Fannie Mae sensed this.

"Yes, McKie, that is friendship, is love.  Do you possess this feeling toward Human female companions?"

Her question angered him.  Why was she prying?  His private sexual relationships were no concern of hers!

"Your love turns easily to anger," she chided.

"There are limits to how deeply a Saboteur Extraordinary can allow himself to be involved with anyone."

"Which came first, McKie - the Saboteur Extraordinary or these limits?"

Her response carried obvious derision.  Had he chosen the Bureau because he was incapable of warm relationships?  But he really cared for Fannie Mae!  He admired her . . . and she could hurt him because he admired her and felt . . . felt this way.

He spoke out of his anger and hurt.

"Without the Bureau there'd be no ConSentiency and no need for Calebans."

"Yes, indeed.  People have but to look at a dread agent from BuSab and know fear."

It was intolerable, but he couldn't escape the underlying warmth he felt toward this strange Caleban entity, this being who could creep unguarded into his mind and talk to him as no other being dared.  If only he had found a woman to share that kind of intimacy . . .

And this was the part of their conversation which came back to haunt him.  After months with no contact between them, why had she chosen that moment just three days before the Dosadi crisis burst upon the Bureau?  She'd pulled out his ego, his deepest sense of identity.  She'd shaken that ego and then she'd skewered him with her barbed question:

"Why are you so cold and mechanical in your Human relationships?"

Her irony could not be evaded.  She'd made him appear ridiculous in his own eyes.  He could feel warmth, yes . . . even love, for a Caleban but not for a Human female.  This unguarded feeling he held for Fannie Mae had never been directed at any of his marital companions.  Fannie Mae had aroused his anger, then reduced his anger to verbal breast-beating, and finally to silent hurt.  Still, the love remained.

Why?

Human females were bed partners.  They were bodies which used him and which he used.  That was out of the question with this Caleban.  She was a star burning with atomic fires, her seat of consciousness unimaginable to other sentients.  Yet, she could extract love from him.  He gave this love freely and she knew it.  There was no hiding an emotion from a Caleban when she sent her mental tendrils into your awareness.

She'd certainly known he would see the irony.  That had to be part of her motive in such an attack.  But Calebans seldom acted from a single motive - which was part of their charm and the essence of their most irritant exchanges with other sentient beings.

"McKie?"  Softly in his mind.

"Yes."  Angry.

"I show you now a fractional bit of my feeling toward your node."

Like a balloon being inflated by a swift surge of gas, he felt himself suffused by a projected sense of concern, of caring.  He was drowning in it . . . wanted to drown in it.  His entire body radiated this white-hot sense of protective attention.  For a whole minute after it was withdrawn, he still glowed with it.

A fractional bit?

"McKie?"  Concerned.

"Yes."  Awed.

"Have I hurt you?"

He felt alone, emptied.

"No."

"The full extent of my nodal involvement would destroy you.  Some Humans have suspected this about love."

Nodal involvement?

She was confusing him as she'd done in their first encounters.  How could the Calebans describe love as . . . nodal involvement?

"Labels depend on viewpoint," she said.  "You look at the universe through too narrow an opening.  We despair of you sometimes."

There she was again, attacking.

He fell back on a childhood platitude.

"I am what I am and that's all I am."

"You may soon learn, friend McKie, that you're more than you thought."

With that, she'd broken the contact.  He'd awakened in damp, chilly darkness, the sound of the fountain loud in his ears.  Nothing he did would bring her back into communication, not even when he'd spent some of his own credits on a Taprisiot in a vain attempt to call her.

His Caleban friend had shut him out.

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.