Страница 46 из 65
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 co
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.
Africa! Already the telemetered signals from Genghis Mao blur and fade as Shadrach approaches the thousand-kilometer boundary. He still picks up data, feeble clicks and bleats and pops out of the implant system, but as the plane streaks south-westward it becomes harder and harder for Shadrach to translate them into comprehensible analogues of the Chairman’s bodily processes: Genghis Mao, his kidneys and liver and pancreas, his heart and lungs, his arteries, his intestines, have become remote, are becoming unreal. And soon the signals are gone altogether, dropping below the threshold and leaving Shadrach suddenly, amazingly, alone in his own body. That crash of silence! That absence of subliminal input! He had forgotten what it was like, not to have those steady burbling pulses of information flowing through his consciousness, and in the first moments after leaving telemeter range he feels almost bereft, as if he has lost one of his major senses. Then the i
The plane is comfortable — a wide rump-gripping cushion of a seat, plenty of leg room. Probably it is about twenty years old; certainly it is pre-Virus War. Many industries have disappeared since the War, and the aircraft industry is one of them. The greatly reduced postwar population can easily make do, given a proper maintenance program, with the planes it inherited from the crowded, hectic world of the 1980s, when the old industrial economy was going through its last great period of convulsive expansion amid, paradoxically, dreadful shortages and dislocations. Not that the War and the organ-rot have brought an end to technological progress: in Shadrach’s time fusion power has rescued the world from its energy crisis, subterrene borers have created an entirely new mass-transit-tu
June 1, continued
If the ruler of the world is schizoid, doesn’t this have serious consequences for his subjects? I think not. I’ve studied history closely. Throughout all of history people have gotten the rulers they deserved, the appropriate rulers. A sovereign mirrors the spirit of his times and expresses the deepest traits of his people — Hitler, Napoleon, Attila, Augustus, Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, Genghis Khan, Robespierre: none of them accidents or anomalies, all of them organic outgrowths of the needs of the time. Even when a ruler imposes his will by conquest, as I have not, the historical imperative is at work: those people wanted to be conquered, needed to be conquered, or they would not have fallen to him. So too now. Schizoid times demand schizoid government. The people of the world are dying lingering deaths of organ-rot; an antidote exists but we do not put it into widespread distribution; the people of the world accept this situation. I define that as madness. A mad government, then, for a mad citizenry, a government that offers promises of antidotes but never delivers. Of course there isn’t enough of the Antidote to go around. But there’s some to spare. We do not give priority to expanding the supply. We offer hope but no injections, and this somehow sustains our subjects. Madness. A world that destroys itself with cloud-borne antigens is mad; one that gives itself over to an oligarchy of strangers is mad; fitting then that the oligarchs themselves are mad.