For Norbert Slepyan
Copyright © 1976 by Robert Silverberg
It is nine minutes before sunrise in the great city of Ulan Bator, capital of the reconstituted world. For some time now Dr. Shadrach Mordecai has lain awake, restless and tense in his hammock, staring somberly at aglowing green circlet in the wall that is the shining face of his data screen. Red letters on the screen announce the new day:
As usual, Dr. Mordecai has been unable to get more than a few hours of sleep. Insomnia has plagued him all year; his wakefulness must be some kind of message from his cerebral cortex, but so far he has been unable to decipher it. Today, at least, he has some excuse for awakening early, because great challenges and tensions lie ahead. Dr. Mordecai is personal physician to Genghis II Mao IV Khan, Prince of Princes and Chairman of Chairmen—which is to say, ruler of the earth —and on this day the aged Genghis Mao is due to undergo a liver transplant, his third in seven years.
The world leader sleeps less than twenty meters away, in a suite adjoining Mordecai's. Dictator and doctor occupy residential chambers on the seventy-fifth floor of the Grand Tower of the Khan, a superb onyx-walled needle of a building that rises breathtakingly from the dusty brown Mongolian tableland. Just now Genghis Mao sleeps soundly, eyes unmoving beneath the thick lids, spine enviably relaxed, respiration slow and even, pulse steady, hormone levels rising normally. Mordecai knows all this because he carries, surgically inlaid in the flesh of his arms, thighs, and buttocks, several dozen minute perceptor nodes that constantly provide him with telemetered information on the stale of Genghis Mao's vital signs. It took Mordecai a year of full-time training to learn to read the input, the tiny twitches and tremors and flickers and itches that are the analogue-coded equivalents of the Chairman's major bodily processes, but by this time it is second nature for him to perceive and comprehend the data. A tickle here means digestive distress, a throb there means urinary sluggishness, a pricking elsewhere tells of saline imbalance. For Shadrach Mordecai it is something like living in two bodies at once, but he has grown accustomed to it. And so the Chairman's precious life is safeguarded by his vigilant physician. Genghis Mao is officially said to be eighty-seven years old and may be even older, though his body, a patchwork of artificial and transplanted organs, is as strong and responsive as that of a man of fifty. It is the Chairman's wish to postpone death until his work on earth is complete—which is to say, never to die.
How sweetly he rests now! Mordecai runs automatically through the readings again and again: respiratory, digestive, endocrine, circulatory, all the autonomic systems going beautifully. The Chairman, dreamless (the motionless eyes), lying as customary on his left side (faint aortal pressure), emitting gentle hhnnorrking snores (reverberations in the rib cage), obviously feels no apprehension about the coming surgery. Mordecai envies him his calmness. Of course, organ transplants are an old story to Genghis Mao.
At the precise moment of dawn the doctor leaves his hammock, stretches, walks naked across his bedchamber's cool stone floor to the balcony, and steps outside. The air, suffused now with early blue to the east, is clear, crisp, cold, with a sharp wind blowing across the plains, a strong southerly breeze racing through Mongolia from the Great Wall toward Lake Baikal. It ruffles the black flags of Genghis Mao in Sukhe Baior Square, the capital's grand plaza, and stirs the boughs of the pink-blossomed tamarisks. Shadrach Mordecai inhales deeply and studies the remote horizon, as if looking for meaningful smoke signals out of China. No signals come; only the little throbs and tingles of the implant disks, caroling the song of Genghis Mao's irrepressible good health.
All is quiet below. The whole city sleeps, save for those who must be awake to work; Mongols are not given to insomnia. Mordecai is; but then, Mordecai isn't a Mongol. He is a black man, dark with an African darkness, though he is no African either; slender, long-limbed, tall—some two hundred centimeters in height—with dense woolly hair, large wide-set eyes, full lips, a broad though high-bridged nose. In this land of sturdy golden-skinned folk with sharp noses and glossy straight hair. Dr. Mordecai is a conspicuous figure, more conspicuous, perhaps, than he would like to be.
He squats, straightens, squats, straightens, jackknifing his arms out and in, out and in. He starts every morning with a calisthenic routine on the balcony, naked in the chilly air: he is thirty-six years old, and even though his post in the government gives him guaranteed access to the Roncevic Antidote, even though he is thus spared the fear of organ-rot that obsesses most of the world's two billion inhabitants, thirty-six is nevertheless an age when one must begin conscientiously to take measures to protect the body against the normal unravelings time brings. Metis sana in corpore sano; yes, keep on bending and twisting, Shadrach; make the juices flow; let the old yin balance the yang. He is in perfect health, and his bodily organs are the ones that were in him when he popped from the womb one frosty day in 1976. Up, down, up, down, unsparing of self. Sometimes it seems odd to him that his vigorous, violent morning exercises never awaken Genghis Mao, but of course the flow of telemetered data runs only in one direction, and as Mordecai puts himself through his fierce balcony workout, the Chairman snores placidly on, unaware.
Eventually, panting, perspiring, shivering lightly, feeling alive and open and receptive, hardly worrying at all about the coming surgical ordeal, Mordecai decides he has had enough of a workout. He washes, dresses, punches for his customary light breakfast, and sets about his morning routine of duties.
So, then, the doctor confronts Interface Three, through which he daily enters the residential suite of his master the Khan. It is a ponderous diamond-shaped doorway, two and a half meters high. From its silken-smooth bronze surface jut a dozen and a half warty cylindrical snouts, three to nine centimeters high. Some of them are scanners and sensors, some are audio conduits, some are weapons of ineluctable lethality; and Shadrach Mordecai has no idea which is which. Most likely, what serves as a scanner today may well be a laser cannon tomorrow; with such random shifts of function does Genghis Mao contrive to confuse the faceless assassins he so vividly dreads.
"Shadrach Mordecai to serve the Khan," Mordecai says in a clear firm voice into what he hopes is today's audio pickup.
Interface Three, now emitting a gentle hum, subjects Mordecai's announcement to voiceprint analysis. At the same time, Mordecai's body is being checked for thermal output, mass, postural stress, olfactory texture, and much more. If any datum should fall beyond the established Mordecai-norm, he could find himself immobilized by loops of suddenly spurting webfoam while the guards are summoned to investigate; resistance at that point might lead to his immediate destruction. Five of these interfaces protect the five entrances to Chairman Genghis Mao's chambers, and they are the wiliest doors ever devised. Daedalus himself could not have forged more clever barriers to guard King Minos.
In a microsecond Mordecai is recognized to be himself, rather than some cunning lifelike simulacrum on a king-slaying errand. With a smooth hiss of perfectly machined joints and a gentle nimble of flawless bearings the interface's outer slab glides open. This admits the doctor to a stone-walled inner holding chamber hardly larger than himself. No welcome vestibule for claustrophobes, this. Here he must halt another microsecond while the entire surveillance is repeated, and only after he passes this second muster is he allowed to enter the imperial residence proper.
"Redundancy," Chairman Genghis Mao has declared, "is our main avenue of survival." Mordecai agrees. The intricate business of crossing these interfaces is a trifle to him, part of the normal order of the universe, no more bothersome than the need to turn a key in a lock. The room just on the far side of Interface Three is a cavernous sphere known as Surveillance Vector One. It is, in a literal sense, Genghis Mao's window on the world. Here a dazzling array of screens, each five square meters in area, rises in overwhelming tiers from floor to ceiling, offering a constantly shifting panorama of televised images relayed from thousands of spy-eyes everywhere on the planet. No great public building is without its secret eyes; scanners look down on all major streets; a corps of government engineers is constantly employed in shifting the cameras from place to place and in installing new ones in previously unspied-upon places. Nor are all the eyes in fixed positions. So many spy-satellites streak through the nearer reaches of space that if their orbits were turned to silk they would swathe the earth in a dense cocoon. At the center of Surveillance Vector One is a grand control panel by means of which the Khan, sitting for hours at a time in an elegant thronelike seat, is able to control the flow of data from all these eyes, calling in signals with quick flutters of his fingertips so that he may look at will into the doings of Tokyo and Bangkok, New York and Moscow, Buenos Aires and Cairo. So sharp is the resolution of the Khan's myriad lenses that they can show Genghis Mao the color of a man's eyes at a distance of five kilometers.
When the Chairman is not making use of Surveillance Vector One, the hundreds of screens continue to function without interruption as the master mechanism sucks in data randomly from the innumerable pickup points. Images come and go, sometimes flitting across a screen in a second or two, sometimes lingering to provide consecutive sequences many minutes in length. Shadrach Mordecai, since he must pass through this room every morning on his way to his master, has formed the habit of pausing for a few minutes to watch the gaudy, dizzying stream of pictures. Privately he refers to this daily interlude as "Checking the Trauma Ward," the Trauma Ward being Mordecai's secret name for the world in general, that great vale of sorrow and bodily corruption.
He stands in mid-room now, observing the world's griefs.
The flow is jerkier than usual today; whatever giant computer operates this system is in a twitchy mood, it seems, its commands moving restlessly from eye to eye, and pictures wink on and off in a frenzied way. Still, there are isolated flashes of clarity.   A sag-shouldered old woman, carrying carefully wrapped bundles through the cobbled plaza of some mellow European city, gasps and clutches at her chest, letting her packages tumble as she falls.  A crowd—Mexicans? Japanese?—gathers around two boys dueling with carving knives; their arms and chests are bright with red cuts. Three children huddle on the roof of a torn-away house rushing swiftly downstream on the white-flecked gray breast of a flooding river. A hawk-faced beggar stretches forth an accusing clawlike hand. A young dark-haired woman kneels at a curb, bowed double in pain, head touching the pavement, while two small boys look on. A speeding automobile veers crazily from a highway and vanishes in a bushy gulley. Surveillance Vector One is like some vast tapestry of hundreds of compartments, each with a story to tell, a fragmentary story, tantalizing, defying comprehension. Out there in the world, out in the great big wide Trauma Ward that is the world, the two billion subjects of Genghis II Mao IV Khan are dying hour by hour, despite the best efforts of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee. Nothing new about that—everyone who has ever lived has died hour by hour all through his life—but the modes of death are different in these years following the Virus War; death seems ever so much more immediate when so many people are so conspicuously rotting within all at once; and the general decay out there is that much more poignant because there are these innumerable eyes to see it in its totality. The scanners of the Khan capture everything, making no comment, offering no judgment, merely filling these walls with a staggering, baffling portrait of the revised postwar early-twenty-first-century version of the human condition.
The room is a touchstone of character, drawing revealing responses from every viewer. To Mordecai the whirling stream of scenes is fascinating and repelling, a crazy mosaic of decomposition and defeat, courage and endurance; he loves and pities the sufferers who flash so quickly across the screens, and if he could he would embrace them all—lift that old woman to her feet, put coins in the beggar's gnarled hand, stroke that child's distended belly. But Mordecai is, by inclination and profession, a healer. To others the brutal theater that is Surveillance Vector One serves only as a reminder of their own good fortune: how wise of them it was to attain high governmental rank and steady supplies of the Roncevic Antidote, to enjoy the favor of Chairman Genghis Mao and live free of pain and hunger and organ-rot, insulated from the nightmare of real life! To others the screens are unbearable, arousing not a sense of smug superiority but rather a feeling of intolerable guilt that they should be here, safe, while they are out there. And to others the screens are merely boring: they show dramas without plot, transactions without discernible purpose, tragedies without moral significance, mere stray snatches of life's scratchy fabric. What Genghis Mao's own reactions to Surveillance Vector One may be is impossible to determine, for the Khan is, in this as in so many other things, wholly inscrutable as he manipulates the controls. But he does spend hours in there. Somehow the room feeds him. Shadrach Mordecai takes his time this morning, giving the huge room five minutes, eight, ten. Genghis Mao still sleeps, after all. The implanted monitors tell Mordecai that. In this world no one escapes surveillance; while the many eyes of Genghis Mao scan the globe, the slumbering Khan is himself scanned by his physician. Mordecai, standing quite motionless beside the Chairman's upholstered throne, receives a flood of data within and without, Genghis Mao's metabolic output twanging and tweaking the doctor's implants, the flowing shimmer of the screens assailing his eyes. He starts to leave, but just then a screen high up and to his left shows him a glimpse of what is certainly Philadelphia, unmistakably Philadelphia, and he halts, riveted. His native city: he was a Bicentennial baby, entering the world in Ben Franklin's own town, coming forth high up in Hahnemann Hospital when the United States of America was four months short of its two hundredth birthday. And there is Philadelphia now, turning in the gyre of some ineffably keen satellite-mounted eye; the familiar childhood totems, City Hall, Independence Hall, Penn Center, Christ Church. It is years since he last was there. For a decade now, Shadrach Mordecai has lived in Mongolia. Once it was hard for him to believe that there really was such a place as Mongolia, fabled land of Prester John and Genghis Khan, but by this time it is Philadelphia that has started to seem a place of fable to him. And the United States of America? Do those syllables still have meaning? Who could imagine that the Constitution of Jefferson and Madison would be forgotten, and America pledge allegiance to a Mongol overlord? But that overstates the case: America, Mordecai knows, is governed like all other nations by a local wing of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, that alliance of radical and reactionary groups functioning through a series of vestigial quasi-democratic institutions; and the aged recluse Genghis Mao is merely the Chairman of the Committee, a remote and semimythical figure who governs indirectly and has no immediate consequence in the daily lives of Dr. Mordecai's former countrymen. Probably no one in America pauses to consider Genghis Mao the embodiment of the authority of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, and thus the true master of the body politic, any more than one considers the chairman of the board of the local electric company to be the source and controller of the power that flows when the switch is thrown. But he is. Not that many Americans would be disturbed to learn that they owed fealty to a Mongol. The whole world has abdicated; the game of politics is ended; Genghis Mao rules by default, rules because no one cares, because in an exhausted, shattered world dying of organ-rot, there is general relief that someone, anyone, is willing to play the role of global dictator.
Philadelphia vanishes from the screen and is replaced by an idyllic tropical scene, pink-white half-moon beach, feathery palm fronds, flowering hibiscus in scarlet and yellow, no people in view. Mordecai shrugs and moves on.
The imperial chambers are circular in layout, occupying the entire top story of the Grand Tower of the Khan except for the five wedge-shaped apartments, such as the one where Mordecai lives, that notch into the suite equidistantly around its rim. As the doctor crosses Surveillance Vector One he comes to three massive doorways, spaced some eight meters apart along the side of the room farthest from the interface through which he entered. The left-hand doorway leads to the bedroom of Genghis Mao, but Mordecai does not take it—best to let the Chairman have all the sleep he needs, today—nor does he choose the central doorway, which goes to the Chairman's private office. Instead he approaches the right-hand doorway, the one that opens into the room known as Committee Vector One, through which he must pass to reach his own office.
He waits briefly while the door scans and approves him. All the inner rooms of the imperial suite are divided one from another by such impermeable barriers, smaller in scope than the main doors at the five interfaces but similarly suspicious: no one is allowed to range freely here from room to room. After a moment the door grants him entry to Committee Vector One. This is a large, brightly lit room, spherical like all the major rooms of Genghis Mao's suite. It occupies the physical center of the apartment, the locus around which all else turns, and in a less literal sense it is the nerve center of the planetary governing structure, the Permanent Revolutionary Committee. Here, day and night, arrive urgent communiques from Committee cadres in every city; and here, day and night. Committee potentates sit in front of intricate switchboards glistening with terminals, making policy and communicating it to the lesser satraps in the outer provinces. All applications for Roncevic Antidote treatments are routed through this room; all requests for organ transplants, regeneration therapy, and other vital medical services are considered in Committee Vector One; all jurisdictional disputes within the regional Committee leadership are settled here according to the principles of centripetal depolarization, Genghis Mao's chief philosophical gift to humanity. Shadrach Mordecai is not a political man and he has little concern with the events that take place in Committee Vector One, but since the floor plan of the building requires him to cross the room many times a day, he does occasionally pause to observe the bureaucrats at their labors, the way he might stop to examine the behavior of bizarre insects in a crumbling log.
Not much seems to be going on here now. At times of high crisis all twelve of the switchboard seats are occupied, and Genghis Mao himself, seated at his own elaborate desk at the very center of everything, fiercely manipulating his formidable battery of sophisticated communications devices, directs the course of strategy. But these are quiet days. The only conspicuous crisis in the world is the one in the Chairman's liver, and that will soon be remedied. For weeks now Genghis Mao has not bothered to take up his post in Committee Vector One, preferring to discharge his sovereign responsibilities from his smaller private office adjoining his bedroom. And only three of the switch-boards are in use this morning, operated by weary-looking vice-chairmen, one male and two female, who yawn and slouch as they take incoming messages and formulate appropriate replies.
Mordecai is halfway across the room and walking briskly when someone calls his name. He turns and sees Mangu, the heir-apparent to Genghis Mao, heading toward him from the direction of the Chairman's private office.
"Do they operate on the Khan today?" Mangu asks worriedly.
Mordecai says, nodding, "In about three hours."
Mangu frowns. He is a sleek, handsome young Mongol, unusually tall for his kind, nearly as tall as Mordecai himself.
 At the moment he seems tense, jangled,
"Will it go well, Shadrach? Are there any risks?"
"Don't worry. You won't become Khan today. It's only a liver transplant, after all."
"Only!"
"Genghis Mao's had plenty of those."
"But how much more surgery can he stand? Genghis Mao is an old man."
"Better not let him hear you say that!"
"He's probably listening right this minute," says Mangu casually. Some of the tension goes from him. He grins. "The Khan never takes what I say seriously, anyway. I believe he sometimes thinks I'm a bit of a fool."
Mordecai smiles guardedly. He also sometimes thinks Mangu is a bit of a fool, and perhaps more than a bit. He remembers Dr. Crowfoot of Project Avatar, Nikki Crowfoot, his Nikki with whom he would have spent this past night but for Genghis Mao's operation, telling him months ago of the dismal fate reserved for Mangu. Mordecai knows, as Mangu almost certainly does not, that Genghis Mao plans to be his own successor, through the vehicle of Mangu's strong, healthy young body. If Project Avatar is carried to a successful conclusion, and the auguries are favorable for it, the fine sturdy figure of Mangu will indeed someday sit upon the throne of Genghis Mao, but Mangu himself won't be there to enjoy the occasion.
"Where will you be during the operation?" Mordecai asks.
Mangu gestures broadly toward the main command desk of Committee Vector One. "Over there, pretending to run the show."
"Pretending?"
"You know there are many things I still have to learn, Shadrach. I'm not going to be ready to take over for years. That's why I wish he wouldn't undergo all these transplants."
"He doesn't do it for the exercise," Mordecai says. "The present liver's been failing for weeks. It's got to come out. But I tell you: don't worry."
Mangu smiles and grips Mordecai's forearm for a brief, affectionate, surprisingly painful squeeze. "I won't. I have faith in you, Shadrach. In the whole medical team that keeps the Khan alive. Let me know the moment it's over, will you?"
He strides away, toward the main command post, to play at being monarch of the world.
Mordecai shakes his head. Mangu is an attractive figure, genial and charming and even charismatic. In a dark time lit only by ghastly jagged flashes of nightmare-light, Mangu is something of a popular hero. In the past ten months or so he has become the Chairman's public surrogate, appearing in Genghis Mao's place at formal functions, dam dedications, Committee congresses and the like, and the dashing, gallant prince-in-waiting, so disarming, so unpretentious, so accessible to the populace, is beloved in a way that Genghis Mao never has been, never for an instant. Those who have observed Mangu at close range are aware that he is essentially a hollow man, all image and no substance, shallow and plump-souled, an amiable athlete living an implausible charade; but though Mangu is trivial, he is far from contemptible, and Mordecai feels genuine compassion for him. Poor Mangu, fretting over the possibility that he might succeed the Khan this day, with his apprenticeship not yet finished! Does it ever occur to Mangu that he will never—not in a year, not in ten years, not in a thousands—be a fit successor to Genghis Mao, that he is fundamentally incapable of wielding the terrible power which he is ostensibly being groomed to inherit? Apparently not. Or else Mangu, knowing his own limits, would gave begun to wonder what plan Genghis Mao really had for him, why the Chairman had picked as his successor a mere handsome boy, his own opposite in all important respects. To train him to be supreme sovereign? No. No. To be a puppet, merely; to dance before the people and win their love. And then, one day, to have his identity scooped out and thrown away, so that his body might become a dwelling for the wily mind and dark soul of Genghis Mao, when the Chairman's own ancient patched hull can no longer be repaired. Poor Mangu. Mordecai shivers. He hurries on into his own office, closes the door, seals it.
There is a sudden sharp twanging in his left thigh, close to the hip, the place where he receives Genghis Mao's cerebral output. Four rooms away, the Khan is awakening.
Mordecai's office is an island of tranquility for him within the tumultuous intensity of life atop the Grand Tower of the Khan. The room, a sphere ten meters in diameter, has many entrances, but they are programmed to open only for himself or Genghis Mao. One is the door through which he has just come, out of Committee Vector One. Another goes to the Khan's private dining room, and another, on the far side, to a seldom-used heavy-insulation study known as the Khan's Retreat. The last door is Interface Five, connecting the doctor's office to the two-story-high Surgery that occupies one of the five outer wedges of the tower.
In the sanctuary of his office Shadrach Mordecai enjoys a few moments of peace before proceeding on his voyage into the turmoils of the day. Though Genghis Mao is up, there is no need to hurry. Mordecai's implants tell him—by now, he can equate every trifling inner signal with some concrete aspect of the Khan's activities—that the imperial servitors have entered Genghis Mao's bedchamber, have helped the Khan to his feet, are walking him through the series of mild arm-swinging chest-stretching exercises that the old man, at Dr. Mordecai's insistence, performs every morning.  Though there will be no breakfast for Genghis Mao today, because of the impending operation, Shadrach Mordecai has at least an hour before he must attend the Khan.
Simply being in the office buoys him. The dark, rich paneling, the subdued lighting, the curving uncluttered desk of strange exotic woods, the splendid bookcase of crystalline rods and thin travertine slabs in which he keeps his priceless library of classic medical texts, the elegant armoires that house his extensive collection of antique medical instruments—it is an ideal environment for him, a perfect enclosure for the doctor he would like to be and occasionally is able to believe he is, the master of the Hippocratic arts, the prince of healers, the preserver and prolonger of life. Not that this room is a place for the practice of medicine. The only medical tools here are ancient ones, romantic and quaint apparatus, odd beakers and scalpels and lancets, bloodletting knives and cauterizing irons, ophthalmoscopes and defibrillators, early and inaccurate anatomical models, chirurgical saws, sphygmomanometers, electrical invigorators, flasks of discredited antitoxins, trephines, microtomes, relics of more innocent times. He has acquired these things eagerly in the past five years, by way of establishing his professional kinship with the great physicians of yesterday. The books, too, rare and auspicious, landmarks of medical history, talismans of scientific progress: the Fabrica of Vesalius, De Motu Cordis of Harvey, Boerhaave's Institutiones, Laennec on auscultation, Beaumont on digestion—with what joy be has collected them, with what reverence he has fondled them! Not without some guilt, too, for in this battered and deflated era it is all too easy for those few who have power and wealth to take advantage of those who have not; and Mordecai, so close to the throne, has accumulated his treasures cheaply, catching them as they slip from the grasp of older, unluckier, perhaps more worthy possessors. Still, had these things not descended to him they might have been lost altogether in the chaos that surges freely through the world beyond the Grand Tower of the Khan.
Mordecai's actual medical work is done elsewhere, in the Surgery beyond Interface Five, which serves not only for actual surgical operations but also for any other medical attention Genghis Mao may need. Mordecai's office is a place for research and reflection only. Just to the right of his desk are keyboards, compact data terminals, giving him instant access to entire libraries of medical knowledge; he need only touch a finger to a key or even speak a coded word, cite symptomata, facies, tentative diagnosis, and back will come, in neatly codified form, extracts from the accumulated scientific wisdom of the eons, the relevant distillate of everything from the Smith Papyrus and Hippocrates and Galen down through the latest findings of the microbiologists and immunologists and endocrinologists who labor in the laboratories of the Khan. It is all here: encephalitis and endocarditis, gastritis and gout, nephritis, nephrosis, neuroma, nystagmus, aspergillosis and bilharzia, uremia and xanthochromia, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Time was when doctors were shamans in feathers and paint, bravely pounding drums to frighten away frightening demons, doing solitary battle against unfathomable causes and unaccountable effects, gamely piercing veins and ventilating skulls, grubbing for roots and leaves of purely magical merit. Alone against the dark spirits of disease, no guide but one's stock of inherited supernatural lore and one's intuition. And now! Here! The answer machine! A touch of the finger and behold: etiology, pathology, symptomatology, pharmacology, contraindications, prophylaxis, prognosis, sequelae, the whole miraculous scroll of diagnosis and treatment and cure and convalescence unrolling at a command! In moments of lull Shadrach Mordecai enjoys testing his wits against the computer, setting hypothetical problems for himself, postulating symptoms and proposing diagnoses; he is eleven years out of Harvard Medical School and still a student, ever a student.
Today allows few lulls. He swings to his left and taps out the telephone number of the Surgery. "Warhaftig," he says crisply.
A moment, and there the screen shows the flat, homely face of Nicholas Warhaftig, surgeon to the Khan, veteran of a hundred critical transplant operations. The camera picks up a sweeping view of the operating room behind him, boards glittering with measuring dials and control panels, the laser bank, the anesthesiologist's spidery maze of needles and tubes and pipes, and, only partly visible, the main surgical stage itself, dais and bed and lights and instruments, white linens and dazzling chrome-steel fixtures, everything awaiting the imperial patient.
"The Khan's awake," Mordecai says.
"We're on schedule, than," says Warhaftig.
He is sixty years old, silver-haired, phlegmatic. He was already the supreme organ-transplant man when Shadrach Mordecai was an idol-worshipping undergraduate, and though Mordecai is technically his superior on Genghis Mao's staff now, there is no doubt in either man's mind about which one of them actually holds the greater professional authority. This makes their relationship an uncomfortable one for Mordecai.
Warhaftig says, "Will you get him to me by 0900 sharp?"
"I'll try."
 "We begin perfusion at 0915. The liver's still on ice, but coordinating defrost is always tricky. How's he feeling?"
"As usual. The strength of ten men."
"Can you give me quick readings on blood glucose and fibrinogen production?"
"A moment," Mordecai says. Those are not factors on which he receives direct telemetering from Genghis Mao's body; but he has become skillful in deducing hundreds of the Chairman's lesser body functions from clues given by the main metabolic responses. He says shortly, "Glucose doing fine, within the expected reduced levels caused by the general hepatic necrosis. It's harder to get the fibrinogen reading, but my feeling is that all the plasma proteins are on the low side. Probably the fibrinogen not as bad as the heparin."
"And bile?"
"Off sharply since Friday. Down some more this morning. No critical breakdowns of any function yet."
"All right," Warhaftig says. He gestures brusquely to someone beyond camera range. The surgeon's hands are formidable, long and muscular, fingers like elongated pliable wands, incredible octave-devouring fingers of extraordinary power and delicacy. Shadrach Mordecai, although he is no surgeon, has strong and graceful hands himself, but the sight of Warhaftig's always make him think of his own as coarse and stumpy, butcher-fingered hands. "We're moving well here. I'll expect you at 0900. Anything else?"
"I just wanted you to know the Khan was awake," Mordecai answers, a little sharply, and breaks the contact.
Next he phones the Chairman's bedchamber and talks briefly with one of the Khan's valets. Yes, Genghis Mao is awake, he has bathed, he is readying himself for the operation. He will begin his morning meditation in a moment. Does the doctor wish to speak with the Khan before that? The doctor does. The screen goes blank, and there is a lengthy pause during which Mordecai feels his adrenalin levels beginning to rise: not yet, not even after all this time, has the fear and awe that Genghis Mao inspires in him begun to ebb. He forces himself into calmness with a quick centering exercise, and none too soon, for abruptly the head and shoulders of Genghis II Mao IV Khan appear on the telephone screen.
The Chairman is a lean, leathery-looking man with a narrow triangular skull, powerful cheekbones, heavy brows, fierce eyes, thin harsh lips. His skin is more brown than yellow in tone; his hair is thick, black, combed back straight from his forehead and descending almost to his shoulders. His face is one that readily and obviously evokes dread, but also, oddly, trust; he seems omniperceptive and omnicompetent, a man to whom all the burdens of the world can be given and who will uncomplainingly and effectually assume them. The recent deterioration of his current liver has had visible effect on him—a bronzing of his skin beyond its normal deep hue, some blotches of pigment on his cheeks, an uncharacteristic feverish brightness of the eyes— but still he seems a man of regal bearing and inexhaustible strength, a man designed by nature to endure and to rule.
"Shadrach," he says. His voice is deep, grating, with a narrow dynamic range, not really a good demagogue's voice. "How am I this morning?"
It is an old joke between them. The Khan laughs; Mordecai manages a bilious smile.
The doctor replies, "Strong, well rested, a little low on blood sugar, but everything generally as expected. Warhaftig is waiting for you. He'd like you in the Surgery by 0900 hours. Mangu's at the Committee Vector One desk. It's a quiet day so far."
"This will be my fourth liver."
"Your third, sir," Mordecai says gently. "I've been over the records. First transplant in 2005, the second in 2010, and now—“
“I was born with one also, Shadrach. We should count that. I'm human, eh, Shadrach? We mustn't forget the set of organs I was born with." Genghis Mao's inescapable eyes pierce the uneasy Mordecai. Human, yes, one must always try to keep that in mind; the Chairman is human, though his pancreas is a tiny plastic disk and his heart is constantly spurred by electric jolts delivered through fine silver needles and his kidneys were grown in bodies other than his own and his spleen his lungs his corneas his colon his esophagus his pharynx his thymus his pulmonary artery his stomach his yes oh yes human he is human but sometimes it is hard to remember that—and sometimes, looking into those irresistible terrifying glacial eyes, one sees not the godlike flash of supreme authority, but something else, an opaque look of fatigue or perhaps terror, a look that seems at once to reveal an overwhelming fear of death and to offer warm welcome to it.  Mordecai has heard Genghis Mao speak of the purity of not-being. Not for him the coming of süsser Tod, no, never, and yet how he savors the tempting sweetness of it even as he averts his lips from it.  But how can Genghis Mao, brooding dreamily on the delicate beauties of death, nevertheless also yearn to live forever?
"Come for me at 0900," the Chairman tells him.
Mordecai nods to a dead screen.
In the time remaining before he must go to fetch the Khan, Shadrach Mordecai discharges one of his regular bureaucratic responsibilities: receiving the daily progress reports from the directors of the three great research schemes in which Genghis Mao has much of the resources of the government mobilized, Project Talos, Project Phoenix, and Project Avatar. As Genghis Mao's physician, Shadrach is ex-officio head of all three projects, and he confers each morning with the project leaders whose laboratories are located in the lower levels of the Grand Tower of the Khan.
Katya Lindman of Project Talos comes on screen first. "We coded the eyelids yesterday," she tells him at once. "It's one of the biggest steps so far in our analogue-to-digital conversion program. As of now we have seven of Genghis Mao's three hundred basic kinesic traits fully graphed and equivalented."  Her project is the most farfetched of the three, an attempt to develop a mechanical Genghis Mao, an analogue-entity through which he can continue to rule after bodily death—a puppet, a simulacrum, but one with a sustaining Genghis Mao-like life of its own. The technology for building such an automaton already exists, of course; the problem is to create something that transcends the Walt Disney robots that Mordecai remembers from his youth, the cunning Abe Lincoln and Thomas Edison and Christopher Columbus machines, so lifelike in their skin tones and movements and manner of speaking. Disney machines are not sufficient to the present need. A Disneyed Abe Lincoln can deliver the Gettysburg Address flawlessly, eight times an hour, but it would never be able to deal with a delegation of angry Reconstructionist congressmen; and a Genghis Mao of metal and plastic might spout the tenets of centripetal depolarization with hypnotic eloquence, but what value would that be in meeting the crises of a constantly changing, challenging society? No, they must capture the essence of the living Genghis Mao, code it, make from it a program that will continue to grow and react. Shadrach Mordecai is skeptical of success. He asks Katya Lindman, as he does every few weeks, how her department is coming on the task of digitalizing Genghis Mao's mental processes, which is rather more difficult than working out digital programs for his facial expressions and habits of posture. The question is threatening to her, and her eyes briefly flash with familiar fire; but all she says is, "We continue to attack the problem. Our best people are constantly at work on it."
"Thank you," Shadrach says, and switches to Irayne Sarafrazi's channel. The head of Project Phoenix is a young Persian gerontologist, a slight, almost fragile-looking person, with huge dark eyes, full solemn lips, black hair pulled back starkly from her forehead. Her group seeks a body-renewal technique that will allow rejuvenation of the living cellular matter of Genghis Mao, so that he may be reborn in his own skin when he no longer has the strength and resilience to accept further organ transplants. The prime obstacle here is the unwillingness of the brain to regenerate the cells it daily sloughs off; reversing the decline of the other organs and making them young again is a relatively simple matter of nucleic-acid reprogramming, but no one has found a way to halt, let alone to recoup, the constant death of the brain. Already in Genghis Mao's long life the estimated weight of his brain has declined by ten percent, with a corresponding loss in mnemonic function and neural response time; nevertheless he is far from senile, but what hideous decline into idiocy might not overtake him if he were given a further century or two of residence in his present cerebro-cerebellar equipment? Hundreds of hapless primates have surrendered their cranial contents to Irayne Sarafrazi's research, and their brains live in bell jars on her laboratory benches, alive and responsive while she seeks ways of tickling their neurons into new growth, but no progress has been made. This morning she seems discouraged. Her glittering Achaemenid eyes look dull and strained. The disembodied brain of Pan, a chimpanzee, has suddenly undergone a fatal deterioration, just when it appeared that some actual cellular growth was beginning. "We're about to begin the autopsy,'' Irayne Sarafrazi says dismally, "but we think Pan's death may mean our whole cerebral stimulation program is a mistake. I'm thinking of switching our emphasis away from actual brain regeneration and toward redundancy activation. What do you think, Shadrach?" Mordecai shrugs. Of course he knows that the human brain has vast redundant areas, billions of cells whose only apparent function is to be an emergency reserve; he knows, too, what has been accomplished by way of rehabilitating the victims of strokes and other cerebral damage through redirecting the neural channels into the redundant areas. But more efficient utilization of existing brain tissue only delays, does not remove, the threat of senile degeneracy. So long as cells daily die, Genghis Mao will tumble eventually into senility in his rejuvenated body, fifty or seventy or ninety years from now, a drooling Struldbrug of the mind trapped in a sturdy requickened frame. "Redundancy is a short-term measure," Shadrach tells her.  An old brain in a young body won't work. Let me see the autopsy report on the chimp tomorrow and maybe I'll have some ideas." Unable to bear the sight of her stricken face, he tunes Sarafrazi out and gets Nikki Crowfoot of Project Avatar on his screen.
She smiles tenderly. "Did you sleep well, Shadrach?" Her strength, and the strength of her concern for him, radiates glowingly from the screen. She is a stalwart woman, an athlete, a huntress, tawny-skinned, big-breasted, nearly 190 centimeters tall, with a strong heavy-boned face, wide-set eyes, wide-lipped mouth, assertive high-bridged nose. Her parents on both sides were Amerindians, Navajo mother, detribalized Assiniboin father. She and Shadrach Mordecai have been lovers for four months, friends for more than a year. Mordecai hopes Genghis Mao knows nothing of their affair, but he suspects it is a naive hope.
He says, "I slept well for a while, anyway."
"Worrying about the Chairman's operation?"
"I suppose. Or, maybe just worrying in general."
"I could have helped you relax," she says with a sly grin.
"Probably you could. But I've always abstained the night before the Chairman undergoes surgery. Like a prizefighter, like an opera singer. To keep the concentration absolutely clear, the mind unblurred. I know it's silly, Nikki, but it's something I do."
"All right. All right. I was only teasing. Anyway, we can make up for it tonight."
"Tonight, yes. Or this afternoon. We'll have him off the table by 0230 hours. How would you like to take the tunnel to Karakorum with me?"
Nikki Crowfoot sighs. "Can't. Don't tempt me. Critical tests this afternoon. Do you want to hear my report?"
Dr. Crowfoot's work overlaps, in some respects, both the other projects, for Project Avatar's goal is to develop a personality-transfer technique that will permit Genghis Mao—his soul, his spirit, his persona, his anima, but no actual physical part of him—to move to another, younger body. Like Project Talos, Avatar strives to reduce the patterns of Genghis Mao's mental responses to digital—therefore programmable, therefore reproducible—codings; like Project Phoenix, Avatar intends to give the Chairman a new and healthy body in which to dwell. But where Talos would house the digital-coded analogue of Genghis Mao in a mechanical construct. Avatar would use a real body of flesh and blood; and where Phoenix would give the Chairman new vitality by rejuvenating his own body, Avatar would place him in one formerly inhabited by someone else, specifically Mangu. On the one hand Crowfoot's project would avoid the inhumanity of creating a robot Khan, on the other it would sidestep the problem of brain-cell deterioration by instilling the intangible and abstract essence of Genghis Mao in a young and vigorous brain. Despite the areas of overlap, the three projects conduct their research altogether independently of one another, and no attempts are made at exchanges of ideas. Redundancy, after all, is our main avenue of survival.
Shadrach Mordecai, because he is privy to the work of all three, is perhaps the only one who really knows where they stand in relation to one another. He knows that Katya Lindman's team is attempting something that is probably hopeless—instilling the soul of a man into a machine will not produce a convincing and politically viable duplicate of the original, machines ordinarily being incapable of transcending their machinehood—and that Irayne Sarafrazi' s group, though it is pursuing the most plausible route toward giving Genghis Mao the eternal life he hungers for, is destined to be blocked by the apparently insoluble brain-decay difficulty. He knows, too, that Nikki Crowfoot's approach to personality coding has been more fruitful than Lindman's, and that in a matter of months it may be possible for the scientists of Project Avatar to infuse the essence of Genghis Mao like a pervasive coating of paint over the mind of a donor body whose previous occupant has been obliterated by electroencephalographic mindpick techniques. Poor Mangu. Poor hopeful tragic princeling, destined to be nothing better than a tabula rasa for the Khan.
Mangu's fate will not be long delayed. Mordecai listens in chilly fascination to Nikki's recitation of the latest wonders. They have reached the stage where they can code the souls of animals, abstracting from them the unique electrical patterns of their minds, transforming those waveforms into numbers, using the numbers to replicate the electrical patterns within the brains of donor beasts. They have coded a rooster and pumped its soul into a mindpicked hawk; hawk no longer flies, but runs cock-a-doodling around the chicken coop, clumsily fluttering its magnificent wings and crazily mounting the terrified hens. They have coded a gibbon and housed its mind in a gorilla's body; gorilla has turned berserkly arboreal, brachiating in wild desperation through the treetops, while its evicted gorilla-essence now resides within a former gibbon that struts ponderously at ground level, leaning on its flexed knuckles and pausing occasionally to pound its scrawny chest. And so on, and so on; they are getting ready to attempt the first human transfers, within a matter of weeks. Mordecai does not ask Crowfoot where she intends to obtain her experimental subjects. There are confusing problems of ethics as it is in this whole business of serving Genghis Mao; he would rather not load his conscience with his beloved's deeds.
"Call me when the operation's over," Nikki Crowfoot tells him
"Won't that interrupt your critical tests?"
"Not critically. Call me. I'll see you tonight."
"Tonight, yes," Shadrach says faintly.
The time is 0855 hours. He must convey Genghis Mao now to the Surgery.
The liver, the body's largest gland, is a useful and complex organ weighing a kilogram and a half—about two percent of the total body weight —that performs hundreds of significant biochemical functions. The liver produces bile, a green liquid essential to digestion. Through the liver passes exhausted venous blood en route to the heart, blood which the liver filters to remove bacteria, poisons, drugs, and other noxious impurities. To the blood the liver adds the plasma proteins it manufactures, among them the clotting agent fibrinogen and the anticoagulant heparin. From the blood the liver takes sugar, which it converts to glycogen and stores until the body's energy needs require it. The liver is responsible also for the conversion of fats and proteins into carbohydrates, the storage of fat-soluble vitamins, the manufacture of antibodies, the destruction of outworn red blood cells, and much else.
So many metabolic purposes does the liver serve that no vertebrate can survive more than a few hours without one. So central is it to life that it has extraordinary regenerative powers: if three quarters of the liver is removed, the remaining cells will multiply so rapidly that the gland will regain its original dimensions within two months. Even if ninety percent of the liver is destroyed, it continues to produce bile at the normal rate. Redundancy is our main avenue of survival. Nevertheless the liver is subject to many dysfunctions—the various jaundices, the various necroses, septicemia, dysenteric abscesses, cancer of the bile passages, and so forth. The liver's totipotence enables it to withstand such dysfunctions for prolonged periods, but its powers of recuperation diminish, like most other things, with age.
Genghis Mao suffers from chronic liver trouble. To sustain his life and the life of the assorted artificial and transplanted organs within him, the Chairman must pour oceans of medication through his system each day, and even the most durable of livers would be hard pressed to handle the constant assault of high-powered chemicals it is asked to filter from Genghis Mao's bloodstream. Then, too, the presence of so many alien organs sets up biochemical interaction phenomena within the body that the liver must counteract, and the strain is telling. The Chairman's beleaguered liver is in a perpetually morbid state, aggravated by his great age and the unnatural intricacy of his composite internal structure, and periodically it must be replaced. That time has again come.
Two burly aides lift Genghis Mao's short, slight figure onto a gurney and the familiar trip from the imperial bedchamber to the operating table commences. The Khan is cheerful, feverish and frail and beady-eyed though he looks; he nods and winks to the aides as they position him, telling them that he is comfortable; he chuckles, he even essays a quip or two. Mordecai is astounded, as always, by the Khan's incredible calmness at such a moment, as evidenced by the telemetered data reaching his implanted sensors. Surely Genghis Mao knows that there is a significant chance of his dying during the operation, but his somatic output registers no apparent awareness of that—as though the Chairman's spirit is so neatly balanced between love of life and hunger for death that it floats in perfect metabolic equilibrium. At any rate Shadrach is much less relaxed than his employer, perhaps because he regards the risks of a liver transplant operation as distinctly nontrivial and is far from ready to confront the personal uncertainties of a post-Genghis Mao world.
On silent pneumatic treads the gurney bearing the Chairman glides from the imperial bedchamber to the imperial office, thence via the private dining room into Shadrach Mordecai's office, and—after an eternity of suspicious scanning—through Interface Five into the Surgery. This is a magnificent tetrahedral enclosure extending through the uppermost two stories of the Grand Tower of the Khan and subtending some thirty degrees of arc along the skin of the elongated conical building. A cruciform cluster of chromed fixtures at the room's summit floods it with brilliant but not glaring light. A platform midway between floor and ceiling juts from the wall opposite the interface, dividing the great room almost in half on its far side, and atop this platform rests the dazzling aseptic transparent bubble within which the actual surgery is performed; beneath the platform that supports the bubble is the surgical stage's environment-support apparatus: a huge sinister hooded cube of dull green metal, housing what Mordecai imagines to be pumps, filters, heating ducts, reservoirs of sterilizing chemicals, humidifiers, and other equipment. On the other side of the room is a ziggurat of supplementary machinery rising step by step on smooth blue-green benches for some thirty meters—a squat brick-colored power unit at the bottom, an array of metering devices, an autoclave, a laser bank, the anesthesia console, a camera boom and associated playback screens to enable consulting doctors to follow the events inside the bubble, and much other materiel, some of it wholly baffling to Mordecai.
He does not need to understand what functions all this equipment serves. He will perform no actual surgery. His role in the operation is as part of the auxiliary equipment—for, with his capability to monitor, evaluate, and report on the moment-by-moment physiological changes within Genghis Mao's body, he is a kind of supercomputer, far more supple and perceptive than any medical machine could be. The Chairman's condition will, of course, be monitored by the usual machinery as well (redundancy is our main avenue . . .) but Shadrach, standing at Warhaftig's elbow and receiving direct bulletins from the Khan's interior, will be able to interpret and recommend with an intuitive and deductive wisdom that no machine could attempt. He is neither flattered nor insulted by his function as a supercomputer: it is merely what he is here to do. The gurney waddles onto the operating stage and positions itself next to the table. The table's own octopuslike, power-driven, glittering steel arms, extending telescopically, embrace Genghis Mao, lift him, and make the transfer; the gurney marches away. Mordecai, Warhaftig, and Warhaftig's two assistants, all properly scrubbed and gowned, enter the aseptic bubble; it is sealed behind them and will not open again until the operation is over. Now a soft hissing: the atmosphere of the bubble is being withdrawn and replaced by a surgically clean environment.
Genghis Mao, supine but still conscious and in high spirits, darts bright, keen glances everywhere, alertly observing each phase of the preparations. The assistants lay bare the Chairman's small hard torso—Genghis Mao is light-framed but muscular, with little subcutaneous fat and sparse body hair; the fine scars of innumerable operations crisscross his yellow-bronze skin—and begin the laborious process of connecting the terminals of the monitoring devices. Warhaftig thoughtfully palpates the Khan's abdomen and adjusts the cutting angle of the surgical laser. The anesthesiologist, whose post is outside the bubble, runs off preliminary acupuncture combinations on his keyboard. "Hook up the perfusion," Warhaftig mutters absently to Shadrach Mordecai, who is pleased to have something to do.
Since Genghis Mao will be liverless for four to six hours, an artificial liver must be used to sustain him during the operation. But no wholly artificial liver has ever been perfected, not even now, after more than fifty years of organ-transplant technology. The squat cubical device Warhaftig employs is a mechano-organic composite: pipes, tubes, pumps, and electrodialytic filters keep the patient's blood properly pure, but the basic biochemical functions of the liver, having thus far proven impossible to duplicate mechanically, are performed by the naked liver of a dog, resting in a bath of warm fluid at the core of the apparatus. Mordecai deftly slides two needles into Genghis Mao's upper arm, one tapping a vein, the other entering an artery. The arterial line seems to encounter some resistance and Shadrach hesitates. The Chairman winks. This is old stuff to him. "Go ahead," he murmurs. "I'm all right." Mordecai completes the hookup and nods to an assistant. Shortly the Chairman's blood is traveling toward the dialyzing coils, perfusing thereafter through the moist red lobes of the canine liver, and returning to the Chairman's body. Shadrach keeps careful check on Genghis Mao's telemeter reports: fine, fine, everything fine. "Immunosuppressives," Warhaftig orders. For several weeks, in anticipation of the operation, Mordecai has been dosing the Khan with antimetabolitic drugs, gradually raising the level in order to damp out Genghis Mao's normal graft-rejecting immune response. By now the Khan's antigenic structure has been so weakened that the chance of a graft rejection is slight, but no risks will be run: Genghis Mao receives a last jolt of antimetabolites now, as well as a dose of corticosteroids, and an aide outside the bubble activates a node that will irradiate the blood passing through the liver-surrogate, thus destroying the rejection-inducing lymphocyte corpuscles. Redundancy, redundancy, ever redundancy! The Khan's heart beats strongly. Everything is at normal throb, Mordecai perceives: blood pressure, pulse, body temperature, peristaltic rhythm, muscle tonus, pupil dilation, muscular reflexes. "Anesthesia," Warhaftig says.
The anesthesiologist, perched high on the far wall at the keyboard of an instrument more complicated than a concert synthesizer, begins his virtuoso performance. A touch of his sensitive fingertips and the shining retractable claws of the operating table unfold and hover over the Chairman's body. The anesthesiologist seeks the acupuncture points, maneuvering the claws into place by remote control, probing with little sonic blurts until he finds the precise conduits of neural energy; when he has arranged his metal fingers to his satisfaction, he activates the ultrasonic generators and beams of sonic force rush from the hovering fingers into the Khan's relaxed, motionless body. No acupuncture needles penetrate Genghis Mao, merely a laminar flow of high-frequency sound entering the acupuncture meridians. Warhaftig, using epidermal electrodes, tests the Khan's reactions, confers with the anesthesiologist, tests again, asks Mordecai for a reading, runs a deeper test, gets no wince of pain from Genghis Mao. The steel digits of the sonipuncture equipment sparkle in the bright light of the operating chamber; they surround Genghis Mao like the bristly organs of insects, palps or stings or ovipositors. Genghis Mao never permits a general anesthetic to be administered to him—loss of consciousness is too much like death—and Warhaftig dislikes all chemical anesthetics, general or local, so sonipuncture is the method of choice both for doctor and for patient. Fully conscious still, terrifyingly alert, Genghis Mao offers reports on his deepening loss of sensation. At last Warhaftig and the anesthesiologist deem the process complete.
"We begin now," the surgeon declares.
There is a momentary dip in the illumination as all surgical devices and support systems are activated at once. Mordecai imagines a throb passing through the entire building under the sudden power demand. To the left of the operating table is the perfusion machine, quietly pumping blood from Genghis Mao and forcing it through the dialysis coils. To the right waits the new liver, which has been stored in an iced saline solution since its removal from the donor and now is being bathed by warm fluids bringing it to body temperature. Warhaftig checks his laser bank one last time and, with a quick jab of a long bony finger against the control stud, causes a flash of dazzling purple light to leap forth and cut a thin red incision in Genghis Mao's abdomen. The Khan remains entirely motionless. The surgeon glances at Shadrach, who says, "All systems placid. Keep going."
Deftly, Warhaftig slices deeper. As he makes each cut, scanners record the epidermal stratifications down to the cellular level, so that all joins will be perfect when the abdominal cavity is resealed. Bright steel retractors move automatically into place to hold the widening incision. The Khan watches the early phases with deep fascination, but, as his internal organs are laid bare, he turns his head away and stares toward the domed ceiling. Perhaps he finds the sight of his viscera frightening or repellent, Mordecai thinks, but more likely the Chairman is merely bored with them, having been cut open so many times.
Now the dark diseased liver is visible, heavy, spongy, sullen in color. Warhaftig, fingers moving like unerring spindles, clamps the arteries and veins connected to it. With quick daredevil flicks of his laser scalpel he severs the portal vein, the hepatic artery, the inferior vena cava, the ligamentum teres, and the bile duct. "Done," he murmurs, and Genghis Mao's third liver is lifted from his abdomen. Away for biopsy; the fourth waits close by, large and plump and healthy, resting within a crystalline jewel-case.
The surgeon and his team commence the most taxing part of the operation. Any pigsticker can make an incision, but only an artist can execute perfect sutures. Warhaftig seals flesh to flesh with a different laser, one that welds rather than cuts. Slowly, showing no sign of fatigue, he connects the closed-off arteries, veins, and bile duct to the new liver. Genghis Mao is limp, almost comatose now, eyes glazed, lips slack: Shadrach Mordecai has seen this response before and understands it well. It is a sign neither of exhaustion nor of shock. It is no more than a kind of yogic exercise by which the Chairman disassociates himself from the boredom of his long ordeal. His vital signs are still high, with a preponderance of alpha rhythms in the cerebral output. Warhaftig toils on. The liver has been installed. The Khan's pulse rate rises and corrective measures must be taken, but this is to be expected; no cause for alarm. Meticulously Warhaftig rejoins peritoneum and muscular layers and dermis and epidermis, collaborating in this process with the computer that feeds him the stratification data. Every join is flawless. Scar formation will be minimal. Now the abdominal wall is closed. Warhaftig steps back, cool, self-satisfied, and lesser beings take over. The transplant has been accomplished in exactly five hours. Mordecai leans forward to study Genghis Mao's face. The Chairman sleeps, so it would seem, facial muscles relaxed, eyes quiescent, chest rising and falling evenly; but no, but no, the mere shadow of Shadrach seems to register on the Khan's consciousness, for his thin lips pull back in a frosty smile; his left eye opens and performs an unmistakable wink.
"Well, that's another one over with," Genghis Mao says, his voice firm and clear.
And so, in early evening, the day's work done and his Hippocratic responsibilities well discharged, it is off to Karakorum, the playground of this weary world's ruling class, for Shadrach Mordecai, with Nikki Crowfoot as his playmate. He picks her up three hours after the operation in the Project Avatar laboratory on the seventh level of the Grand Tower of the Khan. A great green-walled barn of a place it is, experimental animals caged everywhere, crazy animals, cockadoodling hawks and tree-climbing gorillas, and colossal banks of testing equipment wherever there are no cages.  Most of the Avatar staff has left for the day, but Crowfoot, in gray lab smock and battered sandals, is busy at a five-meter-high agglomeration of computers and playback heads and television screens when he comes in. She stands with her back to the door, watching pyrotechnic bursts of green, blue, and red erupt and wiggle wildly across the face of a gigantic oscilloscope. Shadrach slips up behind her and, sliding his hands under her arms, cups her breasts through the smock. Her back goes rigid at the first touch of his fingers, but then she relaxes immediately, and does not turn around.
"Idiot," she says, but there is only affection in her voice. "Don't distract me. I'm running a triple simulation. That's a real Genghis Mao tape down there, the green, and the blue above it is our April seven persona-construct, and—"
"Forget it. Genghis Mao died on the table when we pulled his liver out. The revolution started an hour ago.  Idiot!"
"Actually, he's doing fine, even though Warhaftig put the new liver in upside down."
"Stop it, Shadrach."
"All right. He really is in good shape. He took ten minutes off to recuperate and now he's leading Mongol-style square-dancing in Committee Vector One."
"Shadrach—"
"I can't help it. I'm in my postoperative manic phase."
"Well, I'm not. It's been a garbage day here."
"Your tests came out bad?"
"We blew them altogether. Hit a feedback loop and wiped three key tapes before we knew what was happening. I'm trying to salvage what's left. We've been set back a month, a month and a half."
"Poor Nikki. Is there any way I can help?"
"Just get me out of here," she says. "Amuse me. Distract me. Make funny faces. How did the operation go?"
"Flawless. Warhaftig's a wizard. He could do a nuclear implant on an amoeba with his thumbs and bring it off."
"The great man rests well?"
"Beautifully," Mordecai says. ''It's almost obscene, the way an eighty-seven-year-old man bounces back from major surgery like this every five or six weeks."
"Is that what he is, eighty-seven?"
Shadrach shrugs. "That's what the official figure is. There are stories that he's older, perhaps a lot older, ninety, ninety-five, even past a hundred, they say. Rumors that he served in World War II. What we're talking about, of course, is the brain, the epidermal integument, and the skeletal structure. The rest of him's been cobbled together relatively recently out of fresh parts. A lung here, a kidney there, dacron arteries, ceramic hip joints, a plastic esophagus, a molybdenum-chromium shoulder, a new liver every few years—how it all hangs together I don't know. But he just gets younger and younger, stronger and stronger, wilier and wilier. You ought to hear his vital signs ticking away in here."
Grinning, Nikki Crowfoot puts her hands to Shadrach's thighs as though to feel the sensor implants. "Ye-es. He's doing marvelously well for his age. At the moment he's fornicating a nurse. Wait, Wait. I think he's coming! No, it's a sneeze. And now I pick up audio input. Gezundheit, she just said.
"I try not to ask."
"Doesn't your inner machinery tell you?"
"Honi soit qui mal y pense," Mordecai says.  Probably more active than mine."
"You didn't have to sleep alone last night."
"My vocation demanded it of me." He gestures toward the door. "Karakorum?"
"Karakorum, yes. But first I need to wash and change."
They go to her apartment, forty stories higher in the building. All important members of Genghis Mao's staff have lodgings in the tower; but a research-group director has far less prestige than the Chairman's personal physician, and Crowfoot's suite is not nearly as opulent as Shadrach Mordecai's, just three rooms, plain furnishings, floors of common wood, no balcony, a sliver of a view. Shadrach settles into a webfoam lounger while Nikki strips and heads for the shower. Her bare body is strikingly beautiful, and desire stirs in him at the sight of her heavy dark-tipped breasts, her powerful thighs, her flat hard belly. She is long and lean, with strong shoulders, a narrow waist, sudden flaring hips, sleek muscular buttocks; a dense flood of thick black hair descends to the middle of her back. Unclothed she sheds the laboratory aura, the tense and fatigued look of the dissatisfied scientist, and becomes something primitive, barbaric, primordial—Pocahontas, Sacajawea, moon-begotten Nokomis. Once when he made such feverish comparisons when they were in bed together she became embarrassed and self-conscious, and mockingly, defensively, called him Othello and Ras Tafari and Chaka Zulu; never again has he overtly romanticized her savage ancestry, for he does not like to be twitted about his own, but the feeling persists, whenever she bares herself to him, that she is a princess of a fallen nation, high priestess of the great plains, red Amazon of the pagan night. She emerges and dons a floor-length robe of openwork golden mesh, blatantly provocative, the antithesis of her epicene lab smock. Chocolate nipples show through, hints of the blue-black wire-stiff pubic triangle, flashes of haunch and thigh. He would gladly bed her this moment, but he knows she is tired and hungry, still preoccupied with the failures of the day, not yet at all in the mood for making love, and in any case she usually dislikes afternoon couplings, preferring to let erotic tensions build through the evening. So he contents himself with a light playful kiss and an appreciative smile, and out they go, down to the depths of the tower, to the loading ramp of the Karakorum tube-train.
Karakorum lies four hundred kilometers west of Ulan Bator. Five years ago a nuclear-powered subterrene drilled a wide tunnel connecting the two cities beneath the Central Gobi, its invincible thermal-stress penetrator slicing serenely through the resistant deep-lying Paleozoic granites and schists. Now high-speed trains on silent inertialess tracks sweep between the ancient capital and the modern one, making the journey in less than an hour. Shadrach Mordecai and Nikki Crowfoot join the pleasure-bound throngs on the platform; the next train is due to depart in just a few minutes. Several people greet them but no one comes close. There is something formidable and intimidating about a truly impressive-looking couple, something that seals them within a zone of chilly unapproachability, and Shadrach knows he and Nikki are impressive, tall slender black man and tall sturdy copper-skinned woman, handsome of form and face, elegantly dressed, Othello and Pocahontas out for a night on the town. But there is another isolating factor at work—Dr. Mordecai's professional proximity to the Khan: these people are aware that he has face-to-face access to Genghis Mao, one of the very few, and some of the Chairman's aura has been transferred to him, a contagion of awesomeness, making Mordecai one not to be approached casually. He dislikes this but there is little he can do about it.
The tube-train pulls in. Off now to Karakorum go Shadrach and Nikki.
Karakorum. Founded eight hundred years ago by Genghis Khan. Transformed into a majestic capital by Genghis's son Ogodai. Abandoned a generation later by Genghis's grandson Kublai, who preferred to rule from Cambaluc in China. Destroyed by Kublai Khan when his rebellious younger brother attempted to make it the seat of his revolt. Rebuilt eventually, abandoned again, allowed to fall into decay, forgotten entirely. Its site rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century by archaeologists of the Mongolian People's Republic and the Soviet Union. And now much restored by decree of Genghis II Mao IV Khan, self-anointed successor to one ancient empire and one modern one, who wishes to remind the world of the greatness of Genghis I and to make it forget the centuries of Mongol slumber that followed the decline of the Khans.
Karakorum by night glitters with an unearthly brightness, a stunning lunar glow. Mordecai and Crowfoot, leaving the tube train station, behold the excavated ruins of old Karakorum to their left—a solitary stone tortoise in a field of yellowed grass, the outlines of some brick walls, a shattered pillar. Nearby are gray stone stupas, monuments to holy lamas, erected in the sixteenth century; in the distance, against the parched hills, are the white stucco buildings of Karakorum State Farm, a grandiose project of the defunct Mongolian People's Republic, a vast agricultural enterprise occupying half a million hectares of grassland. Between the farm buildings and the stupas lies the Karakorum of Genghis Mao, a flamboyant reconstruction of the original city, the great many-columned walled palace of Ogodai Khan imagined anew, the splendid observatory with its heaven-stabbing turrets, the mosques and churches, the gaudy silken tents of the nobility, the somber brick houses of the foreign merchants, all testifying to the might and magnificence of the latter-day Prince of Princes, Genghis Mao, who, according to a half-suppressed legend, had once had a humbler Mongol name, Choijamise or Ochirbal or Gombojab— the tales vary according to the teller—and had been a minor functionary, a very insignificant apparatchik, in the bureaucracy of the old People's Republic in the vanished Marxist-Leninist days, before the world fell apart and a new Mongol empire was constructed on its relict. The resurrected Karakorum is not merely a sterile monument to antiquity, though: by Genghis Mao's decree it is an amusement park, a place of revelry and pleasures, a twenty-first-century Xanadu blazing with frantic energy. In these black and yellow and scarlet tents one may dine, drink, gamble; the latest hallucinations are for sale here; here one may find willing sexual partners of all kinds; those who indulge in the popular cults of the moment—dream-death, transtemporalism, and carpentry are the fashionable ones just now—have facilities for their rituals in Karakorum. Shadrach is a carpentry-cultist himself; Nikki Crowfoot goes in for transtemporalism, and he has dabbled in that too, though not lately. Once he came to Karakocum with Karya Lindman, and that fierce, intense woman urged him to try dream-death with her, but he refused, and she scorned him for his timidity for days afterward. Not with words. Little castrating scowls; sudden harsh flickers of her furious eyes. Mocking quiverings of her elegant nostrils.
As they pass the dream-death pavilion now, neither of them giving it more than a casual glance, Mordecai forcing the image of Katya Lindman's bare blazing body out of his mind, Crowfoot says, "Isn't it risky, your going this far from Ulan Bator only a few hours after he's had major surgery?"
"Not especially. In fact, I always go out the evening after a transplant. A little bonus I give myself after a hard day's work. If anything, it's a better time for a Karakorum trip than most."
"Why so?"
"He's in an intensive-care support system tonight. If any complications set in, alarms will go off all over the place and one of the low-echelon medics will respond instantly. You know, my job doesn't require me to hold the boss's hand twenty-five hours a day. It isn't needed and he doesn't want it."
Fireworks abruptly explode overhead. Wheels of gold and crimson, spears coursing across the night. Shadrach imagines he sees the face of Genghis Mao filling the sky, but no, but no, just self-deception, the pattern is plainly abstract. Plainly.
"If an emergency comes up, they'll summon you, won't they?" Nikki asks.
"They won't need to," Mordecai tells her. Out of the dream-death pavilion comes a weird discordant music, bagpipes gone awry. He thinks of Katya Lindman crooning in Swedish an hour before the dawn one snowy night, and shivers. He pats his thigh where the implants are and says, "I'm getting the full broadcast, remember?"
"Even out here?"
He nods. "The telemetering range is about a thousand kilometers. I'm picking him up clearly right this minute. He's resting very comfortably, dozing, I'd say, temperature about a degree above normal, pulse very slightly high, new liver integrating itself nicely and already making positive changes in his general metabolic state. If anything starts deteriorating, I'll know about it immediately, and if necessary I can always get back to him in ninety minutes or so. Meanwhile I'm covered and I'm free to amuse myself."
"Always aware of the state of his health."
"Yes. Always. Even while I sleep, the information ticks into me."
"Your implants fascinate me philosophically," she says. They pause at a sweets-vendor's booth to buy some refreshments. The vendor, a squat thick-nosed Mongol, offers them airag, the ancient Mongol beverage of fermented mare's milk, and, shrugging, Mordecai takes a flask for her and one for himself. She makes a face, but drinks, and says, "What I mean is, looking at you and the Chairman in strict cybernetic terms, it's hard to see where the boundaries of your individuality end and his begin.
"That's not exactly how I see it," Mordecai tells her. "There may be a constant flow of metabolic information from his body to mine, and the information I receive from him has some impact on the course of my actions and I suppose ultimately on his, but he remains an autonomous being, the Chairman of the PRC, no less, with all the tremendous power that that entails, and I am only—"
"No. Look at it with a total-systems approach," Crowfoot urges impatiently. "Let's say you're Michelangelo, trying to turn a huge block of marble into the David. The figure is within the marble: you must liberate it with your mallet and chisel, right? You strike the block; a chip of marble is knocked off. You strike it again. Another chip. A few more chips and perhaps the outline of an arm begins to emerge. The angle of the chisel is slightly different for each stroke, isn't it? And maybe the intensity of the force you use to hit the chisel with the mallet is different, too. You constantly modify and correct your strokes according to the information you're receiving from the cul face of the marble block—the emerging shape, the right cleavage planes, and soon. Do you see the total system? The process of creating Michelangelo's David isn't one in which you, Michelangelo, simply act on a passive lump of stone. The marble's an active force too, part of the circuit, in a sense part of the mind system that is Michelangelo-as-sculptor. Because—"
"I don't—"
"Let me finish. Let me trace the whole circuit for you. A change in the outline of the marble is perceived by your eye and is evaluated by your brain, which transmits instructions to the muscles of your arm having to do with the force and angle of the next blow, and this causes a change in your neuromuscular response as you strike the next blow, producing further change in the marble that causes further perception of change in the eye and a further alteration of program within the brain, leading to another correction of neuromuscular response for the next stroke, and so on, on and on around the loop until the statue is done. The process of carving the statue is a process of perceiving and responding to change, to stroke-by-stroke difference; and the block of marble is an essential part of the total system."
"It didn't ask to be," Shadrach says mildly. "It doesn't know it's part of a system."
"Irrelevant. View the system as a closed universe. The marble is changing and its changes produce changes within Michelangelo that lead to further changes in the marble. Within the closed universe of sculptor-and-tools-and-marble, it's incorrect to view Michelangelo as the 'self,' the actor, and the marble as a 'thing,' the acted-upon. Sculptor and tools and marble together make up a single network of causal pathways, a single thinking-and-acting-and-changing entity, a single person, if you will. Now, you and Genghis Mao—"
"Are different persons," Mordecai insists. "The feedback's not the same. If his kidney conks out, I react to the extent that I perceive the malfunction and treat it and arrange for a kidney replacement, but I won't get sick myself. And if something goes wrong with my kidneys, it won't affect him in any way."
Crowfoot shrugs. "True but trivial. Don't you see that the causal interlock between the two of you is much more intimate? Your whole daily routine is controlled by the transmissions you get from Genghis Mao: you sleep alone or sleep with me depending on his health, you go to Karakorum or stay by his bedside, you experience somatic anxieties if the signal from him starts going critical, you have a whole constellation of life-choices and life-responses that are governed almost entirely by his metabolism. You're an extension of Genghis Mao. And what about him? He lives or dies at your option. He may be Chairman of the PRC, but he would be just another dead man next week if you fail to pick up some key symptom or fail to take the proper corrective action. You're essential to his survival, and he controls many of your movements and actions. One system, Shadrach, one constantly resonating circuit, you and Genghis Mao, Genghis Mao and you!"
Still Shadrach Mordecai shakes his head. "The analogy's close, but not close enough to convince me. Not quite close enough. I'm equipped with some extraordinary diagnostic devices, sure, but they're not all that special; my implants help me respond faster to emergencies than an ordinary doctor might respond to an ordinary patient, but that's all. It's only a quantitative difference. You can define any doctor-patient unit as a single self-corrective information-processing system, of sorts, but I don't think the hookup between Genghis Mao and myself creates any kind of significant difference in that type of system. If I got sick when he got sick, the point would be valid, but—"
Nikki Crowfoot sighs. "Let it pass, Shadrach. It isn't worth all this palaver. In the Avatar lab we constantly have to deal with the principle that the popular notion of self is pretty meaningless, that it's necessary to think in terms of larger information-handling systems, but maybe I'm extending the principle into areas where it doesn't need to go. Or maybe you and I simply aren't communicating very well right now.'' She closes her eyes for a moment and clenches her jaws as if trying to discharge some jangling current pulsing through her brain. Another barrage of fireworks lights up the sky with garish purple and green streaks. Savage thorny music, all snarls and shrieks, pierces the air. After a moment Crowfoot relaxes, grins, points to the shimmering tent of the transtemporalists a few meters in front of them. "Enough talk," she says. "Now some excitement."
"I shall explain the method of our rite, if you wish," says the transtemporalist. Deep slurred Mongol voice, monolithic face, all nose and cheekbones, the eyes hidden in shadows.
"Not necessary," Mordecai tells him. "I've been here before."
"Ah. Of course." An obsequious little bow. "I was not sure of that, Dr. Mordecai."
Shadrach is accustomed to being recognized. Mongolia is full of foreigners but very few of them are black. The sound of his own name, therefore, gives him only the most fleeting jab of surprise. Still, he would have welcomed more anonymity here. The transtemporalist kneels and beckons to him to do the same. They are in a private little cubicle, formed by thick carpets draped over ropes, within the vast dim tent. A thick yellow candle set in a pewter cup on the earthen floor flickers between them sending a heavy spiral of dark sour smoke toward the tent's sloping top. In Mordecai's nostrils are all sorts of primeval Mongol odors, the reek of shaggy goatskin walls, the stench of what might well be a cow-dung fire somewhere nearby. The floor is densely strewn with soft wood shavings, a luxury in this land of few trees. The transtemporalist is busy at the chemistry of his vocation, mixing fluids in a tall pewter beaker, an oily blue one and a thin scarlet one, stirring them around with an ivory swizzle stick that makes lively swirl patterns, adding now a sprinkle of a green powder and a yellow one. Hocus-pocus, all of it: Mordecai suspects that only one of these substances is the true drug, the others being mere decoration. But rites demand mystery and color, and these dour priests, claiming all of time and space for their province, must heighten their effects as best they can. Shadrach wonders how far from him Nikki is now. They were parted at the entrance to the transtemporalists' maze of a tent, each led separately into the shadows by silent acolytes. The time voyage is a journey that one must take alone.
The Mongol concludes his pharmaceutics and, holding the cup tenderly in both hands, passes it above the candle's sputtering flame to Shadrach Mordecai.
"Drink," he says, and, feeling a bit like Tristan, Shadrach drinks. Surrenders the cup. Sits back on his haunches, waiting. "Give me your hands," the transtemporalist murmurs. Shadrach extends them, palms upward. The Mongol covers them with his own short-fingered wide-spanned hands and intones some gibberish prayer, unintelligible except for scattered Mongol words that have no contextual coherence, A faint dizziness is beginning in Shadrach Mordecai now. This will be his third transtemporal experience, the first in nearly a year. Once he visited the court of King Baldwin of Jerusalem in the guise of a black prince of Ethiopia, a Christian Moor at the swaggering feasts of the Crusaders; and once he found himself atop a stone pyramid in Mexico, robed all in white, slashing with an obsidian dagger at the breast of a writhing Spaniard spread-eagled on the sacrificial altar of Huitzilopitchli. And now? He will have no choice in his destination. The transtemporalist will choose it for him according to some unfathomable whim, aiming him with a word or two, a skillful suggestion as he is cut loose from his moorings by the drug and sent adrift into the living past. His own imagination and historical knowledge, coupled with, perhaps— who knows?—whispered cues from the transtemporalist as his drugged body lies on the floor of the tent—will do the rest.
Mordecai sways now. Everything whirls. The transtemporalist leans close and speaks, and it is a struggle to comprehend the words, but Shadrach must comprehend, he needs to hear—
"It is the night of Cotopaxi," the Mongol whispers. "Red sun, yellow sky."
The tent disappears and Shadrach is alone.
Where is he? A city. Not Karakorum. This place is unfamiliar, subtropical, narrow streets, steep hills, iron-grilled doorways, twining red-flowered vines, cool clear air, grand fountains in spacious plazas, white-fronted houses with wrought-iron balconies. A Latin city, intense, hectic, busy.
—¡Barato aqui! Barato!
— Yo tengo un hambre canina.
Honking horns, barking dogs, the shouts of children, the cries of vendors. Women roasting bits of meat over charcoal braziers in the cobbled streets. A thousand strident people-sounds. Where is there a city with such vigorous life? Why does no one show signs of the organ-rot? They are all so healthy here, even the beggars, even the paupers. There are no such cities. No more, no more. Ah. Naturally. He is dreaming a city mat no longer exists. This is a city of yesterday.
—Le telefonearé un dia de estos.
—Hasta la semana que viene.
He has never spoken Spanish. And yet he recognizes the words, and yet he understands them.
—¿Donde esta el teléfono?
—¡Vaya de prisa! ¡Tenga cuidado! —¡Maricéa!
—No es verdad.
Standing in the middle of a busy street at the top of a broad hill, he is stunned by the view. Mountains! They rim the city, great snowcapped cones, gleaming in the midday sun. He has lived too long on the Mongolian plateau; mountains such as these have become unfamiliar and alien to him. Shadrach stares in awe at the immense glaciered peaks, so huge they seem top-heavy, they seem about to rumble from the sky to crush the bustling city. And is that a plume of smoke rising from the crest of that most enormous one? He is not sure. At such a distance— at least fifty kilometers—is it possible to see smoke? Yes. Yes. Beyond any doubt, smoke. He remembers the last words he heard before the dizziness took him: "It is the night of Cotopaxi. Red sun, yellow sky." The great volcano—is that it? A flawless cone, swathed in snow and pumice, its base hidden in clouds, its summit outlined in numbing majesty against the darkening sky. He has never seen such a mountain.
He halts a boy who darts past him.
—Por favor.
The boy is wide-eyed, terrified, but yet he stops, looks up.
—¿Si, Señor?
—¿Como se llama esta montaña?
Shadrach points toward the colossal snowcapped volcano. The boy smiles and relaxes. His fear is gone; obviously he is pleased by the notion of knowing something that this tall dark-skinned stranger does not. He says:
—Cotopaxi.
Cotopaxi. Of course. The transtemporalist has given him a front row ticket to the great catastrophe. This is the city of Quito, then, in Ecuador, and that trailing smoke to the southeast is Cotopaxi, the world's loftiest active volcano, and this day must be the nineteenth of August, 1991, a day that everyone remembers, and Shadrach Mordecai knows that before the sun touches the Pacific tonight the world will be shaken as it rarely has been shaken in all the time of mankind, and an era will end and a reign of fire will be loosed upon civilization. And he is the only person on earth who knows this, and here he stands below great Cotopaxi and he can do nothing. Nothing. Nothing but watch, and tremble, and perhaps perish with the half million who will perish here tonight. Can one die, he wonders, while one is traveling this way? Is it not only a dream, a dream, a dream, and can dreams kill? Even if he dreams an eruption, even if he dreams tons of lava and brimstone descending on his broken body?
The boy is still standing there, staring at him.
—Gracias, amigo.
—De nada, señor.
The boy waits, perhaps for a coin, but Shadrach has none to give him, and after a moment he runs off, pausing after ten paces to look back and stick out his tongue, then running again, sprinting into an alleyway, disappearing.
And a moment later there is a terrible noise from Cotopaxi and a white column at least a hundred meters thick rises straight up like a scepter from a secondary cone on the volcano's sloping flank.
Immediately all movement halts in the city. Everyone freezes; every head turns toward Cotopaxi. The white column, pouring from the vent with incredible velocity, rising already to a height of at least a thousand meters above Cotopaxi's summit, is spreading now, filling the sky like a broad plume of feathers, a cloak of live steam. Mordecai perceives a low droning rumbling sound, as of a train passing through the city, but a train for giants, a titanic train that makes lanterns sway and potted plants topple from balconies. The cloud of steam has turned gray on top, with tinges of red and yellow toward its outer edges.
—¡Aie! ¡El fin del mundo!
—¡Madre de dios! ¡La montaña!
—¡Ayuda! ¡Ayuda! ¡Ayuda!
And the flight from Quito begins. Nothing has happened yet, nothing but a roar and a hiss and a column of steam rushing skyward, but nevertheless the people of the city abandon their houses, carrying little or nothing, grasping perhaps a crucifix or a child or a cat or a handful of clothes, crowding into the streets, shuffling somberly downhill, northward, long lines of people moving with hunched shoulders, no one looking back, everyone heading out of the city, heading away from Cotopaxi, from the frightening crimson cloud that now looms over the mountain, from the death that soon will come to Quito. These are people wise in the way of volcanoes, and they do not care to stay for the show. Shadrach Mordecai is swept along in the human tide. He towers over these folk as the volcano does over the city, and they glance strangely at him and some tug at his arms in a kind of appeal, as if they think he is a black deity come to lead them to safety. But he is leading no one. He is following, he is fleeing helplessly with all the rest. Unlike them he does look over his shoulder every few minutes. Whenever he can, whenever the press of refugees is not too powerful, he pauses and turns to see what is happening. The volcano now is spurting little bursts of pumice and light ash, wind-borne powdery stuff that changes the color of the air, staining it yellow, deepening the sun's hues to an orange-red. The earth seems to be groaning. The whole city shakes. Automobiles laden with well-dressed citizens move slowly through the streets, unable to make headway in the throngs of shuffling pedestrians; there are collisions, shouts, quarrels. Soon the cars have halted altogether and their passengers, quirky-lipped and disdainful, shoulder their way into the lines of humbler folk. Shadrach has been marching for an hour or two now, perhaps three, mechanically pushing himself along; the air has grown thin and chilly, with an acrid reek of brimstone in it, and though it is only the middle of the afternoon the falling ash has so obscured the light that the street lamps have come on— the ash is accumulating like fine snow in the streets, already ankle-deep—and still Cotopaxi roars and hisses, and still the people straggle northward.  With the eerie double-edged vision of the time traveler, he looks forward as well as back, remembering the future. Before long there will be the explosion that will be heard thousands of miles away, the earthquake, the clouds of poisonous gas, the lunatic outpouring of tons of volcanic ash that will blot out the sun all over the world, and on this night of Cotopaxi the ancient gods will be let loose on earth and empires will crumble. He has lived through this night once already, but not with the knowledge he now has. Somewhere far away at this moment is fifteen-year-old Shadrach, all arms and legs and huge eyes, doing his lessons and dreaming of medical school, and he will hear the explosion too, dull and muffled though it will sound after spanning the planet from Quito to Philadelphia, and he will think it is a terrorist's bomb, perhaps, going off downtown, but in the morning he will see the sky tinted yellow and the swollen sun gone all red, and then the fine dust will fall for days, bringing early twilights on these summer evenings, and news will trickle out of South America of the terrible eruption, the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. What that young Shadrach does not know, what no one knows except the stranger striding through the northern outskirts of Quito under a dirty crimson cloud, is that the eruption of Cotopaxi is more than a natural event: it signals a political apocalypse, the fall of the nations about to begin, the time of Genghis Mao about to arrive.
—¡El fin del mundo!
Yes. Yes. The end of the world. And now the explosion comes.
It happens in stages, first five quick sharp reports like cannon-fire; then a long moment of total silence when even the persistent rumble that has gone on for hours abruptly halts; then a violent shaking of the earth and a single monstrous booming sound, the loudest sound Mordecai has ever heard, a sound that breaks windows and splits walls; then silence again; then the rumbling once more; then more cannonfire, bang bang bang, quick hard pops; then a second great boom, five times as powerful as the first, that drops people to their knees, clutching at their ears; then silence, an ominous, sinister, nerve-tightening silence; and then the sound of sounds, the sound of a planet splitting apart at its core, an unending grotesque avalanche of sound that makes the neck snap and the arms jerk wildly and the eyes jiggle in then-sockets, a sound that rolls over Quito like the trampling foot of an angry god.  The mountain appears to be ripping open. Shadrach can see huge chunks of its crest, slabs of rock that must be the size of great buildings, flying loose and soaring slowly and grandly toward Quito. The perfect cone, once as graceful as Mount Fuji's, is a ruin now; a shattered wreck, dimly visible through the dense clouds of ash and the flying balls of pumice; it is only a stump, irregular and ghastly. The air itself is burning. People still struggle onward, moving even more slowly, dragging themselves along on leaden legs toward a salvation that is not to be reached, but they vomit, they clutch at their throats, they gasp, they choke, they fall.
—Ayuda. Ayuda.
But there is no help to be had. They are dying here in the early afternoon of this sparkling day, sparkling no longer.
Shadrach, trying to breathe an atmosphere that is half ash and half carbon monoxide, falls himself, gets up, falls again, forces himself to rise.
— Yo soy un médico.
—Gracias, señor. Gracias.
Her eyes flutter. She looks to him for aid, medicine, a drink of water, anything. How can he help her? He is a doctor, yes, but can he teach the dying to breathe poisoned air? She gags, shivers, and then—strangely—yawns. She is falling asleep in his arms. But it is a deadly drowsiness, and she will not wake. He releases her. He moves onward, handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Useless. Useless. He falls again and does not rise, he lies in a heap of weeping murmuring victims, a victim himself. So this is how it was on the night of Cotopaxi. Night and ash, flight and death. That saucy boy, those women roasting bits of meat, the shopkeepers and the bankers, the cab drivers and the policemen, that fall black-skinned stranger, all dying together now, the hours of frenzied flight a waste, and Cotopaxi's ashy ejecta filling the heavens, giving all the world a blood-red twilight. El fin del mundo, yes. Shadrach claws at the ashes filling his mouth. There is another explosion, a lesser one now— for what could equal that last unimaginable apocalyptic blast?— and another, another, and he knows that the booms will continue in diminishing intensity for many hours, even for days. No one will sleep tonight in Ecuador, in Colombia, Venezuela, in all of Central America, even in Mexico; the dread thunder of Cotopaxi will resound in Canada, in Patagonia, it will reach far across both oceans, and by dawn, the dust-choked dawn, the black dawn through which no light can penetrate, the first revolution will be under way, the putsch in Brazil, the insurrectionists taking advantage of the strange darkness and the universal terror to launch their long-awaited coup; and then the chain reaction, the uprisings triggered by the Brazilian one in Argentina, Nicaragua, Algeria, Indonesia, one bloodbath providing the cue for the next, and all spurred by Cotopaxi, by the great symbol-freighted upheaval of the volcano; the economic crises of the 1970s and the repressions and shortages of the impoverished 1980s leading inexorably to the worldwide chaos of 1991, the global revolution, the long Walpurgisnacht touched off in some incalculable way by the eruption.
So this is how it was on the night of Cotopaxi. The angry gods shaking the world and bringing the nations into destruction. Shadrach bows his head, closes his eyes, surrenders to the soft warm fragrant ash that drifts peacefully upon him. This is the night of Cotopaxi, yes, el fin del mundo, the sounding of the last trump, the opening of the seventh seal, and he has been part of it, he has tasted the pumice of the volcano. And now he sleeps.
He stands in the gravel-strewn walk outside the tent of the transtemporalists, dazed, the sulphurous taste of Cotopaxi somehow still in his mouth. Nikki has not yet emerged. Other people he knows wander by, members of Genghis Mao's staff, flowing past him down the midway toward the garish cluster of gaming pavilions at the western end of the pleasure complex: there goes Frank Ficifolia, the jowly little communications man who designed Surveillance Vector One, and after him a Mongol military aide-de-camp, Gonchigdorge, all ribbons and medals in his comic-book uniform, and then two of the Committee vice-chairmen, a pallid Turk named Eyuboglu and a burly Greek named Ionigylakis. Each, as he passes, greets Shadrach in characteristic style, Ficifolia warm and effusive, Gonchigdorge offhanded and remote, Eyuboglu wary, Ionigylakis boisterous. Shadrach Mordecai manages a nod and a glassy smile in return, no more. Yo soy un médico. He still feels the earth rumbling. He wishes everyone would let him alone. In Karakorum one deserves a little privacy. Especially right now. The significant sectors of his consciousness are still in the suburbs of Quito, sinking under tons of fine hot ash. Coming out of transtemporalism is always something of a shock, but this is too much, it is as bad as eviction from the womb; he is vulnerable and fuddled, unable to cope with the social rituals. Those rough globules of airy pumice, that scent of brimstone, that inescapable sleepiness; above all, that crushing sense of transition, that feeling of one world falling apart and a new, strange one being formed.— Out of the transtemporalists' tent now comes a short pigeon-breasted man with crooked teeth and astonishing bushy red eyebrows. He is Roger Buckmaster, British, a microengineering expert, competent and usually sullen, a man whom few people seem to know well. He plants himself near the exit of the tent, a few meters from Shadrach Mordecai, and digs both feet firmly, flatfootedly, into the gravel as though he is uncertain about his balance. He has the stunned look of a man who has just been thrown out of a pub after five beers too many.
Mordecai, though he has only a distant acquaintance with Buckmaster and just now has especially little interest in a conversation with him, knows all too well how confusing the first moments outside the tent can be, and is sympathetic. He feels impelled to meet Buckmaster's wobbly gaze with some sort of polite gesture; he smiles and says hello, thinking that he will now retreat into his own confusion and fatigued meditations.
Buckmaster, though, blinks and glares aggressively. "It's the black bahstard!" he says. His voice is thick, phlegmy, high-pitched, not at all friendly. "The black bahstard himself!"
"Black bahstard?" Mordecai repeats wonderingly, mimicking the accent, "Black bahstard? Man, did you call me—"
"Bahstard. Black."
"That's what I thought you said."
"Black bahstard. Evil as the ace of spades."
This is ludicrous.
"Roger, are you all right?"
"Evil. Black and evil."
"I heard you, yes," Shadrach says. A miserable throbbing begins along the left side of his skull. He regrets having acknowledged Buckmaster's presence; he wishes Buckmaster would disappear. The racial slur itself is more grotesque than insulting to him, for he has never had any reason to feel defensive about his color, but he is puzzled by the gratuitousness of the attack and he remains too deeply under the spell of his own powerful transtemporal experience to want any sort of interaction with a truculent clown like Buckmaster, not now, above all not now. Perhaps the thing to do is ignore him. Shadrach folds his arms and steps back against a light-pillar.
But Buckmaster says into Shadrach's silence, "You don't feel covered with shame, Mordecai?"
"Look, Roger—"
"Drenched with guilt for every filthy act of your treacherous life?"
"Come on. What have you been drinking in there, man?"
"The same as everyone else. Just the drug, the drug, the time-drug, whatever they give you. D'ye think they fed me hashish? D'ye think I'm high on whiskey? Oh, no, just the time-drink, and it opened my eyes, let me tell you, it opened them wide!" Buckmaster advances until he stands no more man thirty centimeters from Shadrach Mordecai, glaring up at him, shouting The pain in Shadrach's skull is that of a spike being hammered deep. "I've seen Judas sell Him out!" Buckmaster roars. "I was there, in Jerusalem, at the Supper, watching them eat. Thirteen at the table, eh? I poured the wine with my own hands, you black devil, I watched Judas smirking, saw him whispering in His ear, even, and then out into the garden, y'know. Gethsemane, there in the darkness—"
"Would you like a trank, Roger?"

"You're getting overwrought. You ought to try to calm yourself."
"Listen to him doctoring me. Me. No, you won't dope me, and you'll pay heed while I tell you—"
"Some other time," Shadrach says. He is pinned between Buckmaster and the light-pillar, but he slips aside and makes broad swimming gestures in the air between them, as though Buckmaster is a noxious vapor he'd like to blow away. "I'm tired now. I've had a heavy trip in there myself. I can't handle any of this at the moment, Buckmaster, if you don't mind. All right?"
 I saw it, everything, Judas coming up to Him and kissing Him in the garden, and saying, Master, master, just as it is in the Book, and then the Roman soldiers closing in and arresting him—oh, the bloody betraying bahstard. I saw it, I was there, I understand now what guilt means. Do you? You don't. And you're as guilty as he was, in a different way but the same kind, Mordecai."
"I'm a Judas?" Shadrach shakes his head wearily. Drunks irritate him, even if they are drunk only on the transtemporalists' drug. "I don't understand any of this. Who is it I'm supposed to have betrayed?"
"Everyone. All of mankind."
"And you say you aren't drunk."
"Never been more sober. Oh, my eyes are open now! Who is it who keeps him alive, answer me that?  Eh?"
"You want the Chairman to die?"
"Damn right I do!"
Shadrach gasps. Buckmaster has obviously been driven insane by his transtemporal experience; Shadrach can no longer be annoyed with him. The angry little man must be protected against himself. "You'll be arrested if you go on this way," Shadrach says. "He might be listening to us right now."
"He's flat on his back, half dead from the operation," Buckmaster retorts. "Don't you think I know that? You put a new liver into him today."
"Even so, there are spy-eyes everywhere, recording instruments—you designed some of them yourself, Buckmaster."
"I don't care. Let him hear me."

"My eyes are open. I've had a revelation in that tent. Guilt, responsibility, evil—"
"You think the world would be better off with Genghis Mao dead?"
Fiercely Buckmaster cries, "Yes! Yes! He's draining us all so he can live forever.  Look, Mordecai, we could be rebuilding, we could be passing around the Antidote and healing the whole world, not just the favored few, we could go back to what we had before the War, but no, no, we're ruled by a bloody Mongol Khan, can you imagine that? A hundred-year-old Mongol Khan who wants to live forever! And he'd have been dead five years ago but for you."
Shadrach sees where Buckmaster is heading, and he presses his hands to his temples in dismay. He wants more desperately than ever to escape from this conversation.  Shadrach has thought all this through, long ago, considered the moral problems, and dismissed them.  No job for a nice sincere dedicated black boy from Philadelphia who wants to do good. But is Genghis Mao evil? Are there any alternatives to his rule, other than chaos? If Genghis Mao is inevitable, like some natural force, like the rising of the sun or the falling of the rain, then no guilt attaches to serving him: one does what seems appropriate, one lives one's life, one accepts one's karma, and if one is a doctor then one heals, without considering the ramifications of one's patient's identity. To Shadrach this is no glib rationalization, but rather a statement of acceptance of destiny. He refuses to assume burdens of guilt that have no meaning to him, and he will not let Buckmaster, of all people, flagellate him over absurdities nor accuse him of misplacing his loyalties.
He notices that Nikki Crowfoot has come out of the transtemporalist's tent and is standing to one side, hands on her hips, waiting for him, and he says to Buckmaster, "Excuse me. I have to go now."
Nikki seems transfigured. Her eyes are aglow, her face glistens with ecstatic sweat, her whole body seems to gleam. As Shadrach strides toward her, she acknowledges him with a mere tilt of her head, but she is far away, still lost in her hallucination.
"Let's go," he says.
He reaches for her hand.
"Wait!" Buckmaster yells, running toward them. "I'm not through with you.
Mordecai shrugs and says, ''All right. You can have one more minute. What do you want me to do, exactly?"
"Leave off tending him."
"I'm a doctor, Buckmaster. He's my patient."
"Precisely.  Billions of people to care for in the world, and he's the one you choose to look after. Dooming us all to decades more of Genghis Mao."
"Someone else would serve him if I didn't," Shadrach says gently.
"But you do. You. And I must hold you responsible."
Astonished, baffled by the force and persistence of Buckmaster's attack, Shadrach says, "Responsible for what?"
"For the way the world is. The whole bleeding mess. The continued threat of universal organ-rot twenty years after the Virus War. The hunger, the poverty. Oh, don't you have any shame, Mordecai?
Shadrach glances at Nikki, appealing to her to do something to rescue him. But she still has that far-off look; she does not appear to be aware of Buckmaster at all.
Angrily Mordecai says, "Who designed that machinery, Roger?"
Buckmaster recoils. He has been hit where it hurts. His cheeks blaze; his eyes glisten with furious tears. "I! I did!  Don't you think I know I share the guilt? Don't you think I understand that now? But I'm getting out. I won't bear the responsibility any longer."
"This is suicidal, the way you're carrying on." Shadrach Mordecai points to shadowy figures on the periphery of the path, high staffers who hover in the darkness, unwilling to come within range of possible spy-eyes while they enjoy Buckmaster's juicy lunatic outburst. "There'll be a report of all this on the Chairman's desk tomorrow, Roger, more likely than not. You're destroying yourself."
"I'll destroy him. The bloodsucker. He holds us all for ransom, our bodies, our souls, he'll let us rot if we don't serve."
"Don't be melodramatic. We serve Genghis Mao because we have skills and this is the proper place to employ them," Mordecai says crisply. "It's no fault of ours that the world is as it is. If you'd rather have been out in Liverpool or Manchester living in some stinking cellar with your intestines full of holes, you could have been."
"Don't goad me, Mordecai."
"But it's true. We're lucky to be here. We're doing the only sane thing possible in a crazy world. Guilt is a luxury we can't afford. You want to walk out now, go ahead, go, Roger. But you won't want to leave the Khan when you calm down in the morning."
"I refuse to have you patronize me."
"I'm trying to protect you.
"And I'm trying to get you to pull the plug and free us from Genghis Khan Mao," Buckmaster wails, flushed and wild-eyed.
"So you think we'd be better off without him?" Shadrach asks. "What are your alternatives, Buckmaster? What kind of government would you suggest? Come on. I'm serious. You've been calling me a lot of unpleasant names, now let's have some rational discussion. You've become a revolutionary, right? Okay. What's your program? What do you want?"
Buckmaster is beyond the moment for philosophical discourse, however. He glowers at Mordecai in barely controlled loathing, framing words that will not leave his throat except as incoherent guttural growls; he clenches and unclenches his fists, he sways alarmingly, his reddened cheeks turn scarlet. Shadrach, all sympathy long gone, turns from him and reaches toward Nikki Crowfoot again. As they begin to walk away together Buckmaster rushes forward in a clumsy flailing lunge, clamping his hands on Shadrach's shoulders and trying to pull him down. Shadrach pivots gracefully, bends slightly to slip free of Buckmaster's grasp, and, when Buckmaster hurls himself at him, seizes him about the ribs, spins him around, and holds him immobile. Buckmaster squirms, kicks, spits, sputters, but Shadrach is much too strong for him. "Easy," Shadrach murmurs. "Easy. Relax. Let go of it, Roger. Let go of everything." He holds Buckmaster as one might hold a hysterical child, until at length he feels Buckmaster go slack, all the frenzy leaving him. Mordecai releases him and steps back, hands poised at chest level, ready for a new lunge, but Buckmaster is spent. He backs away from Mordecai in the slinking heavy-shouldered walk of a beaten man, pausing after a few paces to scowl and mutter, "All right, Mordecai. Bahstard. Stay with Genghis Mao. Wipe his decrepit arse for him. See what happens to you!
Shadrach laughs. The tension is broken. "The furnace. I like that. Very literary, Buckmaster."
"The furnace for you, Shadrach!"
Mordecai, smiling, takes Crowfoot's arm. She still looks radiant, ecstatic, lost in transcendental raptures. "Let's go," he says. "I can't take any more of this."
Softly, in a dream-furry voice, she says, "What did he mean by that, Shadrach? About the furnace?"
"Biblical reference. Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego."
"Who?"
"You don't know of it?"
"No. Shadrach, it's such a lovely night. Let's go somewhere and make love."
"Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego. In the Book of Daniel.  Strange you don't know the story."
"What happened to them?"
"I told you, love. They were unharmed, not a hair of their heads singed, and Nebuchadnezzar called them forth, and told them that their God was a mighty god, and promoted them to high office in Babylon. Poor Buckmaster. He ought to realize that a Shadrach wouldn't be afraid of furnaces. Did you have a good trip, love?"
"Oh, yes, yes, Shadrach!"
"Where did they send you?"
"Joan of Arc's execution. I watched her burning, and it was beautiful, the way she smiled, the way she looked toward heaven." Nikki presses close against him as they walk. Her voice still comes to him out of some realm of dream; that bonfire has left her stoned. "The most inspiring trip I ever had. The most deeply spiritual. Where can we go now, Shadrach? Where can we be alone?"
He is weary of Karakorum after his encounter with Buckmaster, and he sees now how this whole long day has drained his vigor and glazed his soul; if he could he would stagger to the tube-train and let himself be whisked off to Ulan Bator and his hammock and a night of—at last—deep, satisfying sleep. But Crowfoot, eerily exultant, glows now with insistent lusts, and he does not feel strong enough to confront her disappointment if he denies her now. Arm in arm, therefore, they go to the lovers' hospice at the north end of the pleasure grounds, a bright-skinned orange-and-green geodesic dome, and with a touch of his thumb against the credit plate he rents a three-hour room.
Not much of a room. Bed, washstand, clothes rack, within a little slope-ceilinged segment of the vast dome, annoying bluish purple granular-finish walls, but the place suffices. It suffices.  Mouth seeking mouth, hands rising to breasts. She embraces him, then darts away, prudently offering her left hip to the contraception next to the washstand: presses the switch, receives the benevolent bath of sterilizing soft radiation, and returns to him. The tattooed no-preg symbol on her tawny flank, a nine-pointed star, glows in brilliant chartreuse, telling them that the irradiation has done its job. She strips him and claps hands in glee at the sight of his rigid maleness. This is not Joan of Arc he is bedding, oh, no; a warrior perhaps but a maiden no. They tumble to the bed. With hands nearly as skilled as those of Warhaftig the surgeon, he diligently commences the customary foreplay, but she lets him know by a quick wordless flip of her shoulders that he can skip it and get down to the main event; and he enters the taut hidden harbor between her thighs with a sudden unsparing thrust that brings grunts of pleasure from them both. Some things never change. There is a man only four hundred kilometers to the east who has had four livers and seven kidneys thus far, and in a tent just a few hundred meters from this bed they sell a drug that lets one be an eyewitness to the betrayal of the Savior, and there is a machine in Ulan Bator that flashes instantaneous pictures of virtually everything that is happening anywhere in the world, and all of these things would have been deemed miracles only two generations ago, but nevertheless in this miracle-infested world of 2012 there have been no significant technological improvements on the act of love. Oh, there are cunning drugs that are said to enhance the sensations, and there are clever devices that suppress fertility, and there are some other little biomechanical gimmicks that the sophisticated sometimes employ, but all of these are simply updated versions of peripheral equipment that has been in use since medieval days. The basic operation has not yet been digitalized or miniaturized or randomized or otherwise futurized, but remains what it was in the days of the australopithecines and the pithecanthropoids; that is, something that mere naked people do, pressing their humble natural-born bodies one against the other. The bodies press, copper clasping ebony, acting out the ancient rite, Shadrach surprising himself with the intensity of his passions. He is not sure whether this energy comes from Nikki, via some mysterious telepathic transfer, or from some unexpected reservoir within himself, but he is grateful for it whatever the source, and rides it to an agreeable conclusion. Afterward he slips easily into a sound sleep, awakening only when the mellow but inescapable beeper tone signals the approaching end of their three-hour rental period. He finds himself cozily pillowed against Nikki's breasts. She is awake and evidently has been for sometime, but her smile is beatific and no doubt she would have cradled him like that all night, an appealing idea. The night is well-nigh gone, in any case. They allow themselves a brief cuddle, rise, wash, dress, go forth with hands lightly touching into the chilly moon-dappled darkness. Like children unwilling to leave the playground, they drift into a gaming parlor, a wine house, a light studio, all three packed with raucous debauched-looking fun-seekers, but they stay no more than a few minutes in each place, drifting out as aimlessly as they went in, and finally they admit to each other that they have had enough for one night. To the tube-train station, then. Dawn will be here soon. From the ceiling above the station platform dangles a huge glowing green globe, a public telescreen showing a late-night news program, and wearily Shadrach peers at it: the face of Mangu looks back at him, sincere and earnest and deplorably youthful. Mangu is making a speech, so it seems. Gradually, for he is very tired, Shadrach perceives that it is the classic Roncevic Antidote speech, the one which Genghis Mao traditionally makes every five or six months and which now apparently has been delegated to the heir-apparent. ". . . major laboratory breakthroughs," Mangu is saying. ".. . encouraging progress... fundamental qualitative transformations of the manufacturing technology ... the unceasing efforts of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee ... the diligent and persevering leadership of our beloved Chairman Genghis Mao... there can be no doubt any longer... large-scale distribution of the drug throughout the world... the scourge of organ-rot driven from our midst ... stockpiles increasing daily... a time is approaching when ... a happy, healthy humanity . . ."
A florid, goggle-eyed man standing a few meters farther down the platform says in a loud harsh whisper to the woman who accompanies him, "Certainly. In only ninety to one hundred years."
"Quiet, Belá!" his companion cries, sounding genuinely alarmed.
"But it is the truth. He lies when he says the stockpiles are increasing daily. I have seen the figures. I tell you, I have seen reliable figures."
Mordecai finds this interesting. The florid man is Belá Horthy, a dour but volatile Hungarian physicist, creator of the great fusion plant at Bayan Hongor that supplies power for most of northeastern Asia. He also happens to be minister of technology for the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, and it is a little odd to hear so formidably well-connected a government leader uttering such scandalous subversion in public. Of course, this is Karakorum, and Horthy, looking boneless and out of focus just now, is obviously adrift on some potent hallucinogen, but still, but still—
"The Antidote stockpiles are stable at best, or even decreasing slightly," Horthy continues, framing his words with the exaggerated precision of the extremely intoxicated. "What Mangu tells us is a lie intended to pacify the populace. He thinks that telling them such things will make them happy and induce them to love him. Pfaugh!" The woman tries desperately to quiet him. She is short and compact, efficiently constructed with her center of gravity close to the ground; her face is partly obscured by an ornate, flamboyant green domino, but Shadrach, after a moment, recognizes her as Donna Labile, no less a mogul than Horthy himself, in fact minister of demography for the Committee, whose responsibility it is to maintain a reasonable balance between births and deaths. Masked or not, it is she, no mistaking that ferocious jaw, and Shadrach observes that Horthy too has a mask, dangling from his left hand. Perhaps he thinks he still wears it. She struggles with him, taking the mask from his limp hand and attempting to fasten it in place, but be brushes her aside, and, lurching toward Shadrach Mordecai, greets the doctor with so grandiose a bow that he nearly pitches himself from the platform.  "Ah, Dr. Mordecai!" Horthy bellows. "Our leader's devoted Aesculapius! I greet you!"
"... the climax of our unending struggle against.. ." Mangu says from the glowing globular screen.
Horthy jerks a thumb at the image of the heir-apparent. "Do you believe that trash, Mordecai?"
Shadrach has his own suspicions about the sincerity of the Khan's oft-expressed plan for universal distribution of the Ron-cevic Antidote, but they are suspicions rather less than half formed, and in any case this is no place to voice them. Softly he says, "I'm not a member of the Committee, Dr. Horthy. The only inside information I have concerns such things as the endocrine balance of Genghis Mao."
"But you have an opinion, haven't you?"
"My opinion's an uninformed one, and therefore worthless."
"Such a diplomat you are!" Horthy says in contempt.
"Pay no attention," Donna Labile begs. "He's had too much tonight. Eating kot and yipka like so much candy, drugging himself crazy, now risking his whole career—"
"It seems to be the night for it," Shadrach remarks.
"A filthy hoax," Horthy says heavily, shaking his fist at the screen. He is trembling, ashen-faced beneath his florid glow, sweating profusely. "Cruel, sinister, bestial—'' and he lapses into a series of unintelligible sibilant expletives, presumably Magyar, toward the end of which he begins to sob. Donna Labile, meanwhile, has disappeared. After a moment she returns leading two tall men who wear the gray-and-blue uniform of the Citizens' Peace Brigade. It is odd to find a couple of Citpols here, for Shadrach thinks of Karakorum as an open city, naturally monitored by secret spy-eyes and the usual audio bugs but otherwise unpoliced; and these two are more man ordinarily repellent even for Citpols, for they look like identical ugly twins, gray-faced and gray-eyed, with flat heads and stiff close-cropped hair and strange malproportioned bodies, all legs and no middle. They walk in a weird clucking stride, like a couple of poorly programmed robots, but they appear to be human, more or less: perhaps the Committee, finding volunteers scarce, is raising a clone of monsters to serve as policemen. They surround Horthy and speak to him in low, urgent tones. One of them takes the domino from Donna Labile and with curiously fussy, almost mincing, gestures, affixes it over the bridge of Morthy's nose.
Then, slipping their arms gently under those of the minister of technology, they lead him, lifting him a bit so that his feet are dragging, toward a gray enameled door at the far end of the platform. Shadrach Mordecai is uncertain whether they are arresting him at Donna Labile's instigation or—more likely— are hauling him up to some behind-the-scenes sobering-up facility before he can compromise himself further.
"... a glorious epoch in the splendid history of the human race ..." Mangu booms.
The tube-train arrives. The survivors of the night's revelries at Karakorum move slowly, sleepily aboard.
Before he heads for his hammock, Shadrach Mordecai visits the Khan. Though the implants tell him all is well, he feels obligated after his outing to make a personal call on his patient. It is early morning, and Genghis Mao lies in blissful sleep: through the electroencephalographic node in Mordecai's haunch travel the slow rhythmic quivers of the Chairman's peaceful delta waves. All the telemetered data reaching Shadrach is encouraging: blood pressure good, lungs clear of fluid, temperature back to normal, cardiac activity fine, bile production excellent. The newly installed liver has obviously established itself already and has begun to undo the deteriorations of the recent weeks. Shadrach passes through the interface and enters the bedroom where the Chairman rests within the intricate cocoon of the intensive-care support system. The biometer readings on the support system's instrument panel instantly confirm Shadrach's long-distance diagnosis: the Chairman is doing amazingly well. None of the emergency equipment has been needed, neither the oxygen tent nor the electrodialysis machine nor the heart-lung respirator nor the twelve or fourteen other instruments. There he lies, relaxed, a faint smile on his thin lips, this man of ninety years or so, only sixteen hours out of major surgery and already nearly strong enough to resume the stress of normal life. But of course there is nothing normal about Genghis Mao's body, reconstructed so many times out of so many healthy borrowed parts: like the cannibal chieftain, he has feasted on the flesh of heroes, and their strength has become his strength. And, Shadrach suspects, there is some quality of the mind within that tapering triangular skull that will not admit bodily weakness, that banishes it altogether from his metabolic cycle. The doctor stands for a few moments by the bedside, admiring Genghis Mao's toughness of constitution, half expecting Genghis Mao to wink at him, but the Khan's sleep holds him utterly.
Off to his own, then. With Genghis Mao in such fine shape, Shadrach feels free to sleep until sleep is done with him, even if that is midafternoon. Crowfoot already lies curled and dozing in his hammock; he strips, snuggles in beside her, delicately coils his belly and thighs against her back and buttocks, and lets consciousness go from him.
He is awakened some hours later by an internal jolt that nearly throws him from the hammock. A geyser of adrenalin floods his bloodstream; his heart begins to pound, his limbs tremble, all systems switching on in a violent alarm reaction. Automatically he begins a process of self-diagnosis, considering and rejecting within the first fraction of a second such possibilities as a coronary thrombosis, a cerebral hemorrhage, pulmonary edema; a moment later, as the thunderous tachycardia begins to subside and his breathing starts to return to normal, he realizes that it is nothing more serious than an episode of shock leading into a classic fight-or-flight syndrome; and an instant after that he becomes aware that it is all purely vicarious, that there is nothing wrong with him at all but that he is getting an intense overload via the telemetering system that links him to Genghis Mao.
He leaps from the hammock, sending it swinging Wildly. "Shadrach?" Nikki asks, her voice groggy and dim. "Shadrach, what's happening?"