“Oh, Shadrach!”
“I mean, I’m the key man, right?”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
“You’d have to find another host for Genghis Mao. Then you’d have to recalibrate all over again. You—”
“Stop it. Please.”
“All right,” he says. “At any rate, it’s futile to try to escape from the Khan.”
“You won’t even try?”
“I won’t even try.”
Crowfoot regards him levelly for a long silent moment. Then she says, “I should feel relieved about that, I suppose.”
“Why?”
“If you won’t take responsibility for saving yourself, then I don’t have to take responsibility for — for—”
“For what’s going to happen to me if I stay here?”
“Yes.”
“That’s right. You don’t need to feel any guilt at all. I’ve had fair warning, and nevertheless I freely choose to stay and face the music. You’re absolved, Nikki. Your hands are washed of my blood.”
“Are you being sarcastic, Shadrach?”
“Not particularly.”
“I can never tell when you’re being sarcastic.”
“Not this time.” he says.
They stare at each other strangely again. He still feels that mysterious sexual tension, that grotesque and inappropriate lust. He suspects that if he reached for her and dragged her down on the carpeted floor, down between the desk and the filing cabinets, he could have her right here, right now, in her own office, one last crazy and frantic screw. Then he thinks of Eis and his colleagues running around on the other side of the locked office door, busy with their computers and their chimps, doing simulated transfers of the persona of Genghis Mao into the bodily hull of Shadrach Mordecai, and his ardor cools a little. But only a little. Nikki laughs.
“What’s funny?” he asks.
“Do you remember,” she says, “that time we spoke about the concept of you and Genghis Mao being one life system, one self-corrective information-processing unit? That was before any of this happened. Mangu was still alive, I think. I talked about how the chisel and the mallet and the stone are aspects of the sculptor, or, more precisely, that the sculptor and his tools and materials together make up a single thinking and acting entity, a single person, and how you and Genghis Mao—”
“Yes. I remember.”
“It’s going to be even truer now, won’t it? In the most literal sense. That seems awfully ironic to me. Your nervous system and his, entwined, interlocked, indistinguishable. When we spoke then, you said no, it wasn’t a true analogy, that Genghis Mao can send data to you but you can’t send it to him, so that there’s a limitation on the information flow, a discrete boundary. That’ll change, now. It’ll be impossible to tell where one of you leaves off and the other begins. But even then, I wanted to tell you that you weren’t really grasping the idea — that the marble can’t design a sculpture but is nevertheless part of the total sculpture-making system, and that you can’t feed metabolic data into Genghis Mao but are nevertheless part of the total Genghis Mao system; there is an interaction, there is a feedback relationship that links you to him and he to you, there is—” She has been talking very rapidly, a torrential flow of words. Now she halts and in an altogether different voice says, “Oh, Shadrach, why don’t you want to hide yourself?”
“I told you. It’s useless. I keep telling people that, but they don’t seem to want to believe me.”
He thinks about himself as part of the total Genghis Mao system. He considers the analogies. No doubt of it, his sensors and implants link him to the Khan in a very special way. But he is no more — and no less — important to the total Genghis Mao system than Michelangelo’s lump of marble was to the total statue-making system. Michelangelo, if he fell that a given lump of marble was no longer necessary to the needs of the total system, would casually discard it and introduce another into the system.
Nikki is trembling.
“If you won’t try to save yourself,” she says, “then nobody else can do anything for you.”
After he and Genghis Mao come to share one body, they will truly be an integrated information-processing unit. Of course, such a unit needs only one biocomputer, one brain, one mind, one self. And that self will not be the self of Shadrach Mordecai.
He says, “I know that. We’ve already discussed that. I take full responsibility.”
“Don’t you care?”
“Maybe not. Not any longer. I don’t know.”
“Shadrach—”
She starts to reach toward him, a tentative gesture, perhaps sexual, perhaps merely some sort of reflexive grab at a sinking man. He pulls back. There is a wall between them, an impermeable barrier of words and fears and doubts and hesitations and guilts. He does not mind that. He takes refuge behind that wall. But still there is that sexual pull between them, that taut hot line of erotic tension, spanning the barrier, drilling through it, eroding it, breaching it. And then the barrier is gone. He loves her, he hates her, he wants her, he loathes her. He makes a tentative gesture toward her and halts. They are like two adolescents, absurdly unsure of themselves, feinting foolishly, making silly false starts and finicky nervous withdrawals. He smiles tensely. So does she. She is obviously as conscious as he is of the minute shifts of balance that are rapidly occurring within them and between them. It is as though they are voyagers aboard an ocean liner that is struggling through turbulent, stormy waters, and they are trapped together in a tiny cabin with a massive metal safe that slides wildly about, careening across the floor with every convulsion of the waves, crashing into the walls as they jump about, threatening to crush them if they do not succeed in scampering out of its way as it bears down on them. There is something undeniably comic about their predicament, but the peril is real, too, and not at all funny. How much longer can they hold out? The safe is so heavy, the sea so rough, the cabin so small, and they are getting weary—
And suddenly they come together, embracing, grappling, mouth seeking mouth, fingers digging furiously into flesh. He is terrified by the power of the blind, irrational force that has been unleashed in him, that he has unleashed in himself. “No,” he mutters, even as he claws at her clothes, even as he pushes himself against her, even as he finds the fullness of her breasts beneath the sexless lab smock. “No,” she whimpers, seemingly equally appalled. But neither of them resists. They stumble about ridiculously, sway, topple to the floor. On the carpet, between the desk and the filing cabinet.
Neither of them undresses. Down with zipper, up with skirt; this is no tender act of love, this is not even a display of sexual athleticism, this is mere savage coupling, a desperate and unsophisticated cleaving-together of flesh. His hands slide along the smooth firm columns of her thighs and his fingers find and probe the secret slit between them, already hot and moist, and she gasps and thrusts her pelvis at him and, quickly, blindly, he drives himself into her. There is barely room for their bodies to move on the floor; she tilts herself upward, feet pointed at the ceiling, and he reaches below to grasp her buttocks, supporting her, and rams himself against her with lunatic vigor. Almost at once, so it seems to him, she comes with unfamiliar little shivers and giggles, and moments later so does he, in wild galvanic spasms that wrench a hoarse strained cry from him. Inelegantly Shadrach slumps down on her chest, exhausted, and she holds him tightly, with loving rocklike patience, as if she would be willing to hold him this way for hours or weeks, but after two or three minutes he pulls free, stunned, dazed, hardly believing what has just passed between them.
They look at each other. He blinks; so does she. There are thin faint smiles of embarrassment.
Shakily he rises. Nikki lies there, her legs lowered now but still spread wide, her rumpled skirt pushed up around her hips, her face shiny with sweat, her eyes bloodshot, unfocused. Shadrach averts his glance from her body in peculiar fastidiousness: he is not exactly repelled by the sight of her exposed loins, but somehow he does not want to look. Perhaps he is frightened by the power that that dark hairy humid cavern has over him, the primordial female chasm, irresistible, all-engulfing. At any rate he adjusts his clothes, coughs self-consciously, stoops to offer Nikki a helping hand. She shakes him off gently and gets to her feet unaided, and they stand facing each other. He has nothing to say. It is a sticky moment, but she rescues them from it by taking his hand, by giving him a warm loving smile, by pulling him toward her for a quick chaste kiss, lips lightly brushing lips, a kiss that simultaneously acknowledges the intensity of what has just taken place and brings down a curtain on it. It is time for him logo.