Chapterhouse: Dune

Frank Herbert

 

 

 

April 1985

Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.

-Bene Gesserit Coda

When the ghola-baby was delivered from the first Bene Gesserit axlotl tank,

Mother Superior Darwi Odrade ordered a quiet celebration in her private dining

room atop Central. It was barely dawn, and the two other members of her Council

-- Tamalane and Bellonda -- showed impatience at the summons, even though Odrade

had ordered breakfast served by her personal chef.

"It isn't every woman who can preside at the birth of her own father," Odrade

quipped when the others complained they had too many demands on their time to

permit of "time-wasting nonsense."

Only aged Tamalane showed sly amusement.

Bellonda held her over-fleshed features expressionless, often her equivalent of

a scowl.

Was it possible, Odrade wondered, that Bell had not exorcised resentment of the

relative opulence in Mother Superior's surroundings? Odrade's quarters were a

distinct mark of her position but the distinction represented her duties more

than any elevation over her Sisters. The small dining room allowed her to

consult aides during meals.

Bellonda glanced this way and that, obviously impatient to be gone. Much effort

had been expended without success in attempts to break through Bellonda's coldly

remote shell.

"It felt very odd to hold that baby in my arms and think: This is my father,"

Odrade said.

"I heard you the first time!" Bellonda spoke from the belly, almost a baritone

rumbling as though each word caused her vague indigestion.

She understood Odrade's wry jest, though. The old Bashar Miles Teg had, indeed,

been the Mother Superior's father. And Odrade herself had collected cells (as

fingernail scrapings) to grow this new ghola, part of a long-time "possibility

plan" should they ever succeed in duplicating Tleilaxu tanks. But Bellonda

would be drummed out of the Bene Gesserit rather than go along with Odrade's

comment on the Sisterhood's vital equipment.

"I find this frivolous at such a time," Bellonda said. "Those madwomen hunting

us to exterminate us and you want a celebration!"

Odrade held herself to a mild tone with some effort. "If the Honored Matres

find us before we are ready perhaps it will be because we failed to keep up our

morale."

Bellonda's silent stare directly into Odrade's eyes carried frustrating

accusation: Those terrible women already have exterminated sixteen of our

planets!

Odrade knew it was wrong to think of those planets as Bene Gesserit possessions.

The loosely organized confederation of planetary governments assembled after the

Famine Times and the Scattering depended heavily on the Sisterhood for vital

services and reliable communications, but old factions persisted -- CHOAM,

Spacing Guild, Tleilaxu, remnant pockets of the Divided God's priesthood, even

Fish Speaker auxiliaries and schismatic assemblages. The Divided God had

bequeathed humankind a divided Empire -- all of whose factions were suddenly

moot because of rampaging Honored Matre assaults from the Scattering. The Bene

Gesserit -- holding to most of their old forms -- were the natural prime target

for attack.

Bellonda's thoughts never strayed far from this Honored Matre threat. It was a

weakness Odrade recognized. Sometimes, Odrade hesitated on the point of

replacing Bellonda, but even in the Bene Gesserit there were factions these days

and no one could deny that Bell was a supreme organizer. Archives had never

been more efficient than under her guidance.

As she frequently did, Bellonda without even speaking the words managed to focus

Mother Superior's attention on the hunters who stalked them with savage

persistence. It spoiled the mood of quiet success Odrade had hoped to achieve

this morning.

She forced herself to think of the new ghola. Teg! If his original memories

could be restored, the Sisterhood once more would have the finest Bashar ever to

serve them. A Mentat Bashar! A military genius whose prowess already was the

stuff of myths in the Old Empire.

But would even Teg be of use against these women returned from the Scattering?

By whatever gods may be, the Honored Matres must not find us! Not yet!

Teg represented too many disturbing unknowns and possibilities. Mystery

surrounded the period before his death in the destruction of Dune. He did

something on Gammu to ignite the unbridled fury of the Honored Matres. His

suicidal stand on Dune should not have been enough to bring this berserk

response. There were rumors, bits and pieces from his days on Gammu before the

Dune disaster. He could move too fast for the human eye to see! Had he done

that? Another outcropping of wild abilities in Atreides genes? Mutation? Or

just more of the Teg myth? The Sisterhood had to learn as soon as possible.

An acolyte brought in three breakfasts and the sisters ate quickly, as though

this interruption must be put behind them without delay because time wasted was

dangerous.

Even after the others had gone, Odrade was left with the aftershock of

Bellonda's unspoken fears.

And my fears.

She arose and went to the wide window that looked across lower rooftops to part

of the ring of orchards and pastures around Central. Late spring and already

fruit beginning to form out there. Rebirth. A new Teg was born today! No

feeling of elation accompanied the thought. Usually she found the view

restorative but not this morning.

What are my real strengths? What are my facts?

The resources at a Mother Superior's command were formidable: profound loyalty

in those who served her, a military arm under a Teg-trained Bashar (far away now

with a large portion of their troops guarding the school planet, Lampadas),

artisans and technicians, spies and agents throughout the Old Empire, countless

workers who looked to the Sisterhood to protect them from Honored Matres, and

all the Reverend Mothers with Other Memories reaching into the dawn of life.

Odrade knew without false pride that she represented the peak of what was

strongest in a Reverend Mother. If her personal memories did not provide needed

information, she had others around her to fill the gaps. Machine-stored data as

well, although she admitted to a native distrust of it.

Odrade found herself tempted to go digging in those other lives she carried as

secondary memory -- these subterranean layers of awareness. Perhaps she could

find brilliant solutions to their predicament in experiences of Others.

Dangerous! You could lose yourself for hours, fascinated by the multiplicity of

human variations. Better to leave Other Memories balanced in there, ready on

demand or intruding out of necessity. Consciousness, that was the fulcrum and

her grip on identity.

Duncan Idaho's odd Mentat metaphor helped.

Self-awareness: facing mirrors that pass through the universe, gathering new

images on the way -- endlessly reflexive. The infinite seen as finite, the

analogue of consciousness carrying the sensed bits of infinity.

She had never heard words come closer to her wordless awareness. "Specialized

complexity," Idaho called it. "We gather, assemble, and reflect our systems of

order."

Indeed, it was the Bene Gesserit view that humans were life designed by

evolution to create order.

And how does that help us against these disorderly women who hunt us? What

branch of evolution are they? Is evolution just another name for God?

Her Sisters would sneer at such "bootless speculation."

Still, there might be answers in Other Memory.

Ahhhh, how seductive!

How desperately she wanted to project her beleaguered self into past identities

and feel what it had been to live then. The immediate peril of this enticement

chilled her. She felt Other Memory crowding the edges of awareness. "It was

like this!" "No! It was more like this!" How greedy they were. You had to

pick and choose, discreetly animating the past. And was that not the purpose of

consciousness, the very essence of being alive?

Select from the past and match it against the present: Learn consequences.

That was the Bene Gesserit view of history, ancient Santayana's words resonating

in their lives: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat

it."

The buildings of Central itself, this most powerful of all Bene Gesserit

establishments, reflected that attitude wherever Odrade turned. Usiform, that

was the commanding concept. Little about any Bene Gesserit working center was

allowed to become nonfunctional, preserved out of nostalgia. The Sisterhood had

no need for archeologists. Reverend Mothers embodied history.

Slowly (much slower than usual) the view out her high window produced its

calming effect. What her eyes reported, that was Bene Gesserit order.

But Honored Matres could end that order in the next instant. The Sisterhood's

situation was far worse than what they had suffered under the Tyrant. Many of

the decisions she was forced to make now were odious. Her workroom was less

agreeable because of actions taken here.

Write off our Bene Gesserit Keep on Palma?

That suggestion was in Bellonda's morning report waiting on the worktable.

Odrade fixed an affirmative notation to it. "Yes."

Write it off because Honored Matre attack is imminent and we cannot defend them

or evacuate them.

Eleven hundred Reverend Mothers and the Fates alone knew how many acolytes,

postulants, and others dead or worse because of that one word. Not to mention

all of the "Ordinary lives" existing in the Bene Gesserit shadow.

The strain of such decisions produced a new kind of weariness in Odrade. Was it

a weariness of the soul? Did such a thing as a soul exist? She felt deep

fatigue where consciousness could not probe. Weary, weary, weary.

Even Bellonda showed the strain and Bell feasted on violence. Tamalane alone

appeared above it but that did not fool Odrade. Tam had entered the age of

superior observation that lay ahead of all Sisters if they survived into it.

Nothing mattered then except observations and judgments. Most of this was never

uttered except in fleeting expressions on wrinkled features. Tamalane spoke few

words these days, her comments so sparse as to be almost ludicrous:

"Buy more no-ships."

"Brief Sheeana."

"Review Idaho records."

"Ask Murbella."

Sometimes, only grunts issued from her, as though words might betray her.

And always the hunters roamed out there, sweeping space for any clue to the

location of Chapterhouse.

In her most private thoughts, Odrade saw the no-ships of Honored Matres as

corsairs on those infinite seas between the stars. They flew no black flags

with skull and crossbones, but that flag was there nonetheless. Nothing

whatsoever romantic about them. Kill and pillage! Amass your wealth in the

blood of others. Drain that energy and build your killer no-ships on ways

lubricated with blood.

And they did not see they would drown in red lubricant if they kept on this

course.

There must be furious people out there in that human Scattering where Honored

Matres originated, people who live out their lives with a single fixed idea:

Get them!

It was a dangerous universe where such ideas were allowed to float around

freely. Good civilizations took care that such ideas did not gain energy, did

not even get a chance for birth. When they did occur, by chance or accident,

they were to be diverted quickly because they tended to gather mass.

Odrade was astonished that the Honored Matres did not see this or, seeing it,

ignored it.

"Full-blown hysterics," Tamalane called them.

"Xenophobia," Bellonda disagreed, always correcting, as though control of

Archives gave her a better hold on reality.

Both were right, Odrade thought. The Honored Matres behaved hysterically. All

outsiders were the enemy. The only people they appeared to trust were the men

they sexually enslaved, and those only to a limited degree. Constantly testing,

according to Murbella (our only captive Honored Matre), to see if their hold was

firm.

"Sometimes out of mere pique they may eliminate someone just as an example to

others." Murbella's words and they forced the question: Are they making an

example of us? "See! This is what happens to those who dare oppose us!"

Murbella had said, "You've aroused them. Once aroused, they will not desist

until they have destroyed you."

Get the outsiders!

Singularly direct. A weakness in them if we play it right, Odrade thought.

Xenophobia carried to a ridiculous extreme?

Quite possibly.

Odrade pounded a fist on her worktable, aware that the action would be seen and

recorded by Sisters who kept constant watch on Mother Superior's behavior. She

spoke aloud then for the omnipresent comeyes and watchdog Sisters behind them.

"We will not sit and wait in defensive enclaves! We've become as fat as

Bellonda (and let her fret over that!) thinking we've created an untouchable

society and enduring structures."

Odrade swept her gaze around the familiar room.

"This place is one of our weaknesses!"

She took her seat behind the worktable thinking (of all things!) about

architecture and community planning. Well, that was a Mother Superior's right!

Sisterhood communities seldom grew at random. Even when they took over existing

structures (as they had with the old Harkonnen Keep on Gammu) they did so with

rebuilding plans. They wanted pneumotubes to shunt small packages and messages.

Lightlines and hardray projectors to transmit encrypted words. They considered

themselves masters at safeguarding communications. Acolyte and Reverend Mother

couriers (committed to self-destruction rather than betray their superiors)

carried the more important messages.

She could visualize it out there beyond her window and beyond this planet -- her

web, superbly organized and manned, each Bene Gesserit an extension of the

others. Where Sisterhood survival was concerned, there was an untouchable core

of loyalty. Backsliders there might be, some spectacular (as the Lady Jessica,

grandmother of the Tyrant), but they slid only so far. Most upsets were

temporary.

And all of that was a Bene Gesserit pattern. A weakness.

Odrade admitted a deep agreement with Bellonda's fears. But I'll be damned if I

allow such things to depress all joy of living! That would be giving in to the

very thing those rampaging Honored Matres wanted.

"It's our strengths the hunters want," Odrade said, looking up at the ceiling

comeyes. Like ancient savages eating the hearts of enemies. Well . . . we will

give them something to eat all right! And they will not know until too late

that they cannot digest it!

Except for preliminary teachings tailored to acolytes and postulants, the

Sisterhood did not go in much for admonitory sayings, but Odrade had her own

private watchwords: "Someone has to do the plowing." She smiled to herself as

she bent to her work much refreshed. This room, this Sisterhood, these were her

garden and there were weeds to be removed, seeds to plant. And fertilizer.

Mustn't forget the fertilizer.

When I set out to lead humanity along my Golden Path I promised a lesson their

bones would remember. I know a profound pattern humans deny with words even

while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet,

conditions they call peace. Even as they speak, they create seeds of turmoil

and violence.

-Leto II, the God Emperor

So she calls me Spider Queen!

Great Honored Matre leaned back in a heavy chair set high on a dais. Her

withered breast shook with silent chuckles. She knows what will happen when I

get her in my web! Suck her dry, that's what I'll do.

A small woman with unremarkable features and muscles that twitched nervously,

she looked down on the skylighted yellow-tile floor of her audience room. A

Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother sprawled there in shigawire bindings. The captive

made no attempt to struggle. Shigawire was excellent for this purpose. Cut her

arms off, it would!

The chamber where she sat suited Great Honored Matre as much for its dimensions

as for the fact that it had been taken from others. Three hundred meters

square, it had been designed for convocations of Guild Navigators here on

Junction, each Navigator in a monstrous tank. The captive on that yellow floor

was a mote in immensity.

This weakling took too much joy in revealing what her so-called Superior named

me!

But it still was a lovely morning, Great Honored Matre thought. Except that no

tortures or mental probes worked on these witches. How could you torture

someone who might choose to die at any moment? And did! They had ways of

suppressing pain, too. Very wily, these primitives.

She's loaded with shere, too! A body infused with that damnable drug

deteriorated beyond the reach of probes before it could be examined adequately.

Great Honored Matre signaled an aide. That one nudged the sprawled Reverend

Mother with a foot and, at a further signal, eased the shigawire bindings to

allow minimal movement.

"What is your name, child?" Great Honored Matre asked. Her voice rasped

hoarsely with age and false bonhomie.

"I am called Sabanda." Clear young voice, still untouched by the pain of

probings.

"Would you like to watch us capture a weak male and enslave him?" Great Honored

Matre asked.

Sabanda knew the proper response to this. They had been warned. "I will die

first." She said it calmly, staring up at that ancient face the color of a

dried root left too long in the sun. Those odd orange flecks in the crone's

eyes. A sign of anger, Proctors had told her.

A loosely hung red-gold robe with black dragon figures down its open face and

red leotards beneath it only emphasized the scrawny figure they covered.

Great Honored Matre did not change expression even with a recurrent thought

about these witches: Damn them! "What was your task on that dirty little

planet where we took you?"

"A teacher of the young."

"I'm afraid we didn't leave any of your young alive." Now why does she smile?

To offend me! That's why!

"Did you teach your young ones to worship the witch, Sheeana?" Great Honored

Matre asked.

"Why should I teach them to worship a Sister? Sheeana would not like that."

"Would not . . . Are you saying she has come back to life and you know her?"

"Is it only the living we know?"

How clear and fearless the voice of this young witch. They had remarkable selfcontrol,

but even that could not save them. Odd, though, how this cult of

Sheeana persisted. It would have to be rooted out, of course, destroyed the way

the witches themselves were being destroyed.

Great Honored Matre lifted the little finger of her right hand. A waiting aide

approached the captive with an injection. Perhaps this new drug would free a

witch's tongue, perhaps not. No matter.

Sabanda grimaced when the injector touched her neck. In seconds she was dead.

Servants carried the body away. It would be fed to captive Futars. Not that

Futars were much use. Wouldn't breed in captivity, wouldn't obey the most

ordinary commands. Sullen, waiting.

"Where Handlers?" one might ask. Or other useless words would spill from their

humanoid mouths. Still, Futars provided some pleasures. Captivity also

demonstrated they were vulnerable. Just as these primitive witches were. We'll

find the witches' hiding place. It's only a matter of time.

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can

terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands.

"I already know the important things!" we say. Then Changer comes and throws

our old ideas away.

-The Zensufi Master

Miles Teg enjoyed playing in the orchards around Central. Odrade had first

taken him here when he could just toddle. One of his earliest active memories:

hardly more than two years old and already aware he was a ghola, though he did

not understand the word's full meaning.

"You are a special child," Odrade said. "We made you from cells taken from a

very old man."

Although he was a precocious child and her words had a vaguely disturbing sound,

he was more interested then in running through tall summer grass beneath the

trees.

Later, he added other orchard days to that first one, accumulating as well

impressions about Odrade and the others who taught him. He recognized quite

early that Odrade enjoyed the excursions as much as he did.

One afternoon in his fourth year, he told her: "Spring is my favorite time."

"Mine, too."

When he was seven and already showing the mental brilliance coupled to

holographic memory that had caused the Sisterhood to place such heavy

responsibilities on his previous incarnation, he suddenly saw the orchards as a

place touching something deep inside him.

This was his first real awareness that he carried memories he could not recall.

Deeply disturbed, he turned to Odrade, who stood outlined in light against the

afternoon sun, and said: "There are things I can't remember!"

"One day you will remember," she said.

He could not see her face against the bright light and her words came from a

great shadow place, as much within him as from Odrade.

That year he began studying the life of the Bashar Miles Teg, whose cells had

started his new life. Odrade had explained some of this to him, holding up her

fingernails. "I took tiny scrapings from his neck-cells of his skin and they

held all we needed to bring you to life. "

There was something intense about the orchards that year, fruit larger and

heavier, bees almost frenetic.

"It's because of the desert growing larger down there in the south," Odrade

said. She held his hand as they walked through a dew-fresh morning beneath

burgeoning apple trees.

Teg stared southward through the trees, momentarily mesmerized by leaf-dappled

sunlight. He had studied about the desert, and he thought he could feel the

weight of it on this place.

"Trees can sense their end approaching," Odrade said. "Life breeds more

intensely when threatened."

"The air is very dry," he said. "That must be the desert."

"Notice how some of the leaves have gone brown and curled at the edges? We've

had to irrigate heavily this year."

He liked it that she seldom talked down to him. It was mostly one person to

another. He saw curled brown on leaves. The desert did that.

Deep in the orchard, they listened quietly for a time to birds and insects.

Bees working the clover of a nearby pasture came to investigate but he was

pheromone-marked, as were all who walked freely on Chapterhouse. They buzzed

past him, sensed identifiers and went away about their business with blossoms.

Apples. Odrade pointed westward. Peaches. His attention went where she

directed. And yes, there were the cherries east of them beyond the pasture. He

saw resin ribbing on the limbs.

Seeds and young shoots had been brought here on the original no-ships some

fifteen hundred years ago, she said, and had been planted with loving care.

Teg visualized hands grubbing in dirt, gently patting earth around young shoots,

careful irrigation, the fencing to confine the cattle to wild pastures around

the first Chapterhouse plantations and buildings.

By this time he already had begun learning about the giant sandworm the

Sisterhood had spirited from Rakis. Death of that worm had produced creatures

called sandtrout. Sandtrout were why the desert grew. Some of this history

touched accounts of his previous incarnation -- a man they called "The Bashar."

A great soldier who had died when terrible women called Honored Matres destroyed

Rakis.

Teg found such studies both fascinating and troubling. He sensed gaps in

himself, places where memories ought to be. The gaps called out to him in

dreams. And sometimes when he fell into reverie, faces appeared before him. He

could almost hear words. Then there were times he knew the names of things

before anyone told him. Especially names of weapons.

Momentous things grew in his awareness. This entire planet would become desert,

a change started because Honored Matres wanted to kill these Bene Gesserit who

raised him.

Reverend Mothers who controlled his life often awed him -- black-robed, austere,

those blue-in-blue eyes with absolutely no white. The spice did that, they

said.

Only Odrade showed him anything he took for real affection and Odrade was

someone very important. Everyone called her Mother Superior and that was what

she told him to call her except when they were alone in the orchards. Then he

could call her Mother.

On a morning walk near harvest time in his ninth year, just over the third rise

in the apple orchards north of Central, they came on a shallow depression free

of trees and lush with many different plants. Odrade put a hand on his shoulder

and held him where they could admire black stepping-stones in a meander track

through massed greenery and tiny flowers. She was in an odd mood. He heard it

in her voice.

"Ownership is an interesting question," she said. "Do we own this planet or

does it own us?"

" I like the smells here," he said.

She released him and urged him gently ahead of her. "We planted for the nose

here, Miles. Aromatic herbs. Study them carefully and look them up when you

get back to the library. Oh, do step on them!" when he started to avoid a

plant runner in his path.

He placed his right foot firmly on green tendrils and inhaled pungent odors.

"They were made to be walked on and give up their savor," Odrade said.

"Proctors have been teaching you how to deal with nostalgia. Have they told you

nostalgia often is driven by the sense of smell?"

"Yes, Mother." Turning to look back at where he had stepped, he said: "That's

rosemary."

"How do you know?" Very intense.

He shrugged. "I just know."

"That may be an original memory." She sounded pleased.

As they continued their walk in the aromatic hollow, Odrade's voice once more

became pensive. "Each planet has its own character where we draw patterns of

Old Earth. Sometimes, it's only a faint sketch, but here we have succeeded."

She knelt and pulled a twig from an acid-green plant. Crushing it in her

fingers, she held it to his nose. "Sage."

She was right but he could not say how he knew.

"I've smelled that in food. Is that like melange?"

"It improves flavor but won't change consciousness." She stood and looked down

at him from her full height. "Mark this place well, Miles. Our ancestral

worlds are gone, but here we have recaptured part of our origins."

He sensed she was teaching him something important. He asked Odrade: "Why did

you wonder if this planet owned us?"

"My Sisterhood believes we are stewards of the land. Do you know about

stewards?"

"Like Roitiro, my friend Yorgi's father. Yorgi says his oldest sister will be

steward of their plantation someday."

"Correct. We have a longer residence on some planets than any other people we

know of but we are only stewards."

"If you don't own Chapterhouse, who does?"

"Perhaps nobody. My question is: How have we marked each other, my Sisterhood

and this planet?"

He looked up at her face then down at his hands. Was Chapterhouse marking him

right now?

"Most of the marks are deep inside us." She took his hand. "Come along." They

left the aromatic dell and climbed up into Roitiro's domain, Odrade speaking as

they went.

"The Sisterhood seldom creates botanical gardens," she said. "Gardens must

support far more than eyes and nose."

"Food?"

"Yes, supportive first of our lives. Gardens, produce food. That dell back

there is harvested for our kitchens."

He felt her words flow into him, lodging there among the gaps. He sensed

planning for centuries ahead: trees to replace building beams, to hold

watersheds, plants to keep lake and river banks from crumbling, to hold topsoil

safe from rain and wind, to maintain seashores and even in the waters to make

places for fish to breed. The Bene Gesserit also thought of trees for shade and

shelter, or to cast interesting shadows on lawns.

"Trees and other plants for all of our symbiotic relationships," she said.

"Symbiotic?" It was a new word.

She explained with something she knew he already had encountered -- going out

with others to harvest mushrooms.

"Fungi won't grow except in the company of friendly roots. Each has a symbiotic

relationship with a special plant. Each growing thing takes something it needs

from the other."

She went on at length and, bored with learning, he kicked a clump of grass, then

saw how she stared at him in that disturbing way. He had done something

offensive. Why was it right to step on one growing thing and not on another?

"Miles! Grass keeps the wind from carrying topsoil into difficult places such

as the bottoms of rivers."

He knew that tone. Reprimanding. He stared down at the grass he had offended.

"These grasses feed our cattle. Some have seeds we eat in bread and other

foods. Some cane grasses are windbreaks."

He knew that! Trying to divert her, he said: "Windbrakes?" spelling it.

She did not smile and he knew he had been wrong to think he could fool her.

Resigned to it, he listened as she went on with the lesson.

When the desert came, she told him, grapes, their taproots down several hundred

meters, probably would be the last to go. Orchards would die first.

"Why do they have to die?"

"To make room for more important life."

"Sandworms and melange."

He saw he had pleased her by knowing the relationship between sandworms and the

spice the Bene Gesserit needed for their existence. He was not sure how that

need worked but he imagined a circle: Sandworms to sandtrout to melange and

back again. And the Bene Gesserit took what they needed from the circle.

He was still tired of all this teaching, and asked: "If all these things are

going to die anyway, why do I have to go back to the library and learn their

names?"

"Because you're human and humans have this deep desire to classify, to apply

labels to everything."

"Why do we have to name things like that?"

"Because that way we lay claim to what we name. We assume an ownership that can

be misleading and dangerous."

So she was back on ownership.

"My street, my lake, my planet," she said. "My label forever. A label you give

to a place or thing may not even last out your lifetime except as a polite sop

granted by conquerors . . . or as a sound to remember in fear."

"Dune," he said.

"You are quick!"

"Honored Matres burned Dune."

"They'll do the same to us if they find us."

"Not if I'm your Bashar!" The words were out of him without thought but, once

spoken, he felt they might have some truth. Library accounts said the Bashar

had made enemies tremble just by appearing on a battlefield.

As though she knew what he was thinking, Odrade said: "The Bashar Teg was just

as famous for creating situations where no battle was necessary."

"But he fought your enemies."

"Never forget Dune, Miles. He died there."

"I know."

"Do the Proctors have you studying Caladan yet?"

"Yes. It's called Dan in my histories."

"Labels, Miles. Names are interesting reminders but most people don't make

other connections. Boring history, eh? Names -- convenient pointers, useful

mostly with your own kind?"

"Are you my kind?" It was a question that plagued him but not in those words

until this instant.

"We are Atreides, you and I. Remember that when you return to your study of

Caladan."

When they went back through the orchards and across a pasture to the vantage

knoll with its limb-framed view of Central, Teg saw the administrative complex

and its barrier plantations with new sensitivity. He held this close as they

went down the fenced lane to the arch into First Street.

"A living jewel," Odrade called Central.

As they passed under it, he looked up at the street name burned into the

entrance arch. Galach in an elegant script with flowing lines, Bene Gesserit

decorative. All streets and buildings were labeled in that same cursive.

Looking around him at Central, the dancing fountain in the square ahead of them,

the elegant details, he sensed a depth of human experience. The Bene Gesserit

had made this place supportive in ways he did not quite fathom. Things picked

up in studies and orchard excursions, simple things and complex, came to new

focus. It was a latent Mentat response but he did not know this, only sensing

that his unfailing memory had shifted some relationships and reorganized them.

He stopped suddenly and looked back the way they had come -- the orchard out

there framed in the arch of the covered street. It was all related. Central's

effluent produced methane and fertilizer. (He had toured the plant with a

Proctor.) Methane ran pumps and powered some of the refrigeration.

"What are you looking at, Miles?"

He did not know how to answer. But he remembered an autumn afternoon when

Odrade had taken him over Central in a 'thopter to tell him about these

relationships and give him "the overview." Only words then but now the words

had meaning.

"As near to a closed ecological circle as we can create," Odrade had said in the

'thopter. "Weather Control's orbiters monitor it and order the flow lines."

"Why are you standing there looking at the orchard, Miles?" Her voice was full

of imperatives against which he had no defenses.

"In the ornithopter, you said it was beautiful but dangerous."

They had taken only one 'thopter trip together. She caught the reference

immediately. "The ecological circle."

He turned and looked up at her, waiting.

"Enclosed," she said. "How tempting it is to raise high walls and keep out

change. Rot here in our own self-satisfied comfort."

Her words filled him with disquiet. He felt he had heard them before . . . some

other place with a different woman holding his hand.

"Enclosures of any kind are a fertile breeding ground for hatred of outsiders,"

she said. "That produces a bitter harvest."

Not exactly the same words but the same lesson.

He walked slowly beside Odrade, his hand sweaty in hers.

"Why are you so silent, Miles?"

"You're farmers," he said. "That's really what you Bene Gesserit do. "

She saw immediately what had happened, Mentat training coming out in him without

his knowing. Best not explore that yet. "We are concerned about everything

that grows, Miles. It was perceptive of you to see this."

As they parted, she to return to her tower, he to his quarters in the school

section, Odrade said: " I will tell your Proctors to place more emphasis on

subtle uses of power."

He misunderstood. "I'm already training with lasguns. They say I'm very good."

"So I've heard. But there are weapons you cannot hold in your hands. You can

only hold them in your mind."

Rules build up fortifications behind which small minds create satrapies. A

perilous state of affairs in the best of times, disastrous during crises.

-Bene Gesserit Coda

Stygian blackness in Great Honored Matre's sleeping chamber. Logno, a Grand

Dame and senior aide to the High One, entered from the unlighted hallway as she

had been summoned to do and, seeing darkness, shuddered. These consultations

with no illumination terrified her and she knew Great Honored Matre took

pleasure from that. It could not be the only reason for darkness, though. Was

Great Honored Matre fearful of attack? Several High Ones had been deposed in

bed. No . . . not just that, although it might bear on the choice of setting.

Grunts and moans in the darkness.

Some Honored Matres snickered and said Great Honored Matre dared bed a Futar.

Logno thought it possible. This Great Honored Matre dared many things. Had she

not salvaged some of The Weapons from the disaster of the Scattering? Futars,

though? The Sisters knew Futars could not be bonded by sex. At least not by

sex with humans. That might be the way the Enemies of Many Faces did it,

though. Who knew?

There was a furry smell in the bedchamber. Logno closed the door behind her and

waited. Great Honored Matre did not like to be interrupted in whatever she did

there within shielding blackness. But she permits me to call her Dama.

Another moan, then: "Sit on the floor, Logno. Yes, there by the door. "

Does she really see me or only guess?

Logno did not have the courage to test it. Poison. I'll get her that way

someday. She's cautious but she can be distracted. Although her Sisters might

sneer at it, poison was an accepted tool of succession . . . provided the

successor possessed further ways to maintain ascendancy.

"Logno, those Ixians you spoke with today. What do they say of The Weapon?"

"They do not understand its function, Dama. I did not tell them what it was."

"Of course not."

"Will you suggest again that Weapon and Charge be united?"

"Are you sneering at me, Logno?"

"Dama! I would never do such a thing."

"I hope not. "

Silence. Logno understood that they both considered the same problem. Only

three hundred units of The Weapon survived the disaster. Each could be used

only once, provided the Council (which held the Charge) agreed to arm them.

Great Honored Matre, controlling The Weapon itself, had only half of that awful

power. Weapon without Charge was merely a small black tube that could be held

in the hand. With its Charge, it cut a brief swath of bloodless death across

the arc of its limited range.

"The Ones of Many Faces," Great Honored Matre muttered.

Logno nodded to the darkness where that muttering originated.

Perhaps she can see me. I do not know what else she salvaged or what the Ixians

may have provided her.

And the Ones of Many Faces, curse them through eternity, had caused the

disaster. Them and their Futars! The ease with which all but that handful of

The Weapon had been confiscated! Awesome powers. We must arm ourselves well

before we return to that battle. Dama is right.

"That planet -- Buzzell," Great Honored Matre said. "Are you sure it's not

defended?"

"We detect no defenses. Smugglers say it is not defended."

"But it is so rich in Soostones!"

"Here in the Old Empire, people seldom dare attack the witches."

"I do not believe there are only a handful of them on that planet! It's a trap

of some kind."

"That is always possible, Dama."

I do not trust smugglers, Logno. Bond a few more of them and test this thing of

Buzzell again. The witches may be weak but I do not think they are stupid."

"Yes, Dama."

"Tell the Ixians they will displease us if they cannot duplicate The Weapon."

"But without the Charge, Dama . . .

"We will deal with that when we must. Now, leave."

Logno heard a hissing "Yessssss!" as she let herself out. Even the darkness of

the hallway was welcome after the bedchamber and she hurried toward the light.

We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose.

-Bene Gesserit Coda

The water images again!

We're turning this whole damned planet into a desert and I get water images!

Odrade sat in her workroom, the usual morning clutter around her, and sensed Sea

Child floating in the waves, washed by them, carried by them. The waves were

the color of blood. Her Sea Child self anticipated bloody times.

She knew where these images originated: the time before Reverend Mothers ruled

her life; childhood in the beautiful home on the Gammu seacoast. Despite

immediate worries, she could not prevent a smile. Oysters prepared by Papa.

The stew she still preferred.

What she remembered best of childhood was the sea excursions. Something about

being afloat spoke to her most basic self. Lift and fall of waves, the sense of

unbounded horizons with strange new places just beyond the curved limits of a

watery world, that thrilling edge of danger implicit in the very substance that

supported her. All of it combined to assure her she was Sea Child.

Papa was calmer there, too. And Mama Sibia happier, face turned into the wind,

dark hair blowing. A sense of balance radiated from those times, a reassuring

message spoken in a language older than Odrade's oldest Other Memory. "This is

my place, my medium. I am Sea Child."

Her personal concept of sanity came from those times. The ability to balance on

strange seas. The ability to maintain your deepest self despite unexpected

waves.

Mama Sibia had given Odrade that ability long before the Reverend Mothers came

and took away their "hidden Atreides scion." Mama Sibia, only a foster mother,

had taught Odrade to love herself.

In a Bene Gesserit society where any form of love was suspect, this remained

Odrade's ultimate secret.

At root, I am happy with myself. I do not mind being alone. Not that any

Reverend Mother was ever truly alone after the Spice Agony flooded her with

Other Memories.

But Mama Sibia and, yes, Papa, too, acting in loco parentis for the Bene

Gesserit, had impressed a profound strength upon their charge during those

hidden years. The Reverend Mothers had been reduced to amplifying that

strength.

Proctors had tried to root out Odrade's "deep desire for personal affinities,"

but failed at last, not quite sure they had failed but always suspicious. They

had sent her to Al Dhanab finally, a place deliberately maintained as a mimic of

the worst in Salusa Secundus, there to be conditioned on a planet of constant

testing. A place worse than Dune in some respects: high cliffs and dry gorges,

hot winds and frigid winds, too little moisture and too much. The Sisterhood

had thought of it as a proving ground for those destined to survive on Dune.

But none of this had touched that secret core within Odrade. Sea Child remained

intact.

And it is Sea Child warning me now.

Was it a prescient warning?

She had always possessed this bit of talent, this little twitching that told of

immediate peril to the Sisterhood. Atreides genes reminding her of their

presence. Was it a threat to Chapterhouse? No . . . the ache she could not

touch said it was others in danger. Important, though.

Lampadas? Her bit of talent could not say.

The Breeding Mistresses had tried to erase this dangerous prescience from their

Atreides line but with limited success. "We dare not risk another Kwisatz

Haderach!" They knew of this quirk in their Mother Superior, but Odrade's late

predecessor, Taraza, had advised "cautious use of her talent." It had been

Taraza's view that Odrade's prescience worked only to warn of dangers to the

Bene Gesserit.

Odrade agreed. She experienced unwanted moments when she glimpsed threats.

Glimpses. And lately she dreamed.

It was a vividly recurring dream, every sense attuned to the immediacy of this

thing occurring in her mind. She walked across a chasm on a tightrope and

someone (she dared not turn to see who) was coming from behind with an axe to

cut the rope. She could feel the rough twists of fiber beneath bare feet. She

felt a cold wind blowing, a smell of burning on that wind. And she knew the one

with the axe approached!

Each perilous step required all of her energy. Step! Step! The rope swayed

and she stretched her arms out straight on each side, struggling for balance.

If I fall, the Sisterhood falls!

The Bene Gesserit would end in the chasm beneath the rope. As with any living

thing, the Sisterhood must end sometime. A Reverend Mother dared not deny it.

But not here. Not falling, the rope severed. We must not let the rope be cut!

I must get across the chasm before the axe-wielder comes. "I must! I must!"

The dream always ended there, her own voice ringing in her ears as she awoke in

her sleeping chamber. Chilled. No perspiration. Even in the throes of

nightmare, Bene Gesserit restraints did not permit unnecessary excesses.

Body does not need perspiration? Body does not get perspiration.

As she sat in her workroom remembering the dream, Odrade felt the depth of

reality behind that metaphor of a slender rope: The delicate strand on which I

carry the fate of my Sisterhood. Sea Child sensed the approaching nightmare and

intruded with images of bloody waters. This was no trivial warning. Ominous.

She wanted to stand and shout: "Scatter into the weeds, my chicks! Run! Run!"

And wouldn't that shock the watchdogs!

The duties of a Mother Superior required her to put a good face on her tremors

and act as though nothing mattered except the formal decisions in front of her.

Panic must be avoided! Not that any of her immediate decisions were truly

trivial in these times. But calm demeanor was required.

Some of her chicks already were running, gone off into the unknown. Shared

lives in Other Memory. The rest of her chicks here on Chapterhouse would know

when to run. When we are discovered. Their behavior would be governed then by

the necessities of the moment. All that really mattered was their superb

training. That was their most reliable preparation.

Each new Bene Gesserit cell, wherever it finally went, was prepared as was

Chapterhouse: total destruction rather than submission. The screaming fire

would engorge itself on precious flesh and records. All a captor would find

would be useless wreckage: twisted shards peppered with ashes.

Some Chapterhouse Sisters might escape. But flight at the moment of attack --

how futile!

Key people shared Other Memory anyway. Preparation. Mother Superior avoided

it. Reasons of morale!

Where to run and who might escape, who might be captured? Those were the real

questions. What if they captured Sheeana down there at the edge of the new

desert waiting for sandworms that might never appear? Sheeana plus the

sandworms: a potent religious force Honored Matres might know how to exploit.

And what if Honored Matres captured ghola-Idaho or ghola-Teg? There might never

again be a hiding place if one of those possibilities occurred.

What if? What if?

Angry frustration said: "Should've killed Idaho the minute we got him! We

should never have grown ghola-Teg."

Only her Council members, immediate advisors and some among the watchdogs shared

her suspicion. They sat on it with reservations. None of them felt really

secure about those two gholas, not even after mining the no-ship, making it

vulnerable to the screaming fire.

In those last hours before his heroic sacrifice, had Teg been able to see the

unseeable (including no-ships)? How did he know where to meet us on that desert

of Dune?

And if Teg could do it, the dangerously talented Duncan Idaho with his uncounted

generations of accumulated Atreides (and unknown) genes might also stumble upon

the ability.

I might do it myself!

With sudden shocking insight, Odrade realized for the first time that Tamalane

and Bellonda watched their Mother Superior with the same fears that Odrade felt

in watching the two gholas.

Merely knowing it could be done -- that a human could be sensitized to detect

no-ships and the other forms of that shielding -- would have an unbalancing

effect on their universe. It would certainly set the Honored Matres on a

runaway track. There were uncounted Idaho offspring loose in the universe. He

had always complained he was "no damned stud for the Sisterhood," but he had

performed for them many times.

Always thought he was doing it for himself. And maybe he was.

Any mainline Atreides offspring might have this talent the Council suspected had

come to flower in Teg.

Where did the months and years go? And the days? Another harvest season and

the Sisterhood remained in its terrible limbo. Midmorning already, Odrade

realized. The sounds and smells of Central made themselves known to her.

People out there in the corridor. Chicken and cabbage cooking in the communal

kitchen. Everything normal.

What was normal to someone who dwelt in water images even during these working

moments? Sea Child could not forget Gammu, the smells, the breeze-blown

substance of ocean weeds, the ozone that made every breath oxygen-rich, and the

splendid freedom in those around her so apparent in the way they walked and

spoke. Conversation on the sea went deeper in a way she had never plumbed.

Even small talk had its subterranean elements there, an oceanic elocution that

flowed with the currents beneath them.

Odrade felt compelled to remember her own body afloat in that childhood sea.

She needed to recapture the forces she had known there, take in the

strengthening qualities she had learned in more innocent times.

Face down in salty water, holding her breath as long as she could, she floated

in a sea-washed now that cleansed away woes. This was stress management reduced

to its essence. A great calmness flooded her.

I float, therefore I am.

Sea Child warned and Sea Child restored. Without ever admitting it, she had

needed restoration desperately.

Odrade had looked at her own face mirrored in a workroom window the previous

night, shocked by the way age and responsibilities combined with fatigue to suck

in her cheeks and turn down the corners of her mouth: the sensual lips thinner,

the gentle curves of her face elongated. Only the all-blue eyes blazed with

their accustomed intensity and she still was tall and muscular.

On impulse, Odrade punched up the call symbols and stared at a projection above

the table: the no-ship sitting on the ground at the Chapterhouse spacefield, a

giant bump of mysterious machinery, separated from Time. Over the years of its

semi-dormancy, it had depressed a great sunken area into the landing flat,

becoming almost wedged there. It was a great lump, its engines ticking away

only enough to keep it hidden from prescient searchers, especially from Guild

Navigators who would take a special joy in selling out the Bene Gesserit.

Why had she called up this image just now?

Because of the three people confined there -- Scytale, the last surviving

Tleilaxu Master; Murbella and Duncan Idaho, the sexually bonded pair, held as

much by their mutual entrapment as they were by the no-ship.

Not simple, any of it.

There seldom were simple explanations for any major Bene Gesserit undertaking.

The no-ship and its mortal contents could only be classified as a major effort.

Costly. Very costly in energy even in its standby mode.

The appearance of parsimonious metering to all of that expenditure spoke of

energy crisis. One of Bell's concerns. You could hear it in her voice even

when she was being her most objective: "Down to the bone and nowhere else to

cut!" Every Bene Gesserit knew the watchful eyes of Accounting were on them

these days, critical of the Sisterhood's outflowing vitality.

Bellonda strode into the workroom unannounced with a roll of ridulian crystal

records under her left arm. She walked as though she hated the floor, stamping

on it as if to say: "There! Take that! And that!" Beating the floor because

it was guilty of being underfoot.

Odrade felt her chest tighten as she saw the look in Bell's eyes. The ridulian

records went "Slap!" as Bellonda threw them onto the table.

"Lampadas!" Bellonda said and there was agony in her voice.

Odrade had no need to open the roll. Sea Child's bloody water has become

reality.

"Survivors?" Her voice sounded strained.

"None." Bellonda slumped into the chairdog she kept on her side of Odrade's

table.

Tamalane entered then and sat beside Bellonda. Both looked stricken.

No survivors.

Odrade permitted herself a slow shudder that went from her breast to the soles

of her feet. She did not care that the others saw such a revealing reaction.

This workroom had seen worse behavior from Sisters.

"Who reported?" Odrade asked.

Bellonda said, "It came through our CHOAM spies and had the special mark on it.

The Rabbi supplied the information, no doubt of it. "

Odrade did not know how to respond. She glanced at the wide bow window behind

her companions, seeing a soft flutter of snowflakes. Yes, this news deservedly

went with winter marshaling its forces out there.

The sisters of Chapterhouse were unhappy about the sudden plunge into winter.

Necessities had forced Weather Control to let the temperature drop

precipitately. No gradual decline into winter, no kindness to growing things

that now must pass through the freezing dormancy. This was three and four

degrees colder every night. Get the whole thing over in a week or so and plunge

them all into the seemingly interminable chill.

Cold to match the news about Lampadas.

One result of this weather shift was fog. She could see it dissipating as the

brief snow flurry ended. Very confusing weather. They got the dewpoint next to

the air temperature and the fog rolled into the remaining wet spots. It lifted

from the ground in tulle mists that wandered through leafless orchards like a

poisonous gas.

No survivors at all?

Bellonda shook her head from side to side in answer to Odrade's questioning

look.

Lampadas -- a jewel in the Sisterhood's network of planets, home of their most

prized school, another lifeless ball of ashes and hardened melt. And the Bashar

Alef Burzmali with all of his handpicked defense force. All dead?

"All dead," Bellonda said.

Burzmali, favorite student of the old Bashar Teg, gone and nothing gained by it.

Lampadas -- the marvelous library, the brilliant teachers, the premier students

. . . all gone.

"Even Lucilla?" Odrade asked. The Reverend Mother Lucilla, vice chancellor of

Lampadas, had been instructed to flee at the first sign of trouble, taking with

her as many of the doomed as she could store in Other Memory.

"The spies said all dead," Bellonda insisted.

It was a chilling signal to surviving Bene Gesserit: "You may be next!"

How could any human society be anesthetized to such brutality? Odrade wondered.

She visualized the news with breakfast at some Honored Matre base: "We've

destroyed another Bene Gesserit planet. Ten billion dead, they say. That makes

six planets this month, doesn't it? Pass the cream, will you, dear?"

Almost glassy-eyed with horror, Odrade picked up the report and glanced through

it. From the Rabbi, no doubt of that. She put it down gently and looked at her

Councillors.

Bellonda -- old, fat and florid, Mentat-Archivist, wearing lenses to read now,

uncaring what that revealed about her. Bellonda showed her blunt teeth in a

wide grimace that said more than words. She had seen Odrade's reaction to the

report. Bell might argue once more for retaliation in kind. That could be

expected from someone valued for her natural viciousness. She needed to be

thrown back into Mentat mode where she would be more analytical.

In her own way, Bell is right, Odrade thought. But she won't like what I have

in mind. I must be cautious in what I say now. Too soon to reveal my plan.

"There are circumstances where viciousness can blunt viciousness," Odrade said.

"We must consider it carefully."

There! That would forestall Bell's outburst.

Tamalane shifted slightly in her chair. Odrade looked at the older woman. Tam,

composed there behind her mask of critical patience. Snowy hair above that

narrow face: the appearance of aged wisdom.

Odrade saw through the mask to Tam's extreme severity, the pose that said she

disliked everything she saw and heard.

In contrast to the surface softness of Bell's flesh, there was a bony solidity

to Tamalane. She still kept herself in trim, her muscles as well-toned as

possible. In her eyes, though, was the thing that belied this: a sense of

withdrawing there, pulling back from life. Oh, she observed yet, but something

had begun the final retreat. Tamalane's famed intelligence had become a kind of

shrewdness, relying mostly on past observations and past decisions rather than

on what she saw in the immediate present.

We must begin readying a replacement. It will be Sheeana, I think. Sheeana is

dangerous to us but shows great promise. And Sheeana was blooded on Dune.

Odrade focused on Tamalane's shaggy eyebrows. They tended to hang over her lids

in a concealing disarray. Yes. Sheeana to replace Tamalane.

Knowing the complicated problems they must solve, Tam would accept the decision.

At the moment of announcement, Odrade knew she would only have to turn Tam's

attention to the enormity of their predicament.

I will miss her, dammit!

You cannot know history unless you know how leaders move with its currents.

Every leader requires outsiders to perpetuate his leadership. Examine my

career: I was leader and outsider. Do not assume I merely created a Church-

State. That was my function as leader and I copied historical models. Barbaric

arts of my time reveal me as outsider. Favorite poetry: epics. Popular

dramatic ideal: heroism. Dances: wildly abandoned. Stimulants to make people

sense what I took from them. What did I take? The right to choose a role in

history.

-Leto II (The Tyrant): Vether Bebe Translation

I am going to die! Lucilla thought.

Please, dear Sisters, don't let it come before I pass along the precious burden

I carry in my mind!

Sisters!

The idea of family seldom was expressed among the Bene Gesserit but it was

there. In a genetic sense, they were related. And because of Other Memory,

they often knew where. They had no need for special terms such as "second

cousin" or "great aunt." They saw the relationships as a weaver sees his cloth.

They knew how the warp and weft created the fabric. A better word than Family,

it was the fabric of the Bene Gesserit that formed the Sisterhood but it was the

ancient instinct of Family that provided the warp.

Lucilla thought of her sisters only as Family now. The Family needed what she

carried.

I was a fool to seek refuge on Gammu!

But her damaged no-ship would limp no farther. How diabolically extravagant

Honored Matres had been! The hatred this implied terrified her.

Strewing the escape lanes around Lampadas with deathtraps, the Foldspace

perimeter seeded with small no-globes, each containing a field projector and a

lasgun to fire on contact. When the laser hit the Holzmann generator in the noglobe,

a chain reaction released the nuclear energy. Bzzz into the trap field

and a devastating explosion spread silently across you. Costly but efficient!

Enough such explosions and even a giant Guildship would become a crippled

derelict in the void. Her ship's system of defensive analyses had penetrated

the nature of the trap only when it was too late, but she had been lucky, she

supposed.

She did not feel lucky as she looked out the second story window of this

isolated Gammu farmhouse. The window was open and an afternoon breeze carried

the inevitable smell of oil, something dirty in the smoke of a fire out there.

The Harkonnens had left their oily mark on this planet so deep it might never be

removed.

Her contact here was a retired Suk doctor but she knew him as much more,

something so secret that only a limited number in the Bene Gesserit shared it.

The knowledge lay in a special classification: The secrets of which we do not

speak, even among ourselves, for that would harm us. The secrets we do not pass

from Sister to Sister in the sharing of lives for there is no open path. The

secrets we dare not know until a need arises. Lucilla had stumbled into it

because of a veiled remark by Odrade.

"You know an interesting thing about Gammu? Mmmmm, there's a whole society

there that bands itself on the basis that they all eat consecrated foods. A

custom brought in by immigrants who have never been assimilated. Keep to

themselves, frown on outbreeding, that sort of thing. They ignite the usual

mythic detritus, of course: whispers, rumors. Serves to isolate them even

more. Precisely what they want."

Lucilla knew of an ancient society that fitted itself neatly into this

description. She was curious. The society she had in mind supposedly had died

out shortly after the Second Interspace Migrations. Judicious browsing in

Archives whetted her curiosity even more. Living styles, rumor-fogged

descriptions of religious rituals -- especially the candelabra -- and the

keeping of special holy days with a proscription against any work on those days.

And they were not just on Gammu!

One morning, taking advantage of an uncommon lull, Lucilla entered the workroom

to test her "projective surmise," something not as reliable as a Mentat's

equivalent but more than theory.

"You have a new assignment for me, I suspect."

"I see you've been spending time in Archives."

"It seemed a profitable thing to do just now."

"Making connections?"

"A surmise." That secret society on Gammu -- they're Jews, aren't they?

"You may have need of special information because of where we are about to post

you." Extremely casual.

Lucilla sank into Bellonda's chairdog without invitation.

Odrade picked up a stylus, scribbled on a sheet of disposable and passed it to

Lucilla in a way that hid it from the comeyes.

Lucilla took the hint and bent over the message, holding it close beneath the

shield of her head.

"Your surmise is correct. You must die before revealing it. That is the price

of their cooperation, a mark of great trust." Lucilla shredded the message.

Odrade used eye and palm identification to unseal a panel on the wall behind

her. She removed a small ridulian crystal and handed it to Lucilla. It was

warm but Lucilla felt a chill. What could be so secret? Odrade swung the

security hood from beneath her worktable and pivoted it into position.

Lucilla dropped the crystal into its receptacle with a trembling hand and pulled

the hood over her head. Immediately, words formed in her mind, an oral sense of

extremely old accents clipped for recognition: "The people to whom your

attention has been called are the Jews. They made a defensive decision eons

ago. The solution to recurrent pogroms was to vanish from public view. Space

travel made this not only possible but attractive. They hid on countless

planets -- their own Scattering -- and they probably have planets where only

their people live. This does not mean they have abandoned age-old practices in

which they excelled out of survival necessity. The old religion is sure to

persist even though somewhat altered. It is probable that a rabbi from ancient

times would not find himself out of place behind the Sabbath menorah of a Jewish

household in your age. But their secrecy is such that you could work a lifetime

beside a Jew and never suspect. They call it 'Complete Cover,' although they

know its dangers."

Lucilla accepted this without question. That which was so secret would be

perceived as dangerous by anyone who even suspected its presence. "Else why do

they keep it secret, eh? Answer me that!"

The crystal continued to pour its secrets into her awareness: "At the threat of

discovery, they have a standard reaction, 'We seek the religion of our roots.

It is a revival, bringing back what is best from our past.' "

Lucilla knew this pattern. There were always "nutty revivalists." It was

guaranteed to blunt most curiosity. "Them? Oh, they're another bunch of

revivalists."

"The masking system (the crystal continued) did not succeed with us. We have

our own well-recorded Jewish heritage and a fund of Other Memory to tell us

reasons for secrecy. We did not disturb the situation until I, Mother Superior

during and after the battle of Corrin (Very old, indeed!), saw that our

Sisterhood had need of a secret society, a group responsive to our requests for

assistance."

Lucilla felt a surge of skepticism. Requests?

The long-ago Mother Superior had anticipated skepticism. "On occasion, we make

demands they cannot avoid. But they make demands on us as well."

Lucilla felt immersed in the mystique of this underground society. It was more

than ultra-secret. Her clumsy questions in Archives had elicited mostly

rejections. "Jews? What's that? Oh, yes -- an ancient sect. Look it up for

yourself. We don't have time for idle religious research."

The crystal had more to impart: "Jews are amused and sometimes dismayed at what

they interpret as our copying them. Our breeding records dominated by the

female line to control the mating pattern are seen as Jewish. You are only a

Jew if your mother was a Jew. "

The crystal came to its conclusion: "The Diaspora will be remembered. Keeping

this secret involves our deepest honor."

Lucilla lifted the hood from her head.

"You are a very good choice for an extremely touchy assignment on Lampadas,"

Odrade had said, restoring the crystal to its hiding place.

That is the past and likely dead. Look where Odrade's "touchy assignment" has

brought me!

From her vantage in the Gammu farmhouse, Lucilla noted a large produce carrier

had entered the grounds. There was a bustle of activity below her. Workers

came from all sides to meet the big carrier with towbins of vegetables. She

smelled the pungent juices from the cut stems of marrows.

Lucilla did not move from the window. Her host had supplied her with local

garments -- a long gown of drab gray everwear and a bright blue headscarf to

confine her sandy hair. It was important to do nothing calling undue attention

to herself. She had seen other women pause to watch the farm work. Her

presence here could be taken as curiosity.

It was a large carrier, its suspensors laboring under the load of produce

already piled in its articulated sections. The operator stood in a transparent

house at the front, hands on the steering lever, eyes straight ahead. His legs

were spread wide and he leaned into the web of sloping supports, touching the

power bar with his left hip. He was a large man, face dark and deeply wrinkled,

hair laced with gray. His body was an extension of the machinery -- guiding

ponderous movement. He flicked his gaze up to Lucilla as he passed, then back

to the track into the wide loading area defined by buildings below her.

Built into his machine, she thought. That said something about the way humans

were fitted to the things they did. Lucilla sensed a weakening force in this

thought. If you fitted yourself too tightly to one thing, other abilities

atrophied. We become what we do.

She pictured herself suddenly as another operator in some great machine, no

different from that man in the carrier.

The big machine trundled past her out of the yard, its operator not sparing her

another glance. He had seen her once. Why look twice?

Her hosts had made a wise choice in this hiding place, she thought. A sparsely

populated area with trustworthy workers in the immediate vicinity and little

curiosity among the people who passed. Hard work dulled curiosity. She had

noted the character of the area. when she was brought here. Evening then and

people already trudging toward their homes. You could measure the urban density

of an area by when work stopped. Early to bed and you were in a loosely-packed

region. Night activity said people remained restless, twitchy with inner

awareness of others active and vibrating too near.

What has brought me to this introspective state?

Early in the Sisterhood's first retreat, before the worst onslaughts of the

Honored Matres, Lucilla had experienced difficulty coming to grips with belief

that "someone out there is hunting us with intent to kill."

Pogrom! That was what the Rabbi had called it before going off that morning "to

see what I can do for you."

She knew the Rabbi had chosen his word from long and bitter memory, but not

since her first experience of Gammu before this pogrom had Lucilla felt such

confinement to circumstances she could not control.

I was a fugitive then, too.

The Sisterhood's present situation bore similarities to what they had suffered

under the Tyrant, except that the God Emperor obviously (in retrospect) never

intended to exterminate the Bene Gesserit, only to rule them. And he certainly

ruled!

Where is that damned Rabbi?

He was a large, intense man with old-fashioned spectacles. A broad face browned

by much sunlight. Few wrinkles despite the age she could read in his voice and

movements. The spectacles focused attention on deeply set brown eyes that

watched her with peculiar intensity.

"Honored Matres," he had said (right here in this bare-walled upper room) when

she explained her predicament. "Oh, my! That is difficult."

Lucilla had expected that response and, what was more, she could see he knew it.

"There is a Guild Navigator on Gammu helping the search for you," he said. "It

is one of the Edrics, very powerful, I am told."

"I have Siona blood. He cannot see me."

"Nor me nor any of my people and for the same reason. We Jews adjust to many

necessities, you know."

"This Edric is a gesture," she said. "He can do little."

"But they have brought him. I'm afraid there is no way we can get you safely

off the planet."

"Then what can we do?"

"We will see. My people are not entirely helpless, you understand?"

She recognized sincerity and concern for her. He spoke quietly of resisting the

sexual blandishments of Honored Matres, "doing it unobtrusively so as not to

arouse them."

"I will go whisper in a few ears," he said.

She felt oddly restored by this. There often was something coldly remote and

cruel about falling into the hands of the medical professions. She reassured

herself with the knowledge that Suks were conditioned to be alert to your needs,

compassionate and supportive. (All of those things that can fall by the wayside

in emergencies.)

She bent her efforts to restoring calm, focusing on the personal mantra she had

gained in solo death education.

If I am to die, I must pass along a transcendental lesson. I must leave with

serenity.

That helped but still she felt a trembling. The Rabbi had been gone too long.

Something was wrong.

Was I right to trust him?

Despite a growing sense of doom, Lucilla forced herself to practice Bene

Gesserit naivete as she reviewed her encounter with the Rabbi. Her Proctors had

called this "the innocence that goes naturally with inexperience, a condition

often confused with ignorance." Into this naivete all things flowed. It was

close to Mentat performance. Information entered without prejudgment. "You are

a mirror upon which the universe is reflected. That reflection is all you

experience. Images bounce from your senses. Hypotheses arise. Important even

when wrong. Here is the exceptional case where more than one wrong can produce

dependable decisions."

"We are your willing servants," the Rabbi had said.

That was guaranteed to alert a Reverend Mother.

The explanations of Odrade's crystal felt suddenly inadequate. It's almost

always profit. She accepted this as cynical but from vast experience. Attempts

to weed it out of human behavior always broke up on the rocks of application.

Socializing and communistic systems only changed the counters that measured

profits. Enormous managerial bureaucracies -- the counter was power.

Lucilla warned herself that the manifestations were always the same. Look at

this Rabbi's extensive farm! Retirement retreat for a Suk? She had seen

something of what lay behind the establishment: servants, richer quarters. And

there must be more. No matter the system it was always the same: the best

foods, beautiful lovers, unrestricted travel, magnificent holiday

accommodations.

It gets very tiresome when you've seen it as often as we have.

She knew her mind was jittering but felt powerless to prevent it.

Survival. The very bottom of the demand system is always survival. And I

threaten the survival of the Rabbi and his people.

He had fawned upon her. Always beware of those who fawn upon us, nuzzling up to

all of that power we're supposed to have. How flattering to find great mobs of

servants waiting and anxious to do our bidding! How utterly debilitating.

The mistake of Honored Matres.

What is delaying the Rabbi?

Was he seeing how much he could get for the Reverend Mother Lucilla?

A door slammed below her, shaking the floor under her feet. She heard hurried

footsteps on a stairway. How primitive these people were. Stairways! Lucilla

turned as the door opened. The Rabbi entered bringing a rich smell of melange.

He stood by the door assessing her mood.

"Forgive my tardiness, dear lady. I was summoned for questioning by Edric, the

Guild Navigator."

That explained the smell of spice. Navigators were forever bathed in the orange

gas of melange, their features often fogged by the vapors. Lucilla could

visualize the Navigator's tiny v of a mouth and the ugly flap of nose. Mouth

and nose appeared small on a Navigator's gigantic face with its pulsing temples.

She knew how threatened the Rabbi must have felt listening to the singsong

ululations of the Navigator's voice with its simultaneous mechtranslation into

impersonal Galach.

"What did he want?"

"You."

"Does he . . ."

"He does not know for sure but I am certain he suspects us. However, he

suspects everybody."

"Did they follow you?"

"Not necessary. They can find me any time they want."

"What shall we do?" She knew she spoke too fast, much too loud.

"Dear lady . . ." He came three steps closer and she saw the perspiration on

his forehead and nose. Fear. She could smell it.

"Well, what is it?"

"The economic view behind the activities of Honored Matres -- we find them quite

interesting."

His words crystallized her fears. I knew it! He's selling me out!

"As you Reverend Mothers know very well, there are always gaps in economic

systems."

"Yes?" Profoundly wary.

"Incomplete suppression of trade in any commodity always increases the profits

of the tradesmen, especially the profits of the senior distributors." His voice

was warningly hesitant. "That is the fallacy of thinking you can control

unwanted narcotics by stopping them at your borders."

What was he trying to tell her? His words described elementary facts known even

to acolytes. Increased profits were always used to buy safe paths past border

guards, often by buying the guards themselves.

Has he bought servants of the Honored Matres? Surely, he doesn't believe he can

do that safely.

She waited while he composed his thoughts, obviously forming a presentation he

believed most likely to gain her acceptance.

Why did he point her attention toward border guards? That certainly was what he

had done. Guards always had a ready rationalization for betraying their

superiors, of course. "If I don't, someone else will."

She dared to hope.

The Rabbi cleared his throat. It was apparent he had found the words he wanted

and had placed them in order.

" I do not believe there is any way to get you off Gammu alive."

She had not expected such a blunt condemnation. "But the . . ."

"The information you carry, that is a different matter," he said.

So that was behind all of the focusing on borders and guards!

"You don't understand, Rabbi. My information is not just a few words and some

warnings." She tapped a finger against her forehead. "In here are many

precious lives, all of those irreplaceable experiences, learning so vital that -

-"

"Ahhh, but I do understand, dear lady. Our problem is that you do not

understand."

Always these references to understanding!

"It is your honor upon which I depend at this moment," he said.

Ahhhh, the legendary honesty and trustworthiness of the Bene Gesserit when we

have given our word!

"You know I will die rather than betray you," she said.

He spread his hands wide in a rather helpless gesture. "I am fully confident of

that, dear lady. The question is not one of betrayal but of something we have

never before revealed to your Sisterhood."

"What are you trying to tell me?" Quite peremptory, almost with Voice (which

she had been warned not to try on these Jews).

"I must exact a promise from you. I must have your word that you will not turn

against us because of what I am about to reveal. You must promise to accept my

solution to our dilemma."

"Sight unseen?"

"Only because I ask it of you and assure you that we honor our commitment to

your Sisterhood."

She glared at him, trying to see through this barrier he had erected between

them. His surface reactions could be read but not the mysterious thing beneath

his unexpected behavior.

The Rabbi waited for this fearsome woman to reach her decision. Reverend

Mothers always made him uneasy. He knew what her decision must be and pitied

her. He saw that she could read the pity in his expression. They knew so much

and so little. Their powers were manifest. And their knowledge of Secret

Israel so perilous!

We owe them this debt, though. She is not of the Chosen, but a debt is a debt.

Honor is honor: Truth is truth.

The Bene Gesserit had preserved Secret Israel in many hours of need. And a

pogrom was something his people knew without lengthy explanations. Pogrom was

embedded in the psyche of Secret Israel. And thanks to the Unspeakable, the

chosen people would never forget. No more than they could forgive.

Memory kept fresh in daily ritual (with periodic emphasis in communal sharings)

cast a glowing halo on what the Rabbi knew he must do. And this poor woman!

She, too, was trapped by memories and circumstances.

Into the cauldron! Both of us!

"You have my word," Lucilla said.

The Rabbi returned to the room's only door and opened it. An older woman in a

long brown gown stood there. She stepped in at the Rabbi's beckoning gesture.

Hair the color of old driftwood neatly bound in a bun at the back of her head.

Face pinched in and wrinkled, dark as a dried almond. The eyes, though! Total

blue! And that steely hardness within them . . .

"This is Rebecca, one of our people," the Rabbi said. "As I am sure you can

see, she has done a dangerous thing."

"The Agony," Lucilla whispered.

"She did it long ago and she serves us well. Now, she will serve you. "

Lucilla had to be certain. "Can you Share?"

"I have never done it, lady, but I know it." As Rebecca spoke, she approached

Lucilla and stopped when they were almost touching.

They leaned toward each other until their foreheads made contact. Their hands

went out and gripped the offered shoulders.

As their minds locked, Lucilla forced a projective thought: "This must get to

my Sisters!"

"I promise, dear lady."

There could be no deception in this total mixing of minds, this ultimate candor

powered by imminent and certain death or the poisonous melange essence that

ancient Fremen had rightly called "the little death." Lucilla accepted

Rebecca's promise. This wild Reverend Mother of the Jews committed her life to

the assurance. Something else! Lucilla gasped as she saw it. The Rabbi

intended to sell her to the Honored Matres. The driver of the produce carrier

had been one of their agents come to confirm that there was indeed a woman of

Lucilla's description at the farmhouse.

Rebecca's candor gave Lucilla no escape: "It is the only way we can save

ourselves and maintain our credibility."

So that was why the Rabbi had made her think of guards and power brokers!

Clever, clever. And I accept it as he knew I would.

You cannot manipulate a marionette with only one string.

-The Zensunni Whip

The Reverend Mother Sheeana stood at her sculpting stand, a gray-clawed shaper

covering each hand like exotic gloves. The black sensiplaz on the stand had

been taking form under her hands for almost an hour. She felt herself close to

the creation that sought realization, surging from a wild place within her. The

intensity of the creative force made her skin tremble and she wondered that

passersby in the hall to her right did not sense it. The north window of her

workroom admitted gray light behind her and the western window glowed orange

with a desert sunset.

Prester, Sheeana's senior assistant here at the Desert Watch Station, had paused

in the doorway a few minutes ago but the entire station complement knew better

than to interrupt Sheeana at this work.

Stepping back, Sheeana brushed a strand of sun-streaked brown hair from her

forehead with the back of a hand. The black plaz stood in front of her like a

challenge, its curves and planes almost fitted to the form she sensed within

her.

I come here to create when my fears are greatest, she thought.

This thought dampened the creative surge and she redoubled her efforts to

complete the sculpture. Her shaper-clad hands dipped and swooped over the plaz

and the black shape followed each intrusion like a wave driven by an insane

wind.

The light from the north window faded and the automatics compensated with a

yellow-gray glow from the ceiling edges but it was not the same. It was not the

same!

Sheeana stepped back from her work. Close . . . but not close enough. She

could almost touch the form within her and feel it striving for birth. But the

plaz was not right. One sweeping stroke of her right hand reduced it to a black

blob on the stand.

Damn!

She stripped off the shapers and dropped them to the shelf beside the sculpting

stand. The horizon out the western window still carried a strip of orange.

Fading fast the way she felt the fading of her creative urge.

Striding to the sunset window, she was in time to see the last of the day's

search teams return. Their landing lights were firefly darts off to the south

where a temporary flat had been established in the path of the advancing dunes.

She could see from the slow way the 'thopters came down that they had found no

spiceblows or other signs that sandworms were at last developing from the

sandtrout planted here.

I am shepherd to worms that may never come.

The window gave back to her a dark reflection of her features. She could see

where the Spice Agony had left its marks. The slender, brown-skinned waif of

Dune had become a tall, rather austere woman. But her brown hair still insisted

on escaping the tight coif at the nape of her neck. And she could see the

wildness in her all-blue eyes. Others could see it, too. And that was the

problem, source of some of her fears.

There appeared to be no stopping the Missionaria in its preparations for our

Sheeana.

If the giant sandworms developed -- Shai-hulud returned! And the Missionaria

Protectiva of the Bene Gesserit was ready to launch her onto an unsuspecting

humanity prepared for religious adoration. The myth become real . . . just the

way she tried to make that sculpture back there a reality.

Holy Sheeana! The God Emperor is her thrall! See how the sacred sandworms obey

her! Leto is returned!

Would it influence the Honored Matres? Probably. They gave at least lip

service to the God Emperor in his name of Guldur.

Not likely they would follow "Holy Sheeana's" lead except in the matter of

sexual exploits. Sheeana knew her own sexual behavior, outrageous even by Bene

Gesserit standards, was a form of protest against this role the Missionaria

tried to impose on her. The excuse that she only polished the males trained in

sexual bondage by Duncan Idaho was just that . . . an excuse.

Bellonda suspects.

Mentat Bell was a constant danger to Sisters who got out of line. And that was

a major reason Bell held her powerful position in the high Council of the

Sisterhood.

Sheeana turned away from the window and flung herself onto the orange and umber

spread covering her cot. Directly in front of her, a large black and white

drawing of a giant worm poised above a tiny human figure.

That's the way they were and may never be again. What was I trying to say with

that drawing? If I knew I might be able to complete the plaz sculpture.

It had been perilous to develop a secret hand-talk with Duncan. But there were

things the Sisterhood could not know -- not yet.

There might be a way of escape for both of us.

But where could they go? It was a universe beset by Honored Matres and other

forces. It was a universe of scattered planets peopled mostly by humans who

wanted only to live out their lives in peace -- accepting Bene Gesserit guidance

in some places, squirming under Honored Matre suppression in many regions,

mostly hoping to govern themselves as best they could, the perennial dream of

democracy, and then there were always the unknowns. And always the lesson of

the Honored Matres! Murbella's clues said Fish Speakers and Reverend Mothers in

extremis formed the Honored Matres. Fish Speaker democracy become Honored Matre

autocracy! The clues were too numerous to ignore. But why had they emphasized

unconscious compulsions with their T-probes, cellular induction, and sexual

prowess?

Where is the market to accept our fugitive talents?

This universe no longer possessed a single bourse. A species of subterranean

webworks could be defined. It was extremely loose, based on old compromises and

temporary agreements.

Odrade had once said: "It resembles an old garment with frayed edges and

patched holes."

CHOAM's tightly bound trading network of the Old Empire was no more. Now, it

was fearful bits and pieces held together by the loosest of ties. People

treated this patched thing with contempt, longing always for the good old days.

What kind of a universe would accept us merely as fugitives and not as the

Sacred Sheeana with her consort?

Not that Duncan was a consort. That had been the Bene Gesserit's original plan:

"Bond Sheeana to Duncan. We control him and he can control her."

Murbella cut that plan short. And a good thing for both of us. Who needs a

sexual obsession? But Sheeana was forced to admit she harbored oddly confused

feelings about Duncan Idaho. The hand-talks, the touching. And what could they

say to Odrade when she came prying? Not if, but when.

"We talk about ways for Duncan and Murbella to escape you, Mother Superior. We

talk about other ways to restore Teg's memories. We talk about our own private

rebellion against the Bene Gesserit. Yes, Darwi Odrade! Your former student

has become a rebel against you."

Sheeana admitted to mixed feelings about Murbella as well.

She domesticated Duncan where I might have failed.

The captive Honored Matre was a fascinating study . . . and amusing at times.

There was her joking doggerel posted on the wall of the ship's Acolyte dining

room.

Hey, God! I hope you're there.

I want you to hear my prayer.

That graven image on my shelf:

Is it really you or just myself?

Well, anyway, here it goes:

Please keep me on my toes.

Help me past my worst mistakes,

Doing it for both our sakes,

For an example of perfection

To the Proctors in my section;

Or merely for the Heaven of it,

Like bread, for the leaven of it.

For whatever reason may incline,

Please act for yours and mine.

* * *

The subsequent confrontation with Odrade, caught by the comeyes, had been a

beautiful thing to watch. Odrade's voice oddly strident: "Murbella? You?"

"I'm afraid so." No contrition in her at all.

"Afraid so?" Still strident.

"Why not?" Quite defiant.

"You joke about the Missionaria! Don't protest. That was your intent."

"They're so damned pretentious!"

Sheeana could only sympathize as she reflected on that confrontation.

Rebellious Murbella was a symptom. What ferments until you are forced to notice

it?

I fought in just that way against the everlasting discipline, "which will make

you strong, child."

What was Murbella like as a child? What pressures shaped her? Life was always

a reaction to pressures. Some gave in to easy distractions and were shaped by

them: pores bloated and reddened by excesses. Bacchus leering at them. Lust

fixing its shape on their features. A Reverend Mother knew it by millennial

observation. We are shaped by pressures whether we resist them or not.

Pressures and shapings -- that was life. And I create new pressures by my

secret defiance.

Given the Sisterhood's present state of alertness to all threats, the hand-talk

with Duncan probably was futile.

Sheeana tipped her head and looked at the black blob on the sculpting stand.

But I will persist. I will create my own statement of my life. I will create

my own life! Damn the Bene Gesserit!

And I will lose the respect of my Sisters.

There was something antique about the way respectful conformity was forced upon

them. They had preserved this thing from their most ancient past, taking it out

regularly to polish and make the necessary repairs that time required of all

human creations. And here it was today, held in unspoken reverence.

Thus you are a Reverend Mother and by no other judgment shall that be true.

Sheeana knew then she would be forced to test that antique thing to its limits,

probably breaking it. And that black plaz form seeking outlet from the wild

place within her was only one element of what she knew she had to do. Call it

rebellion, call it by any other name, the force she felt in her breast could not

be denied.

Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life.

The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game

whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise,

you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Nonplayers

often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse

to see that they can create some of their own luck.

-Darwi Odrade

"Have you studied the latest comeye record of Idaho?" Bellonda asked.

"Later! Later!" Odrade knew she was feeling peckish and it had come out in

this response to Bell's pertinent question.

Pressures confined the Mother Superior more and more these days. She had always

tried to face her duties with an attitude of broad interest. The more things to

interest her, the wider her scan and that was sure to bring more usable data.

Using the senses improved them. Substance, that was what her questing interests

desired. Substance. It was like hunting for food to assuage a deep hunger.

But her days were becoming duplicates of this morning. Her liking for personal

inspections was well known but these workroom walls held her. She must be where

she could be reached. Not only reached, but able to dispatch communications and

people on the instant.

Damn! I will make the time. I must!

It was time pressure as much as anything.

Sheeana said: "We trundle along on borrowed days."

Very poetic! Not much help in the face of pragmatic demands. They had to get

as many Bene Gesserit cells as possible Scattered before the axe fell. Nothing

else had that priority. The Bene Gesserit fabric was being torn apart, sent to

destinations no one on Chapterhouse could know. Sometimes, Odrade saw this flow

as rags and remnants. They went flapping away in their no-ships, a stock of

sandtrout in their holds, Bene Gesserit traditions, learning, and memories as

guide. But the Sisterhood had done this long ago in the first Scattering and

none came back or sent a message. Not one. Not one. Only Honored Matres

returned. If they had ever been Bene Gesserit, they now were a terrible

distortion, blindly suicidal.

Will we ever be whole again?

Odrade looked down at the work on her table: more selection charts. Who shall

go and who shall remain? There was little time to pause and take a deep breath.

Other Memory from her late predecessor, Taraza, took on an "I told you so!"

character. "See what I had to go through?"

And I once wondered if there was room at the top.

There might be room at the top (as she was fond of telling acolytes) but there

was seldom enough time.

When she thought of the largely passive non-Bene Gesserit populace "out there,"

Odrade sometimes envied them. They were permitted their illusions. What a

comfort. You could pretend your life was forever, that tomorrow would be

better, that the gods in their heavens watched you with care.

She recoiled from this lapse with disgust at herself. The unclouded eye was

better, no matter what it saw.

"I've studied the latest Idaho records," she said, looking across the table at

the patient Bellonda.

"He has interesting instincts," Bellonda said.

Odrade thought about that. Comeyes throughout the no-ship missed little. The

Council's theory about ghola-Idaho became daily less a theory and more a

conviction. How many memories from the serial Idaho lifetimes did this ghola

contain?

"Tam is raising doubts about their children," Bellonda said. "Do they have

dangerous talents?"

That was to be expected. The three children Murbella had borne Idaho in the noship

had been removed at birth. All were being observed with care as they

developed. Did they have that uncanny reactive speed Honored Matres displayed?

Too early to say. It was a thing that developed in puberty, according to

Murbella.

Their captive Honored Matre accepted the removal of her children with angry

resignation. Idaho, however, showed little reaction. Odd. Did something give

him a broader view of procreation? Almost a Bene Gesserit view?

"Another Bene Gesserit breeding program," he sneered.

Odrade let her thoughts flow. Was it really the Bene Gesserit attitude they saw

in Idaho? The Sisterhood said emotional attachments were ancient detritus --

important for human survival in their day but no longer required in the Bene

Gesserit plan.

Instincts.

Things that came with egg and sperm. Often vital and loud: "This is the

species talking to you, dolt!"

Loves . . . offspring . . . hungers . . . All of those unconscious motives to

compel specific behavior. It was dangerous to meddle in such matters. The

Breeding Mistresses knew this even while they did it. The Council debated it

periodically and ordered a careful watch on consequences.

"You've studied the records. Is that all the answer I get?" Quite plaintive

for Bellonda.

The comeye record of such interest to Bell was of Idaho questioning Murbella

about Honored Matre sexual-addiction techniques. Why? His parallel abilities

came from Tleilaxu conditioning impressed on his cells in the axlotl tank.

Idaho's abilities originated as an unconscious pattern akin to instincts but the

result was indistinguishable from the Honored Matre effect: ecstasy amplified

until it drove out all reason and bound its victims to the source of such

rewards.

Murbella went only so far in a verbal exploration of her abilities. Obvious

residual fury that Idaho had addicted her with the same techniques she had been

taught to use.

"Murbella blocks up when Idaho questions motives," Bellonda said.

Yes, I've seen that.

"I could kill you and you know it!" Murbella had said.

The comeye record showed them in bed in Murbella's no-ship quarters, having just

satiated their mutual addiction. Sweat glistened on bare flesh. Murbella lay

with a blue towel across her forehead, green eyes staring up at the comeyes.

She appeared to be looking directly at the observers. Little orange flecks in

her eyes. Anger flecks from her body's residual store of the spice substitute

Honored Matres employed. She was on melange now -- and no adverse symptoms.

Idaho lay beside her, black hair in disarray around his face, a sharp contrast

to the white pillow beneath his head. His eyes were closed but the lids

flickered. Thin. He wasn't eating enough despite tempting dishes sent by

Odrade's own chef. His high cheekbones were strongly defined. The face had

become craggy in the years of his confinement.

Murbella's threat was backed by physical ability, Odrade knew, but it was

psychologically false. Kill her lover? Not likely!

Bellonda was thinking along these same lines. "What was she doing when she

demonstrated her physical speed? We've seen that before."

"She knows we watch."

The comeyes showed Murbella defying post-coital fatigue to leap from bed.

Moving with blurred speed (much faster than anything the Bene Gesserit had ever

achieved), she kicked out with her right foot, stopping the blow only a hair's

breadth from Idaho's head.

At her first movement, Idaho opened his eyes. He watched without fear, without

flinching.

That blow! Fatal if it struck. You had only to see such a thing once to fear

it. Murbella moved with no resort to her central cortex. Insect-like, an

attack triggered by nerves at the point of muscle ignition.

"You see!" Murbella lowered her foot and glared down at him.

Idaho smiled.

Watching it, Odrade reminded herself that the Sisterhood had three of Murbella's

children, all female. The Breeding Mistresses were excited. In time, Reverend

Mothers born of this line might match that Honored Matre ability.

In time we probably don't have.

But Odrade shared the excitement of the Breeding Mistresses. That speed! Add

that to the nerve-muscle training, the great prana-bindu resources of the

Sisterhood! What that might create lay wordlessly within her.

"She did that for us, not for him," Bellonda said.

Odrade was not sure. Murbella resented the constant watch over her but she had

come to an accommodation with it. Many of her actions obviously ignored the

people behind the comeyes. This record showed her returning to her place in the

bed beside Idaho.

"I have restricted access to that record," Bellonda said. "Some acolytes are

becoming troubled."

Odrade nodded. Sexual addiction. That aspect of Honored Matre abilities

created disturbing ripples in the Bene Gesserit, especially among acolytes.

Very suggestive. And most of the Sisters on Chapterhouse knew the Reverend

Mother Sheeana, alone among them, practiced some of these techniques in defiance

of a general fear this could weaken them.

"We must not become Honored Matres!" Bell was always saying that. But Sheeana

represents a significant control factor. She teaches us something about

Murbella.

One afternoon, catching Murbella alone in her no-ship quarters and obviously

relaxed, Odrade had tried a direct question. "Before Idaho, were none of you

ever tempted to, let us say, 'join in the fun'?"

Murbella had recoiled with angry pride. "He caught me by accident!"

The same kind of anger she showed to Idaho's questions. Remembering this,

Odrade leaned over her worktable and called up the original record.

"Look at how angry she gets," Bellonda said. "A hypnotrance injunction against

answering such questions. I'd stake my reputation on it."

"That'll come out in the Spice Agony," Odrade said.

"If she ever gets to it!"

"Hypnotrance is supposed to be our secret."

Bellonda chewed on the obvious inference: No Sister we sent out in the original

Scattering ever returned.

It was written large in their minds: "Did renegade Bene Gesserit create the

Honored Matres?" Much suggested it. Then why did they resort to sexual

enslavement of males? Murbella's historical prattlings did not satisfy.

Everything about this went against Bene Gesserit teaching.

"We have to learn," Bellonda insisted. "What little we know is very

disturbing."

Odrade recognized the concern. How much of a lure was this ability? Very big,

she thought. Acolytes complained that they dreamed about becoming Honored

Matres. Bellonda was rightly worried.

Create or arouse such unbridled forces and you built carnal fantasies of

enormous complexity. You could lead whole populations around by their desires,

by their fantasy projections.

There was the terrible power the Honored Matres dared use. Let it be known that

they had the key to blinding ecstasy and they had won half the battle. The

simple clue that such a thing existed, that was the beginning of surrender.

People at Murbella's level in that other Sisterhood might not understand this

but the ones at the top . . . Was it possible they merely used this power

without caring or even suspecting its deeper force? If that were the case, how

were our first Scattered Ones lured into this dead end?

Earlier, Bellonda had offered her hypothesis:

Honored Matre with captive Reverend Mother taken prisoner in that first

Scattering. "Welcome, Reverend Mother. We would like you to witness a small

demonstration of our powers." Interlude of sexual demonstration followed by a

display of Honored Matre physical speed. Then -- withdrawal of melange and

injection of the adrenaline-based substitute laced with a hypnodrug. In that

hypothetical trance, the Reverend Mother was sexually imprinted.

That coupled to the selective agony of melange withdrawal (Bell suggested) might

make the victim deny her origins.

Fates help us! Were the original Honored Matres all Reverend Mothers? Do we

dare test this hypothesis on ourselves? What can we learn of this from that

pair in the no-ship?

Two sources of information lay there under the Sisterhood's watchful eyes but

the key had yet to be found.

Woman and man no longer just breeding partners, no longer a comfort and support

to each other. Something new has been added. The stakes have been escalated.

In the comeye record playing at the worktable, Murbella said something that

caught the Mother Superior's full attention.

"We Honored Matres did this to ourselves! Can't blame anyone else."

"You hear that?" Bellonda demanded.

Odrade shook her head sharply, wanting all of her attention on this exchange.

"You can't say the same about me," Idaho objected.

"That's an empty excuse," Murbella accused. "So you were conditioned by the

Tleilaxu to snare the first Imprinter you encountered!"

"And to kill her," Idaho corrected. "That's what they intended."

"But you didn't even try to kill me. Not that you could have."

"That's when . . ." Idaho broke off with an involuntary glance at the recording

comeyes.

"What was he about to say there?" Bellonda pounced. "We must find out!"

But Odrade continued her silent observation of the captive pair. Murbella

demonstrated a surprising insight. "You think you caught me through some

accident in which you were not involved?"

"Exactly."

"But I see something in you that accepted all of it! You didn't just go along

with your conditioning. You performed to your limits."

An inward look filmed Idaho's eyes. He tipped his head back, stretching his

chest muscles.

"That's a Mentat expression!" Bellonda accused.

All of Odrade's analysts suggested this but they had yet to wrest an admission

from Idaho. If he was a Mentat, why withhold that information?

Because of the other things implied by such abilities. He fears us and rightly

so.

Murbella spoke with a sneer. "You improvised and improved on what the Tleilaxu

did to you. There was something in you that made no complaint whatsoever!"

"That's how she deals with her own guilt feelings," Bellonda said. "She has to

believe it's true or Idaho would not have been able to trap her."

Odrade pursed her lips. The projection showed Idaho amused. "Perhaps it was

the same for both of us."

"You can't blame the Tleilaxu and I can't blame the Honored Matres."

Tamalane entered the workroom and sank into her chairdog beside Bellonda. " I

see it has your interest, too." She gestured at the projected figures.

Odrade shut down the projector.

"I've been inspecting our axlotl tanks," Tamalane said. "That damned Scytale

has withheld vital information."

"There's no flaw in our first ghola, is there?" Bellonda demanded.

"Nothing our Suks can find."

Odrade spoke in a mild tone: "Scytale has to keep some bargaining chips."

Both sides shared a fantasy: Scytale was paying the Bene Gesserit for rescue

from the Honored Matres and sanctuary on Chapterhouse. But every Reverend

Mother who studied him knew something else drove the last Tleilaxu Master.

Clever, clever, the Bene Tleilax. Far more clever than we suspected. And they

have dirtied us with their axlotl tanks. The very word "tank" -- another of

their deceptions. We pictured containers of warmed amniotic fluid, each tank

the focus of complex machinery to duplicate (in a subtle, discrete and

controllable way) the workings of the womb. The tank is there all right! But

look at what it contains.

The Tleilaxu solution was direct: Use the original. Nature already had worked

it out over the eons. All the Bene Tleilax need do was add their own control

system, their own way of replicating information stored in the cell.

"The Language of God," Scytale called it. Language of Shaitan was more

appropriate.

Feedback. The cell directed its own womb. That was more or less what a

fertilized ovum did anyway. The Tleilaxu merely refined it.

A sigh escaped Odrade, bringing sharp glances from her companions. Does Mother

Superior have new troubles?

Scytale's revelations trouble me. And what those revelations have done to us.

Oh, how we recoiled from the "debasement." Then, rationalizations. And we knew

they were rationalizations! "If there is no other way. If this produces the

gholas we need so desperately. Volunteers probably can be found." Were found!

Volunteers!

"You're woolgathering!" Tamalane grumbled. She glanced at Bellonda, started to

say something and thought better of it.

Bellonda's face went soft-bland, a frequent accompaniment to her darker moods.

Her voice came out little more than a guttural whisper. "I strongly urge that

we eliminate Idaho. And as for that Tleilaxu monster . . ."

"Why do you make such a suggestion with a euphemism?" Tamalane demanded.

"Kill him then! And the Tleilaxu should be subjected to every persuasion we --"

"Stop it, both of you!" Odrade ordered.

She pressed both palms briefly against her forehead and, staring at the bow

window, saw icy rain out there. Weather Control was making more mistakes. You

couldn't blame them, but there was nothing humans hated more than the

unpredictable. "We want it natural!" Whatever that means.

When such thoughts came over her, Odrade longed for an existence confined to the

order that pleased her: an occasional walk in the orchards. She enjoyed them

in all seasons. A quiet evening with friends, the give and take of probing

conversations with those for whom she felt warmth. Affection? Yes. The Mother

Superior dared much -- even love of companions. And good meals with drinks

chosen for their enhancement of flavors. She wanted that, too. How fine it was

to play upon the palate. And later . . . yes, later -- a warm bed with a gentle

companion sensitive to her needs as she was sensitive to his.

Most of this could not be, of course. Responsibilities! What an enormous word.

How it burned.

"I'm getting hungry," Odrade said. "Shall I order lunch served here?"

Bellonda and Tamalane stared at her. "It's only half past eleven," Tamalane

complained.

"Yes or no?" Odrade insisted.

Bellonda and Tamalane exchanged a private look. "As you wish," Bellonda said.

There was a saying in the Bene Gesserit (Odrade knew) that the Sisterhood ran

smoother when Mother Superior's stomach was satisfied. That had just tipped the

scales.

Odrade keyed the intercom to her private kitchen. "Lunch for three, Duana.

Something special. You choose."

Lunch, when it came, featured a dish Odrade especially enjoyed, a veal

casserole. Duana displayed a delicate touch with herbs, a bit of rosemary in

the veal, the vegetables not overcooked. Superb.

Odrade savored every bite. The other two plodded through the meal, spoon-tomouth,

spoon-to-mouth.

Is this one of the reasons I am Mother Superior and they are not?

While an acolyte cleared away the remains of lunch, Odrade turned to one of her

favorite questions: "What is the gossip in the common rooms and among the

acolytes?"

She remembered in her own acolyte days how she had hung on the words of the

older women, expecting great truths and getting mostly small talk about Sister

So-and-so or the latest problems of Proctor X. Occasionally, though, the

barriers came down and important data flowed.

"Too many acolytes talk of wanting to go out in our Scattering," Tamalane

rasped. "Sinking ships and rats, I say."

"There's a great interest in Archives lately," Bellonda said. "Sisters who know

better come looking for confirmation -- whether such and so acolyte has a heavy

Siona gene-mark."

Odrade found this interesting. Their common Atreides ancestor from the Tyrant's

eons, Siona Ibn Fuad al-Seyefa Atreides, had imparted to her descendants this

ability that hid them from prescient searchers. Every person walking openly on

Chapterhouse shared that ancestral protection.

"A heavy mark?" Odrade asked. "Do they doubt that the ones in question are

protected?"

"They want reassurance," Bellonda growled. "And now may I return to Idaho? He

has the genetic mark and he does not. It worries me. Why do some of his cells

not have the Siona marker? What were the Tleilaxu doing?"

"Duncan knows the danger and he's not suicidal," Odrade said.

"We don't know what he is," Bellonda complained.

"Probably a Mentat, and we all know what that could mean," Tamalane said.

"I understand why we keep Murbella," Bellonda said. "Valuable information. But

Idaho and Scytale . . ."

"That's enough!" Odrade snapped. "Watchdogs can bark too long!"

Bellonda accepted this grudgingly. Watchdogs. Their Bene Gesserit term for

constant monitoring by Sisters to see that you did not fall into shallow ways.

Very trying to acolytes but just another part of life to Reverend Mothers.

Odrade had explained it one afternoon to Murbella, the two of them alone in a

gray-walled interview chamber of the no-ship. Standing close together facing

each other. Eyes at a level. Quite informal and intimate. Except for the

knowledge of those comeyes all around them.

"Watchdogs," Odrade said, responding to a question from Murbella. "It means we

are mutual gadflies. Don't make that more than it is. We seldom nag. A simple

word can be enough."

Murbella, her oval face drawn into a look of distaste, the wide-set green eyes

intent, obviously thought Odrade referred to some common signal, a word or

saying the Sisters used in such situations.

"What word?"

"Any word, dammit! Whatever's appropriate. It's like a mutual reflex. We

share a common 'tic' that comes not to annoy us. We welcome it because it keeps

us on our toes."

"And you'll watchdog me if I become a Reverend Mother?"

"We want our watchdogs. We'd be weaker without them."

"It sounds oppressive."

"We don't find it so."

"I think it's repellent." She looked at the glittering lenses in the ceiling.

"Like those damned comeyes."

"We take care of our own, Murbella. Once you're a Bene Gesserit, you're assured

of lifelong maintenance."

"A comfortable niche." Sneering.

Odrade spoke softly. "Something quite different. You are challenged throughout

your life. You repay the Sisterhood right up to the limits of your abilities."

"Watchdogs!"

"We're always mindful of one another. Some of us in positions of power can be

authoritarian at times, familiar even, but only to a point carefully measured

for the requirements of the moment."

"Never really warm or tender, eh?"

"That's the rule."

"Affection, maybe, but no love?"