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 . . ."