“And we have no choice about the content?”

“Some. Her Instructions are filtered through our sensibilities. But still — still—”

“Is your dream always the same?”

“In content? In tone?”

“Tone.”

“The dream is always different, ” Katya says. “And yet the flavor is the same, for death is always the same. Different things happen each time, but the dream brings you always to the same place, in the same way, at the end.”

“To the still point?”

“You could call it that. Yes. Yes.”

“And the meaning of what I dreamed—”

“No,” she says. “Don’t talk about meaning. Dream-death gives no oracular wisdom. The dream is without meaning.”

The tube-train has reached Ulan Bator. “Come,” Katya says.

They go to her suite, two floors below Nikki Crowfoot’s, a dark place, three small rooms furnished with stark, heavy hangings. Once more they are naked before one another, once more he feels the overwhelming pull of Katya’s thick sturdy body; he moves stiffly toward her, embraces her, digs the tips of his fingers into the deep flesh of her shoulders and back. But he cannot bring himself to kiss that terrifying mouth. He thinks of the joyous couplings he shared with her in dream-death, the rice paddy, the fragrant Mexican nights, and he tugs her down with him to the bed; but, though he fills his hands with her breasts, though he imprisons his head between her smooth cool thighs, though he drives himself urgently against her flesh, he is altogether unmanned by her physical presence, helpless, limp. Not for the first time, either: their sporadic lovemaking has always been marked by such difficulties, which he rarely experiences with other women. Katya is not bothered by this: calmly she pushes him back against the pillow with a thump of her knuckles on his chest, and then, bending forward, she goes to work on him with her mouth, her sinister and ferocious sharp-fanged mouth, lovingly engulfing him, and he feels lips and tongue, lips and tongue, warm and wet, no hint of teeth at all, and under her cunning ministrations he relaxes, he puts aside his fear of her, he grows stiff at last. Deftly she slides upward over him — it is a maneuver she has clearly practiced often — and, with a sudden startling thrust, drives herself downward, impaling herself on him. She squats astraddle, peasant-strong, above him, knees flexed, buttocks taut, body rocking. He looks at her and sees her face distorted by the early spasms of ecstasy, nostrils flared, eyes tight shut, lips pulled back in a fierce grimace; then he closes his own eyes and gives himself up fully to their union. An awesome energy courses through her. She rides him, now squatting high so that their only contact is at their loins, now pressing herself full length against his body, but always remaining above him, always staying in command. He does not object to this. She writhes, grinds, pushes, twists, suddenly rears back and breaks into bizarre laughter; it is, he knows, her signal, and he seizes her breasts and joins her in the final climax.

Afterward he dozes, and wakes to find her quietly sobbing. How strange, how unlike her! He had never imagined Lindman to be capable of tears.

“What’s wrong?”

She shakes her head.

“Katya?”

“Nothing. Please.”

“What is it?”

Sullenly, face against pillow, she says, “I’m afraid for you.”

“Afraid? Why? What about?”

She looks toward him and shakes her head again. She clamps her lips. Suddenly her mouth looks not at all fierce. A child’s mouth. She is frightened.

“Katya?”

“Please, Shadrach.”

“I don’t understand.”

She says nothing. She shakes her head. She shakes her head.

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

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

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

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

“To do what?”

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

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

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

“Even so—”

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

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

“I told you. I feel fine.”

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

“Symptoms of what?” Genghis Mao snaps.

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