Heretics of Dune Read online

  How naive she was, the priests thought. How curiously naive. But she could read and she displayed an intense interest in the Holy Books she found in Tuek's quarters. Her quarters now.

  All was propitiation from the highest to the lowest. Tuek moved into the quarters of his chief assistant and the bumping process moved downward. Fabricators waited upon Sheeana and measured her. The finest stillsuit was fashioned for her. She acquired new robes of priestly gold and white with purple trim.

  People began avoiding historian-locutor Dromind. He took to buttonholing his fellows and expounding the history of the original Siona as though this said something important about the present bearer of the ancient name.

  "Siona was the mate of the Holy Duncan Idaho," Dromind reminded anyone who would listen. "Their descendants are everywhere."

  "Indeed? Pardon me for not listening further but I am really on an urgent errand."

  At first, Tuek was more patient with Dromind. The history was interesting and its lessons obvious. "God has sent us a new Siona," Tuek said. "All should be clear."

  Dromind went away and returned with more tidbits from the past. "The accounts from Dar-es-Balat take on a new meaning now," Dromind told his High Priest. "Should we not make further tests and comparisons of this child?"

  Dromind had braced the High Priest immediately after breakfast. The remains of Tuek's meal still occupied the serving table on the balcony. Through the open window, they could hear stirrings overhead in Sheeana's quarters.

  Tuek put a cautioning finger to his lips and spoke in a hushed voice. "The Holy Child goes of her own choice to the desert." He went to a wall map and pointed to an area southwest of Keen. "Apparently this is an area that interests her or ... I should say, calls her."

  "I am told she makes frequent use of dictionaries," Dromind said. "Surely, that cannot be a--"

  "She is testing us," Tuek said. "Do not be fooled."

  "But Lord Tuek, she asks the most childish questions of Cania and Alhosa."

  "Do you question my judgment, Dromind?"

  Belatedly, Dromind realized he had overstepped the proper bounds. He fell silent but his expression said many more words were compressed within him.

  "God has sent her to weed out some evil that has crept into the ranks of the anointed," Tuek said. "Go! Pray and ask yourself if that evil has lodged itself within you."

  When Dromind had gone, Tuek summoned a trusted aide. "Where is the Holy Child?"

  "She has gone out into the desert, Lord, to commune with her Father."

  "To the southwest?"

  "Yes, Lord."

  "Dromind must be taken far out to the east and left on the sand. Plant several thumpers to make sure he never returns."

  "Dromind, Lord?"

  "Dromind."

  Even after Dromind was translated into the Mouth of God, the priests continued to follow his original injunction. They studied Sheeana.

  Sheeana also studied.

  Gradually, so gradually that she could not identify the point of transition, she recognized her great power over those around her. At first, it was a game, a continual Children's Day with adults jumping to obey each childish whim. But it appeared that no whim was too difficult.

  Did she require a rare fruit for her table?

  The fruit was served to her on a golden dish.

  Did she glimpse a child far below on the teeming streets and require that child as a playmate?

  That child was hustled up to Sheeana's temple quarters. When fear and shock passed, the child might even join in some game, which the priests and priestesses observed intently. Innocent skipping about on the rooftop garden, giggling whispers--all were subjected to intense analysis. Sheeana found the awe of such children a burden. She seldom called the same child back to her, preferring to learn new things from new playmates.

  The priests achieved no consensus about the innocence of such encounters. The playmates were put through fearful interrogation until Sheeana discovered this and raged at her guardians.

  Inevitably, word of Sheeana spread throughout Rakis and off-planet. The Sisterhood's reports accumulated. The years passed in a kind of sublimely autocratic routine--feeding Sheeana's curiosity. It was a curiosity that appeared to have no limits. None of those among the immediate attendants thought of this as education: Sheeana teaching the priests of Rakis and they teaching her. The Bene Gesserit, however, observed this aspect of Sheeana's life at once and watched it closely.

  "She is in good hands. Leave her there until she is ready for us," Taraza ordered. "Keep a defense force on constant alert and see that I get regular reports."

  Not once did Sheeana reveal her true origins nor what Shaitan had done to her family and neighbors. That was a private thing between Shaitan and herself. She thought of her silence as payment for having been spared.

  Some things paled for Sheeana. She made fewer trips into the desert. Curiosity continued but it became obvious that an explanation of Shaitan's behavior toward her might not be found on the open sand. And although she knew there were embassies of other powers on Rakis, the Bene Gesserit spies among her attendants made sure that Sheeana did not express too much interest in the Sisterhood. Soothing answers to dampen such interest were provided and metered out to Sheeana as required.

  The message from Taraza to her observers on Rakis was direct and pointed: "The generations of preparation have become the years of refinement. We will move only at the proper moment. There is no longer any doubt that this child is the one."

  In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history. Show me someone who says, "Something must be done!" and I will show you a head full of vicious intentions that have no other outlet. What we must strive for always! is to find the natural flow and go with it.

  --The Reverend Mother Taraza, Conversational Record, BG File GSXXMAT9

  The overcast sky lifted as the sun of Gammu climbed, picking up the scents of grass and surrounding forest extracted and condensed by the morning dampness.

  Duncan Idaho stood at a Forbidden Window inhaling the smells. This morning Patrin had told him: "You are fifteen years of age. You must consider yourself a young man. You no longer are a child."

  "Is it my birthday?"

  They were in Duncan's sleeping chamber where Patrin had just aroused him with a glass of citrus juice.

  "I do not know your birthday."

  "Do gholas have birthdays?"

  Patrin remained silent. It was forbidden to speak of gholas with the ghola.

  "Schwangyu says you can't answer that question," Duncan said.

  Patrin spoke with obvious embarrassment. "The Bashar wishes me to tell you that your training class will be delayed this morning. He wishes you to do the leg and knee exercises until you are called."

  "I did those yesterday!"

  "I merely convey the Bashar's orders." Patrin took the empty glass and left Duncan alone.

  Duncan dressed quickly. They would expect him for breakfast in the Commissary. Damn them! He did not need their breakfast. What was the Bashar doing? Why couldn't he start the classes on time? Leg and knee exercises! That was just make-work because Teg had some other unexpected duty. Angrily, Duncan took a Forbidden Route to a Forbidden Window. Let the damned guards be punished!

  He found the odors coming through the open window evocative but could not place the memories that lurked at the edges of his awareness. He knew there were memories. Duncan found this frightening but magnetic--like walking along the edge of a cliff or openly confronting Schwangyu with his defiance. He had never walked along the edge of a cliff nor openly confronted Schwangyu with defiance, but he could imagine such things. Just seeing a filmbook holophoto of a cliff-edge path was enough to make his stomach tighten. As for Schwangyu, he often imagined angry disobedience and suffered the same physical reaction.

  Someone else is in my mind, he thought.

  Not just in his mind--in his body. He could sense other experiences as though
he had just awakened, knowing he had dreamed but unable to recall the dream. This dream-stuff called up knowledge that he knew he could not possess.

  Yet he did possess it.

  He could name some of the trees he smelled out there but those names were not in the library's records.

  This Forbidden Window was forbidden because it pierced an outer wall of the Keep and could be opened. It was often open, as now, for ventilation. The window was reached from his room by climbing over a balcony rail and slipping through a storeroom air shaft. He had learned to do this without the slightest disturbance of rail or storeroom or shaft. Quite early, it had been made clear to him that those trained by the Bene Gesserit could read extremely small signs. He could read some of those signs himself, thanks to the teachings of Teg and Lucilla.

  Standing well back in the shadows of the upper hallway, Duncan focused on rolling slopes of forest climbing to rocky pinnacles. He found the forest compelling. The pinnacles beyond it possessed a magical quality. It was easy to imagine that no human had ever touched that land. How good it would be to lose himself there, to be only his own person without worrying that another person dwelled within him. A stranger there.

  With a sigh, Duncan turned away and returned to his room along his secret route. Only when he was back in the safety of his room did he allow himself to say that he had done it once more. No one would be punished for this venture.

  Punishments and pain, which hung like an aura around the places forbidden to him, only made Duncan exercise extreme caution when he broke the rules.

  He did not like to think of the pain Schwangyu would cause him if she discovered him at a Forbidden Window. Even the worst pain, though, would not cause him to cry out, he told himself. He had never cried out even at her nastier tricks. He merely stared back at her, hating her but absorbing her lesson. To him, Schwangyu's lesson was direct: Refine his ability to move unobserved, unseen and unheard, leaving no spoor to betray his passage.

  In his room, Duncan sat on the edge of his cot and contemplated the blank wall in front of him. Once, when he had stared at that wall, an image had formed there--a young woman with light amber hair and sweetly rounded features. She looked out of the wall at him and smiled. Her lips moved without sound. Duncan already had learned lip reading, though, and he read the words clearly.

  "Duncan, my sweet Duncan."

  Was that his mother? he wondered. His real mother?

  Even gholas had real mothers somewhere back there. Lost in the time behind the axlotl tanks there had been a living woman who bore him and... and loved him. Yes, loved him because he was her child. If that face on the wall was his mother, how had her image found its way there? He could not identify the face but he wanted it to be his mother.

  The experience frightened him but fear did not prevent him from wanting to repeat it. Whoever that young woman was, her fleeting presence tantalized him. The stranger within him knew that young woman. He felt sure of this. Sometimes, he wanted to be that stranger only for an instant--long enough to gather up all of those hidden memories--but he feared this desire. He would lose his real self, he thought, if the stranger entered his awareness.

  Would that be like death? he wondered.

  Duncan had seen death before he was six. His guards had repelled intruders and one of the guards was killed. Four intruders died as well. Duncan had watched the five bodies brought into the Keep--flaccid muscles, arms dragging. Some essential thing was gone from them. Nothing remained to call up memories--self--memories or stranger-memories.

  The five were taken somewhere deep within the Keep. He heard a guard say later that the four intruders were loaded with "shere." That was his first encounter with the idea of an Ixian Probe.

  "An Ixian Probe can raid the mind even of a dead person," Geasa explained. "Shere is a drug that protects you from the probe. Your cells will be totally dead before the drug effect is gone."

  Adroit listening told Duncan the four intruders were being probed in other ways as well. These other ways were not explained to him but he suspected this must be something secret to the Bene Gesserit. He thought of it as another hellish trick of the Reverend Mothers. They must animate the dead and extract information from the unwilling flesh. Duncan visualized depersonalized muscles performing at the will of a diabolical observer.

  The observer was always Schwangyu.

  Such images filled Duncan's mind despite every effort by his teachers to dispel "foolishness invented by the ignorant." His teachers said these wild stories were valuable only to create fear of the Bene Gesserit among the uninitiated. Duncan refused to believe that he was of the initiated. Looking at a Reverend Mother he always thought: I'm not one of them!

  Lucilla was most persistent lately. "Religion is a source of energy," she said. "You must recognize this energy. It can be directed for your own purposes."

  Their purposes, not mine, he thought.

  He imagined his own purposes and projected his own images of himself triumphant over the Sisterhood, especially over Schwangyu. Duncan felt that his imaginative projections were a subterranean reality that worked on him from that place where the stranger dwelled. But he learned to nod and give the appearance that he, too, found such religious credulity amusing.

  Lucilla recognized the dichotomy in him. She told Schwangyu: "He thinks mystical forces are to be feared and, if possible, avoided. As long as he persists in this belief he cannot learn to use our most essential knowledge."

  They met for what Schwangyu called "a regular assessment session," just the two of them in Schwangyu's study. The time was shortly after their light supper. The sounds of the Keep around them were those of transition--night patrols beginning, off-duty personnel enjoying one of their brief free-time periods. Schwangyu's study had not been completely insulated from such things, a deliberate contrivance of the Sisterhood's renovators. The trained senses of a Reverend Mother could detect many things from the sounds around her.

  Schwangyu felt more and more at a loss in these "assessment sessions." It was increasingly obvious that Lucilla could not be won over to those opposing Taraza. Lucilla also was immune to a Reverend Mother's manipulative subterfuges. Most damnable of all, Lucilla and Teg between them were imparting highly volatile abilities to the ghola. Dangerous in the extreme. Added to all of her other problems, Schwangyu nurtured a growing respect for Lucilla.

  "He thinks we use occult powers to practice our arts," Lucilla said. "How did he arrive at such a peculiar idea?"

  Schwangyu felt the disadvantage imposed by this question. Lucilla already knew this had been done to weaken the ghola. Lucilla was saying: "Disobedience is a crime against our Sisterhood!"

  "If he wants our knowledge, he will surely get it from you," Schwangyu said. No matter how dangerous, in Schwangyu's view, this was certainly a truth.

  "His desire for knowledge is my best lever," Lucilla said, "but we both know that is not enough." There was no reproof in Lucilla's tone but Schwangyu felt it nevertheless.

  Damn her! She's trying to win me over! Schwangyu thought.

  Several responses entered Schwangyu's mind: "I have not disobeyed my orders." Pah! A disgusting excuse! "The ghola has been treated according to standard Bene Gesserit training practices." Inadequate and untrue. And this ghola was not a standard object of education. There were depths in him that could only be matched by a potential Reverend Mother. And that was the problem!

  "I have made mistakes," Schwangyu said.

  There! That was a double-pronged answer that another Reverend Mother could appreciate.

  "You made no mistake when you damaged him," Lucilla said.

  "But I failed to anticipate that another Reverend Mother might expose the flaws in him," Schwangyu said.

  "He wants our powers only to escape us," Lucilla said. "He's thinking: Someday I'll know as much as they do and then I'll run away."

  When Schwangyu did not respond, Lucilla said: "That was clever. If he runs, we will have to hunt him down and destroy him ourse
lves."

  Schwangyu smiled.

  "I will not make your mistake," Lucilla said. "I tell you openly what I know you would see anyway. I now understand why Taraza sent an Imprinter to one so young."

  Schwangyu's smile vanished. "What are you doing?"

  "I am bonding him to me the way we bond all of our acolytes to their teachers. I am treating him with candor and loyalty as one of our own."

  "But he's male!"

  "So the spice agony will be denied him, but nothing else. He is, I think, responding."

  "And when the time comes for the ultimate stage of imprinting?" Schwangyu asked.

  "Yes, that will be delicate. You think it will destroy him. That, of course, was your plan."

  "Lucilla, the Sisterhood is not unanimous in following Taraza's designs for this ghola. Certainly, you know this."

  It was Schwangyu's most powerful argument and the fact that it had been reserved for this moment said much. The fears that they might produce another Kwisatz Haderach were deep-seated and the dissension in the Bene Gesserit comparably powerful.

  "He is primitive genetic stock and not bred to be a Kwisatz Haderach," Lucilla said.

  "But the Tleilaxu have interfered with his genetic inheritance!"

  "Yes; at our orders. They have sped up his nerve and muscle responses."

  "Is that all they have done?" Schwangyu asked.

  "You've seen the cell studies," Lucilla said.

  "If we could do as much as the Tleilaxu we would not need them," Schwangyu said. "We would have our own axlotl tanks."

  "You think they have hidden something from us," Lucilla said.

  "They had him completely outside our observation for nine months!"

  "I have heard all of these arguments," Lucilla said.

  Schwangyu threw up her hands in a gesture of capitulation. "He's all yours, then, Reverend Mother. And the consequences are on your head. But you will not remove me from this post no matter what you report to Chapter House."

  "Remove you? Certainly not. I don't want your faction sending someone unknown to us."

  "There is a limit to the insults I will take from you," Schwangyu said.

  "And there's a limit to how much treachery Taraza will accept," Lucilla said.