And suddenly he is in San Francisco. A toy city, white and precious, rising on formidable hills and girdled by a sparkling bay. He has never been here before. Odd how he expects famous cities to be gigantic; this one, like Jerusalem, is surprisingly small. Drop it down in Rome, in Nairobi, in crazy sprawling Istanbul, and it would vanish altogether. Surprisingly cold, too. California to him has always been a place of swimming pools and palm trees, of football games played in bright warm sunshine on wondrous January afternoons, but that California of the mind must be somewhere else, probably down by Los Angeles; San Francisco in June has a sullen late-winter feel, with sharp insistent winds and gray, clinging fogs. Even when the fog burns away in the afternoon and the city glitters in brilliant light under an intense cloudless sky, the air still carries thechill of the ocean breezes, and Shadrach huddles into his inadequate summer jacket.
There are no ancient palaces to see here, no gazelles and ostriches running wild, no medieval ramparts or baroque churches. But there are elegant streets of Victorian houses, from grand mansions down to wooden bungalows, all of them delicately ornamented with scrollwork and cornices and friezes and gables and spires and even some stained-glass windows, most of the buildings in fine preservation, survivors of fire, earthquake, insurrection, biochemical warfare, and the collapse of the United States of America itself. There are trees and shrubs everywhere, many in bloom; this city, chilly or not, is nearly as flowery as Nairobi, and he looks with delight on trees that are great blazing masses of red blossoms, on giant tree ferns and contorted wind-sculpted cypresses, on hillsides dark with fragrant groves of eucalyptus. One long day he walks clear across the city from the bay to the ocean, emerging out of a lush dreamlike park to stand at the edge of the Pacific, staring toward Mongolia. Somewhere thousands of kilometers to the northwest Genghis Mao is awakening and beginning his morning exercises. Shadrach wonders about the current kidney functions of Genghis Mao, his pulse rate, his calcium-phosphate levels, his endocrine balances, all the myriad twitching bits of information he was so accustomed to receiving. He realizes that he has begun to miss the broadcasts from Genghis Mao’s body. He misses the daily challenge of sustaining the Chairman’s indomitable but increasingly vulnerable inner mechanisms.He may even miss Genghis Mao himself. Ah, strange, dark, mysterious! Ah, the Hippocratic compulsions!
How goes it with the Khan? The Khan still lives and thrives, judging by the newspaper Shadrach buys — the first he has bothered to look at in all the weeks of his journey — which is strewn with photographs of Mangu’s funeral, held last week with Pharaonic pomp and majesty. There is Genghis Mao himself, in full mourning regalia, riding in the vast procession. There he is again, benevolently blessing the millions crammed into Sukhe Bator Square. (Millions? Well, so it says. Thousands, more likely.) And again, and again, the Khan doing this, the Khan doing that, the Khan orchestrating all the remaining energies of this bedraggled planet in a global outpouring of grief. Ulan Bator, Shadrach discovers, is to be renamed Altan Mangu, “Golden Mangu.” This seems comically excessive to Shadrach, but he supposes he will get used to the new name in time; the old one, which means “Red Hero,” has been obsolete anyway since the fall of the People’s Republic in 1995, and Genghis Mao has been thinking for years of changing it to something more appropriate. Well, Altan Mangu will do well enough, Shadrach decides. A noise in place of a noise. Pages and pages of coverage of the funereal rites! Not even a President of the United States would have received such a spread. And the funeral was last week; have they been running batches of photos like this every day since then? Probably. Probably. The funeral is the big story of the month, bigger even than the news of Mangu’s death, which happened too quickly, which lacked the linear extension in time that makes for really big news. What other news is there, anyway? That people are dying of organ-rot? That the Committee is nobly endeavoring to insure a major increase in the supplies of the Antidote, real soon now? That the Chairman’s personal physician is loose on an aimless jaunt around the world while, in some corner of his woolly skull, he plots ways to thwart the Chairman’s scheme to take possession of his body? Funeral pictures are much more interesting than any of that.
So much fuss, in an American newspaper, about a funeral in Mongolia. Shadrach finds himself thinking about the final president of the United States — someone named Williams, he thinks, or maybe Richards, at any rate a first name turned into a last name — and what sort of funeral he had. Seven mourners and a muddy grave on a rainy day, most likely. (Roberts? Edwards? The name has slipped through his memory, beyond recapture.) There still were presidents of the United States when Shadrach was a boy, even a living ex-president or two. He tries to remember who the president was when he was born. A man named Ford, wasn’t it? Yes, Ford. Most people liked Ford, Shadrach remembers. Before him there was one named Nixon, whom people did not like, and one named Kennedy, who was shot, and Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Roosevelt — resonant names, sturdy American-sounding names. Our leaders, our great men. What is the name of our leader now? Genghis II Mao IV Khan. Who would believe that, in the old United States before the Virus War? Would George Washington have believed it? Would Lincoln? The final year before the PRC took over there were seven presidents, some of them simultaneously. It used to be that the country needed thirty or forty years to run through seven presidents, but there were seven all in one year, in 1995. There used to be emperors in Rome, too, and Augustus or Hadrian would probably have been surprised at the quality and racial origin of some of them toward the end of the imperial era, the ones who were Goths and the ones who were boys and the ones who were madmen and the ones who ruled six days before their own palace guards strangled them in disgust. Well, Lincoln would have been surprised to find Americans accepting someone named Genghis II Mao IV Khan as their leader. Or maybe not. Lincoln might have believed that people get the governments they deserve, and that we must have deserved Genghis Mao. Lincoln might even have liked the gaudy old monster.
San Francisco is a fine city for walking. The scale of the place is modest and human, so that one can move from one neighborhood to another, from the mansions of Pacific Heights to the sunny fantasy-Mediterranean of the Marina, from Russian Hill to the Wharf, from the Mission to the Haight, in a single short brisk jaunt, with a constantly changing and always agreeable urban texture all the way. Neither wind nor fog nor steepness of hill is a serious handicap in such an amiable environment. And the city is alive. There are shops, restaurants, coffeehouses; the waterfront districts offer half a dozen big carpentry chapels of competing sects, a dream-death house, a den of transtemporalists; the people in the streets give the illusion of good health and high spirits, and though Shadrach knows it must be only an illusion, it is a persuasive one. The only thing wrong with San Francisco is the profusion of Citpols.
There are more policemen here than he has ever seen in any one place, more even than in Ulan Bator itself. It is as though every ninth San Franciscan has enrolled in the Citizens’ Peace Brigade. Maybe it is only a delusion of his troubled mind, or maybe the unusual vitality of this city requires a correspondingly unusual quota of policing: at any rate, there are gray-and-blue uniforms everywhere, everywhere, usually in pairs but not infrequently in clumps of three, four, five. Most of them have the mechanical insectoid look that seems to be characteristic of their kind, that makes Shadrach suspect that Citpols are not born and trained but rather are stamped out in some ghastly factory deep in the Caucasus. And they all are watching him. Watching, watching, watching — it can’t be mere paranoia. Can it? Those dull gray watchful eyes, hard, stupid, purposeful, studying him from all angles as he strides through the city? Why are they looking at him so intently? What do they want to know? They are going to arrest me soon, Shadrach tells himself. He is certain that he has been under surveillance since his departure. He is positive that Avogadro is receiving information on his movements and is filing daily reports with Genghis Mao; and — is it his own growing tension that makes it seem that way, or is the tension in Genghis Mao? — the intensity of the surveillance appears to have been increasing, from Nairobi to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to Istanbul, from Istanbul to Rome, first a casual Citpol or two glancing offhandedly at him, then more overt scrutiny, then teams of them following him about, hovering, staring, conferring, charting his movements, until, perhaps in San Francisco, perhaps not until he reaches Peking, they get the orders from the capital and make their move, dozens of them on the housetops, in doorways, on street-corners: All right, Mordecai, come quietly and you won’t get hurt—