Jedrik said:
“It isn’t the first time I’ve had to reassess your conclusions. Hear me: Tria will leave Broey when she’s ready, not when he’s ready. It’s the same for anyone she serves, even Gar.”
They spoke in unison:
“Leave Gar?”
“Leave anyone. Tria serves only Tria. Never forget that. Especially don’t forget it if she comes over to us.”
The man and woman were silent.
McKie thought about what Jedrik had said. Her words were another indication that someone on Dosadi might have other than personal aims. Jedrik’s tone was unmistakable: she censured and distrusted Tria because Tria served only selfish ambition. Therefore, Jedrik (and this other pair by inference) served some unstated mutual purpose. Was it a form of patriotism they served, species-oriented? BuSab agents were always alert for this dangerous form of tribal madness, not necessarily to suppress it, but to make certain it did not explode into a violence deadly to the ConSentiency.
The white-smocked woman, after mulling her own thoughts, spoke:
“If Tria can’t be enlisted for … what I mean is, we can use her own self-serving to hold her.” She corrected herself. “Unless you believe we cannot convince her we’ll overcome Broey.” She chewed at her lip, a fearful expression in her eyes.
A shrewd look came over Jedrik’s face.
“What is it you suspect?”
The woman pointed to the chart on the table.
“Gar still shares in the major decisions. That shouldn’t be, but it is. If he …”
The man spoke with subservient eagerness.
“He has some hold on Broey!”
The woman shook her head.
“Or Broey plays a game other than the one we anticipated.”
Jedrik looked at the woman, the man, at McKie. She spoke as though to McKie, but McKie realized she was addressing the air.
“It’s a specific thing. Gar has revealed something to Broey. I know what he’s revealed. Nothing else could force Broey to behave this way.” She nodded at the chart. “We have them!”
The woman ventured a question.
“Have we done well?”
“Better than you know.”
The man smiled, then:
“Perhaps this is the time to ask if we could have larger rooms. The damn’ children are always moving the furniture. We bump …”
“Not now!”
Jedrik arose. McKie followed her example.
“Let me see the children,” Jedrik said.
The man turned to the open portal.
“Get out here, you! Jedrik wants you!”
Three children came scurrying from the other room. The woman didn’t even look at them. The man favored them with an angry glare. He spoke to Jedrik.
“They’ve brought no food into this house in almost a week.”
McKie studied the children carefully as he saw Jedrik was doing. They stood in a row just inside the room and, from their expressions, it was impossible to tell their reaction to the summons. They were two girls and a boy. The one on the right, a girl, was perhaps nine; on the left, another girl, was five or six. The boy was somewhat older, perhaps twelve or thirteen. He favored McKie with a glance. It was the glance of a predator who recognizes ready prey, but who already has eaten. All three bore more resemblance to the woman than to the man, but the parentage was obvious: the eyes, the set of the ears, nose …
Jedrik had completed her study. She gestured to the boy. “Start sending him to the second training team.”
“About time,” the woman said. “We’ll be glad to get him out of here.”
“Come along, McKie.”
In the hall, Jedrik said:
“To answer your question, they’re pretty typical.”
McKie, who had only wondered silently, swallowed in a dry throat. The petty goals of these people: to get a bigger room where they could live without bumping into furniture. He’d sensed no affection for each other in that couple. They were companions of convenience. There had been not the smallest hint of emotion for each other when they spoke. McKie found it difficult to imagine them making love, but apparently they did. They had produced three children.
Realization came like an explosion in his head. Of course they showed no emotion! What other protection did they have? On Dosadi, anything cared for was a club to beat you into somebody else’s line. And there was another thing.
McKie spoke to Jedrik’s back as they went down the stairs.
“That couple—they’re addicted to something.”
Surprisingly, Jedrik stopped, looked back up at him.
“How else do you think I hold such a pair? The substance is called dis. It’s very rare. It comes from the far mountains, far beyond the … far beyond. The Rim sends parties of children as bearers to obtain dis for me. In a party of fifty, thirty can expect to die on such a trek. Do you get the measure of it, McKie?”
Once more, they headed down the stairs.
McKie, realizing she’d taken the time to teach him another lesson about Dosadi, could only follow, stunned, while she led him into a room where technicians bleached the sun-darkened areas of his skin.
When they emerged, he no longer carried the stigma of Pylash Gate.
When the means of great violence are widespread nothing is more dangerous to the powerful than that they create outrage and injustice, for outrage and injustice will certainly ignite retaliation in kind.
—BuSab Manual
“It is no longer classifiable as rioting,” the aide said.
He was a short Gowachin with pinched features, and he looked across the room to where Broey sat facing a dead communicator. There was a map on the wall behind the aide, its colors made brilliant by harsh morning light coming in the east windows. Below the map, a computer terminal jutted from the wall. Occasionally it clicked.
Gar came into the room from the hall, peered around as though looking for someone, left.
Broey noted the intrusion, glanced at the map.
“Still no sign of where she’s gone to ground?”
“Nothing certain.”
“The one who paraded McKie through the streets …”
“Clearly an expendable underling.”
“Where did they go?”
The aide indicated a place on the map, a group of buildings in the Warrens to the northwest.
Broey stared at the blank face of his communications screen. He’d been tricked again. He knew it. That damnable Human female! Violence in the city teetered on the edge of full-scale war: Gowachin against Human. And still nothing, not even a hint at the location of Gar’s Rim stores, the blasphemous factories. It was an unstable condition which could not continue much longer.
His communications screen came alive with a report: violent fighting near Gate Twenty-One. Broey glanced at the map. That made it more than one hundred clearly defined battles between the species along an unresolved perimeter. The report spoke of new weapons and unsuccessful attempts to capture specimens.
Gate Twenty-One?
That wasn’t far from the place where McKie had been paraded through …
Several things slipped into a new relationship in Broey’s mind. He looked at his aide, who stood waiting obediently at the map.
“Where’s Gar?”
Aides were summoned, sent running. Gar was not to be found.
“Tria?”
She, too, was unavailable.
Gar’s fanatics remained neutral, but more of Jedrik’s pattern was emerging. Everything pointed to an exquisite understanding of the weakness implicit in the behavior of Gar and Tria.
And I thought I was the only one who saw that!
Broey hesitated.
Why would the God not speak to him other than to say “I am watched.”
Broey felt tricked and betrayed in his innermost being. This had a cleansing effect on his reason. He could only depend on himself. And he began to sense a larger pattern in Jedrik’s behavior. Was it possible that Jedrik share
d his goals? The possibility excited him.
He looked at the aides who’d come running with the negative information about Gar and Tria, began to snap orders.
“Get our people out of all those Warrens, except that corridor to the northeast. Reinforce that area. Everyone else fall back to the secondary walls. Let no Humans inside that perimeter. Block all gates. Get moving!”
This last was shouted as his aides hesitated.
Perhaps it already was too late. He realized now that he’d allowed Jedrik to bait and distract him. It was clear that she’d created in her mind an almost perfect simulation model of Broey. And she’d done it from a Liaitor position! Incredible. He could almost feel sorry for Gar and Tria. They were like puppets dancing to Jedrik’s strings.
I was no better.
It came over him that Jedrik’s simulation probably encompassed this very moment of realization. Admiration for her permeated him.
Superb!
Quietly, he issued orders for the sequestering of Gowachin females within the inner Graluz bastions which he’d had the foresight to prepare. His people would thank him for that.
Those who survived the next few hours.
The attack by those who want to die—this is the attack against which you cannot prepare a perfect defense.
—Human aphorism
By the third morning, McKie felt that he might have lived all of his life on Dosadi. The place demanded every element of attention he could muster.
He stood alone in Jedrik’s room, staring absently at the unmade bed. She expected him to put the place in order before her return. He knew that. She’d told him to wait here and had gone away on urgent business. He could only obey.
Concerns other than an unmade bed distracted him, though. He felt now that he understood the roots of Aritch’s fears. The Gowachin of Tandaloor might very well destroy this place, even if they knew that by doing so they blasted open that bloody region where every sentient hid his most secret fears. He could see this clearly now. How the Running Phylum expected him to avoid that monstrous decision was a more elusive matter.
There were secrets here.
McKie sensed Dosadi like a malignant organism beneath his feet, jealously keeping those secrets from him. This place was the enemy of the ConSentiency, but he found himself emotionally siding with Dosadi. It was betrayal of BuSab, of his Legum oath, everything. But he could not prevent that feeling or recognition of it. In the course of only a few generations, Dosadi had become a particular thing. Monstrous? Only if you held to your own precious myths. Dosadi might be the greatest cleansing force the ConSentiency had ever experienced.
The whole prospect of the ConSentiency had begun to sicken him. And Aritch’s Gowachin. Gowachin Law? Stuff Gowachin Law!
It was quiet in Jedrik’s room. Painfully quiet.
He knew that out on the streets of Chu there was violent warfare between Gowachin and Human. Wounded had been rushed through the training courtyard while he was there with Jedrik. Afterward, she’d taken him to her command post, a room across the hall and above Pcharky’s cage. He’d stood nearby, watched her performance as though she were a star on an entertainment circuit and he a member of the audience. It was fascinating. Broey will do this. Broey will give that order. And each time, the reports revealed how precisely she had anticipated her opponent
Occasionally, she mentioned Gar or Tria. He was able to detect the subtle difference in her treatment of that pair.
On their second night together, Jedrik had aroused his sexual appetites softly, deftly. She had treated him to a murmurous compliance, and afterward had leaned over him on an elbow to smile coldly.
“You see, McKie: I can play your game.”
Shockingly, this had opened an area of awareness within him which he’d not even suspected. It was as though she’d held up his entire previous life to devastating observation.
And he was the observer!
Other beings formed lasting relationships and operated from a secure emotional base. But he was a product of BuSab, the Gowachin … and much that had gone before. It had become increasingly obvious to him why the Gowachin had chosen him to groom for this particular role.
I was damaged and they could rebuild me the way they wanted!
Well, the Gowachin could still be surprised by what they produced. Dosadi was evidence of that. They might not even suspect what they’d actually produced in McKie.
He was bitter with a bitterness he knew must’ve been fermenting in him for years. The loneliness of his own life with its central dedication to BuSab had been brought to a head by the loneliness of this imprisoned planet. An incredible jumble of emotions had sorted themselves out, and he felt new purpose burning within him.
Power!
Ahhhh … that was how it felt to be Dosadi!
He’d turned away from Jedrik’s cold smile, pulled the blankets around his shoulder.
Thank you, loving teacher.
Such thoughts roamed through his mind as he stood alone in the room the following day and began to make the bed. After her revelation, Jedrik had resumed her interest in his memories, napping only to awaken him with more questions.
In spite of his sour outlook, he still felt it his duty to examine her behavior in every possible light his imagination could produce. Nothing about Dosadi was too absurd. He had to build a better picture of this society and its driving forces.
Before returning to Jedrik’s room, he’d made another tour of the training courtyard with her. There’d been more new weapons adapted from his kit, and he’d realized the courtyard was merely Jedrik’s testing ground, that there must be many more training areas for her followers.
McKie had not yet revealed to her that Aritch’s people might terminate Dosadi’s people with violence. She’d been centering on this at dawn. Even while they shared the tiny toilet cubicle off her room she’d pressed for answers.
For a time, McKie had diverted her with questions about Pcharky. What were the powers in that cage? At one point, he’d startled her.
“Pcharky knows something valuable he hopes to trade for his freedom.”
“How’d you know?”
“It’s obvious. I’ll tell you something else: he came here of his own free will … for whatever purpose.”
“You learn quickly, McKie.”
She was laughing at him and he glared at her.
“All right! I don’t know that purpose, but it may be that you only think you know it.”
For the briefest flicker, something dangerous glared from her eyes, then:
“Your jumpdoors have brought us many fools, but Pcharky is one of the biggest fools. I know why he came. There’ve been many like him. Now … there is only one. Broey, for all of his power, cannot search out his own Pcharky. And Keila Jedrik is the one who frustrates him.”
Too late, she realized that McKie had goaded her into this performance. How had he done that? He’d almost found out too much too soon. It was dangerous to underestimate this naive intruder from beyond the God Wall.
Once more, she’d begun probing for things he had not yet revealed. Time had protected him. Aides had come urging an early inspection of the new weapons. They were needed.
Afterward, they’d gone to the command post and then to breakfast in a Warren dining room. All through breakfast, he’d plied her with questions about the fighting. How extensive was it? Could he see some of the prisoners? Were they using the weapons built from the patterns in his kit? Were they winning?
Sometimes she merely ignored his questions. Most of her answers were short, distracted. Yes. No. No. Yes. McKie realized she was answering in monosyllables to fend him off. He was a distraction. Something important had been communicated to her and he’d missed it. Although this angered him, he tried to mask the emotion, striving to penetrate her wall of concern. Oddly, she responded when he changed his line of questioning to the parents of the three children and the conversation there.
“You started to designate a particular
place: ‘Beyond the …’ Beyond what?”
“It’s something Gar thinks I don’t know. He thinks only his death fanatics have that kind of rapport with the Rim.”
He stared at her, caught by a sudden thought. By now, he knew much about Gar and Tria. She answered his questions about them with candor, often using him openly to clarify her own thoughts. But-death fanatics?
“Are these fanatics homosexual?”
She pounced.
“How’d you know?”
“A guess.”
“What difference would it make?”
“Are they?”
“Yes.”
McKie shuddered.
She was peremptory.
“Explain!”
“When Humans for any reason go terminal where survival of their species is concerned, it’s relatively easy to push them the short step further into wanting to die.”
“You speak from historical evidence?”
“Yes.”
“Example.”
“With rare exceptions, primitive Humans of the tribal eras reserved their homosexuals as the ultimate shock troops of desperation. They were the troops of last resort, sent into battle as berserkers who expected, who wanted, to die.”
She had to have the term berserkers explained, then showed by her manner that she believed him. She considered this, then:
“What does your ConSentiency do about this susceptibility?”
“We take sophisticated care to guide all natural sexual variants into constructive survival activities. We protect them from the kinds of pressures which might tip them over into behavior destructive of the species.”
Only later had McKie realized she had not answered his question: beyond what? She’d rushed him off to a conference room where more than twenty Humans were assembled, including the two parents who’d made the chart about Tria and Gar. McKie realized he didn’t even know their names.
It put him at a disadvantage not knowing as many of these people by sight and name as he should. They, of course, had ready memories of everyone important around them and, when they used a name, often did it with such blurred movement into new subjects that he was seldom sure who had been named. He saw the key to it, though. Their memories were anchored in explicit references to relative abilities of those around them, relative dangers. And it wasn’t so much that they concealed their emotions as that they managed their emotions. Nowhere in their memories could there be any emotive clouding such as thoughts of love or friendship. Such things weakened you. Everything operated on the strict basis of quid pro quo, and you’d better have the cash ready—whatever that cash might be. McKie, pressed all around by questions from the people in the conference room, knew he had only one real asset: he was a key they might use to open the God Wall. Very important asset, but unfortunately owned by an idiot.