The Dosadi Experiment (ConSentiency Universe #2)

All sentient beings are created unequal.  The best society provides each with equal opportunity to float at his own level.

- The Gowachin Primary

By mid-afternoon, Jedrik saw that her gambit had been accepted.  A surplus of fifty Humans was just the right size to be taken by a greedy underling.  Whoever it was would see the possibilities of continuing - ten here, thirty there - and because of the way she'd introduced this flaw, the next people discarded would be mostly Humans, but with just enough Gowachin to smack of retaliation.

It'd been difficult carrying out her daily routine knowing what she'd set in motion.  It was all very well to accept the fact that you were going into danger.  When the actual moment arrived, it always had a different character.  As the subtle and not so subtle evidence of success accumulated, she felt the crazy force of it rolling over her.  Now was the time to think about her true power base, the troops who would obey her slightest hint, the tight communications linkage with the Rim, the carefully selected and trained lieutenants.  Now was the time to think about McKie slipping so smoothly into her trap.  She concealed elation behind a facade of anger.  They'd expect her to be angry.

The evidence began with a slowed response at her computer terminal.  Someone was monitoring.  Whoever had taken her bait wanted to be certain she was expendable.  Wouldn't want to eliminate someone and then discover that the eliminated someone was essential to the power structure.  She'd made damned sure to cut a wide swath into a region which could be made non-essential.

The microsecond delay from the monitoring triggered a disconnect on her telltale circuit, removing the evidence of her preparations before anyone could find it.  She didn't think there'd be that much caution in anyone who'd accept this gambit, but unnecessary chances weren't part of her plan.  She removed the telltale timer and locked it away in one of the filing cabinets, there to be destroyed with the other evidence when the Elector's toads came prying.  The lonely blue flash would be confined by metal walls which would heat to a nice blood red before lapsing into slag and ashes.

In the next stage, people averted their faces as they walked past her office doorway.

Ahhh, the accuracy of the rumor-trail.

The avoidance came so naturally:  a glance at a companion on the other side, concentration on material in one's hands, a brisk stride with gaze fixed on the corridor's ends.  Important business up there.  No time to stop and chat with Keila Jedrik today.

By the Veil of Heaven!  They were so transparent!

A Gowachin walked by examining the corridor's blank opposite wall.  She knew that Gowachin:  one of the Elector's spies.  What would he tell Elector Broey today?  Jedrik glared at the Gowachin in secret glee.  By nightfall, Broey would know who'd picked up her gambit, but it was too small a bite to arouse his avarice.  He'd merely log the information for possible future use.  It was too early for him to suspect a sacrifice move.

A Human male followed the Gowachin.  He was intent on the adjustment of his neckline and that, of course, precluded a glance at a Senior Liaitor in her office.  His name was Drayjo.  Only yesterday, Drayjo had made courting gestures, bending toward her over this very desk to reveal the muscles under his light grey coveralls.  What did it matter that Drayjo no longer saw her as a useful conquest.  His face was a wooden door, closed, locked, hiding nothing.

Avert your face, you clog!

When the red light glowed on her terminal screen, it came as anticlimax.  Confirmation that her gambit had been accepted by someone who would shortly regret it.  Communication flowed across the screen:

"Opp SD22240268523ZX."

Good old ZX!

Bad news always developed its own coded idiom.  She read what followed, anticipating every nuance:

"The Mandate of God having been consulted, the following supernumerary functions are hereby reduced.  If your position screen carries your job title with an underline, you are included in the reduction.

"Senior Liaitor."

Jedrik clenched her fists in simulated anger while she glared at the underlined words.  It was done. OppOut, the good old Double-O.  Through its pliable arm, the DemoPol, the Sacred Congregation of the Heavenly Veil had struck again.

None of her elation showed through her Dosadi controls.  Someone able to see beyond immediate gain would note presently that only Humans had received this particular good old Double-O.  Not one Gowachin there.  Whoever made that observation would come sniffing down the trail she'd deliberately left.  Evidence would accumulate.  She thought she knew who would read that accumulated evidence for Broey.  It would be Tria.  It was not yet time for Tria to entertain doubts.  Broey would hear what Jedrik wanted him to hear.  The Dosadi power game would be played by Jedrik's rules then, and by the time others learned the rules it'd be too late.

She counted on the factor which Broey labeled "instability of the masses."  Religious twaddle!  Dosadi's masses were unstable only in particular ways.  Fit a conscious justification to their innermost unconscious demands and they became a predictable system which would leap into predictable actions - especially with a psychotic populace whose innermost demands could never be faced consciously by the individuals.  Such a populace remained highly useful to the initiates.  That was why they maintained the DemoPol with its mandate-of-God sample.  The tools of government were not difficult to understand.  All you needed was a pathway into the system, a place where what you did touched a new reality.

Broey would think himself the target of her action.  More fool he.

Jedrik pushed back her chair, stood and strode to the window hardly daring to think about where her actions would truly be felt.  She saw that the sniper's bullet hadn't even left a mark on the glass.  These new windows were far superior to the old ones which had taken on dull streaks and scratches after only a few years.

She stared down at the light on the river, carefully preserving this moment, prolonging it.

I won't look up yet, not yet.

Whoever had accepted her gambit would be watching her now.  Too late!  Too late!

A streak of orange-yellow meandered in the river current:  contaminants from the Warren factories . . . poisons.  Presently, not looking too high yet, she lifted her gaze to the silvered layers of the Council Hills, to the fluting inverted-stalagmites of the high apartments to which the denizens of Chu aspired in their futile dreams.  Sunlight gleamed from the power bulbs which adorned the apartments on the hills.  The great crushing wheel of government had its hub on those hills, but the impetus for that wheel had originated elsewhere.

Now, having prolonged the moment while anticipation enriched it, Jedrik lifted her gaze to that region above the Council Hills, to the sparkling streamers and grey glowing of the barrier veil, to the God Wall which englobed her planet in its impenetrable shell.  The Veil of Heaven looked the way it always looked in this light.  There was no apparent change.  But she knew what she had done.

Jedrik was aware of subtle instruments which revealed other suns and galaxies beyond the God Wall, places where other planets must exist, but her people had only this one planet.  That barrier up there and whoever had created it insured this isolation.  Her eyes blurred with quick tears which she wiped away with real anger at herself.  Let Broey and his toads believe themselves the only objects of her anger.  She would carve a way beyond them through that deadly veil.  No one on Dosadi would ever again cower beneath the hidden powers who lived in the sky!

She lowered her gaze to the carpet of factories and Warrens.  Some of the defensive walls were faintly visible in the layers of smoke which blanketed the teeming scramble of life upon which the city fed.  The smoke erased fine details to separate the apartment hills from the earth.  Above the smoke, the fluted buildings became more a part of sky than of ground.  Even the ledged, set-back walls of the canyon within which Chu created its sanctuary were no longer attached to the ground, but floated separate from this place where people could survive to a riper maturity on Dosadi.  The smoke dulled the greens of ledges and Rim where the Rabble waged a losing battle for survival.  Twenty years was old out there.  In that pressure, they fought for a chance to enter Chu's protective confines by any means available, even welcoming the opportunity to eat garbage from which the poisons of this planet had been removed.  The worst of Chu was better than their best, which only proved that the conditions of hell were relative.

I seek escape through the God Wall for the same reasons the Rabble seeks entrance to Chu.

In Jedrik's mind lay a graph with an undulant line.  It combined many influences:  Chu's precious food cycle and economics, Rim incursions, spots which flowed across their veiled sun, subtle planetary movements, atmospheric electricity, gravitational flows, magnetronic fluctuations, the dance of numbers in the Liaitor banks, the seemingly random play of cosmic rays, the shifting colors in the God Wall . . . and mysterious jolts to the entire system which commanded her most concentrated attention.  There could be only one source for such jolts:  a manipulative intelligence outside the planetary influence of Dosadi.  She called that force "X," but she had broken "X" into components.  One component was a simulation model of Elector Broey which she carried firmly in her head, not needing any of the mechanical devices for reading such things.  "X" and all of its components were as real as anything else on the chart in her mind.  By their interplay she read them.

Jedrik addressed herself silently to "X":

By your actions I know you and you are vulnerable.

Despite all of the Sacred Congregation's prattle, Jedrik and her people knew the God Wall had been put there for a specific purpose.  It was the purpose which pressed living flesh into Chu from the Rim.  It was the purpose which jammed too many people into too little space while it frustrated all attempts to spread into any other potential sanctuary.  It was the purpose which created people who possessed that terrifying mental template which could trade flesh for flesh . . . Gowachin or Human.  Many clues revealed themselves around her and came through that radiance in the sky, but she refused as yet to make a coherent whole out of that purpose.  Not yet.

I need this McKie!

With a Jedrik-maintained tenacity, her people knew that the regions beyond the barrier veil were not heaven or hell.  Dosadi was hell, but it was a created hell.  We will know soon . . . soon.

This moment had been almost nine Dosadi generations in preparation:  the careful breeding of a specific individual who carried in one body the talents required for this assault on "X," the exquisitely detailed education of that weapon-in-fleshly-form . . . and there'd been all the rest of it - whispers, unremarked observations in clandestine leaflets, help for people who held particular ideas and elimination of others whose concepts obstructed, the building of a Rim-Warren communications network, the slow and secret assembly of a military force to match the others which balanced themselves at the peaks of Dosadi power . . .  All of these things and much more had prepared the way for those numbers introduced into her computer terminal.  The ones who appeared to rule Dosadi like puppets - those ones could be read in many ways and this time the rulers, both visible and hidden, had made one calculation while Jedrik had made another calculation.

Again, she looked up at the God Wall.

You out there! Keila Jedrik knows you're there.  And you can be baited, you can be trapped.  You are slow and stupid.  And you think I don't know how to use your McKie.  Ahhh, sky demons, McKie will open your veil for me.  My life's a wrath and you're the objects of my wrath.  I dare what you would not.

Nothing of this revealed itself on her face nor in any movement of her body.