Chapterhouse: Dune Read online

  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 reponse 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."

  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 hun
dred 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. 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 Atriedes 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 axewielder 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 mattered 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 momen
t 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.