ChapterHouse: Dune dc-6 Read online

  Does she really see me or only guess?

  Logno did not have the courage to test it. Poison. I'll get her that way someday. She's cautious but she can be distracted. Although her Sisters might sneer at it, poison was an accepted tool of succession... provided the successor possessed further ways to maintain ascendancy.

  "Logno, those Ixians you spoke with today. What do they say of The Weapon?"

  "They do not understand its function, Dama. I did not tell them what it was."

  "Of course not."

  "Will you suggest again that Weapon and Charge be united?"

  "Are you sneering at me, Logno?"

  "Dama! I would never do such a thing."

  "I hope not. "

  Silence. Logno understood that they both considered the same problem. Only three hundred units of The Weapon survived the disaster. Each could be used only once, provided the Council (which held the Charge) agreed to arm them. Great Honored Matre, controlling The Weapon itself, had only half of that awful power. Weapon without Charge was merely a small black tube that could be held in the hand. With its Charge, it cut a brief swath of bloodless death across the arc of its limited range.

  "The Ones of Many Faces," Great Honored Matre muttered.

  Logno nodded to the darkness where that muttering originated.

  Perhaps she can see me. I do not know what else she salvaged or what the Ixians may have provided her.

  And the Ones of Many Faces, curse them through eternity, had caused the disaster. Them and their Futars! The ease with which all but that handful of The Weapon had been confiscated! Awesome powers. We must arm ourselves well before we return to that battle. Dama is right.

  "That planet - Buzzell," Great Honored Matre said. "Are you sure it's not defended?"

  "We detect no defenses. Smugglers say it is not defended."

  "But it is so rich in Soostones!"

  "Here in the Old Empire, people seldom dare attack the witches."

  "I do not believe there are only a handful of them on that planet! It's a trap of some kind."

  "That is always possible, Dama."

  I do not trust smugglers, Logno. Bond a few more of them and test this thing of Buzzell again. The witches may be weak but I do not think they are stupid."

  "Yes, Dama."

  "Tell the Ixians they will displease us if they cannot duplicate The Weapon."

  "But without the Charge, Dama...

  "We will deal with that when we must. Now, leave."

  Logno heard a hissing "Yessssss!" as she let herself out. Even the darkness of the hallway was welcome after the bedchamber and she hurried toward the light.

  ***

  We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose.

  - Bene Gesserit Coda

  The water images again!

  We're turning this whole damned planet into a desert and I get water images!

  Odrade sat in her workroom, the usual morning clutter around her, and sensed Sea Child floating in the waves, washed by them, carried by them. The waves were the color of blood. Her Sea Child self anticipated bloody times.

  She knew where these images originated: the time before Reverend Mothers ruled her life; childhood in the beautiful home on the Gammu seacoast. Despite immediate worries, she could not prevent a smile. Oysters prepared by Papa. The stew she still preferred.

  What she remembered best of childhood was the sea excursions. Something about being afloat spoke to her most basic self. Lift and fall of waves, the sense of unbounded horizons with strange new places just beyond the curved limits of a watery world, that thrilling edge of danger implicit in the very substance that supported her. All of it combined to assure her she was Sea Child.

  Papa was calmer there, too. And Mama Sibia happier, face turned into the wind, dark hair blowing. A sense of balance radiated from those times, a reassuring message spoken in a language older than Odrade's oldest Other Memory. "This is my place, my medium. I am Sea Child."

  Her personal concept of sanity came from those times. The ability to balance on strange seas. The ability to maintain your deepest self despite unexpected waves.

  Mama Sibia had given Odrade that ability long before the Reverend Mothers came and took away their "hidden Atreides scion." Mama Sibia, only a foster mother, had taught Odrade to love herself.

  In a Bene Gesserit society where any form of love was suspect, this remained Odrade's ultimate secret.

  At root, I am happy with myself. I do not mind being alone. Not that any Reverend Mother was ever truly alone after the Spice Agony flooded her with Other Memories.

  But Mama Sibia and, yes, Papa, too, acting in loco parentis for the Bene Gesserit, had impressed a profound strength upon their charge during those hidden years. The Reverend Mothers had been reduced to amplifying that strength.

  Proctors had tried to root out Odrade's "deep desire for personal affinities," but failed at last, not quite sure they had failed but always suspicious. They had sent her to Al Dhanab finally, a place deliberately maintained as a mimic of the worst in Salusa Secundus, there to be conditioned on a planet of constant testing. A place worse than Dune in some respects: high cliffs and dry gorges, hot winds and frigid winds, too little moisture and too much. The Sisterhood had thought of it as a proving ground for those destined to survive on Dune. But none of this had touched that secret core within Odrade. Sea Child remained intact.

  And it is Sea Child warning me now.

  Was it a prescient warning?

  She had always possessed this bit of talent, this little twitching that told of immediate peril to the Sisterhood. Atreides genes reminding her of their presence. Was it a threat to Chapterhouse? No... the ache she could not touch said it was others in danger. Important, though.

  Lampadas? Her bit of talent could not say.

  The Breeding Mistresses had tried to erase this dangerous prescience from their Atreides line but with limited success. "We dare not risk another Kwisatz Haderach!" They knew of this quirk in their Mother Superior, but Odrade's late predecessor, Taraza, had advised "cautious use of her talent." It had been Taraza's view that Odrade's prescience worked only to warn of dangers to the Bene Gesserit.

  Odrade agreed. She experienced unwanted moments when she glimpsed threats. Glimpses. And lately she dreamed.

  It was a vividly recurring dream, every sense attuned to the immediacy of this thing occurring in her mind. She walked across a chasm on a tightrope and someone (she dared not turn to see who) was coming from behind with an axe to cut the rope. She could feel the rough twists of fiber beneath bare feet. She felt a cold wind blowing, a smell of burning on that wind. And she knew the one with the axe approached!

  Each perilous step required all of her energy. Step! Step! The rope swayed and she stretched her arms out straight on each side, struggling for balance.

  If I fall, the Sisterhood falls!

  The Bene Gesserit would end in the chasm beneath the rope. As with any living thing, the Sisterhood must end sometime. A Reverend Mother dared not deny it.

  But not here. Not falling, the rope severed. We must not let the rope be cut! I must get across the chasm before the axe-wielder comes. "I must! I must!"

  The dream always ended there, her own voice ringing in her ears as she awoke in her sleeping chamber. Chilled. No perspiration. Even in the throes of nightmare, Bene Gesserit restraints did not permit unnecessary excesses.

  Body does not need perspiration? Body does not get perspiration.

  As she sat in her workroom remembering the dream, Odrade felt the depth of reality behind that metaphor of a slender rope: The delicate strand on which I carry the fate of my Sisterhood. Sea Child sensed the approaching nightmare and intruded with images of bloody waters. This was no trivial warning. Ominous. She wanted to stand and shout: "Scatter into the weeds, my chicks! Run! Run!"

  And wouldn't that shock the watchdogs!

  The duties of a Mother Superior required her to put a good face on her tremors and act as though nothing mat
tered except the formal decisions in front of her. Panic must be avoided! Not that any of her immediate decisions were truly trivial in these times. But calm demeanor was required.

  Some of her chicks already were running, gone off into the unknown. Shared lives in Other Memory. The rest of her chicks here on Chapterhouse would know when to run. When we are discovered. Their behavior would be governed then by the necessities of the moment. All that really mattered was their superb training. That was their most reliable preparation.

  Each new Bene Gesserit cell, wherever it finally went, was prepared as was Chapterhouse: total destruction rather than submission. The screaming fire would engorge itself on precious flesh and records. All a captor would find would be useless wreckage: twisted shards peppered with ashes.

  Some Chapterhouse Sisters might escape. But flight at the moment of attack - how futile!

  Key people shared Other Memory anyway. Preparation. Mother Superior avoided it. Reasons of morale!

  Where to run and who might escape, who might be captured? Those were the real questions. What if they captured Sheeana down there at the edge of the new desert waiting for sandworms that might never appear? Sheeana plus the sandworms: a potent religious force Honored Matres might know how to exploit. And what if Honored Matres captured ghola-Idaho or ghola-Teg? There might never again be a hiding place if one of those possibilities occurred.

  What if? What if?

  Angry frustration said: "Should've killed Idaho the minute we got him! We should never have grown ghola-Teg."

  Only her Council members, immediate advisors and some among the watchdogs shared her suspicion. They sat on it with reservations. None of them felt really secure about those two gholas, not even after mining the no-ship, making it vulnerable to the screaming fire.

  In those last hours before his heroic sacrifice, had Teg been able to see the unseeable (including no-ships)? How did he know where to meet us on that desert of Dune?

  And if Teg could do it, the dangerously talented Duncan Idaho with his uncounted generations of accumulated Atreides (and unknown) genes might also stumble upon the ability.

  I might do it myself!

  With sudden shocking insight, Odrade realized for the first time that Tamalane and Bellonda watched their Mother Superior with the same fears that Odrade felt in watching the two gholas.

  Merely knowing it could be done - that a human could be sensitized to detect no-ships and the other forms of that shielding - would have an unbalancing effect on their universe. It would certainly set the Honored Matres on a runaway track. There were uncounted Idaho offspring loose in the universe. He had always complained he was "no damned stud for the Sisterhood," but he had performed for them many times.

  Always thought he was doing it for himself. And maybe he was.

  Any mainline Atreides offspring might have this talent the Council suspected had come to flower in Teg.

  Where did the months and years go? And the days? Another harvest season and the Sisterhood remained in its terrible limbo. Midmorning already, Odrade realized. The sounds and smells of Central made themselves known to her. People out there in the corridor. Chicken and cabbage cooking in the communal kitchen. Everything normal.

  What was normal to someone who dwelt in water images even during these working moments? Sea Child could not forget Gammu, the smells, the breeze-blown substance of ocean weeds, the ozone that made every breath oxygen-rich, and the splendid freedom in those around her so apparent in the way they walked and spoke. Conversation on the sea went deeper in a way she had never plumbed. Even small talk had its subterranean elements there, an oceanic elocution that flowed with the currents beneath them.

  Odrade felt compelled to remember her own body afloat in that childhood sea. She needed to recapture the forces she had known there, take in the strengthening qualities she had learned in more innocent times.

  Face down in salty water, holding her breath as long as she could, she floated in a sea-washed now that cleansed away woes. This was stress management reduced to its essence. A great calmness flooded her.

  I float, therefore I am.

  Sea Child warned and Sea Child restored. Without ever admitting it, she had needed restoration desperately.

  Odrade had looked at her own face mirrored in a workroom window the previous night, shocked by the way age and responsibilities combined with fatigue to suck in her cheeks and turn down the corners of her mouth: the sensual lips thinner, the gentle curves of her face elongated. Only the all-blue eyes blazed with their accustomed intensity and she still was tall and muscular.

  On impulse, Odrade punched up the call symbols and stared at a projection above the table: the no-ship sitting on the ground at the Chapterhouse spacefield, a giant bump of mysterious machinery, separated from Time. Over the years of its semi-dormancy, it had depressed a great sunken area into the landing flat, becoming almost wedged there. It was a great lump, its engines ticking away only enough to keep it hidden from prescient searchers, especially from Guild Navigators who would take a special joy in selling out the Bene Gesserit.

  Why had she called up this image just now?

  Because of the three people confined there - Scytale, the last surviving Tleilaxu Master; Murbella and Duncan Idaho, the sexually bonded pair, held as much by their mutual entrapment as they were by the no-ship.

  Not simple, any of it.

  There seldom were simple explanations for any major Bene Gesserit undertaking. The no-ship and its mortal contents could only be classified as a major effort. Costly. Very costly in energy even in its standby mode.

  The appearance of parsimonious metering to all of that expenditure spoke of energy crisis. One of Bell's concerns. You could hear it in her voice even when she was being her most objective: "Down to the bone and nowhere else to cut!" Every Bene Gesserit knew the watchful eyes of Accounting were on them these days, critical of the Sisterhood's outflowing vitality.

  Bellonda strode into the workroom unannounced with a roll of ridulian crystal records under her left arm. She walked as though she hated the floor, stamping on it as if to say: "There! Take that! And that!" Beating the floor because it was guilty of being underfoot.

  Odrade felt her chest tighten as she saw the look in Bell's eyes. The ridulian records went "Slap!" as Bellonda threw them onto the table.

  "Lampadas!" Bellonda said and there was agony in her voice.

  Odrade had no need to open the roll. Sea Child's bloody water has become reality.

  "Survivors?" Her voice sounded strained.

  "None." Bellonda slumped into the chairdog she kept on her side of Odrade's table.

  Tamalane entered then and sat beside Bellonda. Both looked stricken.

  No survivors.

  Odrade permitted herself a slow shudder that went from her breast to the soles of her feet. She did not care that the others saw such a revealing reaction. This workroom had seen worse behavior from Sisters.

  "Who reported?" Odrade asked.

  Bellonda said, "It came through our CHOAM spies and had the special mark on it. The Rabbi supplied the information, no doubt of it. "

  Odrade did not know how to respond. She glanced at the wide bow window behind her companions, seeing a soft flutter of snowflakes. Yes, this news deservedly went with winter marshaling its forces out there.

  The sisters of Chapterhouse were unhappy about the sudden plunge into winter. Necessities had forced Weather Control to let the temperature drop precipitately. No gradual decline into winter, no kindness to growing things that now must pass through the freezing dormancy. This was three and four degrees colder every night. Get the whole thing over in a week or so and plunge them all into the seemingly interminable chill.

  Cold to match the news about Lampadas.

  One result of this weather shift was fog. She could see it dissipating as the brief snow flurry ended. Very confusing weather. They got the dewpoint next to the air temperature and the fog rolled into the remaining wet spots. It lifted from the ground
in tulle mists that wandered through leafless orchards like a poisonous gas.

  No survivors at all?

  Bellonda shook her head from side to side in answer to Odrade's questioning look.

  Lampadas - a jewel in the Sisterhood's network of planets, home of their most prized school, another lifeless ball of ashes and hardened melt. And the Bashar Alef Burzmali with all of his handpicked defense force. All dead?

  "All dead," Bellonda said.

  Burzmali, favorite student of the old Bashar Teg, gone and nothing gained by it. Lampadas - the marvelous library, the brilliant teachers, the premier students... all gone.

  "Even Lucilla?" Odrade asked. The Reverend Mother Lucilla, vice chancellor of Lampadas, had been instructed to flee at the first sign of trouble, taking with her as many of the doomed as she could store in Other Memory.

  "The spies said all dead," Bellonda insisted.

  It was a chilling signal to surviving Bene Gesserit: "You may be next!"

  How could any human society be anesthetized to such brutality? Odrade wondered. She visualized the news with breakfast at some Honored Matre base: "We've destroyed another Bene Gesserit planet. Ten billion dead, they say. That makes six planets this month, doesn't it? Pass the cream, will you, dear?"

  Almost glassy-eyed with horror, Odrade picked up the report and glanced through it. From the Rabbi, no doubt of that. She put it down gently and looked at her Councillors.

  Bellonda - old, fat and florid, Mentat-Archivist, wearing lenses to read now, uncaring what that revealed about her. Bellonda showed her blunt teeth in a wide grimace that said more than words. She had seen Odrade's reaction to the report. Bell might argue once more for retaliation in kind. That could be expected from someone valued for her natural viciousness. She needed to be thrown back into Mentat mode where she would be more analytical.

  In her own way, Bell is right, Odrade thought. But she won't like what I have in mind. I must be cautious in what I say now. Too soon to reveal my plan.

  "There are circumstances where viciousness can blunt viciousness," Odrade said. "We must consider it carefully."