“Could it be that you want to be the Avatar donor?”

“I want to be Dr. Shadrach Mordecai. I want to go on being him for a long time.”

“Then keep Genghis Mao healthy. So long as his body is functioning, he won’t need yours. Meanwhile, it’ll be my task to make Avatar altogether superfluous by bringing Talos quickly to perfection. You know, Genghis Mao may actually prefer the Talos idea. I think it suits his particular brand of paranoia to be transferred into a machine, an imperishable, flawless machine. After all, even your beautiful body is going to decay and crumble. He knows that. He knows he might have twenty or thirty good years in you, and then it’ll be the same route all over again, organ transplants, drugs, constant surgery, whereas the Talos simulacrum will spare him all that. So Avatar is just a contingency plan for him, a redundancy that he hopes not to have to use, and that’s why he can pick people he values as the donors — Mangu, you — a kind of honor, in its way, the blessing of the Khan, not at all the jeopardy that it might be thought to be. I tried to tell that to Mangu, too, that Avatar wouldn’t necessarily happen, but he—”

“Why did you tell me about this, Katya?”

“For the same reason I told Mangu.”

“To help wreck Avatar?”

Her eyes flash the old Lindman fire. “Don’t be a bastard. Do you think I want you to jump out a window too?”

“What good is it, telling me?”

“I want you to be on guard, Shadrach. I want you to know what danger you’re in now. So long as there’s even a slight likelihood that Avatar will have to be used, you—”

“What does it matter to you, though ? A sore conscience? You don’t like hanging out with men who you know are secretly earmarked for destruction?”

“That’s part of it,” Katya says quietly. “I hate living a lie.”

“What’s the rest?”

“I love you,” she says.

He stares with glassy eyes. “What?” “I’m not capable of it? I’m good only for building automations, is that it? I have no emotions?”

“I didn’t mean that. But — you seemed so cold all the time, so businesslike, so matter-of-fact. Even when — ” He pauses, decides to finish. “Even when we would have sex. I never felt any emotional warmth from you; only, well, physical passion.”

“You were Nikki’s. Getting involved with you would only have been painful to me. You didn’t want me except for the occasional fling in Karakorum, except for the occasional meaningless screw.”

“And now?”

“Do you still love Nikki? She helped sell you out, you know. She went to Genghis Mao, she heard him select you for Avatar, she probably tried to get him to change his mind — we ought to give her that much credit — and she failed, and then she accepted the order. Her career comes before your life. She could have come to you and said. This is what Genghis Mao wants to do, but I can’t do it, I rebel, let’s both get out of this hideous place. She didn’t, though, did she? She simply started keeping away from you. Because of the guilt she felt, right? Not out of love, but out of guilt, out of shame.”

Numbly Shadrach shakes his head.

“This is unreal, Katya.”

“I have told you no lies today.”

“But Nikki—”

“Is afraid of Genghis Mao. As am I, as are you, as is everyone in this city, everyone in the world. That’s the measure of her love for you: her fear of that crazy old man is greater. If I’d been in her position, I might have made the same choice. But it’s not my project. I’m not faced with the option of betraying you versus defying the Khan. I’m free to go behind his back, to warn you, to let you make your own decisions. But it’s strange, isn’t it? The warm tall beautiful loving Nikki agrees to sell you out. And the bitter vengeful squat ugly Katya risks her life to warn you.”

“You aren’t ugly,” he murmurs.

Katya laughs. “Come here,” she says. She sits on the edge of the bed, tugs him down beside her, roughly presses his head against her breasts. “Rest. Think. Make plans, Shadrach. You’re lost if you don’t.” She caresses his aching forehead.

They sit that way in silence for a long while. Then, shakily, he rises, he removes his clothes, he gestures to her, and she disrobes as well. He must operate on the Khan tomorrow, but for once he does not let that matter to him. He reaches for her. He covers her strangely submissive body with his own, locking his long lean dark-skinned arms around her wide meaty shoulders, pushing his thin bony chest into the soft cushion of her bosom, and her legs open and he plunges deep within her, and stays like that, immobile, gathering strength, pasting himself together, until at last he is ready to move.

The next day is the day of Genghis Mao’s aorta transplant. Shadrach, after the usual brief fitful sleep, awakens, exercises, breakfasts, dresses, negotiates passage through Interface Three, pauses to inspect the doings in the Trauma Ward by means of Surveillance Vector One — the standard morning routine. The dancing lenses display for him the world’s two billion, perhaps twenty percent of them stricken with organ-rot, the walking dead, shambling about with perforations and lesions and corruptions, and most of the others who are still whole living in the shadow of the universal disease, going through a semblance of ordinary life with sullen courage, waiting for the spitting of blood and the fire in the guts, looking toward the demigods of Ulan Bator in envy and bewilderment. While he, light-footed Shadrach Mordecai, the pretty doctor of the Khan, has nothing worse to worry about than being evicted from his own nimble body, being kicked out on his black ass so that a Mongol usurper can move into his skull. Other than that, Shadrach, everything’s fine, right? Right. Yassuh, boss.

Shadrach wonders, as he goes to fetch Genghis Mao for the traditional and familiar gurney ride from the imperial bedchamber to the Surgery, how he will react when he comes face to face with the Khan. Surely his expression will betray his new knowledge; surely Genghis Mao, nearly ninety years canny, will see at once that his designated victim is in on the scheme. But Shadrach discovers that his mysterious tranquility of spirit does not desert him even when he is eye to eye with the Khan. He feels nothing, neither fear nor anger nor resentment: the Chairman is the patient, he is the doctor, the sensors are twitching away, loading him with information, and that’s all, no change in their relation-ship. He looks at Genghis Mao and thinks, You have secretly plotted to steal my body, and there is no effect, none. It remains unreal to him.

“And how am I this morning, Shadrach?” Genghis Mao booms jovially.

“Splendid, sir. Never better.”

“Going to cut out my heart, are you?”

“Only the aorta this time,” Shadrach says. He signals to the attendants. They wheel the Chairman away.

And there they all are once more gathered in the Surgery — the Chairman, the physician, the chief surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the nurses and other miscellaneous medical spear-carriers, everyone scrubbed and gowned and masked, the bright lights gleaming, the transparent aseptic bubble sealed, the filters and pumps pumping and filtering, the computers flashing green and red and yellow like gaudy movie props, the new aortal section — Buckmaster’s? — sitting in its container, fresh and plump, ready to be installed in Genghis Mao’s abdomen.

Warhaftig, confident, serene, prepares once more to open the spare, slight body of Genghis Mao.

“Blood pressure?” he asks.

“Normal,” Shadrach says.

“Respiration?”

“Normal.”

“Platelet count?”

“Normal. Normal. Everything normal.”

Shadrach is aware that if Genghis Mao should die on the operating table, there would be no Project Avatar to menace him: none of the three projects is ready yet to be put into effect, and if the Khan does not survive the transplant, that will be the end of him, without hope of reincarnation, perhaps even the end of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee, the entire fragile society of centripetal depolarization polarizing and centrifuging into chaos the instant the legendary figure of Genghis Mao vanishes from the scene. It would not be hard to manage it. Jostle Warhaftig’s elbow, maybe, as he aims the surgical laser at the Chairman’s guts; apologize profusely afterward, but the damage will be done. Or, more subtly, feed the operating team misleading information, cockeyed reports from Genghis Mao’s ostensible interior: they trust Dr. Mordecai, they will follow his data without bothering to check it against the numbers on the scopes and meters, and he could probably cause irreversible injury to the Chairman, fatal oxygen shortage or the like, before Warhaftig realizes what is taking place. And then the apologies, I simply can’t understand why my readings were off so badly. He has no need to worry about a malpractice suit: topple the Khan and the whole fabric comes apart, every man for himself in the aftermath. But he will not. No harm will come to Genghis Mao by way of Shadrach Mordecai today, not even if he knows the Khan intends to activate Project Avatar before next Tuesday. Dr. Mordecai, in peril or not, is nevertheless a doctor, a dedicated doctor, still young and naive enough to take his Hippocratic oath seriously. He was sworn to keep pure and holy both his life and his art. He has vowed to help the sick and to abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm. So be it. Shadrach Mordecai, MD, Harvard ’01, is no traducer of sacred trusts. Genghis Mao is his patient; Genghis Mao will not die at Shadrach Mordecai’s hands this day. Perhaps this is foolishness, but there is also a certain grace in it.