“Questions?” McKie asked.
Broey glanced at Jedrik, obviously surprised by this. It was as though he appealed to her: they were both Dosadi, were they not? This outsider came here with his gross manners, his lack of Dosadi understanding. How could one speak to such one? He addressed Jedrik.
“Have I not already stated my submission? I came alone, I ⦔
Jedrik picked up McKie's cue.
“There are certain ⦠peculiarities to our situation.”
“Peculiarities?”
Broey's nictating membrane blinked once.
Jedrik allowed her manner to convey a slight embarrassment.
“Certain delicacies of the Dosadi condition must be overlooked. We are now, all of us, abject supplicants ⦠and we are dealing with people who do not speak as we speak, act as we act ⦔
“Yes.” He pointed upward. “The mentally retarded ones. We are in danger then.”
It was not a question. Broey peered upward, as though trying to see through the ceiling and intervening floors. He drew in a deep breath.
“Yes.”
Again, it was compressed communication. Anyone who could put the God Wall there could crush an entire planet. Therefore, Dosadi and all of its inhabitants had been brought to a common subjection. Only a Dosadi could have accepted it this quickly without more questions, and Broey was an ultimate Dosadi.
McKie turned to Jedrik. When he spoke, she anticipated every word, but she waited him out.
“Tell your people to stop all attacks.”
He faced Broey.
“And your people.”
Broey looked from Jedrik to McKie, back to Jedrik with a puzzled expression openly on his face, but he obeyed.
“Which communicator?”
Where pain predominates, agony can be a valued teacher.
Â
âDosadi aphorism
M
cKie and Jedrik had no need to discuss the decision. It was a choice which they shared and knew they shared through a memory-selection process now common to both of them. There was a loophole in the God Wall and even though that wall now blanketed Dosadi in darkness, a Caleban contract was still a Caleban contract. The vital question was whether the Caleban of the God Wall would respond.
Jedrik in McKie's body stood guard outside her own room while a Jedrik-fleshed McKie went alone into the room to make the attempt. Who should he try to contact? Fannie Mae? The absolute darkness which enclosed Dosadi hinted at an absolute withdrawal of the guardian Caleban. And there was so little time.
McKie sat cross-legged on the floor of the room and tried to clear his mind. The constant strange discoveries in the female body he now wore interfered with concentration. The moment of exchange left an aftershock which he doubted would ever diminish. They had but to share the desire for the change now and it occurred. But this different bodyâahh, the multiplicity of differences created its own confusions. These went far beyond the adjustments to different height and weight. The muscles of his/her arms and hips felt wrongly attached. The bodily senses were routed through different unconscious processes. Anatomy created its own patterns, its own instinctual behavior. For one thing, he found it necessary to develop consciously monitored movements which protected
his/her breasts. The movements were reminiscent of those male adjustments by which he prevented injury to testes. These were movements which a male learned early and relegated to an automatic behavior pattern. The problem in the female body was that he had to
think
about such behavior. And it went far beyond the breast-testes interlock.
As he tried to clear his mind for the Caleban contact, these webbed clusters of memory intruded. It was maddening: He needed to clear away bodily distractions, but this female body demanded his attention. In desperation, he hyperventilated and burned his awareness into a pineal focus whose dangers he knew only too well. This was the way to permanent identity loss if the experience were prolonged. It produced a sufficient clarity, however, that he could fill his awareness with memories of Fannie Mae.
Silence.
He sensed time's passage as though each heartbeat were a blow.
Fear hovered at the edges of the silence.
It came to him that something had put a terrible fear into the God Wall Caleban.
McKie felt anger.
“Caleban! You owe me!”
“McKie?”
The response was so faint that he wondered whether it might be his hopes playing tricks on him.
“Fannie Mae?”
“Are you McKie?”
That was stronger, and he recognized the familiar Caleban presence in his awareness.
“I am McKie and you owe me a debt.”
“If you are truly McKie ⦠why are you so ⦠strange ⦠changed?”
“I wear another body.”
McKie was never sure, but he thought he sensed consternation. Fannie Mae responded more strongly then.
“I remove McKie from Dosadi now? Contract permits.”
“I will share Dosadi's fate.”
“McKie!”
“Don't argue with me, Fannie Mae. I will share Dosadi's fate unless you remove another node/person with me.”
He projected Jedrik's patterns then, an easy process since he shared all of her memories.
“She wears McKie's body!”
It was accusatory.
“She wears
another
body,” McKie said. He knew the Caleban saw his new relationship with Jedrik. Everything depended now on the interpretation of the Caleban contract.
“Jedrik is Dosadi,” the Caleban protested.
“So am I Dosadi ⦠now.”
“But you are McKie!”
“And Jedrik is also McKie. Contact her if you don't believe me.”
He broke the contact with an angry abruptness, found himself sprawled on the floor, still twitching. Perspiration bathed the female body which he still wore. The head ached.
Would Fannie Mae do as he'd told her? He knew Jedrik was as capable of projecting his awareness as he was of projecting hers. How would Fannie Mae interpret the Dosadi contract?
Gods! The ache in this head was a burning thing. He felt alien in Jedrik's body, misused. The pain persisted and he wondered if he'd done irreparable harm to Jedrik's brain through that intense pineal focus.
Slowly, he pushed himself upright, got to his feet. The Jedrik legs felt weak beneath him. He thought of Jedrik outside that door, trembling in the zombielike trance required for this mind-to-mind contact. What was taking so long? Had the Calebans withdrawn?
Have we lost?
He started for the door but before he'd taken the second step, light blazed around him. For a fractional heartbeat he thought it was the final fire to consume Dosadi, but the light held steady. He glanced around, found himself in the open air. It was a place he recognized immediately: the courtyard of the Dry Head compound on Tandaloor. He saw the familiar phylum
designs on the surrounding walls: green Gowachin script on yellow bricks. There was the sound of water splashing in the corner pool. A group of Gowachin stood in an arched entry directly ahead of him and he recognized one of his old teachers. Yesâthis was a Dry Head sanctum. These people had protected him, trained him, introduced him to their most sacred secrets.
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 Jedrikâmind-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
.
Â
âComparative History, The BuSab Text
M
cKie 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 â¦
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 â¦
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 thereâpeople 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 AritchâGowachin 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 commandsâpeople 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 bodiesâHuman bodies, undoubtedly, and unmarked by the stigmata of his PanSpechi origins.
Bildoon's behaviorâand Aritch'sâappeared so 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.”