Collected Short Fiction, page 1000
He regards me without great interest. After a moment he hands me a bowl. “Drink some airag, old man.”
We share the bowl, I first, then the Great Khan. He is dressed simply, no scarlet robes, no ermine trim, no crown, just a warrior’s leather costume. The top of his head is shaven and in back his hair reaches his shoulders. He could kill me with a slap of his left hand.
“What do you want?” he asks.
“To see you.”
“You see me. What else?”
“To tell you that you will live forever.”
“I will die like any man, old one.”
“Your body will die, Father Genghis. Your name will live in the ages.”
He considers that. “And my empire? What of that? Will my sons rule after me?”
“Your sons will rule over half the world.”
“Half the world,” Genghis Khan says softly. “Only half? Is this the truth, old man?”
“Cathay will be theirs—”
“Cathay is already mine.”
“Yes, but they will have it all, down to the hot jungles. And they will rule the high mountains, and the Russian land, and Turkestan, Afghanistan, Persia, everything as far as the gates of Europe. Half the world, Father Genghis!”
The Khan of Khans grunts.
“And I tell you this, also. Nine hundred years from now a khan named Genghis will rule everything from sea to sea, from shore to shore, all souls upon this world naming him master.”
“A khan of my blood?”
“A true Tatar,” I assure him. Genghis Khan is silent a long while. It is impossible to read his eyes. He is shorter than I would have thought, and his smell is bad, but he is a man of such strength and purpose that I am humbled, for I thought I was of his kind, and in a way I am, and yet he is more than I could ever have teen. There is no calculation about him; he is altogether solid, unhesitating, a man who lives in the moment, a man who must never have paused for a second thought and whose first thought must always have been right. He is only a barbarian prince, a mere wild horseman of the Gobi, to whom every aspect of my ordinary daily life would seem the most dazzling magic: yet put him down in Ulan Bator and he would understand the workings of Surveillance Vector One in three hours. A barbarian he is, yes, but not a mere barbarian, not a mere anything, and though I am his superior in some ways, though my life and my power are beyond his comprehension, I am second to him in all the ways that matter. He awes me. As I expected him to do. And, seeing him, I come close to a willingness to yield up all my authority over men, for, next to him, I am not worthy. I am not worthy.
“Nine hundred years,” he says at last, and the shadow of a smile crosses his face. “Good. Good.” He claps for a servant. “More airags,” he calls. We share another drink. Then he says he must depart; it is time to ride out from Karakorum to the camp of his son Chagadai, where the royal family is to hold a tourney today. He does not invite me to join him. He has no interest in me, though I come from out of the realm of distant time, though I bring him bright tales of Mongol empires to come. I am unimportant to him. I have told him all he cares to know; now I am forgotten. Only the tourney matters now. He leaps to his mare; he rides away, followed by the warriors of his court, and only the servant and I remain.
Two robed acolytes bring Roger Buckmaster to Shadrach out of the depths of the tent of the transtemporalists in Karakorum. Buckmaster is robed too, but not in the coarse black horsehair garb of a transtemporalist. He wears a heavy hooded cassock of thick brown wool, smoothly woven. His feet, bare, are clad in open sandals. A massive cruciform pendant dangles at his throat. He pushes back his hood to reveal a tonsured scalp.
Buckmaster has become some sort of monk.
His new asceticism of clothing is not the only change in him. Before, he had been a blurting, impatient, angry man. with some kind of sullen furious energy circulating within him that seemed dammed at every plausible point of exit. Now he is eerily calm, self-contained, a man inhabiting an unfathomable kingdom of solitude and peace. He is pale, very thin, almost spectral. He stands silently before Shadrach, fingering his beads but otherwise motionless, waiting, waiting.
Shadrach says at last, “I never expected to see you alive again, Roger.”
“Life brings many surprises. Dr. Mordecai.” Buckmaster’s voice is different too, deeper, sepulchral, more resonant, all the sputter and frenzy burned out of it.
“Word went around that you’d been sent to the organ farm. Dissected, dismembered.”
Piously Buckmaster says, “The Lord chose to spare me.”
His piety is hard for Shadrach to take. “Your friends saved your skin, you mean,” he retorts, instantly regretting his bluntness. Not a wise way to talk to someone whose services you need.
But Buckmaster does not seem offended.
“My friends are His agents. As are we all. Dr. Mordecai.”
“Have you been here the whole time?”
“Yes. Since the day after you saw me under interrogation.”
“And the Citpols haven’t come sniffing around for you?”
“I am officially dead, doctor. My body has officially been distributed to ailing members of the government: the computer will tell you so. The Citpols don’t search for dead men. To them I’m no more than a set of scattered parts—a pancreas here, a liver there, a kidney, a lung. Forgotten.” For a moment mischief gleams in Buckmaster’s oddly solemn face. “If you told them I was here, they would deny it.”
“And what have you been doing?” Shadrach asks.
“The transtemporalists regard me as a holy man. I take their cup each day. Each day I retrace the days of the life of our Lord. I have attended His Passion upon Calvary many times, doctor. I have walked among the apostles. I have touched the hem of Mary’s robe. I have beheld the miracles: Cana, Capernaum, Lazarus raised at Bethany. I have watched Him betrayed in Gethsemane. I have seen Him brought before Pilate. I have seen it all. Dr. Mordecai, everything of which the Gospels tell. It is all true. It is literally the truth. My eyes bear witness.”
The unexpected intensity of conviction in Buckmaster’s eyes, the unearthly sound of Buckmaster’s voice, leave Shadrach speechless a moment. It is impossible not to believe that this scruffy little man has strolled through the Galilee with Jesus and Peter and James, that he has heard the sermons of John the Baptist and the lamentations of the Magdalene. Illusion, hallucination, self-deceit, fraud: no matter. Buckmaster has been transformed. He is radiant.
With deliberate bluntness Shadrach asks, “Can you still do microengineering work?”
The irrelevance of the question catches Buckmaster off balance. He is lost in holy reveries, shrouded in mystic serenity and transcendental joy, and Shadrach’s words bring a gasp of amazement from him, as though he has been jabbed in the ribs. He coughs and frowns and says, obviously baffled, “I suppose I could. It’s never entered my mind.”
“I have work for you now.”
“Don’t be preposterous, doctor.”
“I’m being altogether serious. I’ve come to you because there’s a job that you and only you can do properly. You’re the only one I’d trust to do it.”
“The world has expelled me, doctor. I have expelled the world. Here is where I dwell. The concerns of the world are no longer my concerns.”
“You once were concerned about the injustices perpetrated by Genghis Mao and the PRC.”
“I am beyond justice and injustice now.”
“Don’t say that. It sounds impressive, Roger, but it’s dangerous nonsense. The sin of pride, isn’t it? You were rescued by your fellow men. You owe your life to them. They took risks for you. You have obligations to them.”
“I pray for them daily.”
“There’s something more immediately useful you can do.”
“Prayer is the highest good I know,” Buckmaster says. “Certainly I place it higher than microengineering. I fail to see how any microengineering job you give me can help my fellow men.”
“One job can.”
“I fail to see—”
“Genghis Mao is soon to undergo another operation.”
“What’s Genghis Mao to me? He’s forgotten me. I’ve forgotten him.”
“An operation on his brain,” Shadrach continues. “Fluid now accumulates within his skull. Unless it’s drained, it could kill him. Shortly we’ll install a drainage system with a valve through which the fluid can be removed. At the same time a new telemetering implant will be installed in me. Which I want you to design for me, Roger.”
“What will it do?”
“Allow me to control the action of the valve,” Shadrach says.
Two hours later Shadrach is in the great carpentry chapel at the far end of the Karakorum pleasure complex, surrounded by chisels and mallets and saws, trying to enter into the initial meditative state. He is not doing well at it. Now and then he feels just a bit of it, the beginnings of the proper degree of concentration, but he holds it no more than an instant and then, as he congratulates himself for having attained the state at last, he loses it, again and again he loses it. It is Buckmaster’s fault. Buckmaster will not recede from the forefront of Shadrach’s consciousness.
If Buckmaster had had his way, Shadrach would not be among the carpenters at all right now, but rather still would be in the transtemporalists’ tent, lying drugged and limp while his soul journeyed back through the millennia to attend the bloody rite of Calvary. “Take the cup with me,” Buckmaster had urged. “We will visit the Passion together.” But Shadrach had declined. Some other time, he told Buckmaster gently. Transtemporal jaunts consume too much energy; he needs all his strength for the difficult enterprise that lies just ahead. Buckmaster had understood, or at least was willing to forgive him for not caring to make the journey just then. And Shadrach went forth from the tent, with Buckmaster’s promise that he would have the design of the new implant ready in a day or so. And still Buckmaster haunts him.
How astonishing it was to see Buckmaster’s monkishness fall away from him the moment he grasped the implications of Shadrach’s request—his breath quickening, color coming to his cheeks, eyes bright with the old frenzy. Asking a hundred questions, demanding specifications and performance thresholds, size parameters, preferred bodily placement for the device. Scribbling notes furiously. Half an hour was all it took him to work out the rough schematics. He would need computer assistance to do the final, tee said, but that would be no problem: Ficifolia could hook up a telephone relay for him, keying right into Genghis Mao’s own master computer. And Buckmaster laughed stridently. Abruptly his expression shifted. Serenity returned. He had put microengineering aside; suddenly he was a monk again, calm, remote, glacial, saying, “Take the cup with me. We will visit the Passion together.”
Poor crazy Buckmaster.
Shadrach, struggling to regain his own serenity, picks up an awl, lays it down, picks up an auger, runs his fingers along the curved blade of a chisel, presses a bastard file against his forehead. Better. A little better. The touch of cool metal soothes him. Poor crazy Buckmaster has drained the cup by now, no doubt. And has gone off on wings of dream to see them put the crown of thorns in place, hammer in the nails, ram home the spear. Crazy? Buckmaster is a happy man. He has placed himself beyond all pain. He has outsmarted the minions of Genghis Mao. He has emerged out of his torment into holiness, and he will walk daily with the apostles and the Savior. To Buckmaster, the Palestine of Jesus is more real than the Mongolia of Genghis Mao, and who can quarrel with that? Shadrach might make the same choice, if he could. Of course, reality will eventually intrude on Buckmaster’s fantasy: a time will come, and come soon, when Buckmaster’s most recent Antidote treatment will cease to be effective, and he is not likely to be able to obtain a booster dose. But plainly he does not worry about that.
Thinking of Buckmaster’s newfound tranquility allows Shadrach to find a glimmering of it himself. This time he sustains it, voyaging inward to that clear bright place beyond the reach of storms. Buckmaster disappears; Genghis Mao disappears; Shadrach disappears. For hours he works peacefully at his bench, wholly at one with his tools, his lumber. When he departs from the chapel late in the day he is in a state near ecstasy.
He reaches Ulan Bator an hour after nightfall. As soon as he arrives he phones Katya Lindman.
“I want to see you,” he says.
“I was hoping you’d call. I knew you were back.”
They meet in a recreation lounge on the fiftieth floor, a rendezvous favored by middle-echelon staffers. Service is discreet there. The room is a dazzling high-vaulted oval, decorated with shining golden metallic streamers only a few molecules thick that dangle from the ceiling and twirl gently in the currents of air. A giant portrait of Genghis Mao occupies the entire east wall of the lounge, and there is one of Mangu at the other end.
Katya is wearing what is, for Katya, an unusually slinky costume, a clinging tight-woven wrap of some soft rust-colored fabric, low-cut to display her strong broad shoulders and her heavy breasts. She may even have used perfume. Shadrach has never seen her make the slightest concession to conventional femininity, and he is surprised and disappointed to see her opting for such unsubtle seductiveness now. It is not at all in character for her, and not at all necessary. But perhaps Katya is weary of staying in character, hard eyes, sharp teeth, cruel mouth, cool efficient mind, brisk and capable woman of science. She has already confessed her love for him; perhaps now she wants to play at being the sort of woman for whom love is a plausible event. Foolish of her, if that’s her game: he much prefers the Katya he knows. Or thinks he knows. Love is not a costume-party.
She says, “I didn’t think you’d ever come back.”
“I never intended not to. I wasn’t trying to disappear. Only to get away for a while and think things out.”
“And did you succeed?”
“I hope so. I’ll know soon enough.”
“I won’t ask.”
“No. Don’t.”
She smiles. “I’m glad you’re back. Except that I worry about the danger you’re in.”
“If I’m not worrying, why should you?”
“I don’t need to answer that.” Her voice is husky, almost stagy. She leans forward and says, “I missed you, Shadrach. It amazed me how much I missed you. You don’t like me to say things like that, do you?”
“What gives you that idea?”
“Your face. You look so uncomfortable. You don’t want to hear soft words from me. You don’t think it’s proper for mean, tough Dr. Lindman to talk that way.”
“I’m just not used to you that way. It’s a side of you that’s unfamiliar to me.”
“You probably don’t even like the way I’m dressed tonight. But I can be the other Katya again, if you want. Wait. I’ll go and change into my lab smock.”
She sounds almost serious.
“Stop it,” he says. He takes her hand. “You look lovely tonight.”
“Thank you.” Her voice is steely. She withdraws the hand.
“Well, you do. And I’m supposed to say so, and I did. That’s how the game is played. Now you’re supposed to say—”
“Let’s not play any more games, Shadrach. Okay?”
“Okay. Did you dress like that for me or for you?”
“For both of us.”
“Ah. Just for the hell of it, right? Because you just felt like coming on sexy. Right?”
“Right,” she says. “Okay?”
“Okay. Okay.”
“Is it okay to tell you that I missed you? Don’t force me to be some kind of machine, Shadrach. Don’t make me be whatever your image of me is. I’m not asking you to tell me you missed me. But give me the right to express what I feel. Give me the right to be silly once in a while, to be soft, to be inconsistent, if I want to be. Without worrying about which one the real Katya is. I’m always the real Katya, whoever I am at the moment.
Okay, Shadrach?” she insists.
“Okay,” he says, and takes her hand again, and she does not pull it away. After a moment he says, “What’s been happening here while I was gone?”
“You know about the Khan’s headaches, I assume.”
“Sure. That’s why I came back when I did. The moment I picked up the telemetering impulses from him, in Peking.”
“Is it something serious?”
“We’re going to have to operate,” he says. “As soon as some special equipment I’ve ordered is ready.”
“Is brain surgery especially risky?”
“Not as risky as you might think. But the Khan doesn’t like the idea of it at all, lasers poking into his skull, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve never seen him look so spooked about an operation. But he’ll be all right. What else has been going on here?”
“There was the funeral.”
“Yes. I know. I was in Jerusalem then, or Istanbul. I saw some photographs later.”
“It was monstrous,” Katya tells him. “It went on for days and days. God knows how much it must have cost. Everything stopped, practically, while we had the speeches, the parades, the brass bands, the planes flying in formation, all kinds of rituals and celebrations. And Genghis Mao sitting in the middle of the plaza drinking everything in.”
“What a pity I missed it.”
“I’m sure you were heartbroken.”
“Yes. Terribly.” They laugh. He is beginning to think he rather likes the way she looks in that dress. He says, “What else? How’s your project going?”
“Very well. Seventeen kinesic traits are equivalented now. We’ve made more progress in the past three weeks than in the previous three months.”
“Good. I want to see that automaton of yours finished fast. I want your project to be the first one ready to go.”
“Have you talked to Nikki since you’ve been back?”
“No,” he says. “Not yet.”
“I hear that Avatar’s been moving fast too. They say that they’re practically done converting from Mangu’s parameters to—to those of the new donor. Weeks ahead of schedule. It scares me, Shadrach.”
“It shouldn’t.”
“I can’t help thinking—what if—if they ever actually do—”
