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.
He fell back on a childhood platitude.
"I am what I am and that's all I am."
"You may soon learn, friend McKie, that you're more than you thought."
With that, she'd broken the contact. He'd awakened in damp, chilly darkness, the sound of the fountain loud in his ears. Nothing he did would bring her back into communication, not even when he'd spent some of his own credits on a Taprisiot in a vain attempt to call her.
His Caleban friend had shut him out.
***
We have created a monster - enormously valuable and even useful yet extremely dangerous. Our monster is both beautiful and terrifying. We do not dare use this monster to its full potential, but we cannot release our grasp upon it.
A bullet went spang! against the window behind Keila Jedrik's desk, ricocheted and screamed off into the canyon street far below her office. Jedrik prided herself that she had not even flinched. The Elector's patrols would take care of the sniper. The patrols which swept the streets of Chu every morning would home on the sound of the shot. She held the casual hope that the sniper would escape back to the Rim Rabble, but she recognized this hope as a weakness and dismissed it. There were concerns this morning far more important than an infiltrator from the Rim.
Jedrik reached