Called on Phoenix first, the dainty Sarafrazi woman in charge, marvelous eyes, beautiful face. Terrified of me. Showed me her monkeys, her bubbling vats of chemicals, her pickled brains in bell jars. Optimistic forecasts from her, delivered in tense throaty voice. She’ll make me young again, so she claims. Am not so sure of that but told her to keep at it. Paralyzed with awe, she was. I thought she was almost going to kneel as I left. Went from there to Talos. Came in unannounced, but the Lindman woman cool as ice anyway. The report is that she’s Shadrach’s new lover. Can’t understand what he sees in her. Something about her mouth I don’t like, spoils her face. Looks like the mouth of some ferocious gnawing creature. She’s got a plastic Genghis Mao in her lab, very large, nothing finished below the waist, fust framework there, no legs. No legs. The Genghis Mao Memorial Statue. “Finish the legs,” I told her. She gave me a peculiar look. Told me the legs were the final job, more important now to get the internal engineering done. Knows her own mind, won’t take nonsense from me. Even if I am Chairman of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee. I Genghis II Mao IV Khan do command — no. Her robot can wink, smile, wave its arms. Gonchigdorge was with me and said, “It’s just like you, sir, a remarkable likeness,” but I can’t agree. Ingenious but mechanical. I wouldn’t want it to succeed me, I will not terminate Project Talos, not yet at any rate, but I don’t think it’s going to be able to produce what I need.
Went on to Nikki Crowfoot’s lab. Avatar. Ah! Yes!Beautiful woman, though tense, depressed, withdrawn, these days. Guilty about Shadrach, I imagine. She ought to be. But she remains a loyal servant of the Khan. Is this a good thing? “When will you be ready to make the transfer?” I asked her. She said, “It’s just a matter of months.” I felt such a surge of excitement at that that Shadrach phoned from upstairs to find out if I was all right. Told him to mind his own business. But I am his own business. Anyway, Avatar gives me hope. Soon I will put on new healthy flesh. Before the first snows come I will speak to the world with Shadrach’s lips, I will breathe the air with Shadrach’s lungs.
Entering the Project Avatar laboratory unannounced in midafternoon, Shadrach is confronted immediately by Manfred Eis, Nikki Crowfoot’s chief assistant, who emerges out of a maze of equipment and strides purposefully toward him like Thor on the warpath, halting with a crispness just short of a heel-click.
“We are very busy just now,” Eis announces, making a challenge out of it.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“’You have come because — ?”
“A routine inspection visit,” Shadrach answers mildly. “To check on progress. I haven’t been here for a while.”
In fact it is several weeks since he was last in the Avatar lab, not since just before Mangu’s death, and the rhythm of his schedule has usually brought him to each project af least once a month. But Eis hardly makes him feel welcome now. He is a cold-mannered, humorless man at best, a cliche-Teuton, stiff and square-jawed and square-shouldered and very Nordic, with frosty blue eyes, pearly teeth, long yellow hair, everything but the dueling scar. Shadrach is accustomed to Dr. Eis’s Aryan brusqueness, but today there is something new in his manner, something gratuitously hostile, almost patronizing, vaguely contemptuous, that Shadrach finds disturbing because he suspects it has to do with his own suddenly significant personal involvement in the destinies of Project Avatar.
Eis is pleased that Shadrach has been chosen. Eis is gratified. Eis thinks it altogether proper that Shadrach should be the one. That’s it. Perhaps it was Eis who actually sold Genghis Mao on the idea of selecting Shadrach. No, no, an underling like Eis would never have had access to the Chairman; but still, Eis most have rejoiced, seems still to be rejoicing right now. Shadrach does not like being gloated over. He wonders if it is possible to find some appropriate experimental use for Eis’s fine Nordic body.
Nevertheless, Shadrach is nominally in charge here, and Eis must give ground. Busy though the lab is, he will have to let Shadrach make his inspection. The place really is busy, too, frantic, all sorts of experiments with all sorts of animals under way, while electronic gear is hauled from room to room by sweating, cursing technicians, and men and women in lab smocks run around wild-eyed, brandishing sheafs of printouts — a real circus, altogether manic and comic, mad scientists at work, desperately striving to square the circle before the onrushing deadline arrives.
It makes Shadrach queasy to realize that he is the circle they must square. He is the patsy, the sucker, the victim, whose life is eventually going to be swallowed by all this equipment, and the manic tone of the current Avatar operations is entirely the result of the need to convert everything, fast, from Mangu-parameters to Shadrach-parameters. Probably a dozen people here know as much about his body, his brain-wave patterns and his neural circuitry and his serotonin levels, as he does himself. Quite likely he has been under covert scrutiny for days. (Do they steal nail parings? Hair clippings?) Shadrach wonders how many of these technicians know of the host substitution. He imagines that they all do, that they are eyeing him with secret fascination even as they rush to and fro — that they are sizing him up, comparing the authentic actual Shadrach Mordecai to the clusters of abstract and synthetic Shadrach-simulation pulsations that they have been working with. But maybe not. Apparently only a few of the Avatar people knew that Mangu was going to be the body donor in the first place, and most likely even fewer have been allowed to learn the identity of Mangu’s replacement.
Nikki, at any rate, is not caught up in the general manic mood. Summoned by Eis, she greets Shadrach quite calmly. The project, she tells him, is making steady progress. Her gaze is steady, her voice is centered and composed. “Progress,” in this laboratory, can only mean the daily process of bringing Shadrach closer to destruction, and certainly she is aware that he will put that interpretation on it; but it seems that she has decided not to feel guilty or act evasive any longer. They have already had their showdown; she has admitted that she was willing to betray her lover for the sake of Genghis Mao; now life continues — for however long — and she has her job to do. All this passes between them within the space of ninety seconds, and none of it is communicated in words, only in tone of voice and expression of eyes. Shadrach is relieved. He does not enjoy making people feel guilty; it makes him feel obscurely guilty himself. “I should look at the equipment,” Shadrach says.
“Come.”
She takes him on a guided tour. She demonstrates for him the zoo of metempsychosized animals, the latest triumphs of electronic transmigration: here is a dog with rhe soul of a raccoon, diligently dipping its dinner in a pan of wafer, and here is an eagle with a coded peacock-construct in its skull to make it strut and preen and spread its wings, and here they have slipped the essential sheepness of a sheep into a young lioness, who sits placidly munching fodder, to the probable detriment of her digestive system. All these reborn beasts have a trapped, bewildered look, as though they are being gnawed from within by some insatiable parasite, and Shadrach asks Nikki if this is going to be a characteristic of human avatars as well, if the expunged soul of the body donor will not linger as a miasma to complicate the life of his supplanter.
“We don’t think so,” Nikki says. “Remember, all the animals I’ve shown you have undergone implant codings across species lines, in fact across generic lines. A peacock is never going to be comfortable in an eagle’s body, or a sheep in a lion’s. Eventually the animal gets the hang of operating its new body, but it’ll always tend to keep reverting to the old reflex patterns.”
“Then why bother with transgeneric switches? What’s the point, other than showing off how clever you are?”
“The point is that the disparities between the implanted entity and the host are so gross that we can instantly confirm the success of the implant. If we put a spaniel’s mind into another spaniel’s body, if we put a chimp into a chimp, a goat into a goat, how do we know if we’ve accomplished anything? The goat can’t tell us. The spaniel can’t tell us.”