Heretics of Dune (Page 10)
They had been awake and active for almost thirty hours and Teg was glad for the opportunity to sit while Taraza dialed her foodrink installation. It dutifully produced two tall glasses of creamy brown liquid.
Teg recognized the smell as she handed him his glass. It was a quick source of energy, a pick-me-up that the Bene Gesserit seldom shared with outsiders. But Taraza no longer considered him an outsider.
His head tipped back, Teg took a long swallow of the drink, his gaze on the ornate ceiling of Taraza's small parlor. This no-ship was an old-fashioned model, built in the days when more care had been taken with decoration - heavily incised cornices, baroque figures carved in every surface.
The taste of the drink pushed his memory back into childhood, the heavy infusion of melange...
"My mother made this for me whenever I was overly strenuous," he said, looking at the glass in his hand. He already could feel the calming energy flow through his body.
Taraza took her own drink to a chairdog opposite him, a fluffy white bit of animate furniture that fitted itself to her with the ease of long familiarity. For Teg, she had provided a traditional green upholstered chair, but she saw his glance flick across the chairdog and grinned at him.
"Tastes differ, Miles." She sipped her drink and sighed. "My, that was strenuous but it was good work. There were moments when it was right on the edge of getting very nasty."
Teg found himself touched by her relaxation. No pose, no ready-made mask to set them apart and define their separate roles in the Bene Gesserit hierarchy. She was being obviously friendly and not even a hint of seductiveness. So this was just what it seemed to be - as much as that could be said about any encounter with a Reverend Mother.
With quick elation, Teg realized that he had become quite adept at reading Alma Mavis Taraza, even when she adopted one of her masks.
"Your mother taught you more than she was told to teach you," Taraza said. "A wise woman but another heretic. That's all we seem to be breeding nowadays."
"Heretic?" He was caught by resentment.
"That's a private joke in the Sisterhood," Taraza said. "We're supposed to follow a Mother Superior's orders with absolute devotion. And we do, except when we disagree."
Teg smiled and took a deep draught of his drink.
"It's odd," Taraza said, "but while we were in that tight little confrontation I found myself reacting to you as I would to one of my Sisters."
Teg felt the drink warming his stomach. It left a tingling in his nostrils. He placed the empty glass on a side table and spoke while looking at it. "My eldest daughter..."
"That would be Dimela. You should have let us have her, Miles."
"It was not my decision."
"But one word from you..." Taraza shrugged. "Well, that's past. What about Dimela?"
"She thinks I'm often too much like one of you."
"Too much?"
"She is fiercely loyal to me, Mother Superior. She doesn't really understand our relationship and -"
"What is our relationship?"
"You command and I obey."
Taraza looked at him over the lip of her glass. When she put down the glass, she said: "Yes, you've never really been a heretic, Miles. Perhaps... someday..."
He spoke quickly, wanting to divert Taraza from such ideas. "Dimela thinks the long use of melange makes many people become like you."
"Is that so? Isn't it odd, Miles, that a geriatric potion should have so many side effects?"
"I don't find that odd."
"No, of course you wouldn't." She drained her glass and put it aside. "I was addressing the way a significant life extension has produced in some people, you especially, a profound knowledge of human nature."
"We live longer and observe more," he said.
"I don't think it's quite that simple. Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity."
"I've never been able to strike an acceptable balance sheet for the spice," he said, referring to a common Mentat process of data sorting.
Taraza nodded. Obviously, she found the same difficulty. "We of the Sisterhood tend to be more single-track than Mentats," she said. "We have routines to shake ourselves out of it but the condition persists."
"Our ancestors have had this problem for a long time," he said.
"It was different before the spice," she said.
"But they lived such short lives."
"Fifty, one hundred years; that doesn't seem very long to us, but still..."
"Did they compress more into the available time?"
"Oh, they were frenetic at times."
She was giving him observations from her Other Memories, he realized. Not the first time he had shared in such ancient lore. His mother had produced such memories on occasion, but always as a lesson. Was Taraza doing that now? Teaching him something?
"Melange is a many-handed monster," she said.
"Do you sometimes wish we had never found it?"
"The Bene Gesserit would not exist without it."
"Nor the Guild."
"But there would have been no Tyrant, no Muad'dib. The spice gives with one hand and takes with all of its others."
"Which hand contains that which we desire?" he asked. "Isn't that always the question?"
"You're an oddity, you know that, Miles? Mentats so seldom dip into philosophy. I think it's one of your strengths. You are supremely able to doubt."
He shrugged. This turn in the conversation disturbed him.
"You are not amused," she said. "But cling to your doubts anyway. Doubt is necessary to a philosopher."
"So the Zensunni assure us."
"All mystics agree on it, Miles. Never underestimate the power of doubts. Very persuasive. S'tori holds up doubt and surety in a single hand."
Really quite surprised, he asked: "Do Reverend Mothers practice Zensunni rituals?" He had never even suspected this before.
"Just once," she said. "We achieve an exalted form of s'tori, total. It involves every cell."
"The spice agony," he said.
"I was sure your mother told you. Obviously, she never explained the affinity with the Zensunni."
Teg swallowed past a lump in his throat. Fascinating! She gave him a new insight into the Bene Gesserit. This changed his entire concept, including his image of his own mother. They were removed from him into an unattainable place where he could never follow. They might think of him as a comrade on occasion but he could never enter the intimate circle. He could simulate, no more. He would never be like Muad'dib or the Tyrant.
"Prescience," Taraza said.
The word shifted his attention. She had changed the subject but not changed it.
"I was thinking about Muad'dib," he said.
"You think he predicted the future," she said.
"That is the Mentat teaching."
"I hear the doubt in your voice, Miles. Did he predict or did he create? Prescience can be deadly. The people who demand that the oracle predict for them really want to know next year's price on whalefur or something equally mundane. None of them wants an instant-by-instant prediction of his personal life."
"No surprises," Teg said.
"Exactly. If you possessed such fore-knowledge, your life would become an unutterable bore."
"You think Muad'dib life was a bore?"
"And the Tyrant's, too. We think their entire lives were devoted to trying to break out of chains they themselves created."
"But they believed..."
"Remember your philosopher's doubts, Miles. Beware! The mind of the believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe."
Teg sat silently for a moment. He sensed the fatigue that had been driven beyond his immediate awareness by the drink, sensed also the way his thoughts were roiled by the intrusion of new concepts. These were things that he had been taught would weaken a Mentat, yet he felt strengthened by them.
She is teaching me, he thought. There is a lesson here.
As though projected into his mind and outlined there in fire, he found his entire Mentat-attention fixated on the Zensunni admonition that was taught to every beginning student in the Mentat School:
By your belief in granular singularities, you deny all movement - evolutionary or devolutionary. Belief fixes a granular universe and causes that universe to persist. Nothing can be allowed to change because that way your non-moving universe vanishes. But it moves of itself when you do not move. It evolves beyond you and is no longer accessible to you.
"The oddest thing of all," Taraza said, sinking into tune with this mood she had created, "is that the scientists of Ix cannot see how much their own beliefs dominate their universe."
Teg stared at her, silent and receptive.
"Ixian beliefs are perfectly submissive to the choices they make on how they will look at their universe," Taraza said. "Their universe does not act of itself but performs according to the kinds of experiments they choose."
With a start, Teg came out of the memories and awoke to find himself in the Gammu Keep. He still sat in the familiar chair in his workroom. A glance around the room showed nothing moved from where he had put it. Only a few minutes had passed but the room and its contents no longer were alien. He dipped into and out of Mentat mode. Restored.
The smell and taste of the drink Taraza had given him so long ago still tingled on his tongue and in his nostrils. A Mentat blink and he knew he could call up the scene entire once more - the low light of shaded glowglobes, the feeling of the chair beneath him, the sounds of their voices. It was all there for replay, frozen into a time-capsule of isolated memory.
Calling up that old memory created a magical universe where his abilities were amplified beyond his wildest expectations. No atoms existed in that magical universe, only waves and awesome movements all around. He was forced there to discard all barriers built of belief and understanding. This universe was transparent. He could see through it without any interfering screens upon which to project its forms. The magical universe reduced him to a core of active imagination where his own image-making abilities were the only screen upon which any projection might be sensed.
There, I am both the performer and the performed!
The workroom around Teg wavered into and out of his sensory reality. He felt his awareness constricted to its tightest purpose and yet that purpose filled his universe. He was open to infinity.
Taraza did this deliberately! he thought. She has amplified me!
A feeling of awe threatened him. He recognized how his daughter, Odrade, had drawn upon such powers to create the Atreides Manifesto for Taraza. His own Mentat powers were submerged in that greater pattern.
Taraza was demanding a fearful performance from him. The need for such a thing both challenged and terrified him. It could very well mean the end of the Sisterhood.
The basic rule is this: Never support weakness; always support strength.
- The Bene Gesserit Coda
"How is it that you can order the priests around?" Sheeana asked. "This is their place."
Odrade answered casually but picked her words to fit the knowledge she knew Sheeana already possessed: "The priests have Fremen roots. They've always had Reverend Mothers somewhere near. Besides, child, you order them around, too."
"That's different."
Odrade suppressed a smile.
Little more than three hours had passed since her assault force had broken the attack on the temple complex. In that time, Odrade had set up a command center in Sheeana's quarters, carried on the necessary business of assessment and preliminary retaliation, all the while prompting and observing Sheeana.
Simulflow.
Odrade glanced around the room she had chosen as command center. A scrap of Stiros' ripped garments still lay near the wall in front of her. Casualties. The room was an oddly shaped place. No two walls parallel. She sniffed. Still a residual smell of ozone from the snoopers with which her people had assured the privacy of these quarters.
Why the odd shape? The building was ancient, remodeled and added to many times, but that did not explain this room. A pleasantly rough texture of creamy stucco on walls and ceiling. Elaborate spice-fiber hangings flanked the two doors. It was early evening and sunlight filtered by lattice shades stippled the wall opposite the windows. Silver-yellow glowglobes hovered near the ceiling, all tuned to match the sunlight. Muted street sounds came through the ventilators beneath the windows. The soft pattern of orange rugs and gray tiles on the floor spoke of wealth and security but Odrade suddenly did not feel secure.
A tall Reverend Mother came from the adjoining communications room. "Mother Commander," she said, "the messages have been sent to Guild, Ix, and Tleilaxu."
Odrade spoke absently. "Acknowledged."
The messenger returned to her duties.
"What are you doing?" Sheeana asked.
"Studying something."
Odrade pursed her lips in thought. Their guides through the temple complex had brought them along a maze of hallways and stairs, glimpses of courtyards through arches, then into a splendid Ixian suspensor-tube system, which carried them silently to another hallway, more stairs, another curved hallway... finally, into this room.
Once more, Odrade swept her gaze around the room.
"Why are you studying this room?" Sheeana asked.
"Hush, child!"
The room was an irregular polyhedron with the smaller side to the left. About thirty-five meters long, half that at the widest. Many low divans and chairs in various degrees of comfort. Sheeana sat in queenly splendor on a bright yellow chair with wide soft arms. Not a chairdog in the place. Much brown and blue and yellow fabric. Odrade stared at the white lattice of a ventilator above a painting of mountains on the wider end wall. A cool breeze came through the ventilators below the windows and wafted toward the ventilator above the painting.
"This was Hedley's room," Sheeana said.
"Does that annoy him?"
"Don't play word games with me, child! You know it annoys him and that's why you do it."
"Then why did you ask?"
Odrade ignored this while continuing her careful study of the room. The wall opposite the painting stood at an oblique angle to the outer wall. She had it now. Clever! This room had been constructed so that even a whisper here could be heard by someone beyond the high ventilator. No doubt the painting concealed another airway to carry sounds from this room. No snooper, sniffer, or other instrument would detect such an arrangement. Nothing would "beep" at a spying eye or ear. Only the wary senses of someone trained in deception had winkled it out.
A hand signal summoned a waiting acolyte. Odrade's fingers flickered in silent communication: "Find out who is listening beyond that ventilator." She nodded toward the ventilator above the painting. "Let them continue. We must know to whom they report."
"How did you know to come and save me?" Sheeana asked. The child had a lovely voice but it needed training, Odrade thought. There was a steadiness to it, though, that could be shaped into a powerful instrument.
"Answer me!" Sheeana ordered.
The imperious tone startled Odrade, arousing quick anger, which she was forced to suppress. Corrections would have to be made immediately!
"Calm yourself, child," Odrade said. She pitched the command in a precise tenor and saw it take effect.
Again, Sheeana startled her: "That's another kind of Voice. You're trying to calm me. Kipuna told me all about Voice."
Odrade turned squarely facing Sheeana and looked down at her. Sheeana's first grief had passed but there was still anger when she spoke of Kipuna.
"I am busy shaping our response to that attack," Odrade said. "Why do you distract me? I should think you would want them punished."
"What will you do to them? Tell me! What will you do?"
A surprisingly vindictive child, Odrade thought. That would have to be curbed. Hatred was as dangerous an emotion as love. The capacity for hatred was the capacity for its opposite.
Odrade said: "I have sent Guild, Ix, and Tleilaxu the message we always dispatch when we have been annoyed. Three words: 'You will pay.' "
"How will they pay?"
"A proper Bene Gesserit punishment is being fashioned. They will feel the consequences of their behavior."
"But what will you do?"
"In time, you may learn. You may even learn how we design our punishment. For now, there is no need that you know."
A sullen look came over Sheeana's face. She said: "You're not even angry. Annoyed. That's what you said."
"Curb your impatience, child! There are things you do not understand."
The Reverend Mother from the communications room returned, glanced once at Sheeana and spoke to Odrade. "Chapter House acknowledges receipt of your report. They approve your response."
When the Reverend Mother from communications remained standing there, Odrade said: "There is more?"
A flickering glance to Sheeana spoke of the woman's reservations. Odrade held up her right palm, the signal for silent communication.
The Reverend Mother responded, her fingers dancing with unleashed excitement: "Taraza's message - The Tleilaxu are the pivotal element. Guild must be made to pay dearly for its melange. Shut down Rakian supply to them. Throw Guild and Ix together. They will overextend selves in face of crushing competition from the Scattering. Ignore Fish Speakers for now. They fall with Ix. Master of Masters responds to us from Tleilaxu. He goes to Rakis. Trap him."
Odrade smiled softly to acknowledge that she understood. She watched the other woman leave the room. Not only did Chapter House agree with actions taken on Rakis, a suitable Bene Gesserit punishment had been fashioned with fascinating speed. Obviously Taraza and her advisors had anticipated this moment.
Odrade allowed herself a sigh of relief. The message to Chapter House had been terse: an outline account of the attack, the list of the Sisterhood's casualties, identification of the attackers and a confirming note to Taraza that Odrade already had transmitted the required warning to the guilty: "You will pay."
Yes, those fool attackers now knew the hornet's nest had been aroused. That would create fear - an essential part of the punishment.
Sheeana squirmed in her chair. Her attitude said she would now try a new approach. "One of your people said there were Face Dancers." She gestured with her chin toward the roof.
What a vast reservoir of ignorance this child was, Odrade thought. That emptiness would have to be filled. Face Dancers! Odrade thought about the bodies they had examined. The Tleilaxu had finally sent their Face Dancers into action. It was a test of the Bene Gesserit, of course. These new ones were extremely difficult to detect. They still gave off the characteristic smell of their unique pheromones, though. Odrade had sent that datum in her message to Chapter House.
The problem now was to keep the Bene Gesserit knowledge secret. Odrade summoned an acolyte messenger. Indicating the ventilator with a flick of her eyes, Odrade spoke silently with her fingers: "Kill those who listen!"
"You are too interested in Voice, child," Odrade said, speaking down to Sheeana in the chair. "Silence is a most valuable tool for learning."
"But could I learn Voice? I want to learn it."
"I am telling you to be silent and to learn by your silence."
"I command you to teach me Voice!"
Odrade reflected on Kipuna's reports. Sheeana had established effective Voice control over most of those around her. The child had learned it on her own. An intermediate level Voice for a limited audience. She was a natural. Tuek and Cania and the others were frightened by Sheeana. Religious fantasies contributed to that fear, of course, but Sheeana's mastery of Voice pitch and tone displayed an admirable unconscious selectivity.
The indicated response to Sheeana was obvious, Odrade knew. Honesty. It was a most powerful lure and it served more than one purpose.
"I am here to teach you many things," Odrade said, "but I do not do this at your command."
"Everyone obeys me!" Sheeana said.
She's barely into puberty and already at Aristocrat level, Odrade thought. Gods of our own making! What can she become?
Sheeana slipped out of her chair and stood looking up at Odrade with a questioning expression. The child's eyes were on a level with Odrade's shoulders. Sheeana was going to be tall, a commanding presence. If she survived.
"You answer some of my questions but you won't answer others," Sheeana said. "You said you'd been waiting for me but you won't explain. Why won't you obey me?"
"A foolish question, child."
"Why do you keep calling me child?"
"Are you not a child?"
"I menstruate."
"But you're still a child."
"The priests obey me."
"They're afraid of you."
"You aren't?"
"No, I'm not."
"Good! It gets tiresome when people only fear you."
"The priests think you come from God."
"Don't you think that?"
"Why should I? We -" Odrade broke off as an acolyte messenger entered. The acolyte's fingers danced in silent communication: "Four priests listened. They have been killed. All were minions of Tuek."
Odrade waved the messenger away.
"She talks with her fingers," Sheeana said. "How does she do that?"
"You ask too many of the wrong questions, child. And you haven't told me why I should consider you an instrument of God."
"Shaitan spares me. I walk on the desert and when Shaitan comes, I talk to him."
"Why do you call him Shaitan instead of Shai-hulud?"
"Everybody asks that same stupid question!"
"Then give me your stupid answer."
The sullen expression returned to Sheeana's face. "It's because of how we met."
"And how did you meet?"
Sheeana tipped her head to one side and looked up at Odrade for a moment, then: "That's a secret."
"And you know how to keep secrets?"
Sheeana straightened and nodded but Odrade saw uncertainty in the movement. The child knew when she was being led into an impossible position!
"Excellent!" Odrade said. "The keeping of secrets is one of a Reverend Mother's most essential teachings. I'm glad we won't have to bother with that one."
"But I want to learn everything!"
Such petulance in her voice. Very poor emotional control.
"You must teach me everything!" Sheeana insisted.
Time for the whip, Odrade thought. Sheeana had spoken and postured sufficiently that even a fifth-grade acolyte could feel confident of controlling her now.
Using the full power of Voice, Odrade said: "Don't take that tone with me, child! Not if you wish to learn anything!"
Sheeana went rigid. She was more than a minute absorbing what had happened to her and then relaxing. Presently, she smiled, a warm and open expression. "Oh, I'm so glad you came! It's been so boring lately."
Nothing surpasses the complexity of the human mind.
- Leto II: Dar-es-Balat Records
The Gammu night, often quickly foreboding in this latitude, was almost two hours away. Gathering clouds shadowed the Keep. At Lucilla's command, Duncan had returned to the courtyard for an intense session of self-directed practice.
Lucilla observed from the parapet where she had first watched him.
Duncan moved in the tumbling twists of the Bene Gesserit eightfold combat, hurling his body across the grass, rolling, flipping himself from side to side, darting up and then down.
It was a fine display of random dodging, Lucilla thought. She could see no predictable pattern in his movements and the speed was dazzling. He was almost sixteen SY and already coming onto the platform potential of his prana-bindu endowment.
The carefully controlled movements of his training exercises revealed so much! He had responded quickly when she first ordered these evening sessions. The initial step of her instructions from Taraza had been accomplished. The ghola loved her. No doubt of it. She was mother-fixed to him. And it had been accomplished without seriously weakening him, although Teg's anxieties had been aroused.
My shadow is on this ghola but he is not a supplicant nor a dependent follower, she reassured herself. Teg worries about it for no reason.
Just that morning, she had told Teg, "Wherever his strengths dictate, he continues to express himself freely."
Teg should see him right now, she thought. These new practice movements were largely Duncan's own creation.
Lucilla suppressed a gasp of appreciation at a particularly nimble leap, which took Duncan almost to the center of the courtyard. The ghola was developing a nerve-muscle equilibrium that, given time, might be matched to a psychological equilibrium at least equal to Teg's. The cultural impact of such an achievement would be awesome. Look at all those who gave instinctive allegiance to Teg and, through Teg, to the Sisterhood.
We have the Tyrant to thank for much of that, she thought.
Before Leto II, no widespread system of cultural adjustments had ever endured long enough to approach the balance that the Bene Gesserit held as an ideal. It was this equilibrium - "flowing along the blade of a sword" - that fascinated Lucilla. It was why she lent herself so unreservedly to a project whose total design she did not know, but which demanded of her a performance that instinct labeled repugnant.
Duncan is so young!
What the Sisterhood required of her next had been spelled out explicitly by Taraza: the Sexual Imprint. Only that morning, Lucilla had posed naked before her mirror, forming the attitudes and motions of face and body that she knew she would use to obey Taraza's orders. In artificial repose, Lucilla had seen her own face appear like that of a prehistoric love goddess - opulent with flesh and the promise of softness into which an aroused male might hurl himself.
In her education, Lucilla had seen ancient statues from the First Times, little stone figures of human females with wide hips and sagging breasts that assured abundance for a suckling infant. At will, Lucilla could produce a youthful simulation of that ancient form.
In the courtyard below Lucilla, Duncan paused a moment and appeared to be thinking out his next movements. Presently, he nodded to himself, leaped high and twisted in the air, landing like a springbok on one leg, which kicked him sideways into gyrations more akin to dance than to combat.
Lucilla drew her mouth into a tight line of resolution.
Sexual Imprint.
The secret of sex was no secret at all, she thought. The roots were attached to life itself. This explained, of course, why her first command-seduction for the Sisterhood had planted a male face in her memory. The Breeding Mistress had told her to expect this and not be alarmed by it. But Lucilla had realized then that the Sexual Imprint was a two-edged sword. You might learn to flow along the edge of the blade but you could be cut by it. Sometimes, when that male face of her first command-seduction returned unbidden into her mind, Lucilla felt confounded by it. The memory came so frequently at the peak of an intimate moment, forcing her to great efforts of concealment.
"You are strengthened thus," the Breeding Mistresses reassured her.
Still, there were times when she felt that she had trivialized something better left a mystery.
A feeling of sourness at what she must do swept over Lucilla. These evenings when she observed Duncan's training sessions had been her favorite times each day. The lad's muscular development showed such definite progress - moving in the growth of sensitive muscle and nerve links - all of the prana-bindu marvels for which the Sisterhood was so famous. The next step was almost upon her, though, and she no longer could sink into watchful appreciation of her charge.
Miles Teg would come out presently, she knew. Duncan's training would move again into the practice room with its more deadly weapons.
Teg.
Once more, Lucilla wondered about him. She had felt herself more than once attracted to him in a particular way that she recognized immediately. An Imprinter enjoyed some latitude in selecting her own breeding partners, provided she had no prior commitments nor contrary orders. Teg was old but his records suggested he might still be virile. She would not be able to keep the child, of course, but she had learned to deal with that.
Why not? she had asked herself.