"Faaaaa!"

She'd seldom showed that much disgust with him.

"We're not going to make contact with our people on the Rim.  Jedrik and Broey have seen to that.  It wouldn't surprise me if they were cooperating to isolate us."

"But we've . . ."

"Shut up, Father!"  She held up her hands, stared at them.  "I was never really good enough to be one of Broey's chief advisors.  I always suspected that.  I always pressed too hard.  Last night, I reviewed as many of my decisions as I could.  Jedrik deliberately made me look good.  She did it oh so beautifully!"

"But our forces on the Rim . . ."

"May not be ours!  They may be Jedrik's."

"Even the Gowachin?"

"Even the Gowachin."

Gar could hear a ringing in his ears.  Contact Jedrik?  Throw away all of their power?

"I'm good enough to recognize the weakness of a force such as ours," Tria said.  "We can be goaded into spending ourselves uselessly.  Even Broey didn't see that, but Jedrik obviously did.  Look at the salients along her perimeter!"

"What have salients . . ."

"They can be pinched off and obliterated!  Even you must see that."

"Then pull back and . . ."

"Reduce our territory?"  She stared at him, aghast.  "If I even intimate I'm going to do that, our auxiliaries will desert wholesale.  Right now they're . . ."

"Then attack!"

"To gain what?"

Gar nodded.  Jedrik would fall back across mined areas, blast the fanatics out of existence.  She held enough territory that she could afford such destruction.  Clearly, she'd planned on it.

"Then we must pinch off Broey's corridor."

"That's what Jedrik wants us to do.  It's the only negotiable counter we have left.  That's why we must contact Jedrik."

Gar shook his head in despair.

Tria was not finished, though.

"Jedrik might restore us to a share of power in the Rim city if we bargain for it now.  Broey would never do that.  Do you understand now the mistake you made with Broey?"

"But Broey was going to . . ."

"You failed to follow my orders, Father.  You must see now why I always tried to keep you from making independent decisions."

Gar fell into abashed silence.  This was his daughter, but he could sense his peril.

Tria spoke.

"I will issue orders presently to all of our commanders.  They will be told to hold at all costs.  They will be told that you and I will try to contact Jedrik.  They will be told why."

"But how can . . ."

"We will permit ourselves to be captured."

Many things conspired to frustrate McKie.  Few people other than Jedrik answered his questions.  Most responded as though to a cretin.  Jedrik treated him as though he were a child of unknown potential.  At times, he knew he amused her.  Other times, she punished him with an angry glance, by ignoring him, or just by going away - or worse, sending him away.

It was now late afternoon of the fifth day in the battle for Chu, and Broey's forces still held out in the heart of the city with their slim corridor to the Rim.  He knew this from reports he'd overheard.  He stood in a small room off Jedrik's command post, a room containing four cots where, apparently she and/or her commanders snatched occasional rest. One tall, narrow window looked out to the south Rim.  McKie found it difficult to realize that he'd come across that Rim just six days previously.

Clouds had begun to gather over the Rim's terraced escarpments, a sure sign of a dramatic change in the weather.  He knew that much, at least, from his Tandaloor briefings.  Dosadi had no such thing as weather control.  Awareness of this left him feeling oddly vulnerable.  Nature could be so damnably capricious and dangerous when you had no grip on her vagaries.

McKie blinked, held his breath for a moment.

Vagaries of nature.

The vagaries of sentient nature had moved the Gowachin to set up this experiment.  Did they really hope to control that vast, seething conglomerate of motives?  Or had they some other reason for Dosadi, a reason which he had not yet penetrated?  Was this, after all, a test of Caleban mysteries?  He thought not.

He knew the way Aritch and aides said they'd set up this experiment.  Observations here bore out their explanations.  None of that data was consistent with an attempt to understand the Calebans.  Only that brief encounter with Pcharky, a thing which Jedrik no longer was willing to discuss.

No matter how he tried, McKie couldn't evade the feeling that something essential lay hidden in the way this planet had been set upon its experimental course; something the Gowachin hadn't revealed, something they perhaps didn't even understand themselves.  What'd they done at the beginning?  They had this place, Dosadi, the subjects, the Primary . . . yes, the Primary.  The inherent inequality of individuals dominated Gowachin minds.  And there was that damnable DemoPol.  How had they mandated it?  Better yet:  how did they maintain that mandate?

Aritch's people had hoped to expose the inner workings of sentient social systems.  So they said.  But McKie was beginning to look at that explanation with Dosadi eyes, with Dosadi skepticism.  What had Fannie Mae meant about not being able to leave here in his own body/node?  How could he be Jedrik's key to the God Wall?  McKie knew he needed more information than he could hope to get from Jedrik.  Did Broey have this information?  McKie wondered if he might in the end have to climb the heights to the Council Hills for his answers.  Was that even possible now?

When he'd asked for it, Jedrik had given him almost the run of this building, warning:

"Don't interfere."

Interfere with what?

When he'd asked, she'd just stared at him.

She had, however, taken him around to familiarize everyone with his status. He was never quite sure what that status might be, except that it was somewhere between guest and prisoner.

Jedrik had required minimal conversation with her people.  Often, she'd used only hand waves to convey the necessary signals of passage.  The whole traverse was a lesson for McKie, beginning with the doorguards.

"McKie."  Pointing at him.

The guards nodded.

Jedrik had other concerns.

"Team Nine?"

"Back at noon."

"Send word."

Everyone subjected McKie to a hard scrutiny which he felt certain would let them identify him with minimal interruption.

There were two elevators:  one an express from a heavily guarded street entrance on the side of the building, the other starting above the fourth level at the ceiling of Pcharky's cage.  They took this one, went up, pausing at each floor for guards to see him.

When they returned to the cage room, McKie saw that a desk had been installed just inside the street door.  The father of those three wild children sat there watching Pcharky, making occasional notations in a notebook.  McKie had a name for him now, Ardir.

Jedrik paused at the desk. .

"McKie can come and go with the usual precautions."

McKie, addressing himself finally to Jedrik, had said:

"Thanks for taking this time with me."

"No need to be sarcastic, McKie."

He had not intended sarcasm and reminded himself once more that the usual amenities of the ConSentiency suffered a different interpretation here.

Jedrik glanced through Ardir's notes, looked up at Pcharky, back to McKie.  Her expression did not change.

"We will meet for dinner."

She left him then.

For his part, McKie had approached Pcharky's cage, noting the tension this brought to the room's guards and observers.  The old Gowachin sat in his hammock with an indifferent expression on his face.  The bars of the cage emitted an almost indiscernible hissing as they shimmered and glowed.