Страница 9 из 65
Gri
“I try not to ask.”
“Doesn’t your i
“Honi soit qui mal y pense,” Mordecai says. “Doubtless he’s got a splendid sex life. Probably more active than mine.”
“You didn’t have to sleep alone last night.”
“My vocation demanded it of me.” He gestures toward the door. “Karakorum?”
“Karakorum, yes. But first I need to wash and change.”
They go to her apartment, forty stories higher in the building. All important members of Genghis Mao’s staff have lodgings in the tower; but a research-group director has far less prestige than the Chairman’s personal physician, and Crowfoot’s suite is not nearly as opulent as Shadrach Mordecai’s, just three rooms, plain furnishings, floors of common wood, no balcony, a sliver of a view. Shadrach settles into a webfoam lounger while Nikki strips and heads for the shower. Her bare body is strikingly beautiful, and desire stirs in him at the sight of her heavy dark-tipped breasts, her powerful thighs, her flat hard belly. She is long and lean, with strong shoulders, a narrow waist, sudden flaring hips, sleek muscular buttocks; a dense flood of thick black hair descends to the middle of her back. Unclothed she sheds the laboratory aura, the tense and fatigued look of the dissatisfied scientist, and becomes something primitive, barbaric, primordial — Pocahontas, Sacajawea, moon-begotten Nokomis. Once when he made such feverish comparisons when they were in bed together she became embarrassed and self-conscious, and mockingly, defensively, called him Othello and Ras Tafari and Chaka Zulu; never again has he overtly romanticized her savage ancestry, for he does not like to be twitted about his own, but the feeling persists, whenever she bares herself to him, that she is a princess of a fallen nation, high priestess of the great plains, red Amazon of the pagan night. She emerges and dons a floor-length robe of openwork golden mesh, blatantly provocative, the antithesis of her epicene lab smock. Chocolate nipples show through, hints of the blue-black wire-stiff pubic triangle, flashes of haunch and thigh. He would gladly bed her this moment, but he knows she is tired and hungry, still preoccupied with the failures of the day, not yet at all in the mood for making love, and in any case she usually dislikes afternoon couplings, preferring to let erotic tensions build through the evening. So he contents himself with a light playful kiss and an appreciative smile, and out they go, down to the depths of the tower, to the loading ramp of the Karakorum tube-train.
Karakorum lies four hundred kilometers west of Ulan Bator. Five years ago a nuclear-powered subterrene drilled a wide tu
The tube-train pulls in. Off now to Karakorum go Shadrach and Nikki.
Karakorum. Founded eight hundred years ago by Genghis Khan. Transformed into a majestic capital by Genghis’s son Ogodai. Abandoned a generation later by Genghis’s grandson Kublai, who preferred to rule from Cambaluc in China. Destroyed by Kublai Khan when his rebellious younger brother attempted to make it the seat of his revolt. Rebuilt eventually, abandoned again, allowed to fall into decay, forgotten entirely. Its site rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century by archaeologists of the Mongolian People’s Republic and the Soviet Union. And now much restored by decree of Genghis II Mao IV Khan, self-anointed successor to one ancient empire and one modern one, who wishes to remind the world of the greatness of Genghis I and to make it forget the centuries of Mongol slumber that followed the decline of the Khans.
Karakorum by night glitters with an unearthly brightness, a stu
As they pass the dream-death pavilion now, neither of them giving it more than a casual glance, Mordecai forcing the image of Katya Lindman’s bare blazing body out of his mind, Crowfoot says, “Isn’t it risky, your going this far from Ulan Bator only a few hours after he’s had major surgery?”