Herbert, Frank - The Dosadi Experiment

VIP免费
2024-12-08 0 0 439.2KB 221 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
The Dosadi Experiment
Frank Herbert
1969
In memory of Babe because she knew how to enjoy life.
When the Calebans first sent us one of their giant metal "beachballs,"
communicating through this device to offer the use of jumpdoors for
interstellar travel, many in the ConSentiency covertly began to exploit this
gift of the stars for their own questionable purposes. Both the "Shadow
Government" and some among the Gowachin people saw what is obvious today:
that instantaneous travel across unlimited space involved powers which might
isolate subject populations in gross numbers.
This observation at the beginning of the Dosadi Experiment came long before
Saboteur Extraordinary Jorj X. McKie discovered that visible stars of our
universe were either Calebans or the manifestations of Calebans in ConSentient
space. (See Whipping Star, an account of McKie's discovery thinly disguised
as fiction.)
What remains pertinent here is that McKie, acting for his Bureau of Sabotage,
identified the Caleban called "Fannie Mae" as the visible star Thyone. This
discovery of the Thyone-Fannie Mae identity ignited new interest in the
Caleban Question and thus contributed to the exposure of the Dosadi Experiment
-- which many still believe was the most disgusting use of Sentients by
Sentients in ConSentient history. Certainly, it remains the most gross
psychological test of Sentient Beings ever performed, and the issue of
informed consent has never been settled to everyone's satisfaction.
-From the first public account, the Trial of Trials
Justice belongs to those who claim it, but let the claimant beware lest he
create new injustice by his claim and thus set the bloody pendulum of revenge
into its inexorable motion.
-Gowachin aphorism
"Why are you so cold and mechanical in your Human relationships?"
Jorj X. McKie was to reflect on that Caleban question later. Had she been
trying to alert him to the Dosadi Experiment and to what his investigation of
that experiment might do to him? He hadn't even known about Dosadi at the
time and the pressures of the Caleban communications trance, the accusatory
tone she took, had precluded other considerations.
Still, it rankled. He didn't like the feeling that he might be a subject of
her research into Humans. He'd always thought of that particular Caleban as
his friend -- if one could consider being friendly with a creature whose
visible manifestation in this universe was a fourth-magnitude yellow sun
visible from Central Central where the Bureau of Sabotage maintained its
headquarters. And there was inevitable discomfort in Caleban communication.
You sank into a trembling, jerking trance while they made their words appear
in your consciousness.
But his uncertainty remained: had she tried to tell him something beyond the
plain content of her words?
When the weather makers kept the evening rain period short, McKie liked to go
outdoors immediately afterward and stroll in the park enclosure which BuSab
provided for its employees on Central Central. As a Saboteur Extraordinary,
McKie had free run of the enclosure and he liked the fresh smells of the place
after a rain.
The park covered about thirty hectares, deep in a well of Bureau buildings.
It was a scrambling hodgepodge of plantings cut by wide paths which circled
and twisted through specimens from every inhabited planet of the known
universe. No care had been taken to provide a particular area for any
sentient species. If there was any plan to the park it was a maintenance plan
with plants requiring similar conditions and care held in their own sectors.
Giant Spear Pines from Sasak occupied a knoll near one corner surrounded by
mounds of Flame Briar from Rudiria. There were bold stretches of lawn and
hidden scraps of lawn, and some flat stretches of greenery which were not
lawns at all but mobile sheets of predatory leaf imprisoned behind thin moats
of caustic water.
Rain-jeweled flowers often held McKie's attention to the exclusion of all
else. There was a single planting of Lilium Grossa, its red blossoms twice
his height casting long shadows over a wriggling carpet of blue Syringa, each
miniature bloom opening and closing at random like tiny mouths gasping for
air.
Sometimes, floral perfumes stopped his progress and held him in a momentary
olfactory thralldom while his eyes searched out the source. As often as not,
the plant would be a dangerous one -- a flesh eater or poison-sweat variety.
Warning signs in flashing Galach guarded such plantings. Sonabarriers, moats,
and force fields edged the winding paths in many areas.
McKie had a favorite spot in the park, a bench with its back to a fountain
where he could sit and watch the shadows collect across fat yellow bushes from
the floating islands of Tandaloor. The yellow bushes thrived because their
roots were washed in running water hidden beneath the soil and renewed by the
fountain. Beneath the yellow bushes there were faint gleams of phosphorescent
silver enclosed by a force field and identified by a low sign:
"Sangeet Mobilus, a blood-sucking perennial from Bisaj. Extreme danger to all
sentient species. Do not intrude any portion of your body beyond the force
field."
As he sat on the bench, McKie thought about that sign. The universe often
mixed the beautiful and the dangerous. This was a deliberate mixture in the
park. The yellow bushes, the fragrant and benign Golden Iridens, had been
mingled with Sangeet Mobilus. The two supported each other and both thrived.
The ConSentient government which McKie served often made such mixtures . . .
sometimes by accident.
Sometimes by design.
He listened to the plashing of the fountain while the shadows thickened and
the tiny border lights came on along the paths. The tops of the buildings
beyond the park became a palette where the sunset laid out its final display
of the day.
In that instant, the Caleban contact caught him and he felt his body slip into
the helpless communications trance. The mental tendrils were immediately
identified -- Fannie Mae. And he thought, as he often had, what an improbable
name that was for a star entity. He heard no sounds, but his hearing centers
responded as to spoken words, and the inward glow was unmistakable. It was
Fannie Mae, her syntax far more sophisticated than during their earliest
encounters.
"You admire one of us," she said, indicating his attention on the sun which
had just set beyond the buildings.
"I try not to think of any star as a Caleban," he responded. "It interferes
with my awareness of the natural beauty."
"Natural? McKie, you don't understand your own awareness, nor even how you
employ it!"
That was her beginning -- accusatory, attacking, unlike any previous contact
with this Caleban he'd thought of as friend. And she employed her verb form
with new deftness, almost as though showing off, parading her understanding of
his language.
"What do you want, Fannie Mae?"
"I consider your relationships with females of your species. You have entered
marriage relationships which number more than fifty. Not so?"
"That's right. Yes. Why do you . . ."
"I am your friend, McKie. What is your feeling toward me?"
He thought about that. There was a demanding intensity in her question. He
owed his life to this Caleban with an improbable name. For that matter, she
owed her life to him. Together, they'd resolved the Whipping Star threat.
Now, many Calebans provided the jumpdoors by which other beings moved in a
single step from planet to planet, but once Fannie Mae had held all of those
jumpdoor threads, her life threatened through the odd honor code by which
Calebans maintained their contractual obligations. And McKie had saved her
life. He had but to think about their past interdependence and a warm sense
of camaraderie suffused him.
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.
We have created a monster -- enormously valuable and even useful yet extremely
dangerous. Our monster is both beautiful and terrifying. We do not dare use
this monster to its full potential, but we cannot release our grasp upon it.
-Gowachin assessment of the Dosadi experiment
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.
Thus fifty Dosadi Humans took their faceless places behind the numbers in her
computer. Bait, expendable. Those who died by this act wouldn't die
immediately. Forty-nine might never know they'd been deliberately submitted
to early death by her deliberate choice. Some would be pushed back to the
Rim's desperate and short existence. Some would die in the violent battles
she was precipitating. Others would waste away in the Warrens. For most, the
deadly process would extend across sufficient time to conceal her hand in it.
But they'd been slain in her computer and she knew it. She cursed her parents
(and the others before them) for this unwanted sensitivity to the blood and
sinew behind these computer numbers. Those loving parents had taught her
well. She might never see the slain bodies, need give not another thought to
all but one of the fifty; still she sensed them behind her computer display .
. . warm and pulsing.
Jedrik sighed. The fifty were bleating animals staked out to lure a special
beast onto Dosadi's poisonous soil. Her fifty would create a fractional
surplus which would vanish, swallowed before anyone realized their purpose.
Dosadi is sick, she thought. And not for the first time, she wondered: Is
this really Hell?
Many believed it.
We're being punished.
But no one knew what they'd done to deserve punishment.
Jedrik leaned back, looked across her doorless office to the sound barrier and
milky light of the hall. A strange Gowachin shambled past her doorway. He
was a frog figure on some official errand, a packet of brown paper clutched in
his knobby hands. His green skin shimmered as though he'd recently come from
water.
The Gowachin reminded her of Bahrank, he who was bringing McKie into her net,
Bahrank who did her bidding because she controlled the substance to which he
was addicted. More fool he to let himself become an addict to anything, even
to living. One day soon Bahrank would sell what he knew about her to the
Elector's spies; by then it would be too late and the Elector would learn only
what she wanted him to learn when she wanted him to learn it. She'd chosen
Bahrank with the same care she'd used at her computer terminal, the same care
which had made her wait for someone precisely like McKie. And Bahrank was
Gowachin. Once committed to a project, the frog people were notorious for
carrying out their orders in a precise way. They possessed an inbred sense of
order but understood the limits of law.
As her gaze traversed the office, the sparse and functional efficiency of the
space filled her with quiet amusement. This office presented an image of her
which she had constructed with meticulous care. It pleased her that she would
be leaving here soon never to return, like an insect shedding its skin. The
office was four paces wide, eight long. Twelve black metal rotofiles lined
the wall on her left, dark sentinels of her methodical ways. She had reset
their locking codes and armed them to destroy their contents when the
Elector's toads pried into them. The Elector's people would attribute this to
outrage, a last angry sabotage. It would be some time before accumulating
doubts would lead them to reassessment and to frustrated questions. Even then
they might not suspect her hand in the elimination of fifty Humans. She,
after all, was one of the fifty.
This thought inflicted her with a momentary sense of unfocused loss. How
pervasive were the seductions of Dosadi's power structure! How subtle! What
she'd just done here introduced a flaw into the computer system which ruled
the distribution of non-poisonous food in Dosadi's only city. Food -- here
was the real base of Dosadi's social pyramid, solid and ugly. The flaw
removed her from a puissant niche in that pyramid. She had worn the persona of
Keila Jedrik-Liaitor for many years, long enough to learn enjoyment of the
power system. Losing one valuable counter in Dosadi's endless survival game,
she must now live and act only with the persona of Keila Jedrik-Warlord. This
was an all-or-nothing move, a gambler's plunge. She felt the nakedness of it.
But this gamble had begun long ago, far back in Dosadi's contrived history,
when her ancestors had recognized the nature of this planet and had begun
breeding and training for the individual who would take this plunge.
I am that individual, she told herself. This is our moment.
But had they truly assessed the problem correctly?
Jedrik's glance fell on the single window which looked out into the canyon
street. Her own reflection stared back: a face too narrow, thin nose, eyes
and mouth too large. Her hair could be an interesting black velvet helmet if
she let it grow, but she kept it cropped short as a reminder that she was not
a magnetic sex partner, that she must rely on her wits. That was the way
she'd been bred and trained. Dosadi had taught her its cruelest lessons
early. She'd grown tall while still in her teens, carrying more height in her
body than in her legs so that she appeared even taller when seated. She
looked down on most Gowachin and Human males in more ways than one. That was
another gift (and lesson) from her loving parents and from their ancestors.
There was no escaping this Dosadi lesson.
What you love or value will be used against you.
She leaned forward to hide her disquieting reflection, peered far down into
the street. There, that was better. Her fellow Dosadis no longer were warm
and pulsing people. They were reduced to distant movements, as impersonal as
the dancing figures in her computer.
Traffic was light, she noted. Very few armored vehicles moved, no
pedestrians. There'd been only that one shot at her window. She still
entertained a faint hope that the sniper had escaped. More likely a patrol
had caught the fool. The Rim Rabble persisted in testing Chu's defenses
despite the boringly repetitive results. It was desperation. Snipers seldom
waited until the day was deep and still and the patrols were scattered, those
hours when even some among the most powerful ventured out.
Symptoms, all symptoms.
Rim sorties represented only one among many Dosadi symptoms which she'd taught
herself to read in that precarious climb whose early stage came to climax in
this room. It was not just a thought, but more a sense of familiar awareness
to which she returned at oddly reflexive moments in her life.
We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain.
We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and
the strange, the reasonable and the insane.
It made some insane choices magnificently attractive.
Have I made an insane choice?
No!
The data lay clearly in her mind, facts which she could not obliterate by
turning away from them. Dosadi had been designed from a cosmic grab bag:
"Give them one of these and one of these and one of these . . ."
It made for incompatible pairings.
The DemoPol with which Dosadi juggled its computer-monitored society didn't
fit a world which used energy transmitted from a satellite in geosynchrorious
orbit. The DemoPol reeked of primitive ignorance, something from a society
which had wandered too far down the path of legalisms -- a law for everything
and everything managed by law. The dogma that a God-inspired few had chosen
Chu's river canyon in which to build a city insulated from this poisonous
planet, and that only some twenty or so generations earlier, remained
indigestible. And that energy satellite which hovered beneath the God Wall's
barrier -- that stank of a long and sophisticated evolution during which
something as obviously flawed as the DemoPol would have been discarded.
It was a cosmic grab bag designed for a specific purpose which her ancestors
had recognized.
We did not evolve on this planet.
The place was out of phase with both Gowachin and Human. Dosadi employed
computer memories and physical files side by side for identical purposes. And
the number of addictive substances to be found on Dosadi was outrageous. Yet
this was played off against a religion so contrived, so gross in its demands
for "simple faith" that the two conditions remained at constant war. The
mystics died for their "new insights" while the holders of "simple faith" used
control of the addictive substances to gain more and more power. The only
real faith on Dosadi was that you survived by power and that you gained power
by controlling what others required for survival. Their society understood
the medicine of bacteria, virus and brain control, but these could not stamp
out the Rim and Warren Underground where jabua faith healers cured their
patients with the smoke of burning weeds.
And they could not stamp out (not yet) Keila Jedrik because she had seen what
she had seen. Two by two the incompatible things ebbed and flowed around her,
in the city of Chu and the surrounding Rim. It was the same in every case: a
society which made use of one of these things could not naturally be a society
which used the other.
Not naturally.
All around her, Jedrik sensed Chu with its indigestible polarities. They had
only two species: Human and Gowachin. Why two? Were there no other species
in this universe? Subtle hints in some of Dosadi's artifacts suggested an
evolution for appendages other than the flexible fingers of Gowachin and
Human.
Why only one city on all of Dosadi?
Dogma failed to answer.
The Rim hordes huddled close, always seeking a way into Chu's insulated
purity. But they had a whole planet behind them. Granted it was a poisonous
planet, but it had other rivers, other places of potential sanctuary. The
survival of both species argued for the building of more sanctuaries, many
more than that pitiful hole which Gar and Tria thought they masterminded. No
. . . Chu stood alone -- almost twenty kilometers wide and forty long, built
on hills and silted islands where the river slowed in its deep canyon. At
last count, some eighty-nine million people lived here and three times that
number eked a short life on the Rim -- pressing, always pressing for a place
in the poison-free city.
Give us your precious bodies, you stupid Rimmers!
They heard the message, knew its import and defied it. What had the people of
Dosadi done to be imprisoned here? What had their ancestors done? It was
right to build a religion upon hate for such ancestors . . . provided such
ancestors were guilty.
Jedrik leaned toward the window, peered upward at the God Wall, that milky
translucence which imprisoned Dosadi, yet through which those such as this
Jorj X. McKie could come at will. She hungered to see McKie in person, to
confirm that he had not been contaminated as Havvy had been contaminated.
It was a McKie she required now. The transparently contrived nature of Dosadi
told her that there must be a McKie. She saw herself as the huntress, McKie
her natural prey. The false identity she'd built in this room was part of her
bait. Now, in the season of McKie, the underlying religious cant by which
Dosadi's powerful maintained their private illusions would crumble. She could
already see the beginnings of that dissolution; soon, everyone would see it.
She took a deep breath. There was a purity in what was about to happen, a
simplification. She was about to divest herself of one of her two lives,
taking all of her awareness into the persona of that other Keila Jedrik which
all of Dosadi would soon know. Her people had kept her secret well, hiding a
fat and sleazy blonde person from their fellow Dosadis, exposing just enough
of that one to "X" that the powers beyond the God Wall might react in the
proper design. She felt cleansed by the fact that the disguise of that other
life had begun to lose its importance. The whole of her could begin to
surface in that other place. And McKie had precipitated this metamorphosis.
Jedrik's thoughts were clear and direct now:
Come into my trap, McKie. You will take me higher than the palace apartments
of the Council Hills.
Or into a deeper hell than any nightmare has imagined.
摘要：

TheDosadiExperimentFrankHerbert1969InmemoryofBabebecausesheknewhowtoenjoylife.WhentheCalebansfirstsentusoneoftheirgiantmetal"beachballs,"communicatingthroughthisdevicetooffertheuseofjumpdoorsforinterstellartravel,manyintheConSentiencycovertlybegantoexploitthisgiftofthestarsfortheirownquestionablepur...

展开>> 收起<<
Herbert, Frank - The Dosadi Experiment.pdf

共221页,预览12页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：221 页 大小：439.2KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-08

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 221
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注