“American,” Shadrach says, though the label sounds odd in his ears. What else is he to answer, though? Mongol?
“American? Ah! New York? Los Angeles? Once we had plenty Americans here. Before the big death, you know? That plane they come in, it was big, too big, it was always full, all those Americans! They come to see the animals, you know? Out in the bush. With cameras. Not any more. Long time, no Americans here. No anybody here.” He laughs. “Different times, now. Too bad, these times. Except for the animals. Good times for the animals. You see, there, by the road? Hyena. Right by the road!”
Yes, Shadrach sees: a lumpy, sinister beast, like a small ungainly bear, squatting at the edge of the highway. The driver tells him that there are wild animals everywhere now, ostriches strutting down Nairobi’s main streets, lions and cheetahs preying on the suburban farmers, gazelles moving in huge fluttery herds across the university campus. “Because there are not enough people now,” he says. “And most of them too sick. Not much hunting now. Last week, big elephant, ripped up thorn tree in front of New Stanley Hotel. Very old thorn tree, very famous. Very big elephant.” Of course. With the world’s population cut back now to early nineteenth-century levels, the animals would be starting to reclaim their domain. The Virus War had left them unscathed, even the primates closest to man: only the unlucky human chromosomes could harbor the rot.
On the way to the city he sees more animals, two stunning zebras, some wart-hogs, and a group of heavy-humped spindle-shanked antelopes; these are wildebeests, the driver informs him. It pleases Shadrach to observe this resurgence of nature, but the pleasure is tainted by sadness, for if wildebeests graze on the margins of great highways and grass grows in city streets, it is because the time of man is coming to its end, and Shadrach is not ready for that.
Actually not much grass is growing in the streets of Nairobi, at least not on the broad, elegant boulevard on which the taxi enters town. Flowering shrubs erupt in beauty on all sides. After monochromatic Ulan Bator, Nairobi is a visual delight. Bougainvillea, red and purple and orange, cascades over every wall; some creeping succulent with densely packed lavender blossoms carpets the islands in the roadway; thick, many-tentacled aloe trees stand like sentinels at street corners; he recognizes hibiscus and jacaranda, but most of the bushes and trees that fill the streets with such gaudy masses of color are unknown to him. The effect is gay and sparkling and unexpectedly moving: who could feel despair, he wonders, in a world that offers such intensity of beauty? But in that moment of transcendent joy that the glowing flowers of neatly manicured Nairobi create comes its own instant negation, for Shadrach asks himself also how, having been turned loose in this beautiful world, we could have contrived to make such a woeful mess out of so much of it. Nevertheless this serendipitous city inspires more pleasure than gloom in him.
Through flowery sun-loved Nairobi rides Shadrach Mordecai in an old rump-sprung taxi to his hotel, the Hilton, an aging cavernous place where he may well be the only guest. The hotel staff treats him with extraordinary deference, as though he is some visiting prince. In a way he is, to these people. They know he lives at the capital and travels on a PRC passport; probably they conclude from that that he must sit at the right hand of Genghis Mao, which in truth he does, though he is not a part of the government at all. Yet even those who have not seen his passport regard him with awe, here. They pause at their work in corridors, and turn and look. They whisper among themselves. They nod, they point, Shadrach is reminded again of what he tends often to forget: that he is a man of great presence and dignity, capable and self-assured and of striking physical appearance, who radiates an aura that leads others to defer to him. It is hard, living in the shadow of Genghis Mao, to remember that one is a person oneself, even a considerable person, and not merely an extension of the Chairman. In Nairobi he learns it.
Strolling about the city half an hour after checking in, he makes another discovery of the obvious: everyone here is black. Almost everyone, at any rate. He notices a few Chinese shopkeepers, a couple of Indians, a few elderly whites, but they are exceptions, and they stand out as clearly as he does in Ulan Bator. Why should the negritude here surprise him? This is Africa; this is where people are black. And it was the same, really, when he was a boy in Philadelphia — whites rarely ventured into his neighborhood, and at least in early childhood it was easy for him to assume that the ghetto was the world, that black was the norm, that those occasional creatures with pink faces and blue eyes and loose, lank hair were freakish rarities, like the giraffes in his picture book. But this is no ghetto. It is a nation, a universe, where the policemen and the schoolteachers and the Committee delegates and the firemen are black, the engineers at the fusion plant are black, the brain surgeons and the optometrists are black, black through and through. Brothers and sisters everywhere, and yet he is apart from them, he feels not kinship but surprise at the universality of the blackness. Possibly he has lived in Mongolia too long. Living in that polyglot multiracial amalgam that surrounds Genghis Mao, he has lost some degree of his own racial identity; and, living amid millions of Mongols, he has developed some heightened sense of himself as outsider, as freak, that leaves him alienated even among his own kind. If these people, speakers of Swahili, intimates of ostrich and cheetah, bloodlines undiluted by slavemaster genes, can be said to be his own kind.
He discovers yet another obviousness: that Nairobi is not just beautiful boulevards and clear vibrant air, not just bowers of bougainvillea and hibiscus. This place is, however lovely it may be, still very much a part of the Trauma Ward, and he does not need to walk far from the precincts of his hotel to find the sufferers. They straggle through the streets, scores of them, in all phases of the disease, some merely pallid and sluggish, showing the first bafflement at the onrushing crumbling of their bodies, and some bowed and shrunken and dazed, some already hemorrhaging, dizzy with pain and flecked with the shiny sweat of imminent death. Those in the late stages travel in solitary orbits, each shambling alone through the streets, God knows why, struggling with incomprehensible determination to reach some unattainable destination before the final breakdown overtakes them. Often the organ-rot victims pause and stare at Shadrach, as if they know he is immune and want from him some gift of strength, some charismatic infusion that will clothe them in the same immunity, that will heal their lesions and make their bodies whole. But there is nothing particularly reproachful or envious in their gaze: it is the calm, steady, equable look that one sometimes gets from grazing cattle, unreadable but not threatening, with no hint in it that they hold you guilty of the slaughterhouse.
At first Shadrach cannot meet that level stare. He was taught, long ago, that a doctor must be able to look at a patient without feeling apologetic for his own good health, but this is a different case. They are not his patients, and he is healthy only because his political connections give him access to protection they cannot have. He is curious about organ-rot — it is the great medical phenomenon of the age, the latter-day Black Death, the most terrible plague in history, and he studies its effects wherever he encounters them — but neither his curiosity nor his medical detachment is enough lo let him look straight at these people. He gives them only darting sidewise glances until he realizes that his feelings of guilt are irrelevant. These lurching wrecks don’t care if he looks at them. They are beyond caring about anything. They are dying, right out here in public; their bellies are ablaze, their minds are fogged; what does it matter to them if some stranger stares? They look at him; he looks at them. Invisible barriers screen him from them.