The Dosadi Experiment (ConSentiency Universe #2)

The Dosadi Experiment (ConSentiency Universe #2) Page 8

Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.

- Attributed to an ancient Human journalist

As she hurried across the roof of the adjoining parking spire at midafternoon of her final day as a Liaitor, Jedrik couldn't clear her mind of the awareness that she was about to shed another mark of rank.  Stacked in the building beneath her, each one suspended by its roof grapples on the conveyor track, were the vehicles of the power merchants and their minions.  The machines varied from the giant jaigers heavy with armor and weapons and redundant engine systems, of the ruling few, down to the tiny black skitters assigned to such as herself.  Ex-minion Jedrik knew she was about to take a final ride in the machine which had released her from the morning and evening crush on the underground walkways.

She had timed her departure with care.  The ones who rode in the jaigers would not have reassigned her skitter and its driver.  That driver, Havvy, required her special attentions in this last ride, this narrow time slot which she had set aside for dealing with him.

Jedrik sensed events rushing at their own terrible pace now.  Just that morning she had loosed death against fifty Humans.  Now, the avalanche gathered power.

The parking spire's roof pavement had been poorly repaired after the recent explosive destruction of three Rim guerrillas.  Her feet adjusted to the rough paving as she hurried across the open area to the drop chute.  At the chute, she paused and glanced westward through Chu's enclosing cliffs.  The sun, already nearing its late afternoon line on the cliffs, was a golden glow beyond the God Wall's milky barrier.  To her newly sensitized fears, that was not a sun but a malignant eye which peered down at her.

By now, the rotofiles in her office would've been ignited by the clumsy intrusion of the LP toads.  There'd be a delay while they reported this, while it was bucked up through the hierarchy to a level where somebody dared make an important decision.

Jedrik fought against letting her thoughts fall into trembling shadows.  After the rotofiles, other data would accumulate.  The Elector's people would grow increasingly suspicious.  But that was part of her plan, a layer with many layers.

Abruptly, she stepped into the chute, dropped to her parking level, stared across the catwalks at her skitter dangling among the others.  Havvy sat on the sloping hood, his shoulders in their characteristic slouch.  Good.  He behaved as expected.  A certain finesse was called for now, but she expected no real trouble from anyone as shallow and transparent as Havvy.  Still, she kept her right hand in the pocket where she'd secreted a small but adequate weapon.  Nothing could be allowed to stop her now.  She had selected and trained lieutenants, but none of them quite matched her capabilities.  The military force which had been prepared for this moment needed Jedrik for that extra edge which could pluck victory from the days ahead of them.For now, I must float like a leaf above the hurricane.

Havvy was reading a book, one of those pseudodeep things he regularly affected, a book which she knew he would not understand.  As he read, he pulled at his lower lip with thumb and forefinger, the very picture of a deep intellectual involvement with important ideas.  But it was only a picture.  He gave no sign that he heard Jedrik hurrying toward him.  A light breeze flicked the pages and he held them with one finger.  She could not yet see the title, but assumed this book would be on the contraband list as was much of his reading.  That was about the peak of Havvy's risk taking, not great but imbued with a certain false glamor.  Another picture.

She could see him quite distinctly now in readable detail.  He should have looked up by now but still sat absorbed in his book.  Havvy possessed large brown eyes which he obviously believed he employed with deceptive innocence.  The real innocence went far beyond his shallow attempts at deception.  Jedrik's imagination easily played the scene should one of Broey's people confront Havvy in this pose.

"A contraband book?" Havvy would ask, playing his brown eyes for all their worthless innocence.  "I didn't think there were any more of those around.

Thought you'd burned them all.  Fellow handed it to me on the street when I asked what he was reading."

And the Elector's spy would conceal a sneer while asking, "Didn't you question such a gift?"

Should it come to that, things would grow progressively stickier for Havvy along the paths he could not anticipate.  His innocent brown eyes would deceive one of the Elector's people no more than they deceived her.  In view of this, she read other messages in the fact that Havvy had produced her key to the God Wall - this Jorj X. McKie.  Havvy had come to her with his heavy-handed conspiratorial manner:"The Rim wants to send in a new agent.  We thought you might . . ."

And every datum he'd divulged about this oddity, every question he'd answered with his transparent candor, had increased her tension, surprise, and elation.

Jedrik thought upon these matters as she approached Havvy.

He sensed her presence, looked up.  Recognition and something unexpected - a watchfulness half-shielded - came over him.  He closed his book.

"You're early."

"As I said I'd be."

This new manner in Havvy set her nerves on edge, raised old doubts.  No course remained for her except attack.

"Only toads don't break routine," she said.

Havvy's gaze darted left, right, returned to her face.  He hadn't expected this.  It was a bit more open risk than Havvy relished.  The Elector had spy devices everywhere.  Havvy's reaction told her what she wanted to know, however.  She gestured to the skitter.

"Let's go."

He pocketed his book, slid down, and opened her door.  His actions were a bit too brisk.  The button tab on one of his green-striped sleeves caught a door handle.  He freed himself with an embarrassed flurry.

Jedrik slipped into the passenger harness.  Havvy slammed the door a touch too hard.  Nervous.  Good.  He took his place at the power bar to her left, kept his profile to her when he spoke.

"Where?"

"Head for the apartment."

A slight hesitation, then he activated the grapple tracks.  The skitter jerked into motion, danced sideways, and slid smoothly down the diveway to the street.

As they emerged from the parking spire's enclosing shadows, even before the grapple released and Havvy activated the skitter's own power, Jedrik firmed her decision not to look back.  The Liaitor building had become part of her past, a pile of grey-green stones hemmed by other tall structures with, here and there, gaps to the cliffs and the river's arms.  That part of her life she now excised.  Best it were done cleanly.  Her mind must be clear for what came next.  What came next was war.

It wasn't often that a warrior force lifted itself out of Dosadi's masses to seek its place in the power structure.  And the force she had groomed would strike fear into millions.  It was the fears of only a few people that concerned her now, though, and the first of these was Havvy.

He drove with his usual competence, not overly proficient but adequate.  His knuckles were white on the steering arms, however.  It was still the Havvy she knew moving those muscles, not one of the evil identities who could play their tricks in Dosadi flesh.  That was Havvy's usefulness to her and his failure.  He was Dosadi-flawed, corrupted.  That could not be permitted with McKie.

Havvy appeared to have enough good sense to fear her.  Jedrik allowed this emotion to ferment in him while she studied the passing scene.  There was little traffic and all of that was armored.  The occasional tube access with its sense of weapons in the shadows and eyes behind the guard slits - all seemed normal. It was too soon for the hue and cry after an errant Senior Liaitor.

They went through the first walled checkpoint without delay.  The guards were efficiently casual, a glance at the skitter and the identification brassards of the occupants.  It was all routine.

The danger with routines, she told herself, was that they very soon became boring.  Boredom dulled the senses.  That was a boredom which she and her aides constantly guarded against among their warriors.  This new force on Dosadi would create many shocks.

As Havvy took them up the normal ring route through the walls, the streets became wide, more open.  There were garden plantings in the open here, poisonous but beautiful.  Leaves were purple in the shadows.  Barren dirt beneath the bushes glittered with corrosive droplets, one of Dosadi's little ways of protecting territory.  Dosadi taught many things to those willing to learn.

Jedrik turned, studied Havvy, the way he appeared to concentrate on his driving with an air of stored-up energy.  That was about as far as Havvy's learning went.  He seemed to know some of his own deficiencies, must realize that many wondered how he held a driver's job, even for the middle echelons, when the Warrens were jammed with people violently avaricious for any step upward.  Obviously, Havvy carried valuable secrets which he sold on a hidden market.  She had to nudge that hidden market now.  Her act must appear faintly clumsy, as though events of this day had confused her.

"Can we be overheard?" she asked.

That made no difference to her plans, but it was the kind of clumsiness which Havvy would misinterpret in precisely the way she now required.

"I've disarmed the transceiver the way I did before," he said.  "It'll look like a simple breakdown if anyone checks."

To no one but you, she thought.

But it was the level of infantile response she'd come to expect from Havvy.  She picked up his gambit, probing with real curiosity.

"You expected that we'd require privacy today?"

He almost shot a startled took at her, caught himself, then:

"Oh, no!  It was a precaution.  I have more information to sell you."

"But you gave me the information about McKie."

"That was to demonstrate my value."

Oh, Havvy!  Why do you try?

"You have unexpected qualities," she said, and marked that he did not even detect the first level of her irony.  "What's this information you wish to sell?"

"It concerns this McKie."

"Indeed?"

"What's it worth to you?"

"Am I your only market, Havvy?"

His shoulder muscles bunched as his grip grew even tighter on the steering arms.  The tensions in his voice were remarkably easy to read.

"Sold in the right place my information could guarantee maybe five years of easy living - no worries about food or good housing or anything."

"Why aren't you selling it in such a place?"

"I didn't say I could sell it.  There are buyers and then there are buyers."

"And then there are the ones who just take?" .

There was no need for him to answer and it was just as well.  A barrier dropped in front of the skitter, forcing Havvy to a quick stop.  For just an instant, fear gripped her and she felt her reflexes prevent any bodily betrayal of the emotion.  Then she saw that it was a routine stop while repair supplies were trundled across the roadway ahead of them.

Jedrik peered out the window on her right.  The interminable repair and strengthening of the city's fortifications was going on at the next lower level.  Memory told her this was the eighth layer of city protection on the southwest.  The noise of pounding rock hammers filled the street.  Grey dust lay everywhere, clouds of it drifting.  She smelled burnt flint and that bitter metallic undertone which you never quite escaped anywhere in Chu, the smell of the poison death which Dosadi ladled out to its inhabitants.  She closed her mouth and took shallow breaths, noted absently that the labor crew was all Warren, all Human, and about a third of them women.  None of the women appeared older than fifteen.  They already had that hard alertness about the eyes which the Warren-born never lost.

A young male strawboss went by trailing a male assistant, an older man with bent shoulders and straggly grey hair.  The older man walked with slow deliberation and the young strawboss seemed impatient with him, waving the assistant to keep up.  The important subtleties of the relationship thus revealed were entirely lost on Havvy, she noted.  The strawboss, as he passed one of the female laborers, looked her up and down with interest.  The worker noted his attention and exerted herself with the hammer.  The strawboss said something to his assistant, who went over and spoke to the young female.  She smiled and glanced at the strawboss, nodded.  The strawboss and assistant walked on without looking back.  The obvious arrangement for later assignation would have gone without Jedrik's conscious notice except that the young female strongly resembled a woman she'd once known . . . dead now as were so many of her early companions.

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 . . .

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 . . . 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.

It would have to be done without passion, not like a Gowachin male weeding his own tads, but with a kind of clinical decisiveness which "X" could not misunderstand.

For now, she had arranged that Havvy take her to a particular place.  He still had a role to perform.  Later, with discreet attention to the necessary misdirections, she would do what had to be done.  Then the next part of her plan could be assayed.