"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.