“I’m sure Genghis Mao was quite aware of the relationship between us.”

“And picked me deliberately, by way of testing your loyalty? To find out how you would react if you were made to choose between your lover and your laboratory? One of his little psychological games?”

She shrugs. “That’s entirely conceivable.”

“Maybe you made the wrong choice, then. Maybe he was trying to measure your fundamental humanity rather than your loyalty to Genghis Mao. And now that he sees how coldblooded, soulless, unfeeling you are, he may decide that he can’t take the chance of having a person like you in charge of—”

“Stop it, Shadrach.” She is giving ground under his steady assault, his quiet, measured, remorseless voice; her lips are trembling, she is visibly fighting back tears. “Please,” she says. “Stop. Stop. You’re getting what you want.”

“You think I’m being unkind? You think I’ve got no call being angry with you?”

“There was nothing I could have done.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“What about threatening to resign?”

“He’d have let me resign, then. I’m not indispensable. Redundancy is—”

“And your successor would have continued with the project, using me as the donor.”

“I imagine so.”

“Still, even if it changed nothing at all, wouldn’t you have felt cleaner putting up some kind of resistance?”

“Perhaps,” she says. “But it would have changed nothing at all.”

“You could have warned me, at least. I might have fled from Ulan Bator. We might have fled together, if your resignation got you in trouble with Genghis Mao. Wasn’t worth destroying your career over me, though, was it?”

“Flee? Where to? He’d be watching us. On Surveillance Vector One, or some other spy gadget. In a day or two he’d decide we had had a long enough holiday, and the Citpols would pick us up and bring us back.”

“Maybe.” “Not maybe. And I’d end up in the organ farm. And you’d still become the Avatar donor.”

Shadrach considers that scenario. “You’re telling me that it wouldn’t have mattered whether you had warned me or not?”

“Not to you,” Nikki replies. “It would have mattered to me. One way I lose my job and maybe my skin. The other way I get to survive a little longer.”

“I still wish you had been the one to tell me.”

“Instead of Katya?”

“When did I say Katya was the one?”

Nikki smiles. “You didn’t need to, love.”

August 19, 2009

A mild summer day in Ulan Bator. Across half the world it is summer now. The time of lovers. Surveillance Vector One shows me the lovers going arm in arm through the streets of Paris, London, San Francisco, Tokyo. The fond gazes, the little kisses, the nudges of hip against hip. Even the ones with organ-rot shuffling along together, slowly dying but still doing the dance of love. Fools! I think I remember how that dance goes, though it’s forty or fifty years behind me. Yes, yes, the first meeting, the preliminary tensions and assessments, theprobing andparrying, the spark of contact, the dissolving of barriers, the first embrace, the tender words, the pledges, the sense of conspiracy, two against the world, the assumption that all this will last forever, the discovery that it will not, the falling apart, the falling out, the parting, the healing, the forgetting — oh, yes, the man who is Genghis Mao once danced that dance, long before he was Genghis Mao, he once played that game. Long ago. What purpose does it serve? An anesthetic for the aching ego. A lubricant for the biological necessities. A diversion, a distraction, a foolishness. When I saw it for what it was I renounced it, and no regrets. Look at them strolling together. “Eternal love.” As if anything’s eternal, but love? Love? It’s an unstable state, thermodynamic nonsense, two energy sources, two suns, trying to establish orbits around one another, each one striving to give light and heat to the other. How pretty it sounds, how implausible. Naturally the system breaks down under gravitational stress sooner or later, and one pulls the other to pieces, or they spiral into collision, or they go tumbling away from one another. A waste of energy, a futile spilling of the life-force. Love? Abolish it! If only I could.

January 4, 1989

The text of my doctrine is complete, and when the appropriate moment comes I will reveal it to the world. Today, as I finished the last passages, a name for it came to me: centripetal depolarization. Defined as the forging of a consensus of irreconcilables through the illusion of the attainment of everyone’s mutually exclusive goals. And it will sweep the world as irresistibly as once did the hordes of old Father Genghis.

Shadrach takes momentary refuge in carpentry. Until now that fashionable cult has been mere amusement for him, a source of relaxation and release rather than the quasi-mystical focus that it is for many of its adherents, but now, frayed and desperate, no longer the calm and detached Shadrach of yore, he surrenders to its full intensity. The world has tightened around him. Ostensibly, all is as it has been, and is not going to change; his routines will continue, his doctoring and his calisthenics and his collecting and his trips to Karakorum; but in these past two days, aware now of the dread subtraction of self that Genghis Mao has covertly ordained for him, Shadrach finds the familiar and comfortable rhythms of life no longer enough to keep him together. Fear and pain have begun to seep into his soul, and the only antidote he knows for that is submission to some force greater than himself, greater even than Genghis Mao, some all-encompassing power. If he can, he will make carpentry the vehicle of that submission. With hammer and nails, then, with chisel and adze, with plane and saw and awl, he seeks, if not salvation, then at least temporary freedom from anguish.

Usually Shadrach attends the large and majestic carpentry chapel in Karakorum. But there is always a carnival atmosphere in Karakorum, and that tends to trivialize whatever he does there, be it carpentry or dream-death or transtemporalism or mere fornication. Now, in genuine spiritual need, he wants not the fanciest chapel but the one most readily accessible, the one that will enable him most quickly to find surcease from pain, and he goes to a place here in Ulan Bator, down by the Tuula River, in one of those streets of formidable blocky white-stucco buildings constructed in the latter days of the Mongolian Peoples Republic.

It is a starkly functional no-nonsense sort of chapel, lacking in any religious or pseudoreligious iconography. Big bare rooms, sputtering fluorescent lights, the smell of sawdust and lemon oil — it could be an ordinary carpenters’ shop, but for the silence and the peculiar concentration with which the men and women at the benches are going about their tasks. Shadrach pays a fee at the entrance — strictly a service charge, covering the cost of tool rental, lumber, and maintenance, never a fee for worship itself — and is shown to a locker where he exchanges his street clothes for clean coveralls. Then he selects a vacant bench. Shining well-oiled tools have been arranged along and around it with an eye for symmetry and neatness that is positively Japanese: chisels of many sizes in a precisely ordered row, an assortment of hammers and mallets, a cluster of gauges, augers, pincers, compasses, bevels, files, try squares, and rules. The equipment is deliberately varied and copious, to impress upon the worshipper the hieratic nature of the craft, the ancient lineage of its practice, the complexity of its scope.

No one speaks to him. No one looks at him. No one will; those who enter here must remain alone with their tools and their wood. A strange solemnity steals over him as he makes ready to enter the customary initial stale of meditation. In the past, having come to the chapel for nothing more than a relaxing couple of hours of cutting and joining, seeing the whole experience as an amusement on the same level as a round of golf or a game of billiards, he has approached this stage of the ceremony in a casual and amiable way, accepting it as part of the tradition, something that one does merely to get into the spirit of the thing, the equivalent of a golfer’s ritualized practice swings or a billiards player’s careful chalking of the cue; but this time, as he presses both hands flat against the workbench and bows his head, he feels neither flippant nor stagily ostentatious; he is aware of a numinous presence all about him, and he grows somber and reflective as it enters his soul.