Chapterhouse: Dune Page 5

  The crystal had more to impart: "Jews are amused and sometimes dismayed at what they interpret as our copying them. Our breeding records dominated by the female line to control the mating pattern are seen as Jewish. You are only a Jew if your mother was a Jew."

  The crystal came to its conclusion: "The Diaspora will be remembered. Keeping this secret involves our deepest honor."

  Lucilla lifted the hood from her head.

  "You are a very good choice for an extremely touchy assignment on Lampadas," Odrade had said, restoring the crystal to its hiding place.

  That is the past and likely dead. Look where Odrade's "touchy assignment" has brought me!

  From her vantage in the Gammu farmhouse, Lucilla noted a large produce carrier had entered the grounds. There was a bustle of activity below her. Workers came from all sides to meet the big carrier with towbins of vegetables. She smelled the pungent juices from the cut stems of marrows.

  Lucilla did not move from the window. Her host had supplied her with local garments--a long gown of drab gray everwear and a bright blue headscarf to confine her sandy hair. It was important to do nothing calling undue attention to herself. She had seen other women pause to watch the farm work. Her presence here could be taken as curiosity.

  It was a large carrier, its suspensors laboring under the load of produce already piled in its articulated sections. The operator stood in a transparent house at the front, hands on the steering lever, eyes straight ahead. His legs were spread wide and he leaned into the web of sloping supports, touching the power bar with his left hip. He was a large man, face dark and deeply wrinkled, hair laced with gray. His body was an extension of the machinery--guiding ponderous movement. He flicked his gaze up to Lucilla as he passed, then back to the track into the wide loading area defined by buildings below her.

  Built into his machine, she thought. That said something about the way humans were fitted to the things they did. Lucilla sensed a weakening force in this thought. If you fitted yourself too tightly to one thing, other abilities atrophied. We become what we do.

  She pictured herself suddenly as another operator in some great machine, no different from that man in the carrier.

  The big machine trundled past her out of the yard, its operator not sparing her another glance. He had seen her once. Why look twice?

  Her hosts had made a wise choice in this hiding place, she thought. A sparsely populated area with trustworthy workers in the immediate vicinity and little curiosity among the people who passed. Hard work dulled curiosity. She had noted the character of the area when she was brought here. Evening then and people already trudging toward their homes. You could measure the urban density of an area by when work stopped. Early to bed and you were in a loosely-packed region. Night activity said people remained restless, twitchy with inner awareness of others active and vibrating too near.

  What has brought me to this introspective state?

  Early in the Sisterhood's first retreat, before the worst onslaughts of the Honored Matres, Lucilla had experienced difficulty coming to grips with belief that "someone out there is hunting us with intent to kill."

  Pogrom! That was what the Rabbi had called it before going off that morning "to see what I can do for you."

  She knew the Rabbi had chosen his word from long and bitter memory, but not since her first experience of Gammu before this pogrom had Lucilla felt such confinement to circumstances she could not control.

  I was a fugitive then, too.

  The Sisterhood's present situation bore similarities to what they had suffered under the Tyrant, except that the God Emperor obviously (in retrospect) never intended to exterminate the Bene Gesserit, only to rule them. And he certainly ruled!

  Where is that damned Rabbi?

  He was a large, intense man with old-fashioned spectacles. A broad face browned by much sunlight. Few wrinkles despite the age she could read in his voice and movements. The spectacles focused attention on deeply set brown eyes that watched her with peculiar intensity.

  "Honored Matres," he had said (right here in this bare-walled upper room) when she explained her predicament. "Oh, my! That is difficult."

  Lucilla had expected that response and, what was more, she could see he knew it.

  "There is a Guild Navigator on Gammu helping the search for you," he said. "It is one of the Edrics, very powerful, I am told."

  "I have Siona blood. He cannot see me."

  "Nor me nor any of my people and for the same reason. We Jews adjust to many necessities, you know."

  "This Edric is a gesture," she said. "He can do little."

  "But they have brought him. I'm afraid there is no way we can get you safely off the planet."

  "Then what can we do?"

  "We will see. My people are not entirely helpless, you understand?"

  She recognized sincerity and concern for her. He spoke quietly of resisting the sexual blandishments of Honored Matres, "doing it unobtrusively so as not to arouse them."

  "I will go whisper in a few ears," he said.

  She felt oddly restored by this. There often was something coldly remote and cruel about falling into the hands of the medical professions. She reassured herself with the knowledge that Suks were conditioned to be alert to your needs, compassionate and supportive. (All of those things that can fall by the wayside in emergencies.)

  She bent her efforts to restoring calm, focusing on the personal mantra she had gained in solo death education.

  If I am to die, I must pass along a transcendental lesson. I must leave with serenity.

  That helped but still she felt a trembling. The Rabbi had been gone too long. Something was wrong.

  Was I right to trust him?

  Despite a growing sense of doom, Lucilla forced herself to practice Bene Gesserit naivete as she reviewed her encounter with the Rabbi. Her Proctors had called this "the innocence that goes naturally with inexperience, a condition often confused with ignorance." Into this naivete all things flowed. It was close to Mentat performance. Information entered without prejudgment. "You are a mirror upon which the universe is reflected. That reflection is all you experience. Images bounce from your senses. Hypotheses arise. Important even when wrong. Here is the exceptional case where more than one wrong can produce dependable decisions."

  "We are your willing servants," the Rabbi had said.

  That was guaranteed to alert a Reverend Mother.

  The explanations of Odrade's crystal felt suddenly inadequate. It's almost always profit. She accepted this as cynical but from vast experience. Attempts to weed it out of human behavior always broke up on the rocks of application. Socializing and communistic systems only changed the counters that measured profits. Enormous managerial bureaucracies--the counter was power.

  Lucilla warned herself that the manifestations were always the same. Look at this Rabbi's extensive farm! Retirement retreat for a Suk? She had seen something of what lay behind the establishment: servants, richer quarters. And there must be more. No matter the system it was always the same: the best foods, beautiful lovers, unrestricted travel, magnificent holiday accommodations.

  It gets very tiresome when you've seen it as often as we have.

  She knew her mind was jittering but felt powerless to prevent it. Survival. The very bottom of the demand system is always survival. And I threaten the survival of the Rabbi and his people.

  He had fawned upon her. Always beware of those who fawn upon us, nuzzling up to all of that power we're supposed to have. How flattering to find great mobs of servants waiting and anxious to do our bidding! How utterly debilitating.

  The mistake of Honored Matres.

  What is delaying the Rabbi?

  Was he seeing how much he could get for the Reverend Mother Lucilla?

  A door slammed below her, shaking the floor under her feet. She heard hurried footsteps on a stairway. How primitive these people were. Stairways! Lucilla turned as the door opened. The Rabbi entered bringing a rich smell of melange.
He stood by the door assessing her mood.

  "Forgive my tardiness, dear lady. I was summoned for questioning by Edric, the Guild Navigator."

  That explained the smell of spice. Navigators were forever bathed in the orange gas of melange, their features often fogged by the vapors. Lucilla could visualize the Navigator's tiny v of a mouth and the ugly flap of nose. Mouth and nose appeared small on a Navigator's gigantic face with its pulsing temples. She knew how threatened the Rabbi must have felt listening to the singsong ululations of the Navigator's voice with its simultaneous mechtranslation into impersonal Galach.

  "What did he want?"

  "You."

  "Does he..."

  "He does not know for sure but I am certain he suspects us. However, he suspects everybody."

  "Did they follow you?"

  "Not necessary. They can find me any time they want."

  "What shall we do?" She knew she spoke too fast, much too loud.

  "Dear lady..." He came three steps closer and she saw the perspiration on his forehead and nose. Fear. She could smell it.

  "Well, what is it?"

  "The economic view behind the activities of Honored Matres--we find them quite interesting."

  His words crystallized her fears. I knew it! He's selling me out!

  "As you Reverend Mothers know very well, there are always gaps in economic systems."

  "Yes?" Profoundly wary.

  "Incomplete suppression of trade in any commodity always increases the profits of the tradesmen, especially the profits of the senior distributors." His voice was warningly hesitant. "That is the fallacy of thinking you can control unwanted narcotics by stopping them at your borders."

  What was he trying to tell her? His words described elementary facts known even to acolytes. Increased profits were always used to buy safe paths past border guards, often by buying the guards themselves.

  Has he bought servants of the Honoted Matres? Surely, he doesn't believe he can do that safely.

  She waited while he composed his thoughts, obviously forming a presentation he believed most likely to gain her acceptance.

  Why did he point her attention toward border guards? That certainly was what he had done. Guards always had a ready rationalization for betraying their superiors, of course. "If I don't, someone else will."

  She dared to hope.

  The Rabbi cleared his throat. It was apparent he had found the words he wanted and had placed them in order.

  "I do not believe there is any way to get you off Gammu alive."

  She had not expected such a blunt condemnation. "But the..."

  "The information you carry, that is a different matter," he said.

  So that was behind all of the focusing on borders and guards!

  "You don't understand, Rabbi. My information is not just a few words and some warnings." She tapped a finger against her forehead. "In here are many precious lives, all of those irreplaceable experiences, learning so vital that--"

  "Ahhh, but I do understand, dear lady. Our problem is that you do not understand."

  Always these references to understanding!

  "It is your honor upon which I depend at this moment," he said.

  Ahhhh, the legendary honesty and trustworthiness of the Bene Gesserit when we have given our word!

  "You know I will die rather than betray you," she said.

  He spread his hands wide in a rather helpless gesture. "I am fully confident of that, dear lady. The question is not one of betrayal but of something we have never before revealed to your Sisterhood."

  "What are you trying to tell me?" Quite peremptory, almost with Voice (which she had been warned not to try on these Jews).

  "I must exact a promise from you. I must have your word that you will not turn against us because of what I am about to reveal. You must promise to accept my solution to our dilemma."

  "Sight unseen?"

  "Only because I ask it of you and assure you that we honor our commitment to your Sisterhood."

  She glared at him, trying to see through this barrier he had erected between them. His surface reactions could be read but not the mysterious thing beneath his unexpected behavior.

  The Rabbi waited for this fearsome woman to reach her decision. Reverend Mothers always made him uneasy. He knew what her decision must be and pitied her. He saw that she could read the pity in his expression. They knew so much and so little. Their powers were manifest. And their knowledge of Secret Israel so perilous!

  We owe them this debt, though. She is not of the Chosen, but a debt is a debt. Honor is honor. Truth is truth.

  The Bene Gesserit had preserved Secret Israel in many hours of need. And a pogrom was something his people knew without lengthy explanations. Pogrom was embedded in the psyche of Secret Israel. And thanks to the Unspeakable, the chosen people would never forget. No more than they could forgive.

  Memory kept fresh in daily ritual (with periodic emphasis in communal sharings) cast a glowing halo on what the Rabbi knew he must do. And this poor woman! She, too, was trapped by memories and circumstances.

  Into the cauldron! Both of us!

  "You have my word," Lucilla said.

  The Rabbi returned to the room's only door and opened it. An older woman in a long brown gown stood there. She stepped in at the Rabbi's beckoning gesture. Hair the color of old driftwood neatly bound in a bun at the back of her head. Face pinched in and wrinkled, dark as a dried almond. The eyes, though! Total blue! And that steely hardness within them...

  "This is Rebecca, one of our people," the Rabbi said. "As I am sure you can see, she has done a dangerous thing."

  "The Agony," Lucilla whispered.

  "She did it long ago and she serves us well. Now, she will serve you."

  Lucilla had to be certain. "Can you Share?"

  "I have never done it, lady, but I know it." As Rebecca spoke, she approached Lucilla and stopped when they were almost touching.

  They leaned toward each other until their foreheads made contact. Their hands went out and gripped the offered shoulders.

  As their minds locked, Lucilla forced a projective thought: "This must get to my Sisters!"

  "I promise, dear lady."

  There could be no deception in this total mixing of minds, this ultimate candor powered by imminent and certain death or the poisonous melange essence that ancient Fremen had rightly called "the little death." Lucilla accepted Rebecca's promise. This wild Reverend Mother of the Jews committed her life to the assurance. Something else! Lucilla gasped as she saw it. The Rabbi intended to sell her to the Honored Matres. The driver of the produce carrier had been one of their agents come to confirm that there was indeed a woman of Lucilla's description at the farmhouse.

  Rebecca's candor gave Lucilla no escape: "It is the only way we can save ourselves and maintain our credibility."

  So that was why the Rabbi had made her think of guards and power brokers! Clever, clever. And I accept it as he knew I would.

  You cannot manipulate a marionette with only one string.

  --The Zensunni Whip

  The Reverend Mother Sheeana stood at her sculpting stand, a gray-clawed shaper covering each hand like exotic gloves. The black sensiplaz on the stand had been taking form under her hands for almost an hour. She felt herself close to the creation that sought realization, surging from a wild place within her. The intensity of the creative force made her skin tremble and she wondered that passersby in the hall to her right did not sense it. The north window of her workroom admitted gray light behind her and the western window glowed orange with a desert sunset.

  Prester, Sheeana's senior assistant here at the Desert Watch Station, had paused in the doorway a few minutes ago but the entire station complement knew better than to interrupt Sheeana at this work.

  Stepping back, Sheeana brushed a strand of sun-streaked brown hair from her forehead with the back of a hand. The black plaz stood in front of her like a challenge, its curves and planes almost fitted to the form
she sensed within her.

  I come here to create when my fears are greatest, she thought.

  This thought dampened the creative surge and she redoubled her efforts to complete the sculpture. Her shaper-clad hands dipped and swooped over the plaz and black shape followed each intrusion like a wave driven by an insane wind.

  The light from the north window faded and the automatics compensated with a yellow-gray glow from the ceiling edges but it was not the same. It was not the same!

  Sheeana stepped back from her work. Close ... but not close enough. She could almost touch the form within her and feel it striving for birth. But the plaz was not right. One sweeping stroke of her right hand reduced it to a black blob on the stand.

  Damn!

  She stripped off the shapers and dropped them to the shelf beside the sculpting stand. The horizon out the western window still carried a strip of orange. Fading fast the way she felt the fading of her creative surge.