A bell began to ring and the barrier lifted.
Havvy drove on, glancing once at the strawboss as they passed him. The glance was not returned, telling Jedrik that the strawboss had assessed the skitter's occupants much earlier.
Jedrick picked up the conversation with Havvy where they'd left it.
“What makes you think you could get more from me than from someone else?”
“Not more ⦠It's just that there's less risk with you.”
The truth was in his voice, that innocent instrument which told so much about Havvy. She shook her head.
“You want me to take the risk of selling higher up?”
After a long pause, Havvy said:
“You know a safer way for me to operate?”
“I'd have to use you somewhere along the line for verification.”
“But I'd be under your protection then.”
“Why should I protect you when you're no longer of value?”
“What makes you think this is all the information I can get?”
Jedrik allowed herself a sigh, wondered why she continued this empty game.
“We might both run into a taker, Havvy.”
Havvy didn't respond. Surely, he'd considered this in his foolish game plan.
They passed a squat brown building on the left. Their street curved upward around the building and passed through a teeming square at the next higher level. Between two taller buildings on the right, she glimpsed a stretch of a river channel, then it was more buildings which enclosed them like the cliffs of Chu, growing taller as the skitter climbed.
As she'd known, Havvy couldn't endure her silence.
“What're you going to do?” he asked.
“I'll pay one year of such protection as I can offer.”
“But this is ⦔
“Take it or leave it.”
He heard the finality but, being Havvy, couldn't give up. It was his one redeeming feature.
“Couldn't we even discuss a ⦔
“We won't discuss anything! If you won't sell at my price, then perhaps I should become a taker.”
“That's not like you!”
“How little you know. I can buy informants of your caliber far cheaper.”
“You're a hard person.”
Out of compassion, she ventured a tiny lesson. “That's how to survive. But I think we should forget this now. Your information is probably something I already know, or something useless.”
“It's worth a lot more than you offered.”
“So you say, but I know you, Havvy. You're not one to take big risks. Little risks sometimes, big risks never. Your information couldn't be of any great value to me.”
“If you only knew.”
“I'm no longer interested, Havvy.”
“Oh, that's great! You bargain with me and then pull out after I've ⦔
“I was
not
bargaining!” Wasn't the fool capable of anything?
“But you ⦔
“Havvy! Hear me with care. You're a little tad who's stumbled onto something you believe is important. It's actually nothing of great importance, but it's big enough to frighten you. You can't think of a way to sell this information without putting your neck in peril. That's why you came to me. You presume to have me act as your agent. You presume too much.”
Anger closed his mind to any value in her words.
“I take risks!”
She didn't even try to keep amusement from her voice. “Yes, Havvy, but never where you think. So here's a risk for you right out in the open. Tell me your valuable information. No strings. Let me judge. If I think it's worth more than I've already offered I'll pay more. If I already have this information or it's otherwise useless, you get nothing”
“The advantage is all on your side!”
“Where it belongs.”
Jedrik studied Havvy's shoulders, the set of his head, the rippling of muscles under stretched fabric as he drove. He was supposed to be pure Labor Pool and didn't even know that silence was the guardian of the LP:
Learning silence, you learn what to hear
. The LP seldom volunteered anything. And here was Havvy, so far from that and other LP traditions that he might never have experienced the Warren.
Had
never experienced it until he was too old to learn. Yet he talked of friends on the Rim, acted as though he had his own conspiratorial cell. He held a job for which he was barely competent. And
everything he did revealed his belief that all of these things would not tell someone of Jedrik's caliber the essential facts about him.
Unless his were a marvelously practiced act.
She did not believe such a marvel, but there was a cautionary element in recognizing the remote possibility. This and the obvious flaws in Havvy had kept her from using him as a key to the God Wall.
They were passing the Elector's headquarters now. She turned and glanced at the stone escarpment. Her thoughts were a thorn thicket. Every assumption she made about Havvy required a peculiar protective reflex. A non-Dosadi reflex. She noted workers streaming down the steps toward the tube entrance of the Elector's building. Her problem with Havvy carried an odd similarity to the problem she knew Broey would encounter when it came to deciding about an ex-Liaitor named Keila Jedrik. She had studied Broey's decisions with a concentrated precision which had tested the limits of her abilities. Doing this, she had changed basic things about herself, had become oddly non-Dosadi. They would no longer find Keila Jedrik in the DemoPol. No more than they'd find Havvy or this McKie there. But if she could do this â¦
Pedestrian traffic in this region of extreme caution had slowed Havvy to a crawl. More of the Elector's workers were coming up from the Tube Gate One exit, a throng of them as though released on urgent business. She wondered if any of her fifty flowed in that throng.
I must not allow my thoughts to wander.
To float like an aware leaf was one thing, but she dared not let herself enter the hurricane ⦠not yet. She focused once more on the silent, angry Havvy.
“Tell me, Havvy, did you ever kill a person?”
His shoulders stiffened.
“Why do you ask such a question?”
She stared at his profile for an adequate time, obviously reflecting on this same question.
“I presumed you'd answer. I understand now that you will not answer. This is not the first time I've made that mistake.”
Again, Havvy missed the lesson.
“Do you ask many people that question?”
“That doesn't concern you now.”
She concealed a profound sadness.
Havvy hadn't the wit to read even the most blatant of the surface indicators. He compounded the useless.
“You can't justify such an intrusion into my ⦔
“Be still, little man! Have you learned nothing? Death is often the only means of evoking an appropriate answer.”
Havvy saw this only as an utterly unscrupulous response as she'd known he would. When he shot a probing stare at her, she lifted an eyebrow in a cynical shrug. Havvy continued to divide his attention between the street and her face, apprehensive, fearful. His driving degenerated, became actively dangerous.
“Watch what you're doing, you fool!”
He turned more of his attention to the street, presuming this the greater danger.
The next time he glanced at her, she smiled, knowing Havvy would be unable to detect any lethal change in this gesture. He already wondered if she would attack, but guessed she wouldn't do it while he was driving. He doubted, though, and his doubts made him even more transparent. Havvy was no marvel. One thing certain about him: he came from beyond the God Wall, from the lands of “X,” from the place of McKie. Whether he worked for the Elector was immaterial. In fact, it grew increasingly doubtful that Broey would employ such a dangerous, a
flawed
tool. No pretense at foolhardy ignorance of Dosadi's basic survival lessons could be this perfect. The pretender would not survive. Only the truly ignorant could have survived to Havvy's age, allowed to go on living as a curiosity, a possible source of interesting data â¦
interesting
data, not necessarily useful.
Having left resolution of the Havvy Problem to the ultimate moment, wringing every last bit of usefulness from him, she knew her course clearly. Whoever protected Havvy, her questions placed the precisely modulated pressure upon them and left her options open.
“What is your valued information?” she asked.
Sensing now that he bought life with every response, Havvy pulled the skitter to the curb at a windowless building wall, stopped, and stared at her.
She waited.
“McKie ⦔ He swallowed. “McKie comes from beyond the God Wall.”
She allowed laughter to convulse her and it went deeper than she'd anticipated. For an instant, she was helpless with it and this sobered her. Not even Havvy could be permitted such an advantage.
Havvy was angry.
“What's funny?”
“You are. Did you imagine for even a second that I wouldn't recognize someone alien to Dosadi? Little man, how
have
you survived?”
This time, he read her correctly. It threw him back on his only remaining resource and it even answered her question.
“Don't underestimate my value.”
Yes, of course: the unknown value of “X.” And there was a latent threat in his tone which she'd never heard there before. Could Havvy call on protectors from beyond the God Wall? That didn't seem possible, given his circumstances, but it had to be considered. It wouldn't do to approach her larger problem from a narrow viewpoint. People who could enclose an entire planet in an impenetrable barrier would have other capabilities she had not even imagined. Some of these creatures came and went at will, as though Dosadi were merely a casual stopping point. And the travelers from “X” could change their bodies; that was the single terrible fact which must never be forgotten; that was what had led her ancestors to breed for a Keila Jedrik.
Such considerations always left her feeling almost helpless, shaken by the ultimate unknowns which lay in her path. Was Havvy still Havvy? Her trusted senses answered: yes. Havvy was a spy, a diversion, an amusement. And he was something else which she could not fathom. It was maddening. She could read every nuance of his reactions, yet questions remained.
How could you ever understand these creatures from beyond the Veil of Heaven? They were transparent to Dosadi eyes, but that transparency itself confused one.
On the other hand, how could the people of “X” hope to understand (and thus anticipate) a Keila Jedrik? Every evidence of her senses told her that Havvy saw only a surface Jedrik which she wanted him to see. His spying eyes reported what she wanted them to report. But the enormous interests at stake here dictated a brand of caution beyond anything she'd ever before attempted. The fact that she saw this arena of explosive repercussions, however, armed her with grim satisfaction. The idea that a Dosadi
puppet
might rebel against “X” and fully understand the nature of such rebellion, surely that idea lay beyond their capabilities. They were overconfident while she was filled with wariness. She saw no way of hiding her movements from the people beyond the God Wall as she hid from her fellow Dosadis. “X” had ways of spying that no one completely evaded. They would know about the two Keila Jedriks. She counted on only one thing: that they could not see her deepest thoughts, that they'd read only that surface which she revealed to them.
Jedrik maintained a steady gaze at Havvy while these considerations flowed through her mind. Not by the slightest act did she betray what went on in her mind. That, after all, was Dosadi's greatest gift to its survivors.
“Your information is valueless,” she said.
He was accusatory. “You already knew!”
What did he hope to catch with such a gambit? Not for the first time, she asked herself whether Havvy might represent the best that “X” could produce? Would they knowingly send their dolts here? It hardly seemed possible. But how could Havvy's childish incompetence command such tools of power as the God Wall implied? Were the people of “X” the decadent descendants of greater beings?
Even though his own survival demanded it, Havvy would not remain silent.
“If you didn't already know about McKie ⦠then you ⦠you don't believe me!”
This was too much. Even for Havvy it was too much and she told herself:
despite the unknown powers of “X,” he will have to die. He muddies the water. Such incompetence cannot be permitted to breed.