The Gowachin in the shadowed entry were moving excitedly into the courtyard, their attention centered on a figure sprawled near them. The figure stirred, sat up.
McKie recognized his own body there.
Jedrik!
It was an intense mutual need. The body exchange required less than an eyeblink. McKie found himself in his own familiar body, seated on cool tiles. The approaching Gowachin bombarded him with questions.
“McKie, what is this?”
“You fell through a jumpdoor!”
“Are you hurt?”
He waved the questions away, crossed his legs, and fell into the long-call trance focused on that bead in his stomach. That bead Bildoon had never expected him to use!
As it was paid to do, the Taprisiot waiting on CC enfolded his awareness. McKie rejected contact with Bildoon, made six calls through the responsive Taprisiot. The calls went to key agents in BuSab, all of them ambitious and resourceful, all of them completely loyal to the agency’s mandate. He transmitted his Dosadi information in full bursts, using the technique derived from his exchanges with Jedrik—mind-to-mind.
There were few questions and those easily answered.
“The Caleban who holds Dosadi imprisoned plays God. It’s the letter of the contract.”
“Do the Calebans approve of this?”
That question came from a particularly astute Wreave agent sensitive to the complications implicit in the fact that the Gowachin were training Ceylang, a Wreave female, as a Legum.
“The concepts of approval or disapproval are not applicable. The role was necessary for that Caleban to carry out the contract.”
“It was a game?”
The Wreave agent was outraged.
“Perhaps. There’s one thing certain: the Calebans don’t understand harmful behavior and ethics as we understand them.”
“We’ve always known that.”
“But now we’ve really learned it”
When he’s made the six calls, McKie sent his Taprisiot questing for Aritch, found the High Magister in the Running Phylum’s conference pool.
“Greetings, Client.”
McKie projected wry amusement. He sensed the Gowachin’s shock.
“There are certain things which your Legum instructs you to do under the holy seal of our relationship,” McKie said.
“You will take us into the Courtarena, then?”
The High Magister was perceptive and he was a beneficiary of Dosadi’s peculiar gifts, but he was not a Dosadi. McKie found it relatively easy to manipulate Aritch now, enlisting the High Magister’s deepest motivations. When Aritch protested against cancelling the God Wall contract, McKie revealed only the first layer of stubborn determination.
“You will not add to your Legum’s difficulties.”
“But what will keep them on Dosadi?”
“Nothing.”
“Then you will defend rather than prosecute?”
“Ask your pet Wreave,” McKie said. “Ask Ceylang.”
He broke the contact then, knowing Aritch could only obey him. The High Magister had few choices, most of them bad ones. And Gowachin Law prevented him from disregarding his Legum’s orders once the pattern of the contest was set.
McKie awoke from the call to find his Dry Head friends clustered around Jedrik. She was explaining their predicament. Yes … There were advantages to having two bodies with one purpose. McKie got to his feet. She saw him, spoke.
“My head feels better.”
“It was a near thing.” And he added:
“It still is. But Dosadi is free.”
In the classical times of several species, it was the custom of the powerful to nudge the power-counters (money or other economic tabulators, status points, etc.) into occasional violent perturbations from which the knowledgeable few profited. Human accounts of this experience reveal edifying examples of this behavior (for which, see Appendix G). Only the PanSpechi appear to have avoided this phenomenon, possibly because of creche slavery.
—Comparative History, The BuSab Text
McKie made his next series of calls from the room the Dry Heads set aside for him. It was a relatively large room reserved for Human guests and contained well-trained chairdogs and a wide bedog which Jedrik eyed with suspicion despite her McKie memories of such things. She knew the things had only a rudimentary brain, but still they were … alive.
She stood by the single window which looked out on the courtyard pool, turning when she heard McKie awaken from his Taprisiot calls.
“Suspicions confirmed,” he said.
“Will our agent friends leave Bildoon for us?” she asked
“Yes.”
She turned back to the window.
“I keep thinking how the Dosadi sky must look now … without a God Wall. As bright as this.” She nodded toward the courtyard seen through the window. “And when we get jumpdoors …”
She broke off. McKie, of course, shared such thoughts. This new intimacy required considerable adjustment.
“I’ve been thinking about your training as a Legum,” she said.
McKie knew where her thoughts had gone.
The Gowachin chosen to train him had all appeared open in their relationship. He had been told that his teachers were a select group, chosen for excellence, the best available for the task: making a Gowachin Legum out of a non-Gowachin.
A silk purse from a sow’s ear!
His teachers had appeared to lead conventional Gowachin lives, keeping the usual numbers of fertile females in family tanks, weeding the Graluz tads with necessary Gowachin abandon. On the surface of it, the whole thing had assumed a sense of the ordinary. They had introduced him to intimate aspects of their lives when he’d inquired, answered his questions with disarming frankness.
McKie’s Jedrik-amplified awareness saw this in a different light now. The contests between Gowachin phylums stood out sharply. And McKie knew now that he had not asked the right questions, that his teachers had been selected by different rules than those revealed to him at the time, that their private instructions from their Gowachin superiors contained nuances of vital importance which had been hidden from their student.
Poor Ceylang.
These were unsettling reflections. They changed his understanding of Gowachin honor, called into question all of those inadvertent comparisons he’d made between Gowachin forms and the mandate of his own BuSab. His BuSab training came in for the same questioning examination.
Why … why … why … why …
Law? Gowachin Law?
The value in having a BuSab agent as a Legum of the Gowachin had gained a new dimension. McKie saw these matters now as Jedrik had once seen through the God Wall. There existed other forces only dimly visible behind the visible screen. An unseen power structure lay out there—people who seldom appeared in public, decision makers whose slightest whim carried terrible import for countless worlds. Many places, many worlds would be held in various degrees of bondage. Dosadi had merely been an extreme case for a special purpose.
New bodies for old. Immortality. And a training ground for people who made terrible decisions.
But none of them would be as completely Dosadi as this Jedrik-amplified McKie.
He wondered where the Dosadi decision had been made. Aritch had not shared in it; that was obvious. There were others behind Aritch—Gowachin and non-Gowachin. A shadowy power group existed. It could have its seat on any world of the ConSentiency. The power merchants would have to meet occasionally, but not necessarily face to face. And never in the public eye. Their first rule was secrecy. They would employ many people who lived at the exposed fringes of their power, people to carry out shadowy commands—people such as Aritch.
And Bildoon.
What had the PanSpechi hoped to gain? A permanent hold on his creche’s ego? Of course. That … plus new bodies—Human bodies, undoubtedly, and unmarked by the stigmata of his PanSpechi origins.
Bildoon’s behavior—and Aritch’s—appeared s
o transparent now. And there’d be a Mrreg nearby creating the currents in which Aritch swam. Puppet leads to Puppet Master.
Mrreg.
That poor fool, Grinik, had revealed more than he thought.
And Bildoon.
“We have two points of entry,” McKie said.
She agreed.
“Bildoon and Mrreg. The latter is the more dangerous.”
A crease beside McKie’s nose began to itch. He scratched at it absently, grew conscious that something had changed. He stared around, found himself standing at the window and clothed in a female body.
Damn! It happened so easily.
Jedrik stared up at him with his own eyes. She spoke with his voice, but the overtones were pure Jedrik. They both found this amusing.
“The powers of your BuSab.”
He understood.
“Yes, the watchdogs of justice.”
“Where were the watchdogs when my ancestors were lured into this Dosadi trap?”
“Watchdogs of justice, very dangerous role,” he agreed.
“You know our feelings of outrage,” she said.
“And I know what it is to have loving parents.”
“Remember that when you talk to Bildoon.”
Once more, McKie found himself on the bed, his old familiar body around him.
Presently, he felt the mental tendrils of a Taprisiot call, sensed Bildoon’s awareness in contact with him. McKie wasted no time. The shadow forces were taking the bait.
“I have located Dosadi. The issue will come to the Courtarena. No doubt of that. I want you to make the preliminary arrangements. Inform the High Magister Aritch that I make the formal imposition of the Legum. One member of the judicial panel must be a Gowachin from Dosadi. I have a particular Gowachin in mind. His name is Broey.”
“Where are you?”
“On Tandaloor.”
“Is that possible?”
McKie masked his sadness. Ahhh, Bildoon, how easily you are read.
“Dosadi is temporarily out of danger. I have taken certain retaliatory precautions.”
McKie broke the contact.
Jedrik spoke in a musing voice.
“Ohh, the perturbations we spread.”
McKie had no time for such reflections.
“Broey will need help, a support team, an extremely reliable troop which I want you to select for him.”
“Yes, and what of Gar and Tria?”
“Let them run free. Broey will pick them up later.”
Communal/managed economics have always been more destructive of their societies than those driven by greed This is what Dosadi says: Greed sets its own limits, is self-regulating.
—The Dosadi Analysis/BuSab Text
McKie looked around the Legum office they’d assigned him. Afternoon smells from Tandaloor’s fern jungles came in an open window. A low barrier separated him from the Courtarena with its ranks of seats all around. His office and adjoining quarters were small but fitted with all requisite linkages to libraries and the infrastructure to summon witnesses and experts. It was a green-walled space so deceptively ordinary that its like had beguiled more than one non-Gowachin into believing he knew how to perform here. But these quarters represented a deceptive surface riding on Gowachin currents. No matter that the ConSentient Pact modified what the Gowachin might do here, this was Tandaloor, and the forms of the frog people dominated.
Seating himself at the single table in the office space, McKie felt the chairdog adjust itself beneath him. It was good to have a chairdog again after Dosadi’s unrelenting furniture. He flipped a toggle and addressed the Gowachin face which appeared on the screen inset into his table.
“I require testimony from those who made the actual decision to set up the Dosadi experiment Are you prepared to meet this request?”
“Do you have the names of these people?”
Did this fool think he was going to blurt out: “Mrreg”?
“If you force me to it,” McKie warned, “I will bind Aritch to the Law and extract the names from him.”
This had no apparent effect on the Gowachin. He addressed McKie by name and title, adding:
“I leave the formalities to you. Any witness I summon must have a name.”
McKie suppressed a smile. Suspicions confirmed. This was a fact which the watchful Gowachin in the screen was late recognizing. Someone else had read the interchange correctly, however. Another, older, Gowachin face replaced the first one on the screen.
“What’re you doing, McKie?”
“Determining how I will proceed with this case.”
“You will proceed as a Legum of the Gowachin Bar.”
“Precisely.”
McKie waited.
The Gowachin peered narrowly at him from the screen. “Jedrik?”
“You are speaking to Jorj X. McKie, a Legum of the Gowachin Bar.”
Belatedly, the older Gowachin saw something of the way the Dosadi experience had changed McKie.
“Do you wish me to place you in contact with Aritch?”
McKie shook his head. They were so damned obvious, these underlings.
“Aritch didn’t make the Dosadi decision. Aritch was chosen to take the blow if it came to that. I will accept nothing less than the one who made that ultimate decision which launched the Dosadi experiment.”
The Gowachin stared at him coldly, then:
“One moment. I will see what I can do.”
The screen went blank, but the audio remained. McKie heard the voices.
“Hello … Yes, I’m sorry to interrupt at this time.”
“What is it?”
That was a deep and arrogant Gowachin voice, full of annoyance at the interruption. It was also an accent which a Dosadi could recognize in spite of the carefully overlaid masking tones. Here was one who’d used Dosadi.
The voice of the older Gowachin from McKie’s screen continued:
“The Legum bound to Aritch has come up with a sensitive line of questioning. He wishes to speak to you.”
“To me? But I am preparing for Laupuk.”
McKie had no idea what Laupuk might be, but it opened a new window on the Gowachin for him. Here was a glimpse of the rarified strata which had been concealed from him all of those years. This tiny glimpse confirmed him in the course he’d chosen.
“He is listening to us at this time.”
“Listening … why?”
The tone carried threats, but the Gowachin who’d intercepted McKie’s demands went on, unwavering:
“To save explanations. It’s clear that he’ll accept nothing less than speaking to you. This caller is McKie, but …”
“Yes?”
“You will understand.”
“I presume you have interpreted things correctly. Very well. Put him on.”
McKie’s screen flickered, revealed a wide view of a Gowachin room such as he’d never before seen. A far wall held spears and cutting weapons, streamers of colorful pennants, glistening rocks, ornate carvings in a shiny black substance. All of this was backdrop for a semireclining chairdog occupied by an aged Gowachin who sat spraddle-legged being anointed by two younger Gowachin males. The attendants poured a thick, golden substance onto the aged Gowachin from green crystal flasks. The flasks were of a spiral design. The contents were gently massaged into the Gowachin’s skin. The old Gowachin glistened with the stuff and when he blinked—no Phylum tattoos.
“As you can see,” he said, “I’m being prepared for …”
He broke off, recognizing that he spoke to a non-Gowachin. Certainly, he’d known this. It was a slow reaction for a Dosadi.
“This is a mistake,” he said.
“Indeed.” McKie nodded pleasantly. “Your name?”
The old Gowachin scowled at this gaucherie, then chuckled.
“I am called Mrreg.”
As McKie had suspected. And why would a Tandaloor Gowachin assume the name, no, the title of the mythical monster who’d imbued the frog people with a dr
ive toward savage testing? The implications went far beyond this planet, colored Dosadi.
“You made the decision for the Dosadi experiment?”
“Someone had to make it”
That was not a substantive answer, and McKie decided to take it to issue. “You are not doing me any favors! I now know what it means to be a Legum of the Gowachin Bar and I intend to employ my powers to their limits.”
It was as though McKie had worked some odd magic which froze the scene on his screen. The two attendants stopped pouring unguent, but did not look toward the pickup viewer which was recording their actions for McKie. As for Mrreg, he sat utterly still, his eyes fixed unblinking upon McKie.
McKie waited.
Presently, Mrreg turned to the attendant on his left.
“Please continue. There is little time.”
McKie took this as though spoken to himself.
“You’re my client. Why did you send a proxy?”
Mrreg continued to study McKie.
“I see what Ekris meant.” Then, more briskly: “Well, McKie, I followed your career with interest. It now appears I did not follow you closely enough. Perhaps if we had not …”
He left the thought incomplete.
McKie picked up on this.
“It was inevitable that I escape from Dosadi.”
“Perhaps.”
The attendants finished their work, departed, taking the oddly shaped crystal flasks with them.
“Answer my question,” McKie said.
“I am not required to answer your question.”
“Then I withdraw from this case.”
Mrreg hunched forward in sudden alarm. “You cannot! Aritch isn’t …”
“I have no dealings with Aritch. My client is that Gowachin who made the Dosadi decision.”