Collected Short Fiction, page 981
Horthy delicately prods his thumbs into the corners of his bulging, bloodshot eyes. A psychedelic effluvium still hovers about him. “Roger Buckmaster.” he says. “The microengineering man. you know.”
“Yes. I know. I’ve worked with him.”
“Buckmaster was heard making wild statements at Karakorum last night,” Horthy says. “Calling for the overthrow of Genghis Mao, yelling subversion at the top of his lungs. The Citpols picked him up, finally, but they decided he was just drunk and let him go.”
In a low voice Shadrach says, “Is that what happened to you?”
“Me? To me? I don’t understand what you mean.”
“At the tube-train station. I saw you there, remember? While they were running that tape of Mangu’s speech. You made some remarks about the Antidote-distribution program. and then the Citpols—”
“No,” Horthy says. “You must be mistaken.” His eyes fix on Shadrach’s and lock there. They are intimidating eyes, cold and hostile, despite all their dissipated bleariness. With great precision Horthy says, “It was someone else you saw at Karakorum, Dr. Mordecai.”
“You weren’t there last night?”
“It was someone else.”
Shadrach chooses to take the crude hint, and decides not to press the issue. “My apologies. Tell me about Buckmaster. Why do they think he’s the one?”
“His eccentric behavior last night was suspicious.”
“Is that all?”
“You’ll have to ask the Security people for the rest.”
“Was he found near Mangu’s apartment at the time of the murder?”
“I couldn’t say, Dr. Mordecai.”
“All right.” On the surveillance screens, in repellent close-up, the image of a girl vomiting. It is the crimson puke of organ-rot. in glistening lifelike color. Horthy seems almost to smile at the sight, as though nothing horrid is alien to him. Shadrach says, “One more thing. You saw Mangu fall, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And then you notified Genghis Mao?”
“I notified the guards in the lobby, first.”
“Of course.”
“And then I went to the seventy-fifth floor. The Security people had already sealed it, but I was able to enter.”
“Going straight to the Chairman’s bedroom?”
Horthy nods. “Which was under triple guard. I obtained admittance only by insisting on my ministerial privileges.”
“Was Genghis Mao awake?”
“Yes. Reading PRC reports.”
“What would you say was his general state of health?”
“Quite good. He looked pale and weak, but not unusually so. considering that he had just had a major operation. He greeted me and saw from my expression that something was wrong, and asked me, and I told him what had happened.”
“Which was?”
“What else?” Horthy says snappishly. “That Mangu had fallen from his window, naturally.”
“Is that how you put it? ‘Mangu has fallen from his window’ ?”
“Something like that.”
“Did you talk about his being pushed, maybe?”
“Why are you interrogating me. Dr. Mordecai?”
“Please. This is important. I need to know whether the Khan arrived at the idea that Mangu was assassinated by himself, or if you inadvertently put the suggestion in his mind.”
Horthy stares balefully up at Shadrach Mordecai. “I told him exactly what I saw: Mangu falling from the window. I drew no conclusions about how it had happened. Even if someone had thrown him. how much could I have seen. 400 meters below? At that distance Mangu himself was no bigger than a speck against the sky. a doll. I didn’t recognize him until he had nearly reached the ground.” A disconcerting gleam appears in Horthy’s eyes. He leans close to Shadrach and says, almost crooning, “He looked so serene. Dr. Mordecai! Floating there above me—his eyes wide open, his hair straight out behind him. his lips drawn back—he was smiling, I think. Smiling! And then he hit.”
Ionigylakis, who has evidently been eavesdropping, interjects abruptly, “That’s strange. If someone had just flung him from the window, would he have looked so cheerful?”
Shadrach shakes his head. “I doubt that Mangu was conscious at all by the time Horthy could see his face. That serene expression was probably just acceleration stupor.”
“Perhaps,” Horthy says crisply.
“Go on,” Shadrach tells him. “You informed the Khan that Mangu had fallen. Then what happened?”
“He sat up so sharply that I thought he would break the medical machinery all around him. He turned red in the face and began to perspire. His breath came in gasps. Oh. it was very bad. Dr. Mordecai. I thought he would die from overexcitement. He started to wave his arms, to shout about assassins—suddenly he sank back against the pillow, he put his hands to his chest—”
“You thought he would die from overexcitement.” Shadrach says. “But it never occurred to you beforehand that it might be unwise to trouble him with news like that, in his state of health.”
“One doesn’t think clearly at a time like that.”
“One ought to, if one is in a position of high responsibility.”
“One’s judgment is not always perfect,” Horthy retorts. “Especially when one has nearly been killed oneself a few minutes before by a body plummeting from the sky. And when one realizes that the dead man is such an important figure in the government, in fact the viceroy. And when one suspects that his death may be murder, assassination, the beginning of revolution. And when—”
“All right,” Shadrach says. “All right. He managed to survive the unnecessary shock. But what you did was very risky, Horthy. Worse: it was dumb. Extremely dumb.” He frowns. “You think there’s some conspiracy, eh?”
“I have no idea. Clearly it’s a possibility.”
“So is suicide, though.” Ionigylakis says, “You think so. Shadrach?”
“Avogadro certainly does.”
“But Avogadro’s men have arrested Buckmaster.”
“I’ve heard. The poor crazy devil. I pity him.” Gonchigdorge is still jabbing buttons. The screens are full of weirdly distorted faces, as though the spy-eye lenses are getting much too close to their targets. Donna Labile, from the far side of the room, calls to Horthy, who gives Shadrach a frosty incomprehensible look and stalks away. Shadrach is altogether unable to make sense out of Horthy, but suddenly it does not matter. Nothing matters. This room is a madhouse, through which he wanders, barechested and feeling a bit of a chill, baffled by all the frantic activity around him. He feels too sane, too mundane, for this environment. The screens of Surveillance Vector One suddenly go blank, and then grow bright with wild jagged streaks of blue and green and red. General Gonchigdorge. in his heavy-handed pursuit of conspirators, has broken something. “Ficifolia!” the general yells. “Get Frank Ficifolia up here! The machine has to be repaired!”
Ficifolia is already present, though. Cursing softly, he shoulders through the crowd toward the enthroned general. As he passes Shadrach he pauses to murmur, “Your friend Buckmaster’s in the quiz room right now. I suppose you won’t weep over that.”
“On the contrary. Buckmaster wasn’t in his right mind when he was hassling me last night. And now he’ll pay for it.”
“Avogadro himself is interrogating, I hear.”
“Avogadro thinks it was suicide.”
“So do I,” Ficifolia says, and keeps going.
Shadrach has had enough. He heads for the interface. As he reaches it, he looks back at the turmoil, the blaring jags of color on the screens. Gonchigdorge shouting like an angry child. Horthy and Labile deep in some mysterious intense discussion punctuated by fierce Italo-Magyar gesticulations. Ionigylakis looming above everyone and announcing his confusions in booming tones, Frank Ficifolia squatting by an open panel to insert a long slender wrench into a turbulent spaghetti of bubble-circuits. While somewhere in the depths of this huge building Avogadro, who does not believe a murder was committed, is nevertheless preparing to administer torture to Roger Buckmaster, suspected of having committed that murder, even though Buckmaster almost certainly could not have been capable of murdering anyone this morning. And in the great bedchamber of the Khan that old. old man, his near-fatal episode of shock all but over according to the tickety-tock pulsations and quivers running through Shadrach Mordecai’s body, lies in bed scheming with calm crazy dedication how best to make sacred the memory of the departed viceroy and how to destroy his supposed slayers. Enough, enough. More than enough: too much. Shadrach requests exit from the interface, which opens with blessed promptness and admits him to the holding chamber, and then, quickly, to his own apartment on the far side.
How peaceful it is here! Crowfoot is awake and out of the hammock; she has just taken a shower, and stands, bare, beautiful, in the middle of the room, drying herself, droplets of moisture still glittering on her smooth sleek skin. “I’m going to be awfully late getting to the lab today,” she says casually. “What’s been happening?”
“Everything. Mangu’s dead, the Khan nearly had apoplexy when he found out, they’ve arrested Buckmaster, a general purge of subversives has been ordered. Horthy is—”
“Wait,” she cries, blinking. “Dead? Mangu? How?”
“Fell out the window. Pushed or jumped.”
“Oh.” A little sucking intake of breath. “Oh, God. When was this?”
“Half an hour ago, more or less.”
She crumples her towel into a ball, hurls it into a corner, begins to pace the room, striding like a splendid perplexed tigress. Whirling on him, she demands. “Which window?”
“His own,” he tells her, mystified by the drift of her questions.
“Fell from the top of the building? His body must have been smashed to a ruin.”
“I imagine so. But what—”
“Oh, Shadrach! My project!”
“What about it?”
“This sounds terribly inhuman, doesn’t it? But what will happen to my project now? Without Mangu—”
“Oh,” he says dully. “I hadn’t considered that.”
“He was intended for—”
“Yes. Don’t say it.”
“It’s awful of me to have that reaction.”
“Was the entire project built about Mangu as the specific particular one—the recipient—?”
“Not necessarily. But—oh, to hell with the project!” She crouches near the floor, folding her arms across her breasts. She is shivering. “I don’t understand. Who would kill Mangu. anyway? What’s going on? Is there going to be a revolution, Shadrach?”
“Mangu may have killed Mangu,” he tells her. “No one knows yet. Avogadro’s men didn’t detect any sign of forced entry to his apartment.”
“Yet they’ve arrested Buck master?”
“Because of the nonsense he was spouting last night in Karakorum, I suppose: But they haven’t arrested Horthy, who was being just as subversive. Horthy’s right next door in Surveillance Vector One. He was the one who brought the news about Mangu to Genghis Mao. Damn near killed him with the shock of it.”
Nikki, looking up somberly, says, “Perhaps that’s what he wanted to do.”
Things grow calmer. The messages from the interior of Genghis Mao indicate that the medical crisis is past. The Khan is healing, the morning’s upheavals will have no serious impact. Here at noon, Shadrach Mordecai at last dresses for the day, neutral gray doctor-clothes. He feels rootless, disoriented: too much sleep, after all these months of insomnia, the nap in Nikki’s arms in Karakorum and then the long, emergency-interrupted spell in the hammock, and now his mind is foggy. But he’ll fake it through the day, somehow.
Heading for his office, he passes as usual through Surveillance Vector One. much quieter now than it was fifteen or twenty minutes before. The high panjandrums are gone, Gonchigdorge and Horthy and Labile and that crowd, and no one remains except three underlings, a Citpol man and a couple of Avogadro’s lieutenants, who stare moodily at the jumpy mosaic flitting across the hundreds of screens. Their eyes glazed. Informational overkill, it is. They see so much that they know not what they see.
Bypassing Committee Vector One—Shadrach has no yearning to intrude on the politicos this tense morning—he takes the long route to his office, via Genghis Mao’s own vacant office and the Khan’s majestic dining room. It is, as always, comforting to be among his familiar talismans, his books, his collection of medical instruments. He wanders from case to case, getting himself together. Picks up his devaricator, sinister splay-elbowed forceps used to pry open wounds. Thinks of Mangu. splattered against the terrazzo pavement; banishes the thought. Examines the hacksaw with which some eighteenth-century surgeon accomplished amputations. Thinks of Genghis Mao, livid, beady-eyed, ordering mass arrests. Off with their heads! That may be next; why not? Fondles a fifteenth-century anatomical doll from Bologna, elegant ivory homunculus, female—what is the feminine of homunculus, he wonders? Homuncula? Feminacula?—the belly and breasts of which lift away at the push of a fingertip, revealing heart, lungs, abdominal organs, even a fetus crouching in the uterus like a kangaroo in the pouch. And the books, oh, yes. the precious musty books, formerly owned by great doctors of Vienna, Montreal. Savannah. New Orleans. Valesco de Taranta’s Philonium Pharmaceuticum et Cheirurgicum, 1599: Martin Schurig’s Gynaecologia Historico-Medica, 1730. rich with details of defloration, debauchery, penis captivus, and other wonders! Here is old Rudolf Virchow’s Die Cellularpathologie, 1852, proclaiming that every living organism is “a cell state in which every state is a citizen,” that a disease is “a conflict of citizens in this state, brought about by the action of external forces.” Aux armes, ciloyens! What would Virchow have said of transplanted livers, borrowed lungs? He’d call them hired mercenaries, no doubt: the Hessians of medical metaphor. At least they fight fair in the cellular wars, no sneaky defenestrations, no snipers on the overpass. And this huge book: Grootdoorn, iconographia Mediealis. luscious old engravings—see. here. Saints Cosmas and Damian in this sixteenth-century portrait, shown grafting the dead Moor’s leg to the cancer victim’s stump. Prophetic. Transplant surgery circa A.D. 500, performed posthumously, no less, by the saintly surgeons. If I ever find the original of that print, Shadrach thinks. I’ll give it to Warhaftig for Hanukkah.
He spends half an hour updating Genghis Mao’s medical file, dictating a report on the liver operation. adding a postscript about this morning’s brief alarm. Someday the printout of the Genghis Mao dossier is going to be a medical classic, ranking with the Smith Papyrus and the Fahrica, and he toils conscientiously over it, preparing his place in the history of his art. Just as he finishes the account of the current episode Katya Lindman phones him.
“Can you come down to the Talos lab?” she asks. “I’d like to show you our latest mock-up.”
“I suppose so. You’ve heard about Mangu?”
“Of course.”
“You don’t sound very concerned.”
“What was Mangu? Mangu was an absence. Now the absence is absent. His death was more of an event than his whole existence.”
“I doubt that he saw things that way himself.”
“You are so compassionate, Shadrach,” she says in the flat voice that he knows she reserves for mockery. “I wish I shared your love of mankind.”
“I’ll see you in fifteen minutes, Katya.”
Her laboratory is on the ninth floor of the Grand Tower, a cluttered place festooned with cables, connectors, buses, coaxials, crates of bubble-chips, enough electronic gear to throttle a brontosaur. Out of this chaotic maze of materiel Lindman materializes, coming toward him in her customary slashing headlong stride. She is all business. very much the bustling woman of science. She wears a white blouse, a lavender lab jacket open at the throat, a short brown tweed skirt. The effect is severe, stark, and harsh. Mitigated neither by the bare thighs nor the tightness of the skirt. Lindman is not a woman who works at projecting sexuality. Nor does she need to, with Shadrach; she holds a malign physical authority over him, the source of which he does not comprehend. He feels always when he is with her that he must be on guard—against what, he is not sure.
“Look.” she says triumphantly, with a broad sweeping gesture.
He follows her pointing arm halfway across the laboratory to the one uncluttered place, a kind of dais, on which, under a dazzling spotlight, the current working model of the Genghis Mao automaton sits enthroned. A single thick yellow-and-red cable runs to it from a power unit. The automaton is half again as large as life, a massive imitation of the Chairman, plastic skin over metal armature; the face is an altogether convincing replica, the shoulders and chest look plausibly human, but below the diaphragm the robot Genghis Mao is an incomplete thing of struts and wires and bare circuitry, skinless and lacking even the internal mechanical musculature that fills its upper half. As Shadrach watches, the ersatz Chairman extends its right arm toward him and, with an altogether human impatient little flip of its hand, beckons him forward.
“Go ahead.” Katya Lindman says.
He advances. When he is three or four meters away he halts and waits. The robot’s head slowly turns to face him. The lips pull back in a cruel grimace—no, a grin, unmistakably a grin, the bleak and terrible grin of Genghis Mao. that self-congratulatory smirk, slowly forming at the corners of the leathery cheeks, a regal grin, a monstrous overbearing grin. Imperceptibly the features rearrange themselves, without apparent transition; the robot now is scowling, and the wrath of Genghis Mao darkens the room. Off with their heads, yes, indeed. And then a smile. A cold one, for there is no other sort from Genghis Mao. but yet it is a smile that puts one at one’s ease, Arctic though it is; and the smile of the robot is an uncanny replica of the smile of Genghis Mao. And, lastly, the wink, the famous wink of the Khan, that sly, disarming dip of the eyelid that cancels all the seeming ferocity, that communicates a redeeming sense of perspective, of self-appraisal: Don’t take me so seriously, friend, I may not be the megalomaniac you think I am. And then, just as the wink has achieved its effect and the terror that Genghis Mao can generate with a glance has subsided. the face returns to its original expression, icy, remote, alien.
