Dune Messiah dc-2 Read online

  Noting how intently the Guildsmen watched this exchange, Paul asked: “Do you understand that you’re a gift?”

  “It was explained to me, my Lord.”

  Paul sat back, hands resting on the arms of the throne.

  What debt do I owe Duncan’s flesh? he wondered. The man died saving my life. But this is not Idaho, this is a ghola. Yet, here were body and mind which had taught Paul to fly a ’thopter as though the wings grew from his own shoulders. Paul knew he could not pick up a sword without leaning on the harsh education Idaho had given him. A ghola. This was flesh full of false impressions, easily misread. Old associations would persist. Duncan Idaho. It wasn’t so much a mask the ghola wore as it was a loose, concealing garment of personality which moved in a way different from whatever the Tleilaxu had hidden here.

  “How might you serve us?” Paul asked.

  “In any way my Lord’s wishes and my capabilities agree.”

  Alia, watching from her vantage point, was touched by the ghola’s air of diffidence. She detected nothing feigned. Something ultimately innocent shone from the new Duncan Idaho. The original had been worldly, devil-may-care. But this flesh had been cleansed of all that. It was a pure surface upon which the Tleilaxu had written … what?

  She sensed the hidden perils in this gift then. This was a Tleilaxu thing. The Tleilaxu displayed a disturbing lack of inhibitions in what they created. Unbridled curiosity might guide their actions. They boasted they could make anything from the proper human raw material—devils or saints. They sold killer-mentats. They’d produced a killer medic, overcoming the Suk inhibitions against the taking of human life to do it. Their wares included willing menials, pliant sex toys for any whim, soldiers, generals, philosophers, even an occasional moralist.

  Paul stirred, looked at Edric. “How has this gift been trained?” he asked.

  “If it please my Lord,” Edric said, “it amused the Tleilaxu to train this ghola as a mentat and philosopher of the Zensunni. Thus, they sought to increase his abilities with the sword.”

  “Did they succeed?”

  “I do not know, my Lord.”

  Paul weighed the answer. Truthsense told him Edric sincerely believed the ghola to be Idaho. But there was more. The waters of Time through which this oracular Steersman moved suggested dangers without revealing them. Hayt. The Tleilaxu name spoke of peril. Paul felt himself tempted to reject the gift. Even as he felt the temptation, he knew he couldn’t choose that way. This flesh made demands on House Atreides—a fact the enemy well knew.

  “Zensunni philosopher,” Paul mused, once more looking at the ghola. “You’ve examined your own role and motives?”

  “I approach my service in an attitude of humility, Sire. I am a cleansed mind washed free of the imperatives from my human past.”

  “Would you prefer we called you Hayt or Duncan Idaho?”

  “My Lord may call me what he wishes, for I am not a name.”

  “But do you enjoy the name Duncan Idaho?”

  “I think that was my name, Sire. It fits within me. Yet … it stirs up curious responses. One’s name, I think, must carry much that’s unpleasant along with the pleasant.”

  “What gives you the most pleasure?” Paul asked.

  Unexpectedly, the ghola laughed, said: “Looking for signs in others which reveal my former self.”

  “Do you see such signs here?”

  “Oh, yes, my Lord. Your man Stilgar there is caught between suspicion and admiration. He was friend to my former self, but this ghola flesh repels him. You, my Lord, admired the man I was … and you trusted him.”

  “Cleansed mind,” Paul said. “How can a cleansed mind put itself in bondage to us?”

  “Bondage, my Lord? The cleansed mind makes decisions in the presence of unknowns and without cause and effect. Is this bondage?”

  Paul scowled. It was a Zensunni saying, cryptic, apt—immersed in a creed which denied objective function in all mental activity. Without cause and effect! Such thoughts shocked the mind. Unknowns? Unknowns lay in every decision, even in the oracular vision.

  “You’d prefer we called you Duncan Idaho?” Paul asked.

  “We live by differences, my Lord. Choose a name for me.”

  “Let your Tleilaxu name stand,” Paul said. “Hayt—there’s a name inspires caution.”

  Hayt bowed, moved back one step.

  And Alia wondered: How did he know the interview was over? I knew it because I know my brother. But there was no sign a stranger could read. Did the Duncan Idaho in him know?

  Paul turned toward the Ambassador, said: “Quarters have been set aside for your embassy. It is our desire to have a private consultation with you at the earliest opportunity. We will send for you. Let us inform you further, before you hear it from an inaccurate source, that a Reverend Mother of the Sisterhood, Gaius Helen Mohiam, has been removed from the heighliner which brought you. It was done at our command. Her presence on your ship will be an item in our talks.”

  A wave of Paul’s left hand dismissed the envoy. “Hayt,” Paul said, “stay here.”

  The Ambassador’s attendants backed away, towing the tank. Edric became orange motion in orange gas—eyes, a mouth, gently waving limbs.

  Paul watched until the last Guildsman was gone, the great doors swinging closed behind them.

  I’ve done it now, Paul thought. I’ve accepted the ghola. The Tleilaxu creation was bait, no doubt of it. Very likely the old hag of a Reverend Mother played the same role. But it was the time of the tarot which he’d forecast in an early vision. The damnable tarot! It muddied the waters of Time until the prescient strained to detect moments but an hour off. Many a fish took the bait and escaped, he reminded himself. And the tarot worked for him as well as against him. What he could not see, others might not detect as well.

  The ghola stood, head cocked to one side, waiting.

  Stilgar moved across the steps, hid the ghola from Paul’s view. In Chakobsa, the hunting language of their sietch days, Stilgar said: “That creature in the tank gives me the shudders, Sire, but this gift! Send it away!”

  In the same tongue, Paul said: “I cannot.”

  “Idaho’s dead,” Stilgar argued. “This isn’t Idaho. Let me take its water for the tribe.”

  “The ghola is my problem, Stil. Your problem is our prisoner. I want the Reverend Mother guarded most carefully by the men I trained to resist the wiles of Voice.”

  “I like this not, Sire.”

  “I’ll be cautious, Stil. See that you are, too.”

  “Very well, Sire.” Stilgar stepped down to the floor of the hall, passed close to Hayt, sniffed him and strode out.

  Evil can be detected by its smell, Paul thought. Stilgar had planted the green and white Atreides banner on a dozen worlds, but remained superstitious Fremen, proof against any sophistication.

  Paul studied the gift.

  “Duncan, Duncan,” he whispered. “What have they done to you?”

  “They gave me life, m’Lord,” Hayt said.

  “But why were you trained and given to us?” Paul asked.

  Hayt pursed his lips, then: “They intend me to destroy you.”

  The statement’s candor shook Paul. But then, how else could a Zensunni-mentat respond? Even in a ghola, a mentat could speak no less than the truth, especially out of Zensunni inner calm. This was a human computer, mind and nervous system fitted to the tasks relegated long ago to hated mechanical devices. To condition him also as a Zensunni meant a double ration of honesty … unless the Tleilaxu had built something even more odd into this flesh.

  Why, for example, the mechanical eyes? Tleilaxu boasted their metal eyes improved on the original. Strange, then, that more Tleilaxu didn’t wear them out of choice.

  Paul glanced up at Alia’s spy hole, longed for her presence and advice, for counsel not clouded by feelings of responsibility and debt.

  Once more, he looked at the ghola. This was no frivolous gift. It gave honest answers to dangerous
questions.

  It makes no difference that I know this is a weapon to be used against me, Paul thought.

  “What should I do to protect myself from you?” Paul asked. It was direct speech, no royal “we,” but a question as he might have put it to the old Duncan Idaho.

  “Send me away, m’Lord.”

  Paul shook his head from side to side. “How are you to destroy me?”

  Hayt looked at the guards, who’d moved closer to Paul after Stilgar’s departure. He turned, cast his gaze around the hall, brought his metal eyes back to bear on Paul, nodded.

  “This is a place where a man draws away from people,” Hayt said. “It speaks of such power that one can contemplate it comfortably only in the remembrance that all things are finite. Did my Lord’s oracular powers plot his course into this place?”

  Paul drummed his fingers against the throne’s arms. The mentat sought data, but the question disturbed him. “I came to this position by strong decisions … not always out of my other … abilities.”

  “Strong decisions,” Hayt said. “These temper a man’s life. One can take the temper from fine metal by heating it and allowing it to cool without quenching.”

  “Do you divert me with Zensunni prattle?” Paul asked.

  “Zensunni has other avenues to explore, Sire, than diversion and display.”

  Paul wet his lips with his tongue, drew in a deep breath, set his own thoughts into the counterbalance poise of the mentat. Negative answers arose around him. It wasn’t expected that he’d go haring after the ghola to the exclusion of other duties. No, that wasn’t it. Why a Zensunni-mentat? Philosophy … words … contemplation … inward searching … He felt the weakness of his data.

  “We need more data,” he muttered.

  “The facts needed by a mentat do not brush off onto one as you might gather pollen on your robe while passing through a field of flowers,” Hayt said. “One chooses his pollen carefully, examines it under powerful amplification.”

  “You must teach me this Zensunni way with rhetoric,” Paul said.

  The metallic eyes glittered at him for a moment, then: “M’ Lord, perhaps that’s what was intended.”

  To blunt my will with words and ideas? Paul wondered.

  “Ideas are most to be feared when they become actions,” Paul said.

  “Send me away, Sire,” Hayt said, and it was Duncan Idaho’s voice full of concern for “the young master.”

  Paul felt trapped by that voice. He couldn’t send that voice away, even when it came from a ghola. “You will stay,” he said, “and we’ll both exercise caution.”

  Hayt bowed in submission.

  Paul glanced up at the spy hole, eyes pleading for Alia to take this gift off his hands and ferret out its secrets. Gholas were ghosts to frighten children. He’d never thought to know one. To know this one, he had to set himself above all compassion … and he wasn’t certain he could do it. Duncan … Duncan … Where was Idaho in this shaped-to-measure flesh? It wasn’t flesh … it was a shroud in fleshly shape! Idaho lay dead forever on the floor of an Arrakeen cavern. His ghost stared out of metal eyes. Two beings stood side by side in this revenant flesh. One was a threat with its force and nature hidden behind unique veils.

  Closing his eyes, Paul allowed old visions to sift through his awareness. He sensed the spirits of love and hate spouting there in a rolling sea from which no rock lifted above the chaos. No place at all from which to survey turmoil.

  Why has no vision shown me this new Duncan Idaho? he asked himself. What concealed Time from an oracle? Other oracles, obviously.

  Paul opened his eyes, asked: “Hayt, do you have the power of prescience?”

  “No, m’Lord.”

  Sincerity spoke in that voice. It was possible the ghola didn’t know he possessed this ability, of course. But that’d hamper his working as a mentat. What was the hidden design?

  Old visions surged around Paul. Would he have to choose the terrible way? Distorted Time hinted at this ghola in that hideous future. Would that way close in upon him no matter what he did?

  Disengage … disengage … disengage …

  The thought tolled in his mind.

  In her position above Paul, Alia sat with chin cupped in left hand, stared down at the ghola. A magnetic attraction about this Hayt reached up to her. Tleilaxu restoration had given him youth, an innocent intensity which called out to her. She’d understood Paul’s unspoken plea. When oracles failed, one turned to real spies and physical powers. She wondered, though, at her own eagerness to accept this challenge. She felt a positive desire to be near this new man, perhaps to touch him.

  He’s a danger to both of us, she thought.

  ***

  Truth suffers from too much analysis.

  —ANCIENT FREMEN SAYING

  “Reverend Mother, I shudder to see you in such circumstances,” Irulan said.

  She stood just inside the cell door, measuring the various capacities of the room in her Bene Gesserit way. It was a three-meter cube carved with cutterays from the veined brown rock beneath Paul’s Keep. For furnishings, it contained one flimsy basket chair occupied now by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, a pallet with a brown cover upon which had been spread a deck of the new Dune Tarot cards, a metered water tap above a reclamation basin, a Fremen privy with moisture seals. It was all sparse, primitive. Yellow light came from anchored and caged glowglobes at the four corners of the ceiling.

  “You’ve sent word to the Lady Jessica?” the Reverend Mother asked.

  “Yes, but I don’t expect her to lift one finger against her firstborn,” Irulan said. She glanced at the cards. They spoke of the powerful turning their backs on supplicants. The card of the Great Worm lay beneath Desolate Sand. Patience was counseled. Did one require the tarot to see this? she asked herself.

  A guard stood outside watching them through a metaglass window in the door. Irulan knew there’d be other monitors on this encounter. She had put in much thought and planning before daring to come here. To have stayed away carried its own perils, though.

  The Reverend Mother had been engaged in prajna meditation interspersed with examinations of the tarot. Despite a feeling that she would never leave Arrakis alive, she had achieved a measure of calm through this. One’s oracular powers might be small, but muddy water was muddy water. And there was always the Litany Against Fear.

  She had yet to assimilate the import of the actions which had precipitated her into this cell. Dark suspicions brooded in her mind (and the tarot hinted at confirmations). Was it possible the Guild had planned this?

  A yellow-robed Qizara, head shaved for a turban, beady eyes of total blue in a bland round face, skin leathered by the wind and sun of Arrakis, had awaited her on the heighliner’s reception bridge. He had looked up from a bulb of spice-coffee being served by an obsequious steward, studied her a moment, put down the coffee bulb.

  “You are the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam?”

  To replay those words in her mind was to bring that moment alive in the memory. Her throat had constricted with an unmanageable spasm of fear. How had one of the Emperor’s minions learned of her presence on the heighliner?

  “It came to our attention that you were aboard,” the Qizara said. “Have you forgotten that you are denied permission to set foot on the holy planet?”

  “I am not on Arrakis,” she said. “I’m a passenger on a Guild heighliner in free space.”

  “There is no such thing as free space, Madame.”

  She read hate mingled with profound suspicion in his tone.

  “Muad’dib rules everywhere,” he said.

  “Arrakis is not my destination,” she insisted.

  “Arrakis is the destination of everyone,” he said. And she feared for a moment that he would launch into a recital of the mystical itinerary which pilgrims followed. (This very ship had carried thousands of them.)

  But the Qizara had pulled a golden amulet from beneath his robe, kissed it, touched it
to his forehead and placed it to his right ear, listened. Presently, he restored the amulet to its hidden place.

  “You are ordered to gather your luggage and accompany me to Arrakis.”

  “But I have business elsewhere!”

  In that moment, she suspected Guild perfidy … or exposure through some transcendant power of the Emperor or his sister. Perhaps the Steersman did not conceal the conspiracy, after all. The abomination, Alia, certainly possessed the abilities of a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. What happened when those powers were coupled with the forces which worked in her brother?

  “At once!” the Qizara snapped.

  Everything in her cried out against setting foot once more on that accursed desert planet. Here was where the Lady Jessica had turned against the Sisterhood. Here was where they’d lost Paul Atreides, the kwisatz haderach they’d sought through long generations of careful breeding.

  “At once,” she agreed.

  “There’s little time,” the Qizara said. “When the Emperor commands, all his subjects obey.”

  So the order had come from Paul!

  She thought of protesting to the heighliner’s Navigator-Commander, but the futility of such a gesture stopped her. What could the Guild do?

  “The Emperor has said I must die if I set foot on Dune,” she said, making a last desperate effort. “You spoke of this yourself. You are condemning me if you take me down there.”

  “Say no more,” the Qizara ordered. “The thing is ordained.”

  That was how they always spoke of Imperial commands, she knew. Ordained! The holy ruler whose eyes could pierce the future had spoken. What must be must be. He had seen it, had He not?

  With the sick feeling that she was caught in a web of her own spinning, she had turned to obey.

  And the web had become a cell which Irulan could visit. She saw that Irulan had aged somewhat since their meeting on Wallach IX. New lines of worry spread from the corners of her eyes. Well … time to see if this Sister of the Bene Gesserit could obey her vows.