Aritch massaged the painful muscles of his thighs, said, “I remind you, Legum, that we peopled Dosadi with volunteers.”
“Their descendants volunteered for nothing!”
“Ancestors always volunteer their descendants—for better or for worse. Sentient rights? Informed consent? The ConSentiency has been so busy building law upon law, creating its great illusion of rights, that you’ve almost lost sight of the Primary’s guiding principle: to develop our capacities. People who are never challenged never develop survival strengths!”
Despite the perils, McKie knew he had to press for the answer to his original question: benefits.
“What’ve you learned from your monster?”
“You’ll soon have a complete answer to that question.”
Again, the implication that he could actually watch Dosadi. But first it’d be well to disabuse Aritch of any suspicion that McKie was unaware of the root implications. The issue had to be met head on.
“You’re not going to implicate me.”
“Implicate you?” There was no mistaking Aritch’s surprise.
“No matter how you use what you’ve learned from Dosadi, you’ll be suspected of evil intent. Whatever anyone learns from …”
“Oh, that. New data gives one power.”
“And you do not confuse me, Aritch. In the history of every species there are many examples of places where new data has been gravely abused.”
Aritch accepted this without question. They both knew the background. The Gowachin distrusted power in all of its forms, yet they used power with consummate skill. The trend of McKie’s thoughts lay heavily in this room now. To destroy Dosadi would be to hide whatever the Gowachin had learned there. McKie, a non-Gowachin, therefore, would learn these things, would share the mantle of suspicion should it be cast. The historical abuses of new data occurred between the time that a few people learned the important thing and the time when that important thing became general knowledge. To the Gowachin and to BuSab it was the “Data Gap,” a source of constant danger.
“We would not try to hide what we’ve learned,” Aritch said, “only how we learned it.”
“And it’s just an academic question whether you destroy an entire planet and every person on it!”
“Ahh, yes: academic. What you don’t know, McKie, is that one of our test subjects on Dosadi has initiated, all on her own, a course of events which will destroy Dosadi very quickly whether we act or not. You’ll learn all about this very soon when, like the good Legum we know you to be, you go there to experience this monster with your own flesh.”
In the name of all that we together hold holy I promise three things to the sacred congregation of people who are subject to my rule. In the first place, that the holy religion which we mutually espouse shall always preserve their freedom under my auspices; secondly, that I will temper every form of rapacity and inequity which may inflict itself upon us all; and thirdly, that I will command swift mercy in all judgments, that to me and to you the gracious Lord may extend His Recognition.
—The Oath of Power,
Dosadi Sacred Congregation papers
Broey arose from prayer, groped behind him for the chair, and sank into it. Enclosed darkness surrounded him. The room was a shielded bubble attached to the bottom of his Graluz. Around the room’s thick walls was the warm water which protected his females and their eggs. Access to the bubble was through a floor hatch and a twisting flooded passage from the Graluz. Pressure in the bubble excluded the water, but the space around Broey smelled reassuringly of the Graluz. This helped reinforce the mood he now required.
Presently, the God spoke to him. Elation filled Broey. God spoke to him, only to him. Words hissed within his head. Scenes impinged themselves upon his vision centers.
Yes! Yes! I keep the DemoPol!
God was reassured and reflected that reassurance.
Today, God showed him a ritual Broey had never seen before. The ritual was only for Gowachin. The ritual was called Laupuk. Broey saw the ritual in all of its gory details, felt the rightness of it as though his very cells accepted it.
Responsibility, expiation—these were the lessons of Laupuk. God approved when Broey expressed understanding.
They communicated by words which Broey expressed silently in his thoughts, but there were other thoughts which God could not perceive. Just as God no doubt held thoughts which were not communicated to Broey. God used people, people used God. Divine intervention with cynical overtones. Broey had learned the Elector’s role through a long and painful apprenticeship.
I am your servant, God.
As God admonished, Broey kept the secret of his private communion. It suited his purpose to obey, as it obviously suited God’s purpose. There were times, though, when Broey wanted to shout it:
“You fools! I speak with the voice of God!”
Other Electors had made that mistake. They’d soon fallen from the seat of power. Broey, drawing on several lifetimes of assembled experiences, knew he must keep this power if he ever were to escape from Dosadi.
Anyway, the fools did his bidding (and therefore God’s) without divine admonition. All was well. One presented a selection of thoughts to God … being careful always where and when one reviewed private thoughts. There were times when Broey felt God within him when there’d been no prayer, no preparations here in the blackness of this bubble room. God might peer out of Broey’s eyes at any time—softly, quietly—examining His world and its works through mortal senses.
“I guard My servant well.”
The warmth of reassurance which flowed through Broey then was like the warmth of the Graluz when he’d still been a tad clinging to his mother’s back. It was a warmth and sense of safety which Broey tempered with a deep awareness of that other Graluz time: a giant grey-green adult male Gowachin ravening through the water, devouring those tads not swift enough, alert enough to escape.
I was one of the swift.
Memory of that plunging, frantic flight in the Graluz had taught Broey how to behave with God.
In his bubble room’s darkness, Broey shuddered. Yes, the ways of God were cruel. Thus armed, a servant of God could be equally cruel, could surmount the fact that he knew what it was to be both Human and Gowachin. He need only be the pure servant of God. This thought he shared.
Beware, McKie. God has told me whence you come. I know your intentions. Hold fast to the narrow path, McKie. You risk my displeasure.
Behavioral engineering in all of its manifestations always degenerates into merciless manipulation. It reduces all (manipulators and manipulated alike) to a deadly “mass effect.” The central assumption, that manipulation of individual personalities can achieve uniform behavioral responses, has been exposed as a lie by many species but never with more telling effect than by the Gowachin on Dosadi. Here, they showed us the “Walden Fallacy” in ultimate foolishness, explaining: “Given any species which reproduces by genetic mingling such that every individual is a unique specimen, all attempts to impose a decision matrix based on assumed uniform behavior will prove lethal.”
—The Dosadi Papers,
BuSab reference
McKie walked through the jumpdoor and, as Aritch’s aides had said, found himself on sand at just past Dosadi’s midmorning. He looked up, seeking his first real-time view of the God Wall, wanting to share the Dosadi feeling of that enclosure. All he saw was a thin haze, faintly silver, disappointing. The sun circle was more defined than he’d expected and he knew from the holographic reproductions he’d seen that a few of the third-magnitude stars would be filtered out at night. What else he’d expected, McKie could not say, but somehow this milky veil was not it. Too thin, perhaps. It appeared insubstantial, too weak for the power it represented.
The visible sun disk reminded him of another urgent necessity, but he postponed that necessity while he examined his surroundings.
A tall white rock? Yes, there it was on his left.
They’d warned him to wait be
side that rock, that he’d be relatively safe there. Under no circumstances was he to wander from this contact point.
“We can tell you about the dangers of Dosadi, but words are not enough. Besides, the place is always developing new threats.”
Things he’d learned in the briefing sessions over the past weeks reinforced the warning. The rock, twice as tall as a Human, stood only a few paces away, massive and forbidding. He went over and leaned against it. Sand grated beneath his feet. He smelled unfamiliar perfumes and acridities. The sun-warmed surface of the rock gave its energy to his flesh through the thin green coveralls they’d insisted he wear.
McKie longed for his armored clothing and its devices to amplify muscles, but such things were not permitted. Only a reduced version of his toolkit had been allowed and that reluctantly, a compromise. McKie had explained that the contents would be destroyed if anyone other than himself tried to pry into the kit’s secrets. Still, they’d warned him never to open the kit in the presence of a Dosadi native.
“The most dangerous thing you can do is to underestimate any of the Dosadi.”
McKie, staring around him, saw no Dosadi.
Far off across a dusty landscape dotted with yellow bushes and brown rocks, he identified the hazy spires of Chu rising out of its river canyon. Heat waves dizzied the air above the low scrub, giving the city a magical appearance.
McKie found it difficult to think about Chu in the context of what he’d learned during the crash course the Gowachin had given him. Those magical fluting spires reached heavenward from a muck where “you can buy anything … anything at all.”
Aritch’s aides had sewn a large sum in Dosadi currency into the seams of his clothing but, at the same time, had forced him to digest hair-raising admonitions about “any show of unprotected wealth.”
The jumpdoor attendants had recapitulated many of the most urgent warnings, adding:
“You may have a wait of several hours. We’re not sure. Just stay close to that rock where you’ll be relatively safe. We’ve made protective arrangements which should work. Don’t eat or drink anything until you get into the city. You’ll be faintly sick with the diet change for a few days, but your body should adjust.”
“Should adjust?”
“Give it time.”
He’d asked about specific dangers to which he should be most alert.
“Stay clear of any Dosadi natives except your contacts. Above all, don’t even appear to threaten anyone.”
“What if I get drowsy and take a nap?”
They’d considered this, then:
“You know, that might be the safest thing to do. Anyone who’d dare to nap out there would have to be damned well protected. There’d be some risk, of course, but there always is on Dosadi. But they’d be awfully leery of anyone casual enough to nap out there.”
Again, McKie glanced around.
Sharp whistlings and a low rasp like sand across wood came from behind the tall rock. Quietly, McKie worked his way around to where he could see the sources of these noises. The whistling was a yellow lizard almost the color of the bushes beneath which it crouched. The rasp came from a direction which commanded the lizard’s attention. Its source appeared to be a small hole beneath another bush. McKie thought he detected in the lizard only a faint curiosity about himself. Something about that hole and the noise issuing from it demanded a great deal of concentrated attention.
Something stirred in the hole’s blackness.
The lizard crouched, continued to whistle.
An ebony creature about the size of McKie’s fist emerged from the hole, darted forward, saw the lizard. Wings shot from the newcomer’s sides and it leaped upward, but it was too late. With a swiftness which astonished McKie, the lizard shot forward, balled itself around its prey. A slit opened in the lizard’s stomach, surrounded the ebony creature. With a final rasping, the black thing vanished into the lizard.
All this time, the lizard continued to whistle. Still whistling it crawled into the hole from which its prey had come.
“Things are seldom what they seem to be on Dosadi,” McKie’s teachers had said.
He wondered now what he had just seen.
The whistling had stopped.
The lizard and its prey reminded McKie that, as he’d been warned, there had not been time to prepare him for every new detail on Dosadi. He crouched now and, once more, studied his immediate surroundings.
Tiny jumping things like insects inhabited the narrow line of shade at the base of the white rock. Green (blossoms?) opened and closed on the stems of the yellow bushes. The ground all around appeared to be a basic sand and clay, but when he peered at it closely he saw veins of blue and red discoloration. He turned his back on the distant city, saw far away mountains: a purple graph line against silver sky. Rain had cut an arroyo in that direction. He saw touches of darker green reaching from the depths. The air tasted bitter.
Once again, McKie made a sweeping study of his surroundings, seeking any sign of threat. Nothing he could identify. He palmed an instrument from his toolkit, stood casually and stretched while he turned toward Chu. When he stole a glance at the instrument, it revealed a sonabarrier at the city. Absently scratching himself to conceal the motion, he returned the instrument to his kit. Birds floated in the silver sky above the sonabarrier.
Why a sonabarrier? he wondered.
It would stop wild creatures, but not people. His teachers had said the sonabarrier excluded pests, vermin. The explanation did not satisfy McKie.
Things are seldom what they seem.
Despite the God Wall, that sun was hot. McKie sought the shady. side of the rock. Seated there, he glanced at the small white disk affixed to the green lapel at his left breast: OP40331-D404. It was standard Galach script, the lingua franca of the ConSentiency.
“They speak only Galach on Dosadi. They may detect an accent in your speech, but they won’t question it.”
Aritch’s people had explained that this badge identified McKie as an open-contract worker, one with slightly above average skills in a particular field, but still part of the Labor Pool and subject to assignment outside his skill.
“This puts you three hierarchical steps from the Rim,” they’d said.
It’d been his own choice. The bottom of the social system always had its own communications channels flowing with information based on accurate data, instinct, dream stuff, and what was fed from the top with deliberate intent. Whatever happened here on Dosadi, its nature would be revealed in the unconscious processes of the Labor Pool. In the Labor Pool, he could tap that revealing flow.
“I’ll be a weaver,” he’d said, explaining that it was a hobby he’d enjoyed for many years.
The choice had amused his teachers. McKie had been unable to penetrate the reason for their amusement.
“It is of no importance right now. One choice is as good as another.”
They’d insisted he concentrate on what he’d been doing at the time, learning the signal mannerisms of Dosadi. Indeed, it’d been a hectic period on Tandaloor after Aritch’s insistence (with the most reasonable of arguments) that the best way for his Legum to proceed was to go personally to Dosadi. In retrospect, the arguments remained persuasive, but McKie had been surprised. For some reason which he could not now identify, he had expected a less involved overview of the experiment, watching through instruments and the spying abilities of the Caleban who guarded the place.
McKie was still not certain how they expected him to pull this hot palip from the cooker, but it was clear they expected it. Aritch had been mysteriously explicit:
“You are Dosadi’s best chance for survival and our own best chance for … understanding.”
They expected their Legum to save Dosadi while exonerating the Gowachin. It was a Legum’s task to win for his client, but these had to be the strangest circumstances, with the client retaining the absolute power of destruction over the threatened planet.
On Tandaloor, McKie had been allowed
just time for short naps. Even then, his sleep had been restless, part of his mind infernally aware of where he lay: the bedog strange and not quite attuned to his needs, the odd noises beyond the walls—water gurgling somewhere, always water.
When he’d trained there as a Legum, that had been one of his first adjustments: the uncertain rhythms of disturbed water. Gowachin never strayed far from water. The Graluz—that central pool and sanctuary for females, the place where Gowachin raised those tads which survived the ravenous weeding by the male parent—the Graluz always remained a central fixation for the Gowachin. As the saying put it:
“If you do not understand the Graluz, you do not understand the Gowachin.”
As such sayings went, it was accurate only up to a point.
But there was always the water, contained water, the nervous slapping of wavelets against walls. The sound conveyed no fixed rhythms, but it was a profound clue to the Gowachin: contained, yet always different.
For all short distances, swimming tubes connected Gowachin facilities. They traversed long distances by jumpdoor or in hissing jetcars which moved on magnetic cushions. The comings and goings of such cars had disturbed McKie’s sleep during the period of the crash course on Dosadi. Sometimes, desperately tired, his body demanding rest, he would find himself awakened by voices. And the subtle interference of the other sounds—the cars, the waves—made eavesdropping difficult. Awake in the night, McKie would strain for meaning. He felt like a spy listening for vital clues, seeking every nuance in the casual conversations of people beyond his walls. Frustrated, always frustrated, he had retreated into sleep. And when, as happened occasionally, all sound ceased, this brought him to full alert, heart pounding, wondering what had gone wrong.
And the odors! What memories they brought back to him. Graluz musk, the bitter pressing of exotic seeds, permeated every breath. Fern tree pollen intruded with its undertones of citrus. And the caraeli, tiny, froglike pets, invaded your sleep at every dawning with their exquisite belling arias.