Chapterhouse: Dune Read online

  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 vour young ones to worship the witch, Sheeana?" Great d Matre asked.

  "Why should 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 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 were 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 fo
r 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: "Wind-brakes?" spelling it.