with Bhishma Das has survived the journey out of Africa. Jerusalem is truly a city of light, a city of joy. He remembers his hymn-singing great-aunts Ellie and Hattie clapping their hands and chanting—
Jerusalem, my happy home
When shall I come to thee?
When shall my sorrows have an end?
Thy joys when shall I see?
—and suddenly he is again a boy of six or seven, wearing tight blue trousers and a starched white shirt, standing between those two colossal black women in their Sunday finery, singing with them, clapping his hands, humming or making up words where he does not know the right ones, oh, yes, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, lead me unto Jerusalem, Lord! That promised land, long ago, far away, that city of prophets and kings, Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest, and here he is at its gates, trembling with anticipation. He calls for a cab.
But when he actually enters the city, passing through St. Stephen's Gate and stepping forth onto the Via Dolorosa, that romance and fantasy begins unexpectedly to evaporate, and he wonders how he could have babbled so blithely to Das of the good times a-coming. Jerusalem is undeniably picturesque, yes—but to call a place picturesque is to damn it—with its narrow steep streets and sturdy age-old masonry, its crowded stalls piled high with pots and pans, fish and apples, pastries and flayed lambs, its scents of strange spices, its hawk-faced old men in Bedouin regalia, but a cold wind whistles through the filthy alleyways and everyone he sees, children and beggars and merchants and shoppers and porters and workmen alike, has that same look of dull despair, that same hollow-eyed broken-souled expression that is the mark not of endurance but of anticipated defeat and surrender: The Assyrians are coming, the Romans are coining, the Persians are coming, the Saracens are coming, the Turks are coming, the organ-rot is coming, and we will be crushed, we will be everlastingly annihilated.
It is impossible to escape the twenty-first century even within these medieval walls. Climbing toward Golgotha, Shadrach sees the standard mourning poster of Mangu pasted up all over, the bland young face against the brilliant yellow background. Mangu's presence was not absent from Nairobi, naturally, but in that spacious and airy city the posters were less oppressive, easily obscured by the dazzle of the bougainvilleas and the jacarandas. Here the heavy stone walls sweat garish images of Mangu over passageways barely wide enough for three to go abreast, yellow blotches impossible to escape, and, seeing them, one feels the malign hand of Genghis Mao passing over the city, imposing on it an unfelt grief for the dead viceroy. Genghis Mao is more immediately present, too, the familiar sinister leathery features glowering from breeze-bellied banners at every major intersection. The natives take these alien images as casually as, no doubt, they once took the posters and banners of Nebuchadnezzar, Ptolemy, Titus, Chosroes, Saladin, Suleiman the Magnificent, and all the other transient intruders, but to Shadrach these reduplicated Mongol faces loll against his consciousness like so many leaden bells counting out his dwindling hours.
Then too the organ-rot is here. Not as conspicuously as in Nairobi, perhaps, for on the broad avenues of that city the terminal cases walked alone, stumbling and lurching through private zones of vacant space. Old Jerusalem is too congested for that. But there is no scarcity of victims, shivering and sweating and groping along the Via Dolorosa. Occasionally one halts, sags against a wall, digs his fingers between the stones for support. The Stations of the Cross are indicated by marble plaques set into walls: here Jesus received the cross, here He fell the first time, here He encountered His Mother, and so on. And here, up the Via Dolorosa, go the dying, lost in their own crucifixions. As in Nairobi, they stare without seeming to see. But a few stretch their hands toward him as if imploring his blessing. This is a town where miracles have not been uncommon, and the black stranger is a man of dignity and stature: who knows, perhaps a new Savior walks these streets? But Shadrach has no miracles to offer, none. He is helpless. He is as much a dead man as they are, though he still walks about. As they do.
He feels much too conspicuous, too tall, too black, too alien, too healthy. Beggars, mostly children, cluster about him like flies. "Dol-lar," they implore. "Dol-lar, dol-lar, dol-lar!" He carries no coins—he uses a government credit planchet to cover all expenses—and so there is no way he can get rid of them. He scoops one five-year-old into the air, hoping to make a piggyback ride serve in lieu of baksheesh, but the expression of terror in the child's huge eyes is so pitiful that Shadrach quickly puts him down, and kneels, trying to give comfort. The child's fright passes at once: "Dol-lar," he demands. Shadrach shrugs and the child spits at him and runs. There are too many children here, too many everywhere, unattended, running in packs through the cities of the world. They are orphans, running wild, a feral generation. Shadrach has seen Donna Labile's demographic surveys: the worst impact of the organ-rot has fallen upon those who would now be between the ages of twenty-five and forty, Shadrach's own contemporaries, those who were children during the Virus War. Slower to succumb than their parents were, they survived into adulthood—just long enough, most of them, to marry and bring forth young; then they died, having seeded the world with little savages. The PRC has begun to establish camps for these abandoned children, but they are not much more attractive than prisons, and the system is not working well.
It is too much for Shadrach—the fierce children, the woeful staggerers, the dirt, the unfamiliar density of the populace that throngs this tiny walled city. There is no way to escape the overwhelming sadness of the place. He should never have entered it; it would have been better by far to look out from his hotel balcony and think romantic thoughts of Solomon and Saladin. He is pushed, prodded, pawed, and elbowed; harsh-sounding things are said to him in languages he does not understand; he is beleaguered by offers to buy his clothing, to sell him jewelry, to take him on tours of the great religious sites. Without the help of guides he makes his way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a grimy and graceless building, but he does not go in, for some kind of pitched battle seems to be under way at its main entrance between priests of different sects, who shout and shake fists and tug one another's beards and shred one another's cassocks. Turning aside, he finds, just back of the church, a busy bazaar—more accurately a flea market—where sherds and tatters of the former era are for sale: broken radios, antique television tubes, outboard engines, a miscellany of gears and wheels and cameras and electric shavers and telephones and pumps and gyroscopes and vacuum cleaners and batteries and lasers and gauges and tape recorders and calculators and microscopes and phonographs and washing machines and prisms and amplifiers, all the debris of the affluent twentieth century washed up on this strange shore. Everything is seemingly broken or defective, but the traders are doing a brisk business anyway. Shadrach is unable even to guess what uses these remnants and fragments may now be finding in the Palestinian hinterlands. He actually spies something he wants for his own medical collection, a gleaming little ultramicrotome once used to prepare tissue sections for the electron microscope, but when he produces his credit planchet rather than haggle, the trader merely gives him a blank, sullen stare. The PRC has decreed that government planchets must be accepted as legal tender everywhere, but the old Arab, after examining the glossy strip of plastic without much interest, hands it silently back to Shadrach and turns away. There is a Citpol at the edge of the marketplace who appears to be watching the aborted transaction. Shadrach could call the policeman over and get him to make the trader honor the planchet, but he decides against it; perhaps there will be unforeseeable complications, even dangers, and he does not want to attract attention in this place. He abandons the microtome and walks off to the south, through quieter streets, a residential district.
In a few minutes he comes to steps that lead downward to a great opened space, a cobblestoned plaza, at the far end of which stands an immense wall made of titanic blocks of roughhewn stone. Shadrach ambles across the plaza, heading toward the wall as he studies his map and tries to get his bearings. He remembers turning left, then left again at the Street of the Chain—perhaps he is in the old Jewish Quarter, heading back toward the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa, in which case— "You should cover your head in this place," says a quiet voice at his right elbow. "You stand on holy ground."
A small compact man, seventy years old or more, tanned and vigorous-looking, has approached him. He wears a round black skullcap, and, with a courteous but insistent gesture, has produced another from his pocket which he extends toward Shadrach.
"Isn't this whole city holy ground?" Shadrach asks, taking the skullcap.
"Every inch is holy to someone, yes. The Arabs have their places, the Copts, the Greek Orthodox, the Armenians, the Syrian Christians, everyone. But this is ours. Don't you know the Wall?" There is no mistaking the capital letter in his voice.
"The Wall," Shadrach says, embarrassed, staring at the great stone blocks, then at his map. "Oh. Of course. You mean this is the Wailing Wall? I didn't realize—"
"The Western Wall, we called it, after the reconquest in 1967, when the wailing stopped for a time. Now it is the Wailing Wall again. Though I myself do not believe much in wailing, even in times such as these." The little man smiles. "Under whatever name, it is for us Jews a holy of holies. The last remnant of the Temple." Again the capital letter.
"Solomon's Temple?"
"No, not that one. The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple, twenty-seven hundred years ago. This is the wall of the Second Temple, Herod's Temple, leveled by the Romans under Titus. The Wall is all that the Romans left standing. We revere it because it is for us a symbol not only of persecution but of endurance, of survival. This is your first time in Jerusalem?"
"Yes."
"American?"
"Yes," Shadrach says.
"I am also. So to speak. My father brought me here when I was seven. To a kibbutz in the Galilee. Just after the proclamation of the State of Israel, you know?—in 1948. I fought in the Sinai in '67, the Six Day War, and I was here to pray at the Wall in the first days after the victory, and I have lived in Jerusalem ever since. And the Wall to me is still the center of the world. I come here every day. Even though there is no longer really a State of Israel. Even though there are no longer any states at all, any dreams, any—" He pauses. "Forgive me. I talk too much. Would you like to pray at the Wall?"
"But I'm not Jewish," Shadrach says.
"What does that matter? Come with me.
"Not particularly."
"No religion at all?"
"No official religion. But I would like to go to the Wall."
"Come, then." They stride across the plaza, the short old man and the tall young one. Shadrach's companion says suddenly, "I am Meshach Yakov."
"Meshach?"
"Yes. It is a name from the Bible, The Book of Daniel. He was one of the three Jews who defied Nebuchadnezzar when the king ordered them to—"
"I know," Shadrach cries, "I know!" He is laughing. Delight bubbles in him. It is a delicious moment. "You don't have to tell me the story. I'm Shadrach!"
"Pardon me?"
"Shadrach. Shadrach Mordecai. It's my name."
"Your name," says Meshach Yakov. He laughs too. "Shadrach. Shadrach Mordecai. It is a beautiful name. It could be a fine Israeli name. With a name like that you aren't Jewish?"
"The wrong genes, I think. But I suppose that if I converted I wouldn't need to bother changing my name."
"No. No. A beautiful Jewish name. Shalom, Shadrach!"
"Shalom, Meshach!"
They laugh together. It is almost a vaudeville routine, Shadrach thinks. That Citipol lurking over there—is he Abednego? They are right by the Wall, now, and the laughter goes from them. The enormous weatherbeaten blocks seem incredibly ancient, as old as the Pyramids, as old as the Ark. Meshach Yakov closes his eyes, leans forward, touches his forehead to the Wall as though greeting it. Then he looks at Shadrach. "How shall I pray?" Shadrach asks.
"How? How? Pray any way you want to pray! Speak with the Lord! Tell Him things. Ask Him things. Do I need to tell a grown man how to pray? What can I tell you? Only this: it is better to give thanks than to ask favors. If you can. If you can."
Shadrach nods. He turns toward the Wall. His mind is empty. His soul is empty. He glances at Meshach Yakov. The Israeli, eyes closed, is rocking gently back and forth, murmuring to himself in what Shadrach assumes is Hebrew. No prayers come to Shadrach's lips. He can think only of the wild children, the organ-rot, the blank despondent faces along the Via Dolorosa, the posters of Mangu and Genghis Mao. This journey of his has been a failure. He has learned nothing, he has achieved nothing. He might as well get himself back to Ulan Bator tomorrow and face what must be faced. But the moment he articulates those thoughts, he rejects them. What of that sudden upwelling of optimism as he sipped tea with Bhishma Das? What of the moment of delight, of warm fellow-feeling, that he experienced on first hearing Meshach Yakov's name? These two old men, the Hindu, the Jew, both so sturdy of soul, so patient and steady under the weight of the world catastrophe—has nothing of their strength rubbed off on him?
He stands a long while, listening to the silence within his body that is the absence of Genghis Mao's outputs, and decides that it is not yet time to return to Ulan Bator. He will go onward. He will complete his tour.
He says, under his breath, too self-conscious to let Meshach Yakov hear it. "Thank you, Lord, for having made this world and for having let me live in it as long as I have." Better to give thanks than to ask favors. Even so, asking favors is not forbidden. To himself Shadrach adds, "And let me stay in it awhile longer, Lord. And show me how I can help make it more like the place you meant it to be." The prayer sounds foolish to him, mawkish, ingenuous. And yet not contemptible. And yet not contemptible. If it were given to him to live this one moment over, he would not revise that prayer, although he would not like to admit to anyone, either, that he had uttered it. When they are done at the Wall, Meshach Yakov invites Shadrach to dinner; and Shadrach, who has come to regret having refused Bhishma Das's invitation, accepts. Yakov lives in the modern sector of Jerusalem, far to the west of the old city, out beyond the parliament buildings and the university campus, in a high-rise atop a bare lofty hill. The apartment house, one of a complex of twenty or so, has the glossy, glassy look favored in the late twentieth century, but the marks of decay are all over it. Windows are dusty, even broken, doors are out of true, the balconies are splotched with rust, the elevator creaks and groans. The place is more than half empty, Yakov tells him. As the population dwindles and services deteriorate, people have deserted these once-choice suburbs to live closer to the center of town. But he has been here forty years, he says proudly, and he intends to stay another forty, at the very least.
Yakov's apartment itself is small, well kept, furnished sparsely in a tasteful, old-fashioned way. "My sister Rebekah," he says. "My grandchildren, Joseph, Leah." He tells them Shadrach's name, and they all have a hearty laugh over the coincidence, the close biblical association. The sister is in her seventies, Joseph about eighteen, Leah twelve or thirteen. There are black-framed photographs on the wall—Yakov's wife, Shadrach assumes, and three grown children, probably all victims of the organ-rot. Yakov does not say, Shadrach does not ask.
"Are you Jewish?" Leah demands.
Shadrach smiles, shakes his head.
"There are black Jews," she says. "I know. There are even Chinese Jews."
"Genghis Mao is a Jew," Joseph says, and bursts into wild laughter. But he laughs alone. Meshach Yakov glares at him; Yakov's sister looks shocked, Leah embarrassed. Shadrach finds himself shaken by the sudden intrusion of that alien name into this serene self-contained household.
Stiffly Yakov says to the boy, "Don't talk nonsense."
"I didn't mean anything," Joseph protests.
"Then save your breath," Yakov snaps. To Shadrach he says, "We are not great admirers of the Chairman here. But I would not like to discuss such things. I apologize for the boy's silliness. "
"It's all right," Shadrach says.

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

"I go now and then. Whenever things cut too close. There are some chapels down by Fisherman's Wharf. I wouldn't mind going now. Suppose you come down there with me. It'll do you some good."
"There's a bar at Washington and Stockton that I go to a lot. Suppose we go there instead.  Do me even more good,"
"Bar first, then chapel?"
"We'll see," Ehrenreich says.
The bar is dark, musty, a forlorn place. The bartender is an automatic: card in slot, thumb to identification plate, punch for drinks. They order martinis. Ehrenreich's truculence subsides after his second drink; he grows morose and maudlin, but he is less bitter now. "I'm sorry I said what I did, man," he multers.
"Forget it."
"I really thought you'd be the one."
"I wish I could be."
"I don't wish any trouble on you."
"I'm in trouble already," Shadrach says. "Hanging on by my fingernails." He laughs. A new round of drinks comes from the machine. He lifts his glass. "Never mind. Cheers, friend."
"Cheers, man."
"After this one we'll go to the chapel, right?"
Ehrenreich shakes his head. "Not me. It's not for me, you know? Not now. Not right now. You go without me. Don't nag me about it, just go without me."
"All right," Shadrach says.
He finishes his drink, touches Ehrenreich's arm lightly in farewell—the man is glassy-eyed, inarticulate—and finds a cab to take him down to the Wharf. But the chapel gives Shadrach no ease today. His fingers tremble, his eyes will not focus, he is unable to slip into the meditative state. After half an hour he leaves. He sees a car full of Citpols in a lot up the block. They're still watching him. There is a bearded man in street clothes in the car, also. Ehrenreich? Is that possible? At this distance he can't make out faces, but the heavy shoulders look about right, the thinning hair is familiar. Shadrach scowls. He hails a taxi, goes back to his hotel, packs, heads for the airport. Three hours later he is on his way to Peking.
In Peking, ensconced at the Hundred Gates Hotel in the old legation quarter adjoining the Forbidden City district, where Kublai Khan and Ch'ien-lung once held court, Shadrach begins once more to detect emanations from Genghis Mao. He is still some twelve hundred or thirteen hundred kilometers from Ulan Bator, he calculates—beyond the optimum telemetering range, and so the incoming impulses are blurred and faint. Then, too, after these weeks of separation Shadrach is no longer as much in concord with the broadcast from Genghis Mao's body as he had been. But when he sits very still, when he tunes his attention perfectly to the task, he finds himself able to read the old warlord's biodata with gradually sharpening clarity.
The gross functions come in best, of course: heartbeat, blood pressure, respiration, body temperature. The Khan's major systems all seem to be thundering along at their usual level of irrepressible vitality. Liver and kidney action register in their normal range. Basal metabolic expenditure normal. Neuromus-cular responses normal. It never ceases to amaze Shadrach how healthy, how strong, the old man is. He takes a certain vicarious pride in Genghis Mao's heroic durability and resilience.
Some unexpected puzzles begin to develop, though, as Shadrach extends his reach and starts to bring in the subtler, more refined data. These tend to contradict some of the gross indications. The muscle-firing responses do not seem quite right— phosphate breakdown appears weak, enzyme activity off. Blood viscosity is lower than normal and blood pH is nudging slightly toward the alkaline. Intestinal absorption is minutely down, cholesterol accumulation up, perspiration a trifle above normal. None of these things is cause for real alarm in a man of the Chairman's age who has recently undergone so much radical surgery—it is hardly reasonable to expect htm to be in perfect health—but the combination of factors is peculiar. Shadrach wonders how much of what he is reading is simply an artifact of distance and noise on the line: he is straining for some of these inputs, and he may not be getting them accurately. Still, the distortions, if distortions they are, are remarkably consistent. He gets the same reading whenever he returns to any sensor.
And a hypothesis is starling to take shape.
Diagnosis at more than a thousand kilometers' range is tricky. Shadrach misses his medical library and his computers. But he has an idea of what the problem may be, and he knows what data he needs to confirm his theory. What he does not know is whether Buckmaster's implant system is good enough to transmit analogues of such small-scale phenomena across so great a distance.
If blood viscosity is down and blood pH is alkaline, plasma protein levels are probably subnormal, and osmotic pressure, which draws fluids from the tissues to the capillaries, is going to be low. If the hydrostatic blood pressure is normal, as the gross function modulator is telling him, and the osmotic blood pressure is off, Genghis Mao's tissues may be building up an accumulation of excess fluids—not serious, not dangerous, not yet, but such fluid accumulations may be leading toward the development of edemas, of watery swellings, and edemas can be symptomatic of impending failure in the kidneys, the liver, perhaps the cardiac system. Bearing down in intense concentration, Shadrach roves Genghis Mao's body in search of signs of excess fluid. The lymphatic-system checkpoints give him nothing but normal levels, though. The reports from the pericardial, pleural, and peritoneal outposts are positive. Renal and hepatic functions, as before, are fine. Nothing seems to be wrong. Shadrach begins to abandon his hypothesis. Perhaps the Khan is not in difficulties. Those few negative indications were probably just noise on the line, and therefore—
But then Shadrach notices that something is not quite right in Genghis Mao's skull. Intracranial pressure is unusually high.
The implant monitors in the Chairman's cranium are not as comprehensive as they are elsewhere. Genghis Mao has no history of stroke or other cerebrovascular events, and surgeons have never had reason to invade the imperial skull. Since most of the telemetering equipment in Genghis Mao has been installed during the course of routine corrective surgery, Shadrach must make do with relatively skimpy coverage of the state of the Chairman's brain. But he does have a sensor that reports to him on intracranial pressure, and, as he makes his total scan of Genghis Mao's body, the rise in that pressure catches his attention. Is that where the fluid buildup is taking place?
Struggling, stretching for the data, Shadrach pulls in whatever correlative information he can grab. Osmotic pressure of the cranial capillaries? Low. Hydrostatic pressure? Normal. Meningeal distension? High. Condition of the cerebral ventricles? Congested. Something is awry, very marginally awry, in the system that drains cerebrospinal fluid from the interior of Genghis Mao's brain to the subarachnoid space, next to the skull wall, whereit normally passes into the blood.
What this means, at the moment, is that Genghis Mao probably has been having bad headaches for a few days, that he will have worse ones if Shadrach Mordecai does not return to Ulan Bator at once, and that he may suffer brain damage—possibly fatal—if prompt corrective action is not taken. It means, also, that Shadrach's holiday is at its end. He will not do the sightseeing tour of Peking. Not for him the visit to the Forbidden City, the historical museum, the Ming tombs, the Great Wall, the temple of Confucius, the Working People's Palace of Culture. Those things are unimportant to him now: this is the moment for which he was waiting during his wanderings from continent to continent. The unstable system that is Genghis II Mao IV Khan has, in the absence of the devoted physician, begun to break down. Shadrach's indispensability has been made manifest. He is needed. He must go to his patient immediately. He must take the appropriate actions. He has his Hippocratic obligations to fulfill. He has his own survival to think about, besides.
Shadrach descends to the hotel lobby to arrange for a seat aboard the next flight to Ulan Bator—there is one that evening, he learns, leaving in two and a half hours—and to check out of the room he so recently checked into. The clerk, a gaunt young Chinese who is unable to contain his fascination with the color of Shadrach's skin, staring and staring with surreptitious sideways glances, comments on the brevity of his stay in Peking.
"Change of plan," Shadrach declares resonantly. "Urgent business. Must return at once."
He glances down the length of the lobby—a dim, fragrant space, like the vestibule of some enormous Chinese restaurant, cluttered with mahogany screens and porcelain urns and huge lacquer bowls on rosewood pedestals—and sees, towering above a pair of porters, the husky, hulking figure of Avogadro.  He has just arrived at the hotel, it seems. Shadrach is not at all surprised to discover the security chief here. It was inevitable, he decides, that Avogadro would show up to make the arrest in person.
Neither of them remarks on the coincidence of their presence in this exotic place. Avogadro asks amiably, "How have you been enjoying your travels, Doctor?"
"I've seen a great deal of the world. Most interesting."
"That's the best word you can choose? Interesting? Not overwhelming, illuminating, transcendental?"
"Interesting," Shadrach repeats deliberately. "A very interesting trip. And how is Genghis Mao bearing up in my absence?"
"Not too badly."
"He's well looked after. He likes to think I'm indispensable, but the relief staff is quite capable of handling most of what's likely to come up."
"Probably so."
"But he's been having headaches, hasn't he?"
Avogadro looks mildly startled. "You know that, do you?"
"I'm just at the edge of the telemetering range here."
"And you can detect his headaches?"
"I can pick up certain causal factors," Shadrach says, "and deduce a headache from them."
"How clever that system is. You and the Khan are practically one person, wouldn't that be so? Connected the way you are. He aches and you feel it."
"Well put," Shadrach says. "Actually, Nikki was the first one to make that point to me. Genghis Mao and I are one person, yes, one united information-processing unit. Comparable to the sculptor and the marble and the chisel."
The analogy does not appear to register with Avogadro. He continues to smile the fixed, determinedly affable smile that he has been smiling since they first approached one another in the lobby.
"But not united closely enough," Shadrach goes on. "The system could be linked even more tightly. I plan to talk to the engineers about building some modifications into it, when I get back to Ulan Bator."
"Which will be when?"
"Tonight," Shadrach tells him. "I'm booked on the next flight out."
Avogadro's eyebrows rise. "You are? How convenient Saves me the trouble of—"
"Asking me to return?"
“Yes.”
"I thought you might have had something like that in mind."
"The truth is that Genghis Mao misses you. He sent me down here to talk to you."
"Of course."
"To ask you to come back."
"He sent you to ask me that. Not to bring me, but to ask me. If I would return. Of my own free will."
"To ask, yes."
Shadrach thinks of the Citpols keeping tabs on him all around the world, huddling, conferring, passing bulletins on to their colleagues in distant cities. He knows, and he is sure that Avogadro knows that he knows, that the real situation is not as casual as Avogadro would have him believe. By buying that ticket on this evening's flight, he has spared Avogadro the embarrassment of having to take him into custody and return him to Ulan Bator under duress. He hopes Avogadro is properly grateful for that.
He says, "How bad are the Khan's headaches?"
"Pretty bad, I'm told."
"You haven't seen him?"
Avogadro shakes his head. "Only on the telephone. He looked drawn. Tired."
"How long ago was this?"
"The night before last. But there's been talk in the tower all week about the Chairman's headaches."
"I see," Shadrach says. "I thought it might be like that. That's why I've decided to go back ahead of schedule." His eyes rest squarely on Avogadro's. "You understand that, don't you? That I bought my return ticket as soon as I realized the Khan was in discomfort? Because it was my responsibility to my patient. My responsibility to my patient is always the controlling factor in my actions. Always. Always. You're aware of that, aren't you?"
"Naturally," Avogadro says.
June 23, 2012
What if I had died before my work was done? Not an idle question at all. I am important to history. I am one of the great reconstituters of society. Subtract me from the scene in 1995, in 1998, even as late as 2001, and everything tumbles into chaos. I am to this society as Augustus was to the Roman world, as Ch'in Shih Huang Ti was to China. What kind of world would exist today if I had perished ten years ago? A thousand warring principalities, no doubt, each with its own pathetic army, its own legislature, currency, passports, border guards, customs levies. A host of petty aristocracies, feudal overlords, secret cabals of malcontents, constant little revolutions—chaos, chaos, chaos. New outbreaks of virus warfare, very likely. And ultimately the extinction of mankind. All this if you subtract Genghis Mao at the critical moment in history. I am the world-savior.
It sounds obscenely boastful. World-savior!  And yet it is true, truer for me than for any of them, for without me all of mankind might be dead today, and that is new in the history of the savior-myth. To end the strife, to seal away the virus, to sponsor Roncevic's work—yes, no doubt of it, this could have been a dead planet by now if I had gone into the tomb ten years ago. As history will recognize. And yet, and yet, what does it matter? I will not be forgotten when I die—I will never be forgotten—but I will die. Sooner, later, my subterfuges will exhaust themselves. Neither Talos nor Phoenix nor Avatar can sustain me indefinitely. Something will fail, or boredom will conquer me and I will terminate my own systems, and I will die, and then what will it have meant to have saved the world? What I have done is ultimately meaningless to me. The power I have attained is ultimately empty. Not immediately empty—here I sit, do I not, among splendor and comfort?—but ultimately empty. I pretend that there is meaning in empire, but there is none, no meaning anywhere. This is a philosophy common among the very young, and, I suppose, among the very old. I must pretend that power is important to me. I must pretend that the reckoning of history is the all-consoling consolation. But I am too old to care. I have forgotten why it mattered to me to do what I have done. I am playing out a foolish game, unwilling to let it reach its end, but unsure of the nature of the winning gambit. And so I go on and on and on. I, Genghis II Mao IV Khan, savior of the world, taking care to conceal from those around me the profound and paralyzing vacancy that lies beneath the subcellars of my spirit. I think I have lost the thread of my own argument. I am tired. I am bored. My head hurts. My head hurts.
"Shadrach!" Genghis Mao roars. "This filthy headache! Fix me, Shadrach!"
The old buccaneer forces a grin. He sits propped up against triple pillows, looking weary and frayed. His jaws are set in a rigid grimace; his ryes have a harsh glare and they waver frantically as though he is struggling to keep them in focus. At this close range Shadrach can easily detect a dozen different symptoms of the pressure building up in the recesses of the Chairman's brain. Already there are many tiny signs of deterioration in Genghis Mao's cerebral functions. No doubt of the diagnosis now. No doubt of it.
"You were away too long," the Khan mutters. "Enjoying yourself? Yes. But the headache, Shadrach, the miserable hideous headache—I shouldn't have let you go. Your place is here. Beside me. Watching me. Healing me. It was like sending my right hand on a voyage around the world.  And you'll fix my head? It frightens me. The throbbing. Like something trying to escape in there."
"There's no reason to worry, sir. We'll fix you soon enough."
Genghis Mao rolls his eyes in torment. "How? Chop a hole in my skull?
"This isn't the Neolithic," Shadrach says. "The trephine is obsolete. We have better methods." He touches the tips of his fingers to the Khan's cheeks, probing for the sharp, upthrusting bones. "Relax, sir. Let the muscles go slack." It is late at night, and Shadrach is exhausted, having flown this day from San Francisco to Peking, from Peking to Ulan Bator, having gone at once to Genghis Mao's bedside without pausing even for fresh clothing. His mind is a muddle of time zones and he is not sure whether he is in Saturday, Sunday, or Friday. But there is a sphere of utter crystalline clarity at the core of his spirit. "Relax," he croons. "Relax.  Easy, now, easy—"
Genghis Mao scoffs. "You aren't going to cure this with massages and soothing talk."
"But we can ease the symptoms this way. We can palliate, sir."
"And then?"
"If necessary, there are surgical remedies."
"You see? You will chop open my skull!"
"We'll be neat about it, I promise." Shadrach moves around behind Genghis Mao, so he will not be distracted by the need to maintain eye contact with the fierce old man, and concentrates on diagnostic perceptions. Hydrostatic imbalance, yes; roeningeal congestion, yes; some accumulation of metabolic wastes about the brain, yes. The situation is far from critical—action could be deferred for weeks, perhaps for many months, without great risk—but Shadrach intends to deal swiftly with the problem. And not only for Genghis Mao's sake.
Genghis Mao says, "It's good to have you back."
"Thank you, sir."
"You should have been here for the funeral. You would have had a front-row seat. It was magnificent, Shadrach. Did you watch the funeral on television?"
"Of course," Shadrach lies. "In—ah—in Jerusalem. I think I was in Jerusalem then. Yes. Magnificent. Yes."
"Magnificent," says Genghis Mao, dwelling lovingly on the word. "It will never be forgotten. One of history's great spectacles. I was proud of it. The Assyrians couldn't have done better for old Sardanapalus." The Khan laughs. "If one can't attend one's own funeral, Shadrach, one can at least satisfy the urge by staging a splendid funeral for someone else. Eh? Eh?"
"I wish I could have been there, sir."
"But you were in Jerusalem. Or was it Istanbul?"
"Jerusalem, I think, sir." He touches Genghis Mao's temples, pressing lightly but firmly. The Chairman winces. When Shadrach presses the sides of Genghis Mao's neck, just below and behind the ears, the Chairman grunts. "Tender there," Genghis Mao says.
"Yes."
"How bad is it, really?"
"It's not good. No immediate danger, but there's definitely a problem in there."
"Explain it to me."
Shadrach moves out where Genghis Mao can see him. "The brain and spinal cord," he says, "float, literally float, in a liquid we call cerebrospinal fluid, which is manufactured in hollow chambers within the brain known as ventricles. It protects and nourishes the brain and, when it drains into the spaces surrounding the brain, it carries off the metabolic wastes resulting from the brain's activity. Under certain circumstances the passageways from the ventricles to these meningeal spaces become blocked, and cerebrospinal fluid accumulates in the ventricles."
"Is that what's happening to my head?"
"So it seems."
"Why?"
Shrugging, Shadrach replies, "It's usually caused by infection or by a tumor at the base of the brain. Occasionally it comes on spontaneously, without observable lesion. A function of aging, maybe."
"And what are the effects?"
"In children, the skull enlarges as the ventricles swell. That's the condition known as hydrocephalus, water on the brain. The adult cranium isn't capable of expansion, of course, so the brain must bear all the pressure. Severe headaches are the first symptom, naturally. Followed by failure of physical coordination, vertigo, facial paralysis, gradual loss of eyesight, periods of coma, general impairments of cerebral functions, epileptic seizures—“
"And death?"
"Death, yes. Eventually."
"How long from first to last?"
"It depends on the degree of the blockage, the vigor of the patient, and a lot of other factors. Some people live for years with mild or incipient hydrocephalic conditions and aren't even aware of it. Even acute cases can drag on for years, with long periods of remission. On the other hand, it's possible to go from first congestion to mortality in a matter of months, and sometimes much more quickly even than that, if something like a medullary edema develops, an intracranial swelling that disrupts the autonomic systems."
These recitals of symptomatology and prognosis have always fascinated Genghis Mao, and intense interest is evident in his eyes now. But there is something else, a haunted look, a flashing look of dismay verging on terror, that Shadrach has never observed in him before.
The Chairman says, "And in my case?"
"We'll have to run a full series of tests, of course. But on the basis of what the implants are telling me, I'm inclined toward quick corrective surgery."
"I've never had brain surgery."
"I know that, sir."
"I don't like the whole idea. A kidney or a lung is trivial.
"There's no question of our doing that."
"What will you do, then?"
"It's strictly a decompressive therapy. We'll install valved tubes to shunt the excess fluid directly into the jugular system. The operation is relatively simple and much less risky than an organ transplant."
Genghis Mao smiles icily. "I'm accustomed to organ transplants, though. I think I like organ transplants. Brain surgery is something new for me."
Shadrach, as he prepares a sedative for the Chairman, says cheerfully, "Perhaps you'll come to like brain surgery as well, sir."
In the morning he seeks out Frank Ficifolia at the main communications nexus deep in the service core of the tower. "I heard you'd returned," Ficifolia says. "I heard it, but I didn't believe it. For Christ's sake, why'd you come back?"
Shadrach eyes the banks of screens and monitors warily. "Is it safe to talk here?"
"Jesus, do you think I'd bug my own office?"
"Someone might have done it without telling you about it."
"Talk," Ficifolia says. "It's safe here."
"If you say so."
"I say so. Why didn't you stay where you were?"
"The Citpols knew where I was, every minute. Avogadro himself dropped in on me in Peking."
"What did you expect? Taking commercial transport all around the world. There are ways of hiding, but—did Avogadro make you come back here, then?"
"I had already bought my ticket."
"Jesus, why?"
"I came back because I saw a way of saving myself."
"The way to save yourself is to go underground."
"No," Shadrach says emphatically. "The way to save yourself is to return and continue to carry out my functions as the Chairman's doctor. You know that the Chairman is ill?"
"Bad headaches, they tell me."
"Dangerous headaches. We'll need to operate."
"Brain surgery?"
"That's right."
Ficifolia compresses his lips and studies Shadrach's face as though examining a map of El Dorado.  Maybe I was wrong. Maybe you're plenty crazy. You have to be crazy if you think you can intentionally bungle an operation on Genghis Mao and get away with it. Don't you think Warhaftig will notice what you're doing and stop you? Or turn you in, if you actually do pull it off? What good is killing the Khan if you end up in the organ farms yourself?
"But—"
"You're jumping to conclusions. Projecting your own fantasies, perhaps. I'm simply going to operate. And cure the Chairman's headaches. And see to it that he stays in good health." Shadrach smiles. "Don't ask questions. Just help me."
"Help you how?"
"I want you to find Buckmaster for me. There's a special piece of equipment I'll need, and he's the right man to build it. Then I'll want you to help me rig the telemetering circuits to run it.”
"Buckmaster? Why Buckmaster? There are plenty of capable microengineering people right here on the staff."
"Buckmaster's the one I want for this job. He's the best in his field, and he happens to be the one who built my implant system. He's the one who ought to build any additions to that system.'' Shadrach's gaze is uncompromising. "Will you get me Buckmaster?"
Ficifolia, after a moment, blinks and brusquely nods. "I'll take you to him," be says. "When do you want to go?"
"Now."
"Right now? Right this literal minute?"
"Now," Shadrach says. "Is he very far from here?"
"Not really."
"Where is he?"
"Karakorum," Ficifolia replies. "We hid him among the transtemporalists."
January 2, 2009
I insisted, and they allowed me to sample the transtemporal experience. Much talk of risks, of side effects, of my responsibilities to the commonwealth. I overruled them. It is not often that I have to insist. It is rare that I can speak of being allowed. But this was a struggle. Which of course I won, but it was work. Visited Karakorum after midnight, light snow falling. The tent was cleared. Guards posted. Teixeira had given me a full checkup first. Because of the drugs they use. Clean bill of health: I can handle their most potent potions. And so, into the tent. Dark place, foul smell. I remember that smell from my childhood-burning cow-chips, uncured goathides. Little slump-backed lama comes forth, very unimpressed with me, no awe at all—why be awed by Genghis Mao, I guess, when you can gulp a drug and visit Caesar, the Buddha, Genghis Khan?—and mixes his brews for me. Oils, powders. Gives me the cup to drink. Sweet, gummy, not a good taste. Takes my hands, whispers things to me, and I am dizzy and then the tent becomes a cloud and is gone and I find myself in another tent, wide and low, white flags and brocaded hangings, and there he is before me, thick-bodied, short, a man of middle years or more long dark mustache, small eyes, strong mouth, stink of sweat coming from him as if he hasn't bathed in years, and for the first time in my life I want to sink to my knees before another human being, for this is surely Temujin, this is the Great Khan, this is he, the founder, the conqueror.
I do not kneel, except within myself. Within myself I fall at his feet. I offer him my hand. I bow my head.
"Father Genghis," I say. "Across nine hundred years I come to do you homage."
He regards me without great interest. After a moment he hands me a bowl. "Drink some airag, old man."
We shared the bowl, I first, then the Great Khan. He is dressed simply, no scarlet robes, no ermine trim, no crown, just a warrior's leather costume. The top of his head is shaven and in back his hair reaches his shoulders. He could kill me with a slap of his left hand.
"What do you want?" he asks.
"To see you."
"You see me. What else?"
"To tell you that you will live forever."

"Your body will die, Father Genghis. Your name will live in the ages."
He considers that. "And my empire? What of that? Will my sons rule after me?"
"Your sons will rule over half the world."
"Half the world," Genghis Khan says softly. "Only half? Is this the truth, old man?"
"Cathay will be theirs—"
“Cathay is already mine."
"Yes, but they will have it all, down to the hot jungles. And they will rule the high mountains, and the Russian land, and Turkestan, Afghanistan, Persia, everything as far as the gates of Europe. Half the world. Father Genghis!"
The Khan of Khan grunts.
"And I tell you this, also. Nine hundred years from now a khan named Genghis will rule everything from sea to sea, from shore to shore, all souls upon this world naming him master."
"A khan of my blood?"
"A true Tatar," I assure him.
Genghis Khan is silent a long while. It is impossible to read his eyes. He is shorter than I would have thought, and his smell is bad, but he is a man of such strength and purpose that I am humbled, for I thought I was of his kind, and in a way I am, and yet he is more than I could ever have been. There is no calculation about him; he is altogether solid, unhesitating, a man who lives in the moment, a man who must never have paused for a second thought and whose first thought must always have been right. He is only a barbarian prince, a mere wild horseman of the Gobi, to whom every aspect of my ordinary daily life would seem the most dazzling magic: yet put him down in Ulan Bator and he would understand the workings of Surveillance Vector One in three hours. A barbarian he is, yes, but not a mere barbarian, not a mere anything, and though I am his superior in some ways, though my life and my power are beyond his comprehension, I am second to him in all the ways that matter. He awes me. As I expected him to do. And, seeing him, I come close to a willingness to yield up all my authority over men, for, next to him, I am not worthy. I am not worthy.
"Nine hundred years," he says at last, and the shadow of a smile crosses his face. "Good. Good." He claps for a servant. "More airag," he calls. We share another drink. Then he says he must depart; it is time to ride out from Karakorum to the camp of his son Chagadai, where the royal family is to hold a tourney today. He does not invite me to join him.  I am unimportant to him. I have told him all he cares to know; now I am forgotten. Only the tourney matters now. He leaps to his mare; he rides away, followed by the warriors of his court, and only the servant and I remain.
Two robed acolytes bring Roger Buckmaster to Shadrach out of the depths of the tent of the transtemporslists in Karakorum. Buckmaster is robed too, but not in the coarse black horsehair garb of a transtemporalist. He wears a heavy hooded cassock of thick brown wool, smoothly woven. His feet, bare, are clad in open sandals. A massive cruciform pendant dangles at his throat. He pushes back his hood to reveal a tonsured scalp.
Buckmaster has become some sort of monk.
His new asceticism of clothing is not the only change in him. Before, he had been a blurting, impatient, angry man, with some kind of sullen furious energy circulating within him that seemed dammed at every plausible point of exit. Now he is eerily calm, self-contained, a man inhabiting an unfathomable kingdom of solitude and peace. He is pale, very thin, almost spectral. He stands silently before Shadrach, fingering his beads but otherwise motionless, waiting, waiting.
Shadrach says at last, "I never expected to see you alive again."
"Life brings many surprises, Dr. Mordecai." Buckmaster's voice is different too, deeper, sepulchral, more resonant, all the sputter and frenzy burned out of it,
"Word went around that you'd been sent to the organ farm. Dissected, dismembered."
Piously Buckmaster says, "The Lord chose to spare me."
His piety is hard for Shadrach to take. "Your friends saved your skin, you mean," he retorts, instantly regretting his bluntness. Not a wise way to talk to someone whose services you need.
But Buckmaster does not seem offended. "My friends are His agents. As are we all. Dr. Mordecai."
"Have you been here the whole time?"
'' Yes. Since the day after you saw me under interrogation.''
"And the Citpols haven't come sniffing around for you?"
"I am officially dead, Doctor. My body has officially been distributed to ailing members of the government: the computer will tell you so. The Citpols don't search for dead men. To them I'm no more man a set of scattered parts—a pancreas here, a liver there, a kidney, a lung. Forgotten." For a moment mischief gleams in Buckmaster's oddly solemn face. "If you told them I was here, they would deny it."
"And what have you been doing?" Shadrach asks.
"The transtemporalists regard me as a holy man. I take their cup each day. Each day I retrace the days of the life of our Lord. I have attended His Passion upon Calvary many times. Doctor. I have walked among the apostles. I have touched the hem of Mary's robe. I have beheld the miracles: Cana, Capernaum, Lazarus raised at Bethany., I have watched Him betrayed in Gethsemane. I have seen Him brought before Pilate. I have seen it all, Dr. Mordecai, everything of which the Gospels tell. It is all true. It is literally the truth. My eyes bear witness." The unexpected intensity of conviction in Buckmaster's eyes, the unearthly sound of Buckmaster's voice, leave Shadrach speechless a moment. It is impossible not to believe that this scruffy little man has strolled through the Galilee with Jesus and Peter and James, that he has heard the sermons of John the Baptist and the lamentations of the Magdalene. Illusion, hallucination, self-deceit, fraud; no matter. Buckmaster has been transformed. He is radiant.
With deliberate bluntness Shadrach asks, "Can you still do microengineering work?"
The irrelevance of the question catches Buckmaster off balance. He is lost in holy reveries, shrouded in mystic serenity and transcendental joy, and Shadrach's words bring a gasp of amazement from him, as though he has been jabbed in the ribs. He coughs and frowns and says, obviously baffled, "I suppose I could. It's never entered my mind."
"I have work for you now."
"Don't be preposterous, Doctor."
"I'm being altogether serious. I've come to you because there's a job that you and only you can do properly. You're the only one I'd trust to do it."
"The world has expelled me, Doctor. I have expelled the world. Here is where I dwell. The concerns of the world are no longer my concerns. "
"You once were concerned about the injustices perpetrated by Genghis Mao and the PRC."
"I am beyond justice and injustice now."
"Don't say that. It sounds impressive, Roger, but it's dangerous nonsense. The sin of pride, isn't it? You were rescued by your fellow men. You owe your life to them. They took risks for you. You have obligations to them."
"I pray for them daily."
"There's something more immediately useful you can do."
"Prayer is the highest good I know," Buckmaster says. "Certainly I place it higher than microengineering. I fail to see how any microengineering job you give me can help my fellow men."
"One job can."
"I fail to see—"
"Genghis Mao is soon to undergo another operation."
"What's Genghis Mao to me? He's forgotten me. I've forgotten him."
"An operation on his brain," Shadrach continues. "Fluid now accumulates within his skull. Unless it's drained, it could kill him. Shortly we'll install a drainage system with a valve through which the fluid can be removed. At the same time a new telemetering implant will be installed in me. Which I want you to design for me, Roger."
"What will it do?"
"Allow me to control the action of the valve," Shadrach says.
Two hours later Shadrach is in the great carpentry chapel at the far end of the Karakorum pleasure complex, surrounded by chisels and mallets and saws, trying to enter into the initial meditative state. He is not doing well at it. Now and then he feels just a bit of it, the beginning of the proper degree of concentration, but he holds it no more than an instant and then, as he congratulates himself for having attained the state at last, he loses it, again and again he loses it. It is Buckmaster's fault. Buckmaster will not recede from the forefront of Shadrach's consciousness.
If Buckmaster had had his way, Shadrach would not be among the carpenters at all right now, but rather still would be in the transtemporalists' tent, lying drugged and limp while his soul journeyed back through the millennia to attend the bloody rite of Calvary. "Take the cup with me," Buckmaster had urged. "We will visit the Passion together," But Shadrach had declined. Some other time, he told Buckmaster gently. Transtemporal jaunts consume too much energy; he needs all his strength for the difficult enterprise that lies just ahead. Buckmaster had understood, or at least was willing to forgive him for not caring to make the journey just then. And Shadrach went forth from the tent, with Buckmaster's promise that he would have the design of the new implant ready in a day or so. And still Buckmaster haunts him.
 Asking a hundred questions, demanding specifications and performance Thresholds, size parameters, preferred bodily placement for the device. Scribbling notes furiously. Half an hour was all it took him to work out the rough schematics. He would need computer assistance to do the final, he said, but that would be no problem: Ficifolia could hook up a telephone relay for him, keying right into Genghis Mao's own master computer. And Buckmaster laughed stridently. Abruptly his expression shifted. Serenity returned. He had put microengineering aside; suddenly he was a monk again, calm, remote, glacial, saying, "Take the cup with me. We will visit the Passion together."
 Better. A little better. The touch of cool metal soothes him. Poor crazy Buckmaster has drained the cup by now, no doubt. And has gone off on wings of dream to see them put the crown of thorns in place, hammer in the nails, ram home the spear. Crazy? Buckmaster is a happy man. He has placed himself beyond all pain. He has outsmarted the minions of Genghis Mao. He has emerged out of his torment into holiness, and he will walk daily with the apostles and the Savior. To Buckmaster, the Palestine of Jesus is more real than the Mongolia of Genghis Mao, and who can quarrel with that? Shadrach might make the same choice, if he could. Of course, reality will eventually intrude on Buckmaster's fantasy: a time will come, and come soon, when Buckmaster's most recent Antidote treatment will cease to be effective, and he is not likely to be able to obtain a booster dose. But plainly he does not worry about that.
Thinking of Buckmaster's newfound tranquility allows Shadrach to find a glimmering of it himself. This time he sustains it, voyaging inward to that clear bright place beyond the reach of storms. Buckmaster disappears; Genghis Mao disappears; Shadrach disappears. For hours he works peacefully at his bench, wholly at one with his tools, his lumber. When he departs from the chapel late in the day he is in a state near ecstasy.
He reaches Ulan Bator an hour after nightfall. As soon as he arrives he phones Katya Lindman. "I want to see you," he says.
"I was hoping you'd call. I knew you were back."
They meet in a recreation lounge on the fiftieth floor, a rendezvous favored by middle-echelon staffers. Service is discreet there. The room is a dazzling high-vaulted oval, decorated with shining golden metallic streamers only a few molecules thick that dangle from the ceiling and twirl gently in the currents of air. A giant portrait of Genghis Mao occupies the entice east wall of the lounge, and there is one of Mangu at the other end.
Katya is wearing what is, for Katya, an unusually slinky costume, a clinging tight-woven wrap of some soft rust-colored fabric, low-cut to display her strong broad shoulders and her heavy breasts. She may even have used perfume. Shadrach has never seen her make the slightest concession to conventional femininity, and he is surprised and disappointed to see her opting for such unsubtle seductiveness now. It is not at all in character for her, and not at all necessary. But perhaps Katya is weary of staying in character, hard eyes, sharp teeth, cruel mouth, cool efficient mind, brisk and capable woman of science. She has already confessed her love for him; perhaps now she wants to play at being the sort of woman for whom love is a plausible event. Foolish of her, if that's her game: he much prefers the Katya he knows. Or thinks he knows. Love is not a costume party.
She says, "I didn't think you'd ever come back."
"I never intended not to. I wasn't trying to disappear. Only to get away for a while and think things out."
"And did you succeed?"
"I hope so. I'll know soon enough."
"I won't ask."
"No. Don't."
She smiles. "I'm glad you're back. Except that I worry about the danger you're in."
"If I'm not worrying, why should you?"
"I don't need to answer that." Her voice is husky, almost stagy. She leans forward and says, "I missed you, Shadrach. It amazed me how much I missed you. You don't like me to say things like that, do you?
"What gives you that idea?"
"Your face. You look so uncomfortable. You don't want to hear soft words from me. You don't think it's proper for mean, tough Dr. Lindman to talk that way."
"I'm just not used to you that way. It's a side of you that's unfamiliar to me."
"You probably don't even like the way I'm dressed tonight. But I can be the other Katya again, if you want. Wait. I'll go and change into my lab smock." She sounds almost serious.
"Stop it," he says. He takes her hand. "You look lovely tonight."
"Thank you." Her voice is steely. She withdraws the hand.
"Well, you do. And I'm supposed to say so, and I did; that's how the game is played. Now you're supposed to say—"
"Let's not play any more games, Shadrach, Okay?"
"Okay. Did you dress like that for me or for you?"
"For both of us."
"Ah. Just for the hell of it, right?  Right?"
"Right," she says. "Okay?"
"Okay. Okay."
 Don't force me to be some kind of machine, Shadrach. Don't make me be whatever your image of me is. I'm not asking you to tell me you missed me. But give me the right to express what I feel. Give me the right to be silly once in a while, to be soft, to be inconsistent, if I want to be. Without worrying about which one the real Katya is. I'm always the real Katya, whoever I am at the moment. Okay?"
"Okay," he says, and takes her hand again, and she does not pull it away. After a moment he says, "What's been happening here while I was gone?"
"You know about the Khan's headaches, I assume."
"Sure. That's why I came back when I did. The moment I picked up the telemetering impulses from him, in Peking,"
"Is it something serious?"
"We're going to have to operate," he says. "As soon as some special equipment I've ordered is ready."

"Not as risky as you might think. But the Khan doesn't like the idea of it at all, lasers poking into his skull, et cetera, et cetera. I've never seen him look so spooked about an operation. But he'll be all right. What else has been going on here?"
"There was the funeral."
"Yes. I know. I was in Jerusalem then, or Istanbul. I saw some photographs later."
"It was monstrous," Karya tells him. "It went on for days and days. God knows how much it must have cost. Everything stopped, practically, while we had the speeches, the parades, the brass bands, the planes flying in formation, all kinds of rituals and celebrations. And Genghis Mao sitting in the middle of the plaza drinking everything in."
"What a pity I missed it."
"I'm sure you were heartbroken."
"Yes. Terribly."
They laugh. He is beginning to think he rather likes the way she looks in that dress.
He says, "What else? How's your project going?"
"Very well. Seventeen kinesic traits are equivalent now. We've made more progress in the past three weeks than in the previous three months."
"Good. I want to see that automaton of yours finished fast.
"Have you talked to Nikki since you've been back?"
"No," he says. "Not yet."
"I hear that Avatar's been moving fast too. They say that they're practically done converting from Mangu's parameters to—to those of the new donor. Weeks ahead of schedule. It scares me, Shadrach."
"It shouldn't."
"I can't help thinking—what if—if they ever actually do—"
"They won't," he says. "It's not going to happen. I'm much too valuable to Genghis Mao as I am."
" 'Redundancy is our main avenue of survival,' remember. How many other doctors do you think he has waiting? Complete with telemeter implants and everything?"
"None."
"Can you be sure?"
"Buckmaster would know if a duplicate set of implants had ever been built. He never heard anything about that."
"Buckmaster's dead, Shadrach."
He lets the point pass. "I know that there's no duplicate Shadrach Mordecai waiting somewhere to take over when I go. I realize now how dependent Genghis Mao is on me, exclusively on me, irreplaceable me. And I have a notion I'm going to be a lot less redundable in the near future, a lot more indispensable. I'm not worrying about Avatar, Katya."
"I hope you know what you're doing."
"So do I," he says. He gestures toward the lounge exit, just below the vast blank-eyed portrait of sad silly Mangu. "Let's go upstairs," he suggests, and she smiles and nods.
Now it is the morning of the operation. Genghis Mao lies face down upon the operating table, awake, fully conscious, occasionally turning his head to stare sourly at the doctors assembled about him—Shadrach, Warhaftig, and Warhaftig's neurological consultant, an Israeli named Malin. There is no mistaking the Khan's look: he is frightened. He is trying to cover his fear with his usual swagger, but he is not succeeding. In ten minutes the surgical lasers will be drilling into his skull, and the prospect does not charm him. But for the headaches—whose effects are visible now, as imperial grimaces and winces—none of this would be happening.
The Chairman's head has been shaved. Without his thick black mane he looks, strangely, much younger, more vigorous: that sturdy knob of a skull, bare, speaks of the immense strength of the man, the intensity of the driving forces within him. The musculature of his scalp is powerful and conspicuous, hills and valleys outlined in bold relief, a rugged landscape of cords and ridges nurtured and developed through nearly ninety years of ferocious talking, thinking, biting, chewing. The surgeons' angles of entry have been marked on his skin in luminous ink.
Warhaftig is ready to make the first incision. The strategy of the operation has evolved during three days of conferences. They will not go near the cerebral centers. The skull is to be opened high on the occipital curve, and the drainage device is to be inserted in the brain stem, the pons, just below the fourth ventricle near the medulla oblongata. This, everyone has agreed, is the optimum site for the valve, and not incidentally will keep the lasers away from the seat of reason—though any surgical slip could do damage to the medulla, which controls vasomotor and cardiac functions and other vital autonomic responses. But Warhaftig is not one who slips.
The surgeon glances at Shadrach. "Is all well?"
"Fine. Go when ready."
Warhaftig lightly touches Genghis Mao's neck. The Khan does not react, nor does a sharp pinch at the base of his skull bring any response from him. He is under local anesthesia, induced as customary through sonipuncture. "Now," Warhaftig says. "We begin." He makes the initial cut.
Genghis Mao closes his eyes—but, Shadrach's inner monitors tell him, the Khan is still at full awareness, tense, poised like a wary leopard on a high branch. The skin is peeled back and clamped by retractors. Warhaftig steps aside and allows Malin to make the cranial incision. The neurosurgeon's touch is not as deft as Warhaftig's, but Malin has spent thirty years slicing into skulls, and he knows as Warhaftig cannot possibly know just how much margin for error his cuts can have. There, now: there is a window into the Khan's head. Shadrach, peering on tiptoes, stares in awe at the very brain that conceived the theories of centripetal depolarization, that hatched the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, that carried mankind out of the chaos of fhe Virus War. There, there, right there, in that mysterious gray lump, it all was spawned, yes.
They are searching now for a site for the drainage valve. Warhaftig has resumed command. Instead of a laser, he uses at this point a hollow needle filled with liquid nitrogen, cryostatically cooled to a temperature of -160° C. The needle, sliding to the depths of the Khan's brain stem, freezes the brain cells on contact, and if contact is prolonged it will kill them. While Malin calls off instrument readings and Shadrach supplies telemetering data on the state of Genghis Mao's autonomic activities, Warhaftig, reassured that he is not destroying vital neural centers, opens a space for insertion of the drainage device. Everything goes smoothly. The Khan continues to breathe, to pump blood, to generate the normal array of electroencephalographic waves. There is lodged within him now a tube to shunt excess cerebrospinal fluid into his circulatory system, a valve through which the fluid can be drawn, and a telemetering implant that will relay to his physician constant reports on the functioning of that valve and the fluid levels of his cranial ventricles. Bone and skin are restored to place; the Khan, haggard and pallid but smiling now, is wheeled to the recovery station.
Warhaftig turns to Shadrach. "As long as we have everything set up, let's proceed to the next operation immediately. Yes?" He reaches for Shadrach's left hand. "You want the telemetering implant to go here, is that correct? Embedded in the thenar muscles. But not at the base of the thumb, eh? Over here, closer to the center of the palm, do I have it? All right, Let's scrub you up and get along with it, then."
Shadrach and Nikki, meeting for the first time since his return, are ill at ease with each other. He tries to smile, but he doubts that his face is doing a very good job of it, and her cordiality seems equally forced.
"How is the Khan?" she asks finally.
"Healing," Shadrach says. "As per usual."
She glances at his bandaged left hand. "And you?"
"A little sore. This implant was larger than the others. More complex. Another day or two and I'll be fine."
"I'm glad everything went well."
"Yes. Thank you."
They go through the ritual of forced smiles again. "It's good to see you," he says. "Yes. Very good to see you."
They are silent. But though the conversation has faltered, neither begins to depart. He is surprised how unmoved he is by her beauty today: she is as splendid as ever, but he feels nothing, nothing at all, only a kind of abstract admiration, as he might feel for a marble statue or a spectacular sunset. He tests it. He summons memories. The coolness of her thighs against his lips. The solidity of her breasts cupped in his hands. The little grunt as he thrusts himself into her. The fragrance of her dark torrent of hair. Nothing. The all-night conversations, when there was so much to tell each other. Nothing. Nothing. Thus does treason carbonize love. But she is still beautiful.
"Shadrach—"
He waits. She is groping for words. He suspects he knows what she wants to say: to tell him once more that she is sorry, that she had no choice, that although she betrayed him it was only out of a sense of the inevitability of what would befall. It is an endless awkward moment.
At last she says, "We're doing well on the project."
"So I've been told."
"I have to go on with it, you know. There's no other way for me. But I want you to realize that I hope it never is used. I mean, it's valuable research, it's a tremendous breakthrough, but I want it to remain just a laboratory achievement, just a—a—" She falters.
"That's all right," he tells her, and hears an odd tenderness creeping into his voice. "Don't torment yourself about it, Nikki. Do your work, do it well. That's all you need to think about. Do your work." For an instant, only an instant, he feels a flicker of what he once felt for her. "Don't worry about me," he says gently. "I'm going to be all right."
On the third day the bandage comes off his hand. There is only a faint pink line to mark the place where the implant was inserted, a barely perceptible furrow against the darker pink of his palm. Like his master, Shadrach is a swift healer. He flexes his hand—slight muscular soreness, he notes—but is careful not to clench it into a fist. He is not ready to test the new device.
At the end of the week, with Genghis Mao rapidly mending, Shadrach allows himself an evening in Karakorum. He goes alone, on a mild summer night with the scent of new blossoms and the hint of rain in the air, and hires a cubicle in the dream-death pavilion, strips and dons the loincloth and the chest bands, takes the polished talisman from the lioness-headed guide, looks upon the pattern of spiraling lines, disappears into the hallucination. Once more he dies. He gives up hope and fear and striving and dismay and anxiety and need, he gives up breath and life, he dies to the world and is reborn in another place, rising above his hollow outworn husk, looking down upon it, that long brown empty form with its spidery sprawl of limbs hanging out uselessly, and floats out, out into the fragrant void, where time and space are cut loose from their moorings.  He enters a city of ox carts and aileyways and low wooden buildings strung out in rambling impenetrable mazes, a place of picturesque squalor and medieval filth, and sees the lords and ladies in their green and scarlet brocaded robes tumbling in the unpaved streets, howling, sobbing, trembling, sweating, crying to the Lord, clutching at the throbbing swollen places under their arms and between their legs. Yes, yes, the Black Death, and Shadrach goes among them saying, I am Shadrach the healer, come from the land of the dead to save you, and he touches their fiery swellings and lifts them to their feet and sends them forth into life, and they sing hymns to his name. And he moves on to another city, a place of bamboo and silk, of gardens rich with chrysanthemums and junipers and small contorted pines, and in the stillness of the day a fireball bursts in the sky, a great mushroom cloud bellies toward the roof of heaven, houses break into flame, the people rush into the blazing streets, small folk, almond-eyed, yellow-skinned, and Shadrach, standing like an ebony tower among them, tells them in soft tones not to be afraid, that it is only a dream that afflicts them, that pain and even death may yet be rejected, and he spreads forth his hands to them, soothing them, draining the fire from them. The sky fills with ash and soot and pumice and it is the night of Cotopaxi once more, the volcano rumbles and hisses and drones, the air turns to poison, and the young black doctor kneels in the streets, breathing in the mouths of the fallen, raising them, comforting them. And he moves on. The howling Assyrian hordes ride through the streets of Jerusalem, slashing without mercy, and Shadrach patiently sews together the sundered bodies of the fallen, saying. Rise, walk, I am the Healer. The great woolly beasts flee as the glacial snows melt beneath the suddenly colossal sun, and the people of the caves grow thin and feeble, and Shadrach teaches them to eat grasses and seeds, to collect the berries of the newly sprouted thickets, to string weirs across the streams to snare the frisky fishes, and they worship him and paint his image on the walls of the holy cave. He takes Jesus from the cross when the Roman soldiers go off to the tavern, slinging the limp body over one shoulder and hurrying into a dark hut, where he wipes the blood from the maimed hands and feet, he applies ointments and unguents, he mixes a healing draft of herbs and juices and gives it to Him to drink, telling Him, Go. Walk. Live. Preach. He seines the fragments of Osiris from the Nile, he rejoins the severed members, he breathes life into the fallen god and summons Isis, saying, Here is Osiris. I, Shadrach, restore him to you. The sky grows green with strange cloudbursts, and the Virus War breaks above the cities of mankind, and the alien rot enters the bodies of mankind, and as the people groan and fall. Shadrach raises them, saying, Fear nothing. Death is transient. Life awaits you. And in the heavens is the smiling face of Genghis Mao. Shadrach drifts across the centuries, moving freely in space and time, and gradually he becomes aware that he is no longer alone, that there is a woman beside him, plucking at his sleeve, trying to tell him something. He ignores her. He hears celestial choirs singing his name: "Shadrach! Shadrach!" And the heavenly voices cry, "O Shadrach!  Shadrach who was, Genghis to be! All hail Shadrach!" And a voice like thunder cries out, "You henceforth shall be known as Genghis III Mao V Khan!"
And the woman plucks at his sleeve, and he sees that she is Katya, and he says, "What do you want?" She says, It's too late. He says, "The next donor's already been picked?" Yes. "I don't suppose you'd care to tell me his name." I don't think! should. "Who is he?" You, she says.The world erupts in flame and flood. The laughter of Genghis Mao rolls through the heavens, shattering mountains. Shadrach awakens. He sits up. He clenches his fist and holds it tightly clenched. Out of Ulan Bator, four hundred kilometers to the east, comes the terrible jolt of Genghis Mao's agony, the silent scream of the sensors reporiing the wave of pain that is sweeping through the Khan.
Shadrach approaches Interface Three and announces, "Shadrach Mordecai to serve the Khan."
He is scanned. He is approved. He is admitted.
It is close to midnight. Shadrach goes at once to the Khan's bedroom, but Genghis Mao is not there. Shadrach frowns. The Khan has been strong enough to leave his bed for the past several days, but it is odd that he should be wandering around this late at night. Shadrach finds a servitor who tells him that the Khan has spent most of the evening in the secluded study known as the Khan's Retreat, on the far side of the seventy-five-story compound, and is probably there now.
Onward, then. Into the Khan's office—he is not there—and thence to the private imperial dining room, empty, and then Shadrach goes into his own office, where he pauses a moment, collecting himself amid his familiar and beloved possessions, his sphygmomanometers and scalpels, his microtomes and trephines. Here, in a flask, is the authentic abdominal aorta of Genghis II Mao IV Khan. Surely a treasure of medical history, that one. And here, the newest addition to Shadrach's museum, is a lock of Genghis Mao's thick, rank, preternaturally dark hair, an exhibit perhaps more fitting for a museum of witchcraft and voodoo than one of medicine, but yet appropriate, for it was removed in the course of preparations for brain surgery carried out successfully in the celebrated patient's ninetieth (or eighty-fifth, or ninety-fifth, or whatever) year of life. And so. Onward. He presents himself to the door of the Khan's Retreat and asks entry.
The door rolls back.
The Khan's Retreat is the room least used on the floor, accessible only through Shadrach's office and insulated against the intrusion of even the loudest external distractions. Its ceiling is low, its lights are dim, its furnishings are ornate and oriental, running toward thick draperies and elaborate carpets. Genghis Mao lies on a cushioned divan along the left-hand wall. Already his shaven scalp is coveted by a thin black stubble. The vitality of the man is irrepressible. But he looks shaken, even dazed.
"Shadrach," he says. His voice is thick and scratchy. "I knew you'd get here. You felt it, didn't you? About an hour and a half ago. I thought my head was going to explode."
"I felt it, yes."
 To drain off the fluid, you said."
"We did, sir."
"Doesn't it work right?"
"It works perfectly, sir," Shadrach says mildly.
Genghis Mao looks confused. "Then what made my head hurt so much a litlle while ago?"
"This did," says Shadrach. He smiles and stretches forth his left hand and clenches his fist.
For a moment nothing happens. Then Genghis Mao's eyes widen in shock and amazement. He growls and clamps his hands to his temples.  The implanted sensors that report on the bodily functions of the Khan tell Shadrach of the intense reactions within Genghis Mao: pulse and respiration rates climbing alarmingly, blood pressure dropping, intracranial pressure severe. Genghis Mao coils into a huddled ball, shivering, groaning. Shadrach lets his fingers relax. Gradually the pain recedes from Genghis Mao, the tense crumpled body uncoils, and Shadrach ceases to feel the broadcast of shock symptoms. Genghis Mao looks up. He stares at Shadrach for a long moment.
"What have you done to me?" Genghis Mao asks in a harsh whisper.
"Installed a valve in your skull, sir. To drain away the dangerous accumulations of cerebrospinal fluid. However, I should tell you that the action of the valve has been designed to be reversible. Upon telemetered command it can be made to pump fluid into the cranial ventricles instead of draining it from them. I control the action of the valve, here, by a piezoelectric crystal implanted in my palm. A twitch of my hand and the fluid ceases to drain. A harder twitch and I can pump it upward. I can interrupt your life processes. I can cause you instant pain of the kind you have now experienced twice, and in a surprisingly short span of time I could cause your death."
Genghis Mao's facial expression is entirely opaque. He considers Shadrach's declaration in silence.

"To protect myself, sir."
The Khan manages a glacial smile. "You thought I would use your body for Project Avatar?"
"I was certain of it, sir."
"Wrong. It wouldn't ever have happened. You're too important for me as you are, Shadrach."
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
"You think I'm lying. I tell you that there was never any possibility we would have activated Project Avatar with you as the donor. Don't misunderstand me, Shadrach. I'm not pleading with you now. I'm simply telling you how things really stand."
"Yes, sir. But I know your teachings concerning redundancy, sir. I feared I was about to be made dispensable, I have made myself indispensable now, I think."
 Genghis Mao asks.
"If I felt my life was in danger, yes."
"What would Hippocrates say about that?"
"The right of self defense is allowed even to physicians, sir."
Genghis Mao's smile grows warmer. He seems to be enjoying this discussion. There is no trace of anger on his face.
He says calmly, merely raising a speculative hypothesis, "Suppose I have you seized by stealth, immobilized before you can clench your fist, and put to death?"
Shadrach shakes his head, "The implant in my hand is keyed to the electrical output of my brain. If I die, if I'm mindpicked in any way, if there's any sort of significant interruption in my brain waves, the valve automatically begins pumping cerebro-spinal fluid to your medulla. The moment of my death is the automatic prelude to your own, sir. Our fates are joined. Guard my life, sir, for your own sake."
"And if I have the valve removed from my head and replaced by one that isn't quite as—ah—versatile?"
"No, sir. There's no way you could enter surgery without my implant system notifying me of it. I'd take defensive action, naturally, at the first moment. No. We have become one entity in two bodies, sir. And we'll remain that way forever."
"Very clever. Who built this mechanical marvel for you?"
"Buckmaster did, sir."
"Buckmaster? But he's been dead since May. You couldn't have known then—"
"Buckmaster is still alive, sir," Shadrach says softly.
Genghis Mao considers that. He grows extremely thoughtful. He is silent for a long while. "Still alive. Strange."
"Yes."
"I don't understand. " Shadrach makes no reply. After a time Genghis Mao says, "You've planted a bomb in me.”
"So to speak, sir, I have."
"I have power over all of mankind. And you have power over me, Shadrach. Do you realize what that makes you?  All hail, Genghis III Mao V!" Genghis Mao laughs savagely. "Do you understand that? Do you know what you have achieved?"
"The thought has crossed my mind," Shadrach admits.
"You could force my resignation. You could compel me to name you as my successor.  You see that? Of course you see that. Is that what you mean to do?"
"No, sir. The last thing in the world I want is to be Chairman."
"Go ahead. Wiggle your hand at me, stage a coup d'etat. Take power, Shadrach. I'm old, tired, bored, crumbling. I'm willing to be overthrown. I admire your shrewdness. I'm fascinated by what you've done. No one has ever fooled me so thoroughly before, do you know that? You've accomplished what thousands of enemies have utterly failed to do. Quiet Shadrach, loyal Shadrach, dependable Shadrach—you have me beaten. You own me. I am your puppet now, do you see that? Go on. Make yourself Chairman. You've earned it, Shadrach."
"It's not what I want."
"What do you want, then?"
"To continue as your physician. To protect your health and strive to extend your life. To remain by your side and serve you according to my oath."
"That's all?"
"That's all. No, there's one thing more, sir."
"Let's hear it."
"I request a place on the Committee, sir."
"Ah."
"Specifically, I want authority in the sphere of public health. Government medical policy."
"Ah. Yes."
"Control over distribution of the Antidote, sir. I mean to develop a program for immediate worldwide treatment of the healthy population," Shadrach says. "And expansion of whatever programs currently exist for research into a permanent cure for the organ-rot. That is, a total reversal of what I undersiand is existing PRC policy."
"Ah!" Genghis Mao begins to laugh. "Now it emerges! You do intend to be Khan, then! I keep the Chairmanship, but you call the tunes. Is that it, Shadrach? Is that what you've engineered? Very well. You have me. I'm yours, Shadrach. You'll join the Committee at the next meeting. Draw up your policy statements and submit them." He glances somberly at Shadrach's left hand. "All hail," the Chairman cries, "Genghis III Mao V!"