Shadrach in the Furnace

14

Over a week goes by before Shadrach sees Nikki Crowfoot again. She claims she is very busy in the laboratory — problems of recalibration, necessary compensatory adjustments in the Avatar persona-transplant system now that the donor body will not be Mangu’s — and therefore she is too tired in the evenings to want company. But he suspects she is avoiding him. Crowfoot has always been at her most sociable when she is most overworked; it is her escape from pressure. Shadrach does not know why she would want to avoid him. Surely the night he spent with Katya Lindman has nothing to do with it. He has been to bed with Lindman before, and with others; Crowfoot too has had other partners; such things have never mattered between them. It baffles him. When they speak by telephone Nikki is wary and aloof. Beyond doubt something has gone wrong in their relationship, but he has no theories.

A new Genghis Mao crisis distracts him briefly from these matters. For the past several days the Khan has been leaving his bed to work in his office, to visit Surveillance Vector One, to direct the Committee activities from the headquarters room. His recuperation was proceeding so smoothly that there seemed no reason to confine him. But now Dr. Mordecai’s sensitive implants are picking up early warnings of trouble — epigastric pulsations, faint systolic murmur, general circulatory stress. Too much activity too soon? Shadrach goes to the Chairman’s office to discuss the problem. But Genghis Mao, still busy with his Mangu monuments and his roundup of assassins, does not feel like conferring with his doctor, does not want to talk about symptoms. He brushes Shadrach’s queries aside with a brusque declaration that he has rarely felt better. Then he turns back to his desk. The arrests, he tells Mordecai proudly, now total two hundred eighty-two. Of these, ninety-seven have already been found guilty and sent to the organ farms. “Soon,” the Khan says, “the lungs and kidneys and intestines of these criminals will serve to extend the lives of loyal members of the government. Is there not poetic justice in that? All things are centripetal, Shadrach. All opposites are reconciled.”

“Two hundred eighty-two conspirators?” Shadrach asks. “Did it take that many to push one man out one window?”

“Who knows? The actual crime perhaps required no more than two or three perpetrators. But a great network of subordinate plotters must have been needed. Security devices had to be altered, guards distracted, cameras deflected. We believe it may have taken a dozen conspirators simply to remove the bodies of the killers from the plaza after they jumped.”

“To do what?”

Genghis Mao smiles blandly. “We believe,” he says, “that the assassins, after hurling Mangu from the window, deliberately jumped from the same window themselves to keep from being captured in the building. Confederates in the plaza immediately gathered up their bodies and drove off with them, while others removed all signs of their deaths from the pavement.”

Shadrach stares. “Horthy saw only one man falling, sir.”

“Horthy did not remain in the plaza to observe further developments.”

“Even so—”

“If the killers of Mangu did not leap after him,” the Khan says, eyes bright with the brightness of reason triumphant, “what did become of them? No suspicious persons were found in the tower after the crime.”

Shadrach is unable to find an appropriate reply to this. No comment he might make, he suspects, would be constructive. After a pause he says, clearing his throat, “Sir, if we could talk about your health again for a moment—”

“I told you. I feel fine.”

“The symptoms I’ve begun to detect are fairly serious ones, sir.”

“Symptoms of what?” Genghis Mao snaps.

Shadrach suspects that the Khan may be developing an aneurysm of the abdominal aorta — a defect in the wall of the great vessel that conveys blood from the heart. He asks Genghis Mao if he has felt any unusual discomfort, and the Chairman grudgingly admits recent sharp pains in the back and sides. Dr. Mordecai does not point out how this contradicts Genghis Mao’s claim of being in good health; but the admission does give Shadrach the upper hand, and he orders the Chairman back to bed for rest.

Peering through the eye of a fiber probe extending into Genghis Mao’s catheterized aorta, Shadrach confirms his diagnosis. The recent liver surgery, perhaps, has released emboli into the Chairman’s bloodstream, and one has somehow made its way against the arterial flow, lodging in the abdominal aorta and causing infection. Or perhaps not, but at any rate a tumor is taking form, and more surgery will be necessary. If it were anyone else, the risks of an operation so soon after a major organ transplant might be even greater than the risks of letting the aneurysm expand. But Shadrach has become amazingly casual about delivering up his venerable patient to the knife. Genghis Mao’s resilient body has been opened so often that it accepts frequent surgery as the natural state. Besides, the aneurysm is not far from the liver, and Warhaftig will be able to enter through the recent incision, which is only now beginning to heal.

The news annoys Genghis Mao. “I have no time for surgery now,” he says, irritated. “We’re still finding new conspirators everyday. I must give my full attention to the problem. And next week is Mangu’s stale funeral, at which I intend to preside in person, I—”

“The danger is critical, sir.”

“You always tell me that. I think you enjoy telling me that. You’re too insecure, Shadrach. Even if you didn’t manage to find some new crisis every few weeks I’d still keep you on the payroll. I like you, Shadrach.”

I don’t invent the crises, sir.”

“Even so. Can’t this wait a month or two?”

“We’d have to make a fresh cut in healed tissue then.”

“What of it? What’s one more slice?”

“Aside from that, the risks—”

“Yes,” Genghis Mao says. “The risks. What risks do I run by letting this thing sit?”

“Do you know what an aneurysm is, sir?”

“More or less.”

“It’s a tumor containing blood or a blood clot, in direct contact with the wall of an artery and causing deteriorative changes in the tissue surrounding it. Think of it as a balloon, gradually being inflated. When balloons get too big, they explode.”

“Ah.”

“Eventually this aneurysm could rupture — into the intestines, the peritoneum, the pleura, or the retroperitoneal tissues. Or it might cause an embolism of the superior mesenteric artery, producing intestinal infarction. The aorta itself could rupture spontaneously. There are several other possibilities. All fatal.”

“Fatal?”

“Invariably fatal. Agonizing pain, death usually within minutes.”

“Ah,” Genghis Mao says. “Ah. I see.”

“It could come at almost any time.”

“Ah.”

“Without warning.”

“I see.”

“We’d be helpless, once the aneurysm goes. No way of saving you, sir.”

“Ah. I see. Ah.”

Does he see? Yes. Certainly, visions of erupting aneurysms are floating before Genghis Mao’s basilisk eyes. The lean leathery cheeks contract in profound speculation; somber frowns furrow the bronze forehead. The Khan is troubled. He had not planned on being confronted with potential extinction this morning. Now, obviously, he contemplates the going of Genghis II Mao IV Khan from the world, and likes the idea no more than ever. The Permanent Revolution that has transformed the aching world requires a Permanent Leader; though Genghis Mao has often said, echoing Mao I’s similar words, that when one participates in a revolution one attains revolutionary immortality, one transcends the death of the individual by living on indefinitely within the permanent revolutionary ferment one has helped to create, it is plain that Genghis Mao prefers the other, less metaphorical species of immortality for himself. He glowers. He sighs. He gives his consent to this latest surgical interruption of his revolutionary labors.

Warhaftig is summoned. There are conferences; schedules are rearranged; details of the surgery are explained to the Khan. The blood vessels will be clamped above and below the aneurysm to arrest circulation temporarily while Warhaftig removes the aneurysm and installs a dacron or teflon prosthesis.

“No,” the Khan says. “Not a prosthesis. You can use a tissue graft, can’t you? There’s not much of a rejection problem with arterial tissue. It’s like stitching in a length of hose.”

Warhaftig says, “But dacron and teflon have proven perfectly—”

“No. I have enough plastic in me already. And the organ banks are overflowing with new material. Give me real aorta.” Genghis Mao’s eyes gleam. “Give me aorta from one of the recently convicted conspirators.”

Warhaftig looks at Shadrach Mordecai, who shrugs.

“As you wish,” the surgeon says.

Shadrach has lunch soon afterward with Katya Lindman. When they have eaten, they stroll in Sukhe Bator Square. He has spent more time than usual with Lindman since the night they went to Karakorum, although he has not slept with her again. He finds her more gentle, less threatening now, and is not sure whether she has changed or simply his attitude toward her; waking up and finding her sobbing may have had something to do with it. Certainly she has become warm and friendly, so much so that he suspects and fears she may even be falling in love with him; yet there is something reserved at her core, some ineluctable holding back, a zone of silence within her that strikes him as the enemy of love. There never were such sealed places in Nikki Crowfoot when Shadrach’s relationship with her was going well.

The midday sun is bright, the air soft, the day warm; golden flowers gleam in the terra-cotta tubs of shrubbery that decorate the plaza. Katya walks close to him, but their bodies do not touch. She has already heard of the new crisis. News of all sorts travels inordinately swiftly through the Grand Tower of the Khan, but especially news of the health of Genghis Mao. “Tell me what an aneurysm is,” she says. He gives her an elaborate explanation and describes the operation that will be performed. They are standing near the place where Mangu fell. When he finishes, Shadrach looks up and tries to imagine two or three assassins plummeting in Mangu’s wake, while lurking confederates spring forth to sweep up the shattered bodies and escape with them. Madness, Shadrach thinks. And this is the carefully considered theory propounded in all seriousness by the ruler of the world. Madness. Madness.

He says, “There’ve been almost three hundred arrests so far. Ninety-seven sent to the organ farms. Last week Roger Buckmaster was alive, healthy, his own master as much as any of us is. Tomorrow we may be using his aorta to patch Genghis Mao’s. And still the arrests continue.”

“So I gather. Avogadro’s men bring them in, day and night. When will the Khan be satisfied?”

“When he decides that all the conspirators have been caught, I suppose.”

“Conspirators!” Katya says scathingly. For a moment she has the old frightening intensity again. “What conspirators? What conspiracy? The whole thing is insane. Mangu killed himself.”

“You think it was suicide too, then?”

“ Think? I know it was,” she says in a low voice, turning away from the Grand Tower as though to avoid cameras that might read her lips.

“You talk as if you were there when he jumped.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“How can you know it was suicide, then?”

“I know. I know.”

“ Were you there when he—”

“Of course not,” Lindman says.

“Then why are you so sure you’re right?”

“Good reasons. Sufficient reasons.”

“You know something that the security people don’t?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Then why don’t you speak up about it, before Avogadro arrests the whole world?”

She is silent a moment. “No,” she says at last. “I can’t. It would destroy me.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You would if I told you the story.” She studies him. “If I told you, would it stop with you?”

“If that’s what you wanted.”

“I feel I should tell someone. I’d like to tell you. I trust you, Shadrach. But I’m afraid.”

“If you’d rather not—”

“No. No. I’ll tell you. Walk with me across the plaza. Keep your back to the tower.”

“There are cameras everywhere. It doesn’t matter which way we face. But they can’t pick up everything, I guess.”

They start across the plaza. Lindman raises her arm, holding it across her face as though to scratch her nose with the back of her wrist, and says, mouth covered, voice muffled, “I saw Mangu the night before he jumped. We talked about Project Avatar. I told him be was going to be the donor.”

“Oh, Jesus. You didn’t!”

She nods grimly. “I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer. It was a Monday night, just before Genghis Mao’s liver transplant, right? Yes. Mangu had made a speech that night, something about worldwide distribution of the Antidote. Then he and I went for drinks somewhere. He was afraid Genghis Mao might die during the operation and he’d have to take charge of things — I’m not ready, Mangu kept saying, I’m not ready. And then we started talking about the three projects, and he began to speculate about Avatar. What his role would likely be in the government if they transplanted Genghis Mao’s mind into some other body. Whether Genghis Mao would still want him as viceroy after the transition, things like that. It was so sad, Shadrach, so fucking sad, so filthy sad, the way he kept poking at it, trying to figure out what was in store for him, working up all sorts of hypotheses and scenarios. Finally I couldn’t stand it and I told him to stop worrying about it, that he was wasting his time, that after the transition he wasn’t going to be around, that Genghis Mao was going to use his body as the donor.”

Shadrach is stunned by this confession. He can barely speak; his legs tremble, his skin is chilled. He says, “How could you have done it?”

“The words just came out. I mean, here was this man, this pitiful doomed man trying to understand his future, trying to see what his role would be, and I knew that he had no future. Not if Project Avator worked out. We all knew it, all but him. And I couldn’t hold it back any longer.”

“What happened than?”

“His face seemed to cave in. His eyes went dead — blank — empty. He sat for a long time and didn’t say anything. Then he asked me how I knew. I said it was known to a lot of people. He asked if you knew and I said I thought so. I want to talk to Nikki Crowfoot, he said. She’s at Karakorum with Shadrach, I told him. Then he asked me if I thought Avatar really would work out, and I said I didn’t know, I had a lot of faith in my own project, with any luck Talos would head Avatar off. It’s all a matter of time, I said. Avatar’s ahead of Talos now, and if anything serious happens to Genghis Mao in the next few months they might have to activate Avatar, because the Talos automation needs at least a year of further development work and Project Pheonix isn’t getting anywhere. He thought about that. He said it didn’t matter to him whether he actually became the donor or not, the thing was that Genghis Mao had let him think he was the heir-apparent while secretly approving what amounted to his murder. That was what hurt, he said, not the idea of dying, not the idea of giving up his body to Genghis Mao, but being tricked, being treated like a simpleton. And then he got up, he said goodnight, he went out. Walking very slowly. After that I don’t know. I suppose he spent the whole night thinking things over. Thinking about how he had been duped. The prize lamb, fattened for the slaughter. And in the morning he jumped.”

“And in the morning he jumped,” Shadrach says. “Yes. Yes. It sounds right. Some truths can’t be faced.”

“So there are no conspirators. The conspiracy exists only in Genghis Mao’s paranoia. Those three hundred arrested people are innocent. How many sent to the organ farms so far? Ninety-seven? Innocent. All innocent. I’ve watched it happen, but there’s nothing I can do. I can’t speak out. They say the Khan refuses even to consider the suicide hypothesis.”

“He wants there to have been a conspiracy, yes,” Shadrach says. “He enjoys punishing the guilty.”

“And if I told him what I’ve just told you, the Khan would have me killed.”

“You’d be in the organ farm tomorrow. Yes. Or else maybe he’d pick you as the new Avatar donor.”

“No,” Katya says. “That isn’t likely.”

“It would suit his philosophy. It would be very centripetal, wouldn’t it? Your loose tongue costs him Mangu’s body, so you become Mangu’s replacement. Very fitting. Very neat.”

“Don’t be foolish, Shadrach. It’s unimaginable. He’s a barbarian, isn’t he? He’s a Mongol. He thinks he’s the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. He’d never let himself be transplanted into a woman’s body.”

“Why not? The old Mongol khans weren’t sexists, Katya. As I recall, the Mongols let themselves be ruled by female regents now and then when the male line gave out. Of course, there are problems of adaptation he’d have, changing sexes, all the bodily reflexes, all the million little masculine things that he’d have to unlearn—

“Stop it, Shadrach. It isn’t a serious possibility, the Khan’s taking my body.”

“But it’s amusing to consider—”

“It doesn’t amuse me.” She halts and swings around to face him. She is pale, drawn, tense. “What can we do? How can we stop these hideous arrests?”

“There’s no way. The thing has to run its course.”

“Suppose an anonymous tip is sent to the Khan, telling him merely that Mangu had learned what was in store for him, that some unnamed person had revealed to him that he would be used for—”

“No. Either Genghis Mao will ignore it, or else he’ll begin a vast and bloody interrogation of everybody who might have had knowledge of the Avatar plan.”

“What if the arrests don’t stop though?”

Shadrach says, “Avogadro’s running out of suspects. It’s almost over.”

“And the prisoners awaiting sentence?”

Shadrach Mordecai sighs. “We can’t help them. They are lost. Nothing can be done, Katya. One way or another, we’re all awaiting sentence.”

He is haunted all afternoon by the vision of Mangu, pitiful deluded Mangu, stripped of all delusions, confronted at last by frosty reality. Why had Lindman tipped him to his true fate? Out of compassion? Did she really think she was helping him, for God’s sake? Had she thought that receiving such knowledge could do Mangu any good? Could she have failed to see how cruel, how merciless, she was being? No. She must have known that a man like Mangu, genial, shallow, unquestioning, a man who was living an impossible fantasy of eventual succession to the world’s most powerful office, believing he enjoyed the esteem, even the love, of Genghis Mao, would collapse totally if that structure of fantasy was ripped away. She must have known.

Of course. An hour after lunching with Katya Lindman, Shadrach finally grasps the pattern. Lindman, good chessplayer that she is, had foreseen all the consequences of her move. Tell Mangu the truth, pretending compassion and claiming a compulsion to frankness. Mangu — out of humiliation, chagrin, fear, even vengefulness, whatever — reacts by putting his body beyond Genghis Mao’s reach. No Mangu, and Project Avatar is dealt a mighty blow. Nikki, Lindman’s rival, is discomfited; Avatar, set back by many months, loses its primacy to Lindman’s Project Talos; Shadrach, already mysteriously estranged from Nikki, is drawn inevitably closer to Katya as her star rises. Of course. Of course. And all the rest, Katya’s pretense of concern for the hapless victims of the mass arrests, Katya’s show of grief for poor pathetic Mangu — all part of the game. Shadrach shivers. Even in the harsh and perverse climate of the Grand Tower of the Khan, this seems monstrous, and Lindman a baleful and alien figure, malevolent enough to make a suitable consort for Genghis Mao himself. Or, if not a mate, then a fitting housing for the old ogre’s devious and sinister mind. Yes! For a moment Shadrach does seriously consider urging the Khan to take Lindman’s body in place of Mangu’s: An appropriate choice, sir, very centripetal, very apt. Though he is puzzled by one still-obscure motive: why has Lindman revealed all this to him? If she is so calculating a monster, would she not have calculated the likelihood that he would sooner or later come to see her for what she is? Can that have been her ultimate aim? Why? He is dizzied by the multiplicity of speculations.

He wants to turn to Nikki, but Nikki has continued to hold herself aloof, and he has not even spoken to her by telephone for two or three days. He phones her now, on the pretext that he needs an update on Project Avatar progress, but one of her assistants appears on the screen, a Dr. Eis from Frankfurt. Eis, classically Teutonic, pale blue eyes and soft golden hair, does an odd little take of — surprise? dismay? distaste? — at the sight of Shadrach, forehead furrowing and corner of mouth pulling in, but he recovers quickly and gives him a cool, formal greeting. Shadrach says, “May I speak with Dr. Crowfoot, please?”

“I’m sorry. Dr. Crowfoot is not here. Perhaps I can be of assis—”

“Will she be back this afternoon?”

“Dr. Crowfoot has left for the day. Dr. Mordecai.”

“I need to reach her.”

“She is in her apartment, Doctor. An illness. She has asked that she not be disturbed.”

“Sick? What’s me matter?”

“A mild upset. A fever, headaches. She has asked me to tell you, if you called the laboratory, that we are still studying the recalibration problem, but that at present there is nothing to report, no—”

“Danke, Dr. Eis.”

“Bitte, Dr. Mordecai,” Eis replies crisply, as Shadrach blanks the screen.

He starts to phone Nikki’s apartment. No. He’s had enough of evasions, excuses, procrastinations, deflections. It’s too easy for her to run numbers like that when he calls. He’ll simply go down there and ring the doorbell, uninvited.

She lets him stand in the hallway a long time before she responds, though she must know, from her doorscreen, who’s there. Then she says, “What do you want, Shadrach?”

“Eis told me you were ill.”

“It’s nothing serious. Just a bad case of the lousies.”

“May I come in?”

“I’m trying to take a nap, Shadrach.”

“I won’t stay long.”

“But I feel so awful. I’d rather not have visitors.”

He starts to turn away from the door, but, although he knows his maniac persistence can do him no good, he finds it loo painful to leave without seeing her. Helplessly he hears himself saying, ” At least let me see if I can prescribe something for you, Nikki. I am a doctor, after all.”

Long silence. Desperately he prays that no one he knows will come upon him here, out in the hall like a lovesick Romeo pleading to be let in.

The door opens, at last.

She is in bed, and she really does look sick, face flushed and feverish, eyes bloodshot. The air in the bedroom has that stale sickroom quality, stuffy and congested. He goes at once to open the window; Crowfoot shivers and asks him not to, but he ignores her. He sees when she sits up that she is naked under her blanket. “I’ll find your pajamas for you if you’re cold,” he says.

“No. I hate wearing pajamas. I don’t know if I’m cold or hot.”

“May I examine you?”

“I’m not all that sick, Shadrach.”

“Even so, I’d like to make certain.”

“You think I’m coming down with organ-rot?”

“There’s no harm in checking things out, Nikki. It’ll take only a moment.”

“Pity you can’t diagnose me the way you do Genghis Mao, just by reading your own internal gadgets. Without having to bother me at all.”

“No, I can’t,” he says. “But this’ll be quick.”

“All right,” she tells him. She has not once met his eyes during this interchange, and that bothers him. “Go ahead. Play doctor with me, if you have to.”

He uncovers her, and finds himself curiously reticent about exposing her body this way, as though their recent estrangement has somehow deprived him of a doctor’s traditional privileges. But of course he has had only one patient in his career, having gone straight from medical school to the service of Genghis Mao, having done nothing but gerontological research until being elevated to serve as the Khan’s personal physician, and he has never developed the practicing doctor’s traditional indifference to flesh: this is no anonymous patient, this is Nikki Crowfoot whom he loves, and her naked body is more than an object to him. After a moment he attains some impersonality, though, transforms her breasts into mere globes of meat, her thighs into sexless columns of flesh and muscle, and checks her over without further unsettling himself, reading her pulse, tapping her chest, palpating her abdomen, all the routine things. Her self-diagnosis turns out to have been accurate: no incipient organ-rot, just a trifling upset, some fever, nothing remarkable. Plenty of fluids, rest, a couple of pills, and she’ll be back to normal in a day or so.

“Satisfied?” she asks mockingly.

“Is it so hard for you to accept the fact lhat I worry about you, Nikki?”

“I told you I didn’t have anything serious.”

“I still worried.”

“So examining me was really therapy for you?”

“I suppose,” he admits.

“And if you hadn’t rushed over to give me the benefit of your high-powered medical skills, I might be asleep now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“All right, Shadrach.”

She turns away from him, curling up sullenly under the bedclothes. He stands by the bed, silent, wanting to ask a thousand unaskable questions, wanting to know what shadow has fallen between them, why she has become so mysteriously remote, so cool, why she will not even look straight at him when she speaks to him. After a moment he says, instead, “How’s the project going?”

“Didn’t Eis speak to you? We’re recalibrating. It’ll take us a while to gear up for a new donor. The whole thing’s a colossal pain in the ass.”

“How much of a setback is it, actually?”

She shrugs. “A month, if we’re lucky. Or three.Or six. It all depends.”

“On what?”

“On — on — oh, Christ! Look, Shadrach, I don’t really want to talk shop right now. I feel sick. Do you know what being sick means? My head hurts. My belly hurts. My skin tingles. I want to get some rest. I don’t want to discuss my current research problems.”

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

“Will you go now?”

“Yes. Yes. I’ll phone you in the morning to see how you’re coming along, okay?”

She mutters something into her pillow.

He starts to leave. But he makes one last attempt to reach her before he goes. At the door he says tamely, “Oh — have you heard the newest rumor making the rounds? About Mangu’s death?”

She groans stoically. “I haven’t heard anything. But go on. Go on. What is it?”

He frames his words carefully, so that he will not feel he is breaching Katya Lindman’s confidence: “The story that’s going around is that Mangu committed suicide because somebody connected with Project Talos tipped him that he was to be the Avatar donor.”

Nikki sits upright, eyes wide, face animated, cheeks blazing in excitement.

“What? What? I hadn’t heard that!”

“It’s just a story.”

“Who’s the one who’s supposed to have tipped him?”

“They don’t say.”

“Lindman herself, was it?” Nikki demands.

“It’s only a rumor, Nikki. Nobody specific has been named. Anyway, Katya wouldn’t do anything so unprofessional.”

“Oh no?”

“I don’t think so. If it happened at all, it was probably some ambitious underling, some third-echelon programmer. If it happened at all. There may not be a shred of truth to it.”

“But it sounds right,” she says. Her breasts are heaving, her skin is glossy with new sweat. “What better way could Lindman find to sabotage my work? Oh, why didn’t I think of it! How could I not have seen—”

“Stay calm, Nikki. You aren’t well.”

“When I get hold of her—”

“Please,” Shadrach says. “Lie down. I wish I hadn’t said a word. You know what sort of wild rumors go floating around this building. I absolutely don’t believe that Katya would—”

“We’ll see,” she says ominously. She grows more calm. “You may be right. Even so. Even so. We should have had much tighter security. However many people knew that Mangu was the donor, five, six, ten people, that was too many. Much too many. For the next donor — ” Crowfoot coughs. She turns away again, huddling into her pillow. “Oh, Shadrach, I feel lousy! Go away! Please go away! Now you’ve got me all stirred up over something altogether new, and I — oh, Shadrach—”

“I’m sorry,” he says once more. “I didn’t mean—”

“Goodbye, Shadrach.”

“Goodbye, Nikki.”

He bolts from the apartment. He plunges through the hall, fetching up finally against a stanchion near the stairs. He grasps it, steadies himself. The visit to Nikki has hardly improved his state of mind. Her attitude toward him, he realizes, ranged from indifferent to irritated; never once did she express any pleasure that he had come to see her. He was tolerated at best.

And now, he knows, he must hurry back to Katya.

She seemed surprised to see him again so soon. She greets him warmly, unsubtly, as though automatically assuming he has come here to make love. His mood is far from sexual, though. He disengages himself from her embrace as soon as is politic, and gently but firmly establishes a psychic distance between them. In quick earnest blurts he reports the essence of his conversation with Nikki, stressing that the “rumor” he had invented did not in any way incriminate Katya herself in the tipping off of Mangu.

“But of course Crowfoot immediately guessed I was the one, right?”

“I’m afraid so. I argued that it was inconceivable you’d do any such thing, but she—”

“Now she knows I did, and will hold the grudge against me forever, and will do whatever she can to pay me back. Thanks a lot.”

Quietly Shadrach says, “If she’s angry, you can’t entirely blame her. You have to admit there was an aspect of sabotaging Avatar in your passing the word to Mangu.”

“I passed the word to Mangu out of pity for him,” Lindman says flintily.

“Pity and nothing but pity? You didn’t consider at all that he might react in a way that would upset the Avatar program, and that that would create problems for Nikki Crowfoot?” Katya is silent for some while.

At length she says, in a more yielding voice, “I suppose that that crossed my mind too. But it was very secondary. Very very secondary. Mainly I couldn’t bear to face Mangu any more, listening to him talking about his future and knowing what I knew. I had to warn him or I’d saddle myself with full responsibility for what was going to happen to him, Can you believe that, Shadrach? How evil do you think I am? Do you think my life begins and ends with these insane projects of Genghis Mao’s? Do you think that the only motivations that operate in me are Talos motivations, how I can push my own career, how I can wreck Nikki Crowfoot’s? Do you?”

“I don’t know. I suppose not.”

“You suppose?”

“I don’t think you’re like that, no.”

“Fine. Splendid. Thank you. And what happens now? Will she denounce me to Genghis Mao?”

“There’s no proof you ever said anything to Mangu,” Shadrach Mordecai replies. “She knows that. She knows also that whatever accusations she makes against you will be discounted as professional jealousy. I don’t think she’ll take any action at all, actually. Except that she did say she’d maintain tighter security on the identity of the next Avatar donor, so that there’d be no chance the same thing would—”

“It’s too late,” Lindman says.

“The next donor’s already been picked?”

“Yes.”

“And you know his name?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me,” Shadrach says.

“I don’t think I should.”

“Are you planning to tell him?”

“Would you say it was sabotage again if I did?”

“It depends on the circumstances, I guess. Who is he?”

Katya Lindman trembles. Her lips quiver.

“You,” she says.