The Dosadi Experiment (ConSentiency Universe #2)

The Dosadi Experiment (ConSentiency Universe #2) Page 34

In a changing universe, only a changing species can hope to be immortal and then only if its eggs are nurtured in widely scattered environments.  This predicts a wealth of unique individuals.

- Insights (a glimpse of early Human philosophy), BuSab Text

Jedrik made contact with McKie while he waited for the arrival of Aritch and Ceylang.  He had been staring absently at the ceiling, evaluating in a profoundly Dosadi way how to gain personal advantage from the upcoming encounter, when he felt the touch of her mind on his.

McKie locked himself in his body.

"No transfer."

"Of course not."

It was a tiny thing, a subtle shading in the contact which could have been overlooked by anyone with a less accurate simulation model of Jedrik.

"You're angry with me," McKie said.

He projected irony, knew she'd read this correctly.

When she responded, her anger had been reduced to irritation.  The point was not the shading of emotion, it was that she allowed such emotion to reveal itself.

"You remind me of one of my early lovers," she said.

McKie thought of where Jedrik was at this moment:  safely rocked in the flower-perfumed air of his floating island on the planetary sea of Tutalsee.  How strange such an environment must be for a Dosadi - no threats, fruit which could be picked and eaten without a thought of poisons.  The memories she'd taken from him would coat the island with familiarity, but her flesh would continue to find that a strange experience.  His memories - yes. The island would remind her of all those wives he'd taken to the honeymoon bowers of that place.

McKie spoke from this awareness.

"No doubt that early lover failed to show sufficient appreciation of your abilities, outside the bedroom, that is. Which one was it . . ."

And he named several accurate possibilities, lifting them from the memories he'd taken from Jedrik.

Now, she laughed.  He sensed the untainted response, real humor and unchecked.

McKie was reminded in his turn of one of his early wives, and this made him think of the breeding situation from which Jedrik had come - no confusions between a choice for breeding mate and a lover taken for the available enjoyment of sex.  One might even actively dislike the breeding mate.

Lovers . . . wives . . .  What was the difference, except for the socially imprinted conventions out of which the roles arose?  But Jedrik did remind him of that one particular woman, and he explored this memory, wondering if it might help him now in his relationship with Jedrik.  He'd been in his midthirties and assigned to one of his first personal BuSab cases, sent out with no oldtimer to monitor and instruct him.  The youngest Human agent in the Bureau's history ever to be released on his own, so it was rumored.  The planet had been one of the Ylir group, very much unlike anything in McKie's previous experience:  an ingrown place with deep entryways in all of the houses and an oppressive silence all around.  No animals, no birds, no insects - just that awesome silence within which a fanatic religion was reported forming.  All conversations were low voiced and full of subtle intonations which suggested an inner communication peculiar to Ylir and somehow making sport with all outsiders not privy to their private code.  Very like Dosadi in this.

His wife of the moment, safely ensconced on Tutalsee, had been quite the opposite:  gregarious, sportive, noisy.

Something about that Ylir case had sent McKie back to this wife with a sharpened awareness of her needs.  The marriage had gone well for a long time, longer than any of the others.  And he saw now why Jedrik reminded him of that one:  they both protected themselves with a tough armor of femininity, but were extremely vulnerable behind that facade.  When the armor collapsed, it collapsed totally.  This realization puzzled McKie because he read his own reaction clearly:  he was frightened.

In the eyeblink this evaluation took, Jedrik read him:

"We have not left Dosadi.  We've taken it with us."

So that was why she'd made this contact, to be certain he mixed this datum into his evaluations.  McKie looked out the open window.  It would be dusk soon here on Tandaloor.  The Gowachin home planet was a place which had defied change for thousands of standard years.  In some respects, it was a backwater.

The ConSentiency will never be the same.

The tiny trickle of Dosadi which Aritch's people had hoped to cut off was now a roaring cataract. The people of Dosadi would insinuate themselves into niche after niche of ConSentient civilization.  What could resist even the lowliest Dosadi?  Laws would change.  Relationships would assume profound and subtle differences.  Everything from the most casual friendship to the most complex business relationship would take on some Dosadi character.

McKie recalled Aritch's parting question as Aritch had sent McKie to the jumpdoor which would put him on Dosadi.

"Ask yourself if there might be a price too high to pay for the Dosadi lesson."

That had been McKie's first clue to Aritch's actual motives and the word lesson had bothered him, but he'd missed the implications.  With some embarrassment, McKie recalled his glib answer to Aritch's question:

"It depends on the lesson."

True, but how blind he'd been to things any Dosadi would have seen.  How ignorant.  Now, he indicated to Jedrik that he understood why she'd called such things to his attention.

"Aritch didn't look much beyond the uses of outrage and injustice . . ."

"And how to turn such things to personal advantage."

She was right, of course.  McKie stared out at the gathering dusk.  Yes, the species tried to make everything its own.  If the species failed, then forces beyond it moved in, and so on, ad infinitum.

I do what I do.

He recalled those words of the sleeping monster with a shudder, felt Jedrik recoil.  But she was proof even against this.

"What powers your ConSentiency had."

Past tense, right.  And not our ConSentiency because that already was a thing of the past.  Besides . . . she was Dosadi.

"And the illusions of power," she said.

He saw at last what she was emphasizing, and her own shared memories in his mind made the lesson doubly impressive.  She'd known precisely what McKie's personal ego-focus might overlook.  Yet, this was one of the glues which held the ConSentiency together.

"Who can imagine himself immune from any retaliation?" he quoted.

It was right out of the BuSab Manual.

Jedrik made no response.

McKie needed no more emphasis from her now.  The lesson of history was clear.  Violence bred violence.  If this violence got out of hand, it ran a course depressing in its repetitive pattern.  More often than not, that course was deadly to the innocent, the so-called "enlistment phase."  The ex-innocents ignited more violence and more violence until either reason prevailed or all were destroyed.  There were a sufficient number of cinder blocks which once had been planets to make the lesson clear.  Dosadi had come within a hair of joining that uninhabited, uninhabitable list.

Before breaking contact, Jedrik had another point to make.

"You recall that in those final days, Broey increased the rations for his Human auxiliaries, his way of saying to them:  'You'll be turned out onto the Rim soon to tend for yourselves."'

"A Dosadi way of saying that."

"Correct.  We always held that thought in reserve:  that we should breed in such numbers that some would survive no matter what happened.  We would thus begin producing species which could survive there without the city of Chu . . . or any other city designed solely to produce nonpoisonous foods."

"But there's always a bigger force waiting in the wings."

"Make sure Aritch understands that."