Shadrach, cool and bouncy, wanders toward the river, whistling some lush romantic melody — a tune out of Rachmaninoff, he suspects. He is being followed, he realizes, by a man who emerged from the carpentry chapel a moment after he did. This does not worry him. For the moment, nothing worries him. He is charmed by everything: the steppe, the hills, the faintly chilly spring air, the idea of being followed. He is charmed even by the silly ubiquity of Mangu, whose bland symmetrical features have been plastered to everything, and sprout from mailboxes, from trashbins, from the low smooth white wall of the promenade that runs along the river; there are Mangu pennants and streamers hanging all around, and everything is done to a background of the Mongol mourning color, which is yellow and lends an oddly bright and festive tone to the display, as though there is shortly to be a parade in Mangu’s honor, followed by the viceroy’s glorious second coming. Shadrach smiles. He leans his long body over the promenade wall to admire the lovely turbulent flow of the river, quickened by its spring freshets and humming along with rare energy, swirling and dancing. He imagines filaments and tendrils of tributary streams spreading outward from the channel below him, lacing this arid land together, carrying water joyously from the mountains, sweeping it to the river and thence to the sea, a vast arterial system serving the living, throbbing entity that is the earth, and the image pleases the doctor in him. If he listens carefully, he tells himself, he can hear the breathing of the planet, and even the rhythms of its heart, tub-dub, tub-dub. The man who has been following him appears now on the promenade and takes up a position just to Shadrach’s left. Side by side they watch the river in silence. After a moment Shadrach risks a furtive glance and discovers that the man is Frank Ficifolia, the communications expert, the designer of Surveillance Vector One. Ficifolia is a short, rotund, capable man, perhaps fifty years old, good-natured and talkative, and his uncharacteristic silence now is significant. Upon entering the carpentry chapel Shadrach had had a glimpse of someone he thought might be Ficifolia, but the etiquette of the cult had kept him from taking a second look; his guess is now confirmed. But a different etiquette controls Shadrach here. In the bugged and spy-eyed world of Genghis Mao, one is frequently approached by people who wish to talk without outwardly seeming to be holding a conversation. Many times Shadrach has carried on long interchanges with someone who is staring in another direction, even with someone whose back is to him. He continues, therefore, to study the rushing flow of the river, offering Ficifolia no greeting, and waiting. Eventually Ficifolia says, apropos of nothing and without looking at Shadrach, “I don’t understand why you’re still hanging around here.”
“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.”