"Who is it that dares awaken me?"

McKie felt his body trembling, felt Jedrik trembling beside him.  The Caleban/Taprisiot-trembling, the sweaty response to trance!  He saw these phenomena now in a different light.  When you walked at the edge of this abyss . . .

While these thoughts passed through his mind, he felt a slight shift, no more than the blurred reflection of something which was not quite movement.  Now, while he still felt his own flesh around him, he also felt himself possessed of an inner contact with Jedrik's body and knew she shared this experience.

Such a panic as he had not thought possible threatened to overwhelm him.  He felt Jedrik trying to break the contact, to stop this hideous sharing, but they were powerless in the grip of a force which would not be stopped.

No time sense attached itself to this experience, but a fatalistic calm overcame them almost simultaneously.  McKie felt awareness of Jedrik/flesh deepen.  Curiosity dominated him now.

So this is woman!

This is man?

They shared the thoughts across an indistinct bridge.

Fascination gripped McKie.  He probed deeper.

He/She could feel himself/herself breathing.  And the differences!  It was not the genitalia, the presence or lack of breasts.  She felt bereft of breasts.  He felt acutely distressed by their presence, self-consciously aware of profound implications.  The sense of difference went back beyond gamete McKie/Jedrik.

McKie sensed her thoughts, her reactions.

Jedrik:  "You cast your sperm upon the stream of time."

McKie:  "You enclose and nurture . . ."

"I cast / I nurture."

It was as though they looked at an object from opposite sides, aware belatedly that they both examined the same thing.

"We cast / we nurture."

Obscuring layers folded away, and McKie found himself in Jedrik's mind, she in his.  Their thoughts were one entity.

The separate Dosadi and ConSentient experiences melted into a single relationship.

"Aritch . . . ah, yes.  You see?  And your PanSpechi friend, Bildoon.  Note that.  You suspected, but now you know . . ."

Each set of experiences fed on the other, expanding, refining . . . condensing, discarding, creating . . .

So that's the training of a Legum.

Loving parents?  Ahhh, yes, loving parents.

"I/we will apply pressure there . . . and there . . . They must be maneuvered into choosing that one as a judge.  Yes, that will give us the required leverage.  Let them break their own code."

And the awakened monster stirred within them.  It had no dimension, no place, only existence.  They felt its power.

"I do what I do!"

The power enveloped them.  No other awareness was permitted.  They sensed a primal current, unswerving purpose, a force which could override any other thing in their universe.  It was not God, not Life, not any particular species.  It was something so far beyond such articulations that Jedrik/McKie could not even contemplate it without a sense that the next instant would bring obliteration.  They felt a question hurled at their united, fearful awareness.  The question was framed squarely in anger, astonishment, cold amusement, and threat.

"For this you awaken me?"

Now, they understood why the old body and donor-ego had always been slain immediately.  This terrible sharing made a . . . made a noise.  It awakened a questioner.

They understood the question without words, knowing they could never grasp the full meaning and emotive thrust, that it would burn them out even to try.  Anger . . . astonishment . . . cold amusement . . . threat.  The question as their own united mind(s) interpreted it represented a limit.  It was all that Jedrik/McKie could accept.

The intrusive questioner receded.

They were never quite sure afterward whether they'd been expelled or whether they'd fled in terror, but the parting words were burned into their combined awareness.

"Let the sleeper sleep."

They walked softly in their minds then.  They understood the warning, but knew it could never be translated in its fullest threat for any other sentient being.

Concurrent:  McKie/Jedrik felt a projection of terror from the God Wall Caleban, unfocused, unexplained.  It was a new experience in the male-female collective memory.  Caleban Fannie Mae had not even projected this upon original McKie when she'd thought herself doomed.

Concurrent:  McKie/Jedrik felt a burntout fading from Pcharky.  Something in that terrible contact had plunged Pcharky into his death spiral.  Even as McKie/Jedrik realized this, the old Gowachin died. It was a slammed door.  But this came after a blazing realization by McKie/Jedrik that Pcharky had shared the original decision to set up the Dosadi experiment.

McKie found himself clothed in living, breathing flesh which routed its messages through his awareness.  He wasn't sure which of their two bodies he possessed, but it was distinct, separate.  It wrapped him in Human senses:  the taste of salt, the smell of perspiration, and the omnipresent Warren stink.  One hand held cold metal, the other clasped the hand of a fellow Human.  Perspiration drenched this body, made the clasped hands slippery.  He felt that knowing which hand held another hand was of utmost importance, but he wasn't ready to face that knowledge.  Awareness of self, this new self, and a whole lifetime of new memories, demanded all of the attention he could muster.

Focus:  A Rim city, never outside Jedrik's control because she had fed the signals through to Gar and Tria with exquisite care, and because those who gave the orders on the Rim had shared in the generations of selective breeding which had produced Jedrik.  She was a biological weapon whose sole target was the God Wall.

Focus:  Loving parents can thrust their child into deadly peril when they know everything possible has been done to prepare that child for survival.

The oddity to McKie was that he felt such things as personal memories.

"I did that."

Jedrik suffered the throes of similar experiences.

Which body?

So that was the training of a BuSab agent.  Clever . . . almost adequate.  Complex and full of much that she found to be new, but why did it always stop short of a full development?

She reviewed the sessions with Aritch and Ceylang.  A matched pair.  The choice of Ceylang and the role chosen for her appeared obvious.  How innocent!  Jedrik felt herself free to pity Ceylang.  When allowed to run its course, this was an interesting emotion.  She had never before felt pity in uncolored purity.

Focus:  McKie actually loved her.  She savored this emotion in its ConSentient complexity.  The straight flow of selected emotions fascinated her.  They did not have to be bridled!

In and out of this creative exchange there wove an intimacy, a pure sexuality without inhibitions.

McKie, savoring the amusement Jedrik had felt when Tria had suggested a McKie/Jedrik breeding, found himself caught by demanding male eroticism and knew by the sensation that he retained his old body.

Jedrik, understanding McKie's long search for a female to complete him, found her amusement converted to the desire to demonstrate that completion.  As she turned toward him, releasing the dull rod which had once shimmered in contact with Pcharky, she found herself in McKie's flesh looking into her own eyes.

McKie gasped in the mirror experience.

Just as abruptly, driven by shock, they shifted back into familiar flesh:  McKie male, Jedrik female.  Instantly, it became a thing to explore - back - and forth.  Eroticism was forgotten in this new game.

"We can be either sex/body at will!"

It was something beyond Taprisiots and Calebans, far more subtle than the crawling progression of a PanSpechi ego through the bodies from its creche.

They knew the source of this odd gift even as they sank back on the bed, content to be familiar male and female for a time.