Heretics of Dune (Page 28)

"Ahhh, you are a bright little manikin," she said. "How does one allow for anything? It is not logical."

She sounded, Waff thought, like one of the ancient leaders of the Butlerian Jihad, which had tried to rid humankind of mechanical minds. This Honored Matre was strangely out of date.

"Our ancestors looked for an answer with computers," he ventured. Let her try that!

"You already know that computers lack infinite storage capacity," she said.

Again, her words disconcerted him. Could she actually read minds? Was this a form of mind-printing? What the Tleilaxu did with Face Dancers and gholas, others might do as well. He centered his awareness and concentrated on Ixians, on their evil machines. Powindah machines!

The Honored Matre swept her gaze around the room. "Are we wrong to trust the Ixians?" she asked.

Waff held his breath.

"I don’t think you fully trust them," she said. "Come, come, little man. I offer you my good will."

Belatedly, Waff began to suspect that she was trying to be friendly and candid with him. She certainly had put aside her earlier pose of angry superiority. Waff’s informants from the Lost Ones said the Honored Matres made sexual decisions much in the manner of the Bene Gesserit. Was she trying to be seductive? But she clearly understood and had exposed the weakness of logic.

It was very confusing!

"We are talking in circles," he said.

"Quite the contrary. Circles enclose. Circles limit. Humankind no longer is limited by the space in which to grow."

There she went again! He spoke past a dry tongue: "It is said that what you cannot control you must accept."

She leaned forward, the orange eyes intent on his face. "Do you accept the possibility of a final disaster for the Bene Tleilax?"

"If that were the case I would not be here."

"When logic fails, another tool must be used."

Waff grinned. "That sounds logical."

"Don’t mock me! How dare you!"

Waff lifted his hands defensively and assumed a placating tone: "What tool would the Honored Matre suggest?"

"Energy!"

Her answer surprised him. "Energy? In what form and how much?"

"You demand logical answers," she said.

With a feeling of sadness, Waff realized that she was not, after all Zensunni. The Honored Matre only played word games on the fringes of non-logic, circling it, but her tool was logic.

"Rot at the core spreads outward," he said.

It was as though she had not heard his testing statement. "There is untapped energy in the depths of any human we deign to touch," she said. She extended a skeletal finger to within a few millimeters of his nose.

Waff pulled back into his chair until she dropped her arm. He said: "Is that not what the Bene Gesserit said before producing their Kwisatz Haderach?"

"They lost control of themselves and of him," she sneered.

Again, Waff thought, she employed logic in thinking of the non-logical. How much she had told him in these little lapses. He could glimpse the probable history of these Honored Matres. One of the natural Reverend Mothers from the Fremen of Rakis had gone out in the Scattering. Diverse people had fled on the no-ships during and immediately after the Famine Times. A no-ship had seeded the wild witch and her concepts somewhere. That seed had returned in the form of this orange-eyed huntress.

Once more she hurled Voice at him, demanding: "What have you wrought with this ghola?"

This time, Waff was prepared and shrugged it off. This Honored Matre would have to be deflected or, if possible, slain. He had learned much from her but there was no way of telling how much she had learned from him with her unguessed talents.

They are sexual monsters, his informants had said. They enslave men by the powers of sex.

"How little you know the joys I could give you," she said. Her voice coiled like a whip around him. How tempting! How seductive!

Waff spoke defensively: "Tell me why you -"

"I need tell you nothing!"

"Then you did not come to bargain." He spoke sadly. The no-ships had, indeed, seeded those other universes with rot. Waff sensed the weight of necessity on his shoulders. What if he could not slay her?

"How dare you keep suggesting a bargain with an Honored Matre?" she demanded. "Know you that we set the price!"

"I do not know your ways, Honored Matre," Waff said. "But I sense in your words that I have offended."

"Apology accepted."

No apology intended! He stared at her blandly. Many things could be deduced from her performance. Out of his millennial experiences, Waff reviewed what he had learned here. This female from the Scattering came to him for an essential piece of information. Therefore, she had no other source. He sensed desperation in her. Well masked but definitely there. She needed confirmation or refutation of something she feared.

How like a predatory bird she was, sitting there with her claw hands so lightly on the arms of her chair! Rot at the core spreads outward. He had said it and she had not heard. Clearly, atomic humankind continued to explode on its Scatterings of Scatterings. The people represented by this Honored Matre had not found a way to trace the no-ships. That was it, of course. She hunted the no-ships just as the witches of the Bene Gesserit did.

"You seek the way to nullify a no-ship’s invisibility," he said.

The statement obviously rocked her. She had not expected this from the elflike manikin seated in front of her. He saw fear, then anger, then resolution pass across her features before she resumed her predatory mask. She knew, though. She knew he had seen.