First flicker of independence poor Shadrach’s ever shown. About time, too.
What if I get seriously ill while he’s gone? Heart. Liver. Lungs. Kidneys. Cerebral hemorrhage. Pleurisy. Acute pericarditis. Toxicuremia. So fragile, so flimsy, so vulnerable, this body, just chunks of meat strung together. Capable of falling apart overnight.
Mustn’t worry about that. I feel fine. I feel fine. I feel fine. I am in extraordinarily good health.
I am not dependent on Shadrach Mordecai.
I am not dependent on Shadrach Mordecai.
And what if he knows some way of actually disappearing? I suppose there’s at least a slight chance of that. What becomes of Avatar then? Find another donor? But I want him. Whenever I see him, I think of how fine his body is, how agile, how elegant. I mean to wear that body someday, oh, yes!
Should I therefore let him get out of my sight? No one can get out of my sight. Right.
Anyway, I know Shadrach. It doesn’t worry me, this trip of his. He’ll go, he’ll have his fling, and then he’ll come back to me. Of his own free will. He’ll come back, all right. Yes. Of his own free will.
It is time to think of the choosing of destinations. Shadrach can go anywhere in the world, and no concern for the cost; he is a member of the ruling elite, is he not, Antidote-blessed, an aristocrat in a world of rotting pieces. But where shall he go? He heads for Surveillance Vector One to consider his options. Though he has often paused before the screens of Surveillance Vector One for a random dip into the activities of the outer world that he calls the Trauma Ward, this is the first time that Shadrach has actually seated himself in the imperial throne from which the great spy-eye apparatus is controlled. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of colored buttons confront him: a bank of red ones, a wedge of green ones, yellow, blue, violet, orange. His hands hover above them like those of a novice organist approaching a full keyboard for the first time. Nothing is labeled. Is there a system? All about the room, images whirl and flit on the myriad screens, zipping by at unfathomable variable rates. Shadrach pokes a green button. Has anything been accomplished? The screens still seem random. He covers dozens of green buttons with both palms outstretched. Ah. Now there seems to be a detectable pattern of response. One slice of screens high up and to his right is showing unmistakably European cities — Paris, London, maybe Prague, Vienna, Stockholm. The color-coding, then, may be keyed to continents.
Leaving the green keys depressed, Shadrach punches a bunch of orange ones. A systematic search through the whirling madness of the blinking screens shows him, eventually, a bloc of North American scenery far to his left — glimpses of Los Angeles, surely, and New York, and Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh. So. Yes.
Half an hour of patient, absorbing work and he has mastered the system; he is a quick study. Violet is Africa, yellow is Asia, red is Latin America, and so on. He discovers, also, that there are certain master buttons — the red of red, so to speak, the blue of blues — which, when punched, wipe from the screens all data on continents other than the one covered by keys of that color, so that one need not contend with the crazy oversufficiency of information that the whole of Surveillance Vector One is capable of supplying. He learns, also, how to summon images of particular cities: the keys within each color group are arranged in a geographical analogue of their actual positions, and by activating a screen at his left elbow he can call for maps, divided into grids that show him which buttons to push. And then he systematically examines the Trauma Ward to see where he wants to go.
The famous cities of the world, yes. The ancient capitals. Rome? Of course. He punches for it. The Colosseum flashes by, the Forum, the Spanish Steps. Yes. And Jerusalem, yes, one glimpse is enough. He considers Egypt and punches for Cairo, but rejects it when he sees the beggars shambling about the base of the Great Pyramid, their blind eyes crusted with swarming flies. He has heard rumors about Egypt, and they seem to be true: organ-rot does not frighten him, but he has no antidotes for the ghastly trachoma, for the endemic bilharziasis, for the thousand other Cairene plagues that the screens show him. The healer in him might be willing enough to go to Egypt for a laying on of hands, a spraying on of medicines, but this is meant to be a holiday, he is going abroad not as a doctor but as an anti-doctor, and he shies from that challenge. No Egypt. But he chooses Istanbul after a view of the plump mosques rising from the hills; he picks London; bypasses his native Philadelphia and, with a shudder, New York; elects San Francisco; and finally Peking. The grand tour. The great adventure.
He sleeps alone that night, and for a change he sleeps well, as if the prospect of world-girdling travel has perversely calmed his restless spirit. Before dawn he awakens, does some perfunctory calisthenics, packs quickly, taking little with him. The green face of the data screen tells him it is
He does not bother with farewells. Just as the sun breaks the horizon he summons a car and is taken to the airport.
June 1, 2012
I did tell him about the voices after all. Despite earlier resolves. Should I have told him? But he didn’t take me seriously. Do I take me seriously? Do I take them seriously? Perhaps they are symptoms of some grave mental disorder. But were the saints mad too, then? The voices whisper to me. They have always come to me in times of crisis. During the Virus War I heard them most dearly. One voice said, I am Temujin Genghis Khan, and you are my son, and you shall be Genghis II. A voice of thunder, though he only whispered. And I am Mao, another voice said, smooth as silk. You are my son, Mao said, and you shall be Mao II. But we had already had a Mao II, nasty little coward, completely destroved his country with his idiocies, and there was even a Mao III, briefly, during the days just before the outbreak of the Virus War, so I answered Mao, I told him he was behind the times, it was too late for me to be Mao II, I must become Mao IV. He understood. So they blessed me and anointed me. Genghis II Mao IV, I became. So my voices dubbed and ordained and anointed me. And they have guided me. Is it a sign of schizoid disturbance to hear disembodied voices? It could be. Am I schizoid, then? Very well, I am schizoid. But I am also Genghis II Mao IV, and I rule the world.
20
No flights are due to depart that morning, Shadrach learns, for Jerusalem, Istanbul, Rome, or any plausible connecting points to those destinations. There is a flight to Peking soon, but Peking is too close to Ulan Bator and Chinese look too much like Mongols; just now he needs a total change of scene. There is a flight a little later on to San Francisco, but San Francisco is awkwardly placed in respect to the rest of his itinerary. And there is a flight leaving almost immediately for Nairobi. Somehow Shadrach had not considered going to Nairobi at all, nor any other black African city, despite the vaguely felt ancestral ties. But spontaneity, he tells himself, is good for the soul. Right at this moment the idea of going to Nairobi seems oddly appealing. Impulsively, unhesitatingly, he boards the plane.
He has not left Mongolia for two and a half years, not since the time Genghis Mao unexpectedly decided to preside in person over a vast and meaningless Committee congress being held at the dilapidated old United Nations headquarters in New York. Shadrach was not yet the Khan’s personal physician then — a shrewd, diplomatic Portuguese internist named Teixeira had that job — but Teixeira was placidly dying of leukemia and Shadrach was being phased in slowly as his replacement. Ostensibly Shadrach went to New York as a mere junior medic, a spear carrier in the Khan’s huge retinue, but when Genghis Mao came down with a hypertensive attack afier delivering a six-hour harangue from the podium of the former General Assembly chamber, it was Shadrach who coped with the problem while Teixeira lay doped and useless in his suite. Genghis Mao, having subsequently invented Mangu to handle such ceremonial chores as Committee congresses, had stayed close to Ulan Bator ever since. So has Shadrach. But now he finds himself watching through the porthole of a supersonic transport plane as the bleak Mongol steppe rapidly retreats far below. In just a few hours he will be in Africa.