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“Pardon me?”
“In Ulan Bator. Waiting for the ax to fall. If I were you I’d go into hiding, Shadrach.”
“So you know about—”
“I know, yes. Several people know. What are you going to do?”
“I’m not sure. Stay put for a while, I guess, and think things over. There’s a lot I have to evaluate.”
“Evaluate? Evaluate? Of course you’d say something like that!” Ficifolia, though plainly trying to be unobtrusive, ca
Shadrach shakes his head. “Hiding’s not my style.”
“Is dying?”
“Not particularly. But I won’t hide. That’s not like me. My people are done with hiding. The old Underground Railway days are gone forever.”
“ ‘My people are done with hiding,’ ” Ficifolia says, doing his mimicry in a harsh, high-pitched tone. “Jesus. Jesus! Maybe I underestimated you. Maybe you’re as crazy as the rest of us here. Genghis Mao has fingered you for doom, has put the old black spot right on you, and you put racial pride ahead of survival. Bravo, Shadrach! Very noble. Very dumb.”
“Where could I go? The Khan’s spy gadgets will find me anywhere. Gadgets that you helped invent for him.”
“There are ways.”
“Disguise myself? Paint my skin white? Wear a blond wig?”
“You could disappear the way Buckmaster did.”
Shadrach coughs. “I don’t need sick jokes just now, Frank.”
“I’m not talking about organ farms. I mean disappearing. We disappeared Buckmaster. We could do the same for you.”
“Buckmaster isn’t dead?”
“Alive and well. We altered the master perso
“Where is he?”
“That’s not important now. What’s important is that we saved him, and we can save you.”
“We? Who’s ‘we’?”
“That’s not important either.”
“Should I believe any of this, Frank?”
“No. Of course not. It’s all lies. Actually, I’m spying for the Khan, trying to trap you. Jesus, Shadrach, use your head! Do you think I’m trying to get you into trouble? You are in trouble. I’m risking my ass to—”
“All right. Let me think, Frank.”
“So think, already.”
“You do your hocus-pocus and I disappear. Now I’m without an identity and without a profession. Can I practice medicine if I’m hiding out in some cellar? I was meant to be a doctor. Maybe not Genghis Mao’s doctor, but somebody’s doctor, Frank. If I’m not working at that, I’m nobody, I’m a waste of skills and talent. In my own eyes I’ll be nothing. Is there any point in disappearing into that kind of life? And how long would I have to stay underground? If I’m going to spend the rest of my life locked up in a cellar, I wouldn’t be a whole lot worse off letting Genghis Mao use me for Avatar. Better off, maybe.”
“You might have to stay out of sight until Genghis Mao dies. But afterward—”
“Afterward? What afterward? Genghis Mao might live another hundred years. I won’t.”
“He won’t either,” Ficifolia says, strange undertones of menace in his voice. Shadrach stares in wonder. He is not sure he believes a syllable of this. Buckmaster alive? Ficifolia a subversive? Conspiratorial plans afoot to do away with the Khan? Questions bubble in him, and he hungers for a thousand answers; but from the corner of his eye he perceives men in gray and blue, two Citpols on patrol. So there will be no answers now. Ficifolia sees them too and nods ever so slightly and says, “Think about it. Do your evaluating, let me know what you warn to do.”
“All right.”
“Have you ever seen the river as high us this?”
“It was an unusually snowy winter,” Shadrach says, as the Citpols saunter past.
18
May 27, 2012
Troublesome dreams last night. Mouth full of cobwebs, fingers growing roots. Premonitions of death. Is the end of Genghis Mao drawing nigh? Morbid, morbid, morbid. To wake and not to be there. The great crash of silence. It pains me. To wake and not to be there. To have gone somewhere else. Or to have gone nowhere at all, the big black hole. The longer one lives, the tighter one grasps life: living becomes a habit that’s hard to break. How empty the world would be if I were to leave it. Poof, no more Genghis Mao. Such a vacuum! Tornado. Hurricane.
Oh I love to dwell on death.
Dying can be so instructive. Dying can tell you so very much about your true self. Dying can even be pleasurable, I imagine. Dying as a healing experience, yes, the battered old body gladly giving up the ghost! For some people, I imagine, it is the sharpest ecstasy they have ever known.
Oh I dread it.
How shall I die, what will the ma