ChapterHouse: Dune dc-6 Read online

  "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 self-control, 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 rig
ht 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. "