“That’s how it seems.”

“No sign of anything in it?”

“Not that we can see. The Ball does appear to be a bit . . . banged up. There are some pitting and a few external scars. What’s this all about?”

“No doubt you’ve heard of Mliss Abnethe?”

“Who hasn’t?”

“She recently spent some of her quintillions to hire a Caleban.”

“Hire a . . .” Furuneo shook his head. “I didn’t know it could be done.”

“Neither did anyone else.”

“I read the max-alert,” Furuneo said. “Abnethe’s connection with the case wasn’t explained.”

“She’s a bit kinky about floggings, you know,” McKie said.

“I thought she was treated for that.”

“Yeah, but it didn’t eliminate the root of her problem. It just fixed her so she couldn’t stand the sight of a sentient suffering.”

“So?”

“Her solution, naturally, was to hire a Caleban.”

“As a victim!” Furuneo said.

Furuneo was beginning to understand, McKie saw. Someone had once said the problem with Calebans was that they presented no patterns you could recognize. This was true, of course. If you could imagine an actuality, a being whose presence could not be denied but who left your senses dangling every time you tried to look at it—then you could imagine a Caleban.

“They’re shuttered windows opening onto eternity,”as the poet Masarard put it.

In the first Caleban days, McKie had attended every Bureau lecture and briefing about them. He tried to recall one of those sessions now, prompted by a nagging sensation that it had contained something of value to his present problem. It had been something about “communications difficulties within an aura of affliction.” The precise content eluded him. Odd, he thought. It was as though the Calebans’ crumbled projection created an effect on sentient memory akin to their effect on sentient vision.

Here lay the true source of sentient uneasiness about Calebans. Their artifacts were real—the S’eye jumpdoors, the Beachballs in which they were reputed to live—but no one had ever really seen a Caleban.

Furuneo, watching the fat little gnome of an agent sit there thinking, recalled the snide story about McKie, that he had been in BuSab since the day before he was born.

“She’s hired a whipping boy, eh?” Furuneo asked.

“That’s about it.”

“The max-alert spoke of deaths, insanity. . . .”

“Are all your people dosed with angeret?” McKie asked.

“I got the message, McKie.”

“Good. Anger seems to afford some protection.”

“What exactly is going on?”

“Calebans have been . . . vanishing,” McKie said. “Every time one of them goes, there are quite a few deaths and . . . other unpleasant effects—physical and mental crippling, insanity. . . .”

Furuneo nodded in the direction of the sea, leaving his question unspoken.

McKie shrugged. “We’ll have to go take a look. The hell of it is, up until your call there seemed to be only one Caleban left in the universe, the one Abnethe hired.”