Very tiny consciousness then peering out at a tumultuous universe they
themselves created!
Ohhhh, lovely!
Odrade summoned her night attendant, a first-stage acolyte, and asked for
melange tea containing a dangerous stimulant, something to help her delay the
body's demands for sleep. But at a cost.
The acolyte hesitated before obeying. She returned in a moment with the mug
steaming on a small tray.
Odrade had decided long ago that melange tea made with the deep cold water of
Chapterhouse had a taste that worked its way into her psyche. The bitter
stimulant deprived her of that refreshing taste and gnawed at her conscience.
Word would go out from the ones who watched. Worry, worry, worry. Would
Proctors take another vote?
She sipped slowly, giving the stimulant time to work. Condemned woman rejects
last dinner. Sips tea.
Presently, she put aside the empty mug and called for warm clothing. "I'm going
for a walk in the orchards." The night attendant made no comment. Everyone
knew she often went walking there, even at night.
Within minutes she was in the narrow, link-fenced path to her favorite orchard,
her way lighted by a miniglobe fixed on a short cord to her right shoulder. A
small herd of the Sisterhood's black cattle came up to the fence beside Odrade
and gazed at her as she passed. She looked at the wet muzzles, inhaled the rich
smell of alfalfa in the steam of their breathing and paused. The cows sniffed
and sensed the pheromone that told them to accept her. They went back to eating
forage piled near the fence by herdsmen.
Turning her back on the cattle, Odrade looked at leafless trees across from the
pasture. Her miniglobe drew a circle of yellow light that emphasized winter
starkness.
Few understood why this place attracted her. It was not enough to say she found
troubled thoughts soothed here. Even in winter, with frost crunching underfoot.
This orchard was a hard-bought silence between storms. She extinguished her
miniglobe and let her feet follow the familiar way in darkness. Occasionally,
she glanced up at starlight defined by leafless branches. Storms. She felt one
approaching that no meteorologist could anticipate. Storms beget storms. Rage
begets rage. Revenge begets revenge. Wars beget wars.
The old Bashar had been a master at breaking those circles. Would his ghola
still have that talent?
What a perilous gamble.
Odrade looked back at the cattle, a dark blob of movement and starlighted steam.
They had herded close for warmth and she heard a familiar grinding as they
chewed their cuds.
I must go south into the desert. Face to face with Sheeana there. The
sandtrout thrive. Why are there no sandworms?
She spoke aloud to the cattle clustered by the fence: "Eat your grass. It's
what you're supposed to do."
If a spying watchdog chanced on that remark, Odrade knew she would have serious
explaining to do.
But I have seen through to the heart of our enemy this night. And I pity them.
To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances
will true nature be seen. (The Amtal Rule) Do not depend only on theory if your
life is at stake. (Bene Gesserit Commentary)
Duncan Idaho stood almost in the center of the no-ship's practice floor and
three paces from the ghola-child. Sophisticated training instruments were near
at hand, some exhausting, some dangerous.
The child looked admiring and trusting this morning.
Do I understand him better because I, too, am a ghola? A questionable
assumption. This one has been brought up in a way much different from the one
they designed for me. Designed! The precise term.
The Sisterhood had copied as much of Teg's original childhood as possible. Even
to an adoring younger companion standing in for the long-lost brother. And
Odrade giving him the deep teaching! As Teg's birth-mother did.
Idaho remembered the aged Bashar whose cells had produced this child. A
thoughtful man whose comments were to be heeded. With only a slight effort,
Idaho recalled the man's manner and words:
"The true warrior often understands his enemy better than he understands his
friends. A dangerous pitfall if you let understanding lead to sympathy as it
will naturally do when left unguided."
Difficult to think of the mind behind those words as latent somewhere in this
child. The Bashar had been so insightful, teaching about sympathies on that
long-ago day in the Gammu Keep.
"Sympathy for the enemy -- a weakness of police and armies alike. Most perilous
are the unconscious sympathies directing you to preserve your enemy intact
because the enemy is your justification for existence."
"Sir?"
How could that piping voice become the commanding tones of the old Bashar?
"What is it?"
"Why are you just standing there looking at me?"
"They called the Bashar 'Old Reliability.' Did you know that?"
"Yes, sir. I've studied the story of his life."
Was it "Young Reliability" now? Why did Odrade want his original memories
restored so quickly?
"Because of the Bashar, the entire Sisterhood has been digging into Other
Memory, revising their views of history. Did they tell you that?"
"No, sir. Is it important for me to know? Mother Superior said you would train
my muscles."
"You liked to drink Danian Marinete, a very fine brandy, I recall. "
"I'm too young to drink, sir."
"You were a Mentat. Do you know what that means?"
"I'll know when you restore my memories, won't I?"
No respectful sir. Calling the teacher to task for unwanted delays.
Idaho smiled and got a grin in response. An engaging child. Easy to show him
natural affection.
"Watch out for him," Odrade had said. "He's a charmer."
Idaho recalled Odrade's briefing before bringing the child.
"Since every individual is accountable ultimately to the self," she said, "the
formation of that self demands our utmost care and attention. "
"Is that necessary with a ghola?"
They had been in Idaho's sitting room that night, Murbella a fascinated
listener.
"He will remember everything you teach him."
"So we do a little editing of the original."
"Careful, Duncan! Give a bad time to an impressionable child, teach that child
not to trust anyone, and you create a suicide -- slow or fast suicide, doesn't
make any difference."
"Are you forgetting that I knew the Bashar?"
"Don't you remember, Duncan, how it was before your memories were restored?"
"I knew the Bashar could do it and I thought of him as my salvation."
"And that's how he sees you. It's a special kind of trust."
"I'll treat him honestly."
"You may think you act from honesty but I advise you to look deeply into
yourself every time you come face to face with his trust."
"And if I make a mistake?"
"We will correct it if possible." She glanced up at the comeyes and back to
him.
"I know you'll be watching us!"
"Don't let it inhibit you. I'm not trying to make you self-conscious. Just
cautious. And remember that my Sisterhood has efficient methods of healing."
"I'll be cautious."
"You might remember it was the Bashar who said: 'The ferocity we display to our
foes is always tempered by the lesson we hope to teach.' "
"I can't think of him as a foe. The Bashar was one of the finest men I've ever
known."
"Excellent. I place him in your hands."
And here the child was on the practice floor getting more than a little
impatient with his teacher's hesitations.
"Sir, is this part of a lesson, just standing here? I know sometimes --"
"Be still."
Teg came to military attention. No one had taught him that. This was from his
original memories. Idaho was suddenly fascinated by this glimpse of the Bashar.
They knew he would catch me this way!
Never underestimate Bene Gesserit persuasiveness. You could find yourself doing
things for them without knowing pressures had been applied. Subtle and
damnable! There were compensations, of course. You lived in interesting times,
as the ancient curse had it. All in all, Idaho decided, he preferred
interesting times, even these times.
He took a deep breath. "Restoring your original memories will cause pain --
physical and mental. In some ways, the mental pains are worse. I am to prepare
you for that."
Still at attention. No comment.
"We will begin without weapons, using an imaginary blade in your right hand.
This is a variation on the 'five attitudes.' Each response arises before the
need. Drop your arms to your sides and relax."
Moving behind Teg, Idaho grasped the child's right arm below the elbow and
demonstrated the first movements.
"Each attacker is a feather floating on an infinite path. As the feather
approaches, it is diverted and removed. Your response is like a puff of air
blowing the feather away."
Idaho stepped aside and observed as Teg repeated the movements, correcting
occasionally with a sharp blow to an offending muscle.
"Let your body do the learning!" When Teg asked why he did that.
In a rest period, Teg wanted to know what Idaho meant by "mental pains."
"You have ghola-imposed walls around your original memories. At the proper
moment, some of those memories will come flooding back. Not all memories will
be pleasant."
"Mother Superior says the Bashar restored your memories."
"Gods of the deep, child! Why do you keep saying 'the Bashar'? That was you!"
"But I don't know that yet."
"You present a special problem. For a ghola to reawaken, there should be memory
of death. But the cells for you do not carry death memory."
"But the . . . Bashar is dead."
"The Bashar! Yes, he's dead. You must feel that where it hurts most and know
that you are the Bashar."
"Can you really give me back that memory?"
"If you can stand the pain. Do you know what I said to you when you restored my
memories? I said: 'Atreides! You're all so damned alike!' "
"You hated . . . me?"
"Yes, and you were disgusted with yourself for what you did to me. Does that
give you any idea of what I must do?"
"Yes, sir." Very low.
"Mother Superior says I must not betray your trust . . . yet you betrayed my
trust."
"But I restored your memories?"
"See how easy it is to think of yourself as Bashar? You were shocked. And yes,
you restored my memories."
"That's all I want."
"So you say."
"Mother . . . Superior says you're a Mentat. Will that help . . . that I was a
Mentat, too?"
"Logic says 'Yes.' But we Mentats have a saying, that logic moves blindly. And
we're aware there's a logic that kicks you out of the nest into chaos."
"I know what chaos means!" Very proud of himself.
"So you think."
"And I trust you!"
"Listen to me! We are servants of the Bene Gesserit. Reverend Mothers did not
build their order on trust."
"Shouldn't I trust Mother . . . Superior?"
"Within limits you will learn and appreciate. For now, I warn you the Bene
Gesserit work under a system of organized distrust. Have they taught you about
democracy?"
"Yes, sir. That's where you vote for --"
"That's where you distrust anyone with power over you! The Sisters know it
well. Don't trust too much."
"Then I should not trust you, either?"
"The only trust you can place in me is that I will do my best to restore your
original memories."
"Then I don't care how much it hurts." He looked up at the comeyes, knowledge
of their purpose in his expression. "Do they mind that you say these things
about them?"
"Their feelings don't concern a Mentat except as data."
"Does that mean fact?"
"Facts are fragile. A Mentat can get tangled in them. Too much reliable data.
It's like diplomacy. You need a few good lies to get at your projections."
"I'm . . . confused." He used the word hesitantly, not sure it was what he
meant.
"I said that once to Mother Superior. She said: 'I've been behaving badly.' "
"You're not supposed to . . . confuse me?"
"Unless it teaches." And when Teg still looked puzzled, Idaho said: "Let me
tell you a story. "
Teg immediately sat on the floor, an action revealing that Odrade often used the
same technique. Good. Teg already was receptive.
"In one of my lives I had a dog that hated clams," Idaho said.
"I've had clams. They come from the Great Sea."
"Yes, well, my dog hated clams because one of them had the temerity to spit in
his eye. That stings. But even worse, it was an innocent hole in the sand that
did the spitting. No clam visible."
"What'd your dog do?" Leaning forward, chin on fist.
"He dug up the offender and brought it to me." Idaho grinned. "Lesson one:
Don't let the unknown spit in your eye."
Teg laughed and clapped his hands.
"But look at it from the dog's viewpoint. Go after the spitter! Then --
glorious reward: Master is pleased."
"Did your dog dig more clams?"
"Every time we went to the beach. He went growling after spitters and Master
took them away never to be seen again except as empty shells with bits of meat
still clinging to the insides."
"You ate them."
"See it as the dog did. Spitters get their just punishment. He has a way to
rid his world of offensive things and Master is pleased with him."
Teg demonstrated his brightness. "Do the Sisters think of us as dogs?"
"In a way. Never forget it. When you get back to your rooms, look up 'lese
majeste.' It helps place our relationship to our Masters."
Teg looked up at the comeyes and back to Idaho but said nothing.
Idaho lifted his attention to the door behind Teg and said: "That story was for
you, too."
Teg jumped to his feet, turning and expecting to see Mother Superior. But it
was only Murbella.
She was leaning against the wall near the door.
"Bell won't like you talking about the Sisterhood that way," she said.
"Odrade told me I have a free hand." He looked at Teg. "We've wasted enough
time on stories! Let me see if your body has learned anything."
An odd feeling of excitement had come over Murbella as she entered the training
area and saw Duncan with the child. She watched for a time, aware that she was
seeing him in a new and almost Bene Gesserit light. Mother Superior's briefing
came out in Duncan's candor with Teg. Extremely odd sensation, this new
awareness, as though she had come a full step away from her former associates.
The feeling was poignant with loss.
Murbella found herself missing strange things in her former life. Not the
hunting in the streets, seeking new males to captivate and bring under Honored
Matre control. The powers that came from creating sexual addicts had lost their
savor under Bene Gesserit teaching and her experiences with Duncan. She
admitted to missing one element of that power, though: the sense of belonging
to a force nothing could stop.
It was both abstract and specific. Not the recurrent conquests but the
expectation of inevitable victory that came in part from the drug she shared
with Honored Matre Sisters. As the need waned in the shift to melange, she saw
the old addiction from a different perspective. Bene Gesserit chemists, tracing
the adrenaline substitute from samples of her blood, held it ready if she
required it. She knew she did not. Another withdrawal plagued her. Not the
captivated males but the flow of them. Something within her said this was gone
forever. She would never re-experience it. New knowledge had changed her past.
She had prowled the corridors between her quarters and the practice floor this
morning, wanting to watch Duncan with the child, afraid her presence might
interfere. This prowling was a thing she often did these days after the more
strenuous of her morning lessons with a Reverend Mother teacher. Thoughts of
Honored Matres were much with her at these times.
She could not escape this feeling of loss. It was an emptiness such that she
wondered if anything could possibly fill it. The sensation was worse than that
of growing old. Growing old as an Honored Matre had offered its compensations.
Powers gathered in that Sisterhood had a tendency to grow rapidly with age. Not
that. It was an absolute loss.
I have been defeated.
Honored Matres never contemplated defeat. Murbella felt herself forced to it.
She knew Honored Matres were sometimes slain by enemies. Those enemies always
paid. It was the law: whole planets blackened to get one offender.
Murbella knew Honored Matres hunted for Chapterhouse. As a matter of former
loyalties, she was aware she should be assisting those hunters. The poignancy
of her personal defeat lay in the fact that she did not want the Bene Gesserit
to pay the remembered price.
The Bene Gesserit are too valuable.
They were infinitely valuable to Honored Matres. Murbella doubted that any
other Honored Matre even suspected this.
Vanity.
That was the judgment she attached to her former Sisters. And to myself as I
was. A terrible pride. It had grown out of being subjugated so many
generations before they gained their own ascendancy. Murbella had tried to
convey this to Odrade, recounting from history taught by Honored Matres.
"The slave makes an awful master," Odrade said.
There was an Honored Matre pattern, Murbella realized. She had accepted it once
but now rejected it and could not give all of her reasons for this change.
I have grown out of those things. They would be childish to me now.
Duncan once more had stopped the practice session. Perspiration poured from
both teacher and student. They stood panting, regaining breath, an odd exchange
of looks between them. Conspiracy? The child looked strangely mature.
Murbella recalled Odrade's comment: "Maturity imposes its own behavior. One of
our lessons -- make those imperatives available to consciousness. Modify
instincts."
They have modified me and will do so even more.
She could see the same thing at work in Duncan's behavior with the ghola-child.
"This is an activity that creates many stresses in the societies we influence,"
Odrade had said. "That forces us to constant adjustments."
But how can they adjust to my former Sisters?
Odrade revealed characteristic sangfroid when braced with this question.
"We face major adjustments because of our past activities. It was the same
during the reign of the Tyrant."
Adjustments?
Duncan was talking to the child. Murbella moved closer to listen.
"You've been exposed to the story of Muad'Dib? Good. You're an Atreides and
that includes flaws."
"Does that mean mistakes, sir?"
"You're damned right it does! Never choose a course just because it offers the
opportunity for a dramatic gesture."
"Is that how I died?"
He has the child thinking of his former self in the first person.
"You be the judge. But it was always an Atreides weakness. Attractive things,
gestures. Die on the horns of a great bull as Muad'Dib's grandfather did. A
grand spectacle for his people. The stuff of stories for generations! You can
even hear bits of it around after all of these eons."
"Mother Superior told me that story."
"Your birth-mother probably told it to you, too."
The child shuddered. "It gives me a funny feeling when you say birth-mother."
Awe in his young voice.
"Funny feelings are one thing; this lesson is another. I'm talking about
something with a persistent label: The Desian Gesture. It used to be
Atreidesian but that's too cumbersome."
Once more the child touched that core of mature awareness. "Even a dog's life
has its price."
Murbella caught her breath, glimpsing how it would be -- an adult mind in that
child's body. Disconcerting.
"Your birth-mother was Janet Roxbrough of the Lernaeus Roxbroughs," Idaho said.
"She was Bene Gesserit. Your father was Loschy Teg, a CHOAM station factor. In
a few minutes I'm going to show you the Bashar's favorite picture of his home on
Lernaeus. I want you to keep it with you and study it. Think of it as your
favorite place."
Teg nodded but the expression on his face said he was afraid.
Was it possible the great Mentat Warrior had known fear? Murbella shook her
head. She had an intellectual knowledge of what Duncan was doing but felt gaps
in the accounts. This was something she might never experience. What would the
feeling be -- reawakening to new life with the memories of another lifetime
intact? Much different from a Reverend Mother's Other Memory, she suspected.
"Mind at its beginning," Duncan called it. "Awakening of your True Self. I
felt I had been plunged into a magic universe. My awareness was a circle and
then a globe. Arbitrary forms became transient. The table was not a table.
Then I fell into a trance -- everything around me had a shimmering quality.
Nothing was real. This passed and I felt I had lost the one reality. My table
was a table once more. "
She had studied the Bene Gesserit manual "On Awakening a Ghola's Original
Memories." Duncan was diverging from those instructions. Why?
He left the child and approached Murbella.
"I have to talk to Sheeana," he said as he passed her. "There's got to be a
better way."
Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of
understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The
judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead
ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.
-Mentat Fixe (adacto)
Idaho, seated alone at his console, encountered an entry he had stored in
Shipsystems during his first days of confinement, and found himself dumped (he
applied the word later) into attitudes and sensory awareness of that earlier
time. It no longer was afternoon of a frustrating day in the no-ship. He was
back there, stretched between then and now the way serial ghola lives linked
this incarnation to his original birth.
Immediately, he saw what he had come to call "the net" and the elderly couple
defined by criss-crossed lines, bodies visible through a shimmering of jeweled
ropes -- green, blue, gold, and a silver so brilliant it made his eyes ache.
He sensed godlike stability in these people, but something common about them.
The word ordinary came to mind. The by-now-familiar garden landscape stretched
out behind them: floral bushes (roses, he thought), rolling lawns, tall trees.
The couple stared back at him with an intensity that made Idaho feel naked.
New power in the vision! It no longer was confined to the Great Hold, an
increasingly compulsive magnet drawing him down there so frequently he knew the
watchdogs were alerted.
Is he another Kwisatz Haderach?
There was a level of suspicion the Bene Gesserit could achieve that would kill
him if it grew. And they were watching him now! Questions, worried
speculations. Despite this, he could not turn away from the vision.
Why did that elderly couple look so familiar? Someone from his past? Family?
Mentat riffling of his memories produced nothing to fit the speculation. Round
faces. Abbreviated chins. Fat wrinkles at the jowls. Dark eyes. The net
obscured their color. The woman wore a long blue and green dress that concealed
her feet. A white apron stained with green covered the dress from ample bosom
to just below her waist. Garden tools dangled from apron loops. She carried a
trowel in her left hand. Her hair was gray. Wisps of it had escaped a
confining green scarf and blew around her eyes, emphasizing laughter lines
there. She appeared . . . grandmotherly.
The man suited her as though created by the same artist as a perfect match. Bib
overalls over a mounded stomach. No hat. Those same dark eyes with reflections
twinkling in them. A brush of close-cropped wiry gray hair.
He had the most benign expression Idaho had ever seen. Up-curved smile creases
at the corners of his mouth. He held a small shovel in his left hand, and on
his extended right palm he balanced what appeared to be a small metal ball. The
ball emitted a piercing whistle that made Idaho clap his hands over his ears.
This did not stop the sound. It faded away of itself. He lowered his hands.
Reassuring faces. That thought aroused Idaho's suspicions because now he
recognized the familiarity. They looked somewhat like Face Dancers, even to the
pug noses.
He leaned forward but the vision kept its distance. "Face Dancers," he
whispered.
Net and elderly couple vanished.
They were replaced by Murbella in practice-floor leotards of glistening ebony.
He had to reach out and touch her before he could believe she really stood
there.
"Duncan? What is it? You're all sweaty."
"I . . . think it's something the damned Tleilaxu planted in me. I keep seeing
. . . I think they're Face Dancers. They . . . they look at me and just now . .
. a whistle. It hurt."
She glanced up at the comeyes but did not appear worried. This was something
the Sisters could know without it presenting immediate dangers . . . except
possibly to Scytale.
She sank to her haunches beside him and put a hand on his arm. "Something they
did to your body in the tanks?"
"No!"
"But you said . . ."
"My body's not just a piece of new baggage for this trip. It has all of the
chemistry and substance I ever had. It's my mind that's different."
That worried her. She knew the Bene Gesserit concern over wild talents. "Damn
that Scytale!"
"I'll find it," he said.
He closed his eyes and heard Murbella stand. Her hand went away from his arm.
"Maybe you shouldn't do that, Duncan."
She sounded far away.
Memory. Where did they hide the secret thing? Deep in the original cells?
Until this moment, he had thought of his memory as a Mentat tool. He could call
up his own images from long-ago moments in front of mirrors. Close up,
examining an age wrinkle. Looking at a woman behind him -- two faces in the
mirror and his face full of questions.
Faces. A succession of masks, different views of this person he called myself.
Slightly imbalanced faces. Hair sometimes gray, sometimes the jet karakul of
his current life. Sometimes humorous, sometimes grave and seeking inward for
wisdom to meet a new day. Somewhere in all of that lay a consciousness that
observed and deliberated. Someone who made choices. The Tleilaxu had tampered
with that.
Idaho felt his blood pumping hard and knew danger was present. This was what he
was intended to experience . . . but not by the Tleilaxu. He had been born with
it.
This is what it means to be alive.
No memory from his other lives, nothing the Tleilaxu had done to him, none of
that changed his deepest awareness one whit.
He opened his eyes. Murbella still stood near but her expression was veiled.
So that's how she will look as a Reverend Mother.
He did not like this change in her.
"What happens if the Bene Gesserit fail?" he asked.
When she did not reply, he nodded. Yes. That's the worst assumption. The
Sisterhood down history's sewerpipe. And you don't want that, my beloved.
He could see it in her face when she turned and left him.
Looking up at the comeyes, he said: "Dar. I must talk to you, Dar."
No response from any of the mechanisms around him. He had not expected one.
Still, he knew he could talk to her and she would have to listen.
"I've been coining at our problem from the other direction," he said. And he
imagined the busy whirring of recorders as they spun the sounds of his voice
into ridulian crystals. "I've been getting into the minds of Honored Matres. I
know I've done it. Murbella resonates."
That would alert them. He had an Honored Matre of his own. But had was not the
proper word. He did not have Murbella. Not even in bed. They had each other.
Matched the way those people in his vision appeared to be matched. Was that
what he saw there? Two older people sexually trained by Honored Matres?
"I look at another issue now," he said. "How to overcome the Bene Gesserit."
That threw down the gauntlet.
"Episodes," he said. A word Odrade was fond of using.
"That's how we have to see what's happening to us. Little episodes. Even the
worst-case assumption has to be screened against that background. The
Scattering has a magnitude that dwarfs anything we do."
There! That demonstrated his value to the Sisters. It put Honored Matres in a
better perspective. They were back here in the Old Empire. Fellow dwarves. He
knew Odrade would see it. Bell would make her see it.
Somewhere out there in the Infinite Universe, a jury had brought in a verdict
against Honored Matres. Law and its managers had not prevailed for the hunters.
He suspected that his vision had shown him two of the jurors. And if they were
Face Dancers, they were not Scytale's Face Dancers. Those two people behind the
shimmering net belonged to no one but themselves.
Major flaws in government arise from a fear of making radical internal changes
even though a need is clearly seen.
-Darwi Odrade
For Odrade, the first melange of the morning was always different. Her flesh
responded like a starveling who clutched at sweet fruit. Then followed the
slow, penetrating and painful restoration.
This was the fearful thing about melange addiction.
She stood at the window of her sleeping chamber waiting for the effect to run
its course. Weather Control, she noted, had achieved another morning rain. The
landscape was washed clean, everything immersed in a romantic haze, all edges
blurred and reduced to essences like old memories. She opened the window. Damp
cold air blew across her face, drawing recollections around her the way one put
on a familiar garment.
She inhaled deeply. Smells after a rain! She remembered the essentials of life
amplified and smoothed by falling water but these rains were different. They
left a flinty aftersmell she could taste. Odrade did not like it. The message
was not of things washed clean but of life resentful, wanting all rain stopped
and locked away. This rain no longer gentled and brought fullness. It carried
inescapable awareness of change.
Odrade closed the window. At once, she was back in the familiar odors of her
quarters, and that constant smell of shere from the metering implants required
of everyone who knew the location of Chapterhouse. She heard Streggi enter, the
slip-slip sounds of the desert map being changed.
An efficient sound in Streggi's movements. Weeks of close association had
confirmed Odrade's first judgment. Reliable. Not brilliant but supremely
sensitive to Mother Superior's needs. Look how quietly she moved. Transfer
Streggi's sensitivity to the needs of young Teg and they had his required height
and mobility. A horse? Much more.
Odrade's melange assimilation reached its peak and subsided. Streggi's
reflection in the window showed her waiting for assignment. She knew these
moments were given over to the spice. At her stage, she would be looking
forward to the day when she entered this mysterious enhancement.
I wish her well of it.
Most Reverend Mothers followed the teaching and seldom thought of their spice as
addiction. Odrade knew it every morning for what it was. You took your spice
during the day as your body demanded, following a pattern of early training:
dosage minimal, just enough to whet the metabolic system and drive it into peak
performance. Biological necessities meshed more smoothly with melange. Food
tasted better. Barring accident or fatal assault, you lived much longer than
you could without it. But you were addicted.
Her body restored, Odrade blinked and considered Streggi. Curiosity about the
morning's long ritual was plain in her. Speaking to Streggi's reflection in the
window, Odrade said: "Have you learned about melange withdrawal?"
"Yes, Mother Superior."
Despite warnings to keep awareness of addiction low key, it was never more than
an eyeblink away from Odrade and she felt the accumulated resentments. Mental
preparations as an acolyte (firmly impressed in the Agony) had been eroded by
Other Memory and accumulations of time. The admonition: "Withdrawal removes an
essential of your life and, if it occurs in late middle age, can kill you." How
little that meant now.
"Withdrawal has intense meaning for me," Odrade said. "I am one of those for
whom the morning melange is painful. I'm sure they told you this happens."
"I'm sorry, Mother Superior."
Odrade studied the map. It showed a longer finger of desert thrusting northward
and a pronounced widening of drylands to the southeast of Central where Sheeana
had her station. Presently, Odrade returned her attention to Streggi, who was
watching Mother Superior with new interest.
Brought up short by thoughts of the spice's darker side!
"The uniqueness of melange is seldom considered in our age," Odrade said. "All
of the old narcotics in which humans have indulged possess a remarkable factor
in common -- all except the spice. They all brought shorter life and pain."
"We were told, Mother Superior."
"But you probably were not told that a fact of governance could be obscured by
our concern with Honored Matres. There's an energy greed in governments (yes,
even in ours) that can dump you into a trap. If you serve me, you will feel it
in your guts because every morning you will watch me suffer. Let knowledge of
it sink into you, this deadly trap. Don't become uncaring pushers, caught in a
system that displaces life with careless death as Honored Matres do. Remember:
Acceptable narcotics can be taxed to pay salaries or otherwise create jobs for
uncaring functionaries."
Streggi was puzzled. "But melange extends our lives, increases health and
arouses appetites for --"
She was stopped by Odrade's scowl.
Right out of the Acolyte Manual!
"It has this other side, Streggi, and you see it in me. The Acolyte Manual does
not lie. But melange is a narcotic and we are addicted. "
" I know it's not gentle with everyone, Mother Superior. But you said Honored
Matres don't use it."
"The substitute they employ replaces melange with few benefits except to prevent
withdrawal agonies and death. It is parallel addictive."
"And the captive?"
"Murbella used it and now she uses melange. They are interchangeable.
Interesting?"
"I . . . suppose we will learn more of this. I notice, Mother Superior, that
you never call them whores."
"As acolytes do? Ahh, Streggi, Bellonda has been a bad influence. Oh, I
recognize the pressures." As Streggi started to protest. "Acolytes feel the
threat. They look at Chapterhouse and think of it as their fortress for the
long night of the whores."
"Something like that, Mother Superior." Extremely hesitant.
"Streggi, this planet is only another temporary place. Today we go south and
impress that upon you. Find Tamalane, please, and tell her to make the
arrangements we discussed for our visit to Sheeana. Speak to no one else about
it."
"Yes, Mother Superior. Do you mean I will accompany you?"
"I want you by my side. Tell the one you are training that she now has full
charge of my map."
As Streggi left, Odrade thought of Sheeana and Idaho. She wants to talk to him
and he wants to talk to her.
Comeye analysis noted that these two sometimes conversed by hand-signals while
hiding most of the movements with their bodies. It had the look of an old
Atreides battle language. Odrade recognized some of it but not enough to
determine content. Bellonda wanted an explanation from Sheeana. "Secrets!"
Odrade was more cautious. "Let it go a bit. Perhaps something interesting will
come of it."
What does Sheeana want?
Whatever Duncan had in mind it concerned Teg. Creating the pain required for
Teg to recover his original memories went against Duncan's grain.
Odrade had noted this when she interrupted Duncan at his console yesterday.
"You're late, Dar." Not looking up from whatever it was he did there. Late?
It was early evening.
He had been calling her Dar frequently for several years, a goad, a reminder
that he resented his fishtank existence. The goad irritated Bellonda, who
argued against "his damned familiarities." He called Bellonda "Bell," of
course. Duncan was generous with his needle.
Remembering this, Odrade paused before entering her workroom. Duncan had
slammed a fist onto the counter beside his console. "There's got to be a better
way for Teg!"
A better way? What does he have in mind?
Movement down the corridor beyond the workroom brought her out of this
reflection. Streggi returning from Tamalane. Streggi entered the Acolyte Ready
Room. Giving the word to her replacement on the desert map.
A stack of Archival records waited on Odrade's table. Bellonda! Odrade stared
at the pile. No matter how much she tried to delegate there was always this
organized residue that her councillors insisted only Mother Superior could
handle. Much of this new lot came from Bellonda's demand for "suggestions and
analyses."
Odrade touched her console. "Bell!"
The voice of an Archives clerk responded: "Mother Superior?"
"Get Bell up here! I want her in front of me as fast as her fat legs can move!"
It was less than a minute. Bellonda stood in front of the worktable like a
chastened acolyte. They all knew that tone in Mother Superior's voice.
Odrade touched the stack on her table and jerked her hand back as though
shocked. "What in the name of Shaitan is all of that?"
"We judged it significant."
"You think I have to see everything and anything? Where's the keynoting? This
is sloppy work, Bell! I'm not stupid and neither are you. But this . . . in
the face of this . . ."
"I delegate as much as --"
"Delegate? Look at this! Which must I see and which may I delegate? Not one
keynote!"
"I'll see that it's corrected immediately."
"Indeed you will, Bell. Because Tam and I are going south today, an unannounced
inspection tour and a visit with Sheeana. And while I'm gone, you will sit in
my chair. See how you like this daily deluge!"
"Will you be out of touch?"
"I'll have a lightline and Ear-C at all times."
Bellonda breathed easier.
" I suggest, Bell, that you get back to Archives and put someone in charge who
will take responsibility. I'm damned if you're not beginning to act like
bureaucrats. Covering your asses!"
"Real boats rock, Dar."
Was that Bell attempting humor? All was not lost!
Odrade waved a hand over her projector and there was Tamalane in the Transport
Hall. "Tam?"
"Yes?" Without turning from an assignment list.
"How soon can we leave?"
"About two hours."
"Call me when you're ready. Oh, and Streggi goes with us. Make room for her."
Odrade blanked the projection before Tamalane could respond.
There were things she should be doing, Odrade knew. Tam and Bell were not the
only sources of Mother Superior's concerns.
Sixteen planets remaining to us . . . and that includes Buzzell, definitely a
place in peril. Only sixteen! She pushed that thought aside. No time for it.
Murbella. Should I call her and . . . No. That can wait. The new Board of
Proctors? Let Bell deal with that. Community disbandings?
Siphoning personnel into a new Scattering had forced consolidations. Staying
ahead of the desert! It was depressing and she did not feel she could face it
today. I'm always fidgety before a trip.
Abruptly, Odrade fled the workroom and went stalking the corridors, looking into
how her charges were performing, pausing in doorways, noting what the students
read, how they behaved in their everlasting prana-bindu exercises.
"What are you reading there?" demanded of a young second-stage acolyte at a
projector in a semi-darkened room.
"The diaries of Tolstoy, Mother Superior."
That knowing look in the acolyte's eyes said: "Do you have his words directly
in Other Memory?" The question was right there on the edge of the girl's
tongue! They were always trying such petty gambits when they caught her alone.
"Tolstoy was a family name!" Odrade snapped. "By your mention of diaries, I
presume you refer to Count Leo Nikolayevich."
"Yes, Mother Superior." Abashedly aware of censure.
Softening, Odrade threw a quotation at the girl: " 'I am not a river, I am a
net.' He spoke those words at Yasnaya Polyana when he was only twelve. You'll
not find them in his diaries but they are probably the most significant words he
ever uttered."
Odrade turned away before the acolyte could thank her. Always teaching!
She wandered down to the main kitchens then and inspected them, tracing inner
edges of racked pots for grease, noting the cautious way even the teaching chef
observed her progress.
The kitchen was steamy with good smells from lunch preparations. There was a
restorative sound of chopping and stirring but the usual banter stopped at her
entrance.
She went around the long counter with its busy cooks to the teaching chef's
raised platform. He was a great beefy man with prominent cheekbones, his face
as florid as the meats over which he ministered. Odrade had no doubts he was
one of history's great chefs. His name suited him: Placido Salat. He was
assured of a warm place in her thoughts for several reasons, including the fact
that he had trained her personal chef. Important visitors in the days before
Honored Matres had received a kitchen tour and a taste of specialties.
"May I introduce our senior chef, Placido Salat?"
His beef placido (lower case his choice) was the envy of many. Almost raw and
served with an herbed and spicy mustard sauce that did not obscure the meat.
Odrade thought the dish too exotic but never judged it aloud.
When she had Salat's full attention (after a slight interruption to correct a
sauce) Odrade said: "I'm hungry for something special, Placido."
He recognized the opening. This was how she always began a request for her
"special dish."
"Perhaps an oyster stew," he suggested.
It's a dance, Odrade thought. They both knew what she wanted.
"Excellent!" she agreed and went into the required performance. "But it must be
treated gently, Placido, the oysters not overcooked. Some of our own powdered
dry celery in the broth."
"And perhaps a bit of paprika?"
"I always prefer it that way. Be extremely careful with the melange. A breath
of it and no more."
"Of course, Mother Superior!" Eyes rolling in horror at the thought he might
use too much melange. "So easy for the spice to dominate."
"Cook the oysters in clam nectar, Placido. I would prefer you watch over them
yourself, stirring gently until the edges of the oysters just start to curl."
"Not a second longer, Mother Superior."
"Heat some quite creamy milk on the side. Don't boil it!"
Placido displayed astonishment that she might suspect him of boiling the milk
for her oyster stew.
"A small pat of butter in the serving bowl," Odrade said. "Pour the combined
broth over it."
"No sherry?"
"How glad I am that you are taking personal charge of my special dish, Placido.
I forgot the sherry." (Mother Superior never forgot anything and they all knew
it but this was a required step in the dance.)
"Three ounces of sherry in the cooking broth," he said.
"Heat it to get rid of the alcohol."
"Of course! But we must not bruise the flavors. Would you like croutons or
saltines?"
"Croutons, please."
Seated at an alcove table, Odrade ate two bowls of oyster stew, remembering how
Sea Child had savored it. Papa had introduced her to this dish when she was
barely capable of conveying spoon to mouth. He had made the stew himself, his
own specialty. Odrade had taught it to Salat.
She complimented Salat on the wine.
"I particularly enjoyed your choice of a chablis for accompaniment."
"A flinty chablis with a sharp edge on it, Mother Superior. One of our better
vintages. It sets off the oyster flavors admirably."
Tamalane found her in the alcove. They always knew where to find Mother
Superior when they wanted her.
"We are ready." Was that displeasure on Tam's face?
"Where will we stop tonight?"
"Eldio."
Odrade smiled. She liked Eldio.
Tam catering to me because I'm in a critical mood? Perhaps we have the makings
of a small diversion.
Following Tamalane to the transport docks, Odrade thought how characteristic it
was that the older woman preferred to travel by tube. Surface trips annoyed
her. "Who wants to waste time at my age?"
Odrade disliked tubes for personal transport. You were so closed in and
helpless! She preferred surface or air and used tubes only when speed was
urgent. She had no hesitation about using smaller tubes for chits and notes.
Notes don't care just as long as they get there.
This thought always made her conscious of the network that adjusted to her
movements wherever she went.
Somewhere in the heart of things (there was always a "heart of things") an
automated system routed communications and made sure (most of the time) that
important missives arrived where addressed.
When Private Dispatch (they all called it PD) was not needed, stat or viz was
available along scrambled sorters and lightlines. Off-planet was another
matter, especially in these hunted times. Safest to send a Reverend Mother with
memorized message or distrans implant. Every messenger took heavier doses of
shere these days. T-probes could read even a dead mind not guarded by shere.
Every off-planet message was encrypted but an enemy might hit on the one-time
cover concealing it. Great risk off-planet. Perhaps that was why the Rabbi
remained silent.
Now why am I thinking such things at this moment?
"No word yet from Dortujla?" she asked as Tamalane prepared to enter the
Dispatch roundelay where the others in their party waited. So many people. Why
so many?
Odrade saw Streggi up ahead at the edge of the dock talking to a Communications
acolyte. There were at least six other people from Communications nearby.
Tamalane turned in obvious pique. "Dortujla! We have all said we will notify
you the instant we hear!"
"I was just asking, Tam. Just asking."
Meekly, Odrade followed Tamalane into Dispatch. I should put a monitor on my
mind and question everything that rises there. Mental intrusions always had
good reason behind them. That was the Bene Gesserit way, as Bellonda often
reminded her.
Odrade felt surprise at herself then, realizing she was more than a little sick
of Bene Gesserit ways.
Let Bell worry about such things for a change!
This was a time for floating free, for responding like a will o' the wisp to the
currents moving around her.
Sea Child knew about currents.
Time does not count itself. You have only to look at a circle and this is
apparent.
-Leto II (The Tyrant)
"Look! Look what we have come to!" the Rabbi wailed. He sat cross-legged on
the cold curved floor with his shawl pulled up over his head and almost
concealing his face.
The room around him was gloomy and resonating with small machinery sounds that
made him feel weak. If those sounds should stop!
Rebecca stood in front of him, hands on her hips, a look of weary frustration on
her face.
"Do not stand there like that!" the Rabbi commanded. He peered up at her from
beneath the shawl.
"If you despair, then are we not lost?" she asked.
The sound of her voice angered him and he was a moment putting this unwanted
emotion aside.
She dares to instruct me? But was it not said by wiser men that knowledge can
come from a weed? A great shuddering sigh shook him and he dropped the shawl to
his shoulders. Rebecca helped him stand.
"A no-chamber," the Rabbi muttered. "In here, we hide from . . ." His gaze
searched upward at a dark ceiling. "Better left unspoken even here."
"We hide from the unspeakable," Rebecca said.
"The door cannot even be left open at Passover," he said. "How will the
Stranger enter?"
"Some strangers we do not want," she said.
"Rebecca." He bowed his head. "You are more than a trial and a problem. This
little cell of Secret Israel shares your exile because we understand that --"
"Stop saying that! You understand nothing of what has happened to me. My
problem?" She leaned close to him. "It is to remain human while in contact
with all of those past lives."
The Rabbi recoiled.
"So you are no longer one of us? Are you a Bene Gesserit then?"
"You will know when I'm Bene Gesserit. You will see me looking at myself as I
look at myself."
His brows drew down in a scowl. "What are you saying?"
"What does a mirror look at, Rabbi?"
"Hmmmmph! Riddles now." But a faint smile twitched at his mouth. A look of
determination returned to his eyes. He stared around him at the room. There
were eight of them here -- more than this space should hold. A no-chamber! It
had been assembled painstakingly with smuggled bits and pieces. So small.
Twelve and a half meters long. He had measured it himself. A shape like an
ancient barrel laid on its side, oval in cross section and with half-globe
closures at the ends. The ceiling was no more than a meter above his head. The
widest point here at the center was only five meters and the curve of floor and
ceiling made it seem even narrower. Dried food and recycled water. That was
what they must live on and for how long? One SY maybe if they were not found.
He did not trust the security of this device. Those peculiar sounds in the
machinery.
It had been late in the day when they crept into this hole. Darkness up there
now for sure. And where were the rest of his people? Fled to whatever
sanctuary they could find, drawing on old debts and honorable commitments for
past services. Some would survive. Perhaps they would survive better than this
remnant in here.
The entrance to the no-chamber lay concealed beneath an ash pit with a freestanding
chimney beside it. The reinforcing metal of the chimney contained
threads of ridulian crystal to relay exterior scenes into this place. Ashes!
The room still smelled of burned things and it already had begun to take on a
sewer stink from the small recycling chamber. What a euphemism for a toilet!
Someone came up behind the Rabbi. "The searchers are leaving. Lucky we were
warned in time."
It was Joshua, the one who had built this chamber. He was a short, slender man
with a sharply triangular face narrowing to a thin chin. Dark hair swept over
his broad forehead. He had widely spaced brown eyes that looked out at his
world with a brooding inwardness the Rabbi did not trust. He looks too young to
know so much about these things.
"So they are leaving," the Rabbi said. "They will be back. You will not think
us lucky then."
"They will not guess we hid so near the farm," Rebecca said. "The searchers
were mostly looting."
"Listen to the Bene Gesserit," the Rabbi said.
"Rabbi." What a chiding sound in Joshua's voice! "Have I not heard you say
many times that the blessed ones are they who hide the flaws of others even from
themselves?"
"Everybody's a teacher now!" the Rabbi said. "But who can tell us what will
happen next?"
He had to admit the truth of Joshua's words, though. It is the anguish of our
flight that troubles me. Our little diaspora. But we do not scatter from
Babylon. We hide in a . . . a cyclone cellar!
This thought restored him. Cyclones pass.
"Who is in charge of the food?" he asked. "We must ration ourselves from the
start."
Rebecca heaved a sigh of relief. The Rabbi was at his worst in the wide
oscillations -- too emotional or too intellectual. He had himself in hand once
more. He would become intellectual next. That would have to be dampened, too.
Bene Gesserit awareness gave her a new view of the people around her. Our
Jewish susceptibility. Look at the intellectuals!
It was a thought peculiar to the Sisterhood. The drawbacks of anyone placing
considerable reliance on intellectual achievements were large. She could not
deny all of that evidence from the Lampadas horde. Speaker paraded it for her
whenever she wavered.
Rebecca had come almost to enjoy the pursuit of memory fancies, as she thought
of them. Knowing earlier times forced her to deny her own earlier times. She
had been required to believe so many things she now knew were nonsense. Myths
and chimera, impulses of extremely childish behavior.
"Our gods should mature as we mature."
Rebecca suppressed a smile. Speaker did that to her often -- a little nudge in
the ribs from someone who knew you would appreciate it.
Joshua had gone back to his instruments. She saw that someone was reviewing the
catalogue of food stores. The Rabbi watched this with his normal intensity.
Others had rolled themselves into blankets and were sleeping on the cots in the
darkened end of the chamber. Seeing all of this, Rebecca knew what her function
must be. Keep us from boredom.
"The games master?"
Unless you have something better to suggest, don't try to tell me about my own
people, Speaker.
Whatever else she might say about these inner conversations, there was no doubt
that all of the pieces were connected -- the past with this room, this room with
her projections of consequences. And that was a great gift from the Bene
Gesserit. Do not think of "The Future." Predestination? Then what happens to
the freedom you are given at birth?
Rebecca looked at her own birth in a new light. It had embarked her on movement
toward an unknown destiny. Fraught with unseen perils and joys. So they had
come around a bend in the river and found attackers. The next bend might reveal
a cataract or a stretch of peaceful beauty. And here lay the magical enticement
of prescience, the lure to which Muad'Dib and his Tyrant son had succumbed. The
oracle knows what is to come! The horde of Lampadas had taught her not to seek
oracles. The known could beleaguer her more than the unknown. The sweetness of
the new lay in its surprises. Could the Rabbi see it?
"Who will tell us what happens next?" he asks.
Is that what you want, Rabbi? You will not like what you hear. I guarantee it.
From the moment the oracle speaks your future becomes identical to your past.
How you would wail in your boredom. Nothing new, not ever. Everything old in
that one instant of revelation.
"But this is not what I wanted!" I can hear you saying it.
No brutality, no savagery, no quiet happiness nor exploding joy can come upon
you unexpectedly. Like a runaway tube train in its wormhole, your life will
speed through to its final moment of confrontation. Like a moth in the car you
will beat your wings against the sides and ask Fate to let you out. "Let the
tube undergo a magical change of direction. Let something new happen! Don't
let the terrible things I have seen come to pass!"
Abruptly, she saw that this must have been Muad'Dib's travail. To whom had he
uttered his prayers?
"Rebecca!" It was the Rabbi calling her.
She went to where he stood beside Joshua now, looking at the dark world outside
of their chamber as it was revealed in the small projection above Joshua's
instruments.
"There is a storm coming," the Rabbi said. "Joshua thinks it will make a cement
of the ash pit."
"That is good," she said. "It is why we built here and left the cover off the
pit when we entered."
"But how do we get out?"
"We have tools for that," she said. "And even without tools, there's always our
hands."
A major concept guides the Missionaria Protectiva: Purposeful instruction of
the masses. This is firmly seated in our belief that the aim of argument should
be to change the nature of truth. In such matters, we prefer the use of power
rather than force.
-The Coda
To Duncan Idaho, life in the no-ship had taken on the air of a peculiar game
since the advent of his vision and insights into Honored Matre behavior. Entry
of Teg into the game was a deceptive move, not just the introduction of another
player.
He stood beside his console this morning and recognized elements in this game
parallel to his own ghola childhood at the Bene Gesserit Keep on Gammu with the
aging Bashar as weapons master-guardian.
Education. That had been a primary concern then as it was now. And the guards,
mostly unobtrusive in the no-ship but always there as they had been on Gammu.
Or their spy devices present, artfully camouflaged and blended into the decor.
He had become an adept at evading them on Gammu. Here, with Sheeana's help, he
had raised evasion to a fine art.
Activity around him was reduced to low background. Guards carried no weapons.
But they were mostly Reverend Mothers with a few senior acolytes. They would
not believe they needed weapons.
Some things in the no-ship contributed to an illusion of freedom, chiefly its
size and complexity. The ship was large, how large he could not determine but
he had access to many floors and to corridors that ran for more than a thousand
paces.
Tubes and tunnels, access piping that conveyed him in suspensor pods, dropchutes
and lifts, conventional hallways and wide corridors with hatches that hissed
open at a touch (or remained sealed: Forbidden!) -- all of it was a place to
lock in memory, becoming there his own turf, private to him in a way far
different from what it was to guards.
The energy required to bring the ship down to the planet and maintain it spoke
of a major commitment. The Sisterhood could not count the cost in any ordinary
way. The comptroller of the Bene Gesserit treasury did not deal merely in
monetary counters. Not for them the Solar or comparable currencies. They
banked on their people, on food, on payments due sometimes for millennia,
payments often in kind -- both materials and loyalties.
Pay up, Duncan! We're calling in your note!
This ship was not just a prison. He had considered several Mentat projections.
Prime: it was a laboratory where Reverend Mothers sought a way to nullify a noship's
ability to confuse human senses.
A no-ship gameboard -- puzzle and warren. All to confine three prisoners? No.
There had to be other reasons.
The game had secret rules, some he could only guess. But he had found it
reassuring when Sheeana entered into the spirit of it. I knew she would have
her own plans. Obvious when she began practicing Honored Matre techniques.
Polishing my trainees!
Sheeana wanted intimate information about Murbella and much more -- his memories
of people he had known in his many lives, especially memories of the Tyrant.
And I want information about the Bene Gesserit.
The Sisterhood kept him in minimal activity. Frustrating him to increase Mentat
abilities. He was not at the heart of that larger problem he sensed outside the
ship. Tantalizing fragments came to him when Odrade gave him glimpses of their
predicament through her questions.
Enough to offer new premises? Not without access to data that his console
refused to display.
It was his problem, too, damn them! He was in a box within their box. All of
them trapped.
Odrade had stood beside this console one afternoon a week ago and blandly
assured him the Sisterhood's data sources were "opened wide" to him. Right
there she had stood, her back to the counter, leaning on it casually, arms
folded across her breast. Her resemblance to the adult Miles Teg was uncanny at
times. Even to that need (was it a compulsion?) to stand while talking. She
disliked chairdogs, too.
He knew he had an extremely loose comprehension of her motives and plans. But
he didn't trust them. Not after Gammu.
Decoy and bait. That was how they had used him. He was lucky not to have gone
the way of Dune -- a dead husk. Used up by the Bene Gesserit.
When he fidgeted this way, Idaho preferred to slump into the chair at his
console. Sometimes, he sat here for hours, immobile, his mind trying to
encompass complexities of the ship's powerful data resources. The system could
identify any human in it. So it has automatic monitors. It had to know who was
speaking, making demands, assuming temporary command.
Flight circuits defy my attempts to break through the locks. Disconnected?
That was what his guards said. But the ship's way of identifying who tapped the
circuits -- he knew his key lay there.
Would Sheeana help? It was a dangerous gamble to trust her too much. Sometimes
when she watched him at his console he was reminded of Odrade. Sheeana was
Odrade's student. That was a sobering memory.
What was their interest in how he used Shipsystems? As if he needed to ask!
During his third year here he had made the system hide data for him, doing this
with his own keys. To thwart the prying comeyes, he hid his actions in plain
sight. Obvious insertions for later retrieval but with an encrypted second
message. Easy for a Mentat and useful mostly as a trick, exploring the
potentials of Shipsystems. He had booby-trapped his data to a random dump
without hope of recovery.
Bellonda suspected, but when she questioned him about it, he only smiled.
I hide my history, Bell. My serial lives as a ghola -- all of them back to the
original non-ghola. Intimate things I remember about those experiences: a
dumping ground for poignant memories.
Sitting now at the console, he experienced mixed feelings. Confinement galled
him. No matter the size and richness of his prison, it still was a prison. He
had known for some time that he very likely could escape but Murbella and his
increasing knowledge about their predicament held him. He felt as much a
prisoner of his thoughts as of the elaborate system represented by guards and
this monstrous device. The no-ship was a device, of course. A tool. A way to
move unseen in a dangerous universe. A means of concealing yourself and your
intentions even from prescient searchers.
With accumulated skills of many lifetimes, he looked on his surroundings through
a screen of sophistication and naivete. Mentats cultivated naivete. Thinking
you knew something was a sure way to blind yourself. It was not growing up that
slowly applied brakes to learning (Mentats were taught) but an accumulation of
"things I know."
New data sources the Sisterhood had opened to him (if he could rely on them)
raised questions. How was opposition to Honored Matres organized in the
Scattering? Obviously there were groups (he hesitated to call them powers) who
hunted Honored Matres the way Honored Matres hunted the Bene Gesserit. Killed
them, too, if you accepted Gammu evidence.
Futars and Handlers? He made a Mentat Projection: A Tleilaxu offshoot in the
first Scattering had engaged in genetic manipulation. Those two he saw in his
vision: were they the ones who created Futars? Could that couple be Face
Dancers? Independent of Tleilaxu Masters? All was not singular in the
Scattering.
Dammit! He needed access to more data, to potent sources. His present sources
were not even remotely adequate. A tool of limited purpose, his console could
be adapted to larger requirements but his adaptations limped. He needed to
stride out as a Mentat!
I've been hobbled and that's a mistake. Doesn't Odrade trust me? She's an
Atreides, damn her! She knows what I owe her family.
More than one lifetime and the debt never paid!
He knew he was fidgeting. Abruptly, his mind locked on that. Mentat fidgeting!
A signal that he stood poised at the edge of breakthrough. A Prime Projection!
Something they had not told him about Teg?
Questions! There were unasked questions lashing at him.
I need perspective! Not necessarily a matter of distance. You could gain
perspective from within if your questions carried few distortions.
He sensed that somewhere in Bene Gesserit experiences (perhaps even in Bell's
jealously guarded Archives) lay missing pieces. Bell should appreciate this! A
fellow Mentat must know the excitement of this moment. His thoughts were like
tesserae, most of the pieces at hand and ready to fit into a mosaic. It was not
a matter of solutions.
He could hear his first Mentat teacher, the words rumbling in his mind:
"Assemble your questions in counterpoise and toss your temporary data onto one
side of the scales or the other. Solutions unbalance any situation. Imbalances
reveal what you seek."
Yes! Achieving imbalances with sensitized questions was a Mentat's juggling
act.
Something Murbella had said the night before -- what? They had been in her bed.
He recalled seeing the time projected on the ceiling: 9:47. And he had
thought: That projection takes energy.
He could almost feel the flow of the ship's power, this giant enclosure cut out
of Time. Frictionless machinery to create a mimetic presence no instrument
could distinguish from natural background. Except for now when it was on
standby, shielded not from eyes but from prescience.
Murbella beside him: another kind of power, both aware of the force trying to
pull them together. The energy it took to suppress that mutual magnetism!
Sexual attraction building and building and building.
Murbella talking. Yes, that was it. Oddly self-analytic. She approached her
own life with a new maturity, a Bene Gesserit-heightened awareness and
confidence that something of great strength grew in her.
Every time he recognized this Bene Gesserit change, he felt sad.
Nearer the day of our parting.
But Murbella was talking. "She (Odrade was often 'she') keeps asking me to
assess my love for you."
Remembering this, Idaho allowed it to replay.
"She has tried the same approach with me."
"What do you say?"
"Odi et amo. Excrucior."
She lifted herself on one elbow and looked down at him. "What language is
that?"
"A very old one Leto had me learn once."
"Translate." Peremptory. Her old Honored Matre self.
" 'I hate her and I love her. And I am racked.' "
"Do you really hate me?" Unbelieving.
"What I hate is being tied this way, not the master of my self."
"Would you leave me if you could?"
"I want the decision to recur moment by moment. I want control of it."
"It's a game where one of the pieces can't be moved."
There it was! Her words.
Remembering, Idaho felt no elation but as though his eyes had suddenly been
opened after a long sleep. A game where one of the pieces can't be moved.
Game. His view of the no-ship and what the Sisterhood did here.
There was more to the exchange.
"The ship is our own special school," Murbella said.
He could only agree. The Sisterhood reinforced his Mentat capacities to screen
data and display what had not gone through. He sensed where this might lead and
felt leaden fear.
"You clear the nerve passages. You block off distractions and useless mindwanderings."
You redirected your responses into that dangerous mode every Mentat was warned
to avoid. "You can lose yourself there."
Students were taken to see human vegetables, "failed Mentats," kept alive to
demonstrate the peril.
How tempting, though. You could sense the power in that mode. Nothing hidden.
All things known.
In the midst of that fear, Murbella turning toward him on the bed, he felt the
sexual tensions become almost explosive.
Not yet. Not yet!
One of them had said something else. What? He had been thinking about the
limits of logic as a tool to expose the Sisterhood's motives.
"Do you often try to analyze them?" Murbella asked.
Uncanny how she did that, addressing his unspoken thoughts. She denied she read
minds. "I just read you, ghola mine. You are mine, you know."
"And vice versa. "
"Too true." Almost bantering but it covered something deeper and convoluted.
There was a pitfall in any analysis of human psyches and he said this.
"Thinking you know why you behave as you do gives you all sorts of excuses for
extraordinary behavior."
Excuses for extraordinary behavior! There was another piece in his mosaic.
More of the game but these counters were guilt and blame.
Murbella's voice was almost musing. "I suppose you can rationalize almost
anything by laying it on some trauma."
"Rationalize such things as burning entire planets?"
"There's a kind of brutal self-determination in that. She says making
determined choices firms up the psyche and gives you a sense of identity you can
rely on under stress. Do you agree, Mentat mine?"
"The Mentat is not yours." No force in his voice.
Murbella laughed and slumped back onto her pillow. "You know what the Sisters
want of us, Mentat mine?"
"They want our children."
"Oh, much more than that. They want our willing participation in their dream."
Another piece of the mosaic!
But who other than a Bene Gesserit knew that dream? The Sisters were actresses,
always performing, letting little that was real come through their masks. The
real person was walled in and metered out as needed.
"Why does she keep that old painting?" Murbella asked.
Idaho felt his stomach muscles tighten. Odrade had brought him a holorecord of
the painting she kept in her sleeping chamber. Cottages at Cordeville by
Vincent Van Gogh. Awakening him in this bed at some witching hour of the night
almost a month ago.
"You asked for my hold on humanity and here it is." Thrusting the holo in front
of his sleep-fogged eyes. He sat up and stared at the thing, trying to
comprehend. What was wrong with her? Odrade sounded so excited.
She left the holo in his hands while she turned on all of the lights, giving the
room a sense of hard and immediate shapes, everything vaguely mechanical the way
you would expect it in a no-ship. Where was Murbella? They had gone to sleep
together.
He focused on the holo and it touched him in an unaccountable way, as though it
linked him to Odrade. Her hold on her humanity? The holo felt cold to his
hands. She took it from him and propped it on the side table where he stared at
it while she found a chair and sat near his head. Sitting? Something compelled
her to be near him!
"It was painted by a madman on Old Terra," she said, bringing her cheek close to
his while both looked at the copy of the painting. "Look at it! An
encapsulated human moment."
In a landscape? Yes, dammit. She was right.
He stared at the holo. Those marvelous colors! It was not just the colors. It
was the totality.
"Most modern artists would laugh at the way he created that," Odrade said.
Couldn't she be silent while he looked at it?
"That was a human being as ultimate recorder," Odrade said. "The human hand,
the human eye, the human essence brought to focus in the awareness of one person
who tested the limits."
Tested the limits! More of the mosaic.
"Van Gogh did that with the most primitive materials and equipment." She
sounded almost drunk. "Pigments a caveman would have recognized! Painted on a
fabric he could have made with his own hands. He might have made the tools
himself from fur and wild twigs."
She touched the surface of the holo, her finger placing a shadow across the tall
trees. "The cultural level was crude by our standards, but see what he
produced?"
Idaho felt he should say something but words would not come. Where was
Murbella? Why wasn't she here?
Odrade pulled back and her next words burned themselves into him.
"That painting says you cannot suppress the wild thing, the uniqueness that will
occur among humans no matter how much we try to avoid it."
Idaho tore his gaze away from the holo and looked at Odrade's lips when she
spoke.
"Vincent told us something important about our fellows in the Scattering."
This long-dead painter? About the Scattering?
"They have done things out there and are doing things we cannot imagine. Wild
things! The explosive size of that Scattered population insures it."
Murbella entered the room behind Odrade, belting a soft white robe, her feet
bare. Her hair was damp from a shower. So that was where she had gone.
"Mother Superior?" Murbella's voice was sleepy.
Odrade spoke over her shoulder without fully turning. "Honored Matres think
they can anticipate and control every wildness. What nonsense. They cannot
even control it in themselves."
Murbella came around to the foot of the bed and stared questioningly at Idaho.
"I seem to have come in on the middle of a conversation. "
"Balance, that's the key," Odrade said.
Idaho kept his attention on Mother Superior.
"Humans can balance on strange surfaces," Odrade said. "Even on unpredictable
ones. It's called 'getting in tune.' Great musicians know it. Surfers I
watched when I was a child on Gammu, they knew it. Some waves throw you but
you're prepared for that. You climb back up and go at it once more."
For no reason he could explain, Idaho thought of another thing Odrade had said:
"We have no attic storerooms. We recycle everything."
Recycle. Cycle. Pieces of the circle. Pieces of the mosaic.
He was random hunting and knew better. Not the Mentat way. Recycle, though --
Other Memory was not an attic storeroom then but something they considered as
recycling. It meant they used their past only to change it and renew it.
Getting in tune.
A strange allusion from someone who claimed she avoided music.
Remembering, he sensed his mental mosaic. It had become a jumble. Nothing
fitted anywhere. Random pieces that probably did not go together at all.
But they did!
Mother Superior's voice continued in his memory. So there is more.
"People who know this go to the heart of it," Odrade said. "They warn that you
cannot think about what you're doing. That's a sure way to fail. You just do
it!"
Don't think. Do it. He sensed anarchy. Her words threw him back onto
resources other than Mentat training.
Bene Gesserit trickery! She did this deliberately, knowing the effect. Where
was the affection he sometimes felt radiating from her? Could she have concern
for the well-being of someone she treated this way?
When Odrade left them (he barely noticed her departure), Murbella sat on the bed
and straightened the robe around her knees.
Humans can balance on strange surfaces. Movement in his mind: the pieces of
the mosaic trying to find relationships.
He felt a new surge in the universe. Those two strange people in his vision?
They were part of it. He knew this without being able to say why. What was it
the Bene Gesserit claimed? "We modify old fashions and old beliefs."
"Look at me!" Murbella said.
Voice? Not quite but now he was sure she tried it on and she had not told him
they were training her in this witchery.
He saw the alien look in her green eyes that told him she was thinking about her
former associates.
"Never try to be more clever than the Bene Gesserit, Duncan."
Speaking for the comeyes?
He could not be sure. It was the intelligence behind her eyes that gripped him
these days. He could feel it growing there, as though her teachers blew into a
balloon and Murbella's intellect expanded the way her abdomen expanded with new
life.
Voice! What were they doing to her?
That was a stupid question. He knew what they were doing. They were taking her
away from him, making a Sister of her. No longer my lover, my marvelous
Murbella. A Reverend Mother then, remotely calculating in everything she did.
A witch. Who could love a witch?
I could. And always will.
"They grab you from your blind side to use you for their own purposes," he said.
He could see his words take hold. She had awakened to this trap after the fact.
The Bene Gesserit were so damnably clever! They had enticed her into their
trap, giving her small glimpses of things as magnetic as the force binding her
to him. It could only be an enraging realization to an Honored Matre.
We trap others! They do not trap us!
But this had been done by the Bene Gesserit. They were in a different category.
Almost Sisters. Why deny it? And she wanted their abilities. She wanted out
of this probation into the full teaching she could sense just beyond the ship's
walls. Didn't she know why they still kept her on probation?
They know she still struggles in their trap.
Murbella slipped out of her robe and climbed into the bed beside him. Not
touching. But keeping that armed sense of nearness between their bodies.
"They originally intended me to control Sheeana for them," he said.
"As you control me?"
"Do I control you?"
"Sometimes I think you're a comic, Duncan."
"If I can't laugh at myself I'm really lost."
"Laugh at your pretensions to humor, too?"
"Those first." He turned toward her and cupped her left breast in his hand,
feeling the nipple harden under his palm. "Did you know I was never weaned?"
"Never in all of those . . ."
"Not once."
"I might have guessed." A smile formed fleetingly on her lips, and abruptly
both of them were laughing, clutching each other, helpless with it. Presently,
Murbella said, "Damn, damn, damn."
"Damn who?" as his laughter subsided and they pulled apart, forcing the
separation.
"Not who, what. Damn fate!"
"I don't think fate cares."
"I love you and I'm not supposed to do that if I'm to be a proper Reverend
Mother."
He hated these excursions so close to self-pity. Joke then! "You've never been
a proper anything." He massaged the pregnant swelling of her abdomen.
"I am proper!"
"That's a word they left out when they made you."
She pushed his hand away and sat up to look down at him. "Reverend Mothers are
never supposed to love."
"I know that." Did my anguish reveal itself?
She was too caught up in her own worries. "When I get to the Spice Agony . . ."
"Love! I don't like the idea of agony associated with you in any way."
"How can I avoid it? I'm already in the chute. Very soon they'll have me up to
speed. I'll go very fast then."
He wanted to turn away but her eyes held him.
"Truly, Duncan. I can feel it. In a way, it's like pregnancy. There comes a
point when it's too dangerous to abort. You must go through with it."
"So we love each other!" Forcing his thoughts away from one danger into
another.
"And they forbid it."
He looked up at the comeyes. "The watchdogs are watching us and they have
fangs."
"I know. I'm talking to them right now. My love for you is not a flaw. Their
coldness is the flaw. They're just like Honored Matres!"
A game where one of the pieces can't be moved.
He wanted to shout it but listeners behind the comeyes would hear more than
spoken words. Murbella was right. It was dangerous to think you could gull
Reverend Mothers.
Something veiled in her eyes as she looked down at him. "How very strange you
looked just then." He recognized the Reverend Mother she might become.
Veer away from that thought!
Thinking about the strangeness of his memories sometimes diverted her. She
thought his previous incarnations made him somehow similar to a Reverend Mother.
"I've died so many times."
"You remember it?" The same question every time.
He shook his head, not daring to say anything more for the watchdogs to
interpret.
Not the deaths and reawakenings.
Those became dulled by repetition. Sometimes he didn't even bother to put them
into his secret data-dump. No . . . it was the unique encounters with other
humans, the long collection of recognitions.
That was a thing Sheeana claimed she wanted from him. "Intimate trivia. It's
the stuff all artists want."
Sheeana did not know what she asked. All of those living encounters had created
new meanings. Patterns within patterns. Minuscule things gained a poignancy he
despaired of sharing with anyone . . . even with Murbella.
The touch of a hand on my arm. A child's laughing face. The glitter in an
attacker's eyes.
Mundane things without counting. A familiar voice saying: "I just want to put
my feet up and collapse tonight. Don't ask me to move."
All had become part of him. They were bound into his character. Living had
cemented them inextricably and he could not explain it to anyone.
Murbella spoke without looking at him. "There were many women in those lives of
yours."
"I've never counted them."
"Did you love them?"
"They're dead, Murbella. All I can promise is that there are no jealous ghosts
in my past."
Murbella extinguished the glowglobes. He closed his eyes and felt darkness
close in as she crept into his arms. He held her tightly, knowing she needed
it, but his mind rolled of its own volition.
An old memory produced a Mentat teacher's saying: "The greatest relevancy can
become irrelevant in the space of a heartbeat. Mentats should look upon such
moments with joy."
He felt no joy.
All of those serial lives continued within him in defiance of Mentat
relevancies. A Mentat came at his universe fresh in each instant. Nothing old,
nothing new, nothing set in ancient adhesives, nothing truly known. You were
the net and you existed only to examine the catch.
What did not go through? How fine a mesh did I use on this lot?
That was the Mentat view. But there was no way the Tleilaxu could have included
all of those ghola-Idaho cells to recreate him. There had to be gaps in their
serial collection of his cells. He had identified many of those gaps.
But no gaps in my memory. I remember them all.
He was a network linked outside of Time. That is how I can see the people of
that vision . . . the net. It was the only explanation Mentat awareness could
provide and if the Sisterhood guessed, they would be terrified. No matter how
many times he denied it, they would say: "Another Kwisatz Haderach! Kill him!"
So work for yourself, Mentat!
He knew he had most of the mosaic pieces but still they did not go together in
that Ahh, hah! assembly of questions Mentats prized.
A game where one of the pieces can't be moved.
Excuses for extraordinary behavior.
"They want our willing participation in their dream."
Test the limits!
Humans can balance on strange surfaces.
Get in tune. Don't think. Do it.
The best art imitates life in a compelling way. If it imitates a dream, it must
be a dream of life. Otherwise, there is no place where we can connect. Our
plugs don't fit.
-Darwi Odrade
As they traveled south toward the desert in the early afternoon, Odrade found
the countryside disturbingly changed from her previous inspection three months
earlier. She felt vindicated in having chosen ground vehicles. Views framed by
the thick plaz protecting them from the dust revealed more details at this
level.
Much drier.
Her immediate party rode in a relatively light car -- only fifteen passengers
including the driver. Suspensors and sophisticated jet drive when they were not
on ground-effect. Capable of a smooth three hundred klicks an hour on the
glaze. Her escort (too large, thanks to an overzealous Tamalane) followed in a
bus that also carried changes of clothing, foods and drinks for wayside stops.
Streggi, seated beside Odrade and behind the driver, said: "Could we not manage
a small rain here, Mother Superior?"
Odrade's lips thinned. Silence was the best answer.
They had been late starting. All of them assembled on the loading dock and were
ready to leave when a message came down from Bellonda. Another disaster report
requiring Mother Superior's personal attention at the last minute!
It was one of those times when Odrade felt her only possible role was that of
official interpreter. Walk to the edge of the stage and tell them what it
meant: "Today, Sisters, we learned that Honored Matres have obliterated four
more of our planets. We are that much smaller."
Only twelve planets left (including Buzzell) and the faceless hunter with the
axe is that much closer.
Odrade felt the chasm yawning beneath her.
Bellonda had been ordered to contain this latest bad news until a more
appropriate moment.
Odrade looked out the window beside her. What was an appropriate moment for
such news?
They had been driving south a little more than three hours, the burner-glazed
roadway like a green river ahead of them. This passage led them through
hillsides of cork oaks that stretched out to ridge-enclosed horizons. The oaks
had been allowed to grow gnomelike in less regimented plantations than orchards.
There were meandering rows up the hills. The original plantation had been laid
out on existing contours, semi-terraces now obscured by long brown grass.
"We grow truffles in there," Odrade said.
Streggi had more bad news. "I am told the truffles are in trouble, Mother
Superior. Not enough rain."
No more truffles? Odrade hesitated on the edge of bringing a Communications
acolyte from the rear and asking Weather if this dryness could be corrected.
She glanced back at her attendants. Three rows, four people in each row,
specialists to extend her observational powers and carry out orders. And look
at that bus following them! One of the larger such vehicles on Chapterhouse.
Thirty meters long, at least! Crammed with people! Dust whirled across and
around it.
Tamalane rode back there at Odrade's orders. Mother Superior could be peppery
when aroused, everyone thought. Tam had brought too many people but Odrade had
discovered it too late for changes.
"Not an inspection! A damned invasion!" Follow my lead, Tam. A little
political drama. Make transition easier.
She returned her attention to the driver, only male in this car. Clairby, a
vinegary little transport expert. Pinched-up face, skin the color of newly
turned damp earth. Odrade's favorite driver. Fast, safe, and wary of limits in
his machine.
They crested a hill and cork oaks thinned out, replaced ahead by fruit orchards
surrounding a community.
Beautiful in this light, Odrade thought. Low buildings of white walls and
orange-tiled roofs. An arch-shaded entrance street could be seen far down the
slope and, in a line behind it, the tall central structure containing regional
overview offices.
The sight reassured Odrade. The community had a glowing look softened by
distance and a haze rising from its ring orchards. Branches still bare up here
in this winter belt but surely capable of at least one more crop.
The Sisterhood demanded a certain beauty in its surroundings, she reminded
herself. A cosseting that provided support for the senses without subtracting
from needs of the stomach. Comfort where possible . . . but not too much!
Someone behind Odrade said: " I do believe some of those trees are starting to
leaf."
Odrade took a more careful look. Yes! Tiny bits of green on dark boughs.
Winter had slipped here. Weather Control, struggling to make seasonal shifts,
could not prevent occasional mistakes. The expanding desert was creating higher
temperatures too early here: odd warming patches that caused plants to leaf or
bloom just in time for an abrupt frost. Die-back of plantations was becoming
much too common.
A Field Advisor had dredged up the ancient term "Indian Summer" for a report
illustrated by projections of an orchard in full blossom being assaulted by
snow. Odrade had felt memory stirring at the advisor's words.
Indian Summer. How appropriate!
Her councillors sharing that little view of their planet's travail recognized
the metaphor of a marauding freeze coming on the heels of inappropriate warmth:
an unexpected revival of warm weather, a time when raiders could plague their
neighbors.
Remembering, Odrade felt the chill of the hunter's axe. How soon? She dared
not seek the answer. I'm not a Kwisatz Haderach!
Without turning, Odrade spoke to Streggi. "This place, Pondrille, have you ever
been here?"
"It was not my postulant center, Mother Superior, but I presume it is similar."
Yes, these communities were much alike: mostly low structures set in garden
plots and orchards, school centers for specific training. It was a screening
system for prospective Sisters, the mesh finer the closer you got to Central.
Some of these communities such as Pondrille concentrated on toughening their
charges. They sent women out for long hours every day to manual labor. Hands
that grubbed in dirt and became stained with fruit seldom balked at muckier
tasks later in life.
Now that they were out of the dust, Clairby opened the windows. Heat poured in!
What was Weather doing?
Two buildings at the edge of Pondrille had been joined one story above the
street, forming a long tunnel. All it needed, Odrade thought, was a portcullis
to duplicate a town gate out of pre-space history. Armored knights would not
find the dusky heat of this entry unfamiliar. It was defined in dark plastone,
visually identical to stone. Comeye apertures overhead surely were places where
guardians lay in wait.
The long, shaded entry to the community was clean, she saw. Nostrils were
seldom assailed by rot or other offensive odors in Bene Gesserit communities.
No slums. Few cripples hobbling along the walks. Much healthy flesh. Good
management took care to keep a healthy population happy.
We have our disabled, though. And not all of them physically disabled.
Clairby parked just within the exit from the shaded street and they emerged.
Tamalane's bus pulled to a stop behind them.
Odrade had hoped the entry passage would provide relief from the heat but
perversity of nature had made an oven of the place and the temperature actually
increased here. She was glad to pass through into the clear light of the
central square where sweat burning off her body provided a few seconds of
coolness.
The illusion of relief passed abruptly as the sun scorched her head and
shoulders. She was forced to call on metabolic control to adjust her body heat.
Water splashed in a reflecting circle at the central square, a careless display
that soon would have to end.
Leave it for now. Morale!
She heard her companions following, the usual groans against "sitting too long
in one position." A greeting delegation could be seen hurrying from the far
side of the square. Odrade recognized Tsimpay, Pondrille's leader, in the van.
Mother Superior's attendants moved onto the blue tiles of the fountain plaza --
all except Streggi, who stood at Odrade's shoulder. Tamalane's group, too, was
attracted to splashing water. All part and parcel of a human dream so ancient
it could never be completely discarded, Odrade thought.
Fertile fields and open water -- clear, potable water you can dip your face into
for thirst-quenching relief.
Indeed, some of her party were doing just that at the fountain. Their faces
glistened with dampness.
The Pondrille delegation came to a stop near Odrade while still on the blue
tiles of the fountain plaza. Tsimpay had brought three other Reverend Mothers
and five older acolytes.
Near the Agony, all of those acolytes, Odrade observed. Showing their awareness
of the trial in directness of gaze.
Tsimpay was someone Odrade saw infrequently at Central where she came sometimes
as a teacher. She was looking fit: brown hair so dark it appeared reddishblack
in this light. The narrow face was almost bleak in its austerity. Her
features centered on all-blue eyes under heavy brows.
"We are glad to see you, Mother Superior." Sounded as though she meant it.
Odrade inclined her head, a minimal gesture. I hear you. Why are you so glad
to see me?
Tsimpay understood. She gestured to a tall, hollow-cheeked Reverend Mother
beside her. "You remember Fali, our Orchard Mistress? Fali has just been to me
with a delegation of gardeners. A serious complaint."
Fali's weathered face looked a bit gray. Overworked? She had a thin mouth
above a sharp chin. Dirt under her fingernails. Odrade noted it with approval.
Not afraid to join in the grubbing.
Delegation of gardeners. So there was an escalation of complaints. Must have
been serious. Not like Tsimpay to dump it on Mother Superior.
"Let's hear it," Odrade said.
With a glance at Tsimpay, Fali went through a detailed recital, even providing
qualifications of delegation leaders. All of them good people, of course.
Odrade recognized the pattern. There had been conferences concerning this
inevitable consequence, Tsimpay in attendance at some of them. How could you
explain to your people that a distant sandworm (perhaps not even in existence
yet) required this change? How could you explain to farmers that it was not a
matter of "just a bit more rain" but went straight to the heart of the planet's
total weather. More rain here could mean a diversion of high-altitude winds.
That in its turn would change things elsewhere, cause moisture-laden siroccos
where they would be not only upsetting but also dangerous. Too easy to bring on
great tornadoes if you inserted the wrong conditions. A planet's weather was no
simple thing to treat with easy adjustments. As I have sometimes demanded.
Each time, there was a total equation to be scanned.
"The planet casts the final vote," Odrade said. It was an old reminder in the
Sisterhood of human fallibility.
"Does Dune still have a vote?" Fali asked. More bitterness in the question than
Odrade had anticipated.
"I feel the heat. We saw the leaves on your orchards as we arrived," Odrade
said. I know what concerns you, Sister.
"We will lose part of the crop this year," Fali said. Accusation in her words:
This is your fault!
"What did you tell your delegation?" Odrade asked.
"That the desert must grow and Weather no longer can make every adjustment we
need."
Truth. The agreed response. Inadequate, as truth often was, but all they had
now. Something would have to give soon. Meanwhile, more delegations and loss
of crops.
"Will you take tea with us, Mother Superior?" Tsimpay, the diplomat,
intervening. You see how it is escalating, Mother Superior? Fali will now go
back to dealing with fruits and vegetables. Her proper place. Message
delivered.
Streggi cleared her throat.
That damnable gesture will have to be suppressed! But the meaning was clear.
Streggi had been put in charge of their schedule. We must be going.
"We got a late start," Odrade said. "We stopped only to stretch our legs and
see if you have problems you cannot meet on your own."
"We can handle the gardeners, Mother Superior."
Tsimpay's brisk tone said much more and Odrade almost smiled.
Inspect if you wish, Mother Superior. Look anywhere. You will find Pondrille
in Bene Gesserit order.
Odrade glanced at Tamalane's bus. Some of the people already were returning to
the air-conditioned interior. Tamalane stood by the door, well within earshot.
"I hear good reports of you, Tsimpay," Odrade said. "You can do without our
interference. I certainly don't want to intrude on you with an entourage that
is far too large." This last loud enough that all would be certain to hear.
"Where will you spend the night, Mother Superior?"
"Eldio."
"I've not been down there for some time but I hear the sea is much smaller."
"Overflights confirm what you've heard. No need to warn them that we're coming,
Tsimpay. They already know. We had to prepare them for this invasion."
Orchard Mistress Fali took a small step forward. "Mother Superior, if we could
get just . . ."
"Tell your gardeners, Fali, that they have a choice. They can grumble and wait
here until Honored Matres arrive to enslave them or they can elect to go
Scattering."
Odrade returned to her car and sat, eyes closed, until she heard the doors
sealed and they were well on their way. Presently, she opened her eyes. They
already were out of Pondrille and onto the glassy lane through the southern ring
orchards. There was charged silence behind her. Sisters were looking deeply
into questions about Mother Superior's behavior back there. An unsatisfactory
encounter. Acolytes naturally picked up the mood. Streggi looked glum.
This weather demanded notice. Words no longer could smooth over the complaints.
Good days were measured by lower standards. Everyone knew the reason but
changes remained a focal point. Visible. You could not complain about Mother
Superior (not without good cause!) but you could grumble about the weather.
"Why did they have to make it so cold today? Why today when I have to be out in
it? Quite warm when we came out but look at it now. And me without proper
clothing!"
Streggi wanted to talk. Well, that's why I brought her. But she had become
almost garrulous as enforced intimacy eroded her awe of Mother Superior.
"Mother Superior, I've been searching in my manuals for an explanation of --"
"Beware of manuals!" How many times in her life had she heard or spoken those
words? "Manuals create habits."
Streggi had been lectured often about habits. The Bene Gesserit had them --
those things the Folk preserved as "Typical of the Witches!" But patterns that
allowed others to predict behavior, those must be carefully excised.
"Then why do we have manuals, Mother Superior?"
"We have them mainly to disprove them. The Coda is for novices and others in
primary training."
"And the histories?"
"Never ignore the banality of recorded histories. As a Reverend Mother, you
will relearn history in each new moment."
"Truth is an empty cup." Very proud of her remembered aphorism.
Odrade almost smiled.
Streggi is a jewel.
It was a cautioning thought. Some precious stones could be identified by their
impurities. Experts mapped impurities within the stones. A secret fingerprint.
People were like that. You often knew them by their defects. The glittering
surface told you too little. Good identification required you to look deep
inside and see the impurities. There was the gem quality of a total being.
What would Van Gogh have been without impurities?
"It is comments of perceptive cynics, Streggi, things they say about history,
that should be your guides before the Agony. Afterward, you will be your own
cynic and you will discover your own values. For now, the histories reveal
dates and tell you something occurred. Reverend Mothers search out the
somethings and learn the prejudices of historians."
"That's all?" Deeply offended. Why did they waste my time that way?
"Many histories are largely worthless because prejudiced, written to please one
powerful group or another. Wait for your eyes to be opened, my dear. We are
the best historians. We were there."
"And my viewpoint will change daily?" Very introspective.
"That's a lesson the Bashar reminded us to keep fresh in our minds. The past
must be reinterpreted by the present."
"I'm not sure I will enjoy that, Mother Superior. So many moral decisions."
Ahhhh, this jewel saw to the heart of it and spoke her mind like a true Bene
Gesserit. There were brilliant facets among Streggi's impurities.
Odrade looked sideways at the pensive acolyte. Long ago, the Sisterhood had
ruled that each Sister must make her own moral decisions. Never follow a leader
without asking your own questions. That was why moral conditioning of the young
took such high priority.
That is why we like to get our prospective Sisters so young. And it may be why
a moral flaw has crept into Sheeana. We got her too late. What do she and
Duncan talk about so secretly with their hands?
"Moral decisions are always easy to recognize," Odrade said. "They are where
you abandon self-interest."
Streggi looked at Odrade with awe. "The courage it must take!"
"Not courage! Not even desperation. What we do is, in its most basic sense,
natural. Things done because there is no other choice."
"Sometimes you make me feel ignorant, Mother Superior."
"Excellent! That's beginning wisdom. There are many kinds of ignorance,
Streggi. The basest is to follow your own desires without examining them.
Sometimes, we do it unconsciously. Hone your sensitivity. Be aware of what you
do unconsciously. Always ask: 'When I did that, what was I trying to gain?' "
They crested the final hill before Eldio and Odrade welcomed a reflexive moment.
Someone behind her murmured, "There's the sea."
"Stop here," Odrade ordered as they neared a wide turnout at a curve overlooking
the sea. Clairby knew the place and was prepared for it. Odrade often asked
him to stop here. He brought them to a halt where she wanted. The car creaked
as it settled. They heard the bus pull up behind, a loud voice back there
calling on companions to "Look at that!"
Eldio lay off to Odrade's left far down there: delicate buildings, some raised
off the ground on slender pipes, wind passing under and through them. This was
far enough south and down off the heights where Central perched that it was much
warmer. Small vertical-axis windmills, toys from this distance, whirled at the
corners of Eldio's buildings to help power the community. Odrade pointed them
out to Streggi.
"We thought of them as independence from bondage to a complex technology
controlled by others."
As she spoke, Odrade shifted her attention to the right. The sea! It was a
dreadfully condensed remnant of its once glorious expanse. Sea Child hated what
she saw.
Warm vapor lifted from the sea. The dim purple of dry hills drew a blurred
outline of horizon on the far side of the water. She saw that Weather had
introduced a wind to disperse saturated air. The result was a choppy froth of
waves beating against the shingle below this vantage.
There had been a string of fishing villages here, Odrade recalled. Now that the
sea had receded, villages lay farther back up the slope. Once, the villages had
been a colorful accent along the shore. Much of their population had been
siphoned off in the new Scattering. People who remained had built a tram to get
their boats to and from the water.
She approved of this and deplored it. Energy conservation. The whole situation
struck her suddenly as grim -- like one of those Old Empire geriatric
installations where people waited around to die.
How long until these places die?
"The sea is so small!" It was a voice from the rear of the car. Odrade
recognized it. An Archives clerk. One of Bell's damned spies.
Leaning forward, Odrade tapped Clairby on the shoulder. "Take us down to the
near shore, that cove almost directly below us. I wish to swim in our sea,
Clairby, while it still exists."
Streggi and two other acolytes joined her in the warm waters of the cove. The
others walked along the shore or watched this odd scene from the car and bus.
Mother Superior swimming nude in the sea!
Odrade felt energizing water around her. Swimming was required because of
command decisions she must make.
How much of this last great sea could they afford to maintain during these final
days of their planet's temperate life? The desert was coming -- total desert to
match that of lost Dune. If the axe-bearer gives us time. The threat felt very
close and the chasm deep. Damn this wild talent! Why do I have to know?
Slowly, Sea Child and wave motions restored her sense of balance. This body of
water was a major complication -- much more important than scattered small seas
and lakes. Moisture lifted from here in significant amounts. Energy to charge
unwanted deviations in Weather's barely controlled management. Yet, this sea
still fed Chapterhouse. It was a communication and transport route. Sea
carriers were cheapest. Energy costs must be balanced against other elements in
her decision. But the sea would vanish. That was sure. Whole populations
faced new displacements.
Sea Child's memories interfered. Nostalgia. It blocked paths of proper
judgment. How fast must the sea go? That was the question. All of the
inevitable relocations and resettlements waited on that decision.
Best it were done quickly. The pain banished into our past. Let us get on with
it!
She swam to the shallows and looked up at a puzzled Tamalane. Tam's robed
skirts were dark with splashings from an unexpected wave. Odrade lifted her
head clear of the small surges.
"Tam! Eliminate the sea as fast as possible. Get Weather to plot a swift
dehydration scheme. Food and Transport will have to be brought into it. I'll
approve the final plan after our usual review."
Tamalane turned away without speaking. She beckoned appropriate Sisters to
accompany her, glancing only once at Mother Superior as she did this. See! I
was right to bring along the necessary cadre!
Odrade climbed from the water. Wet sand gritted under her feet. Soon, it will
be dry sand. She dressed without bothering to towel herself. Clothing gripped
her flesh uncomfortably but she ignored this, walking up the strand away from
the others, not looking back at the sea.
Souvenirs of memory must be only that. Things to be taken up and fondled
occasionally for evocation of past joys. No joy can be permanent. All is
transient. "This, too, shall pass away" applies to all of our living universe.
Where the beach became loamy dirt and a few sparse plants, she turned finally
and looked back at the sea she had just condemned.
Only life itself mattered, she told herself. And life could not endure without
an ongoing thrust of procreation.
Survival. Our children must survive. The Bene Gesserit must survive!
No single child was more important than the totality. She accepted this,
recognizing it as the species talking to her from her deepest self, the self she
had first encountered as Sea Child.
Odrade allowed Sea Child one last sniff of salt air as they returned to their
vehicles and prepared to drive into Eldio. She felt herself grow calm. That
essential balance, once learned, did not require a sea to maintain it.
Uproot your questions from their ground and the dangling roots will be seen.
More questions!
-Mentat Zensufi
Dama was in her element.
Spider Queen!
She liked the witches' title for her. This was the heart of her web, this new
control center on junction. The exterior of the building still did not suit
her. Too much Guild complacency in its design. Conservative. But the interior
had begun to take on a familiarity that soothed her. She could almost imagine
she had never left Dur, that there had been no Futars and the harrowing flight
back into the Old Empire.
She stood in the open door of the Assembly Room looking out at the Botanical
Garden. Logno waited four paces behind. Not too close behind me, Logno, or I
shall have to kill you.
There was still dew on the lawn beyond the tiles where, when the sun had risen
far enough, servants would distribute comfortable chairs and tables. She had
ordered a sunny day and Weather had damned well better produce it. Logno's
report was interesting. So the old witch had returned to Buzzell. And she was
angry, too. Excellent. Obviously, she knew she was being watched and she had
visited her supreme witch to ask for removal from Buzzell, for sanctuary. And
she had been refused.
They don't care that we destroy their limbs just as long as the central body
remains hidden.
Speaking over her shoulder to Logno, Dama said: "Bring that old witch to me.
And all of her attendants."
As Logno turned to obey, Dama added: "And begin starving some Futars. I want
them hungry."
"Yes, Dama."
Someone else moved into Logno's attendant position. Dama did not turn to
identify the replacement. There were always enough aides to carry out necessary
orders. One was much like another except in the matter of threat. Logno was a
constant threat. Keeps me alert.
Dama inhaled deeply of the fresh air. It was going to be a good day precisely
because that was what she desired. She gathered in her secret memories then and
let them soothe her.
Guldur be blessed! We've found the place to rebuild our strength.
Consolidation of the Old Empire was proceeding as planned. There could not be
many witches' nests left out there and, once that damnable Chapterhouse was
found, the limbs could be destroyed at leisure.
Ix, now. There was a problem. Perhaps I should not have killed those two Ixian
scientists yesterday.
But the fools had dared demand "more information" from her. Demanded! And
after saying they still had no solution to rearming The Weapon. Of course, they
did not know it was a weapon. Did they? She could not be sure. So it had been
a good thing to kill those two after all. Teach them a lesson.
Bring us answers, not questions.
She liked the order she and her Sisters were creating in the Old Empire. There
had been too much wandering about and too many different cultures, too many
unstable religions.
Worship of Guldur will serve them as it serves us.
She felt no mystical affinity to her religion. It was a useful tool of power.
The roots were well known: Leto II, the one those witches called "The Tyrant,"
and his father, Muad'Dib. Consummate power brokers, both of them. Lots of
schismatic cells around but those could be weeded out. Keep the essence. It
was a well-lubricated machine.
The tyranny of the minority cloaked in the mask of the majority.
That was what the witch Lucilla had recognized. No way to let her live after
discovering she knew how to manipulate the masses. The witch nests would have
to be found and burned. Lucilla's perceptiveness clearly was not an isolated
example. Her actions betrayed the workings of a school. They taught this
thing! Fools! You had to manage reality or things really got out of control.
Logno returned. Dama could always tell the sound of her footsteps. Furtive.