Jedrik looked at the woman, the man, at McKie. She spoke as though to McKie, but McKie realized she was addressing the air.
"It's a specific thing. Gar has revealed something to Broey. I know what he's revealed. Nothing else could force Broey to behave this way." She nodded at the chart. "We have them!"
The woman ventured a question.
"Have we done well?"
"Better than you know."
The man smiled, then:
"Perhaps this is the time to ask if we could have larger rooms. The damn' children are always moving the furniture. We bump . . ."
"Not now!"
Jedrik arose. McKie followed her example.
"Let me see the children," Jedrik said.
The man turned to the open portal.
"Get out here, you! Jedrik wants you!"
Three children came scurrying from the other room. The woman didn't even look at them. The man favored them with an angry glare. He spoke to Jedrik.
"They've brought no food into this house in almost a week."
McKie studied the children carefully as he saw Jedrik was doing. They stood in a row just inside the room and, from their expressions, it was impossible to tell their reaction to the summons. They were two girls and a boy. The one on the right, a girl, was perhaps nine; on the left, another girl, was five or six. The boy was somewhat older, perhaps twelve or thirteen. He favored McKie with a glance. It was the glance of a predator who recognizes ready prey, but who already has eaten. All three bore more resemblance to the woman than to the man, but the parentage was obvious: the eyes, the set of the ears, nose . . .
Jedrik had completed her study. She gestured to the boy.
"Start sending him to the second training team."
"About time," the woman said. "We'll be glad to get him out of here."
"Come along, McKie."
In the hall, Jedrik said:
"To answer your question, they're pretty typical."
McKie, who had only wondered silently, swallowed in a dry throat. The petty goals of these people: to get a bigger room where they could live without bumping into furniture. He'd sensed no affection for each other in that couple. They were companions of convenience. There had been not the smallest hint of emotion for each other when they spoke. McKie found it difficult to imagine them making love, but apparently they did. They had produced three children.
Realization came like an explosion in his head. Of course they showed no emotion! What other protection did they have? On Dosadi, anything cared for was a club to beat you into somebody else's line. And there was another thing.
McKie spoke to Jedrik's back as they went down the stairs.
"That couple - they're addicted to something."
Surprisingly, Jedrik stopped, looked back up at him.
"How else do you think I hold such a pair? The substance is called dis. It's very rare. It comes from the far mountains, far beyond the . . . far beyond. The Rim sends parties of children as bearers to obtain dis for me. In a party of fifty, thirty can expect to die on such a trek. Do you get the measure of it, McKie?"
Once more, they headed down the stairs.
McKie, realizing she'd taken the time to teach him another lesson about Dosadi, could only follow, stunned, while she led him into a room where technicians bleached the sun-darkened areas of his skin.
When they emerged, he no longer carried the stigma of Pylash Gate.
When the means of great violence are widespread, nothing is more dangerous to the powerful than that they create outrage and injustice, for outrage and injustice will certainly ignite retaliation in kind.
''It is no longer classifiable as rioting," the aide said. He was a short Gowachin with pinched features, and he looked across the room to where Broey sat facing a dead communicator. There was a map on the wall behind the aide, its colors made brilliant by harsh morning light coming in the east windows. Below the map, a computer terminal jutted from the wall. Occasionally it clicked.
Gar came into the room from the hall, peered around as though looking for someone, left.
Broey noted the intrusion, glanced at the map.
"Still no sign of where she's gone to ground?"
"Nothing certain."
"The one who paraded McKie through the streets . . ."
"Clearly an expendable underling."
"Where did they go?"
The aide indicated a place on the map, a group of buildings in the Warrens to the northwest.
Broey stared at the blank face of his communications screen. He'd been tricked again. He knew it. That damnable Human female! Violence in the city teetered on the edge of full-scale war: Gowachin against Human. And still nothing, not even a hint at the location of Gar's Rim stores, the blasphemous factories. It was an unstable condition which could not continue much longer.
His communications screen came alive with a report: violent fighting near Gate Twenty-One. Broey glanced at the map. That made it more than one hundred clearly defined battles between the species along an unresolved perimeter. The report spoke of new weapons and unsuccessful attempts to capture specimens.
Gate Twenty-One?
That wasn't far from the place where McKie had been paraded through . . .
Several things slipped into a new relationship in Broey's mind. He looked at his aide, who stood waiting obediently at the map.
"Where's Gar?"
Aides were summoned, sent running. Gar was not to be found.
"Tria?"
She, too, was unavailable.