“Pardon me?”

“In Ulan Bator. Waiting for the ax to fall. If I were you I’d go into hiding, Shadrach.”

“So you know about—”

“I know, yes. Several people know. What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure. Stay put for a while, I guess, and think things over. There’s a lot I have to evaluate.”

“Evaluate? Evaluate? Of course you’d say something like that!” Ficifolia, though plainly trying to be unobtrusive, cannot control his emotions; he raises his voice; he gesticulates passionately. “You know, man, you never belonged in this town. You aren’t crazy enough to qualify. You’re so calm, so reasonable, you always want to think things out, you want to stop and evaluate when they’ve got the knife to your throat — how did you ever land here, anyway? This is a place for madmen. I mean that seriously, Shadrach. The lunatics are running the asylum, and the head lunatic is the craziest one of all, and you just don’t fit in. Can you think of anything crazier than a world full of rotting people governed by a few thousand Antidote-filled bureaucrats and ruled by a ninety-year-old Mongol warlord who’s planning to live forever? This is sanity? This is the logical outcome of five hundred years of Western imperialism? And the spy-eyes everywhere? The surveillance vectors taping my very words right now and feeding them to God knows what kind of machine where they may not be digested and acted upon for three thousand years? The robot policemen? The organ farms? Anyone who begins to take this world at face value has to be a madman, and that’s what we are, all of us, top to bottom, Avogadro, Horthy, Lindman, Labile, me, the whole crew. Except you. So solemn, so contained, so accepting. Doing your job, doing your job, you and Warhaftig, stitching the new liver into the Khan, never cracking a smile, never saying to each other. This is a crazy way of making a living, never even perceiving the craziness because you’re so fundamentally sane — not Warhaftig, he’s either a robot or a lunatic, but you, Shadrach, deadpan, full of weird microelectronic gear and even that doesn’t upset you. Don’t you ever want to scream and rant? Do you have to accept everything? Do you even accept the idea that Genghis Mao is going to evict you from your own fucking head? Do you — ” Abruptly Ficifolia checks himself, reining himself in with a little shudder and a quick series of jerking ticks of the facial muscles. More calmly, in an entirely different voice, he says, “Really, Shadrach, you’re in big trouble. You ought to disappear while you still can.”

Shadrach shakes his head. “Hiding’s not my style.”

“Is dying?”

“Not particularly. But I won’t hide. That’s not like me. My people are done with hiding. The old Underground Railway days are gone forever.”

“ ‘My people are done with hiding,’ ” Ficifolia says, doing his mimicry in a harsh, high-pitched tone. “Jesus. Jesus! Maybe I underestimated you. Maybe you’re as crazy as the rest of us here. Genghis Mao has fingered you for doom, has put the old black spot right on you, and you put racial pride ahead of survival. Bravo, Shadrach! Very noble. Very dumb.”

“Where could I go? The Khan’s spy gadgets will find me anywhere. Gadgets that you helped invent for him.”

“There are ways.”

“Disguise myself? Paint my skin white? Wear a blond wig?”

“You could disappear the way Buckmaster did.”

Shadrach coughs. “I don’t need sick jokes just now, Frank.”

“I’m not talking about organ farms. I mean disappearing. We disappeared Buckmaster. We could do the same for you.”

“Buckmaster isn’t dead?”

“Alive and well. We altered the master personnel register the day he was sentenced. Transposed half a dozen binary digits and the records show that Roger Buckmaster went to the organ farms on such-and-such day and was duly carved up. Once it’s in the record, it’s realer than real. Machine reality is a higher order of reality than reality reality. If Buckmaster shows upon any of the Khan’s scanners now, the computer will reject the data as nonsense, because Buckmaster is known to be dead, and dead men by definition aren’t found walking around.”

“Where is he?”

“That’s not important now. What’s important is that we saved him, and we can save you.”

“We? Who’s ‘we’?”

“That’s not important either.”

“Should I believe any of this, Frank?”

“No. Of course not. It’s all lies. Actually, I’m spying for the Khan, trying to trap you. Jesus, Shadrach, use your head! Do you think I’m trying to get you into trouble? You are in trouble. I’m risking my ass to—”

“All right. Let me think, Frank.”

“So think, already.”

“You do your hocus-pocus and I disappear. Now I’m without an identity and without a profession. Can I practice medicine if I’m hiding out in some cellar? I was meant to be a doctor. Maybe not Genghis Mao’s doctor, but somebody’s doctor, Frank. If I’m not working at that, I’m nobody, I’m a waste of skills and talent. In my own eyes I’ll be nothing. Is there any point in disappearing into that kind of life? And how long would I have to stay underground? If I’m going to spend the rest of my life locked up in a cellar, I wouldn’t be a whole lot worse off letting Genghis Mao use me for Avatar. Better off, maybe.”

“You might have to stay out of sight until Genghis Mao dies. But afterward—”

“Afterward? What afterward? Genghis Mao might live another hundred years. I won’t.”

“He won’t either,” Ficifolia says, strange undertones of menace in his voice. Shadrach stares in wonder. He is not sure he believes a syllable of this. Buckmaster alive? Ficifolia a subversive? Conspiratorial plans afoot to do away with the Khan? Questions bubble in him, and he hungers for a thousand answers; but from the corner of his eye he perceives men in gray and blue, two Citpols on patrol. So there will be no answers now. Ficifolia sees them too and nods ever so slightly and says, “Think about it. Do your evaluating, let me know what you warn to do.”

“All right.”

“Have you ever seen the river as high us this?”

“It was an unusually snowy winter,” Shadrach says, as the Citpols saunter past.

May 27, 2012

Troublesome dreams last night. Mouth full of cobwebs, fingers growing roots. Premonitions of death. Is the end of Genghis Mao drawing nigh? Morbid, morbid, morbid. To wake and not to be there. The great crash of silence. It pains me. To wake and not to be there. To have gone somewhere else. Or to have gone nowhere at all, the big black hole. The longer one lives, the tighter one grasps life: living becomes a habit that’s hard to break. How empty the world would be if I were to leave it. Poof, no more Genghis Mao. Such a vacuum! Tornado. Hurricane.

Oh I love to dwell on death.

Dying can be so instructive. Dying can tell you so very much about your true self. Dying can even be pleasurable, I imagine. Dying as a healing experience, yes, the battered old body gladly giving up the ghost! For some people, I imagine, it is the sharpest ecstasy they have ever known.

Oh I dread it.

How shall I die, what will the manner of my going be? I think I fear assassins most of all. To leave the world is one thing, natural and inevitable; to be sent from it is altogether other, an affront to the self, an insult to the ego. I will not be able to bear that awareness of dismissal. Or the sense of transition, the moments just before the going, the confrontation with the killer, the contemplation of loss as he moves toward me with his knife or his gun or whatever. Let it be a bomb, if it comes. Let it be instant poison in my soup. But there will be no assassins. I am guarded too well. The mistake was in not protecting Mangu the same way. Still, Mangu wasn’t Genghis Mao: his loss was not to him what my loss will be to me. The idea of dying is alien to me. I am too large of spirit, I occupy too great a place in the consciousness of mankind; the subtraction of me from the world is more than the world can accept. Certainly more than I can accept.