The Dosadi Experiment by Frank Herbert Read Free Book Online

face nor in any movement of her body.

Arm yourself when the Frog God smiles.
    Â 
    â€”Gowachin admonition
    M ckie began speaking as he entered the Phylum sanctus: “I’m Jorj X. McKie of the Bureau of Sabotage.”
    Name and primary allegiance, that was the drill. If he’d been a Gowachin, he’d have named his Phylum or would’ve favored the room with a long blink to reveal the identifying Phylum tattoo on his eyelids. As a non-Gowachin, he didn’t need a tattoo.
    He held his right hand extended in the Gowachin peace sign, palm down and fingers wide to show that he held no weapon there and had not extended his claws. Even as he entered, he smiled, knowing the effect this would have on any Gowachin here. In a rare mood of candor, one of his old Gowachin teachers had once explained the effect of a smiling McKie.
    â€œWe feel our bones age. It is a very uncomfortable experience.”
    McKie understood the reason for this. He possessed a thick, muscular body—a swimmer’s body with light mahogany skin. He walked with a swimmer’s rolling gait. There were Polynesians in his Old Terran ancestry, this much was known in the Family Annals. Wide lips and a flat nose dominated his face; the eyes were large and placidly brown. There was a final genetic ornamentation to confound the Gowachin: red hair. He was the Human equivalent of the greenstone sculpture found in every Phylum house here on Tandaloor. McKie possessed
the face and body of the Frog God, the Giver of Law.
    As his old teacher had explained, no Gowachin ever fully escaped feelings of awe in McKie’s presence, especially when McKie smiled. They were forced to hide a response which went back to the admonition which every Gowachin learned while still clinging to his mother’s back.
    Arm yourselves! McKie thought.
    Still smiling, he stopped after the prescribed eight paces, glanced once around the room, then narrowed his attention. Green crystal walls confined the sanctus. It was not a large space, a gentle oval of perhaps twenty meters in its longest dimension. A single oval window admitted warm afternoon light from Tandaloor’s golden sun. The glowing yellow created a contrived spiritual ring directly ahead of McKie. The light focused on an aged Gowachin seated in a brown chairdog which had spread itself wide to support his elbows and webbed fingers. At the Gowachin’s right hand stood an exquisitely wrought wooden swingdesk on a scrollwork stand. The desk held one object: a metal box of dull blue about fifteen centimeters long, ten wide, and six deep. Standing behind the blue box in the servant-guard position was a red-robed Wreave, her fighting mandibles tucked neatly into the lower folds of her facial slit.
    This Phylum was initiating a Wreave!
    The realization filled McKie with disquiet. Bildoon had not warned him about Wreaves on Tandaloor. The Wreave indicated a sad shift among the Gowachin toward a particular kind of violence. Wreaves never danced for joy, only for death. And this was the most dangerous of Wreaves, a female , recognizable as such by the jaw pouches behind her mandibles. There’d be two males somewhere nearby to form the breeding triad. Wreaves never ventured from their home soil otherwise.
    McKie realized he no longer was smiling. These damnable Gowachin! They’d known the effect a Wreave female would have on him. Except in the Bureau, where a special dispensation prevailed, dealing with Wreaves required the most delicate care to avoid giving offence. And because they periodically exchanged triad members, they developed extended
families of gigantic proportions wherein offending one member was to offend them all.
    These reflections did not sit well with the chill he’d experienced at sight of the blue box on the swingdesk. He still did not know the identity of this Phylum, but he knew what that blue box had to be. He could smell the peculiar scent of antiquity about it. His choices