The Dosadi Experiment

Frank Herbert

1969

In memory of Babe because she knew how to enjoy life.

When the Calebans first sent us one of their giant metal "beachballs," communicating through this device to offer the use of jumpdoors for interstellar travel, many in the ConSentiency covertly began to exploit this gift of the stars for their own questionable purposes.  Both the "Shadow Government" and some among the Gowachin people saw what is obvious today:  that instantaneous travel across unlimited space involved powers which might isolate subject populations in gross numbers.

This observation at the beginning of the Dosadi Experiment came long before Saboteur Extraordinary Jorj X. McKie discovered that visible stars of our universe were either Calebans or the manifestations of Calebans in ConSentient space.  (See Whipping Star, an account of McKie's discovery thinly disguised as fiction.)

What remains pertinent here is that McKie, acting for his Bureau of Sabotage, identified the Caleban called "Fannie Mae" as the visible star Thyone.  This discovery of the Thyone-Fannie Mae identity ignited new interest in the Caleban Question and thus contributed to the exposure of the Dosadi Experiment -- which many still believe was the most disgusting use of Sentients by Sentients in ConSentient history.  Certainly, it remains the most gross psychological test of Sentient Beings ever performed, and the issue of informed consent has never been settled to everyone's satisfaction.

-From the first public account, the Trial of Trials

Justice belongs to those who claim it, but let the claimant beware lest he create new injustice by his claim and thus set the bloody pendulum of revenge into its inexorable motion.

-Gowachin aphorism

"Why are you so cold and mechanical in your Human relationships?"

Jorj X. McKie was to reflect on that Caleban question later.  Had she been trying to alert him to the Dosadi Experiment and to what his investigation of that experiment might do to him?  He hadn't even known about Dosadi at the time and the pressures of the Caleban communications trance, the accusatory tone she took, had precluded other considerations.

Still, it rankled.  He didn't like the feeling that he might be a subject of her research into Humans.  He'd always thought of that particular Caleban as his friend -- if one could consider being friendly with a creature whose visible manifestation in this universe was a fourth-magnitude yellow sun visible from Central Central where the Bureau of Sabotage maintained its headquarters.  And there was inevitable discomfort in Caleban communication.  You sank into a trembling, jerking trance while they made their words appear in your consciousness.

But his uncertainty remained:  had she tried to tell him something beyond the plain content of her words?

When the weather makers kept the evening rain period short, McKie liked to go outdoors immediately afterward and stroll in the park enclosure which BuSab provided for its employees on Central Central.  As a Saboteur Extraordinary, McKie had free run of the enclosure and he liked the fresh smells of the place after a rain.

The park covered about thirty hectares, deep in a well of Bureau buildings.  It was a scrambling hodgepodge of plantings cut by wide paths which circled and twisted through specimens from every inhabited planet of the known universe.  No care had been taken to provide a particular area for any sentient species.  If there was any plan to the park it was a maintenance plan with plants requiring similar conditions and care held in their own sectors.  Giant Spear Pines from Sasak occupied a knoll near one corner surrounded by mounds of Flame Briar from Rudiria.  There were bold stretches of lawn and hidden scraps of lawn, and some flat stretches of greenery which were not lawns at all but mobile sheets of predatory leaf imprisoned behind thin moats of caustic water.

Rain-jeweled flowers often held McKie's attention to the exclusion of all else.  There was a single planting of Lilium Grossa, its red blossoms twice his height casting long shadows over a wriggling carpet of blue Syringa, each miniature bloom opening and closing at random like tiny mouths gasping for air.

Sometimes, floral perfumes stopped his progress and held him in a momentary olfactory thralldom while his eyes searched out the source.  As often as not, the plant would be a dangerous one -- a flesh eater or poison-sweat variety.  Warning signs in flashing Galach guarded such plantings.  Sonabarriers, moats, and force fields edged the winding paths in many areas.

McKie had a favorite spot in the park, a bench with its back to a fountain where he could sit and watch the shadows collect across fat yellow bushes from the floating islands of Tandaloor.  The yellow bushes thrived because their roots were washed in running water hidden beneath the soil and renewed by the fountain. Beneath the yellow bushes there were faint gleams of phosphorescent silver enclosed by a force field and identified by a low sign:

"Sangeet Mobilus, a blood-sucking perennial from Bisaj.  Extreme danger to all sentient species.  Do not intrude any portion of your body beyond the force field."

As he sat on the bench, McKie thought about that sign.  The universe often mixed the beautiful and the dangerous.  This was a deliberate mixture in the park.  The yellow bushes, the fragrant and benign Golden Iridens, had been mingled with Sangeet Mobilus.  The two supported each other and both thrived.  The ConSentient government which McKie served often made such mixtures . . . sometimes by accident.

Sometimes by design.

He listened to the plashing of the fountain while the shadows thickened and the tiny border lights came on along the paths.  The tops of the buildings beyond the park became a palette where the sunset laid out its final display of the day.

In that instant, the Caleban contact caught him and he felt his body slip into the helpless communications trance.  The mental tendrils were immediately identified -- Fannie Mae. And he thought, as he often had, what an improbable name that was for a star entity.  He heard no sounds, but his hearing centers responded as to spoken words, and the inward glow was unmistakable.  It was Fannie Mae, her syntax far more sophisticated than during their earliest encounters.

"You admire one of us," she said, indicating his attention on the sun which had just set beyond the buildings.

"I try not to think of any star as a Caleban," he responded.  "It interferes with my awareness of the natural beauty."

"Natural?  McKie, you don't understand your own awareness, nor even how you employ it!"

That was her beginning -- accusatory, attacking, unlike any previous contact with this Caleban he'd thought of as friend.  And she employed her verb form with new deftness, almost as though showing off, parading her understanding of his language.

"What do you want, Fannie Mae?"

"I consider your relationships with females of your species.  You have entered marriage relationships which number more than fifty.  Not so?"

"That's right.  Yes.  Why do you . . ."

"I am your friend, McKie.  What is your feeling toward me?"

He thought about that.  There was a demanding intensity in her question.  He owed his life to this Caleban with an improbable name.  For that matter, she owed her life to him.  Together, they'd resolved the Whipping Star threat.  Now, many Calebans provided the jumpdoors by which other beings moved in a single step from planet to planet, but once Fannie Mae had held all of those jumpdoor threads, her life threatened through the odd honor code by which Calebans maintained their contractual obligations.  And McKie had saved her life.  He had but to think about their past interdependence and a warm sense of camaraderie suffused him.

Fannie Mae sensed this.

"Yes, McKie, that is friendship, is love.  Do you possess this feeling toward Human female companions?"

Her question angered him.  Why was she prying?  His private sexual relationships were no concern of hers!

"Your love turns easily to anger," she chided.

"There are limits to how deeply a Saboteur Extraordinary can allow himself to be involved with anyone."

"Which came first, McKie -- the Saboteur Extraordinary or these limits?"

Her response carried obvious derision.  Had he chosen the Bureau because he was incapable of warm relationships?  But he really cared for Fannie Mae!  He admired her . . . and she could hurt him because he admired her and felt . . . felt this way.

He spoke out of his anger and hurt.

"Without the Bureau there'd be no ConSentiency and no need for Calebans."

"Yes, indeed.  People have but to look at a dread agent from BuSab and know fear."

It was intolerable, but he couldn't escape the underlying warmth he felt toward this strange Caleban entity, this being who could creep unguarded into his mind and talk to him as no other being dared.  If only he had found a woman to share that kind of intimacy . . .

And this was the part of their conversation which came back to haunt him.  After months with no contact between them, why had she chosen that moment just three days before the Dosadi crisis burst upon the Bureau?  She'd pulled out his ego, his deepest sense of identity.  She'd shaken that ego and then she'd skewered him with her barbed question:

"Why are you so cold and mechanical in your Human relationships?"

Her irony could not be evaded.  She'd made him appear ridiculous in his own eyes.  He could feel warmth, yes . . . even love, for a Caleban but not for a Human female.  This unguarded feeling he held for Fannie Mae had never been directed at any of his marital companions.  Fannie Mae had aroused his anger, then reduced his anger to verbal breast-beating, and finally to silent hurt.  Still, the love remained.

Why?

Human females were bed partners.  They were bodies which used him and which he used.  That was out of the question with this Caleban.  She was a star burning with atomic fires, her seat of consciousness unimaginable to other sentients.  Yet, she could extract love from him.  He gave this love freely and she knew it.  There was no hiding an emotion from a Caleban when she sent her mental tendrils into your awareness.

She'd certainly known he would see the irony.  That had to be part of her motive in such an attack.  But Calebans seldom acted from a single motive -- which was part of their charm and the essence of their most irritant exchanges with other sentient beings.

"McKie?"  Softly in his mind.

"Yes."  Angry.

"I show you now a fractional bit of my feeling toward your node."

Like a balloon being inflated by a swift surge of gas, he felt himself suffused by a projected sense of concern, of caring.  He was drowning in it . . . wanted to drown in it.  His entire body radiated this white-hot sense of protective attention.  For a whole minute after it was withdrawn, he still glowed with it.

A fractional bit?

"McKie?"  Concerned.

"Yes."  Awed.

"Have I hurt you?"

He felt alone, emptied.

"No."

"The full extent of my nodal involvement would destroy you.  Some Humans have suspected this about love."

Nodal involvement?

She was confusing him as she'd done in their first encounters.  How could the Calebans describe love as . . . nodal involvement?

"Labels depend on viewpoint," she said.  "You look at the universe through too narrow an opening.  We despair of you sometimes."

There she was again, attacking.

He fell back on a childhood platitude.

"I am what I am and that's all I am."

"You may soon learn, friend McKie, that you're more than you thought."

With that, she'd broken the contact.  He'd awakened in damp, chilly darkness, the sound of the fountain loud in his ears.  Nothing he did would bring her back into communication, not even when he'd spent some of his own credits on a Taprisiot in a vain attempt to call her.

His Caleban friend had shut him out.

We have created a monster -- enormously valuable and even useful yet extremely dangerous.  Our monster is both beautiful and terrifying.  We do not dare use this monster to its full potential, but we cannot release our grasp upon it.

-Gowachin assessment of the Dosadi experiment

A bullet went spang! against the window behind Keila Jedrik's desk, ricocheted and screamed off into the canyon street far below her office.  Jedrik prided herself that she had not even flinched.  The Elector's patrols would take care of the sniper.  The patrols which swept the streets of Chu every morning would home on the sound of the shot.  She held the casual hope that the sniper would escape back to the Rim Rabble, but she recognized this hope as a weakness and dismissed it.  There were concerns this morning far more important than an infiltrator from the Rim.

Jedrik reached one hand into the corner of early sunlight which illuminated the contact plates of her terminal in the Master Accountancy computer.  Those flying fingers -- she could almost disassociate herself from them.  They darted like insects at the waiting keys.  The terminal was a functional instrument, symbol of her status as a Senior Liaitor.  It sat all alone in its desk slot -- grey, green, gold, black, white and deadly.  Its grey screen was almost precisely the tone of her desk top.

With careful precision, her fingers played their rhythms on the keys.  The screen produced yellow numbers, all weighted and averaged at her command -- a thin strip of destiny with violence hidden in its golden shapes.

Every angel carries a sword, she thought.

But she did not really consider herself an angel or her weapon a sword.  Her real weapon was an intellect hardened and sharpened by the terrible decisions her planet required.  Emotions were a force to be diverted within the self or to be used against anyone who had failed to learn what Dosadi taught.  She knew her own weakness and hid it carefully:  she'd been taught by loving parents (who'd concealed their love behind exquisite cruelty) that Dosadi's decisions were indeed terrible.

Jedrik studied the numbers on her computer display, cleared the screen and made a new entry.  As she did this, she knew she took sustenance from fifty of her planet's Human inhabitants.  Many of those fifty would not long survive this callous jape.  In truth, her fingers were weapons of death for those who failed this test.  She felt no guilt about those she slew.  The imminent arrival of one Jorj X. McKie dictated her actions, precipitated them.

When she thought about McKie, her basic feeling was one of satisfaction.  She'd waited for McKie like a predator beside a burrow in the earth.  His name and identifying keys had been given to her by her chauffeur, Havvy, hoping to increase his value to her.  She'd taken the information and made her usual investigation.  Jedrik doubted that any other person on Dosadi could have come up with the result her sources produced:  Jorj X. McKie was an adult human who could not possibly exist.  No record of him could be found on all of Dosadi -- not on the poisonous Rim, not in Chu's Warrens, not in any niche of the existing power structure.  McKie did not exist, but he was due to arrive in Chu momentarily, smuggled into the city by a Gowachin temporarily under her control.

McKie was the precision element for which she had waited.  He wasn't merely a possible key to the God Wall (not a bent and damaged key like Havvy) but clean and certain.  She'd never thought to attack this lock with poor instruments.  There'd be one chance and only one; it required the best.

Thus fifty Dosadi Humans took their faceless places behind the numbers in her computer.  Bait, expendable.  Those who died by this act wouldn't die immediately.  Forty-nine might never know they'd been deliberately submitted to early death by her deliberate choice.  Some would be pushed back to the Rim's desperate and short existence.  Some would die in the violent battles she was precipitating.  Others would waste away in the Warrens.  For most, the deadly process would extend across sufficient time to conceal her hand in it.  But they'd been slain in her computer and she knew it.  She cursed her parents (and the others before them) for this unwanted sensitivity to the blood and sinew behind these computer numbers.  Those loving parents had taught her well.  She might never see the slain bodies, need give not another thought to all but one of the fifty; still she sensed them behind her computer display . . . warm and pulsing.

Jedrik sighed. The fifty were bleating animals staked out to lure a special beast onto Dosadi's poisonous soil.  Her fifty would create a fractional surplus which would vanish, swallowed before anyone realized their purpose.

Dosadi is sick, she thought.  And not for the first time, she wondered:  Is this really Hell?

Many believed it.

We're being punished.

But no one knew what they'd done to deserve punishment.

Jedrik leaned back, looked across her doorless office to the sound barrier and milky light of the hall.  A strange Gowachin shambled past her doorway.  He was a frog figure on some official errand, a packet of brown paper clutched in his knobby hands.  His green skin shimmered as though he'd recently come from water.

The Gowachin reminded her of Bahrank, he who was bringing McKie into her net, Bahrank who did her bidding because she controlled the substance to which he was addicted.  More fool he to let himself become an addict to anything, even to living.  One day soon Bahrank would sell what he knew about her to the Elector's spies; by then it would be too late and the Elector would learn only what she wanted him to learn when she wanted him to learn it.  She'd chosen Bahrank with the same care she'd used at her computer terminal, the same care which had made her wait for someone precisely like McKie.  And Bahrank was Gowachin.  Once committed to a project, the frog people were notorious for carrying out their orders in a precise way.  They possessed an inbred sense of order but understood the limits of law.

As her gaze traversed the office, the sparse and functional efficiency of the space filled her with quiet amusement.  This office presented an image of her which she had constructed with meticulous care.  It pleased her that she would be leaving here soon never to return, like an insect shedding its skin.  The office was four paces wide, eight long.  Twelve black metal rotofiles lined the wall on her left, dark sentinels of her methodical ways.  She had reset their locking codes and armed them to destroy their contents when the Elector's toads pried into them.  The Elector's people would attribute this to outrage, a last angry sabotage.  It would be some time before accumulating doubts would lead them to reassessment and to frustrated questions.  Even then they might not suspect her hand in the elimination of fifty Humans.  She, after all, was one of the fifty.

This thought inflicted her with a momentary sense of unfocused loss.  How pervasive were the seductions of Dosadi's power structure!  How subtle!  What she'd just done here introduced a flaw into the computer system which ruled the distribution of non-poisonous food in Dosadi's only city.  Food -- here was the real base of Dosadi's social pyramid, solid and ugly.  The flaw removed her from a puissant niche in that pyramid. She had worn the persona of Keila Jedrik-Liaitor for many years, long enough to learn enjoyment of the power system.  Losing one valuable counter in Dosadi's endless survival game, she must now live and act only with the persona of Keila Jedrik-Warlord.  This was an all-or-nothing move, a gambler's plunge.  She felt the nakedness of it.  But this gamble had begun long ago, far back in Dosadi's contrived history, when her ancestors had recognized the nature of this planet and had begun breeding and training for the individual who would take this plunge.

I am that individual, she told herself.  This is our moment.

But had they truly assessed the problem correctly?

Jedrik's glance fell on the single window which looked out into the canyon street.  Her own reflection stared back:  a face too narrow, thin nose, eyes and mouth too large.  Her hair could be an interesting black velvet helmet if she let it grow, but she kept it cropped short as a reminder that she was not a magnetic sex partner, that she must rely on her wits.  That was the way she'd been bred and trained.  Dosadi had taught her its cruelest lessons early.  She'd grown tall while still in her teens, carrying more height in her body than in her legs so that she appeared even taller when seated.  She looked down on most Gowachin and Human males in more ways than one.  That was another gift (and lesson) from her loving parents and from their ancestors.  There was no escaping this Dosadi lesson.

What you love or value will be used against you.

She leaned forward to hide her disquieting reflection, peered far down into the street.  There, that was better.  Her fellow Dosadis no longer were warm and pulsing people.  They were reduced to distant movements, as impersonal as the dancing figures in her computer.

Traffic was light, she noted.  Very few armored vehicles moved, no pedestrians.  There'd been only that one shot at her window.  She still entertained a faint hope that the sniper had escaped.  More likely a patrol had caught the fool.  The Rim Rabble persisted in testing Chu's defenses despite the boringly repetitive results.  It was desperation.  Snipers seldom waited until the day was deep and still and the patrols were scattered, those hours when even some among the most powerful ventured out.

Symptoms, all symptoms.

Rim sorties represented only one among many Dosadi symptoms which she'd taught herself to read in that precarious climb whose early stage came to climax in this room.  It was not just a thought, but more a sense of familiar awareness to which she returned at oddly reflexive moments in her life.

We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain.  We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and the strange, the reasonable and the insane.

It made some insane choices magnificently attractive.

Have I made an insane choice?

No!

The data lay clearly in her mind, facts which she could not obliterate by turning away from them.  Dosadi had been designed from a cosmic grab bag:  "Give them one of these and one of these and one of these . . ."

It made for incompatible pairings.

The DemoPol with which Dosadi juggled its computer-monitored society didn't fit a world which used energy transmitted from a satellite in geosynchrorious orbit.  The DemoPol reeked of primitive ignorance, something from a society which had wandered too far down the path of legalisms -- a law for everything and everything managed by law.  The dogma that a God-inspired few had chosen Chu's river canyon in which to build a city insulated from this poisonous planet, and that only some twenty or so generations earlier, remained indigestible.  And that energy satellite which hovered beneath the God Wall's barrier -- that stank of a long and sophisticated evolution during which something as obviously flawed as the DemoPol would have been discarded.

It was a cosmic grab bag designed for a specific purpose which her ancestors had recognized.

We did not evolve on this planet.

The place was out of phase with both Gowachin and Human.  Dosadi employed computer memories and physical files side by side for identical purposes.  And the number of addictive substances to be found on Dosadi was outrageous.  Yet this was played off against a religion so contrived, so gross in its demands for "simple faith" that the two conditions remained at constant war.  The mystics died for their "new insights" while the holders of "simple faith" used control of the addictive substances to gain more and more power.  The only real faith on Dosadi was that you survived by power and that you gained power by controlling what others required for survival.  Their society understood the medicine of bacteria, virus and brain control, but these could not stamp out the Rim and Warren Underground where jabua faith healers cured their patients with the smoke of burning weeds.

And they could not stamp out (not yet) Keila Jedrik because she had seen what she had seen.  Two by two the incompatible things ebbed and flowed around her, in the city of Chu and the surrounding Rim.  It was the same in every case:  a society which made use of one of these things could not naturally be a society which used the other.

Not naturally.

All around her, Jedrik sensed Chu with its indigestible polarities.  They had only two species:  Human and Gowachin.  Why two? Were there no other species in this universe?  Subtle hints in some of Dosadi's artifacts suggested an evolution for appendages other than the flexible fingers of Gowachin and Human.

Why only one city on all of Dosadi?

Dogma failed to answer.

The Rim hordes huddled close, always seeking a way into Chu's insulated purity.  But they had a whole planet behind them.  Granted it was a poisonous planet, but it had other rivers, other places of potential sanctuary.  The survival of both species argued for the building of more sanctuaries, many more than that pitiful hole which Gar and Tria thought they masterminded.  No . . . Chu stood alone -- almost twenty kilometers wide and forty long, built on hills and silted islands where the river slowed in its deep canyon.  At last count, some eighty-nine million people lived here and three times that number eked a short life on the Rim -- pressing, always pressing for a place in the poison-free city.

Give us your precious bodies, you stupid Rimmers!

They heard the message, knew its import and defied it.  What had the people of Dosadi done to be imprisoned here?  What had their ancestors done?  It was right to build a religion upon hate for such ancestors . . . provided such ancestors were guilty.

Jedrik leaned toward the window, peered upward at the God Wall, that milky translucence which imprisoned Dosadi, yet through which those such as this Jorj X. McKie could come at will.  She hungered to see McKie in person, to confirm that he had not been contaminated as Havvy had been contaminated.

It was a McKie she required now.  The transparently contrived nature of Dosadi told her that there must be a McKie.  She saw herself as the huntress, McKie her natural prey.  The false identity she'd built in this room was part of her bait.  Now, in the season of McKie, the underlying religious cant by which Dosadi's powerful maintained their private illusions would crumble.  She could already see the beginnings of that dissolution; soon, everyone would see it.

She took a deep breath.  There was a purity in what was about to happen, a simplification.  She was about to divest herself of one of her two lives, taking all of her awareness into the persona of that other Keila Jedrik which all of Dosadi would soon know.  Her people had kept her secret well, hiding a fat and sleazy blonde person from their fellow Dosadis, exposing just enough of that one to "X" that the powers beyond the God Wall might react in the proper design.  She felt cleansed by the fact that the disguise of that other life had begun to lose its importance.  The whole of her could begin to surface in that other place.  And McKie had precipitated this metamorphosis.  Jedrik's thoughts were clear and direct now:

Come into my trap, McKie.  You will take me higher than the palace apartments of the Council Hills.

Or into a deeper hell than any nightmare has imagined.

How to start a war?  Nurture your own latent hungers for power.  Forget that only madmen pursue power for its own sake.  Let such madmen gain power -- even you.  Let such madmen act behind their conventional masks of sanity.  Whether their masks be fashioned from the delusions of defense or the theological aura of law, war will come.

-Gowachin aphorism

The odalarm awoke Jorj X. McKie with a whiff of lemon.  For just an instant his mind played tricks on him.  He thought he was on Tutalsee's gentle planetary ocean floating softly on his garlanded island.  There were lemons on his floating island, banks of Hibiscus and carpets of spicy Alyssum.  His bowered cottage lay in the path of perfumed breezes and the lemon . . .

Awareness came.  He was not on Tutalsee with a loving companion; he was on a trained bedog in the armored efficiency of his Central Central apartment; he was back in the heart of the Bureau of Sabotage; he was back at work.

McKie shuddered.

A planet full of people could die today . . . or tomorrow.

It would happen unless someone solved this Dosadi mystery.  Knowing the Gowachin as he did, McKie was convinced of it.  The Gowachin were capable of cruel decisions, especially where their species pride was at stake, or for reasons which other species might not understand.  Bildoon, his Bureau chief, assessed this crisis the same way.  Not since the Caleban problem had such enormity crossed the ConSentient horizon.

But where was this endangered planet, this Dosadi?

After a night of sleep suppression, the briefings about Dosadi came back vividly as though part of his mind had remained at work sharpening the images.  Two operatives, one Wreave and one Laclac, had made the report.  The two were reliable and resourceful.  Their sources were excellent, although the information was sparse.  The two also were bucking for promotion at a time when Wreaves and Laclacs were hinting at discrimination against their species.  The report required special scrutiny.  No BuSab agent, regardless of species, was above some internal testing, a deception designed to weaken the Bureau and gain coup merits upon which to ride into the director's office.

However, BuSab was still directed by Bildoon, a PanSpechi in Human form, the fourth member of his creche to carry that name.  It had been obvious from Bildoon's first words that he believed the report.

"McKie, this thing could set Human and Gowachin at each others' throats."

It was an understandable idiom, although in point of fact you would go for the Gowachin abdomen to carry out the same threat.  McKie already had acquainted himself with the report and, from internal evidence to which his long association with the Gowachin made him sensitive, he shared Bildoon's assessment.  Seating himself in a grey chairdog across the desk from the director in the rather small, windowless office Bildoon had lately preferred, McKie shifted the report from one hand to the other.  Presently, recognizing his own nervous mannerism, he put the report on the desk.  It was on coded memowire which played to trained senses when passed through the fingers or across other sensitive appendages.

"Why couldn't they pinpoint this Dosadi's location?"  McKie asked.

"It's known only to a Caleban."

"Well, they'll . . ."

"The Calebans refuse to respond."

McKie stared across the desk at Bildoon.  The polished surface reflected a second image of the BuSab director, an inverted image to match the upright one.  McKie studied the reflection.  Until you focused on Bildoon's faceted eyes (how like an insect's eyes they were), this PanSpechi appeared much like a Human male with dark hair and pleasant round face.  Perhaps he'd put on more than the form when his flesh had been molded to Human shape.  Bildoon's face displayed emotions which McKie read in Human terms.  The director appeared angry.

McKie was troubled.

"Refused?"

"The Calebans don't deny that Dosadi exists or that it's threatened.  They refuse to discuss it."

"Then we're dealing with a Caleban contract and they're obeying the terms of that contract."

Recalling that conversation with Bildoon as he awakened in his apartment, McKie lay quietly thinking.  Was Dosadi some new extension of the Caleban Question?

It's right to fear what we don't understand.

The Caleban mystery had eluded ConSentient investigators for too long.  He thought of his recent conversation with Fannie Mae.  When you thought you had something pinned down, it slipped out of your grasp.  Before the Calebans' gift of jumpdoors, the ConSentiency had been a relatively slow and understandable federation of the known sentient species.  The universe had contained itself in a shared space of recognizable dimensions.  The ConSentiency of those days had grown in a way likened to expanding bubbles.  It had been linear.

Caleban jumpdoors had changed that with an explosive acceleration of every aspect of life.  Jumpdoors had been an immediately disruptive tool of power.  They implied infinite usable dimensions.  They implied many other things only faintly understood.  Through a jumpdoor you stepped from a room on Tutalsee into a hallway here on Central Central.  You walked through a jumpdoor here and found yourself in a garden on Paginui.  The intervening "normal space" might be measured in light years or parsecs, but the passage from one place to the other ignored such old concepts.  And to this day, ConSentient investigators did not understand how the jumpdoors worked.  Concepts such as "relative space" didn't explain the phenomenon; they only added to the mystery.

McKie ground his teeth in frustration.  Calebans inevitably did that to him.  What good did it do to think of the Calebans as visible stars in the space his body occupied?  He could look up from any planet where a jumpdoor deposited him and examine the night sky.  Visible stars:  ah, yes.  Those are Calebans.  What did that tell him?

                There was a strongly defended theory that Calebans were but a more sophisticated aspect of the equally mysterious Taprisiots.  The ConSentiency had accepted and employed Taprisiots for thousands of standard years.  A Taprisiot presented sentient form and size.  They appeared to be short lengths of tree trunk cut off at top and bottom and with oddly protruding stub limbs.  When you touched them they were warm and resilient.  They were fellow beings of the ConSentiency.  But just as the Calebans took your flesh across the parsecs, Taprisiots took your awareness across those same parsecs to merge you with another mind.

Taprisiots were a communications device.

But current theory said Taprisiots had been introduced to prepare the ConSentiency for Calebans.

It was dangerous to think of Taprisiots as merely a convenient means of communication.  Equally dangerous to think of Calebans as "transportation facilitators."  Look at the socially disruptive effect of jumpdoors!  And when you employed a Taprisiot, you had a constant reminder of danger:  the communications trance which reduced you to a twitching zombie while you made your call.  No . . . neither Calebans nor Taprisiots should be accepted without question.

With the possible exception of the PanSpechi, no other species knew the first thing about Caleban and Taprisiot phenomena beyond their economic and personal value.  They were, indeed, valuable, a fact reflected in the prices often paid for jumpdoor and long-call services.  The PanSpechi denied that they could explain these things, but the PanSpechi were notoriously secretive.  They were a species where each individual consisted of five bodies and only one dominant ego.  The four reserves lay somewhere in a hidden creche.  Bildoon had come from such a creche, accepting the communal ego from a creche-mate whose subsequent fate could only be imagined.  PanSpechi refused to discuss internal creche matters except to admit what was obvious on the surface:  that they could grow a simulacrum body to mimic most of the known species in the ConSentiency.

McKie felt himself overcome by a momentary pang of xenophobia.

We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

Keeping his eyes closed, McKie sat up.  His bedog rippled gently against his buttocks.

Blast and damn the Calebans!  Damn Fannie Mae!

He'd already called Fannie Mae, asking about Dosadi.  The result had left him wondering if he really knew what Calebans meant by friendship.

"Information not permitted."

What kind of an answer was that?  Especially when it was the only response he could get.

Not permitted?

The basic irritant was an old one:  BuSab had no real way of applying its "gentle ministrations" to the Calebans.

But Calebans had never been known to lie.  They appeared painfully, explicitly honest . . . as far as they could be understood.  But they obviously withheld information.  Not permitted!  Was it possible they'd let themselves be accessories to the destruction of a planet and that planet's entire population?

McKie had to admit it was possible.

They might do it out of ignorance or from some stricture of Caleban morality which the rest of the ConSentiency did not share or understand.  Or for some other reason which defied translation.  They said they looked upon all life as "precious nodes of existence."  But hints at peculiar exceptions remained.  What was it Fannie Mae had once said?

"Dissolved well this node."

How could you look at an individual life as a "node"?

If association with Calebans had taught him anything, it was that understanding between species was tenuous at best and trying to understand a Caleban could drive you insane.  In what medium did a node dissolve?

McKie sighed.

For now, this Dosadi report from the Wreave and Laclac agents had to be accepted on its own limited terms.  Powerful people in the Gowachin Confederacy had sequestered Humans and Gowachin on an unlisted planet.  Dosadi -- location unknown, but the scene of unspecified experiments and tests on an imprisoned population.  This much the agents insisted was true.  If confirmed, it was a shameful act.  The frog people would know that, surely.  Rather than let their shame be exposed, they could carry out the threat which the two agents reported:  blast the captive planet out of existence, the population and all of the incriminating evidence with it.

McKie shuddered.

Dosadi, a planet of thinking creatures -- sentients.  If the Gowachin carried out their violent threat, a living world would be reduced to blazing gases and the hot plasma of atomic particles.  Somewhere, perhaps beyond the reach of other eyes, something would strike fire against the void.  The tragedy would require less than a standard second.  The most concise thought about such a catastrophe would require a longer time than the actual event.

But if it happened and the other ConSentient species received absolute proof that it had happened . . . ahhh, then the ConSentiency might well be shattered. Who would use a jumpdoor, suspecting that he might be shunted into some hideous experiment?  Who would trust a neighbor, if that neighbor's habits, language, and body were different from his own?  Yes . . . there would be more than Humans and Gowachin at each other's throats.  These were things all the species feared.  Bildoon realized this.  The threat to this mysterious Dosadi was a threat to all.

McKie could not shake the terrible image from his mind:  an explosion, a bright blink stretching toward its own darkness.  And if the ConSentiency learned of it . . . in that instant before their universe crumbled like a cliff dislodged in a lightning bolt, what excuses would be offered for the failure of reason to prevent such a thing?

Reason?

McKie shook his head, opened his eyes.  It was useless to dwell on the worst prospects.  He allowed the apartment's sleep gloom to invade his senses, absorbed the familiar presence of his surroundings.

I'm a Saboteur Extraordinary and I've a job to do.

It helped to think of Dosadi that way.  Solutions to problems often depended upon the will to succeed, upon sharpened skills and multiple resources.  BuSab owned those resources and those skills.

McKie stretched his arms high over his head, twisted his blocky torso.  The bedog rippled with pleasure at his movements.  He whistled softly and suffered the kindling of morning light as the apartment's window controls responded.  A yawn stretched his mouth.  He slid from the bedog and padded across to the window.  The view stretched away beneath a sky like stained blue paper.  He stared out across the spires and rooftops of Central Central.  Here lay the heart of the domine planet from which the Bureau of Sabotage spread its multifarious tentacles.

He blinked at the brightness, took a deep breath.

The Bureau.  The omnipresent, omniscient, omnivorous Bureau.  The one source of unmonitored governmental violence remaining in the ConSentiency.  Here lay the norm against which sanity measured itself.  Each choice made here demanded utmost delicacy.  Their common enemy was that never-ending sentient yearning for absolutes.  And each hour of every waking workday, BuSab in all of its parts asked itself:

"What are we if we succumb to unbridled violence?"

The answer was there in deepest awareness:

"Then we are useless."

ConSentient government worked because, no matter how they defined it, the participants believed in a common justice personally achievable.  The Government worked because BuSab sat at its core like a terrible watchdog able to attack itself or any seat of power with a delicately balanced immunity.  Government worked because there were places where it could not act without being chopped off.  An appeal to BuSab made the individual as powerful as the ConSentiency.  It all came down to the cynical, self-effacing behavior of the carefully chosen BuSab tentacles.

I don't feel much like a BuSab tentacle this morning, McKie thought.

In his advancing years, he'd often experienced such mornings.  He had a personal way of dealing with this mood:  he buried himself in work.

McKie turned, crossed to the baffle into his bath, where he turned his body over to the programmed ministrations of his morning toilet.  The psyche-mirror on the bath's far wall reflected his body while it examined and adjusted to his internal conditions.  His eyes told him he was still a squat, dark-skinned gnome of a Human with red hair, features so large they suggested an impossible kinship with the frog people of the Gowachin.  The mirror did not reflect his mind, considered by many to be the sharpest legal device in the ConSentiency.

The Daily Schedule began playing to McKie as he emerged from the bath.  The DS suited its tone to his movements and the combined analysis of his psychophysical condition.

"Good morning, ser," it fluted.

McKie, who could interpret the analysis of his mood from the DS tone, put down a flash of resentment.  Of course he felt angry and concerned.  Who wouldn't under these circumstances?

"Good morning, you dumb inanimate object," he growled.  He slipped into a supple armored pullover, dull green and with the outward appearance of cloth.

The DS waited for his head to emerge.

"You wanted to be reminded, ser, that there is a full conference of the Bureau Directorate at nine local this morning, but the . . ."

"Of all the stupid . . ." McKie's interruption stopped the DS.  He'd been meaning for some time to reprogram the damned thing.  No matter how carefully you set them, they always got out of phase.  He didn't bother to bridle his mood, merely spoke the key words in full emotional spate:  "Now you hear me, machine:  don't you ever again choose that buddy-buddy conversational pattern when I'm in this mood!  I want nothing less than a reminder of that conference.  When you list such a reminder, don't even suggest remotely that it's my wish.  Understood?"

"Your admonition recorded and new program instituted, ser."  The DS adopted a brisk, matter of fact tone as it continued:  "There is a new reason for alluding to the conference."

"Well, get on with it."

McKie pulled on a pair of green shorts and matching kilt, of armored material identical to that of the pullover.

The DS continued:

"The conference was alluded to, ser, as introduction to a new datum:  you have been asked not to attend."

McKie, bending to fit his feet into self-powered racing boots, hesitated, then:

"But they're still going to have a showdown meeting with all the Gowachin in the Bureau?"

"No mention of that, ser.  The message was that you are to depart immediately this morning on the field assignment which was discussed with you.  Code Geevee was invoked.  An unspecified Gowachin Phylum has asked that you proceed at once to their home planet.  That would be Tandaloor.  You are to consult there on a problem of a legal nature."

McKie finished fitting the boots, straightened.  He could feel all of his accumulated years as though there'd been no geriatric intervention.  Geevee invoked a billion kinds of hell.  It put him on his own with but one shopside backup facility:  a Taprisiot monitor.  He'd have his own Taprisiot link sitting safely here on CC while he went out and risked his vulnerable flesh.  The Taprisiot served only one function:  to note his death and record every aspect of his final moments -- every thought, every memory. This would be part of the next agent's briefing.  And the next agent would get his own Taprisiot monitor etcetera, etcetera, etcetera . . . BuSab was notorious for gnawing away at its problems.  The Bureau never gave up.  But the astronomical cost of such a Taprisiot monitor left the operative so gifted with only one conclusion:  odds were not in his favor.  There'd be no accolades, no cemetery rites for a dead hero . . . probably not even the physical substance of a hero for private grieving.

McKie felt less and less heroic by the minute.

Heroism was for fools and BuSab agents were not employed for their foolishness.  He saw the reasoning, though.  He was the best qualified non-Gowachin for dealing with the Gowachin.  He looked at the nearest DS voder.

"Was it suggested that someone doesn't want me at that conference?"

"There was no such speculation."

"Who gave you this message?"

"Bildoon.  Verified voiceprint.  He asked that your sleep not be interrupted, that the message be given to you on awakening."

"Did he say he'd call back or ask me to call him?"

"No."

"Did Bildoon mention Dosadi?"

"He said the Dosadi problem is unchanged.  Dosadi is not in my banks, ser.  Did you wish me to seek more info . . ."

"No! I'm to leave immediately?"

"Bildoon said your orders have been cut.  In relationship to Dosadi, he said, and these are his exact words:  'The worst is probable.  They have all the motivation required.' "

McKie ruminated aloud: "All the motivation . . . selfish interest or fear. . ."

"Ser, are you inquiring of . . ."

"No, you stupid machine!  I'm thinking out loud.  People do that.  We have to sort things out in our heads, put a proper evaluation on available data."

"You do it with extreme inefficiency."

This startled McKie into a flash of anger.  "But this job takes a sentient, a person, not a machine!  Only a person can make the responsible decision.  And I'm the only agent who understands them sufficiently."

"Why not set a Gowachin agent to ferret out their . . ."

"So you've worked it out?"

"It was not difficult, even for a machine.  Sufficient clues were provided.  And since you'll get a Taprisiot monitor, the project involves danger to your person.  While I do not have specifics about Dosadi, the clear inference is that the Gowachin have engaged in questionable activity.  Let me remind McKie that the Gowachin do not admit guilt easily.  Very few non-Gowachin are considered by them to be worthy of their company and confidence.  They do not like to feel dependent upon non-Gowachin.  In fact, no Gowachin enjoys any dependent condition, not even when dependent upon another Gowachin.  This is at the root of their law."

This was a more emotionally loaded conversation than McKie had ever before heard from his DS.  Perhaps his constant refusal to accept the thing on a personal anthropomorphic basis had forced it into this adaptation.  He suddenly felt almost shy with the DS.  What it had said was pertinent, and more than that, vitally important in a particular way:  chosen to help him to the extent the DS was capable.  In McKie's thoughts, the DS was suddenly transformed into a valued confidante.

As though it knew his thoughts, the DS said:

"I'm still a machine.  You are inefficient, but as you have correctly stated you have ways of arriving at accuracy which machines do not understand.  We can only . . . guess, and we are not really programmed to guess unless specifically ordered to do so on a given occasion.  Trust yourself."

"But you'd rather I were not killed?"

"That is my program."

"Do you have any more helpful suggestions?"

"You would be advised to waste as little time us possible here.  There was a tone of urgency in Bildoon's voice."

McKie stared at the nearest voder. Urgency in Bildoon's voice? Even under the most urgent necessity, Bildoon had never sounded urgent to McKie.  Certainly, Dosadi could be an urgent matter, but . . .  Why should that sound a sour note?

"Are you sure he sounded urgent?"

"He spoke rapidly and with obvious tensions."

"Truthful?"

"The tone-spikes lead to that conclusion."

McKie shook his head.  Something about Bildoon's behavior in this matter didn't ring true, but whatever it was it escaped the sophisticated reading circuits of the DS.

And my circuits, too.

Still troubled, McKie ordered the DS to assemble a full travel kit and to read out the rest of the schedule.  He moved to the tool cupboard beside his bath baffle as the DS began reeling off the schedule.

His day was to start with the Taprisiot appointment.  He listened with only part of his attention, taking care to check the toolkit as the DS assembled it.  There were plastipiks. He handled them gently as they deserved.  A selection of stims followed.  He rejected these, counting on the implanted sense/muscle amplifiers which increased the capabilities of senior BuSab agents.  Explosives in various denominations went into the kit -- raygens, pentrates.  Very careful with these dangerous items.  He accepted multilenses, a wad of uniflesh with matching mediskin, solvos, miniputer.  The DS extruded a life-monitor bead for the Taprisiot linkage.  He swallowed it to give the bead time to anchor in his stomach before the Taprisiot appointment.  A holoscan and matching blanks were accepted, as were ruptors and comparators.  He rejected the adapter for simulation of target identities.  It was doubtful he'd have time or facilities for such sophisticated refinements.  Better to trust his own instincts.

Presently, he sealed the kit in its wallet, concealed the wallet in a pocket.  The DS had gone rambling on:

". . . and you'll arrive on Tandaloor at a place called Holy Running. The time there will be early afternoon."

Holy Running!

McKie riveted his attention to this datum.  A Gowachin saying skittered through his mind:  The Law is a blind guide, a pot of bitter water.  The Law is a deadly contest which can change as waves change.

No doubt of what had led his thoughts into that path.  Holy Running was the place of Gowachin myth.  Here, so their stories said, lived Mrreg, the monster who had set the immutable pattern of Gowachin character.

And now, McKie suspected he knew which Gowachin Phylum had summoned him.  It could be any one of five Phyla at Holy Running, but he felt certain it'd be the worst of those five -- the most unpredictable, the most powerful, the most feared.  Where else could a thing such as Dosadi originate?

McKie addressed his DS:

"Send in my breakfast.  Please record that the condemned person ate a hearty breakfast."

The DS, programmed to recognize rhetoric for which there was no competent response, remained silent while complying.

All sentient beings are created unequal.  The best society provides each with equal opportunity to float at his own level.

-The Gowachin Primary

By mid-afternoon, Jedrik saw that her gambit had been accepted.  A surplus of fifty Humans was just the right size to be taken by a greedy underling.  Whoever it was would see the possibilities of continuing -- ten here, thirty there -- and because of the way she'd introduced this flaw, the next people discarded would be mostly Humans, but with just enough Gowachin to smack of retaliation.

It'd been difficult carrying out her daily routine knowing what she'd set in motion.  It was all very well to accept the fact that you were going into danger.  When the actual moment arrived, it always had a different character.  As the subtle and not so subtle evidence of success accumulated, she felt the crazy force of it rolling over her.  Now was the time to think about her true power base, the troops who would obey her slightest hint, the tight communications linkage with the Rim, the carefully selected and trained lieutenants.  Now was the time to think about McKie slipping so smoothly into her trap.  She concealed elation behind a facade of anger.  They'd expect her to be angry.

The evidence began with a slowed response at her computer terminal.  Someone was monitoring.  Whoever had taken her bait wanted to be certain she was expendable.  Wouldn't want to eliminate someone and then discover that the eliminated someone was essential to the power structure.  She'd made damned sure to cut a wide swath into a region which could be made non-essential.

The microsecond delay from the monitoring triggered a disconnect on her telltale circuit, removing the evidence of her preparations before anyone could find it.  She didn't think there'd be that much caution in anyone who'd accept this gambit, but unnecessary chances weren't part of her plan.  She removed the telltale timer and locked it away in one of the filing cabinets, there to be destroyed with the other evidence when the Elector's toads came prying.  The lonely blue flash would be confined by metal walls which would heat to a nice blood red before lapsing into slag and ashes.

In the next stage, people averted their faces as they walked past her office doorway.

Ahhh, the accuracy of the rumor-trail.

The avoidance came so naturally:  a glance at a companion on the other side, concentration on material in one's hands, a brisk stride with gaze fixed on the corridor's ends.  Important business up there.  No time to stop and chat with Keila Jedrik today.

By the Veil of Heaven!  They were so transparent!

A Gowachin walked by examining the corridor's blank opposite wall.  She knew that Gowachin:  one of the Elector's spies.  What would he tell Elector Broey today?  Jedrik glared at the Gowachin in secret glee.  By nightfall, Broey would know who'd picked up her gambit, but it was too small a bite to arouse his avarice.  He'd merely log the information for possible future use.  It was too early for him to suspect a sacrifice move.

A Human male followed the Gowachin.  He was intent on the adjustment of his neckline and that, of course, precluded a glance at a Senior Liaitor in her office.  His name was Drayjo.  Only yesterday, Drayjo had made courting gestures, bending toward her over this very desk to reveal the muscles under his light grey coveralls.  What did it matter that Drayjo no longer saw her as a useful conquest.  His face was a wooden door, closed, locked, hiding nothing.

Avert your face, you clog!

When the red light glowed on her terminal screen, it came as anticlimax.  Confirmation that her gambit had been accepted by someone who would shortly regret it.  Communication flowed across the screen:

"Opp SD22240268523ZX."

Good old ZX!

Bad news always developed its own coded idiom.  She read what followed, anticipating every nuance:

"The Mandate of God having been consulted, the following supernumerary functions are hereby reduced.  If your position screen carries your job title with an underline, you are included in the reduction.

"Senior Liaitor."

Jedrik clenched her fists in simulated anger while she glared at the underlined words.  It was done. OppOut, the good old Double-O.  Through its pliable arm, the DemoPol, the Sacred Congregation of the Heavenly Veil had struck again.

None of her elation showed through her Dosadi controls.  Someone able to see beyond immediate gain would note presently that only Humans had received this particular good old Double-O.  Not one Gowachin there.  Whoever made that observation would come sniffing down the trail she'd deliberately left.  Evidence would accumulate.  She thought she knew who would read that accumulated evidence for Broey.  It would be Tria.  It was not yet time for Tria to entertain doubts.  Broey would hear what Jedrik wanted him to hear.  The Dosadi power game would be played by Jedrik's rules then, and by the time others learned the rules it'd be too late.

She counted on the factor which Broey labeled "instability of the masses."  Religious twaddle!  Dosadi's masses were unstable only in particular ways.  Fit a conscious justification to their innermost unconscious demands and they became a predictable system which would leap into predictable actions -- especially with a psychotic populace whose innermost demands could never be faced consciously by the individuals.  Such a populace remained highly useful to the initiates.  That was why they maintained the DemoPol with its mandate-of-God sample.  The tools of government were not difficult to understand.  All you needed was a pathway into the system, a place where what you did touched a new reality.

Broey would think himself the target of her action.  More fool he.

Jedrik pushed back her chair, stood and strode to the window hardly daring to think about where her actions would truly be felt.  She saw that the sniper's bullet hadn't even left a mark on the glass.  These new windows were far superior to the old ones which had taken on dull streaks and scratches after only a few years.

She stared down at the light on the river, carefully preserving this moment, prolonging it.

I won't look up yet, not yet.

Whoever had accepted her gambit would be watching her now.  Too late!  Too late!

A streak of orange-yellow meandered in the river current:  contaminants from the Warren factories . . . poisons.  Presently, not looking too high yet, she lifted her gaze to the silvered layers of the Council Hills, to the fluting inverted-stalagmites of the high apartments to which the denizens of Chu aspired in their futile dreams.  Sunlight gleamed from the power bulbs which adorned the apartments on the hills.  The great crushing wheel of government had its hub on those hills, but the impetus for that wheel had originated elsewhere.

Now, having prolonged the moment while anticipation enriched it, Jedrik lifted her gaze to that region above the Council Hills, to the sparkling streamers and grey glowing of the barrier veil, to the God Wall which englobed her planet in its impenetrable shell.  The Veil of Heaven looked the way it always looked in this light.  There was no apparent change.  But she knew what she had done.

Jedrik was aware of subtle instruments which revealed other suns and galaxies beyond the God Wall, places where other planets must exist, but her people had only this one planet.  That barrier up there and whoever had created it insured this isolation.  Her eyes blurred with quick tears which she wiped away with real anger at herself.  Let Broey and his toads believe themselves the only objects of her anger.  She would carve a way beyond them through that deadly veil.  No one on Dosadi would ever again cower beneath the hidden powers who lived in the sky!

She lowered her gaze to the carpet of factories and Warrens.  Some of the defensive walls were faintly visible in the layers of smoke which blanketed the teeming scramble of life upon which the city fed.  The smoke erased fine details to separate the apartment hills from the earth.  Above the smoke, the fluted buildings became more a part of sky than of ground.  Even the ledged, set-back walls of the canyon within which Chu created its sanctuary were no longer attached to the ground, but floated separate from this place where people could survive to a riper maturity on Dosadi.  The smoke dulled the greens of ledges and Rim where the Rabble waged a losing battle for survival.  Twenty years was old out there.  In that pressure, they fought for a chance to enter Chu's protective confines by any means available, even welcoming the opportunity to eat garbage from which the poisons of this planet had been removed.  The worst of Chu was better than their best, which only proved that the conditions of hell were relative.

I seek escape through the God Wall for the same reasons the Rabble seeks entrance to Chu.

In Jedrik's mind lay a graph with an undulant line.  It combined many influences:  Chu's precious food cycle and economics, Rim incursions, spots which flowed across their veiled sun, subtle planetary movements, atmospheric electricity, gravitational flows, magnetronic fluctuations, the dance of numbers in the Liaitor banks, the seemingly random play of cosmic rays, the shifting colors in the God Wall . . . and mysterious jolts to the entire system which commanded her most concentrated attention.  There could be only one source for such jolts:  a manipulative intelligence outside the planetary influence of Dosadi.  She called that force "X," but she had broken "X" into components.  One component was a simulation model of Elector Broey which she carried firmly in her head, not needing any of the mechanical devices for reading such things.  "X" and all of its components were as real as anything else on the chart in her mind.  By their interplay she read them.

Jedrik addressed herself silently to "X":

By your actions I know you and you are vulnerable.

Despite all of the Sacred Congregation's prattle, Jedrik and her people knew the God Wall had been put there for a specific purpose.  It was the purpose which pressed living flesh into Chu from the Rim.  It was the purpose which jammed too many people into too little space while it frustrated all attempts to spread into any other potential sanctuary.  It was the purpose which created people who possessed that terrifying mental template which could trade flesh for flesh . . . Gowachin or Human.  Many clues revealed themselves around her and came through that radiance in the sky, but she refused as yet to make a coherent whole out of that purpose.  Not yet.

I need this McKie!

With a Jedrik-maintained tenacity, her people knew that the regions beyond the barrier veil were not heaven or hell.  Dosadi was hell, but it was a created hell.  We will know soon . . . soon.

This moment had been almost nine Dosadi generations in preparation:  the careful breeding of a specific individual who carried in one body the talents required for this assault on "X," the exquisitely detailed education of that weapon-in-fleshly-form . . . and there'd been all the rest of it -- whispers, unremarked observations in clandestine leaflets, help for people who held particular ideas and elimination of others whose concepts obstructed, the building of a Rim-Warren communications network, the slow and secret assembly of a military force to match the others which balanced themselves at the peaks of Dosadi power . . .  All of these things and much more had prepared the way for those numbers introduced into her computer terminal.  The ones who appeared to rule Dosadi like puppets -- those ones could be read in many ways and this time the rulers, both visible and hidden, had made one calculation while Jedrik had made another calculation.

Again, she looked up at the God Wall.

You out there! Keila Jedrik knows you're there.  And you can be baited, you can be trapped.  You are slow and stupid.  And you think I don't know how to use your McKie.  Ahhh, sky demons, McKie will open your veil for me.  My life's a wrath and you're the objects of my wrath.  I dare what you would not.

Nothing of this revealed itself on her face nor in any movement of her body.

Arm yourself when the Frog God smiles.

-Gowachin admonition

McKie began speaking as he entered the Phylum sanctus:

"I'm Jorj X. McKie of the Bureau of Sabotage."

Name and primary allegiance, that was the drill.  If he'd been a Gowachin, he'd have named his Phylum or would've favored the room with a long blink to reveal the identifying Phylum tattoo on his eyelids.  As a non-Gowachin, he didn't need a tattoo.

He held his right hand extended in the Gowachin peace sign, palm down and fingers wide to show that he held no weapon there and had not extended his claws.  Even as he entered, he smiled, knowing the effect this would have on any Gowachin here.  In a rare mood of candor, one of his old Gowachin teachers had once explained the effect of a smiling McKie.

"We feel our bones age.  It is a very uncomfortable experience."

McKie understood the reason for this.  He possessed a thick, muscular body -- a swimmer's body with light mahogany skin.  He walked with a swimmer's rolling gait.  There were Polynesians in his Old Terran ancestry, this much was known in the Family Annals.  Wide lips and a flat nose dominated his face; the eyes were large and placidly brown.  There was a final genetic ornamentation to confound the Gowachin:  red hair.  He was the Human equivalent of the greenstone sculpture found in every Phylum house here on Tandaloor.  McKie possessed the face and body of the Frog God, the Giver of Law.

As his old teacher had explained, no Gowachin ever fully escaped feelings of awe in McKie's presence, especially when McKie smiled.  They were forced to hide a response which went back to the admonition which every Gowachin learned while still clinging to his mother's back.

Arm yourselves!  McKie thought.

Still smiling, he stopped after the prescribed eight paces, glanced once around the room, then narrowed his attention.  Green crystal walls confined the sanctus.  It was not a large space, a gentle oval of perhaps twenty meters in its longest dimension.  A single oval window admitted warm afternoon light from Tandaloor's golden sun.  The glowing yellow created a contrived spiritual ring directly ahead of McKie.  The light focused on an aged Gowachin seated in a brown chairdog which had spread itself wide to support his elbows and webbed fingers.  At the Gowachin's right hand stood an exquisitely wrought wooden swingdesk on a scrollwork stand.  The desk held one object:  a metal box of dull blue about fifteen centimeters long, ten wide, and six deep.  Standing behind the blue box in the servant-guard position was a red-robed Wreave, her fighting mandibles tucked neatly into the lower folds of her facial slit.

This Phylum was initiating a Wreave!

The realization filled McKie with disquiet.  Bildoon had not warned him about Wreaves on Tandaloor.  The Wreave indicated a sad shift among the Gowachin toward a particular kind of violence.  Wreaves never danced for joy, only for death.  And this was the most dangerous of Wreaves, a female, recognizable as such by the jaw pouches behind her mandibles.  There'd be two males somewhere nearby to form the breeding triad.  Wreaves never ventured from their home soil otherwise.

McKie realized he no longer was smiling.  These damnable Gowachin!  They'd' known the effect a Wreave female would have on him.  Except in the Bureau, where a special dispensation prevailed, dealing with Wreaves required the most delicate care to avoid giving offence.  And because they periodically exchanged triad members, they developed extended families of gigantic proportions wherein offending one member was to offend them all.

These reflections did not sit well with the chill he'd experienced at sight of the blue box on the swingdesk.  He still did not know the identity of this Phylum, but he knew what that blue box had to be.  He could smell the peculiar scent of antiquity about it.  His choices had been narrowed.

"I know you, McKie," the ancient Gowachin said.

He spoke the ritual in standard Galach with a pronounced burr, a fact which revealed he'd seldom been off this planet.  His left hand moved to indicate a white chairdog positioned at an angle to his right beyond the swingdesk, yet well within striking range of the silent Wreave.

"Please seat yourself, McKie."

The Gowachin glanced at the Wreave, at the blue box, returned his attention to McKie.  It was a deliberate movement of the pale yellow eyes which were moist with age beneath bleached green brows.  He wore only a green apron with white shoulder straps which outlined crusted white chest ventricles.  The face was flat and sloping with pale, puckered nostrils below a faint nose crest.  He blinked and revealed the tattoos on his eyelids.  McKie saw there the dark, swimming circle of the Running Phylum, that which legend said had been the first to accept Gowachin Law from the Frog God.

His worst fears confirmed, McKie seated himself and felt the white chairdog adjust to his body.  He cast an uneasy glance at the Wreave, who towered behind the swingdesk like a red-robed executioner.  The flexing bifurcation which served as Wreave legs moved in the folds of the robe, but without tension.  This Wreave was not yet ready to dance.  McKie reminded himself that Wreaves were careful in all matters.  This had prompted the ConSentient expression, "a Wreave bet."  Wreaves were noted for waiting for the sure thing.

"You see the blue box," the old Gowachin said.

It was a statement of mutual understanding, no answer required, but McKie took advantage of the opening.

"However, I do not know your companion."

"This is Ceylang, Servant of the Box."

Ceylang nodded acknowledgment.

A fellow BuSab agent had once told McKie how to count the number of triad exchanges in which a Wreave female had participated.

"A tiny bit of skin is nipped from one of her jaw pouches by the departing companion.  It looks like a little pockmark."

Both of Ceylang's pouches were peppered with exchange pocks.  McKie nodded to her, formal and correct, no offense intended, none given.  He glanced at the box which she served.

McKie had been a Servant of the Box once.  This was where you began to learn the limits of legal ritual.  The Gowachin words for this novitiate translated as "The Heart of Disrespect."  It was the first stage on the road to Legum.  The old Gowachin here was not mistaken:  McKie as one of the few non-Gowachin ever admitted to Legum status, to the practice of law in this planetary federation, would see that blue box and know what it contained.  There would be a small brown book printed on pages of ageless metal, a knife with the blood of many sentient beings dried on its black surface, and lastly a grey rock, chipped and scratched over the millennia in which it'd been used to pound on wood and call Gowachin courts into session.  The box and its contents symbolized all that was mysterious and yet practical about Gowachin Law.  The book was ageless, yet not to be read and reread; it was sealed in a box where it could be thought upon as a thing which marked a beginning.  The knife carried the bloody residue of many endings.  And the rock -- that came from the natural earth where things only changed, never beginning or ending.  The entire assemblage, box and contents, represented a window into the soul of the Frog God's minions.  And now they were educating a Wreave as Servant of the Box.

McKie wondered why the Gowachin had chosen a deadly Wreave, but dared not enquire.  The blue box, however, was another matter.  It said with certainty that a planet called Dosadi would be named openly here.  The thing which BuSab had uncovered was about to become an issue in Gowachin Law.  That the Gowachin had anticipated Bureau action spoke well of their information sources.  A sense of careful choosing radiated from this room.  McKie assumed a mask of relaxation and remained silent.

The old Gowachin did not appear pleased by this.  He said:

"You once afforded me much amusement, McKie."

That might be a compliment, probably not.  Hard to tell.  Even if it were a compliment, coming from a Gowachin it would contain signal reservations, especially in legal matters.  McKie held his silence.  This Gowachin was big power and no mistake.  Whoever misjudged him would hear the Courtarena's final trumpet.

"I watched you argue your first case in our courts," the Gowachin said.  "Betting was nine-point-three to three-point-eight that we'd see your blood.  But when you concluded by demonstrating that eternal sloppiness was the price of liberty . . . ahhh, that was a master stroke.  It filled many a Legum with envy.  Your words clawed through the skin of Gowachin Law to get at the meat.  And at the same time you amused us.  That was the supreme touch."

Until this moment, McKie had not even suspected that there'd been amusement for anyone in that first case.  Present circumstances argued for truthfulness from the old Gowachin, however.  Recalling that first case, McKie tried to reassess it in the light of this revelation.  He remembered the case well.  The Gowachin had charged a Low Magister named Klodik with breaking his most sacred vows in an issue of justice.  Klodik's crime was the release of thirty-one fellow Gowachin from their primary allegiance to Gowachin Law and the purpose of that was to qualify the thirty-one for service in BuSab.  The hapless prosecutor, a much-admired Legum named Pirgutud, had aspired to Klodik's position and had made the mistake of trying for a direct conviction.  McKie had thought at the time that the wiser choice would've been to attempt discrediting the legal structure under which Klodik had been arraigned.  This would have thrown judgment into the area of popular choice, and there'd been no doubt that Klodik's early demise would've been popular.  Seeing this opening, McKie had attacked the prosecutor as a legalist, a stickler, one who preferred Old Law.  Victory had been relatively easy.

When it had come to the knife, however, McKie had found himself profoundly reluctant.  There'd been no question of selling Pirgutud back to his own Phylum.  BuSab had needed a non-Gowachin Legum . . . the whole non-Gowachin universe had needed this.  The few other non-Gowachin who'd attained Legum status were all dead, every last one of them in the Courtarena.  A current of animosity toward the Gowachin worlds had been growing.  Suspicion fed on suspicion.

Pirgutud had to die in the traditional, the formal, way.  He'd known it perhaps better than McKie.  Pirgutud, as required, had bared the heart area beside his stomach and clasped his hands behind his head.  This extruded the stomach circle, providing a point of reference.

The purely academic anatomy lessons and the practice sessions on lifelike dummies had come to deadly focus.

"Just to the left of the stomach circle imagine a small triangle with an apex at the center of the stomach circle extended horizontally and the base even with the bottom of the stomach circle.  Strike into the lower outside corner of this triangle and slightly upward toward the midline."

About the only satisfaction McKie had found in the event was that Pirgutud had died cleanly and quickly with one stroke.  McKie had not entered Gowachin Law as a "hacker."

What had there been in that case and its bloody ending to amuse the Gowachin?  The answer filled McKie with a profound sense of peril.

The Gowachin were amused at themselves because they had so misjudged me!  But I'd planned all along for them to misjudge me.  That was what amused them!

Having provided McKie with a polite period for reflection, the old Gowachin continued:

"I'd bet against you, McKie.  The odds, you understand?  You delighted me nonetheless.  You instructed us while winning your case in a classic manner which would've done credit to the best of us.  That is one of the Law's purposes, of course:  to test the qualities of those who choose to employ it.  Now what did you expect to find when you answered our latest summons to Tandaloor?"

The question's abrupt shift almost caught McKie by surprise.

I've been too long away from the Gowachin, he thought. I can't relax even for an instant.

It was almost a palpable thing:  if he missed a single beat of the rhythms in this room, he and an entire planet could fall before Gowachin judgment.  For a civilization which based its law on the Courtarena where any participant could be sacrificed, anything was possible.  McKie chose his next words with life-and-death care.

"You summoned me, that is true, but I came on official business of my Bureau.  It's the Bureau's expectations which concern me."

"Then you are in a difficult position because you're also a Legum of the Gowachin Bar subject to our demands.  Do you know me?"

This was a Magister, a Foremost-Speaker from the "Phylum of Phylums," no doubt of it.  He was a survivor in one of the most cruel traditions known to the sentient universe.  His abilities and resources were formidable and he was on his home ground.  McKie chose the cautious response.

"On my arrival I was told to come to this place at this time.  That is what I know."

The least thing that is known shall govern your acts.

This was the course of evidence for the Gowachin.  McKie's response put a legal burden on his questioner.

The old Gowachin's hands clutched with pleasure at the level of artistry to which this contest had risen.  There was a momentary silence during which Ceylang gathered her robe tightly and moved even closer to the swingdesk.  Now, there was tension in her movements.  The Magister stirred, said:

"I have the disgusting honor to be High Magister of the Running Phylum, Aritch by name."

As he spoke, his right hand thrust out, took the blue box, and dropped it into McKie's lap.  "I place the binding oath upon you in the name of the book!"

As McKie had expected, it was done swiftly.  He had the box in his hands while the final words of the ancient legal challenge were ringing in his ears.  No matter the ConSentient modifications of Gowachin Law which might apply in this situation, he was caught in a convoluted legal maneuvering.  The metal of the box felt cold against his fingers.  They'd confronted him with the High Magister.  The Gowachin were dispensing with many preliminaries.  This spoke of time pressures and a particular assessment of their own predicament.  McKie reminded himself that he was dealing with people who found pleasure in their own failures, could be amused by death in the Courtarena, whose most consummate pleasure came when the currents of their own Law were changed artistically.

McKie spoke with the careful formality which ritual required if he were to emerge alive from this room.

"Two wrongs may cancel each other.  Therefore, let those who do wrong do it together.  That is the true purpose of Law."

Gently, McKie released the simple swing catch on the box, lifted the lid to verify the contents.  This must be done with precise attention to formal details.  A bitter, musty odor touched his nostrils as the lid lifted.  The box held what he'd expected:  the book, the knife, the rock.  It occurred to McKie then that he was holding the original of all such boxes.  It was a thing of enormous antiquity -- thousands upon thousands of standard years.  Gowachin professed the belief that the Frog God had created this box, this very box, and its contents as a model, the symbol of "the only workable Law."

Careful to do it with his right hand, McKie touched each item of the box in its turn, closed the lid and latched it.  As he did this, he felt that he stepped into a ghostly parade of Legums, names imbedded in the minstrel chronology of Gowachin history.

Bishkar who concealed her eggs . . .

Kondush the Diver . . .

Dritaik who sprang from the marsh and laughed at Mrreg . . .

Tonkeel of the hidden knife . . .

McKie wondered then how they would sing about him.  Would it be McKie the blunderer?  His thoughts raced through review of the necessities.  The primary necessity was Aritch.  Little was known about this High Magister outside the Gowachin Federation, but it was said that he'd once won a case by finding a popular bias which allowed him to kill a judge.  The commentary on this coup said Aritch "embraced the Law in the same way that salt dissolves in water."  To the initiates, this meant Aritch personified the basic Gowachin attitude toward their Law:  "respectful disrespect."  It was a peculiar form of sanctity.  Every movement of your body was as important as your words.  The Gowachin made it an aphorism.

"You hold your life in your mouth when you enter the Courtarena."

They provided legal ways to kill any participant -- judges, Legums, clients . . .  But it must be done with exquisite legal finesse, with its justifications apparent to all observers, and with the most delicate timing.  Above all, one could kill in the arena only when no other choice offered the same worshipful disrespect for Gowachin Law.  Even while changing the Law, you were required to revere its sanctity.

When you entered the Courtarena, you had to feel that peculiar sanctity in every fiber.  The forms. . . the forms . . . the forms . . .  With that blue box in his hands, the deadly forms of Gowachin Law dominated every movement, every word.  Knowing McKie was not Gowachin-born, Aritch was putting time pressures on him, hoping for an immediate flaw.  They didn't want this Dosadi matter in the arena.  That was the immediate contest.  And if it did get to the arena . . . well, the crucial matter would be selection of the judges.  Judges were chosen with great care.  Both sides maneuvered in this, being cautious not to intrude a professional legalist onto the bench.  Judges could represent those whom the Law had offended.  They could be private citizens in any number satisfactory to the opposing forces.  Judges could be (and often were) chosen for their special knowledge of a case at hand.  But here you were forced to weigh the subtleties of prejudgment.  Gowachin Law made a special distinction between prejudgment and bias.

McKie considered this.

The interpretation of bias was:  "If I can rule for a particular side I will do so."

For prejudgment:  "No matter what happens in the arena I will rule for a particular side."

Bias was permitted, but not prejudgment.

Aritch was the first problem, his possible prejudgments, his bias, his inborn and most deeply conditioned attitudes.  In his deepest feelings, he would look down on all non-Gowachin legal systems as "devices to weaken personal character through appeals to illogic, irrationality, and to ego-centered selfishness in the name of high purpose."

If Dosadi came to the arena, it would be tried under modified Gowachin Law.  The modifications were a thorn in the Gowachin skin.  They represented concessions made for entrance into the ConSentiency.  Periodically, the Gowachin tried to make their Law the basis for all ConSentient Law.

McKie recalled that a Gowachin had once said of ConSentient Law:

"It fosters greed, discontent, and competitiveness not based on excellence but on appeals to prejudice and materialism."

Abruptly, McKie remembered that this was a quotation attributed to Aritch, High Magister of the Running Phylum.  Were there even more deeply hidden motives in what the Gowachin did here?

Showing signs of impatience, Aritch inhaled deeply through his chest ventricles, said:

"You are now my Legum.  To be convicted is to go free because this marks you as enemy of all government.  I know you to be such an enemy, McKie."

"You know me," McKie agreed.

It was more than ritual response and obedience to forms, it was truth.  But it required great effort for McKie to speak it calmly.  In the almost fifty years since he'd been admitted to the Gowachin Bar, he'd served that ancient legal structure four times in the Courtarena, a minor record among the ordinary Legums.  Each time, his personal survival had been in the balance.  In all of its stages, this contest was a deadly battle.  The loser's life belonged to the winner and could be taken at the winner's discretion.  On rare occasions, the loser might be sold back to his own Phylum as a menial.  Even the losers disliked this choice.

Better clean death than dirty life.

The blood-encrusted knife in the blue box testified to the more popular outcome.  It was a practice which made for rare litigation and memorable court performances.

Aritch, speaking with eyes closed and the Running Phylum tattoos formally displayed, brought their encounter to its testing point.

"Now McKie, you will tell me what official matters of the Bureau of Sabotage bring you to the Gowachin Federation."

Law must retain useful ways to break with traditional forms because nothing is more certain than that the forms of Law remain when all justice is gone.

-Gowachin aphorism

He was tall for a Dosadi Gowachin, but fat and ungroomed.  His feet shuffled when he walked and there was a permanent stoop to his shoulders.  A flexing wheezing overcame his chest ventricles when he became excited.  He knew this and was aware that those around him knew it.  He often used this characteristic as a warning, reminding people that no Dosadi held more power than he, and that power was deadly.  All Dosadi knew his name:  Broey.  And very few misinterpreted the fact that he'd come up through the Sacred Congregation of the Heavenly Veil to his post as chief steward of Control:  The Elector.  His private army was Dosadi's largest, most efficient, and best armed.  Broey's intelligence corps was a thing to invoke fear and admiration.  He maintained a fortified suit atop his headquarters building, a structure of stone and plasteel which fronted the main arm of the river in the heart of Chu.  Around this core, the twisting walled fortifications of the city stepped outward in concentric rings.  The only entrance to Broey's citadel was through a guarded Tube Gate in a subbasement, designated TG One.  TG One admitted the select of the select and no others.

In the forenoon, the ledges outside Broey's windows were a roosting place for carrion birds, who occupied a special niche on Dosadi.  Since the Lords of the Veil forbade the eating of sentient flesh by sentient, this task devolved upon the birds.  Flesh from the people of Chu and even from the Rim carried fewer of the planet's heavy metals.  The carrion birds prospered.  A flock of them strutted along Broey's ledge, coughing, squawking, defecating, brushing against each other with avian insolence while they watched the outlying streets for signs of food.  They also watched the Rim, but it had been temporarily denied to them by a sonabarrier.  Bird sounds came through a voder into one of the suite's eight rooms.  This was a yellow-green space about ten meters long and six wide occupied by Broey and two Humans.

Broey uttered a mild expletive at the bird noise.  The confounded creatures interfered with clear thinking.  He shuffled to the window and silenced the voder.  In the sudden quiet he looked out at the city's perimeter and the lower ledges of the enclosing cliffs.  Another Rim foray had been repulsed out there in the night.  Broey had made a personal inspection in a convoy of armored vehicles earlier.  The troops liked it that he occasionally shared their dangers.  The carrion birds already had cleaned up most of the mess by the time the armored column swept through..  The flat back structure of Gowachin, who had no front rib cage, had been easily distinguishable from the white framework which had housed Human organs.  Only a few rags of red and green flesh had marked where the birds had abandoned their feast when the sonabarriers herded them away.

When he considered the sonabarriers, Broey's thoughts grew hard and clear.  The sonabarriers were one of Gar's damned affectations!  Let the birds finish it.

But Gar insisted a few bodies be left around to make the point for the Rim survivors that their attacks were hopeless.

The bones by themselves would be just as effective.

Gar was bloody minded.

Broey turned and glanced across the room past his two Human companions.  Two of the walls were taken up by charts bearing undulant squiggles in many colors.  On a table at the room's center lay another chart with a single red line.  The line curved and dipped, ending almost in the middle of the chart.  Near this terminus lay a white card and beside it stood a Human male statuette with an enormous erection which was labeled "Rabble."  It was a subversive, forbidden artifact of Rim origin.  The people of the Rim knew where their main strength lay:  breed, breed, breed . . .

The Humans sat facing each other across the chart.  They fitted into the space around them through a special absorption.  It was as though they'd been initiated into the secrets of Broey's citadel through an esoteric ritual both forbidding and dangerous.

Broey returned to his chair at the head of the table, sat down, and quietly continued to study his companions.  He experienced amusement to feel his fighting claws twitch beneath their finger shields as he looked at the two.  Yes -- trust them no more than they trusted him.  They had their own troops, their own spies -- they posed real threat to Broey but often their help was useful.  Just as often they were a nuisance.

Quilliam Gar, the Human male who sat with his back to the windows, looked up as Broey resumed his seat.  Gar snorted, somehow conveying that he'd been about to silence the voder himself.

Damned carrion birds! But they were useful . . . useful.

The Rim-born were always ambivalent about the birds.

Gar rode his chair as though talking down to ranks of the uninformed.  He'd come up through the educational services in the Convocation before joining Broey.  Gar was thin with an inner emaciation so common that few on Dosadi gave it any special notice.  He had the hunter's face and eyes, carried his eighty-eight years as though they were twice that.  Hairline wrinkles crawled down his cheeks.  The bas-relief of veins along the backs of his hands and the grey hair betrayed his Rim origins, as did a tendency to short temper.  The Labor Pool green of his clothing fooled very few, his face was that well known.

Across from Gar sat his eldest daughter and chief lieutenant, Tria.  She'd placed herself there to watch the windows and the cliffs.  She'd also been observing the carrion birds, rather enjoying their sounds.  It was well to be reminded here of what lay beyond the city's outer gates.

Tria's face held too much brittle sharpness to be considered beautiful by any except an occasional Gowachin looking for an exotic experience or a Warren laborer hoping to use her as a step out of peonage.  She often disconcerted her companions by a wide-eyed, cynical stare.  She did this with an aristocratic sureness which commanded attention.  Tria had developed the gesture for just this purpose.  Today, she wore the orange with black trim of Special Services, but without a brassard to indicate the branch.  She knew that this led many to believe her Broey's personal toy, which was true but not in the way the cynical supposed.  Tria understood her special value:  she possessed a remarkable ability to interpret the vagaries of the DemoPol.

Indicating the red line on the chart in front of her, Tria said, "She has to be the one.  How can you doubt it?"  And she wondered why Broey continued to worry at the obvious.

"Keila Jedrik," Broey said.  And again:  "Keila Jedrik."

Gar squinted at his daughter.

"Why would she include herself among the fifty who . . ."

"She sends us a message," Broey said.  "I hear it clearly now."  He seemed pleased by his own thoughts.

Gar read something else in the Gowachin's manner.

"I hope you're not having her killed."

"I'm not as quick to anger as are you Humans," Broey said.

"The usual surveillance?" Gar asked.

"I haven't decided.  You know, don't you, that she lives a rather celibate life?  Is it that she doesn't enjoy the males of your species?"

"More likely they don't enjoy her," Tria said.

"Interesting.  Your breeding habits are so peculiar."

Tria shot a measuring stare at Broey.  She wondered why the Gowachin had chosen to wear black today.  It was a robe-like garment cut at a sharp angle from shoulders to waist, clearing his ventricles.  The ventricles revolted her and Broey knew this.  The very thought of them pressing against her . . .  She cleared her throat.  Broey seldom wore black; it was the happy color of priestly celebrants.  He wore it, though, with a remoteness which suggested that thoughts passed through his mind which no other person could experience.

The exchange between Broey and Tria worried Gar.  He could not help but feel the oddity that each of them tried to present a threatening view of events by withholding some data and coloring other data.

"What if she runs out to the Rim?" Gar asked.

Broey shook his head.

"Let her go.  She's not one to stay on the Rim."

"Perhaps we should have her picked up," Gar said.

Broey stared at him, then:

"I've gained the distinct impression that you've some private plan in mind.  Are you prepared to share it?"

"I've no idea what you . . ."

"Enough!" Broey shouted.  His ventricles wheezed as he inhaled.

Gar held himself very quiet.

Broey leaned toward him, noting that this exchange amused Tria.

"It's too soon to make decisions we cannot change!  This is a time for ambiguity."

Irritated by his own display of anger, Broey arose and hurried into his adjoining office, where he locked the door.  It was obvious that those two had no more idea than he where Jedrik had gone to ground.  But it was still his game.  She couldn't hide forever.  Seated once more in his office, he called Security.

"Has Bahrank returned?"

A senior Gowachin officer hurried into the screen's view, looked up.

"Not yet."

"What precautions to learn where he delivers his cargo?"

"We know his entry gate.  It'll be simple to track him."

"I don't want Gar's people to know what you're doing."

"Understood."

"That other matter?"

"Pcharky may have been the last one.  He could be dead, too.  The killers were thorough."

"Keep searching."

Broey put down a sense of disquiet.  Some very unDosadi things were happening in Chu . . . and on the Rim.  He felt that things occurred which his spies could not uncover.  Presently, he returned to the more pressing matter.

"Bahrank is not to be interfered with until afterward."

"Understood."

"Pick him up well clear of his delivery point and bring him to your section.  I will interview him personally."

"Sir, his addiction to . . ."

"I know the hold she has on him.  I'm counting on It."