The Dosadi Experiment [Mass Market Paperback]

Frank Herbert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 16, 2002

Beyond the God Wall

Generations of a tormented human-alien people, caged on a toxic planet, conditioned by constant hunger and war-this is the Dosadi Experiment, and it has succeeded too well. For the Dosadi have bred for Vengeance as well as cunning, and they have learned how to pass through the shimmering God Wall to exact their dreadful revenge on the Universe that created them . . .

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

SALES POINTS 'Totally credible and told with an ease which belies an extraordinary control over the genre' The Times "Those who fell in love with Dune will love this one' Financial Times "Splendid entertainment, with moral sinew and an astonishing romance' New York Times "J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are not in Mr Herbert's inventive league' New York Times --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 splashing 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 forms 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.
<...

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (September 16, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765342537
• ISBN-13: 978-0765342539
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #298,541 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Frank Herbert (1920-86) was born in Tacoma, Washington and worked as a reporter and later editor of a number of West Coast newspapers before becoming a full-time writer. His first sf story was published in 1952 but he achieved fame more than ten years later with the publication in Analog of Dune World and The Prophet of Dune that were amalgamated in the novel Dune in 1965.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Herbert's Best, which says a whole lot, September 16, 2002

By 

718 Session (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dosadi Experiment (Mass Market Paperback)

Frank Herbert deserves his rep as one of the greatest science fiction writers. Dune, his most popular book (with 2 film adaptations) is an incredible epic. This book, however, is something that has stuck with me and improved with every reading. It a superior work in a lot of ways.

Some spoiler-free background:

Like a James Bond in the future, 500-year-old Jorge McKie is an agent for the government. The government in question is the ConSentiency: an amalgam of all sentient races in the galaxy worknig to keep the peace. This alone is an incredibly difficult prospect, for surly a race with a different biology and a different culture would come up with a different set of laws. How could such a thing as a ConSentiency exist? Making things more difficult are two relatively new uphevals: 1> that stars are sentent beings, and 2> stars themselves allow instant travel from place to place in the galaxy.

And now, as our story starts, the uneasy peace is threatened by an experiment: 200 years previously, a race of aliens has created Dosadi: a poison planet inhabited with kidnapped humans and aliens who have had their memories erased and been dumped on the planet to fend for themselves. How will they survive when cut off from the rest of the galaxy and not given enough resources?

The makers of Dosadi hope to learn how to improve their own race, but their creation becomes something else entirely. It is horror enough that this world exists, but what to do with the experiment? McKie, with the fate of the entire planet in his hands, is ordered to visit the planet and discover for himself.

All of this is revealed in the first few chapters, and I won't go into any more plot detail. The beauty of this book, though, is the extremes of the ConSentiency and Dosadi; and the truly alien nature of the aliens. Herbert fills the ConSentiency and Dosadi with many layers of meaning that unpeel before the readers eyes. McKie is a character who has dedicated his life to reaching for the alien shore (his expertise is in alien law and ethics). When McKie travels to Dosadi, he will find how life-altering his vocation can be.

I'd also like to add that few authors could write a book that includes a courtroom drama so completly alien and so compelling.

This is a wonderful book. Some passages ring so piercingly that you just have to put the book down and absorb them. Dosadi is an unpleasant world, to be sure, but it works as a nice stand-in for our own. And there are a ton of ethical questions abounding in this book, not that Frank is one to hit you over the head with them. For in addition to all of the philosophy and metaphysics, it is a ripping good yarn.

Note: "The Dosadi Experiment" takes place in the same universe as "The Whipping Star" and "The Artful Saboteaur", but it is NOT a sequal and it can be read on its own.

Enjoy!

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorite "non-Dune" Herbert novels, September 26, 2002

By 

Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dosadi Experiment (Mass Market Paperback)

Yes, Frank Herbert wrote other novels than the "Dune" series. Of these, "The Dosadi Experiment" is by far one of the best.

Dosadi is an artificially populated planet with a dark, dark secret. Jorg X. McKie, who was introduced in a companion novel "Whipping Star" is sent to investigate the goings-on on Dosadi, an assignment that could very well lead to his destruction.

Dosadi is a toxic planet, where survivors live either in an overpopulated fortress of a city and survive on their wits, or struggle to live on the poisonous Rim, where the very soil and plants are enemies. The people of Dosadi are tough indeed, but they are a lot more than just tough survivors. They hold a desperate secret that could upset the balance of the rest of the galaxy.

McKie's struggle to survive and to discover Dosadi's secrets make for a really exciting tale. The characters are vivid, creative (all kinds of sentient species) and very interesting. If you love good science fiction, this is a must-read.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars more of Herbert's mastery of the closed society topic, July 16, 2000

By 

J. K. Kelley "literary mercenary" (Eastern WA, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dosadi Experiment (Hardcover)

If you read Dune (or almost any other Herbert book) you know that one of his favourite themes is that of the sequestered/closed society in a harsh environment. No one ever did it as well.

_Dosadi_ offers a lot. It offers a very interesting alien race (well, more than one, but one that gets the most attention) that is truly alien, with a fascinating legal system that questions the basic assumptions we start with. The plot unfolds like a sunrise, letting out bits of information gradually until the reader comes to understand just what a monstrous timebomb has been created by shortsighted beings. The protagonist and other main characters are well-described and interesting, as is the interplay among them.

This is not light reading, but if you like fiction that inspires you to question your assumptions, this is one of the best examples of same. Especially recommended to those with an interest in the topic of law and legal proceedings, or to anyone who has already decided they like Herbert's style.