“Can you come down to the Talos lab?” she asks. “I’d like to show you our latest mock-up.”

“I suppose so. You’ve heard about Mangu?”

“Of course.”

“You don’t sound very concerned.”

“What was Mangu? Mangu was an absence. Now the absence is absent. His death was more of an event than his whole existence.”

“I doubt that he saw things that way himself.”

“You are so compassionate, Shadrach,” she says in the flat voice that he knows she reserves for mockery. “I wish I shared your love of mankind.”

“I’ll see you in fifteen minutes, Katya.”

Her laboratory is on the ninth floor of the Grand Tower, a cluttered place festooned with cables, connectors, buses, coaxials, crates of bubble-chips, enough electronic gear to throttle a brontosaur. Out of this chaotic maze of materiel Lindman materializes, coming toward him in her customary slashing headlong stride. She is all business, very much the bustling woman of science. She wears a white blouse, a lavender lab jacket open at the throat, a short brown tweed skirt. The effect is severe, stark, and harsh, mitigated neither by the bare thighs nor the tightness of the skirt nor the exposed cleft of her breasts. Lindman is not a woman who works at projecting sexuality. Nor does she need to, with Shadrach; she holds a malign physical authority over him, the source of which he does not comprehend. He feels always when he is with her that he must be on guard — against what, he is not sure.

“Look,” she says triumphantly, with a broad sweeping gesture.

He follows her pointing arm halfway across the laboratory to the one uncluttered place, a kind of dais, on which, under a dazzling spotlight, the current working model of the Genghis Mao automaton sits enthroned. A single thick yellow-and-red cable runs to it from a power unit. The automaton is half again as large as life, a massive imitation of the Chairman, plastic skin over metal armature; the face is an altogether convincing replica, the shoulders and chest look plausibly human, but below the diaphragm the robot Genghis Mao is an incomplete thing of struts and wires and bare circuitry, skinless and lacking even the internal mechanical musculature that fills its upper half. As Shadrach watches, the ersatz Chairman extends its right arm toward him and, with an altogether human impatient little flip of its hand, beckons him forward. “Go ahead,” Katya Lindman says. He advances. When he is three or four meters away he halts and waits. The robot’s head slowly turns to face him. The lips pull back in a cruel grimace — no, a grin, unmistakably a grin, the bleak and terrible grin of Genghis Mao, that self-congratulatory smirk, slowly forming at the corners of the leathery cheeks, a regal grin, a monstrous overbearing grin. Imperceptibly the features rearrange themselves, without apparent transition; the robot now is scowling, and the wrath of Genghis Mao darkens the room. Off with their heads, yes, indeed. And then a smile. A cold one, for there is no other sort from Genghis Mao, but yet it is a smile that puts one at one’s ease, Arctic though it is; and the smile of the robot is an uncanny replica of the smile of Genghis Mao. And, lastly, the wink, the famous wink of the Khan, that sly, disarming dip of the eyelid that cancels all the seeming ferocity, that communicates a redeeming sense of perspective, of self-appraisal: Don’t take me so seriously, friend, I may not be the megalomaniac you think I am. And then, just as the wink has achieved its effect and the terror that Genghis Mao can generate with a glance has subsided, the face returns to its original expression, icy, remote, alien. “Well?” Lindman asks, after some while.

“Doesn’t he speak?”

“Not yet. The audio is trivial to accomplish. We aren’t bothering with it just now.”

“That’s the whole show, then?”

“That’s it. You sound disappointed.”

“Somehow I expected more. I’ve seen him do the grin already.”

“But not the wink. The wink is new.”

“Even so, Katya — you add a feather here and there, but you still don’t have an eagle.”

“What did you think I’d show you? A walking, talking Genghis Mao? The complete simulacrum overnight?” His disappointment has angered her, obviously: her mouth works tensely, the lips drawing back from the gums again and again, baring those pointed carnivorous incisors. “We still are in preliminary stages here. But I thought you would like the wink. I like the wink. I rather do like the wink, Shadrach.” Her voice grows lighter, her features soften; he can almost hear the gears shifting within her. “I’m sorry I wasted your time. I was pleased with the wink. I wanted to share it with you.”

“It’s a fantastic wink, Katya.”

“And, you know, Project Talos will become much more important with Mangu gone. Everything that Dr. Crowfoot has been doing was aimed toward integrating the Chairman’s personality with the neural responses of Mangu’s living mind and body, and that’s over with, now, that whole approach must be discarded.”

Shadrach knows enough about Nikki’s work to know that this is not literally so; apparently Mangu was indeed the template against which the Avatar personality-coding program was being plotted, but there was nothing inexorable about the use of Mangu; with the appropriate adjustments the project can readily be reshaped around some other body donor. But there is no need to tell Lindman that, if she wants to feel that her project, peripheral so far, has suddenly become Genghis Mao’s prime hope of postmortem survival. She has made an obvious effort in the past minute or two to be less intimidating, less abrasive, and he prefers her that way; he will do nothing that might spur new tension and defensiveness in her.

In fact her mood has eased so much that she seems almost coquettish. Chattering in a shrill, girlish, wholly unKatyaesque way, she leads him on a hectic and gratuitous tour of the laboratory, displaying circuit diagrams, boxes of memory chips, prototypes for the pelvis and spine of the next model of Genghis Mao, and other bits of Project Talos that are of no conceivable significance just now; and he realizes, after a time, that her only pretext for doing all this is to detain him, to have a few minutes more of his company. It puzzles him. Lindman’s usual manner is aggressive and peremptory, but now she is coy, flirtatious, sidling up unsubtly to him, plenty of heavy breathing and forthright eye contact, actually grazing his elbow with her breasts as they stand close together rummaging through a table full of schematics. Does she think that such stuff will make him snort, sweat, paw the ground with his hooves, fling himself upon her throbbing body? He has no idea what she thinks. He rarely does. Nor is he going to find out now, for whatever she is organizing here is truncated abruptly by a squeaky summons from his pocket beeper, tracking him through the building. He activates his portable telephone. Avogadro is calling.

“Can you come to Security Vector One, Doctor?”

“Now?”

“If you would.”

“What’s happening?” Shadrach asks.

“We’ve been interrogating Buckmaster. Your name has—”

“Oh. Ok. Am I a suspect too, now?”

“Hardly. A witness, perhaps. Can we expect you in five minutes?”

Shadrach looks at Katya, who is flushed, excited. “I have to go,” he says. “Avogadro. Something about the Mangu inquiry. It sounds urgent.”

Her face darkens. Her lips compress. But she says only that she hopes to see him again soon, and, hiding her disappointment behind a mask of detachment, she releases him. As he leaves the laboratory he feels his entire body expand, as though it had been held under great pressure while he was with her. Security Vector One is on the sixty-fourth floor. Mordecai has never had occasion to go there, and he has little idea what to expect, other than standard police paraphernalia — magnifying glasses and fingerprint pads all over the place, no doubt, photos of known subversives mounted on tacky boards, sheafs of dossiers and transcripts, rows of tap-terminals and fiber-eyes, whatever things detectives would be likely to use in protecting the physical persons of Genghis Mao and the PRC, Perhaps such things are there, but Shadrach gets no glimpse of them. A feline, soft-voiced young man, Oriental but too sinuous to be a Mongol, probably Chinese, greets him at the reception desk and guides him through a labyrinth of blank-walled hallways, past a nest of tiny offices where weary-looking bureaucrats sit at desks heaped wish paper. The place could be the headquarters of an insurance company, a bank, a brokerage house. Only when he is ushered into the interrogation cell where Avogadro and Buckmaster are waiting for him does he feel that he is among the enforcers of the law.