/*The Dosadi Experiment*/ 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.