“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.

It seems like a joke, and not a very good joke. He is unable to accept it at all, despite the strident note of conviction in Katya’s voice, that shrill, almost desperate note of certainty that Shadrach had also heard when Roger Buckmaster was trying to deny his complicity in Mangu’s death, that tone that says. You won’t believe this no matter how heavy an oath I swear, but what I’m telling you is true, is true, is true, is true! Yet if he has been selected as the new donor, it would explain why Nikki has been avoiding him, why she is remote and short-tempered when they speak, why her eyes will not meet his—

“No,” he says. “I don’t believe you.”

“So don’t believe me.”

“It’s absurd, Katya.”

“Undoubtedly it’s absurd. And it’ll be just as absurd the day they come for you and put the electrodes on your head and obliterate every trace of Shadrach Mordecai and pour the soul of Genghis Mao into your pretty brown body.”

“My pretty brown body,” Shadrach says, “is full og complicated and irreplaceable medical devices that register every twitch of Genghis Mao’s metabolism. It took Roger Buckmaster a couple of years to design and build that system, it took Warhaftig weeks to implant it in me, it took me a year to learn how to use it. Using it, I can protect Genghis Mao’s health in a way that was never before possible in medical history. With all the warm bodies Avatar has to choose from, do you think Genghis Mao would let them choose the one body that’s indispensable to his—”

“Think, Shadrach, think. Avatar won’t be activated unless Genghis Mao’s present body is on the threshold of death. He won’t need all your fancy implants once he moves into your body. He won’t need you as his doctor; he won’t really need a full-time doctor at all, not for many years. And he can find another doctor. He can find another Buckmaster to build a new set of implants when the time comes. He’s probably got a replacement for you in training already, somewhere in Bulgaria or Afghanistan. Remember what he always says about redundancy, Shadrach? The avenue of survival. Genghis Mao understands survival very well. Better than you, I’m afraid.”

Shadrach Mordecai’s mouth opens. Says nothing. Closes.

“If Avatar is activated,” Katya says, “you go. I swear it.”

“When was this decided?”

“More than a week ago. I found out about it a few hours before we left for Karakorum.”

Which was just about the time Nikki Crowfoot began finding excuses for not keeping company with him, Shadrach reflects. He remembers waking up in this very room, Katya’s room, the night of the dream-death excursion, and discovering Katya sobbing beside him in bed, and hearing her tell him that she was afraid for him, without offering further explanation. Yes. And he remembers all that lunatic talk of Genghis Mao’s about nominating him for Pope, for King of England — what was that about? Disguised and displaced intimations of the real nomination? He remembers, too, and the memory chills him, running shirtless into Genghis Mao’s bedroom just after the news of Mangu’s death had broken, remembers seeing the Khan eyeing his bare torso with interest, with admiration, Genghis Mao saying. You look very healthy, Shadrach. Yes. Shopping for a new body already, was he, minutes after learning of the loss of Mangu?

He thinks of Buckmaster screaming, You’ll finish in the furnace, Shadrach, in the furnace, in the bloody furnace!

No. No. No.

“I can’t believe this,” he says.

“Start learning how.”

“It makes no sense to me. I literally can’t grasp the meaning of the whole thing.”

“Doesn’t it frighten you, Shadrach?”

“No. Not at all.” He holds out his hands. Steady. As steady as Warhaftig’s. “See? I’m entirely calm. I am without affect. It doesn’t register on me. It’s unreal.”

“But it isn’t, Shadrach.”

“Nikki knows?”

“Of course.”

“She’s not the one who picked me, is she?”

“Genghis Mao picked you.”

“Yes. That figures. Yes.” He laughs. “Do you notice how I begin to talk as though I believe this? As though I accept it, on some level?”

“What will you do, Shadrach?”

“Do? Do? What should I do? Should I do what Mangu did?”

“You’re not Mangu.”

“No,” he says. “Even if I had absolute proof, even if they came to me with an engraved scroll signed by Genghis Mao, nominating me for Avatar, I wouldn’t choose Mangu’s way. I’m not in the least a suicidal person. Maybe it sets in later, Katya. First I have to feel something. I don’t feel anything yet. I don’t feel betrayed, I don’t feel endangered, I don’t think I even feel surprised.”