The Dosadi Experiment (ConSentiency Universe #2)

The Dosadi Experiment (ConSentiency Universe #2) Page 2

We have created a monster - enormously valuable and even useful yet extremely dangerous.  Our monster is both beautiful and terrifying.  We do not dare use this monster to its full potential, but we cannot release our grasp upon it.

-Gowachin assessment of the Dosadi experiment

A bullet went spang! against the window behind Keila Jedrik's desk, ricocheted and screamed off into the canyon street far below her office.  Jedrik prided herself that she had not even flinched.  The Elector's patrols would take care of the sniper.  The patrols which swept the streets of Chu every morning would home on the sound of the shot.  She held the casual hope that the sniper would escape back to the Rim Rabble, but she recognized this hope as a weakness and dismissed it.  There were concerns this morning far more important than an infiltrator from the Rim.

Jedrik reached one hand into the corner of early sunlight which illuminated the contact plates of her terminal in the Master Accountancy computer.  Those flying fingers - she could almost disassociate herself from them.  They darted like insects at the waiting keys.  The terminal was a functional instrument, symbol of her status as a Senior Liaitor.  It sat all alone in its desk slot - grey, green, gold, black, white and deadly.  Its grey screen was almost precisely the tone of her desk top.

With careful precision, her fingers played their rhythms on the keys.  The screen produced yellow numbers, all weighted and averaged at her command - a thin strip of destiny with violence hidden in its golden shapes.

Every angel carries a sword, she thought.

But she did not really consider herself an angel or her weapon a sword.  Her real weapon was an intellect hardened and sharpened by the terrible decisions her planet required.  Emotions were a force to be diverted within the self or to be used against anyone who had failed to learn what Dosadi taught.  She knew her own weakness and hid it carefully:  she'd been taught by loving parents (who'd concealed their love behind exquisite cruelty) that Dosadi's decisions were indeed terrible.

Jedrik studied the numbers on her computer display, cleared the screen and made a new entry.  As she did this, she knew she took sustenance from fifty of her planet's Human inhabitants.  Many of those fifty would not long survive this callous jape.  In truth, her fingers were weapons of death for those who failed this test.  She felt no guilt about those she slew.  The imminent arrival of one Jorj X. McKie dictated her actions, precipitated them.

When she thought about McKie, her basic feeling was one of satisfaction.  She'd waited for McKie like a predator beside a burrow in the earth.  His name and identifying keys had been given to her by her chauffeur, Havvy, hoping to increase his value to her.  She'd taken the information and made her usual investigation.  Jedrik doubted that any other person on Dosadi could have come up with the result her sources produced:  Jorj X. McKie was an adult human who could not possibly exist.  No record of him could be found on all of Dosadi - not on the poisonous Rim, not in Chu's Warrens, not in any niche of the existing power structure.  McKie did not exist, but he was due to arrive in Chu momentarily, smuggled into the city by a Gowachin temporarily under her control.

McKie was the precision element for which she had waited.  He wasn't merely a possible key to the God Wall (not a bent and damaged key like Havvy) but clean and certain.  She'd never thought to attack this lock with poor instruments.  There'd be one chance and only one; it required the best.

Thus fifty Dosadi Humans took their faceless places behind the numbers in her computer.  Bait, expendable.  Those who died by this act wouldn't die immediately.  Forty-nine might never know they'd been deliberately submitted to early death by her deliberate choice.  Some would be pushed back to the Rim's desperate and short existence.  Some would die in the violent battles she was precipitating.  Others would waste away in the Warrens.  For most, the deadly process would extend across sufficient time to conceal her hand in it.  But they'd been slain in her computer and she knew it.  She cursed her parents (and the others before them) for this unwanted sensitivity to the blood and sinew behind these computer numbers.  Those loving parents had taught her well.  She might never see the slain bodies, need give not another thought to all but one of the fifty; still she sensed them behind her computer display . . . warm and pulsing.

Jedrik sighed. The fifty were bleating animals staked out to lure a special beast onto Dosadi's poisonous soil.  Her fifty would create a fractional surplus which would vanish, swallowed before anyone realized their purpose.

Dosadi is sick, she thought.  And not for the first time, she wondered:  Is this really Hell?

Many believed it.

We're being punished.

But no one knew what they'd done to deserve punishment.

Jedrik leaned back, looked across her doorless office to the sound barrier and milky light of the hall.  A strange Gowachin shambled past her doorway.  He was a frog figure on some official errand, a packet of brown paper clutched in his knobby hands.  His green skin shimmered as though he'd recently come from water.

The Gowachin reminded her of Bahrank, he who was bringing McKie into her net, Bahrank who did her bidding because she controlled the substance to which he was addicted.  More fool he to let himself become an addict to anything, even to living.  One day soon Bahrank would sell what he knew about her to the Elector's spies; by then it would be too late and the Elector would learn only what she wanted him to learn when she wanted him to learn it.  She'd chosen Bahrank with the same care she'd used at her computer terminal, the same care which had made her wait for someone precisely like McKie.  And Bahrank was Gowachin.  Once committed to a project, the frog people were notorious for carrying out their orders in a precise way.  They possessed an inbred sense of order but understood the limits of law.

As her gaze traversed the office, the sparse and functional efficiency of the space filled her with quiet amusement.  This office presented an image of her which she had constructed with meticulous care.  It pleased her that she would be leaving here soon never to return, like an insect shedding its skin.  The office was four paces wide, eight long.  Twelve black metal rotofiles lined the wall on her left, dark sentinels of her methodical ways.  She had reset their locking codes and armed them to destroy their contents when the Elector's toads pried into them.  The Elector's people would attribute this to outrage, a last angry sabotage.  It would be some time before accumulating doubts would lead them to reassessment and to frustrated questions.  Even then they might not suspect her hand in the elimination of fifty Humans.  She, after all, was one of the fifty.

This thought inflicted her with a momentary sense of unfocused loss.  How pervasive were the seductions of Dosadi's power structure!  How subtle!  What she'd just done here introduced a flaw into the computer system which ruled the distribution of non-poisonous food in Dosadi's only city.  Food - here was the real base of Dosadi's social pyramid, solid and ugly.  The flaw removed her from a puissant niche in that pyramid. She had worn the persona of Keila Jedrik-Liaitor for many years, long enough to learn enjoyment of the power system.  Losing one valuable counter in Dosadi's endless survival game, she must now live and act only with the persona of Keila Jedrik-Warlord.  This was an all-or-nothing move, a gambler's plunge.  She felt the nakedness of it.  But this gamble had begun long ago, far back in Dosadi's contrived history, when her ancestors had recognized the nature of this planet and had begun breeding and training for the individual who would take this plunge.

I am that individual, she told herself.  This is our moment.

But had they truly assessed the problem correctly?

Jedrik's glance fell on the single window which looked out into the canyon street.  Her own reflection stared back:  a face too narrow, thin nose, eyes and mouth too large.  Her hair could be an interesting black velvet helmet if she let it grow, but she kept it cropped short as a reminder that she was not a magnetic sex partner, that she must rely on her wits.  That was the way she'd been bred and trained.  Dosadi had taught her its cruelest lessons early.  She'd grown tall while still in her teens, carrying more height in her body than in her legs so that she appeared even taller when seated.  She looked down on most Gowachin and Human males in more ways than one.  That was another gift (and lesson) from her loving parents and from their ancestors.  There was no escaping this Dosadi lesson.

What you love or value will be used against you.

She leaned forward to hide her disquieting reflection, peered far down into the street.  There, that was better.  Her fellow Dosadis no longer were warm and pulsing people.  They were reduced to distant movements, as impersonal as the dancing figures in her computer.

Traffic was light, she noted.  Very few armored vehicles moved, no pedestrians.  There'd been only that one shot at her window.  She still entertained a faint hope that the sniper had escaped.  More likely a patrol had caught the fool.  The Rim Rabble persisted in testing Chu's defenses despite the boringly repetitive results.  It was desperation.  Snipers seldom waited until the day was deep and still and the patrols were scattered, those hours when even some among the most powerful ventured out.

Symptoms, all symptoms.

Rim sorties represented only one among many Dosadi symptoms which she'd taught herself to read in that precarious climb whose early stage came to climax in this room.  It was not just a thought, but more a sense of familiar awareness to which she returned at oddly reflexive moments in her life.

We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain.  We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and the strange, the reasonable and the insane.

It made some insane choices magnificently attractive.

Have I made an insane choice?

No!

The data lay clearly in her mind, facts which she could not obliterate by turning away from them.  Dosadi had been designed from a cosmic grab bag:  "Give them one of these and one of these and one of these . . ."

It made for incompatible pairings.

The DemoPol with which Dosadi juggled its computer-monitored society didn't fit a world which used energy transmitted from a satellite in geosynchrorious orbit.  The DemoPol reeked of primitive ignorance, something from a society which had wandered too far down the path of legalisms - a law for everything and everything managed by law.  The dogma that a God-inspired few had chosen Chu's river canyon in which to build a city insulated from this poisonous planet, and that only some twenty or so generations earlier, remained indigestible.  And that energy satellite which hovered beneath the God Wall's barrier - that stank of a long and sophisticated evolution during which something as obviously flawed as the DemoPol would have been discarded.

It was a cosmic grab bag designed for a specific purpose which her ancestors had recognized.

We did not evolve on this planet.

The place was out of phase with both Gowachin and Human.  Dosadi employed computer memories and physical files side by side for identical purposes.  And the number of addictive substances to be found on Dosadi was outrageous.  Yet this was played off against a religion so contrived, so gross in its demands for "simple faith" that the two conditions remained at constant war.  The mystics died for their "new insights" while the holders of "simple faith" used control of the addictive substances to gain more and more power.  The only real faith on Dosadi was that you survived by power and that you gained power by controlling what others required for survival.  Their society understood the medicine of bacteria, virus and brain control, but these could not stamp out the Rim and Warren Underground where jabua faith healers cured their patients with the smoke of burning weeds.

And they could not stamp out (not yet) Keila Jedrik because she had seen what she had seen.  Two by two the incompatible things ebbed and flowed around her, in the city of Chu and the surrounding Rim.  It was the same in every case:  a society which made use of one of these things could not naturally be a society which used the other.

Not naturally.

All around her, Jedrik sensed Chu with its indigestible polarities.  They had only two species:  Human and Gowachin.  Why two? Were there no other species in this universe?  Subtle hints in some of Dosadi's artifacts suggested an evolution for appendages other than the flexible fingers of Gowachin and Human.

Why only one city on all of Dosadi?

Dogma failed to answer.

The Rim hordes huddled close, always seeking a way into Chu's insulated purity.  But they had a whole planet behind them.  Granted it was a poisonous planet, but it had other rivers, other places of potential sanctuary.  The survival of both species argued for the building of more sanctuaries, many more than that pitiful hole which Gar and Tria thought they masterminded.  No . . . Chu stood alone - almost twenty kilometers wide and forty long, built on hills and silted islands where the river slowed in its deep canyon.  At last count, some eighty-nine million people lived here and three times that number eked a short life on the Rim - pressing, always pressing for a place in the poison-free city.

Give us your precious bodies, you stupid Rimmers!

They heard the message, knew its import and defied it.  What had the people of Dosadi done to be imprisoned here?  What had their ancestors done?  It was right to build a religion upon hate for such ancestors . . . provided such ancestors were guilty.

Jedrik leaned toward the window, peered upward at the God Wall, that milky translucence which imprisoned Dosadi, yet through which those such as this Jorj X. McKie could come at will.  She hungered to see McKie in person, to confirm that he had not been contaminated as Havvy had been contaminated.

It was a McKie she required now.  The transparently contrived nature of Dosadi told her that there must be a McKie.  She saw herself as the huntress, McKie her natural prey.  The false identity she'd built in this room was part of her bait.  Now, in the season of McKie, the underlying religious cant by which Dosadi's powerful maintained their private illusions would crumble.  She could already see the beginnings of that dissolution; soon, everyone would see it.

She took a deep breath.  There was a purity in what was about to happen, a simplification.  She was about to divest herself of one of her two lives, taking all of her awareness into the persona of that other Keila Jedrik which all of Dosadi would soon know.  Her people had kept her secret well, hiding a fat and sleazy blonde person from their fellow Dosadis, exposing just enough of that one to "X" that the powers beyond the God Wall might react in the proper design.  She felt cleansed by the fact that the disguise of that other life had begun to lose its importance.  The whole of her could begin to surface in that other place.  And McKie had precipitated this metamorphosis.  Jedrik's thoughts were clear and direct now:

Come into my trap, McKie.  You will take me higher than the palace apartments of the Council Hills.

Or into a deeper hell than any nightmare has imagined.