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How to start a war? Nurture your own latent hungers for power Forget that only madmen pursue power for its own sake Let such ain power - even you Let such madmen act behind their conventional masks of sanity Whether their masks be fashioned froical aura of laill come

- Gowachin aphorism

The odalarm awoke Jorj X McKie with a whiff of lemon For just an instant his ht he was on Tutalsee&039;s gentle planetary ocean floating softly on his garlanded island There were le island, banks of Hibiscus and carpets of spicy Alyssue lay in the path of perfumed breezes and the lemon

Awareness ca co in the armored efficiency of his Central Central aparte; he was back at work

McKie shuddered

A planet full of people could die todayor tomorrow

It would happen unless so the Gowachin as he did, McKie was convinced of it The Gowachin were capable of cruel decisions, especially where their species pride was at stake, or for reasons which other species ht not understand Bildoon, his Bureau chief, assessed this crisis the same way Not since the Caleban problem had such enormity crossed the ConSentient horizon

But where was this endangered planet, this Dosadi?

After a night of sleep suppression, the briefings about Dosadi cah part of his es Two operatives, one Wreave and one Laclac, had made the report The tere reliable and resourceful Their sources were excellent, although the infor for pro at discriainst their species The report required special scrutiny No BuSab agent, regardless of species, was above soned to weaken the Bureau and gain coup merits upon which to ride into the director&039;s office

However, BuSab was still directed by Bildoon, a PanSpechi in Human form, the fourth member of his creche to carry that name It had been obvious from Bildoon&039;s first words that he believed the report

"McKie, this thing could set Human and Gowachin at each others&039; throats"

It was an understandable idioo for the Gowachin abdomen to carry out the same threat McKie already had acquainted himself with the report and, fro association with the Gowachin made him sensitive, he shared Bildoon&039;s assess across the desk from the director in the rather small, less office Bildoon had lately preferred, McKie shifted the report fro his own nervous mannerism, he put the report on the desk It was on coded h the fingers or across other sensitive appendages

"Why couldn&039;t they pinpoint this Dosadi&039;s location?" McKie asked

"It&039;s known only to a Caleban"

"Well, they&039;ll"

"The Calebans refuse to respond"

McKie stared across the desk at Bildoon The polished surface reflected a second ie to ht one McKie studied the reflection Until you focused on Bildoon&039;s faceted eyes (how like an insect&039;s eyes they were), this PanSpechi appeared much like a Human male with dark hair and pleasant round face Perhaps he&039;d put on more than the form when his flesh had been molded to Human shape Bildoon&039;s face displayed emotions which McKie read in Hury

McKie was troubled

"Refused?"

"The Calebans don&039;t deny that Dosadi exists or that it&039;s threatened They refuse to discuss it"

"Then we&039;re dealing with a Caleban contract and they&039;re obeying the ter that conversation with Bildoon as he awakened in his apart Was Dosadi soht to fear e don&039;t understand

The Caleban He thought of his recent conversation with Fannie Mae When you thought you had sorasp Before the Calebans&039; gift of jumpdoors, the ConSentiency had been a relatively slow and understandable federation of the known sentient species The universe had contained itself in a shared space of recognizable dirown in a way likened to expanding bubbles It had been linear

Caleban jued that with an explosive acceleration of every aspect of life Jumpdoors had been an immediately disruptive tool of power They implied infinite usable dis only faintly understood Through a jumpdoor you stepped from a room on Tutalsee into a hallway here on Central Central You walked through a juinui The intervening "norht years or parsecs, but the passage fronored such old concepts And to this day, ConSentient investigators did not understand how the jumpdoors worked Concepts such as "relative space" didn&039;t explain the phenoround his teeth in frustration Calebans inevitably did that to hiood did it do to think of the Calebans as visible stars in the space his body occupied? He could look up from any planet where a juht sky Visible stars: ah, yes Those are Calebans What did that tell him?

There was a strongly defended theory that Calebans were but a more sophisticated aspect of the equally mysterious Taprisiots The ConSentiency had accepted and employed Taprisiots for thousands of standard years A Taprisiot presented sentient forths of tree trunk cut off at top and botto stub limbs When you touched them they ars of the ConSentiency But just as the Calebans took your flesh across the parsecs, Taprisiots took your awareness across those sae you with another mind

Taprisiots were a communications device

But current theory said Taprisiots had been introduced to prepare the ConSentiency for Calebans

It was dangerous to think of Taprisiots as merely a convenient erous to think of Calebans as "transportation facilitators" Look at the socially disruptive effect of jumpdoors! And when you eer: the co zombie while you made your call Noneither Calebans nor Taprisiots should be accepted without question

With the possible exception of the PanSpechi, no other species knew the first thing about Caleban and Taprisiot phenomena beyond their economic and personal value They were, indeed, valuable, a fact reflected in the prices often paid for ju-call services The PanSpechi denied that they could explain these things, but the PanSpechi were notoriously secretive They were a species where each individual consisted of five bodies and only one doo The four reserves lay somewhere in a hidden creche Bildoon had coo froined PanSpechi refused to discuss internal creche matters except to admit as obvious on the surface: that they could grow a simulacrum body to mimic most of the known species in the ConSentiency

McKie felt hi of xenophobia

We accept too das on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying

Keeping his eyes closed, McKie sat up His bedog rippled gently against his buttocks

Blast and damn the Calebans! Da about Dosadi The result had left hi if he really knehat Calebans meant by friendship

"Information not permitted"

What kind of an ansas that? Especially when it was the only response he could get

Not permitted?

The basic irritant was an old one: BuSab had no real way of applying its "gentle ministrations" to the Calebans

But Calebans had never been known to lie They appeared painfully, explicitly honestas far as they could be understood But they obviously withheld information Not permitted! Was it possible they&039;d let themselves be accessories to the destruction of a planet and that planet&039;s entire population?

McKie had to adnorance or from some stricture of Caleban morality which the rest of the ConSentiency did not share or understand Or for some other reason which defied translation They said they looked upon all life as "precious nodes of existence" But hints at peculiar exceptions remained What was it Fannie Mae had once said?

"Dissolved well this node"

How could you look at an individual life as a "node"?

If association with Calebans had taught hi between species was tenuous at best and trying to understand a Caleban could drive you insane In what hed

For now, this Dosadi report froents had to be accepted on its own limited terms Powerful people in the Gowachin Confederacy had sequestered Humans and Gowachin on an unlisted planet Dosadi - location unknown, but the scene of unspecified experiments and tests on an ients insisted was true If confir people would know that, surely Rather than let their shame be exposed, they could carry out the threat which the two agents reported: blast the captive planet out of existence, the population and all of the incri evidence with it

McKie shuddered

Dosadi, a planet of thinking creatures - sentients If the Gowachin carried out their violent threat, a living world would be reduced to blazing gases and the hot plasma of atomic particles So would strike fire against the void The tragedy would require less than a standard second The ht about such a catastrophe would require a longer time than the actual event

But if it happened and the other ConSentient species received absolute proof that it had happenedahhh, then the ConSentiencythat he ht be shunted into sohbor, if that neighbor&039;s habits, language, and body were different from his own? Yesthere would be more than Humans and Gowachin at each other&039;s throats These were things all the species feared Bildoon realized this The threat to this mysterious Dosadi was a threat to all

McKie could not shake the terrible iht blink stretching toward its own darkness And if the ConSentiency learned of itin that instant before their universe cru bolt, what excuses would be offered for the failure of reason to prevent such a thing?

Reason?

McKie shook his head, opened his eyes It was useless to dwell on the worst prospects He allowed the apartloom to invade his senses, absorbed the fas

I&039;m a Saboteur Extraordinary and I&039;ve a job to do

It helped to think of Dosadi that way Solutions to problems often depended upon the will to succeed, upon sharpened skills and multiple resources BuSab owned those resources and those skills

McKie stretched his arh over his head, twisted his blocky torso The bedog rippled with pleasure at his move of ht as the apartment&039;scontrols responded A yawn stretched hisand padded across to the The view stretched away beneath a sky like stained blue paper He stared out across the spires and rooftops of Central Central Here lay the heart of the doe spread its htness, took a deep breath

The Bureau The omnipresent, omniscient, oovern in the ConSentiency Here lay the norainst which sanity measured itself Each choice made here demanded utmost delicacy Their co for absolutes And each hour of every waking workday, BuSab in all of its parts asked itself:

"What are we if we succumb to unbridled violence?"

The ansas there in deepest awareness:

"Then we are useless"