“We begin now,” the surgeon declares.

There is a momentary dip in the illumination as all surgical devices and support systems are activated at once. Mordecai imagines a throb passing through the entire building under the sudden power demand. To the left of the operating table is the perfusion machine, quietly pumping blood from Genghis Mao and forcing it through the dialysis coils. To the right waits the new liver, which has been stored in an iced saline solution since its removal from the donor and now is being bathed by warm fluids bringing it to body temperature. Warhaftig checks his laser bank one last time and, with a quick jab of a long bony finger against the control stud, causes a flash of dazzling purple light to leap forth and cut a thin red incision in Genghis Mao’s abdomen. The Khan remains entirely motionless. The surgeon glances at Shadrach, who says, “All systems placid. Keep going.”

Deftly, Warhaftig slices deeper. As he makes each cut, scanners record the epidermal stratifications down to the cellular level, so that all joins will be perfect when the abdominal cavity is resealed. Bright steel retractors move automatically into place to hold the widening incision. The Khan watches the early phases with deep fascination, but, as his internal organs are laid bare, he turns his head away and stares toward the domed ceiling. Perhaps he finds the sight of his viscera frightening or repellent, Mordecai thinks, but more likely the Chairman is merely bored with them, having been cut open so many times.

Now the dark diseased liver is visible, heavy, spongy, sullen in color. Warhaftig, fingers moving like unerring spindles, clamps the arteries and veins connected to it. With quick daredevil flicks of his laser scalpel he severs the portal vein, the hepatic artery, the inferior vena cava, the ligamentum teres, and the bile duct. “Done,” he murmurs, and Genghis Mao’s third liver is lifted from his abdomen. Away for biopsy; the fourth waits close by, large and plump and healthy, resting within a crystalline jewel-case.

The surgeon and his team commence the most taxing part of the operation. Any pigsticker can make an incision, but only an artist can execute perfect sutures. Warhaftig seals flesh to flesh with a different laser, one that welds rather than cuts. Slowly, showing no sign of fatigue, he connects the closed-off arteries, veins, and bile duct to the new liver. Genghis Mao is limp, almost comatose now, eyes glazed, lips slack: Shadrach Mordecai has seen this response before and understands it well. It is a sign neither of exhaustion nor of shock. It is no more than a kind of yogic exercise by which the Chairman disassociates himself from the boredom of his long ordeal. His vital signs are still high, with a preponderance of alpha rhythms in the cerebral output. Warhaftig toils on. The liver has been installed. The Khan’s pulse rate rises and corrective measures must be taken, but this is to be expected; no cause for alarm. Meticulously Warhaftig rejoins peritoneum and muscular layers and dermis and epidermis, collaborating in this process with the computer that feeds him the stratification data. Every join is flawless. Scar formation will be minimal. Now the abdominal wall is closed. Warhaftig steps back, cool, self-satisfied, and lesser beings take over. The transplant has been accomplished in exactly five hours. Mordecai leans forward to study Genghis Mao’s face. The Chairman sleeps, so it would seem, facial muscles relaxed, eyes quiescent, chest rising and falling evenly; but no, but no, the mere shadow of Shadrach seems to register on the Khan’s consciousness, for his thin lips pull back in a frosty smile; his left eye opens and performs an unmistakable wink. “Well, that’s another one over with,” Genghis Mao says, his voice firm and clear.

And so, in early evening, the day’s work done and his Hippocratic responsibilities well discharged, it is off to Karakorum, the playground of this weary world’s ruling class, for Shadrach Mordecai, with Nikki Crowfoot as his playmate. He picks her up three hours after the operation in the Project Avatar laboratory on the seventh level of the Grand Tower of the Khan. A great green-walled barn of a place it is, experimental animals caged everywhere, crazy animals, cockadoodling hawks and tree-climbing gorillas, and colossal banks of testing equipment wherever there are no cages. There is a laboratory stink to the air down here, a stink Mordecai remembers well from his Harvard Med days, a mix of Lysol and formaldehyde and ethyl alcohol and mouse shit and Bunsen-burner fumes and burned insulation and what-all else. Most of the Avatar staff has left for the day, but Crowfoot, in gray lab smock and battered sandals, is busy at a five-meter-high agglomeration of computers and playback heads and television screens when he comes in. She stands with her back to the door, watching pyrotechnic bursts of green, blue, and red erupt and wiggle wildly across the face of a gigantic oscilloscope. Shadrach slips up behind her and, sliding his hands under her arms, cups her breasts through the smock. Her back goes rigid at the first touch of his fingers, but then she relaxes immediately, and does not turn around.

“Idiot,” she says, but there is only affection in her voice. “Don’t distract me. I’m running a triple simulation. That’s a real Genghis Mao tape down there, the green, and the blue above it is our April seven persona-construct, and—”

“Forget it. Genghis Mao died on the table when we pulled his liver out. The revolution started an hour ago. The city—”

She squirms in his embrace, pulling around, staring wide-eyed at him, aghast.

“—is in flames, and if you listen you can hear the explosions where they’re blowing up the statues—”

She sees his expression and begins to laugh, “Idiot! Idiot!” “Actually, he’s doing fine, even though Warhaftig put the new liver in upside down.”

“Stop it, Shadrach.”

“All right. He really is in good shape. He took ten minutes off to recuperate and now he’s leading Mongol-style square-dancing in Committee Vector One.”

“Shadrach—”

“I can’t help it. I’m in my postoperative manic phase.”

“Well, I’m not. It’s been a garbage day here.” Indeed her depression is obvious, once he slows down long enough to perceive it: her eyes are strained, her face is tense, her shoulders are uncharacteristically slumped.

“Your tests came out bad?”

“We blew them altogether. Hit a feedback loop and wiped three key tapes before we knew what was happening. I’m trying to salvage what’s left. We’ve been set back a month, a month and a half.”

“Poor Nikki. Is there any way I can help?”

“Just get me out of here,” she says. “Amuse me. Distract me. Make funny faces. How did the operation go?”

“Flawless. Warhaftig’s a wizard. He could do a nuclear implant on an amoeba with his thumbs and bring it off.”

“The great man rests well?”

“Beautifully,” Mordecai says. “It’s almost obscene, the way an eighty-seven-year-old man bounces back from major surgery like this every five or six weeks.”

“Is that what he is, eighty-seven?”

Shadrach shrugs. “That’s what the official figure is. There are stories that he’s older, perhaps a lot older, ninety, ninety-five, even past a hundred, they say. Rumors that he served in World War II. What we’re talking about, of course, is the brain, the epidermal integument, and the skeletal structure. The rest of him’s been cobbled together relatively recently out of fresh parts. A lung here, a kidney there, dacron arteries, ceramic hip joints, a plastic esophagus, a molybdenum-chromium shoulder, a new liver every few years — how it all hangs together I don’t know. But he just gets younger and younger, stronger and stronger, wilier and wilier. You ought to hear his vital signs ticking away in here.”