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—”