Shadrach in the Furnace

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 manner of my going be? I think I fear assassins most of all. To leave the world is one thing, natural and inevitable; to be sent from it is altogether other, an affront to the self, an insult to the ego. I will not be able to bear that awareness of dismissal. Or the sense of transition, the moments just before the going, the confrontation with the killer, the contemplation of loss as he moves toward me with his knife or his gun or whatever. Let it be a bomb, if it comes. Let it be instant poison in my soup. But there will be no assassins. I am guarded too well. The mistake was in not protecting Mangu the same way. Still, Mangu wasn’t Genghis Mao: his loss was not to him what my loss will be to me. The idea of dying is alien to me. I am too large of spirit, I occupy too great a place in the consciousness of mankind; the subtraction of me from the world is more than the world can accept. Certainly more than I can accept.

But why all this morbidity ? Strange, considering how healthy I feel. Tremendous surge of vitality since the aortal transplant. I thrive on surgery. I should get some sort of organ work done every week. Change kidneys the first of every month, new spleen on the fifteenth. Yes. Meanwhile, healthy though I am, death plays games with my soul as I sleep. I think that it is an amusement, a delicious sport, to toy with fantasies of death. We require some tension in our lives to relieve that unbearable onwardness of existence. That flow of event, day following day, sunrise, noon, sunset, dark, it can be crushing, it can stultify. And so. The delight of dwelling on the end of all perception, that is, the end of all things. There is joy in thinking about the dismal. Especially though not exclusively as it applies to others. There is a German term, schadenfreude, the joy of gloom, the pleasure to be had from the contemplation of the misfortunes of others. This sorry century has been the golden age of schadenfreude. We have known the ectasy of living at the end of an era, we have shared many blessed moments of decline and collapse. The shelling of the cathedrals in 1914, the English troops dying in the mud, the Soviet massacres, the first great economic disaster, the war that followed it, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the time of the assassinations, the toppling of the governments, the Virus War, the organ-rot, so much to weep about, though of course always it was others who suffered more than one’s self, which makes the weeping sweeter; nine dark decades and I have tasted them all, and why not now achieve a bit of interior distance and turn the principle inward, why not weep for the death of Genghis Mao? There is more pleasure in mourning than in dying. Let me in fantasy savor my own lamentable passing. How much I regret my going! I am my own most grief stricken mourner. I love these fantasies; I feel so exquisitely sorry for myself. But am I in fact dying ? I summon Shadrach. He tells me my morning readings. Everything normal, everything healthy. I am a phenomenon. I will not go from the world today. Long life to the Khan! Ten thousand years to the Khan!

Belá Horthy seeks him out in a corridor on one of the lower floors of the Grand Tower of the Khan and says, pretending not to be looking at him, “Frank tells me that you intend to stay here.”

“For the time being,” Shadrach says. “I need to think.”

“Thinking is useful, yes. But why do your thinking in Ulan Bator?”

“It’s where I live.”

“For the time being,” says Horthy. He swings around and looks straight at Shadrach — boldly, daringly. His wild hyperthyroid eyes arc veiled with concern. He must be one of the conspirators too, Shadrach realizes, and that doesn’t seem terribly surprising at all. Horthy says softly, “Run, Shadrach.”

“What’s the use? They’ll catch me.”

“Are you sure? They haven’t caught Buckmaster yet.”

“Aren’t you afraid to say things like that? When there might be—”

“Scanners in the walls?”

“Yes.”

“Everything gets scanned. Everything gets taped. So what? Who can run through all the tapes? The Citpols are drowning in data. Every spy-channel is choked with rivers of conspiracy, most of it insane and imaginary. There’s no filtering system to eliminate the useless noise.” Horthy winks. “Go. As Buckmaster went.”

“Useless.”

“I don’t think so. I advise running. I strongly advise running. You know, some people think better when they’re on the run.”

Horthy smiles. He takes Shadrach’s hand for a moment. As Horthy walks away, Shadrach calls after him, “Hey, are you part of it too?”

“Part of what?” Horthy asks, and laughs.

May 28, 2012

More dark dreams. I went down to Sukhe Bator Square and found they had erected a statue of me in the center of the plaza, a colossus, at least a hundred meters high, made of bronze that was already developing a green patina. My arms outspread in benediction. My face looked awful: wrinkled, cavernous, hideous, the face of a man five hundred years old. And the statue had no legs. It ended at mid-thigh, Genghis Mao on stumps, but the statue floated in mid-air, as though the legs had once been there but had been chopped away and the statue had remained at its original height. There was an old workman, sweeping up faded flowers, and I said to him, “Is Genghis Mao dead?” and he said, “Dead and gone, they sent the pieces back to Dalan-Dzadagad, and good riddance.” The pieces. They sent the pieces back. I don’t like this. There is too much death in my head these days. The game has lost its savor. I must take steps.

After breakfast I decided to make an inspection of the project laboratories. When preoccupied with death, drop in on those who would help you live forever. Wise idea. Immediately felt better. First personal visit in months. Should go more often.

Called on Phoenix first, the dainty Sarafrazi woman in charge, marvelous eyes, beautiful face. Terrified of me. Showed me her monkeys, her bubbling vats of chemicals, her pickled brains in bell jars. Optimistic forecasts from her, delivered in tense throaty voice. She’ll make me young again, so she claims. Am not so sure of that but told her to keep at it. Paralyzed with awe, she was. I thought she was almost going to kneel as I left. Went from there to Talos. Came in unannounced, but the Lindman woman cool as ice anyway. The report is that she’s Shadrach’s new lover. Can’t understand what he sees in her. Something about her mouth I don’t like, spoils her face. Looks like the mouth of some ferocious gnawing creature. She’s got a plastic Genghis Mao in her lab, very large, nothing finished below the waist, fust framework there, no legs. No legs. The Genghis Mao Memorial Statue. “Finish the legs,” I told her. She gave me a peculiar look. Told me the legs were the final job, more important now to get the internal engineering done. Knows her own mind, won’t take nonsense from me. Even if I am Chairman of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee. I Genghis II Mao IV Khan do command — no. Her robot can wink, smile, wave its arms. Gonchigdorge was with me and said, “It’s just like you, sir, a remarkable likeness,” but I can’t agree. Ingenious but mechanical. I wouldn’t want it to succeed me, I will not terminate Project Talos, not yet at any rate, but I don’t think it’s going to be able to produce what I need.

Went on to Nikki Crowfoot’s lab. Avatar. Ah! Yes!Beautiful woman, though tense, depressed, withdrawn, these days. Guilty about Shadrach, I imagine. She ought to be. But she remains a loyal servant of the Khan. Is this a good thing? “When will you be ready to make the transfer?” I asked her. She said, “It’s just a matter of months.” I felt such a surge of excitement at that that Shadrach phoned from upstairs to find out if I was all right. Told him to mind his own business. But I am his own business. Anyway, Avatar gives me hope. Soon I will put on new healthy flesh. Before the first snows come I will speak to the world with Shadrach’s lips, I will breathe the air with Shadrach’s lungs.

Entering the Project Avatar laboratory unannounced in midafternoon, Shadrach is confronted immediately by Manfred Eis, Nikki Crowfoot’s chief assistant, who emerges out of a maze of equipment and strides purposefully toward him like Thor on the warpath, halting with a crispness just short of a heel-click.

“We are very busy just now,” Eis announces, making a challenge out of it.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“’You have come because — ?”

“A routine inspection visit,” Shadrach answers mildly. “To check on progress. I haven’t been here for a while.”

In fact it is several weeks since he was last in the Avatar lab, not since just before Mangu’s death, and the rhythm of his schedule has usually brought him to each project af least once a month. But Eis hardly makes him feel welcome now. He is a cold-mannered, humorless man at best, a cliche-Teuton, stiff and square-jawed and square-shouldered and very Nordic, with frosty blue eyes, pearly teeth, long yellow hair, everything but the dueling scar. Shadrach is accustomed to Dr. Eis’s Aryan brusqueness, but today there is something new in his manner, something gratuitously hostile, almost patronizing, vaguely contemptuous, that Shadrach finds disturbing because he suspects it has to do with his own suddenly significant personal involvement in the destinies of Project Avatar.

Eis is pleased that Shadrach has been chosen. Eis is gratified. Eis thinks it altogether proper that Shadrach should be the one. That’s it. Perhaps it was Eis who actually sold Genghis Mao on the idea of selecting Shadrach. No, no, an underling like Eis would never have had access to the Chairman; but still, Eis most have rejoiced, seems still to be rejoicing right now. Shadrach does not like being gloated over. He wonders if it is possible to find some appropriate experimental use for Eis’s fine Nordic body.

Nevertheless, Shadrach is nominally in charge here, and Eis must give ground. Busy though the lab is, he will have to let Shadrach make his inspection. The place really is busy, too, frantic, all sorts of experiments with all sorts of animals under way, while electronic gear is hauled from room to room by sweating, cursing technicians, and men and women in lab smocks run around wild-eyed, brandishing sheafs of printouts — a real circus, altogether manic and comic, mad scientists at work, desperately striving to square the circle before the onrushing deadline arrives.

It makes Shadrach queasy to realize that he is the circle they must square. He is the patsy, the sucker, the victim, whose life is eventually going to be swallowed by all this equipment, and the manic tone of the current Avatar operations is entirely the result of the need to convert everything, fast, from Mangu-parameters to Shadrach-parameters. Probably a dozen people here know as much about his body, his brain-wave patterns and his neural circuitry and his serotonin levels, as he does himself. Quite likely he has been under covert scrutiny for days. (Do they steal nail parings? Hair clippings?) Shadrach wonders how many of these technicians know of the host substitution. He imagines that they all do, that they are eyeing him with secret fascination even as they rush to and fro — that they are sizing him up, comparing the authentic actual Shadrach Mordecai to the clusters of abstract and synthetic Shadrach-simulation pulsations that they have been working with. But maybe not. Apparently only a few of the Avatar people knew that Mangu was going to be the body donor in the first place, and most likely even fewer have been allowed to learn the identity of Mangu’s replacement.

Nikki, at any rate, is not caught up in the general manic mood. Summoned by Eis, she greets Shadrach quite calmly. The project, she tells him, is making steady progress. Her gaze is steady, her voice is centered and composed. “Progress,” in this laboratory, can only mean the daily process of bringing Shadrach closer to destruction, and certainly she is aware that he will put that interpretation on it; but it seems that she has decided not to feel guilty or act evasive any longer. They have already had their showdown; she has admitted that she was willing to betray her lover for the sake of Genghis Mao; now life continues — for however long — and she has her job to do. All this passes between them within the space of ninety seconds, and none of it is communicated in words, only in tone of voice and expression of eyes. Shadrach is relieved. He does not enjoy making people feel guilty; it makes him feel obscurely guilty himself. “I should look at the equipment,” Shadrach says.

“Come.”

She takes him on a guided tour. She demonstrates for him the zoo of metempsychosized animals, the latest triumphs of electronic transmigration: here is a dog with rhe soul of a raccoon, diligently dipping its dinner in a pan of wafer, and here is an eagle with a coded peacock-construct in its skull to make it strut and preen and spread its wings, and here they have slipped the essential sheepness of a sheep into a young lioness, who sits placidly munching fodder, to the probable detriment of her digestive system. All these reborn beasts have a trapped, bewildered look, as though they are being gnawed from within by some insatiable parasite, and Shadrach asks Nikki if this is going to be a characteristic of human avatars as well, if the expunged soul of the body donor will not linger as a miasma to complicate the life of his supplanter.

“We don’t think so,” Nikki says. “Remember, all the animals I’ve shown you have undergone implant codings across species lines, in fact across generic lines. A peacock is never going to be comfortable in an eagle’s body, or a sheep in a lion’s. Eventually the animal gets the hang of operating its new body, but it’ll always tend to keep reverting to the old reflex patterns.”

“Then why bother with transgeneric switches? What’s the point, other than showing off how clever you are?”

“The point is that the disparities between the implanted entity and the host are so gross that we can instantly confirm the success of the implant. If we put a spaniel’s mind into another spaniel’s body, if we put a chimp into a chimp, a goat into a goat, how do we know if we’ve accomplished anything? The goat can’t tell us. The spaniel can’t tell us.”

Shadrach frowns. “Surely the electrical pattern of one spaniel’s brain is different from another’s, and that can readily be detected. If brain-wave patterns aren’t unique to the individual, what’s your whole project all about?”

“Of course the patterns are unique,” Crowfoot says. “But we need confirmation on gross behavioral level. We have done intraspecies coding and implants, plenty of them, but the behavioral differences after the implant are too subtle to prove very much when we put one chimp into another, say, and the brainwave changes that we can detect are, for all we know, just artifacts of our own meddling. Whereas if we code a sheep and feed her into a lioness, and the lioness is thereupon transformed into a grazing animal, we have very dramatic confirmation that we’ve achieved something. Yes?”

“But it would be very much more dramatic, naturally, if the minds you were switching around were human ones. And much easier to confirm that a switch has actually been induced.”

“Naturally.”

“Only you haven’t done any of that,”

“Not yet,” Nikki says. “Next week, I think, we’ll tackle our first human implant.”

Shadrach feels a faint chill. He has managed an admirable impersonality thus far on this tour, he has carried on this conversation exactly as though his interest in Project Avatar is a purely professional one; but it is not that easy to escape an awareness of the ultimate consequences of all this painstaking research, that he and Crowfoot have begun talking of moving human minds from one body to another. He is unable to ignore the final goal of Avatar, the transmigration of tiger into gazelle: Genghis Mao is the tiger, and he himself the hapless gazelle. What becomes of the. gazelle when the tiger invades? Shadrach examines, briefly, one avenue of escape that he had not previously considered: if they can move sheep-mind to lioness-body and Genghis Mao-mind to Shadrach-body, they can just as easily move Shadrach-mind to some other body, and leave him to proceed from there. But the fantasy fades in the instant of its birth. He does not want to move to another body. He wants to keep his own. How like a dream this is, he thinks. Except that there is no awakening from it.

“How long will you do experiments in human implants,” Shadrach asks, “before you’ll be ready to — to—”

“To transplant the Chairman?”

“Yes.”

Shrugging, Nikki says, “That’s hard to answer. It depends on the problems we encounter in the early human transplants. If there are unexpectedly difficult problems of psychological adaptation, if transplant leads to psychotic freak-outs or cerebral breakdown or identity bleed-throughs or anything like that, it might be months or even years before we dare shift Genghis Mao to a new body. Our animal experiments haven’t indicated that such things are going to happen, but human minds are more complex than spaniel minds, and we have to allow for the possibility that complex minds will react in complicated ways to something as traumatic as a shift of bodies. So we’ll proceed cautiously. Unless, of course, the imminent bodily death of Genghis Mao makes an emergency mind-transplant necessary, in which case, I suppose, we’ll just have to plunge ahead and see what happens. We’re not eager to do that, of course.”

“Of course,” Shadrach echoes dryly.

“We’d much rather be orderly about it. A period of experimentation with human subjects, and then, if all goes smoothly there, we’d like to do two or three preliminary Genghis Mao transplants before we—”

“What?”

“Yes. Insert the Genghis Mao construct into several temporary host bodies, simply to find out how the Chairman reacts when transplanted, what adaptations may be required in order to—”

“And what will you do with all these extra Genghis Maos?” Shadrach asks. “It’s beautiful redundancy, I know, to keep a stockpile of them around. But if they all start giving orders at once we might—”

“Oh, no,” Crowfoot says. “We don’t intend to let the Genghis Mao material remain in any of the experimental subjects. That sort of redundancy is absolutely not wanted here. We’d expunge each subject once we were done testing him. We’d do a complete mindpick after we’ve run our tests.”

“Ah. Yes. Assuming the subject will let you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Remember, you won’t be dealing with a helpless flunky, once you’ve done your transplant. You’ll be dealing with Genghis Mao wearing a new body. You’ll be up against the dominant spirit of the age. You might have problems.”

“I doubt it,” Nikki says breezily. “We’ll take precautions. Come this way, will you?”

She leads him forward, to a vast computer bank, a wall of gray-green metal studded with incomprehensible apparatus. In here, she tells him, the coded essence of Genghis Mao is stored, everything that has been recorded so far, a nearly complete digital persona-construct that is capable of responding to stimuli precisely as the living Genghis Mao would, to a probability of seven or eight decimal places. Nikki offers to demonstrate the constructs Genghis Mao-ness with a few quick simulation runs, but Shadrach, suddenly disheartened, shows little interest; she marches him on to some of the other Avatar wonders, to which he reacts with no greater enthusiasm, and, as though at last noticing that Shadrach has ceased to pretend to be delighted by her technological miracles, she ushers him into her private office and locks the door.

They stand facing each other, less than a meter apart, and he feels sudden surprising excitement, physical, intense. The intensity astounds him. He had thought all desire for her had gone from him forever, once he discovered how she had betrayed him. But no. Still there, strong as ever. The lore of her sleek tawny body, the memory of her fragrance, the glitter of her huge piercing dark eyes. His Indian princess, Pocahontas. Sacajawea. Even now he is drawn to her, even now. He ceases to see the ingenious woman of science whose ingenuity has altogether undone him; he sees only the woman, beautiful, passionate, irresistible. He feels the pull of her body and he is sure she feels the pull of his.

It ought not to be such a surprise. Here they are, man and woman; they have been lovers for many months; they are alone, the door is locked. Why should desire not come over them, despite everything? But still, this sudden shifting of gears into the erotic mode amazes him. Somehow sex, unexpectedly obtruding itself against this background of betrayal, depression, impending doom, seems irrelevant and inappropriate, bizarre and unwelcome. He pretends he feels nothing. He makes no move.

“How are you managing, Shadrach?” she asks tenderly, after a moment. “Is it very bad?”

“I’m holding on.”

“Are you frightened?”

“A little. More angry than frightened, I guess.”

“Do you hate me?”

“I don’t hate anyone. I’m not a hater.”

“I still love you, you know.”

“Quit it, Nikki.”

“I do. That’s what’s been ripping me apart for weeks.”

The force of Crowfoot’s concern for him is like a tangible presence in the small office.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” he says.

“You do hate me.”

“No. I’m just not interested in your remorse.”

“Or my love?”

“Such that it is.”

“Such that it is.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t want my head messed up any more than it already has been.”

“What will you do, Shadrach?”

“What do you mean, what will I do?”

“You aren’t going to stay in Ulan Bator.”

“Everybody’s been telling me to run.”

“Yes.”

“It wouldn’t do any good.”

“You could save yourself,” Crowfoot tells him.

He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t get away. The whole planet’s bugged, Nikki. Watch Surveillance Vector One for fifteen minutes and you’ll realize that. You know that already. You’ve told me yourself that escape’s impossible. There’s a tracer on everyone. Anyway, it would spoil your project again if I disappeared.”

“Oh, Shadrach!”

“I mean, I’m the key man, right?”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

“You’d have to find another host for Genghis Mao. Then you’d have to recalibrate all over again. You—”

“Stop it. Please.”

“All right,” he says. “At any rate, it’s futile to try to escape from the Khan.”

“You won’t even try?”

“I won’t even try.”

Crowfoot regards him levelly for a long silent moment. Then she says, “I should feel relieved about that, I suppose.”

“Why?”

“If you won’t take responsibility for saving yourself, then I don’t have to take responsibility for — for—”

“For what’s going to happen to me if I stay here?”

“Yes.”

“That’s right. You don’t need to feel any guilt at all. I’ve had fair warning, and nevertheless I freely choose to stay and face the music. You’re absolved, Nikki. Your hands are washed of my blood.”

“Are you being sarcastic, Shadrach?”

“Not particularly.”

“I can never tell when you’re being sarcastic.”

“Not this time.” he says.

They stare at each other strangely again. He still feels that mysterious sexual tension, that grotesque and inappropriate lust. He suspects that if he reached for her and dragged her down on the carpeted floor, down between the desk and the filing cabinets, he could have her right here, right now, in her own office, one last crazy and frantic screw. Then he thinks of Eis and his colleagues running around on the other side of the locked office door, busy with their computers and their chimps, doing simulated transfers of the persona of Genghis Mao into the bodily hull of Shadrach Mordecai, and his ardor cools a little. But only a little. Nikki laughs.

“What’s funny?” he asks.

“Do you remember,” she says, “that time we spoke about the concept of you and Genghis Mao being one life system, one self-corrective information-processing unit? That was before any of this happened. Mangu was still alive, I think. I talked about how the chisel and the mallet and the stone are aspects of the sculptor, or, more precisely, that the sculptor and his tools and materials together make up a single thinking and acting entity, a single person, and how you and Genghis Mao—”

“Yes. I remember.”

“It’s going to be even truer now, won’t it? In the most literal sense. That seems awfully ironic to me. Your nervous system and his, entwined, interlocked, indistinguishable. When we spoke then, you said no, it wasn’t a true analogy, that Genghis Mao can send data to you but you can’t send it to him, so that there’s a limitation on the information flow, a discrete boundary. That’ll change, now. It’ll be impossible to tell where one of you leaves off and the other begins. But even then, I wanted to tell you that you weren’t really grasping the idea — that the marble can’t design a sculpture but is nevertheless part of the total sculpture-making system, and that you can’t feed metabolic data into Genghis Mao but are nevertheless part of the total Genghis Mao system; there is an interaction, there is a feedback relationship that links you to him and he to you, there is—” She has been talking very rapidly, a torrential flow of words. Now she halts and in an altogether different voice says, “Oh, Shadrach, why don’t you want to hide yourself?”

“I told you. It’s useless. I keep telling people that, but they don’t seem to want to believe me.”

He thinks about himself as part of the total Genghis Mao system. He considers the analogies. No doubt of it, his sensors and implants link him to the Khan in a very special way. But he is no more — and no less — important to the total Genghis Mao system than Michelangelo’s lump of marble was to the total statue-making system. Michelangelo, if he fell that a given lump of marble was no longer necessary to the needs of the total system, would casually discard it and introduce another into the system.

Nikki is trembling.

“If you won’t try to save yourself,” she says, “then nobody else can do anything for you.”

After he and Genghis Mao come to share one body, they will truly be an integrated information-processing unit. Of course, such a unit needs only one biocomputer, one brain, one mind, one self. And that self will not be the self of Shadrach Mordecai.

He says, “I know that. We’ve already discussed that. I take full responsibility.”

“Don’t you care?”

“Maybe not. Not any longer. I don’t know.”

“Shadrach—”

She starts to reach toward him, a tentative gesture, perhaps sexual, perhaps merely some sort of reflexive grab at a sinking man. He pulls back. There is a wall between them, an impermeable barrier of words and fears and doubts and hesitations and guilts. He does not mind that. He takes refuge behind that wall. But still there is that sexual pull between them, that taut hot line of erotic tension, spanning the barrier, drilling through it, eroding it, breaching it. And then the barrier is gone. He loves her, he hates her, he wants her, he loathes her. He makes a tentative gesture toward her and halts. They are like two adolescents, absurdly unsure of themselves, feinting foolishly, making silly false starts and finicky nervous withdrawals. He smiles tensely. So does she. She is obviously as conscious as he is of the minute shifts of balance that are rapidly occurring within them and between them. It is as though they are voyagers aboard an ocean liner that is struggling through turbulent, stormy waters, and they are trapped together in a tiny cabin with a massive metal safe that slides wildly about, careening across the floor with every convulsion of the waves, crashing into the walls as they jump about, threatening to crush them if they do not succeed in scampering out of its way as it bears down on them. There is something undeniably comic about their predicament, but the peril is real, too, and not at all funny. How much longer can they hold out? The safe is so heavy, the sea so rough, the cabin so small, and they are getting weary—

And suddenly they come together, embracing, grappling, mouth seeking mouth, fingers digging furiously into flesh. He is terrified by the power of the blind, irrational force that has been unleashed in him, that he has unleashed in himself. “No,” he mutters, even as he claws at her clothes, even as he pushes himself against her, even as he finds the fullness of her breasts beneath the sexless lab smock. “No,” she whimpers, seemingly equally appalled. But neither of them resists. They stumble about ridiculously, sway, topple to the floor. On the carpet, between the desk and the filing cabinet.

Neither of them undresses. Down with zipper, up with skirt; this is no tender act of love, this is not even a display of sexual athleticism, this is mere savage coupling, a desperate and unsophisticated cleaving-together of flesh. His hands slide along the smooth firm columns of her thighs and his fingers find and probe the secret slit between them, already hot and moist, and she gasps and thrusts her pelvis at him and, quickly, blindly, he drives himself into her. There is barely room for their bodies to move on the floor; she tilts herself upward, feet pointed at the ceiling, and he reaches below to grasp her buttocks, supporting her, and rams himself against her with lunatic vigor. Almost at once, so it seems to him, she comes with unfamiliar little shivers and giggles, and moments later so does he, in wild galvanic spasms that wrench a hoarse strained cry from him. Inelegantly Shadrach slumps down on her chest, exhausted, and she holds him tightly, with loving rocklike patience, as if she would be willing to hold him this way for hours or weeks, but after two or three minutes he pulls free, stunned, dazed, hardly believing what has just passed between them.

They look at each other. He blinks; so does she. There are thin faint smiles of embarrassment.

Shakily he rises. Nikki lies there, her legs lowered now but still spread wide, her rumpled skirt pushed up around her hips, her face shiny with sweat, her eyes bloodshot, unfocused. Shadrach averts his glance from her body in peculiar fastidiousness: he is not exactly repelled by the sight of her exposed loins, but somehow he does not want to look. Perhaps he is frightened by the power that that dark hairy humid cavern has over him, the primordial female chasm, irresistible, all-engulfing. At any rate he adjusts his clothes, coughs self-consciously, stoops to offer Nikki a helping hand. She shakes him off gently and gets to her feet unaided, and they stand facing each other. He has nothing to say. It is a sticky moment, but she rescues them from it by taking his hand, by giving him a warm loving smile, by pulling him toward her for a quick chaste kiss, lips lightly brushing lips, a kiss that simultaneously acknowledges the intensity of what has just taken place and brings down a curtain on it. It is time for him logo.

“Save yourself,” she whispers. “No one can do it for you.”

“I need to think about things some more.”

“Go, then. Do your thinking. I love you, Shadrach.”

He knows what he is supposed to reply to that, but the words are impossible. He squeezes her fingers instead. And swiftly leaves.