Heretics of Dune

Frank Herbert

April 1984

When I was writing Dune

. . . there was no room in my mind for concerns about the book's success or

failure. I was concerned only with the writing. Six years of research had

preceded the day I sat down to put the story together, and the interweaving of

the many plot layers I had planned required a degree of concentration I had

never before experienced.

It was to be a story exploring the myth of the Messiah.

It was to produce another view of a human-occupied planet as an energy machine.

It was to penetrate the interlocked workings of politics and economics.

It was to be an examination of absolute prediction and its pitfalls.

It was to have an awareness drug in it and tell what could happen through

dependence on such a substance.

Potable water was to be an analog for oil and for water itself, a substance

whose supply diminishes each day.

It was to be an ecological novel, then, with many overtones, as well as a story

about people and their human concerns with human values, and I had to monitor

each of these levels at every stage in the book.

There wasn't room in my head to think about much else.

Following the first publication, reports from the publishers were slow and, as

it turned out, inaccurate. The critics had panned it. More than twelve

publishers had turned it down before publication. There was no advertising.

Something was happening out there, though.

For two years, I was swamped with bookstore and reader complaints that they

could not get the book. The Whole Earth Catalog praised it. I kept getting

these telephone calls from people asking me if I were starting a cult.

The answer: "God no!"

What I'm describing is the slow realization of success. By the time the first

three Dune books were completed, there was little doubt that this was a popular

work -- one of the most popular in history, I am told, with some ten million

copies sold worldwide. Now the most common question people ask is: "What does

this success mean to you?"

It surprises me. I didn't expect failure either. It was a work and I did it.

Parts of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were written before Dune was

completed. They fleshed out more in the writing, but the essential story

remained intact. I was a writer and I was writing. The success meant I could

spend more time writing.

Looking back on it, I realize I did the right thing instinctively. You don't

write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If

you're really doing it, that's all you're doing: writing.

There's an unwritten compact between you and the reader. If someone enters a

bookstore and sets down hard earned money (energy) for your book, you owe that

person some entertainment and as much more as you can give.

That was really my intention all along.

Frank Herbert

Most discipline is hidden discipline, designed not to liberate but to limit. Do

not ask Why? Be cautious with How? Why? leads inexorably to paradox. How?

traps you in a universe of cause and effect. Both deny the infinite.

-The Apocrypha of Arrakis

"Taraza told you, did she not, that we have gone through eleven of these Duncan

Idaho gholas? This one is the twelfth."

The old Reverend Mother Schwangyu spoke with deliberate bitterness as she looked

down from the third-story parapet at the lone child playing on the enclosed

lawn. The planet Gammu's bright midday sunlight bounced off the white courtyard

walls filling the area beneath them with brilliance as though a spotlight had

been directed onto the young ghola.

Gone through! the Reverend Mother Lucilla thought. She allowed herself a short

nod, thinking how coldly impersonal were Schwangyu's manner and choice of words.

We have used up our supply; send us more!

The child on the lawn appeared to be about twelve standard years of age, but

appearance could be deceptive with a ghola not yet awakened to his original

memories. The child took that moment to look up at the watchers above him. He

was a sturdy figure with a direct gaze that focused intently from beneath a

black cap of karakul hair. The yellow sunlight of early spring cast a small

shadow at his feet. His skin was darkly tanned but a slight movement of his

body shifted his blue singlesuit, revealing pale skin at the left shoulder.

"Not only are these gholas costly but they are supremely dangerous to us,"

Schwangyu said. Her voice came out flat and emotionless, all the more powerful

because of that. It was the voice of a Reverend Mother Instructor speaking down

to an acolyte and it emphasized for Lucilla that Schwangyu was one of those who

protested openly against the ghola project.

Taraza had warned: "She will try to win you over."

"Eleven failures are enough," Schwangyu said.

Lucilla glanced at Schwangyu's wrinkled features, thinking suddenly: Someday I

may be old and wizened, too. And perhaps I will be a power in the Bene Gesserit

as well.

Schwangyu was a small woman with many age marks earned in the Sisterhood's

affairs. Lucilla knew from her own

assignment-studies that Schwangyu's conventional black robe concealed a skinny

figure that few other than her acolyte dressers and the males bred to her had

ever seen. Schwangyu's mouth was wide, the lower lip constricted by the age

lines that fanned into a jutting chin. Her manner tended to a curt abruptness

that the uninitiated often interpreted as anger. The commander of the Gammu

Keep was one who kept herself to herself more than most Reverend Mothers.

Once more, Lucilla wished she knew the entire scope of the ghola project.

Taraza had drawn the dividing line clearly enough, though: "Schwangyu is not to

be trusted where the safety of the ghola is concerned."

"We think the Tleilaxu themselves killed most of the previous eleven," Schwangyu

said. "That in itself should tell us something."

Matching Schwangyu's manner, Lucilla adopted a quiet attitude of almost

emotionless waiting. Her manner said: "I may be much younger than you,

Schwangyu, but I, too, am a full Reverend Mother." She could feel Schwangyu's

gaze.

Schwangyu had seen the holos of this Lucilla but the woman in the flesh was more

disconcerting. An Imprinter of the best training, no doubt of it. Blue-in-blue

eyes uncorrected by any lens gave Lucilla a piercing expression that went with

her long oval face. With the hood of her black aba robe thrown back as it was

now, brown hair was revealed, drawn into a tight barette and then cascading down

her back. Not even the stiffest robe could completely hide Lucilla's ample

breasts. She was from a genetic line famous for its motherly nature and she

already had borne three children for the Sisterhood, two by the same sire. Yes

-- a brown-haired charmer with full breasts and a motherly disposition.

"You say very little," Schwangyu said. "This tells me that Taraza has warned

you against me."

"Do you have reason to believe assassins will try to kill this twelfth ghola?"

Lucilla asked.

"They already have tried."

Strange how the word "heresy" came to mind when thinking of Schwangyu, Lucilla

thought. Could there be heresy among the Reverend Mothers? The religious

overtones of the word seemed out of place in a Bene Gesserit context. How could

there be heretical movements among people who held a profoundly manipulative

attitude toward all things religious?

Lucilla shifted her attention down to the ghola, who took this moment to perform

a series of cartwheels that brought him around full circle until he once more

stood looking up at the two observers on the parapet.

"How prettily he performs!" Schwangyu sneered. The old voice did not completely

mask an underlying violence.

Lucilla glanced at Schwangyu. Heresy. Dissidence was not the proper word.

Opposition did not cover what could be sensed in the older woman. This was

something that could shatter the Bene Gesserit. Revolt against Taraza, against

the Reverend Mother Superior? Unthinkable! Mother Superiors were cast in the

mold of monarch. Once Taraza had accepted counsel and advice and then made her

decision, the Sisters were committed to obedience.

"This is no time to be creating new problems!" Schwangyu said.

Her meaning was clear. People from the Scattering were coming back and the

intent of some among those Lost Ones threatened the Sisterhood. Honored Matres!

How like "Reverend Mothers" the words sounded.

Lucilla ventured an exploratory sally: "So you think we should be concentrating

on the problem of those Honored Matres from the Scattering?"

"Concentrating? Hah! They do not have our powers. They do not show good

sense. And they do not have mastery of melange! That is what they want from

us, our spice knowledge."

"Perhaps," Lucilla agreed. She was not willing to concede this on the scanty

evidence.

"Mother Superior Taraza has taken leave of her senses to dally with this ghola

thing now," Schwangyu said.

Lucilla remained silent. The ghola project definitely had touched an old nerve

among the Sisters. The possibility, even remote, that they might arouse another

Kwisatz Haderach sent shudders of angry fear through the ranks. To meddle with

the worm-bound remnants of the Tyrant! That was dangerous in the extreme.

"We should never take that ghola to Rakis," Schwangyu muttered. "Let sleeping

worms lie."

Lucilla gave her attention once more to the ghola-child. He had turned his back

on the high parapet with its two Reverend Mothers, but something about his

posture said he knew they discussed him and he awaited their response.

"You doubtless realize that you have been called in while he is yet too young,"

Schwangyu said.

"I have never heard of the deep imprinting on one that young," Lucilla agreed.

She allowed something softly self-mocking in her tone, a thing she knew

Schwangyu would hear and misinterpret. The management of procreation and all of

its attendant necessities, that was the Bene Gesserit ultimate specialty. Use

love but avoid it, Schwangyu would be thinking now. The Sisterhood's analysts

knew the roots of love. They had examined this quite early in their development

but had never dared breed it out of those they influenced. Tolerate love but

guard against it, that was the rule. Know that it lay deep within the human

genetic makeup, a safety net to insure continuation of the species. You used it

where necessary, imprinting selected individuals (sometimes upon each other) for

the Sisterhood's purposes, knowing then that such individuals would be linked by

powerful bonding lines not readily available to the common awareness. Others

might observe such links and plot the consequences but the linked ones would

dance to unconscious music.

"I was not suggesting that it's a mistake to imprint him," Schwangyu said,

misreading Lucilla's silence.

"We do what we are ordered to do," Lucilla chided. Let Schwangyu make of that

what she would.

"Then you do not object to taking the ghola to Rakis," Schwangyu said. "I

wonder if you would continue such unquestioning obedience if you knew the full

story?"

Lucilla inhaled a deep breath. Was the entire design for the Duncan Idaho

gholas to be shared with her now?

"There is a female child named Sheeana Brugh on Rakis," Schwangyu said. "She

can control the giant worms."

Lucilla concealed her alertness. Giant worms. Not Shai-hulud. Not Shaitan.

Giant worms. The sandrider predicted by the Tyrant had appeared at last!

"I do not make idle chatter," Schwangyu said when Lucilla continued silent.

Indeed not, Lucilla thought. And you call a thing by its descriptive label, not

by the name of its mystical import. Giant worms. And you're really thinking

about the Tyrant, Leto II, whose endless dream is carried as a pearl of

awareness in each of those worms. Or so we are led to believe.

Schwangyu nodded toward the child on the lawn below them. "Do you think their

ghola will be able to influence the girl who controls the worms?"

We're peeling away the skin at last, Lucilla thought. She said: "I have no

need for the answer to such a question."

"You are a cautious one," Schwangyu said.

Lucilla arched her back and stretched. Cautious? Yes, indeed! Taraza had

warned her: "Where Schwangyu is concerned, you must act with extreme caution

but with speed. We have a very narrow window of time within which we can

succeed."

Succeed at what? Lucilla wondered. She glanced sideways at Schwangyu. "I

don't see how the Tleilaxu could succeed in killing eleven of these gholas. How

could they get through our defenses?"

"We have the Bashar now," Schwangyu said. "Perhaps he can prevent disaster."

Her tone said she did not believe this.

Mother Superior Taraza had said: "You are the Imprinter, Lucilla. When you get

to Gammu you will recognize some of the pattern. But for your task you have no

need for the full design."

"Think of the cost!" Schwangyu said, glaring down at the ghola, who now

squatted, pulling at tufts of grass.

Cost had nothing to do with it, Lucilla knew. The open admission of failure was

much more important. The Sisterhood could not reveal its fallibility. But the

fact that an Imprinter had been summoned early -- that was vital. Taraza had

known the Imprinter would see this and recognize part of the pattern.

Schwangyu gestured with one bony hand at the child, who had returned to his

solitary play, running and tumbling on the grass.

"Politics," Schwangyu said.

No doubt Sisterhood politics lay at the core of Schwangyu's heresy, Lucilla

thought. The delicacy of the internal argument could be deduced from the fact

that Schwangyu had been put in charge of the Keep here on Gammu. Those who

opposed Taraza refused to sit on the sidelines.

Schwangyu turned and looked squarely at Lucilla. Enough had been said. Enough

had been heard and screened through minds trained in Bene Gesserit awareness.

The Chapter House had chosen this Lucilla with great care.

Lucilla felt the older woman's careful examination but refused to let this touch

that innermost sense of purpose upon which every Reverend Mother could rely in

times of stress. Here. Get her look fully upon me. Lucilla turned and set her

mouth in a soft smile, passing her gaze across the rooftop opposite them.

A uniformed man armed with a heavy-duty lasgun appeared there, looked once at

the two Reverend Mothers and then focused on the child below them.

"Who is that?" Lucilla asked

"Patrin, the Bashar's most trusted aide. Says he's only the Bashar's batman but

you'd have to be blind and a fool to believe that. "

Lucilla examined the man across from them with care. So that was Patrin. A

native of Gammu, Taraza had said. Chosen for this task by the Bashar himself.

Thin and blond, much too old now to be soldiering, but then the Bashar had been

called back from retirement and had insisted Patrin must share this duty.

Schwangyu noted the way Lucilla shifted her attention from Patrin to the ghola

with real concern. Yes, if the Bashar had been called back to guard this Keep,

then the ghola was in extreme peril.

Lucilla started in sudden surprise. "Why . . . he's . . ."

"Miles Teg's orders," Schwangyu said, naming the Bashar. "All of the ghola's

play is training play. Muscles are to be prepared for the day when he is

restored to his original self."

"But that's no simple exercise he's doing down there," Lucilla said. She felt

her own muscles respond sympathetically to the remembered training.

"We hold back only the Sisterhood's arcana from this ghola," Schwangyu said.

"Almost anything else in our storehouse of knowledge can be his." Her tone said

she found this extremely objectionable.

"Surely, no one believes this ghola could become another Kwisatz Haderach,"

Lucilla objected.

Schwangyu merely shrugged.

Lucilla held herself quite still, thinking. Was it possible the ghola could be

transformed into a male version of a Reverend Mother? Could this Duncan Idaho

learn to look inward where no Reverend Mother dared?

Schwangyu began to speak, her voice almost a growling mutter: "The design of

this project . . . they have a dangerous plan. They could make the same mistake

. . ." She broke off.

They, Lucilla thought. Their ghola.

"I would give anything to know for sure the position of Ix and the Fish Speakers

in this," Lucilla said.

"Fish Speakers!" Schwangyu shook her head at the very thought of the remnant

female army that had once served only the Tyrant. "They believe in truth and

justice."

Lucilla overcame a sudden tightness in her throat. Schwangyu had all but

declared open opposition. Yet, she commanded here. The political rule was a

simple one: Those who opposed the project must monitor it that they might abort

it at the first sign of trouble. But that was a genuine Duncan Idaho ghola down

there on the lawn. Cell comparisons and Truthsayers had confirmed it.

Taraza had said: "You are to teach him love in all of its forms."

"He's so young," Lucilla said, keeping her attention on the ghola.

"Young, yes," Schwangyu said. "So, for now, I presume you will awaken his

childish responses to maternal affection. Later . . ." Schwangyu shrugged.

Lucilla betrayed no emotional reaction. A Bene Gesserit obeyed. I am an

Imprinter. So . . . Taraza's orders and the Imprinter's specialized training

defined a particular course of events.

To Schwangyu, Lucilla said: "There is someone who looks like me and speaks with

my voice. I am Imprinting for her. May I ask who that is?"

"No."

Lucilla held her silence. She had not expected revelation but it had been

remarked more than once that she bore a striking resemblance to Senior Security

Mother Darwi Odrade. "A young Odrade." Lucilla had heard this on several

occasions. Both Lucilla and Odrade were, of course, in the Atreides line with a

strong backbreeding from Siona descendants. The Fish Speakers had no monopoly

on those genes! But the Other Memories of a Reverend Mother, even with their

linear selectivity and confinement to the female side, provided important clues

to the broad shape of the ghola project. Lucilla, who had come to depend on her

experiences of the Jessica persona buried some five thousand years back in the

Sisterhood's genetic manipulations, felt a deep sense of dread from that source

now. There was a familiar pattern here. It gave off such an intense feeling of

doom that Lucilla fell automatically into the Litany Against Fear as she had

been taught it in her first introduction to the Sisterhood's rites:

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that

brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over

me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see

its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

Calm returned to Lucilla.

Schwangyu, sensing some of this, allowed her guard to drop slightly. Lucilla

was no dullard, no special Reverend Mother with an empty title and barely

sufficient background to function without embarrassing the Sisterhood. Lucilla

was the real thing and some reactions could not be hidden from her, not even

reactions of another Reverend Mother. Very well, let her know the full extent

of the opposition to this foolish, this dangerous project!

"I do not think their ghola will survive to see Rakis," Schwangyu said.

Lucilla let this pass. "Tell me about his friends," she said.

"He has no friends; only teachers."

"When will I meet them?" She kept her gaze on the opposite parapet where Patrin

leaned idly-against a low pillar, his heavy lasgun at the ready. Lucilla

realized with an abrupt shock that Patrin was watching her. Patrin was a

message from the Bashar! Schwangyu obviously saw and understood. We guard him!

"I presume it's Miles Teg you're so anxious to meet," Schwangyu said.

"Among others."

"Don't you want to make contact with the ghola first?"

"I've already made contact with him." Lucilla nodded toward the enclosed yard

where the child once more stood almost motionless and looking up at her. "He's

a thoughtful one."

"I've only the reports on the others," Schwangyu said, "but I suspect this is

the most thoughtful one of the series."

Lucilla suppressed an involuntary shudder at the readiness for violent

opposition in Schwangyu's words and attitude. There was not one hint that the

child below them shared a common humanity.

While Lucilla was thinking this, clouds covered the sun as they often did here

at this hour. A cold wind blew in over the Keep's walls, swirling around the

courtyard. The child turned away and picked up the speed of his exercises,

getting his warmth from increased activity.

"Where does he go to be alone?" Lucilla asked.

"Mostly to his room. He has tried a few dangerous escapades, but we have

discouraged this."

"He must hate us very much."

"I'm sure of it."

"I will have to deal with that directly."

"Surely, an Imprinter has no doubts about her ability to overcome hate."

"I was thinking of Geasa." Lucilla sent a knowing look at Schwangyu. "I find

it astonishing that you let Geasa make such a mistake."

"I don't interfere with the normal progress of the ghola's instructions. If one

of his teachers develops a real affection for him, that is not my problem."

"An attractive child," Lucilla said.

They stood a bit longer watching the Duncan Idaho ghola at his training-play.

Both Reverend Mothers thought briefly of Geasa, one of the first teachers

brought here for the ghola project. Schwangyu's attitude was plain: Geasa was

a providential failure. Lucilla thought only: Schwangyu and Geasa complicated

my task. Neither woman gave even a passing moment to the way these thoughts

reaffirmed their loyalties.

As she watched the child in the courtyard, Lucilla began to have a new

appreciation of what the Tyrant God Emperor had actually achieved. Leto II had

employed this ghola-type through uncounted lifetimes -- some thirty-five hundred

years of them, one after another. And the God Emperor Leto II had been no

ordinary force of nature. He had been the biggest juggernaut in human history,

rolling over everything: over social systems, over natural and unnatural

hatreds, over governmental forms, over rituals (both taboo and mandatory), over

religions casual and religions intense. The crushing weight of the Tyrant's

passage had left nothing unmarked, not even the Bene Gesserit.

Leto II had called it "The Golden Path" and this Duncan Idaho-type ghola below

her now had figured prominently in that awesome passage. Lucilla had studied

the Bene Gesserit accounts, probably the best in the universe. Even today on

most of the old Imperial Planets, newly married couples still scattered dollops

of water east and west, mouthing the local version of "Let Thy blessings flow

back to us from this offering, O God of Infinite Power and Infinite Mercy."

Once, it had been the task of Fish Speakers and their tame priesthood to enforce

such obeisance. But the thing had developed its own momentum, becoming a

pervasive compulsion. Even the most doubting of believers said: "Well, it can

do no harm." It was an accomplishment that the finest religious engineers of

the Bene Gesserit Missionaria Protectiva admired with frustrated awe. The

Tyrant had surpassed the Bene Gesserit best. And fifteen hundred years since

the Tyrant's death, the Sisterhood remained powerless to unlock the central knot

of that fearsome accomplishment.

"Who has charge of the child's religious training?" Lucilla asked.

"No one," Schwangyu said. "Why bother? If he is reawakened to his original

memories, he will have his own ideas. We will deal with those if we ever have

to."

The child below them completed his allotted training time. Without another look

up at the watchers on the parapet, he left the enclosed yard and entered a wide

doorway on the left. Patrin, too, abandoned his guard position without glancing

at the two Reverend Mothers.

"Don't be fooled by Teg's people," Schwangyu said. "They have eyes in the backs

of their heads. Teg's birth-mother, you know, was one of us. He is teaching

that ghola things better never shared!"

Explosions are also compressions of time. Observable changes in the natural

universe all are explosive to some degree and from some point of view; otherwise

you would not notice them. Smooth Continuity of change, if slowed sufficiently,

goes without notice by observers whose time/attention span is too short. Thus,

I tell you, I have seen changes you would never have marked.

-Leto II

The woman standing in Chapter House Planet's morning light across the table from

the Reverend Mother Superior Alma Mavis Taraza was tall and supple. The long

aba robe that encased her in shimmering black from shoulders to floor did not

completely conceal the grace with which her body expressed every movement.

Taraza leaned forward in her chairdog and scanned the Records Relay projecting

its condensed Bene Gesserit glyphs above the tabletop for her eyes only.

"Darwi Odrade," the display identified the standing woman, and then came the

essential biography, which Taraza already knew in detail. The display served

several purposes -- it provided a secure reminder for the Mother Superior, it

allowed an occasional delay for thought while she appeared to scan the records,

and it was a final argument should something negative arise from this interview.

Odrade had borne nineteen children for the Bene Gesserit, Taraza observed as the

information scrolled past her eyes. Each child by a different father. Not much

unusual about that, but even the most searching gaze could see that this

essential service to the Sisterhood had not grossened Odrade's flesh. Her

features conveyed a natural hauteur in the long nose and the complementary

angular cheeks. Every feature focused downward to a narrow chin: Her mouth,

though, was full and promised a passion that she was careful to bridle.

We can always depend on the Atreides genes, Taraza thought. A window curtain

fluttered behind Odrade and she glanced back at it. They were in Taraza's

morning room, a small and elegantly furnished space decorated in shades of

green. Only the stark white of Taraza's chairdog separated her from the

background. The room's bow windows looked eastward onto garden and lawn with

faraway snowy mountains of Chapter House Planet as backdrop.

Without looking up, Taraza said: "I was glad when both you and Lucilla accepted

the assignment. It makes my task much easier."

"I would like to have met this Lucilla," Odrade said, looking down at the top of

Taraza's head. Odrade's voice came out a soft contralto.

Taraza cleared her throat. "No need. Lucilla is one of our finest Imprinters.

Each of you, of course, received the identical liberal conditioning to prepare

you for this."

There was something almost insulting in Taraza's casual tone and only the habits

of long association put down Odrade's immediate resentment. It was partly that

word "liberal," she realized. Atreides ancestors rose up in rebellion at the

word. It was as though her accumulated female memories lashed out at the

unconscious assumptions and unexamined prejudices behind the concept.

"Only liberals really think. Only liberals are intellectual. Only liberals

understand the needs of their fellows."

How much viciousness lay concealed in that word! Odrade thought. How much

secret ego demanding to feel superior.

Odrade reminded herself that Taraza, despite the casually insulting tone, had

used the term only in its catholic sense: Lucilla's generalized education had

been carefully matched to that of Odrade.

Taraza leaned back into a more comfortable position but still kept her attention

on the display in front of her. The light from the eastern windows fell

directly on her face, leaving shadows beneath nose and chin. A small woman just

a bit older than Odrade, Taraza retained much of the beauty that had made her a

most reliable breeder with difficult sires. Her face was a long oval with soft

curved cheeks. She wore her black hair drawn back tightly from a high forehead

with a pronounced peak. Taraza's mouth opened minimally when she spoke: superb

control of movement. An observer's attention tended to focus on her eyes: that

compelling blue-in-blue. The total effect was of a suave facial mask from which

little escaped to betray her true emotions.

Odrade recognized this present pose in the Mother Superior. Taraza would mutter

to herself presently. Indeed, right on cue, Taraza muttered to herself.

The Mother Superior was thinking while she followed the biographical display

with great attention. Many matters occupied her attention.

This was a reassuring thought to Odrade. Taraza did not believe there was any

such thing as a beneficent power guarding humankind. The Missionaria Protectiva

and the intentions of the Sisterhood counted for everything in Taraza's

universe. Whatever served those intentions, even the machinations of the longdead

Tyrant, could be judged good. All else was evil. Alien intrusions from

the Scattering -- especially those returning descendants who called themselves

"Honored Matres" -- were not to be trusted. Taraza's own people, even those

Reverend Mothers who opposed her in Council, were the ultimate Bene Gesserit

resource, the only thing that could be trusted.

Still without looking up, Taraza said: "Do you know that when you compare the

millennia preceding the Tyrant with those after his death, the decrease in major

conflicts is phenomenal. Since the Tyrant, the number of such conflicts has

dropped to less than two percent of what it was before."

"As far as we know," Odrade said.

Taraza's gaze flicked upward and then down. "What?"

"We have no way of telling how many wars have been fought outside our ken. Have

you statistics from the people of the Scattering?"

"Of course not!" `

"Leto tamed us is what you're saying," Odrade said.

"If you care to put it that way." Taraza inserted a marker in something she saw

on her display.

"Shouldn't some of the credit go to our beloved Bashar Miles Teg?" Odrade

asked. "Or to his talented predecessors?"

"We chose those people," Taraza said.

"I don't see the pertinence of this martial discussion," Odrade said. "What

does it have to do with our present problem?"

"There are some who think we may revert to the pre-Tyrant condition with a very

nasty bang."

"Oh?" Odrade pursed her lips.

"Several groups among our returning Lost Ones are selling arms to anyone who

wants to or can buy."

"Specifics?" Odrade asked.

"Sophisticated arms are flooding onto Gammu and there can be little doubt the

Tleilaxu are stockpiling some of the nastier weapons."

Taraza leaned back and rubbed her temples. She spoke in a low, almost musing

voice. "We think we make decisions of the greatest moment and out of the very

highest principles."

Odrade had seen this before, too. She said: "Does the Mother Superior doubt

the rightness of the Bene Gesserit?"

"Doubt? Oh, no. But I do experience frustration. We work all of our lives for

these highly refined goals and in the end, what do we find? We find that many

of the things to which we have dedicated our lives came from petty decisions.

They can be traced to desires for personal comfort or convenience and had

nothing at all to do with our high ideals. What really was at stake was some

worldly working agreement that satisfied the needs of those who could make the

decisions."

"I've heard you call that political necessity," Odrade said.

Taraza spoke with tight control while returning her attention to the display in

front of her. "If we become institutionalized in our judgments, that's a sure

way to extinguish the Bene Gesserit."

"You will not find petty decisions in my bio," Odrade said.

"I look for sources of weakness, for flaws."

"You won't find those, either."

Taraza concealed a smile. She recognized this egocentric remark: Odrade's way

of needling the Mother Superior. Odrade was very good at seeming to be

impatient while actually suspending herself in a timeless flow of patience.

When Taraza did not rise to the bait, Odrade resumed her calm waiting -- easy

breaths, the mind steady. Patience came without thinking of it. The Sisterhood

had taught her long ago how to divide past and present into simultaneous

flowings. While observing her immediate surroundings, she could pick up bits

and pieces of her past and live through them as though they moved across a

screen superimposed over the present.

Memory work, Odrade thought. Necessary things to haul out and lay to rest.

Removing the barriers. When all else palled, there was still her tangled

childhood.

There had been a time when Odrade lived as most children lived: in a house with

a man and woman who, if not her parents, certainly acted in loco parentis. All

of the other children she knew then lived in similar situations. They had papas

and mamas. Sometimes only papa worked away from home. Sometimes only mama went

out to her labors. In Odrade's case, the woman remained at home and no creche

nurse guarded the child in the working hours. Much later, Odrade learned that

her birth-mother had given a large sum of money to provide this for the infant

female hidden in plain sight that way.

"She hid you with us because she loved you," the woman explained when Odrade was

old enough to understand. "That is why you must never reveal that we are not

your real parents."

Love had nothing to do with it, Odrade learned later. Reverend Mothers did not

act from such mundane motives. And Odrade's birth-mother had been a Bene

Gesserit Sister.

All of this was revealed to Odrade according to the original plan. Her name:

Odrade. Darwi was what she had always been called when the caller was not being

endearing or angry. Young friends naturally shortened it to Dar.

Everything, however, did not go according to the original plan. Odrade recalled

a narrow bed in a room brightened by paintings of animals and fantasy landscapes

on the pastel blue walls. White curtains fluttered at the window in the soft

breezes of spring and summer. Odrade remembered jumping on the narrow bed -- a

marvelously happy game: up, down, up, down. Much laughter. Arms caught her in

mid leap and hugged her close. They were a man's arms: a round face with a

small mustache that tickled her into giggles. The bed thumped the wall when she

jumped and the wall revealed indentations from this movement.

Odrade played over this memory now, reluctant to discard it into the well of

rationality. Marks on a wall. Marks of laughter and joy. How small they were

to represent so much.

Odd how she had been thinking more and more about papa recently. All of the

memories were not happy. There had been times when he had been sad-angry,

warning mama not to become "too involved." He had a face that reflected many

frustrations. His voice barked when he was in his angry mood. Mama moved

softly then, her eyes full of worry. Odrade sensed the worry and the fear and

resented the man. The woman knew best how to deal with him. She kissed the

nape of his neck, stroked his cheek and whispered into his ear.

These ancient "natural" emotions had engaged a Bene Gesserit analyst-proctor in

much work with Odrade before they were exorcised. But even now there was

residual detritus to pick up and discard. Even now, Odrade knew that all of it

was not gone.

Seeing the way Taraza studied the biographical record with such care, Odrade

wondered if that was the flaw the Mother Superior saw.

Surely they know by now that I can deal with the emotions of those early times.

It was all so long ago. Still, she had to admit that the memory of the man and

woman lay within her, bonded with such force that it might never be erased

completely. Especially mama.

The Reverend Mother in extremis who had borne Odrade had put her in that hiding

place on Gammu for reasons Odrade now understood quite well. Odrade harbored no

resentments. It had been necessary for the survival of them both. Problems

arose from the fact that the foster mother gave Odrade that thing which most

mothers give their children, that thing which the Sisterhood so distrusted --

love.

When the Reverend Mothers came, the foster mother had not fought the removal of

her child. Two Reverend Mothers came with a contingent of male and female

proctors. Afterward Odrade was a long time understanding the significance of

that wrenching moment. The woman had known in her heart that the day of parting

would come. Only a matter of time. Still, as the days became years -- almost

six standards of years -- the woman had dared to hope.

Then the Reverend Mothers came with their burly attendants. They had merely

been waiting until it was safe, until they were sure no hunters knew this was a

Bene Gesserit-planned Atreides scion.

Odrade saw a great deal of money passed to the foster mother. The woman threw

the money on the floor. But no voice was raised in objection. The adults in

the scene knew where the power lay.

Calling up those compressed emotions, Odrade could still see the woman take

herself to a straight-backed chair beside the window onto the street, there to

hug herself and rock back and forth, back and forth. Not a sound from her.

The Reverend Mothers used Voice and their considerable wiles plus the smoke of

drugging herbs and their overpowering presence to lure Odrade into their waiting

groundcar.

"It will be just for a little while. Your real mother sent us."

Odrade sensed the lies but curiosity compelled. My real mother!

Her last view of the woman who had been her only known female parent was of that

figure at the window rocking back and forth, a look of misery on her face, arms

wrapped around herself.

Later, when Odrade spoke of returning to the woman, that memory-vision was

incorporated into an essential Bene Gesserit lesson.

"Love leads to misery. Love is a very ancient force, which served its purpose

in its day but no longer is essential for the survival of the species. Remember

that woman's mistake, the pain."

Until well into her teens, Odrade adjusted by daydreaming. She would really

return after she was a full Reverend Mother. She would go back and find that

loving woman, find her even though she had no names except "mama" and "Sibia."

Odrade recalled the laughter of adult friends who had called the woman "Sibia."

Mama Sibia.

The Sisters, however, detected the daydreams and searched out their source.

That, too, was incorporated into a lesson.

"Daydreaming is the first awakening of what we call simulflow. It is an

essential tool of rational thought. With it you can clear the mind for better

thinking."

Simulflow.

Odrade focused on Taraza at the morning room table. Childhood trauma must be

placed carefully into a reconstructed memory-place. All of that had been far

away on Gammu, the planet that the people of Dan had rebuilt after the Famine

Times and the Scattering. The people of Dan -- Caladan in those days. Odrade

took a firm grip on rational thought, using the stance of the Other Memories

that had flooded into her awareness during the spice agony when she had really

become a full Reverend Mother.

Simulflow . . . the filter of consciousness . . . Other Memories.

What powerful tools the Sisterhood had given her. What dangerous tools. All of

those other lives lay there just beyond the curtain of awareness, tools of

survival, not a way to satisfy casual curiosity.

Taraza spoke, translating from the material that scrolled past her eyes: "You

dig too much in your Other Memories. That drains away energies better

conserved."

The Mother Superior's blue-in-blue eyes sent a piercing stare upward at Odrade.

"You sometimes go right to the edge of fleshly tolerance. That can lead to your

premature death."

"I am careful with the spice, Mother."

"And well you should be! A body can take only so much melange, only so much

prowling in its past!"

"Have you found my flaw?" Odrade asked.

"Gammu!" One word but an entire harangue.

Odrade knew. The unavoidable trauma of those lost years on Gammu. They were a

distraction that had to be rooted out and made rationally acceptable.

"But I am sent to Rakis," Odrade said.

"And see that you remember the aphorisms of moderation. Remember who you are!"

Once more, Taraza bent to her display.

I am Odrade, Odrade thought.

In the Bene Gesserit schools where first names tended to slip away, roll call

was by last name. Friends and acquaintances picked up the habit of using the

roll-call name. They learned early that sharing secret or private names was an

ancient device for ensnaring a person in affections.

Taraza, three classes ahead of Odrade, had been assigned to "bring the younger

girl along," a deliberate association by watchful teachers.

"Bringing along" meant a certain amount of lording it over the younger but also

incorporated essentials better taught by someone closer to peer relationship.

Taraza, with access to the private records of her trainee, started calling the

younger girl "Dar." Odrade responded by calling Taraza "Tar." The two names

acquired a certain glue -- Dar and Tar. Even after Reverend Mothers overheard

and reprimanded them, they occasionally lapsed into error if only for the

amusement.

Odrade, looking down at Taraza now, said: "Dar and Tar."

A smile twitched the edges of Taraza's mouth.

"What is it in my records that you don't already know several times over?"

Odrade asked.

Taraza sat back and waited for the chairdog to adjust itself to the new

position. She rested her clasped hands on the tabletop and looked up at the

younger woman.

Not much younger, really, Taraza thought.

Since school, though, Taraza had thought of Odrade as completely removed into a

younger age group, creating a gap no passage of years could close.

"Care at the beginning, Dar," Taraza said.

"This project is well past its beginning," Odrade said.

"But your part in it starts now. And we are launching ourselves into such a

beginning as has never before been attempted."

"Am I now to learn the entire design for this ghola?"

"No."

That was it. All the evidence of high-level dispute and the "need to know" cast

away with a single word. But Odrade understood. There was an organizational

rubric laid down by the original Bene Gesserit Chapter House, which had endured

with only minor changes for millennia. Bene Gesserit divisions were cut by hard

vertical and horizontal barriers, divided into isolated groups that converged to

a single command only here at the top. Duties (for which read "assigned roles")

were conducted within separated cells. Active participants within a cell did

not know their contemporaries within other parallel cells.

But I know that the Reverend Mother Lucilla is in a parallel cell, Odrade

thought. It's the logical answer.

She recognized the necessity. It was an ancient design copied from secret

revolutionary societies. The Bene Gesserit had always seen themselves as

permanent revolutionaries. It was a revolution that had been dampened only in

the time of the Tyrant, Leto II.

Dampened, but not diverted or stopped, Odrade reminded herself.

"In what you're about to do," Taraza said, "tell me if you sense any immediate

threat to the Sisterhood."

It was one of Taraza's peculiar demands, which Odrade had learned to answer out

of wordless instinct, which then could be formed into words. Quickly, she said:

"If we fail to act, that is worse."

"We reasoned that there would be danger," Taraza said. She spoke in a dry,

remote voice. Taraza did not like calling up this talent in Odrade. The

younger woman possessed a prescient instinct for detecting threats to the

Sisterhood. It came from the wild influence in her genetic line, of course --

the Atreides with their dangerous talents. There was a special mark on Odrade's

breeding file: "Careful examination of all offspring." Two of those offspring

had been quietly put to death.

I should not have awakened Odrade's talent now, not even for a moment, Taraza

thought. But sometimes temptation was very great.

Taraza sealed the projector into her tabletop and looked at the blank surface

while speaking. "Even if you find a perfect sire, you are not to breed without

our permission while you are away from us."

"The mistake of my natural mother," Odrade said.

"The mistake of your natural mother was to be recognized while she was

breeding!"

Odrade had heard this before. There was that thing about the Atreides line that

required the most careful monitoring by the breeding mistresses. The wild

talent, of course. She knew about the wild talent, that genetic force which had

produced the Kwisatz Haderach and the Tyrant. What did the breeding mistresses

seek now, though? Was their approach mostly negative? No more dangerous

births! She had never seen any of her babies after they were born, not

necessarily a curious thing for the Sisterhood. And she never saw any of the

records in her own genetic file. Here, too, the Sisterhood operated with

careful separation of powers.

And those earlier prohibitions on my Other Memories!

She had found the blank spaces in her memories and opened them. It was probable

that only Taraza and perhaps two other councillors (Bellonda, most likely, and

one other older Reverend Mother) shared the more sensitive access to such

breeding information.

Had Taraza and the other really sworn to die before revealing privileged

information to an outsider? There was, after all, a precise ritual of

succession should a key Reverend Mother die while away from her Sisters and with

no chance to pass along her encapsulated lives. The ritual had been called into

play many times during the reign of the Tyrant. A terrible period! Knowing

that the revolutionary cells of the Sisterhood were transparent to him!

Monster! She knew that her sisters had never deluded themselves that Leto II

refrained from destroying the Bene Gesserit out of some deep-seated loyalty to

his grandmother, the Lady Jessica.

Are you there, Jessica?

Odrade felt the stirring far within. The failure of one Reverend Mother: "She

allowed herself to fall in love!" Such a small thing but how great the

consequences. Thirty-five hundred years of tyranny!

The Golden Path. Infinite? What of the lost megatrillions gone into the

Scattering? What threat was posed by those Lost Ones returning now?

As though she read Odrade's mind, which sometimes she appeared to do, Taraza

said: "The Scattered ones are out there . . . just waiting to pounce."

Odrade had heard the arguments: Danger on the one hand and on the other,

something magnetically attractive. So many magnificent unknowns. The

Sisterhood with its talents honed by melange over the millennia -- what might

they not do with such untapped resources of humanity? Think of the uncounted

genes out there! Think of the potential talents floating free in universes

where they might be lost forever!

"It's the not knowing that conjures up the greatest terrors," Odrade said.

"And the greatest ambitions," Taraza said.

"Then do I go to Rakis?"

"In due course. I find you adequate to the task."

"Or you would not have assigned me."

It was an old exchange between them, going right back to their school days.

Taraza realized, though, that she had not entered it consciously. Too many

memories tangled the two of them: Dar and Tar. Have to watch that!

"Remember where your loyalties are," Taraza said.

The existence of no-ships raises the possibility of destroying entire planets

without retaliation. A large object, asteroid or equivalent, may be sent

against the planet. Or the people can be set against each other by sexual

subversion, and then can be armed to destroy themselves. These Honored Matres

appear to favor this latter technique.

-Bene Gesserit Analysis

From his position in the courtyard and even when not appearing to do so, Duncan

Idaho kept his attention on the observers above him. There was Patrin, of

course, but Patrin did not count. It was the Reverend Mothers across from

Patrin who bore watching. Seeing Lucilla, he thought: That's the new one.

This thought filled him with a surge of excitement, which he took out in renewed

exercise.

He completed the first three patterns of the training-play Miles Teg had

ordered, vaguely aware that Patrin would report on how well he did. Duncan

liked Teg and old Patrin and sensed that the feeling was reciprocated. This new

Reverend Mother, though -- her presence suggested interesting changes. For one

thing, she was younger than the others. Also, this new one did not try to hide

the eyes that were a first clue to her membership in the Bene Gesserit. His

first glimpse of Schwangyu had confronted him with eyes concealed behind contact

lenses that simulated non-addict pupils and slightly bloodshot whites. He had

heard one of the Keep's acolytes say Schwangyu's lenses also corrected for "an

astigmatic weakness that has been accepted in her genetic line as a reasonable

exchange for the other qualities she transmits to her offspring."

At the time, most of this remark was unintelligible to Duncan but he had looked

up the references in the Keep's library, references both scarce and severely

limited in content. Schwangyu herself parried all of his questions on the

subject, but the subsequent behavior of his teachers told him she had been

angry. Typically, she had taken out her anger on others.

What really upset her, he suspected, was his demand to know whether she was his

mother.

For a long time now Duncan had known he was something special. There were

places in the elaborate compound of this Bene Gesserit Keep where he was not

permitted. He had found private ways to evade such prohibitions and had stared

out often through thick plaz and open windows at guards and wide reaches of

cleared ground that could be enfiladed from strategically positioned pillboxes.

Miles Teg himself had taught the significance of enfilade positioning.

Gammu, the planet was called now. Once, it had been known as Giedi Prime but

someone named Gurney Halleck had changed that. It was all ancient history.

Dull stuff. There still remained a faint smell of bitter oil in the planet's

dirt from its pre-Danian days. Millennia of special plantations were changing

that, his teachers explained. He could see part of this from the Keep. Forests

of conifers and other trees surrounded them here.

Still covertly watching the two Reverend Mothers, Duncan did a series of

cartwheels. He flexed his striking muscles as he moved, just the way Teg had

taught him.

Teg also instructed in planetary defenses. Gammu was ringed by orbiting

monitors whose crews could not have their families aboard. The families

remained down here on Gammu, hostage to the vigilance of those guardian

orbiters. Somewhere among the ships in space, there were undetectable no-ships

whose crews were composed entirely of the Bashar's people and Bene Gesserit

Sisters.

"I would not have taken this assignment without full charge of all defensive

arrangements," Teg explained.

Duncan realized that he was "this assignment." The Keep was here to protect

him. Teg's orbiting monitors, including the no-ships, protected the Keep.

It was all part of a military education whose elements Duncan found somehow

familiar. Learning how to defend a seemingly vulnerable planet from attacks

originating in space, he knew when those defenses were correctly placed. It was

extremely complicated as a whole but the elements were identifiable and could be

understood. There was, for instance, the constant monitoring of atmosphere and

the blood serum of Gammu's inhabitants. Suk doctors in the pay of the Bene

Gesserit were everywhere.

"Diseases are weapons," Teg said. "Our defense against diseases must be finely

tuned."

Frequently, Teg railed against passive defenses. He called them "the product of

a siege mentality long known to create deadly weaknesses."

When it came to military instructions from Teg, Duncan listened carefully.

Patrin and the library records confirmed that the Mentat Bashar Miles Teg had

been a famous military leader for the Bene Gesserit. Patrin often referred to

their service together and always Teg was the hero.

"Mobility is the key to military success," Teg said. "If you're tied down in

forts, even whole-planet forts, you are ultimately vulnerable."

Teg did not much care for Gammu.

"I see that you already know this place was called Giedi Prime once. The

Harkonnens who ruled here taught us a few things. We have a better idea, thanks

to them, of how terrifyingly brutal humans can become."

As he recalled this, Duncan observed that the two Reverend Mothers watching from

the parapet obviously were discussing him.

Am I the new one's assignment?

Duncan did not like being watched and he hoped the new one would allow him some

time to himself. She did not look like a tough one. Not like Schwangyu.

As he continued his exercises, Duncan timed them to a private litany: Damn

Schwangyu! Damn Schwangyu!

He had hated Schwangyu from the age of nine -- four years now. She did not know

his hate, he thought. She had probably forgotten all about the incident where

his hate had been ignited.

Barely nine and he had managed to slip through the inner guards out into a

tunnel that led to one of the pillboxes. Smell of fungus in the tunnel. Dim

lights. Dampness. He peered out through the box's weapons slits before being

caught and hustled back into the core of the Keep.

This escapade occasioned a stern lecture from Schwangyu, a remote and

threatening figure whose orders must be obeyed. That was how he still thought

of her, although he had since learned about the Bene Gesserit Voice-of-Command,

that vocal subtlety which could bend the will of an untrained listener.

She must be obeyed.

"You have occasioned the disciplining of an entire guard unit," Schwangyu said.

"They will be severely punished."

That had been the most terrible part of her lecture. Duncan liked some of the

guards and occasionally lured some of them into real play with laughter and

tumbling. His prank, sneaking out to the pillbox, had hurt his friends.

Duncan knew what it was to be punished.

Damn Schwangyu! Damn Schwangyu! . . .

After Schwangyu's lecture, Duncan ran to his chief instructor of the moment,

Reverend Mother Tamalane, another of the wizened old ones with a cool and aloof

manner, snowy hair above a narrow face and a leather skin. He demanded of

Tamalane to know about the punishment of his guards. Tamalane fell into a

surprising pensive mood, her voice like sand rasping against wood.

"Punishments? Well, well."

They were in the small teaching room off the larger practice floor where

Tamalane went each evening to prepare the next day's lessons. It was a place of

bubble and spool readers and other sophisticated means for information storage

and retrieval. Duncan far preferred it to the library but he was not allowed in

the teaching room unattended. It was a bright room lighted by many suspensorbuoyed

glowglobes. At his intrusion, Tamalane turned away from where she laid

out his lessons.

"There's always something of a sacrificial banquet about our major punishments,"

she said. "The guards will, of course, receive major punishment."

"Banquet?" Duncan was puzzled.

Tamalane swung completely around in her swivel seat and looked directly into his

eyes. Her steely teeth glittered in the bright lights. "History has seldom

been good to those who must be punished," she said.

Duncan flinched at the word "history." It was one of Tamalane's signals. She

was going to teach a lesson, another boring lesson.

"Bene Gesserit punishments cannot be forgotten."

Duncan focused on Tamalane's old mouth, sensing abruptly that she spoke out of

painful personal experience. He was going to learn something interesting!

"Our punishments carry an inescapable lesson," Tamalane said. "It is much more

than the pain."

Duncan sat on the floor at her feet. From this angle, Tamalane was a blackshrouded

and ominous figure.

"We do not punish with the ultimate agony," she said. "That is reserved for a

Reverend Mother's passage through the spice."

Duncan nodded. Library records referred to "spice agony," a mysterious trial

that created a Reverend Mother.

"Major punishments are painful, nonetheless," she said. "They are also

emotionally painful. Emotion evoked by punishment is always that emotion we

judge to be the penitent's greatest weakness and thus we strengthen the

punished."

Her words filled Duncan with unfocused dread. What were they doing to his

guards? He could not speak but there was no need. Tamalane was not finished.

"The punishment always ends with a dessert," she said and she clapped her hands

against her knees.

Duncan frowned. Dessert? That was part of a banquet. How could a banquet be

punishment?

"It is not really a banquet but the idea of a banquet," Tamalane said. One

clawlike hand described a circle in the air. "The dessert comes something

totally unexpected. The penitent thinks: Ahhh, I have been forgiven at last!

You understand?"

Duncan shook his head from side to side. No, he did not understand.

"It is the sweetness of the moment," she said. "You have been through every

course of a painful banquet and come out at the end to something you can savor.

But! As you savor it, then comes the most painful moment of all, the

recognition, the understanding that this is not pleasure-at-the-end. No,

indeed. This is the ultimate pain of the major punishment. It locks in the

Bene Gesserit lesson."

"But what will she do to those guards?" The words were wrenched from Duncan.

"I cannot say what the specific elements of the individual punishments will be.

I have no need to know. I can only tell you it will be different for each of

them."

Tamalane would say no more. She returned to laying out the next day's lessons.

"We will continue tomorrow," she said, "teaching you to identify the sources of

the various accents of spoken Galach."

No one else, not even Teg or Patrin, would answer his questions about the

punishments. Even the guards, when he saw them afterward, refused to speak of

their ordeals. Some reacted curtly to his overtures and none would play with

him anymore. There was no forgiveness among the punished. That much was clear.

Damn Schwangyu! Damn Schwangyu! . . .

That was where his deep hatred of her began. All of the old witches shared in

his hatred. Would the new young one be the same as the old ones?

Damn Schwangyu!

When he demanded of Schwangyu: "Why did you have to punish them?" Schwangyu

took some time before answering, then: "It is dangerous for you here on Gammu.

There are people who wish you harm."

Duncan did not ask why. This was another area where his questions were never

answered. Not even Teg would answer, although Teg's very presence emphasized

the fact of that danger.

And Miles Teg was a Mentat who must know many answers. Duncan often saw the old

man's eyes glisten while his thoughts went far away. But there was no Mentat

response to such questions as:

"Why are we here on Gammu?"

"Who do you guard against? Who wants to harm me?"

"Who are my parents?"

Silence greeted such questions or sometimes Teg would growl: "I cannot answer

you."

The library was useless. He had discovered this when he was only eight and his

chief instructor was a failed Reverend Mother named Luran Geasa -- not quite as

ancient as Schwangyu but well along in years, more than a hundred, anyway.

At his demand, the library produced information about Gammu/Giedi Prime, about

the Harkonnens and their fall, about various conflicts where Teg had commanded.

None of those battles came through as very bloody; several commentators referred

to Teg's "superb diplomacy." But, one datum leading to another, Duncan learned

about the time of the God Emperor and the taming of his people. This period

commanded Duncan's attention for weeks. He found an old map in the records and

projected it on the focus wall. The commentator's superimpositions told him

that this very Keep had been a Fish Speaker Command Center abandoned during the

Scattering.

Fish Speakers!

Duncan wished then that he had lived during their time, serving as one of the

rare male advisors in the female army that had worshiped the great God Emperor.

Oh, to have lived on Rakis in those days!

Teg was surprisingly forthcoming about the God Emperor, calling him always "the

Tyrant." A library lock was opened and information about Rakis came pouring out

for Duncan.

"Will I ever see Rakis?" he asked Geasa.

"You are being prepared to live there."

The answer astonished him. Everything they taught him about that faraway planet

came into new focus.

"Why will I live there?"

"I cannot answer that."

With renewed interest, he returned to his studies of that mysterious planet and

its miserable Church of Shai-hulud, the Divided God. Worms. The God Emperor

had become those worms! The idea filled Duncan with awe. Perhaps here was

something worthy of worship. The thought touched a chord in him. What had

driven a man to accept that terrible metamorphosis?

Duncan knew what his guards and the others in the Keep thought about Rakis and

the core of priesthood there. Sneering remarks and laughter told it all. Teg

said: "We'll probably never know the whole truth of it, but I tell you, lad,

that's no religion for a soldier."

Schwangyu capped it: "You are to learn about the Tyrant but you are not to

believe in his religion. That is beneath you, contemptible."

In every spare study moment Duncan pored over whatever the library produced for

him: the Holy Book of the Divided God, the Guard Bible, the Orange Catholic

Bible and even the Apocrypha. He learned about the long defunct Bureau of the

Faith and "The Pearl that IS the Sun of Understanding."

The very idea of the worms fascinated him. Their size! A big one would stretch

from one end of the Keep to the other. Men had ridden the pre-Tyrant worms but

the Rakian priesthood forbade this now.

He found himself gripped by accounts from the archeological team that had found

the Tyrant's primitive no-chamber on Rakis. Dar-es-Balat, the place was called.

The reports by Archeologist Hadi Benotto were marked "Suppressed by orders of

the Rakian Priesthood." The file number on the accounts from Bene Gesserit

Archives was a long one and what Benotto revealed was fascinating.

"A kernel of the God Emperor's awareness in each worm?" he asked Geasa.

"So it's said. And even if true, they are not conscious, not aware. The Tyrant

himself said he would enter an endless dream."

Each study session occasioned a special lecture and Bene Gesserit explanations

of religion until finally he encountered those accounts called "The Nine

Daughters of Siona" and "The Thousand Sons of Idaho."

Confronting Geasa, he demanded: "My name is Duncan Idaho, too. What does that

mean?"

Geasa always moved as though standing in the shadow of her failure, her long

head bent forward and her watery eyes aimed at the ground. The confrontation

occurred near evening in the long hall outside the practice floor. She paled at

his question.

When she did not answer, he demanded: "Am I descended from Duncan Idaho?"

"You must ask Schwangyu." Geasa sounded as though the words pained her.

It was a familiar response and it angered him. She meant he would be told

something to shut him up, little information in the telling. Schwangyu,

however, was more open than expected.

"You carry the authentic blood of Duncan Idaho."

"Who are my parents?"

"They are long dead."

"How did they die?"

"I do not know. We received you as an orphan."

"Then why do people want to harm me?"

"They fear what you may do."

"What is it I may do?"

"Study your lessons. All will be made clear to you in time."

Shut up and study! Another familiar answer.

He obeyed because he had learned to recognize when the doors were closed on him.

But now his questing intelligence met other accounts of the Famine Times and the

Scattering, the no-chambers and no-ships that could not be traced, not even by

the most powerful prescient minds in their universe. Here, he encountered the

fact that descendants of Duncan Idaho and Siona, those ancients who had served

the Tyrant God Emperor, also were invisible to prophets and prescients. Not

even a Guild Steersman deep in melange trance could detect such people. Siona,

the accounts told him, was a true-bred Atreides and Duncan Idaho was a ghola.

Ghola?

He probed the library for elaborations on this peculiar word.

Ghola. The library produced for him no more than bare-boned accounts: "Gholas:

humans grown from a cadaver's cells in Tleilaxu axlotl tanks."

Axlotl tanks?

"A Tleilaxu device for reproducing a living human being from the cells of a

cadaver."

"Describe a ghola," he demanded.

"Innocent flesh devoid of its original memories. See Axlotl Tanks."

Duncan had learned to read the silences, the blank places in what the people of

the Keep revealed to him. Revelation swept over him. He knew! Only ten and he

knew!

I am a ghola.

Late afternoon in the library, all of the esoteric machinery around him faded

into a sensory background, and a ten-year-old sat silently before a scanner

hugging the knowledge to himself.

I am a ghola!

He could not remember the axlotl tanks where his cells had grown into an infant.

His first memories were of Geasa picking him up from his cradle, the alert

interest in those adult eyes that had so soon faded into wary lidding.

It was as though the information so grudgingly supplied him by the Keep's people

and records had at last defined a central shape: himself.

"Tell me about the Bene Tleilax," he demanded of the library.

"They are a people self-divided into Face Dancers and Masters. Face Dancers are

mules, sterile and submissive to the Masters."

Why did they do this to me?

The information machines of the library were suddenly alien and dangerous. He

was afraid, not that his questions might meet more blank walls, but that he

would receive answers.

Why am I so important to Schwangyu and the others?

He felt that they had wronged him, even Miles Teg and Patrin. Why was it right

to take the cells of a human and produce a ghola?

He asked the next question with great hesitation. "Can a ghola ever remember

who he was?"

"It can be done."

"How?"

"The psychological identity of ghola to original pre-sets certain responses,

which can be ignited by trauma."

No answer at all!

"But how?"

Schwangyu intruded at this point, arriving at the library unannounced. So

something about his questions had been set to alert her!

"All will be made clear to you in time," she said.

She talked down to him! He sensed the injustice in it, the lack of

truthfulness. Something within him said he carried more human wisdom in his

unawakened self than the ones who presumed themselves so superior. His hatred

of Schwangyu reached a new intensity. She was the personification of all who

tantalized him and frustrated his questions.

Now, though, his imagination was on fire. He would recapture his original

memories! He felt the truth of this. He would remember his parents, his

family, his friends . . . his enemies.

He demanded it of Schwangyu: "Did you produce me because of my enemies?"

"You have already learned silence, child," she said. "Rely on that knowledge."

Very well. That's how I will fight you, damned Schwangyu. I will be silent and

I will learn. I won't show you how I really feel.

"You know," she said, "I think we're raising a stoic."

She patronized him! He would not be patronized. He would fight them all with

silence and watchfulness. Duncan ran from the library and huddled in his room.

In the following months, many things confirmed that he was a ghola. Even a

child knew when things around him were extraordinary. He saw other children

occasionally beyond the walls, walking along the perimeter road, laughing and

calling. He found accounts of children in the library. Adults did not come to

those children and engage them in rigorous training of the sort imposed on him.

Other children did not have a Reverend Mother Schwangyu to order every smallest

aspect of their lives.

His discovery precipitated another change in Duncan's life. Luran Geasa was

called away from him and did not return.

She was not supposed to let me know about gholas.

The truth was somewhat more complex, as Schwangyu explained to Lucilla on the

observation parapet the day of Lucilla's arrival.

"We knew the inevitable moment would come. He would learn about gholas and ask

the pointed questions."

"It was high time a Reverend Mother took over his everyday education. Geasa may

have been a mistake."

"Are you questioning my judgment?" Schwangyu snapped.

"Is your judgment so perfect that it may never be questioned?" In Lucilla's

soft contralto, the question had the impact of a slap.

Schwangyu remained silent for almost a minute. Presently, she said: "Geasa

thought the ghola was an endearing child. She cried and said she would miss

him."

"Wasn't she warned about that?"

"Geasa did not have our training."

"So you replaced her with Tamalane at that time. I do not know Tamalane but I

presume she is quite old."

"Quite."

"What was his reaction to the removal of Geasa?"

"He asked where she had gone. We did not answer."

"How did Tamalane fare?"

"On his third day with her, he told her very calmly: I hate you. Is that what

I'm supposed to do?"'

"So quickly!"

"Right now, he's watching you and thinking: I hate Schwangyu. Will I have to

hate this new one? But he is also thinking that you are not like the other old

witches. You're young. He will know that this must be important."

Humans live best when each has his place to stand, when each knows where he

belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and

you destroy the person.

-Bene Gesserit Teaching

Miles Teg had not wanted the Gammu assignment. Weapons master to a ghola-child?

Even such a ghola-child as this one, with all of the history woven around him.

It was an unwanted intrusion into Teg's well-ordered retirement.

But he had lived all of that life as a Military Mentat under the will of the

Bene Gesserit and could not compute an act of disobedience.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodiet?

Who shall guard the guardians? Who shall see that the guardians commit no

offenses?

This was a question that Teg had considered carefully on many occasions. It

formed one of the basic tenets of his loyalty to the Bene Gesserit. Whatever

else you might say about the Sisterhood, they displayed an admirable constancy

of purpose.

Moral purpose, Teg labeled it.

The Bene Gesserit moral purpose agreed completely with Teg's principles. That

those principles were Bene Gesserit-conditioned in him did not enter into the

question. Rational thought, especially Mentat rationality, could make no other

judgment.

Teg boiled it down to an essence: If only one person followed such guiding

principles, this was a better universe. It was never a question of justice.

Justice required one to resort to law and that could be a fickle mistress,

subject always to the whims and prejudices of those who administered the laws.

No, it was a question of fairness, a concept that went much deeper. The people

upon whom judgment was passed must feel the fairness of it.

To Teg, statements such as "the letter of the law must be observed" were

dangerous to his guiding principles. Being fair required agreement, predictable

constancy and, above all else, loyalty upward and downward in the hierarchy.

Leadership guided by such principles required no outside controls. You did your

duty because it was right. And you did not obey because that was predictably

correct. You did it because the rightness was a thing of this moment.

Prediction and prescience had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Teg knew the Atreides reputation for reliable prescience, but gnomic utterances

had no place in his universe. You took the universe as you found it and applied

your principles where you could. Absolute commands in the hierarchy were always

obeyed. Not that Taraza had made it a question of absolute command, but the

implications were there.

"You are the perfect person for this task."

He had lived a long life with many high points and he was retired with honor.

Teg knew he was old, slow and with all the defects of age waiting just at the

edges of his awareness, but the call to duty quickened him even while he was

forced to put down the wish to say "No."

The assignment had come from Taraza personally. The powerful senior of all

(including the Missionaria Protectiva) singled him out. Not just a Reverend

Mother but the Reverend Mother Superior.

Taraza came to his retirement sanctuary on Lernaeus. It honored him for her to

do this and he knew it. She appeared at his gate unannounced accompanied only

by two acolyte servers and a small guard force, some of whose faces he

recognized. Teg had trained them himself. The time of her arrival was

interesting. Morning, shortly after his breakfast. She knew the patterns of

his life and certainly knew that he was most alert at this hour. So she wanted

him awake and at his fullest capabilities.

Patrin, Teg's old batman brought Taraza into the east wing sitting room, a small

and elegant setting with only solid furniture in it. Teg's dislike of chairdogs

and other living furniture was well known. Patrin had a sour look on his face

as he ushered the black-robed Mother Superior into the room. Teg recognized the

look immediately. Patrin's long, pale face with its many age wrinkles might

appear an unmoved mask to others, but Teg was alert to the deepened wrinkles

beside the man's mouth, the set stare in the old eyes. So Taraza had said

something on the way in here that had disturbed Patrin.

Tall sliding doors of heavy plaz framed the room's eastward view down a long

sloping lawn to trees beside the river. Taraza paused just inside the room to

admire the view.

Without being told, Teg touched a button. Curtains slid across the view and

glowglobes came alight. Teg's action told Taraza he had computed a need for

privacy. He emphasized this by ordering Patrin: "Please see that we are not

disturbed."

"The orders for the South Farm, sir," Patrin ventured.

"Please see to that yourself. You and Firus know what I want."

Patrin closed the door a little too sharply as he left, a tiny signal but it

spoke much to Teg.

Taraza moved a pace into the room and examined it. "Lime green," she said.

"One of my favorite colors. Your mother had a fine eye."

Teg warmed to the remark. He had a deep affection for this building and this

land. His family had been here only three generations but their mark was on the

place. His mother's touches had not really been changed in many rooms.

"It's safe to love land and places," Teg said.

"I particularly liked the burnt orange carpets in the hall and the stained glass

fanlight over the entry door," Taraza said. "That fanlight is a real antique, I

am sure."

"You did not come here to talk about interior decoration," Teg said.

Taraza chuckled.

She had a high-pitched voice, which the Sisterhood's training had taught her to

use with devastating effectiveness. It was not a voice easy to ignore, even

when she appeared most carefully casual as she did now. Teg had seen her in

Bene Gesserit Council. Her manner there was powerful and persuasive, every word

an indicator of the incisive mind that guided her decisions. He could sense an

important decision beneath her demeanor now.

Teg indicated a green upholstered chair at his left. She glanced at it, swept

her gaze once more around the room and suppressed a smile.

Not a chairdog in the house, she would wager. Teg was an antique surrounding

himself with antiques. She seated herself and smoothed her robe while waiting

for Teg to take a matching chair facing her.

"I regret the need to ask that you come out of retirement, Bashar, she said.

"Unfortunately, circumstances give me little choice."

Teg rested his long arms casually on his chair's arms, a Mentat in repose,

waiting. His attitude said: "Fill my mind with data."

Taraza was momentarily abashed. This was an imposition. Teg was still a regal

figure tall and with that large head topped by gray hair. He was, she knew,

four SY short of three hundred. Granting that the Standard Year was some twenty

hours less than the so-called primitive year, it was still an impressive age

with experiences in Bene Gesserit service that demanded that she respect him.

Teg wore, she noted, a light gray uniform with no insignia: carefully tailored

trousers and jacket, white shirt open at the throat to reveal a deeply wrinkled

neck. There was a glint of gold at his waist and she recognized the Bashar's

sunburst he had received at retirement. How like the utilitarian Teg! He had

made the golden bauble into a belt buckle. This reassured her. Teg would

understand her problem.

"Could I have a drink of water?" Taraza asked. "It has been a long and

tiresome journey. We came the last stage by one of our transports, which we

should have replaced five hundred years ago."

Teg lifted himself from the chair, went to a wall panel and removed a chilled

water bottle and glass from a cabinet behind the panel. He put these on a low

table at Taraza's right hand. "I have melange," he said.

"No, thank you, Miles. I've my own supply."

Teg resumed his seat and she noted the signs of stiffness. He was still

remarkably supple, however, considering his years.

Taraza poured herself a half glass of water and drank it in one swallow. She

replaced the glass on the side table with elaborate care. How to approach this?

Teg's manner did not fool her. He did not want to leave retirement. Her

analysts had warned her about that. Since retirement, he had taken more than a

casual interest in farming. His extensive acreage here on Lernaeus was

essentially a research garden.

She lifted her gaze and studied him openly. Square shoulders accentuated Teg's

narrow waist. He still kept himself active then. That long face with its sharp

lines from the strong bones: typically Atreides. Teg returned her gaze as he

always did, demanding attention but open to whatever the Mother Superior might

say. His thin mouth was cocked into a slight smile, exposing bright and even

teeth.

He knows I'm uncomfortable, she thought. Damn it! He's just as much a servant

of the Sisterhood as I am!

Teg did not prompt her with questions. His manner remained impeccable,

curiously withdrawn. She reminded herself that this was a common trait of

Mentats and nothing else should be read into it.

Abruptly, Teg stood and strode to a sideboard at Taraza's left. He turned,

folded his arms across his breast and leaned there looking down at her.

Taraza was forced to swivel her chair to face him. Damn him! Teg was not going

to make this any easier for her. All of the Reverend Mother Examiners had

remarked a difficulty in getting Teg to sit for conversation. He preferred to

stand, his shoulders held with military stiffness, his gaze aimed downward. Few

Reverend Mothers matched his height -- more than two meters. This trait, the

analysts agreed, was Teg's way (probably unconscious) of protesting the

Sisterhood's authority over him. None of this, however, showed itself in his

other behavior. Teg had always been the most reliable military commander the

Sisterhood had ever employed.

In a multisociety universe whose major binding forces interacted with complexity

despite the simplicity of labels, reliable military commanders were worth their

weight in melange many times over. Religions and the common memory of imperial

tyrannies always figured in the negotiations but it was economic forces that

eventually carried the day and the military coin could be entered on anybody's

adding machine. It was there in every negotiation and would be for as long as

necessity drove the trading system -- the need for particular things (such as

spice or the technoproducts of Ix), the need for specialists (such as Mentats or

Suk doctors), and all of the other mundane needs for which there were markets:

for labor forces, for builders, for designers, for planiformed life, for

artists, for exotic pleasures . . .

No legal system could bind such complexity into a whole and this fact quite

obviously brought up another necessity -- the constant need for arbiters with

clout. Reverend Mothers had naturally fallen into this role within the economic

web and Miles Teg knew this. He also knew that he was once more being brought

out as a bargaining chip. Whether he enjoyed that role did not figure in the

negotiations.

"It's not as though you had any family to hold you here," Taraza said.

Teg accepted this silently. Yes, his wife had been dead thirty-eight years now.

His children were all grown and, with the exception of one daughter, gone from

the nest. He had his many personal interests but no family obligations. True.

Taraza reminded him then of his long and faithful service to the Sisterhood,

citing several memorable achievements. She knew the praise would have little

effect on him but it provided her with a needed opening for what must follow.

"You have been apprised of your familial resemblance," she said.

Teg inclined his head no more than a millimeter.

"Your resemblance to the first Leto Atreides, grandfather of the Tyrant, is

truly remarkable," she said.

Teg gave no sign that he heard or agreed. This was merely a datum, something

already stored in his copious memory. He knew he bore Atreides genes. He had

seen the likeness of Leto I at Chapter House. It had been oddly like looking

into a mirror.

"You're a bit taller," Taraza said.

Teg continued to stare down at her.

"Damn it all, Bashar," Taraza said, "will you at least try to help me?"

"Is that an order, Mother Superior?"

"No, it's not an order!"

Teg smiled slowly. The fact that Taraza allowed herself such an explosion in

front of him said many things. She would not do that with people she felt were

untrustworthy. And she certainly would not permit herself such an emotional

display with a person she considered merely an underling.

Taraza sat back in her chair and grinned up at him. "All right," she said.

"You've had your fun. Patrin said you would be most upset with me if I called

you back to duty. I assure you that you are crucial to our plans."

"What plans, Mother Superior?"

"We are raising a Duncan Idaho ghola on Gammu. He is almost six years old and

ready for military education."

Teg allowed his eyes to widen slightly.

"It will be a taxing duty for you," Taraza said, "but I want you to take over

his training and protection as soon as possible."

"My likeness to the Atreides Duke," Teg said. "You will use me to restore his

original memories."

"In eight or ten years, yes."

"That long!" Teg shook his head. "Why Gammu?"

"His prana-bindu inheritance has been altered by the Bene Tleilax, at our

orders. His reflexes will match in speed those of anyone born in our times.

Gammu . . . the original Duncan Idaho was born and raised there. Because of the

changes in his cellular inheritance we must keep all else as close to the

original conditions as possible."

"Why are you doing this?" It was a Mentat's data-conscious tone.

"A female child with the ability to control the worms had been discovered on

Rakis. We will have use for our ghola there."

"You will breed them?"

"I am not engaging you as a Mentat. It is your military abilities and your

likeness to the original Leto that we need. You know how to restore his

original memories when the time comes."

"So you're really bringing me back as a Weapons Master."

"You think that's a comedown for the man who was Supreme Bashar of all our

forces?"

"Mother Superior, you command and I obey. But I will not accept this post

without full command of all of Gammu's defenses."

"That already has been arranged, Miles."

"You always did know how my mind works."

"And I've always been confident of your loyalty."

Teg pushed himself away from the sideboard and stood a moment in thought, then:

"Who will brief me?"

"Bellonda from Records, the same as before. She will provide you with a cipher

to secure the exchange of messages between us."

"I will give you a list of people," Teg said. "Old comrades and the children of

some of them. I will want all of them waiting on Gammu when I arrive."

"You don't think any of them will refuse?"

His look said: "Don't be silly!"

Taraza chuckled and she thought: There's a thing we learned well from the

original Atreides -- how to produce people who command the utmost devotion and

loyalty.

"Patrin will handle the recruiting," Teg said. "He won't accept rank I know,

but he's to get the full pay and courtesies of a colonel-aide."

"You will, of course, be restored to the rank of Supreme Bashar," she said. "We

will . . ."

"No. You have Burzmali. We will not weaken him by bringing back his old

Commander over him."

She studied him a moment, then: "We have not yet commissioned Burzmali as . .

."

"I am well aware of that. My old comrades keep me fully informed of Sisterhood

politics. But you and I, Mother Superior, know it's only a matter of time.

Burzmali is the best."

She could only accept this. It was more than a military Mentat's assessment.

It was Teg's assessment. Another thought struck her.

"Then you already knew about our dispute in Council!" she accused. "And you let

me . . ."

"Mother Superior, if I thought you would produce another monster on Rakis, I

would have said so. You trust my decisions; I trust yours."

"Damn you, Miles, we've been apart too long." Taraza stood. "I feel calmer

just knowing you'll be back in harness."

"Harness," he said. "Yes. Reinstate me as a Bashar on special assignment.

That way, when word gets back to Burzmali, there'll be no silly questions."

Taraza produced a sheaf of ridulian papers from beneath her robe and passed them

to Teg. "I've already signed these. Fill in your own reinstatement. The other

authorizations are all there, transport vouchers and so on. I give you these

orders personally. You are to obey me. You are my Bashar, do you understand?"

"Wasn't I always?" he asked.

"It's more important than ever now. Keep that ghola safe and train him well.

He's your responsibility. And I will back you in that against anyone."

"I hear Schwangyu commands on Gammu."

"Against anyone Miles. Don't trust Schwangyu."

"I see. Will you lunch with us? My daughter has . . ."

"Forgive me, Miles, but I must get back soonest. I will send Bellonda at once."

Teg saw her to the door, exchanged a few pleasantries with his old students in

her party and watched as they left. They had an armored groundcar waiting in

the drive, one of the new models that they obviously had brought with them.

Sight of it gave Teg an uneasy feeling.

Urgency!

Taraza had come in person, the Mother Superior herself on a messenger's errand,

knowing what that would reveal to him. Knowing so intimately how the Sisterhood

performed, he saw the revelation in what had just happened. The dispute in the

Bene Gesserit Council went far deeper than his informants had suggested.

"You are my Bashar."

Teg glanced through the sheaf of authorizations and vouchers Taraza had left

with him. Already carrying her seal and signature. The trust this implied

added to the other things he sensed and increased his disquiet.

"Don't trust Schwangyu."

He slipped the papers into his pocket and went in search of Patrin. Patrin

would have to be briefed, and mollified. They would have to discuss whom to

call in for this assignment. He began to list some of the names in his mind.

Dangerous duty ahead. It called for only the best people. Damn! Everything on

the estate here would have to be passed over to Firus and Dimela. So many

details! He felt his pulse quicken as he strode through the house.

Passing a house guard, one of his old soldiers, Teg paused: "Martin, cancel all

of my appointments for today. Find my daughter and tell her to meet me in my

study."

Word spread through the house and, from there, across the estate. Servants and

family, knowing that The Reverend Mother Superior had just conversed privately

with him, automatically set up a protective screen to keep idle distractions

away from Teg. His eldest daughter, Dimela, cut him short when he tried to list

details necessary to carry on his experimental farm projects.

"Father, I am not an infant!"

They were in the small greenhouse attached to his study. Remains of Teg's lunch

sat on the corner of a potting bench. Patrin's notebook was propped against the

wall behind, the luncheon tray.

Teg looked sharply at his daughter. Dimela favored him in appearance but not in

height. Too angular to be a beauty but she had made a good marriage. They had

three fine children, Dimela and Firus.

"Where is Firus?" Teg asked.

"He's out seeing to the replanting of the South Farm."

"Oh, yes. Patrin mentioned that."

Teg smiled. It had always pleased him that Dimela had refused the Sisterhood's

bid, preferring to marry Firus, a native of Lernaeus, and remain in her father's

entourage.

"All I know is that they're calling you back to duty," Dimela said. "Is it a

dangerous assignment?"

"You know, you sound exactly like your mother," Teg said.

"So it is dangerous! Damn them, haven't you done enough for them?"

"Apparently not."

She turned away from him as Patrin entered the far end of the greenhouse. He

heard her speak to Patrin as they passed.

"The older he gets the more he gets like a Reverend Mother himself!"

What else could she expect? Teg wondered. The son of a Reverend Mother,

fathered by a minor functionary of the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer

Mercantiles, he had matured in a household that moved to the Sisterhood's beat.

It had been apparent to him at an early age that his father's allegiance to

CHOAM's interplanetary trading network vanished when his mother objected.

This house had been his mother's house until her death less than a year after

his father died. The imprint of her choices lay all around him.

Patrin stopped in front of him. "I came back for my notebook. Have you added

any names?"

"A few. You'd better get right on it."

"Yes, sir!" Patrin did a smart about-face and strode back the way he had come,

slapping the notebook against his leg.

He feels it, too, Teg thought.

Once more, Teg glanced around him. This house was still his mother's place.

After all the years he had lived here, raised a family here! Still her place.

Oh, he had built this greenhouse, but the study there had been her private room.

Janet Roxbrough of the Lernaeus Roxbroughs. The furnishings, the decor, still

her place. Taraza had seen that. He and his wife had changed some of the

surface objects, but the core remained Janet Roxbrough's. No question about the

Fish Speaker blood in that lineage. What a prize she had been for the

Sisterhood! That she had wed Loschy Teg and lived out her life here, that was

the oddity. An undigestible fact until you knew how the Sisterhood's breeding

designs worked over the generations.

They've done it again, Teg thought. They've had me waiting in the wings all

these years just for this moment.

Has not religion claimed a patent on creation for all of these millennia?

-The Tleilaxu Question, from Muad'dib Speaks

The air of Tleilax was crystalline, gripped by a stillness that was part the

morning chill and part a sense of fearful crouching, as though life waited out

there in the city of Bandalong, life anticipating and ravenous, which would not

stir until it received his personal signal. The Mahai, Tylwyth Waff, Master of

the Masters, enjoyed this hour more than any other of the day. The city was his

now as he looked out through his open window. Bandalong would come alive only

at his command. This was what he told himself. The fear that he could sense

out there was his hold on any reality that might arise from that incubating

reservoir of life: the Tleilaxu civilization that had originated here and then

spread its powers afar.

They had waited millennia for this time, his people. Waff savored the moment

now. All through the bad times of the Prophet Leto II (not God Emperor but

God's Messenger), all through the Famines and the Scattering, through every

painful defeat at the hands of lesser creatures, through all of those agonies

the Tleilaxu had built their patient forces for this moment.

We have come to our moment, O Prophet!

The city that lay beneath his high window he saw as a symbol, one strong mark on

the page of Tleilaxu design. Other Tleilaxu planets, other great cities,

interlinked, interdependent, and with central allegiance to his God and his

city, awaited the signal that all of them knew must come soon. The twinned

forces of Face Dancers and Masheikh had compressed their powers in preparation

for the cosmic leap. The millennia of waiting were about to end.

Waff thought of it as "the long beginning."

Yes. He nodded to himself as he looked at the crouching city. From its

inception, from that infinitesimal kernel of an idea, Bene Tleilax leaders had

understood the perils of a plan so extended, so protracted, so convoluted and

subtle. They had known they must surmount near disaster time and again, accept

galling losses, submissions and humiliations. All of this and much more had

gone into the construction of a particular Bene Tleilax image. By those

millennia of pretense they had created a myth.

"The vile, detestable, dirty Tleilaxu! The stupid Tleilaxu! The predictable

Tleilaxu! The impetuous Tleilaxu!"

Even the Prophet's minions had fallen prey to this myth. A captive Fish Speaker

had stood in this very room and shouted at a Tleilaxu Master: "Long pretense

creates a reality! You are truly vile!" So they had killed her and the Prophet

did nothing.

How little all of those alien worlds and peoples understood Tleilaxu restraint.

Impetuosity? Let them reconsider after the Bene Tleilax demonstrated how many

millennia they were capable of waiting for their ascendancy.

"Spannungsbogen!"

Waff rolled the ancient word on his tongue: The span of the bow! How far back

you draw the bow before releasing your arrow. This arrow would strike deep!

"The Masheikh have waited longer than any other," Waff whispered. He dared to

utter the word to himself here in his tower fastness: "Masheikh."

The rooftops below him glittered as the sun lifted. He could hear the stirrings

of the city's life. The sweet bitterness of Tleilaxu smells drifted on the air

coming in his window. Waff inhaled deeply and closed his window.

He felt renewed by his moment of solitary observation. Turning away from the

window, he donned the white khilat robe of honor to which all Domel were

conditioned to bow. The robe completely covered his short body, giving him the

distinct feeling that it actually was armor.

The armor of God!

"We are the people of the Yaghist," he had reminded his councillors only last

night. "All else is frontier. We have fostered the myth of our weakness and

evil practices for these millennia with only one purpose. Even the Bene

Gesserit believe!"

Seated in the deep, windowless sagra with its no-chamber shield, his nine

councillors had smiled in silent appreciation of his words. In the judgment of

the ghufran, they knew. The stage upon which the Tleilaxu determined their own

destiny had always been the kehl with its right of ghufran.

It was proper that even Waff, the most powerful of all Tleilaxu, could not leave

his world and be readmitted without abasing himself in the ghufran, begging

pardon for contact with the unimaginable sins of aliens. To go out among the

powindah could soil even the mightiest. The khasadars who policed all Tleilaxu

frontiers and guarded the selamliks of the women were right to suspect even

Waff. He was of the people and the kehl, yes, but he must prove it each time he

left the heartland and returned, and certainly every time he entered the

selamlik for the distribution of his sperm.

Waff crossed to his long mirror and inspected himself and his robe. To the

powindahs, he knew, he appeared an elfin figure barely a meter and a half tall.

Eyes, hair, and skin were shades of gray, all a stage for the oval face with its

tiny mouth and line of sharp teeth. A Face Dancer might mimic his features and

pose, might dissemble at a Masheikh's command, but no Masheikh or khasadar would

be fooled. Only the powindahs would be gulled.

Except for the Bene Gesserit!

This thought brought a scowl to his face. Well, the witches had yet to

encounter one of the new Face Dancers.

No other people have mastered the genetic language as well as have the Bene

Tleilax, he reassured himself. We are right to call it "the language of God,"

for God Himself has given us this great power.

Waff strode to his door and waited for the morning bell. There was no way, he

thought, to describe the richness of emotion he felt now. Time unfolded for

him. He did not ask why the Prophet's true message had been heard only by the

Bene Tleilax. It had been God's doing and, in that, the Prophet had been the

Arm of God, worthy of respect as God's Messenger.

You prepared them for us, O Prophet.

And the ghola on Gammu, this ghola at this time, was worth all of the waiting.

The morning bell sounded and Waff strode out into the hall, turned with other

emerging white-robed figures and went onto the eastern balcony to greet the sun.

As the Mahai and Abdl of his people, he now could identify himself with all

Tleilaxu.

We are the legalists of the Shariat, the last of our kind in the universe.

Nowhere outside the sealed chambers of his malik-brothers could he reveal such a

secret thought but he knew it was a thought shared in every mind around him now,

and the workings of that thought were visible in Masheikh, Domel and Face Dancer

alike. The paradox of kinship ties and a sense of social identity that

permeated the khel from Masheikh down to the lowliest Domel was not a paradox to

Waff.

We work for the same God.

A Face Dancer in the guise of Domel had bowed and opened the balcony doors.

Waff, emerging into sunlight with his many companions close around, smiled at

recognition of the Face Dancer. A Domel yet! It was a kin joke but Face

Dancers were not kin. They were constructs, tools, just as the ghola on Gammu

was a tool, all designed with the language of God spoken only by Masheikhs.

With the others who pressed close around him Waff made obeisance to the sun. He

uttered the cry of the Abdl and heard it echoed by countless voices from the

farthest reaches of the city.

"The sun is not God!" he shouted.

No, the sun was only a symbol of God's infinite powers and mercy -- another

construct, another tool. Feeling cleansed by his passage through the ghufran

the previous night, renewed by the morning ritual, Waff could think now about

the trip outward to powindah places and the return just completed, which had

made ghufran necessary. Other worshipers made way for him as he went back to

the inner corridors and entered the slide passage that dropped him to the

central garden where he had asked his councillors to meet him.

It was a successful foray among the powindah, he thought.

Every time he left the inner worlds of the Bene Tleilax Waff felt himself to be

on lashkar, a war party seeking that ultimate revenge which his people named

secretly as Bodal (always capitalized and always the first thing reaffirmed in

ghufran or khel). This most recent lashkar had been exquisitely successful.

Waff emerged from the slide into a central garden filled with sunlight by

prismatic reflectors on the surrounding rooftops. A small fountain played its

visual fugue at the heart of a graveled circle. A low fence of white palings at

one side enclosed a closely cropped lawn, a space near enough to the fountain

that the air would be moist but not so close that the splashing water would

intrude on low-voiced conversation. Around the grassy enclosure, ten narrow

benches of an ancient plastic were arranged -- nine of them in a semicircle

facing a tenth bench set slightly apart.

Pausing at the edge of the grassy enclosure, Waff glanced around him, wondering

why he had never before felt quite this intense pleasure at sight of the place.

The dark blue of the benches was intrinsic to the material. Centuries of use

had worn the benches into soft curves along the arm rests and where countless

bottoms had planted themselves, but the color was just as strong in the worn

places as it was elsewhere.

Waff sat down facing his nine councillors, marshaling the words he knew he must

use. The document he had brought back from his latest lashkar, indeed, the very

reason for that excursion, could not have been more exquisitely timed. The

label on it and the words carried a mighty message for the Tleilaxu.

From an inner pocket Waff removed the thin sheaf of ridulian crystal. He noted

the quickened interest of his councillors: nine faces similar to his own,

Masheikhs of the innermost kehl. All reflected expectancy. They had read this

document in kehl: "The Atreides Manifesto." They had spent a night of

reflection on the manifesto's message. Now, the words must be confronted. Waff

placed the document on his lap.

"I propose to spread these words far and wide," Waff said.

"Without change?" That was Mirlat, the councillor closest to gholatransformation

among all of them. Mirlat no doubt aspired to Abdl and Mahai.

Waff focused on the councillor's wide jaws where the cartilage had grown over

the centuries as a visible mark of his current body's great age.

"Exactly as it has come into our hands," Waff said.

"Dangerous," Mirlat said.

Waff turned his head to the right, his childlike profile outlined against the

fountain for his councillors to observe. God's hand is on my right! The sky

above him was polished carnelian as though Bandalong, the most ancient city of

the Tleilaxu, had been built under one of those gigantic artificial covers

erected to protect pioneers on the harsher planets. When he returned his

attention to his councillors, Waff's features remained bland.

"Not dangerous to us," he said.

"A matter of opinion," Mirlat said.

"Then let us consider opinions," Waff said. "Have we a need to fear Ix or the

Fish Speakers? Indeed not. They are ours, although they do not know it."

Waff let this sink in; all of them knew that new Face Dancers sat in the highest

councils of Ix and Fish Speakers, the exchange undetected.

"The Guild will not move against us or oppose us because we are their only

secure source of melange," Waff said.

"Then what of these Honored Matres returned from the Scattering?" Mirlat

demanded.

"We will deal with them when it is required of us," Waff said. "And we will be

helped by the descendants of our own people who voluntarily went out into the

Scattering."

"The time does appear opportune," one of the other councillors murmured.

It was Torg the Younger who had spoken, Waff observed. Good. There was a vote

secured.

"The Bene Gesserit!" Mirlat snapped.

"I think the Honored Matres will remove the witches from our path," Waff said.

"Already they growl against each other like animals in the fighting pit."

"What if the author of that manifesto is identified?" Mirlat demanded. "What

then?"

Several heads nodded among the councillors. Waff marked them: people to be won

over.

"It is dangerous to be called Atreides in this age," he said.

"Except perhaps on Gammu," Mirlat said. "And the name Atreides has been signed

to that document!"

How odd, Waff thought. The CHOAM representative at the powindah conference that

had taken Waff away from the inner planets of Tleilax had emphasized that very

point. But most of CHOAM's people were secret atheists who looked on all

religion as suspect, and certainly the Atreides had been a potent religious

force. CHOAM worries had been almost palpable.

Waff recounted this CHOAM reaction now.

"This CHOAM hireling, damn his Godless soul, is right," Mirlat insisted. "The

document's insidious."

Mirlat will have to be dealt with, Waff thought. He lifted the manifesto from

his lap and read the first line aloud:

"In the beginning was the word and the word was God."

"Directly from the Orange Catholic Bible," Mirlat said. Once more, heads nodded

in worried agreement.

Waff showed the points of his canines in a brief smile. "Do you suggest that

there are those among the powindah who suspect the existence of the Shariat and

the Masheikhs?"

It felt good to speak these words openly, reminding his listeners that only here

among the innermost Tleilaxu were the old words and the old language preserved

without change. Did Mirlat or any of the others fear that Atreides words could

subvert the Shariat?

Waff posed this question, too, and saw the worried frowns.

"Is there one among you," Waff asked, "who believes that a single powindah knows

how we use the language of God?"

There! Let them think on that! Every one of them here had been wakened time

after time in ghola flesh. There was a fleshly continuity in this Council that

no other people had ever achieved. Mirlat himself had seen the Prophet with his

own eyes. Scytale had spoken to Muad'dib! Learning how the flesh could be

renewed and the memories restored, they had condensed this power into a single

government whose potency was confined lest it be demanded everywhere. Only the

witches had a similar storehouse of experience upon which to draw and they moved

with fearful caution, terrified that they might produce another Kwisatz

Haderach!

Waff said these things to his councillors, adding: "The time for action has

come."

When no one spoke disagreement, Waff said: "This manifesto has a single author.

Every analysis agrees. Mirlat?"

"Written by one person and that person a true Atreides, no doubt of it," Mirlat

agreed.

"All at the powindah conference affirmed this," Waff said. "Even a third-stage

Guild steersman agrees."

"But that one person has produced a thing that excites violent reactions among

diverse peoples," Mirlat argued.

"Have we ever questioned the Atreides talent for disruption?" Waff asked.

"When the powindah showed me this document I knew God had sent us a signal."

"Do the witches still deny authorship?" Torg the Younger asked.

How alertly apt he is, Waff thought.

"Every powindah religion is called into question by this manifesto," Waff said.

"Every faith except ours is left hanging in limbo."

"Exactly the problem!" Mirlat pounced.

"But only we know this," Waff said. "Who else even suspects the existence of

the Shariat?"

"The Guild," Mirlat said.

"They have never spoken of it and they never will. They know what our response

would be."

Waff lifted the sheaf of papers from his lap and again read aloud:

"Forces that we cannot understand permeate our universe. We see the shadows of

those forces when they are projected upon a screen available to our senses, but

understand them we do not."

"The Atreides who wrote that knows of the Shariat," Mirlat muttered.

Waff continued reading as though there had been no interruption:

"Understanding requires words. Some things cannot be reduced to words. There

are things that can only be experienced wordlessly."

As though he handled a holy relic, Waff returned the document to his lap.

Softly, so that his listeners were required to bend toward him and some cupped a

hand behind an ear, Waff said: "This says our universe is magical. It says all

arbitrary forms are transient and subject to magical changes. Science has led

us to this interpretation as though it placed us on a track from which we cannot

deviate."

He allowed these words to fester for a moment, then: "No Rakian priest of the

Divided God nor any other powindah charlatan can accept that. Only we know it

because our God is a magical God whose language we speak."

"We will be accused of the authorship," Mirlat said. The moment he had spoken,

Mirlat shook his head sharply from side to side. "No! I see it. I see what

you mean."

Waff held his silence. He could see that all of them were reflecting on their

Sufi origins, recalling the Great Belief and the Zensunni ecumenism that had

spawned the Bene Tleilax. The people of this kehl knew the God-given facts of

their origins but generations of secrecy assured that no powindah shared their

knowledge.

Words flowed silently through Waff's mind: "Assumptions based on understanding

contain belief in an absolute ground out of which all things spring like plants

growing from seeds."

Knowing that his councillors also recalled this catechism of the Great Belief,

Waff reminded them of the Zensunni admonition.

"Behind such assumptions lies a faith in words that the powindah do not

question. Only the Shariat question and we do so silently."

His councillors nodded in unison.

Waff inclined his head slightly and continued: "The act of saying that things

exist that cannot be described in words shakes a universe where words are the

supreme belief."

"Powindah poison!" his councillors shouted.

He had them all now and Waff hammered home his victory by demanding: "What is

the Sufi-Zensunni Credo?"

They could not speak it but all reflected on it: To achieve s'tori no

understanding is needed. S'tori exists without words, without even a name.

In a moment, all of them looked up and exchanged knowing glances. Mirlat took

it upon himself to recite the Tleilaxu pledge:

"I can say God, but that is not my God. That is only a noise and no more potent

than any other noise."

"I now see," Waff said, "that you all sense the power that has fallen into our

hands through this document. Millions upon millions of copies already are being

circulated among the powindah."

"Who does this?" Mirlat asked.

"Who cares?" Waff countered. "Let the powindah chase after them, seeking their

origin, trying to suppress them, preaching against them. With each such action,

the powindah inject more power into these words."

"Should we not preach against these words, too?" Mirlat asked.

"Only if the occasion demands it," Waff said. "See you!" He slapped the papers

against his knees. "The powindah have constricted their awareness to its

tightest purpose and that is their weakness. We must insure that this manifesto

gains as wide a circulation as possible."

"The magic of our God is our only bridge," the councillors intoned.

All of them, Waff observed, had been restored to the central security of their

faith. It had been easily managed. No Masheikh shared the powindah stupidity

that whined: "In thy infinite grace, God, why me?" In one sentence, the

powindah invoked infinity and denied it, never once observing their own

foolishness

"Scytale," Waff said.

The youngest and most baby-faced of the councillors, seated at the far left as

was fitting, leaned forward eagerly.

"Arm the faithful," Waff said.

"I marvel that an Atreides has given us this weapon," Mirlat said. "How can it

be that the Atreides always fasten upon an ideal that enlists the billions who

must follow?"

"It is not the Atreides, it is God," Waff said. He lifted his arms then and

spoke the closing ritual: "The Masheikh have met in kehl and felt the presence

of their God."

Waff closed his eyes and waited for the others to leave. Masheikh! How good it

was to name themselves in kehl, speaking the language of Islamiyat, which no

Tleilaxu spoke outside his own secret councils; not even to Face Dancers did

they speak it. Nowhere in the Wekht of Jandola, not to the farthest reaches of

the Tleilaxu Yaghist, was there a living powindah who knew this secret.

Yaghist, Waff thought, rising from his bench. Yaghist, the land of the unruled.

He thought he could feel the document vibrating in his hand. This Atreides

Manifesto was the very kind of thing the masses of powindah would follow to

their doom.

Some days it's melange; some days it's bitter dirt.

-Rakian Aphorism

In her third year with the priests of Rakis, the girl Sheeana lay full length

atop a high curving dune. She peered into the morning distance where a great

rumbling friction could be heard. The light was a ghostly silver that frosted

the horizon with filmy haze. The night's chill still lay on the sand.

She knew the priests were watching her from the safety of their water-girded

tower some two kilometers behind her, but this gave her little concern. The

trembling of the sand beneath her body demanded full attention.

It's a big one, she thought. Seventy meters at least. A beautiful big one.

The gray stillsuit felt slick and smooth against her skin. It had none of the

abrasive patches of the old hand-me-down she had worn before the priests took

her into their care. She felt thankful for the fine stillsuit and the thick

robe of white and purple that covered it, but most of all she felt the

excitement of being here. Something rich and dangerous filled her at moments

such as this.

The priests did not understand what happened here. She knew this. They were

cowards. She glanced over her shoulder at the distant tower and saw sunglint on

lenses.

A precocious child of eleven standard years, slender and dark-skinned with sunstreaked

brown hair, she could visualize clearly what the priests saw through

their spying lenses.

They see me doing what they do not dare. They see me in the path of Shaitan. I

look very small on the sand and Shaitan looks very big. They can see him

already.

From the rasping sound, she knew that she, too, would soon see the giant worm.

Sheeana did not think of the approaching monster as Shai-hulud, God of the

sands, a thing the priests chanted each morning in obeisance to the pearl of

Leto II's awareness that lay encapsulated in each of the multi-ridged rulers of

the desert. She thought of the worms mainly as "they who spared me," or as

Shaitan.

They belonged to her now.

It was a relationship begun slightly more than three years ago during the month

of her eighth birthday, the Month Igat by the old calendar. Her village had

been a poor one, a pioneer venture built far beyond more secure barriers such as

the qanats and ring canals of Keen. Only a moat of damp sand guarded such

pioneer places. Shaitan avoided water but the sandtrout vector soon took away

any dampness. Precious moisture captured in windtraps had to be expended each

day to renew the barrier. Her village was a miserable cluster of shacks and

hovels with two small windtraps, adequate for drinking water but with only a

sporadic surplus that could be apportioned to the worm barrier.

That morning -- much like this morning, the night's chill sharp in her nose and

lungs, the horizon constricted by a ghostly haze -- most of the village children

had fanned out into the desert, there to seek bits and fragments of melange,

which Shaitan sometimes left behind in his passage. Two big ones had been heard

nearby in the night. Melange, even at modern deflated prices, could buy the

glazed bricks to line a third windtrap.

Each searching child not only looked for the spice but also sought those signs

which would reveal one of the old Fremen sietch strongholds. There were only

remnants of such places now but the rock barriers provided a greater security

against Shaitan. And some of the remnant sietch places were reputed to contain

lost hoards of melange. Every villager dreamed of such a discovery.

Sheeana, wearing her patched stillsuit and flimsy robe, went alone to the

northeast, toward the faraway smoky mound of air that told of the great city of

Keen with its moisture richness lifting into the sun-warmed breezes.

Hunting scraps of melange in the sand was largely a matter of focusing attention

into the nostrils. It was a form of concentration that left only bits of

awareness attuned to the rasping sand that told of Shaitan's approach. Leg

muscles moved automatically in the non-rhythmic walk that blended with the

desert's natural sounds.

At first, Sheeana did not hear the screaming. It fitted intimately into the

saltated friction of windblown sand across the barracans that concealed the

village from her sight. Slowly the sound penetrated her consciousness and then

it demanded her attention.

Many voices screaming!

Sheeana discarded the desert precaution of random strides. Moving swiftly as

her childish muscles would carry her, she scrambled up the slipface of the

barracan and stared along it toward that terrifying sound. She was in time to

see that which cut off the last of the screams.

Wind and sandtrout had dried a wide arc of the barrier at the far side of her

village. She could see the gap by the color difference. A wild worm had

penetrated the opening. It circled close inside the remaining dampness. The

gigantic flame-shadowed mouth scooped up people and hovels in a swiftly

tightening circle.

Sheeana saw the last survivors huddled at the center of this destruction, a

space already cleared of its rude hovels and tumbled with the remains of the

windtraps. Even as she watched, some of the people tried to break away into the

desert. Sheeana recognized her father among the frantic runners. None escaped.

The great mouth engulfed all before turning to level the last of the village.

Smoking sand remained and nothing else of the puny village that had dared to

claim a scrap of Shaitan's domain. The place where the village had been was as

unmarked by human habitation as it had been before anyone walked there.

Sheeana took a gasping breath, inhaling through her nose to preserve the

moisture of her body as any good child of the desert would do. She scanned the

horizon for a sign of the other children but Shaitan's track had left great

curves and loops all around the far side of the village. Not a single human

remained in view. She shouted, the high-pitched cry that would carry far

through the dry air. No response came back to her.

Alone.

She moved trancelike along the ridge of the dune toward where her village had

been. As she neared the place a great wave of cinnamon odor filled her

nostrils, carried on the wind that still dusted the tops of the dunes. She

realized then what had happened. The village had been sited disastrously atop a

pre-spice blow. As the great hoard far under the sand came to fruition,

expanding in an explosion of melange, Shaitan had come. Every child knew

Shaitan could not resist a spiceblow.

Rage and wild desperation began to fill Sheeana. Mindlessly, she raced down the

dune toward Shaitan, coming up behind the worm as it turned back through the dry

place where it had entered the village. Without thought, she dashed along

beside the tail, scrambled onto it and ran forward along the great ridged back.

At the hump behind its mouth, she crouched and beat her fists against the

unyielding surface.

The worm stopped.

Her anger suddenly converted to terror, Sheeana broke off pounding on the worm.

She realized only then that she had been screaming. A terrible sense of lonely

exposure filled her. She did not know how she had come here. She knew only

where she was and this gripped her with an agony of fear.

The worm continued quiescent on the sand.

Sheeana did not know what to do. At any moment, the worm could roll over and

crush her. Or it could burrow beneath the sand, leaving her on the surface to

be scooped up at leisure.

Abruptly, a long tremor worked its way down the worm's length from its tail to

Sheeana's position behind the mouth. The worm began to move ahead. It turned

in a wide arc and gathered speed on a course to the northeast.

Sheeana leaned forward and gripped the leading edge of a ring ridge on the

worm's back. She feared that any second it would slide beneath the sand. What

could she do then? But Shaitan did not burrow. As minutes passed without any

deviation from that straight and swift passage across the dunes, Sheeana found

her mind working once more. She knew about this ride. The priests of the

Divided God forbade it but the histories, both written and oral, said Fremen

rode thus in the ancient days. Fremen stood tall atop Shaitan's back supported

by slender poles with hooked ends. The priests decreed that this had been done

before Leto II shared His consciousness with the God of the desert. Now,

nothing was permitted that might demean the scattered bits of Leto II.

With a speed that astonished her, the worm carried Sheeana toward the mistdazzled

shape of Keen. The great city lay like a mirage on the distorted

horizon. Sheeana's threadbare robe whipped against the thin surface of her

patched stillsuit. Her fingers ached where she gripped the leading edge of the

giant ring. The cinnamon, burnt-rock and ozone of the worm's heat exchange

swept over her on shifts in the wind.

Keen began to gain definition ahead of her.

The priests will see me and be angry, she thought.

She identified the low brick structures that marked the first line of qanats

and, beyond them, the enclosed barrel-curve of a surface aqueduct. Above these

structures rose the walls of terraced gardens and the high profiles of giant

windtraps, then the temple complex within its own water barriers.

A day's march across open sand in little more than an hour!

Her parents and village neighbors had made this journey many times for trade and

to join in the dancing but Sheeana had only accompanied them twice. She

remembered mostly the dancing and the violence that followed. The size of Keen

filled her with awe. So many buildings! So many people! Shaitan could not

harm such a place as that.

But the worm plunged straight ahead as though it would ride over qanat and

aqueduct. Sheeana stared at the city rising higher and higher in front of her.

Fascination subdued her terror. Shaitan was not going to stop!

The worm ground to a halt.

The tubular surface vents of the qanat lay no more than fifty meters in front of

its gaping mouth. She smelled the hot cinnamon exhalations, heard the deep

rumblings of Shaitan's interior furnace.

It became apparent to her at last that the journey had ended. Slowly, Sheeana

released her grip on the ring. She stood, expecting any moment the worm would

renew its motion. Shaitan remained quiescent. Moving cautiously, she slid off

her perch and dropped to the sand. She paused there. Would it move now? She

held a vague idea of dashing for the qanat but this worm fascinated her.

Slipping and sliding in the disturbed sand, Sheeana moved around to the front of

the worm and stared into the fearsome mouth. Within the frame of crystal teeth

flames rolled forward and backward. A searing exhalation of spice odors swept

over her.

The madness of that first dash down off the dune and onto the worm came back to

Sheeana. "Damn you, Shaitan!" she shouted, shaking a fist at the awful mouth.

"What did we ever do to you?"

These were words she had heard her mother use at the destruction of a tuber

garden. No part of Sheeana's awareness had ever questioned that name, Shaitan,

nor her mother's fury. She was of the poorest dregs at the bottom of the Rakian

heap and she knew it. Her people believed in Shaitan first and Shai-hulud

second. Worms were worms and often much worse. There was no justice on the

open sand. Only danger lurked there. Poverty and fear of priests might drive

her people onto the perilous dunes but they moved even then with the same angry

persistence that had driven the Fremen.

This time, however, Shaitan had won.

It entered Sheeana's awareness that she stood in the deadly path. Her thoughts,

not yet fully formed, recognized only that she had done a crazy thing. Much

later, as the Sisterhood's teachings rounded her consciousness, she would

realize that she had been overcome by the terror of loneliness. She had wanted

Shaitan to take her into the company of her dead.

A grating sound issued from beneath the worm.

Sheeana stifled a scream.

Slowly at first, then faster, the worm backed off several meters. It turned

there and gathered speed beside the twin-mounded track it had created coming

from the desert. The grating of its passage diminished in the distance.

Sheeana grew aware of another sound. She lifted her gaze to the sky. The

thwock-thwock of a priestly ornithopter swept over her, brushing her with its

shadow. The craft glistened in the morning sunlight as it followed the worm

into the desert.

Sheeana felt a more familiar fear then.

The priests!

She kept her gaze on the 'thopter. It hovered in the distance, then returned to

settle gently onto a patch of worm-smoothed sand nearby. She could smell the

lubricants and the sickly acridity of the 'thopter's fuel. The thing was a

giant insect nestled on the sand, waiting to pounce upon her.

A hatch popped open.

Sheeana threw back her shoulders and stood her ground. Very well; they had

caught her. She knew what to expect now. Nothing could be gained by flight.

Only the priests used 'thopters. They could go anywhere and see anything.

Two richly robed priests, their garments all gold and white with purple trim,

emerged and ran toward her across the sand. They knelt in front of Sheeana so

close she could smell their perspiration and the musky melange incense which

permeated their clothing. They were young but much like all the priests she

could remember: soft of features, uncalloused hands, careless of their moisture

losses. Neither of them wore a stillsuit under those robes.

The one on her left, his eyes on a level with Sheeana's, spoke.

"Child of Shai-hulud, we saw your Father bring you from His lands."

The words made no sense to Sheeana. Priests were men to be feared. Her parents

and all the adults she had ever known had impressed this upon her by words and

actions. Priests possessed ornithopters. Priests fed you to Shaitan for the

slightest infraction or for no infraction at all, for only priestly whims. Her

people knew many instances.

Sheeana backed away from the kneeling men and cast her glance around. Where

could she run?

The one who had spoken raised an imploring hand. "Stay with us."

"You're bad!" Sheeana's voice cracked with emotion.

Both priests fell prostrate on the sand.

Far away on the city's towers, sunlight flashed off lenses. Sheeana saw them.

She knew about such flashings. Priests were always watching you in the cities.

When you saw the lenses flash that was the signal to be inconspicuous, to "be

good."

Sheeana clasped her hands in front of her to still their trembling. She glanced

left and right and then at the prostrate priests. Something was wrong here.

Heads on the sand, the two priests shuddered with fear and waited. Neither

spoke.

Sheeana did not know how to respond. The crush of her immediate experiences

could not be absorbed by an eight-year-old mind. She knew that her parents and

all of her neighbors had been taken by Shaitan. Her own eyes had witnessed

this. And Shaitan had brought her here, refusing to take her into his awful

fires. She had been spared.

This was a word she understood. Spared. It had been explained to her when she

learned the dancing song.

"Shai-hulud spare us!

"Take Shaitan away . . ."

Slowly, not wanting to arouse the prostrate priests, Sheeana began the

shuffling, unrhythmic movements of the dance. As the remembered music grew

within her, she unclasped her hands and swung her arms wide. Her feet lifted

high in the stately movements. Her body turned, slowly at first and then more

swiftly as the dance ecstasy increased. Her long brown hair whipped around her

face.

The two priests dared to lift their heads. The strange child was performing The

Dance! They recognized the movements: The Dance of Propitiation. She asked

Shai-hulud to forgive his people. She asked God to forgive them!

They turned their heads to look at each other and, together, rocked back onto

their knees. There, they began clapping in the time-honored effort to distract

the dancer. Their hands clapped rhythmically as they chanted the ancient words:

"Our fathers ate manna in the desert,

"In the burning places where whirlwinds came!"

The priests excluded from their attention all except the child. She was a

slender thing, they saw, with stringy muscles, thin arms and legs. Her robe and

stillsuit were worn and patched like those of the poorest. Her cheekbones had

high planes that drew shadows across her olive skin. Brown eyes, they noted.

Reddish sun streaks drew their lines in her hair. There was a water-spare

sharpness about her features -- the narrow nose and chin, the wide forehead, the

wide thin mouth, the long neck. She looked like the Fremen portraits in the

holy of holies at Dar-es-Balat. Of course! The child of Shai-hulud would look

thus.

She danced well, too. Not the slightest quickly repeatable rhythm entered her

movements. There was rhythm but it was an admirably long beat, at least a

hundred steps apart. She kept it up while the sun lifted higher and higher. It

was almost noon before she fell exhausted to the sand.

The priests stood and looked out into the desert where Shai-hulud had gone. The

stampings of the dance had not summoned Him back. They were forgiven.

That was how Sheeana's new life began.

Loudly in their own quarters and for many days, the senior priests engaged in

arguments about her. At last, they brought their disputations and reports to

the High Priest, Hedley Tuek. They met in the afternoon within the Hall of

Small Convocations, Tuek and six priestly councillors. Murals of Leto II, a

human face on the great wormshape, looked down upon them with benevolence.

Tuek seated himself on a stone bench that had been recovered from Windgap

Sietch. Muad'dib himself was reputed to have sat on this bench. One of the

legs still bore the carvings of an Atreides hawk.

His councillors took lesser modern benches facing him.

The High Priest was an imposing figure; silky gray hair combed smoothly to his

shoulders. It was a suitable frame for the square face with its wide, thick

mouth and heavy chin. Tuek's eyes retained their original clear whites

surrounding dark blue pupils. Bushy, untrimmed gray eyebrows shaded his eyes.

The councillors were a motley lot. Scions of old priestly families each carried

in his heart the belief that matters would move better if he were sitting on

Tuek's bench.

The scrawny, pinch-faced Stiros put himself forward as opposition spokesman:

"She is nothing but a poor desert waif and she rode Shai-hulud. That is

forbidden and the punishment is mandatory."

Others spoke up immediately. "No! No Stiros. You have it wrong! She did not

stand on Shai-hulud's back as the Fremen did. She had no maker hooks or . . ."

Stiros tried to shout them down.

It was deadlocked, Tuek saw: three and three with Umphrud, a fat hedonist, as

advocate for "cautious acceptance."

"She had no way to guide Shai-hulud's course," Umphrud argued. "We all saw how

she came down to the sand unafraid and talked to Him."

Yes, they all had seen that, either at the moment or in the holophoto that a

thoughtful observer had recorded. Desert waif or not, she had confronted Shaihulud

and conversed with Him. And Shai-hulud had not engulfed her. No, indeed.

The Worm-of-God had drawn back at the child's command and had returned to the

desert.

"We will test her," Tuek said.

Early the following morning, an ornithopter flown by the two priests who had

brought her from the desert conveyed Sheeana far out away from the sight of

Keen's populace. The priests took her down to a dune top and planted a

meticulous copy of a Fremen thumper in the sand. When the thumper's catch was

released, a heavy beating trembled through the desert -- the ancient summons to

Shai-hulud. The priests fled to their 'thopter and waited high overhead while a

terrified Sheeana, her worst fears realized, stood alone some twenty meters from

the thumper.

Two worms came. They were not the largest the priests had ever seen, no more

than thirty meters long. One of them scooped up the thumper and silenced it.

Together, they rounded in parallel tracks and stopped side by side not six

meters from Sheeana.

She stood submissive, fists clenched at her sides. This was what priests did.

They fed you to Shaitan.

In their hovering 'thopter, the two priests watched with fascination. Their

lenses transmitted the scene to equally fascinated observers in the High

Priest's quarters at Keen. All of them had seen similar events before. It was

a standard punishment, a handy way to remove obstructionists from the populace

or priesthood, or to pave the way for acquisition of a new concubine. Never

before, though, had they seen a lone child as victim. And such a child!

The Worms-of-God crept forward slowly after their first stop. They became

motionless once more when only about three meters from Sheeana.

Resigned to her fate, Sheeana did not run. Soon, she thought, she would be with

her parents and friends. As the worms remained motionless, anger replaced her

terror. The bad priests had left her here! She could hear their 'thopter

overhead. The hot spice smell from the worms filled the air around her.

Abruptly, she raised her right hand and pointed up at the 'thopter.

"Go ahead and eat me! That's what they want!"

The priests overhead could not hear her words but the gesture was visible and

they could see that she was talking to the two Worms-of-God. The finger

pointing up at them did not bode well.

The worms did not move.

Sheeana lowered her hand. "You killed my mother and father and all my friends!"

she accused. She took a step forward and shook a fist at them.

The worms retreated, keeping their distance.

"If you don't want me, go back where you came from!" She waved them away toward

the desert.

Obediently, they backed farther and turned in unison.

The priests in the 'thopter tracked them until they slipped beneath the sand

more than a kilometer away. Only then did the priests return, fear and

trepidation in them. They plucked the child of Shai-hulud from the sand and

returned her to Keen.

The Bene Gesserit embassy at Keen had a full report by nightfall. Word was on

its way to the Chapter House by the following morning.

It had happened at last!

The trouble with some kinds of warfare (and be certain the Tyrant knew this,

because it is implicit in his lesson) is that they destroy all moral decency in

susceptible types. Warfare of these kinds will dump the destroyed survivors

back into an innocent population that is incapable of even imagining what such

returned soldiers might do.

-Teachings of the Golden Path, Bene Gesserit Archives

One of Miles Teg's early memories was of sitting at dinner with his parents and

his younger brother, Sabine. Teg had been only seven at the time, but the

events lay indelibly in his memory: the dining room on Lernaeus colorful with

freshly cut flowers, the low light of the yellow sun diffused by antique shades.

Bright blue dinnerware and glistening silver graced the table. Acolyte servants

stood ready at hand, because his mother might be permanently detached on special

duty but her function as a Bene Gesserit teacher was not to be wasted.

Janet Roxbrough-Teg, a large-boned woman who appeared cast for the part of

grande dame, looked down her nose from one end of the table, watching that the

dinner service not be impaired by the slightest misplacement. Loschy Teg,

Miles' father, always observed this with a faint air of amusement. He was a

thin man with high forehead, a face so narrow his dark eyes appeared to bulge at

the sides. His black hair was a perfect counterpoint for his wife's fairness.

Above the subdued sounds at the table and the rich smell of spiced edu soup, his

mother instructed his father on how to deal with an importunate Free Trader.

When she said "Tleilaxu," she had Miles' entire attention. His education had

just recently touched on the Bene Tleilax.

Even Sabine, who succumbed many years later to a poisoner on Romo, listened with

as much of his four-year-old awareness as he could muster. Sabine heroworshiped

his brother. Anything that caught the attention of Miles was of

interest to Sabine. Both boys listened silently.

"The man is fronting for the Tleilaxu," Lady Janet said. "I can hear it in his

voice."

"I do not doubt your ability to detect such things, my dear," Loschy Teg said.

"But what am I to do? He has the proper tokens of credit and he wishes to buy

the --"

"The order for the rice is unimportant at the moment. Never assume that what a

Face Dancer appears to seek is actually what it seeks."

"I'm sure he's not a Face Dancer. He --"

"Loschy! I know you have learned this well at my instruction and can detect a

Face Dancer. I agree that the Free Trader is not one of them. The Face Dancers

remain on his ship. They know I am here."

"They know they could not fool you. Yes, but -"

"Tleilaxu strategy is always woven within a web of strategies, any one of which

may be the real strategy. They learned that from us."

"My dear, if we are dealing with Tleilaxu, and I do not question your judgment,

then it immediately becomes a question of melange."

Lady Janet nodded her head gently. Indeed, even Miles knew about the Tleilaxu

connection with the spice. It was one of the things that fascinated him about

the Tleilaxu. For every milligram of melange produced on Rakis, the Bene

Tleilax tanks produced long tons. Use of melange had grown to fit the new

supply and even the Spacing Guild bent its knee before this power.

"But the rice . . ." Loschy Teg ventured.

"My dear husband, the Bene Tleilax have no need of that much pongi rice in our

sector. They require it for trade. We must find out who really needs the

rice."

"You want me to delay," he said.

"Precisely. You are superb at what we now require. Don't give that Free Trader

the chance to say yes or no. Someone trained by the Face Dancers will

appreciate such subtlety."

"We lure the Face Dancers out of the ship while you initiate inquiries

elsewhere."

Lady Janet smiled. "You are lovely when you leap ahead of me that way."

A look of understanding passed between them.

"He cannot go to another supplier in this sector," Loschy Teg said.

"He will wish to avoid a go, no-go confrontation," Lady Janet said, patting the

table. "Delay, delay, and more delay. You must draw the Face Dancers out of

the ship."

"They will realize, of course."

"Yes, my dear, and it is dangerous. You must always meet on your own ground and

with our own guards nearby."

Miles Teg recalled that his father had, indeed, drawn the Face Dancers out of

their ship. His mother had taken Miles to the viewer where he watched the

copper-walled room in which his father drove the bargain that won CHOAM's

highest commendation and a rich bonus.

The first Face Dancers Miles Teg ever saw: Two small men as alike as twins.

Almost chinless round faces, pug noses, tiny mouths, black button eyes, and

short-cropped white hair that stood up from their heads like the bristles on a

brush. The two were dressed as the Free Trader had been -- black tunics and

trousers.

"Illusion, Miles," his mother said. "Illusion is their way. The fashioning of

illusion to achieve real goals, that is how the Tleilaxu work."

"Like the magician at the Winter Show?" Miles asked, his gaze intent on the

viewer and its toy-figure scene.

"Quite similar," his mother agreed. She too watched the viewer as she spoke but

one arm went protectively around her son's shoulders.

"You are looking at evil, Miles. Study it carefully. The faces you see can be

changed in an instant. They can grow taller, appear heavier. They could mimic

your father so that only I would recognize the substitution."

Miles Teg's mouth formed a soundless "O." He stared at the viewer, listening to

his father explain that the price of CHOAM's pongi rice once more had gone up

alarmingly.

"And the most terrible thing of all," his mother said. "Some of the newer Face

Dancers can, by touching the flesh of a victim, absorb some of the victim's

memories."

"They read minds?" Miles looked up at his mother.

"Not exactly. We think they take a print of the memories, almost a holophoto

process. They do not yet know that we are aware of this."

Miles understood. He was not to speak of this to anyone, not even to his father

or his mother. She had taught him the Bene Gesserit way of secrecy. He watched

the figures in the screen with care.

At his father's words, the Face Dancers betrayed no emotion, but their eyes

appeared to glitter more brightly.

"How did they get so evil?" Miles asked.

"They are communal beings, bred not to identify with any shape or face. The

appearance they present now is for my benefit. They know I am watching. They

have relaxed into their natural communal shape. Mark it closely."

Miles tipped his head to one side and studied the Face Dancers. They looked so

bland and ineffectual.

"They have no sense of self," his mother said. "They have only the instinct to

preserve their own lives unless ordered to die for their masters."

"Would they do that?"

"They have done it many times."

"Who are their masters?"

"Men who seldom leave the planets of the Bene Tleilax."

"Do they have children?"

"Not Face Dancers. They are mules, sterile. But their masters can breed. We

have taken a few of them but the offspring are strange. Few female births and

even then we cannot probe their Other Memories."

Miles frowned. He knew his mother was a Bene Gesserit. He knew the Reverend

Mothers carried a marvelous reservoir of Other Memories going back through all

the millennia of the Sisterhood. He even knew something of the Bene Gesserit

breeding design. Reverend Mothers chose particular men and had children by

those men.

"What are the Tleilaxu women like?" Miles asked.

It was a perceptive question that sent a surge of pride through the Lady Janet.

Yes, it was almost a certainty that she had a potential Mentat here. The

breeding mistresses had been right about the gene potential of Loschy Teg.

"No one outside of their planets has ever reported seeing a Tleilaxu female,"

the Lady Janet said.

"Do they exist or is it just the tanks?"

"They exist."

"Are any of the Face Dancers women?"

"At their own choice, they can be male or female. Observe them carefully. They

know what your father is doing and it angers them."

"Will they try to hurt my father?"

"They don't dare. We have taken precautions and they know it. See how the one

on the left works his jaws. That is one of their anger signs."

"You said they were com . . . communal beings."

"Like hive insects, Miles. They have no self-image. Without a sense of self,

they go beyond amorality. Nothing they say or do can be trusted."

Miles shuddered.

"We have never been able to detect an ethical code in them," the Lady Janet

said. "They are flesh made into automata. Without self, they have nothing to

esteem or even doubt. They are bred only to obey their masters."

"And they were told to come here and buy the rice."

"Exactly. They were told to get it and there's no other place in this sector

where they can do that."

"They must buy it from father?"

"He's their only source. At this very moment, son, they are paying in melange.

You see?"

Miles saw the orange-brown spice markers change hands, a tall stack of them,

which one of the Face Dancers removed from a case on the floor.

"The price is far, far higher than they ever anticipated," the Lady Janet said.

"This will be an easy trail to follow."

"Why?"

"Someone will be bankrupted acquiring that shipment. We think we know who the

buyer is. Whoever it is, we will learn of it. Then we will know what was

really being traded here."

Lady Janet then began to point out the identifiable incongruities that betrayed

a Face Dancer to trained eyes and ears. They were subtle signs but Miles picked

up on them immediately. His mother told him then that she thought he might

become a Mentat . . . perhaps even more.

Shortly before his thirteenth birthday, Miles Teg was sent away to advanced

schooling at the Bene Gesserit stronghold on Lampadas, where his mother's

assessment of him was confirmed. Word went back to her:

"You have given us the Warrior Mentat we had hoped for."

Teg did not see this note until sorting through his mother's effects after her

death. The words inscribed on a small sheet of ridulian crystal with the

Chapter House imprint below them filled him with an odd sense of displacement in

time. His memory put him suddenly back on Lampadas where the love-awe he had

felt for his mother was deftly transferred to the Sisterhood itself, as

originally intended. He had come to understand this only during his later

Mentat training but the understanding changed little. If anything, it bound him

even more strongly to the Bene Gesserit. It confirmed that the Sisterhood must

be one of his strengths. He already knew that the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood was

one of the most powerful forces in his universe -- equal at least to the Spacing

Guild, superior to the Fish Speaker Council that had inherited the core of the

old Atreides Empire, superior by far to CHOAM, and balanced somehow with the

Fabricators of Ix and with the Bene Tleilax. A small measure of the

Sisterhood's far-reaching authority could be deduced from the fact that they

held this authority despite Tleilaxu tank-grown melange, which had broken the

Rakian monopoly on the spice, just as Ixian navigation machines had broken the

Guild monopoly on space travel.

Miles Teg knew his history well by then. Guild Navigators no longer were the

only ones who could thread a ship through the folds of space -- in this galaxy

one instant, in a faraway galaxy the very next heartbeat.

The School Sisters held back little from him, revealing there for the first time

the fact of his Atreides ancestry. That revelation was necessary because of the

tests they gave him. They obviously were testing for prescience. Could he,

like a Guild Navigator, detect fatal obstructions? He failed. They tried him

next on no-chambers and no-ships. He was as blind to such devices as the rest

of humankind. For this test, though, they fed him increased doses of the spice

and he sensed the awakening of his True Self.

"The Mind at Its Beginning," a teaching Sister called it when he asked for an

explanation of this odd sensation.

For a time, the universe was magical as he looked at it through this new

awareness. His awareness was a circle, then a globe. Arbitrary forms became

transient. He fell into trance state without warning until the Sisters taught

him how to control this. They provided him with accounts of saints and mystics

and forced him to draw a freehand circle with either hand, following the line

with his awareness.

By the end of the term, his awareness resumed its touch with conventional

labels, but the memory of the magic never left him. He found that memory a

source of strength at the most difficult moments.

After accepting the assignment as Weapons Master to the ghola, Teg found his

magical memory increasingly with him. It was especially useful during his first

interview with Schwangyu at the Keep on Gammu. They met in the Reverend

Mother's study, a place of shiny metal walls and numerous instruments, most of

them with the stamp of Ix on them. Even the chair in which she sat, the morning

sun coming through a window behind her and making her face difficult to see,

even that chair was one of the Ixian self-molders. He was forced to sit in a

chairdog, though he realized she must know he detested the use of any life form

for such a demeaning task.

"You were chosen because you actually are a grandfatherly figure," Schwangyu

said. The bright sunlight formed a corona around her hooded head. Deliberate!

"Your wisdom will earn the child's love and respect."

"There's no way I could be a father figure."

"According to Taraza, you have the precise characteristics she requires. I know

of your honorable scars and their value to us."

This only reconfirmed his previous Mentat summation: They have been planning

this for a long time. They have bred for it. I was bred for it. I am part of

their larger plan.

All he said was: "Taraza expects this child to become a redoubtable warrior

when restored to his true self."

Schwangyu merely stared at him for a moment, then: "You must not answer any of

his questions about gholas, should he encounter the subject. Do not even use

the word until I give you permission. We will supply you with all of the ghola

data your duties require."

Coldly parceling out his words for emphasis, Teg said: "Perhaps the Reverend

Mother was not informed that I am well versed in the lore of Tleilaxu gholas. I

have met Tleilaxu in battle."

"You think you know enough about the Idaho series?"

"The Idahos are reputed to have been brilliant military strategists," Teg said.

"Then perhaps the great Bashar was not informed about the other characteristics

of our ghola."

No doubt of the mockery in her voice. Something else as well: jealousy and

great anger poorly concealed. Teg's mother had taught him ways of reading

through her own masks, a forbidden teaching, which he had always concealed. He

feigned chagrin and shrugged.

It was obvious, though, that Schwangyu knew he was Taraza's Bashar. The lines

had been drawn.

"At Bene Gesserit behest," Schwangyu said, "the Tleilaxu have made a significant

alteration in the present Idaho series. His nerve-muscle system has been

modernized."

"Without changing the original persona?" Teg fed the question to her blandly,

wondering how far she would go in revelation.

"He is a ghola, not a clone!"

"I see."

"Do you really? He requires the most careful prana-bindu training at all

stages."

"Taraza's orders exactly," Teg said. "And we will all obey those orders."

Schwangyu leaned forward, not concealing her anger. "You have been asked to

train a ghola whose role in certain plans is most dangerous to us all. I don't

think you even remotely understand what you will train!"

What you will train, Teg thought. Not whom. This ghola-child would never be a

whom for Schwangyu or any of the others who opposed Taraza. Perhaps the ghola

would not be a whom to anyone until restored to his original self, firmly seated

in that original Duncan Idaho identity.

Teg saw clearly now that Schwangyu harbored more than hidden reservations about

the ghola project. She was in active opposition just as Taraza had warned.

Schwangyu was the enemy and Taraza's orders had been explicit.

"You will protect that child against any threat."

Ten thousand years since Leto II began his metamorphosis from human into the

sandworm of Rakis and historians still argue over his motives. Was he driven by

the desire for long life? He lived more than ten times the normal span of three

hundred SY, but consider the price he paid. Was it the lure of power? He is

called the Tyrant for good reason but what did power bring him that a human

might want? Was he driven to save humankind from itself? We have only his own

words about his Golden Path to answer this and I cannot accept the self-serving

records of Dar-es-Balat. Might there have been other gratifications, which only

his experiences would illuminate? Without better evidence the question is moot.

We are reduced to saying only that "He did it!" The physical fact alone is

undeniable.

-The Metamorphosis of Leto II, 10,000th Anniversary Peroration by Gaus Andaud

Once more, Waff knew he was on lashkar. This time the stakes were as high as

they could go. An Honored Matre from the Scattering demanded his presence. A

powindah of powindahs! Descendants of Tleilaxu from the Scattering had told him

all they could about these terrible women.

"Far more terrible than Reverend Mothers of the Bene Gesserit," they said.

And more numerous, Waff reminded himself.

He did not fully trust the returned Tleilaxu descendants, either. Their accents

were strange, their manners even stranger and their observances of the rituals

questionable. How could they be readmitted to the Great Kehl? What possible

rite of ghufran could cleanse them after all these centuries? It was beyond

belief that they had kept the Tleilaxu secret down the generations.

They were no longer malik-brothers and yet they were the only source of

information the Tleilaxu possessed about these returning Lost Ones. And the

revelations they had brought! Revelations that had been incorporated in the

Duncan Idaho gholas -- that was worth all of the risks of contamination by

powindah evil.

The meeting place with the Honored Matres was the presumed neutrality of an

Ixian no-ship that held a tight orbit around a mutually selected gas giant

planet in a mined-out solar system of the old Imperium. The Prophet himself had

drained the last of the wealth from this system. New Face Dancers walked as

Ixians among the no-ship's crew but Waff still sweated the first encounter. If

these Honored Matres were truly more terrible than the Bene Gesserit witches,

would the exchange of Face Dancers for Ixian crewmen be detected?

Selection of this meeting place and the arrangements had put a strain on the

Tleilaxu. Was it secure? He reassured himself that he carried two sealed

weapons never before seen off the Tleilaxu core planets. The weapons were the

painstaking result of long effort by his artificers: two minuscule dart

throwers concealed in his sleeves. He had trained with them for years until the

flipping of the sleeves and the discharge of the poisoned darts was almost an

instinctive reflex.

The walls of the meeting room were properly copper-toned, evidence that they

were shielded from Ixian spy devices. But what instruments might the people of

the Scattering have developed beyond the Ixian ken?

Waff entered the room with a hesitant step. The Honored Matre already was there

seated in a leather sling chair.

"You will call me what everyone else calls me," she greeted him. "Honored

Matre."

He bowed as he had been warned to do. "Honored Matre."

No hint of hidden powers in her voice. A low contralto with overtones that

spoke of disdain for him. She looked like an aged athlete or acrobat, slowed

and retired but still maintaining her muscle tone and some of her skills. Her

face was tight skin over a skull with prominent cheekbones. The thin-lipped

mouth produced a sense of arrogance when she spoke, as though every word were

projected downward onto lesser folk.

"Well, come in and sit down!" she commanded, waving at a sling chair facing

her.

Waff heard the hatch hiss closed behind him. He was alone with her! She was

wearing a snooper. He could see the lead for it going into her left ear. His

dart throwers had been sealed and "washed" against snoopers, then maintained at

minus 340° Kelvin in a radiation bath for five SY to make them proof against

snoopers. Had it been enough?

Gently, he lowered himself into the indicated chair.

Orange-tinted contact lenses covered the Honored Matre's eyes, giving them a

feral appearance. She was altogether daunting. And her clothing! Red leotards

beneath a dark blue cape. The surface of the cape had been decorated with some

pearly material to produce strange arabesques and dragon designs. She sat in

the chair as though it were a throne, her clawlike hands resting easily on the

arms.

Waff glanced around the room. His people had inspected this place in company

with Ixian maintenance workers and representatives of the Honored Matre.

We have done our best, he thought, and he tried to relax.

The Honored Matre laughed.

Waff stared at her with as calm an expression as he could muster. "You are

gauging me now," he accused. "You say to yourself that you have enormous

resources to employ against me, subtle and gross instruments to carry out your

commands."

"Do not take that tone with me." The words were low and flat but carried such a

weight of venom that Waff almost recoiled.

He stared at the stringy muscles of the woman's legs, that deep red leotard

fabric which flowed over her skin as though it were organic to her.

Their meeting time had been adjusted to bring them together at a mutually

personal mid-morning, their waking hours having been balanced en route. Waff

felt dislocated, though, and at a disadvantage. What if the stories of his

informants were true? She must have weapons here.

She smiled at him without humor.

"You are trying to intimidate me," Waff said.

"And succeeding." Anger surged through Waff. He kept this from his voice. "I

have come at your invitation."

"I hope you did not come to engage in a confrontation that you would surely

lose," she said.

"I came to forge a bond between us," he said. And he wondered: What do they

need from us? Surely they must need something.

"What bond can there be between us?" she asked. "Would you build an edifice on

a disintegrating raft? Hah! Agreements can be broken and often are."

"For what tokens do we bargain?" he asked.

"Bargain? I do not bargain. I am interested in this ghola you made for the

witches." Her tone gave away nothing but Waff's heartbeat quickened at her

question.

In one of his ghola lifetimes, Waff had trained under a renegade Mentat. The

capabilities of a Mentat were beyond him and besides, reasoning required words.

They had been forced to kill the powindah Mentat but there had been some things

of value in the experience. Waff allowed himself a small moue of distaste at

the memory but he recalled the things of value.

Attack and absorb the data that attack produces!

"You offer me nothing in exchange!" he said, his voice loud.

"Recompense is at my discretion," she said.

Waff produced a scornful gaze. "Do you play with me?"

She showed white teeth in a feral grin. "You would not survive my play, nor

want to."

"So I must be dependent upon your good will!"

"Dependency!" The word curled from her mouth as though it produced a

distasteful sensation. "Why do you sell these gholas to the witches and then

kill the gholas?"

Waff pressed his lips together and remained silent. .

"You have somehow changed this ghola while still making it possible for him to

regain his original memories," she said.

"You know so much!" Waff said. It was not quite a sneer and, he hoped,

revealed nothing. Spies! She had spies among the witches! Was there also a

traitor in the Tleilaxu heartlands?

"There is a girl-child on Rakis who figures in the plans of the witches," the

Honored Matre said.

"How do you know this?"

"The witches do not make a move without our knowing! You think of spies but you

cannot know how far our arms will reach!"

Waff was dismayed. Could she read his mind? Was it something born of the

Scattering? A wild talent from out there where the original human seed could

not observe?

"How have you changed this ghola?" she demanded.

Voice!

Waff, armed against such devices by his Mentat teacher, almost blurted an

answer. This Honored Matre had some of the witches' powers! It had been so

unexpected coming from her. You expected such things from a Reverend Mother and

were prepared. He was a moment recovering his balance. Waff steepled his hands

in front of his chin.

"You have interesting resources," she said.

A gamin expression came over Waff's features. He knew how disarmingly elflike

he could look.

Attack!

"We know how much you have learned from the Bene Gesserit," he said.

A look of rage swept over her face and was gone. "They have taught us nothing!"

Waff pitched his voice at a humorously appealing level, cajoling. "Surely, this

is not bargaining."

"Isn't it?" She actually appeared surprised.

Waff lowered his hands. "Come now, Honored Matre. You are interested in this

ghola. You speak of things on Rakis. What do you take us for?"

"Very little. You become less valuable by the instant."

Waff sensed the coldest machine logic in her response. There was no smell of

Mentat in it but something more chilling. She is capable of killing me right

here!

Where were her weapons? Would she even require weapons? He did not like the

look of those stringy muscles, the calluses on her hands, the hunter's gleam in

her orange eyes. Could she possibly guess (or even know) about the dart

throwers in his sleeves?

"We are confronted by a problem that cannot be resolved by logical means," she

said.

Waff stared at her in shock. A Zensunni Master might have said that! He had

said it himself on more than one occasion.

"You have probably never considered such a possibility," she said. It was as

though her words dropped a mask away from her face. Waff suddenly saw through

to the calculating person behind these postures. Did she take him for some

padfooted seelie fit only for collecting slig shit?

Bringing as much hesitant puzzlement into his voice as possible, he asked: "How

could such a problem be resolved?"

"The natural course of events will dispose of it," she said.

Waff continued to stare at her in simulated puzzlement. Her words did not smack

of revelation. Still, the things implied! He said: "Your words leave me

floundering."

"Humankind has become infinite," she said. "That is the true gift of the

Scattering."

Waff fought to conceal the turmoil these words created. "Infinite universes,

infinite time -- anything may happen," he said.

"Ahhh, you are a bright little manikin," she said. "How does one allow for

anything? It is not logical."

She sounded, Waff thought, like one of the ancient leaders of the Butlerian

Jihad, which had tried to rid humankind of mechanical minds. This Honored Matre

was strangely out of date.

"Our ancestors looked for an answer with computers," he ventured. Let her try

that!

"You already know that computers lack infinite storage capacity," she said.

Again, her words disconcerted him. Could she actually read minds? Was this a

form of mind-printing? What the Tleilaxu did with Face Dancers and gholas,

others might do as well. He centered his awareness and concentrated on Ixians,

on their evil machines. Powindah machines!

The Honored Matre swept her gaze around the room. "Are we wrong to trust the

Ixians?" she asked.

Waff held his breath.

"I don't think you fully trust them," she said. "Come, come, little man. I

offer you my good will."

Belatedly, Waff began to suspect that she was trying to be friendly and candid

with him. She certainly had put aside her earlier pose of angry superiority.

Waff's informants from the Lost Ones said the Honored Matres made sexual

decisions much in the manner of the Bene Gesserit. Was she trying to be

seductive? But she clearly understood and had exposed the weakness of logic.

It was very confusing!

"We are talking in circles," he said.

"Quite the contrary. Circles enclose. Circles limit. Humankind no longer is

limited by the space in which to grow."

There she went again! He spoke past a dry tongue: "It is said that what you

cannot control you must accept."

She leaned forward, the orange eyes intent on his face. "Do you accept the

possibility of a final disaster for the Bene Tleilax?"

"If that were the case I would not be here."

"When logic fails, another tool must be used."

Waff grinned. "That sounds logical."

"Don't mock me! How dare you!"

Waff lifted his hands defensively and assumed a placating tone: "What tool

would the Honored Matre suggest?"

"Energy!"

Her answer surprised him. "Energy? In what form and how much?"

"You demand logical answers," she said.

With a feeling of sadness, Waff realized that she was not, after all Zensunni.

The Honored Matre only played word games on the fringes of non-logic, circling

it, but her tool was logic.

"Rot at the core spreads outward," he said.

It was as though she had not heard his testing statement. "There is untapped

energy in the depths of any human we deign to touch," she said. She extended a

skeletal finger to within a few millimeters of his nose.

Waff pulled back into his chair until she dropped her arm. He said: "Is that

not what the Bene Gesserit said before producing their Kwisatz Haderach?"

"They lost control of themselves and of him," she sneered.

Again, Waff thought, she employed logic in thinking of the non-logical. How

much she had told him in these little lapses. He could glimpse the probable

history of these Honored Matres. One of the natural Reverend Mothers from the

Fremen of Rakis had gone out in the Scattering. Diverse people had fled on the

no-ships during and immediately after the Famine Times. A no-ship had seeded

the wild witch and her concepts somewhere. That seed had returned in the form

of this orange-eyed huntress.

Once more she hurled Voice at him, demanding: "What have you wrought with this

ghola?"

This time, Waff was prepared and shrugged it off. This Honored Matre would have

to be deflected or, if possible, slain. He had learned much from her but there

was no way of telling how much she had learned from him with her unguessed

talents.

They are sexual monsters, his informants had said. They enslave men by the

powers of sex.

"How little you know the joys I could give you," she said. Her voice coiled

like a whip around him. How tempting! How seductive!

Waff spoke defensively: "Tell me why you --"

"I need tell you nothing!"

"Then you did not come to bargain." He spoke sadly. The no-ships had, indeed,

seeded those other universes with rot. Waff sensed the weight of necessity on

his shoulders. What if he could not slay her?

"How dare you keep suggesting a bargain with an Honored Matre?" she demanded.

"Know you that we set the price!"

"I do not know your ways, Honored Matre," Waff said. "But I sense in your words

that I have offended."

"Apology accepted."

No apology intended! He stared at her blandly. Many things could be deduced

from her performance. Out of his millennial experiences, Waff reviewed what he

had learned here. This female from the Scattering came to him for an essential

piece of information. Therefore, she had no other source. He sensed

desperation in her. Well masked but definitely there. She needed confirmation

or refutation of something she feared.

How like a predatory bird she was, sitting there with her claw hands so lightly

on the arms of her chair! Rot at the core spreads outward. He had said it and

she had not heard. Clearly, atomic humankind continued to explode on its

Scatterings of Scatterings. The people represented by this Honored Matre had

not found a way to trace the no-ships. That was it, of course. She hunted the

no-ships just as the witches of the Bene Gesserit did.

"You seek the way to nullify a no-ship's invisibility," he said.

The statement obviously rocked her. She had not expected this from the elflike

manikin seated in front of her. He saw fear, then anger, then resolution pass

across her features before she resumed her predatory mask. She knew, though.

She knew he had seen.

"So that is what you do with your ghola," she said.

"It is what the witches of the Bene Gesserit seek with him," Waff lied.

"I underestimated you," she said. "Did you make the same mistake with me?"

"I do not think so, Honored Matre. The breeding scheme that produced you is

quite obviously formidable. I think you could kick out a foot and kill me

before I blinked an eye. The witches are not in the same league with you."

A smile of pleasure softened her features. "Are the Tleilaxu to be our willing

servants or compelled?"

He did not try to hide outrage. "You offer us slavery?"

"That is one of your options."

He had her now! Arrogance was her weakness. Submissively, he asked: "What

would you command me to do?"

"You will take back as your guests two younger Honored Matres. They are to be

bred with you and . . . teach you our ways of ecstasy."

Waff inhaled and exhaled two slow breaths.

"Are you sterile?" she asked.

"Only our Face Dancers are mules." She would already know that. It was common

knowledge.

"You call yourself Master," she said, "yet you have not mastered yourself."

More than you, Honored Matre bitch! And I call myself Masheikh, a fact that may

yet destroy you.

"The two Honored Matres I send with you will make an inspection of everything

Tleilaxu and return to me with their report," she said.

He sighed as though in resignation. "Are the two younger women comely?"

"Honored Matres!" she corrected him.

"Is that the only name you use?"

"If they choose to give you names, that is their privilege, not yours." She

leaned sideways and rapped a bony knuckle against the floor. Metal gleamed in

her hand. She had a way of penetrating this room's shielding!

The hatch opened and two women dressed much like his Honored Matre entered.

Their dark capes carried less decoration and both women were younger. Waff

stared at them. Were they both . . . He tried not to show elation but knew

he failed. No matter. The older one would think he admired the beauty of these

two. By signs known only to the Masters, he saw that one of the two newcomers

was a new Face Dancer. A successful exchange had been made and these Scattered

Ones could not detect it! The Tleilaxu had successfully passed a hurdle! Would

the Bene Gesserit be as blind to these new gholas?

"You are being sensibly agreeable about this, for which you will be rewarded,"

the old Honored Matre said.

"I recognize your powers, Honored Matre," he said. That was true. He bowed his

head to conceal the resolution that he knew he could not keep from his eyes.

She gestured to the newcomers. "These two will accompany you. Their slightest

whim is your command. They will be treated with all honor and respect."

"Of course, Honored Matre." Keeping his head bowed he lifted both arms as

though in salutation and submission. A dart hissed from each sleeve. As he

released the darts, Waff jerked himself sideways in his chair. The motion was

not quite rapid enough. The old Honored Matte's right foot shot out, catching

him in the left thigh and hurling him backward on his chair.

It was the old Honored Matre's last living act. The dart from his left sleeve

caught her in the back of her throat, entering through her opened mouth, a mouth

left gaping in surprise. Narcotic poison cut off any outcry. The other dart

hit the non-Face Dancer of the newcomers in the right eye. His Face Dancer

accomplice cut off any warning shout by a blurred chop to the throat.

Two bodies slumped in death.

Painfully, Waff disentangled himself from the chair and righted it as he got to

his feet. His thigh throbbed. A fraction of a meter more and she would have

broken his thigh! He realized that her reaction had not been mediated by her

central nervous system. As with some insects, attack could be initiated by the

required muscle system. That development would have to be investigated!

His Face Dancer accomplice was listening at the open hatch. She stepped aside

to allow the entry of another Face Dancer in the guise of an Ixian guard.

Waff massaged his injured thigh while his Face Dancers disrobed the dead women.

The one who copied the Ixian put her head to that of the dead old Honored Matre.

Things moved swiftly after that. Presently, there was no Ixian guard, only a

faithful copy of the old Honored Matre and a younger Honored Matre attendant.

Another pseudo-Ixian entered and copied the younger Honored Matre. Soon, there

were only ashes where dead flesh had been. A new Honored Matre scooped the

ashes into a bag and concealed it beneath her robe.

Waff made a careful examination of the room. The consequences of discovery made

him shudder. Such arrogance as he had seen here came from obviously awesome

powers. Those powers must be probed. He detained the Face Dancer who had

copied the old one.

"You have printed her?"

"Yes, Master. Her waking memories were still alive when I copied."

"Transfer to her." He gestured to the one who had been an Ixian guard. They

touched foreheads for a few heartbeats then parted.

"It is done," said the older one.

"How many other copies of these Honored Matres have we made?"

"Four, Master."

"None of them detected?"

"None, Master."

"Those four must return to the heartland of these Honored Matres and learn all

there is to know about them. One of those four must get back to us with what is

learned."

"That is impossible, Master."

"Impossible?"

"They have cut themselves off from their source. This is their way, Master.

They are a new cell and have established themselves on Gammu."

"But surely we could. . ."

"Your pardon, Master. The coordinates of their place in the Scattering were

contained only in a no-ship's workings and have been erased."

"Their tracks are completely covered?" There was dismay in his voice.

"Completely, Master."

Disaster! He was forced to rein in his thoughts from a sudden frenzied darting.

"They must not learn what we have done here," he muttered.

"They will not learn from us, Master."

"What talents have they developed? What powers? Quickly!"

"They are what you would expect from a Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit but

without the melange memories."

"You're sure?"

"There is no hint of it. As you know, Master, we --

"Yes, yes. I know." He waved her to silence. "But the old one was so

arrogant, so . . ."

"Your pardon, Master, but time presses. These Honored Matres have perfected the

pleasures of sex far beyond that developed by any others."

"So it's true what our informants said."

"They went back to the primitive Tantric and developed their own ways of sexual

stimulation, Master. Through this, they accept the worship of their followers."

"Worship." He breathed the word. "Are they superior to the Breeding Mistresses

of the Sisterhood?"

"The Honored Matres believe so, Master. Shall we demon --"

"No!" Waff dropped his elfin mask at this discovery and assumed the expression

of a dominant Master. The Face Dancers nodded their heads in submission. A

look of glee came over Waff's face. The returned Tleilaxu of the Scattering

reported truthfully! By a simple mind-print he had confirmed this new weapon of

his people!

"What are your orders, Master?" the old one asked.

Waff resumed his elfin mask. "We will explore these matters only when we have

returned to the Tleilaxu core at Bandalong. Meanwhile, even a Master does not

give orders to an Honored Matre. You are my masters until we are free of prying

eyes."

"Of course, Master. Shall I now convey your orders to the others outside?"

"Yes, and these are my orders: This no-ship must never return to Gammu. It

must vanish without a trace. No survivors."

"It will be done, Master."

Technology, in common with many other activities, tends toward avoidance of

risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. Capital investment

follows this rule, since people generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize

how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and

thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our

universe can throw the dice.

-Assessment of Ix, Bene Gesserit Archives

On the morning after that initial test in the desert, Sheeana awoke in the

priestly complex to find her bed surrounded by white-robed people.

Priests and priestesses!

"She's awake," a priestess said.

Fear gripped Sheeana. She clutched the bed covers close to her chin while she

stared out at those intent faces. Were they going to abandon her in the desert

again? She had slept the sleep of exhaustion in the softest bed with the

cleanest linen she had experienced in her eight years but she knew everything

the priests did could have a double meaning. They were not to be trusted!

"Did you sleep well?" It was the priestess who had spoken first. She was a

gray-haired older woman, her face framed in a white cowl with purple trim. The

old eyes were watery but alert. Pale blue. The nose was an upturned stub above

a narrow mouth and outjutting chin.

"Will you speak to us?" the woman persisted. "I am Cania, your night

attendant. Remember? I helped you into your bed."

At least, the tone of voice was reassuring. Sheeana sat up and took a better

look at these people. They were afraid! A desert child's nose could detect the

telltale pheromones. To Sheeana, it was a simple, straightforward observation:

That smell equals fear.

"You thought you would hurt me," she said. "Why did you do that?"

The people around her exchanged looks of consternation.

Sheeana's fear dissipated. She had sensed the new order of things and

yesterday's trial in the desert meant more change. She recalled how subservient

the older woman . . . Cania? She had been almost groveling the previous night.

Sheeana would learn in time that any person who lived through the decision to

die evolved a new emotional balance. Fears were transitory. This new condition

was interesting.

Cania's voice trembled when she responded: "Truly, Child of God, we did not

intend harm."

Sheeana straightened the bedcovers on her lap. "My name is Sheeana." That was

desert politeness. Cania already had produced a name. "Who are these others?"

"They will be sent away if you don't want them . . . Sheeana." Cania indicated

a florid-faced woman at her left dressed in a robe similar to her own. "All

except Alhosa, of course. She is your day attendant."

Alhosa curtsied at the introduction.

Sheeana stared up at a face puffy with waterfat, heavy features in a nimbus of

fluffy blond hair. Shifting her attention abruptly, Sheeana looked at the men

in the group. They watched her with heavy-lidded intentness, some with looks of

trembling suspicion. The fear smell was strong.

Priests!

"Send them away." Sheeana waved a hand at the priests. "They are haram!" It

was the gutter word, the lowest term of all for that which was most evil.

The priests recoiled in shock.

"Begone!" Cania commanded. There was no mistaking the look of malevolent glee

on her face. Cania had not been included among the vile ones. But these

priests clearly stood among those labeled as haram! They must have done

something hideous for God to send a child-priestess to chastise them. Cania

could believe it of priests. They had seldom treated her the way she deserved.

Like chastened bedogs, the priests bowed themselves backward and left Sheeana's

chamber. Among those who went out into the hallway was a historian-locutor

named Dromind, a dark man with a busy mind that tended to fasten onto ideas like

the beak of a carrion bird onto a morsel of meat. When the chamber door closed

behind them, Dromind told his trembling companions that the name Sheeana was a

modern form of the ancient name, Siona.

"You all know Siona's place in the histories," he said. "She served Shai-hulud

in His transformation from human shape into the Divided God."

Stiros, a wrinkled older priest with dark lips and pale, glistening eyes, looked

wonderingly at Dromind. "That is extremely curious," Stiros said. "The Oral

Histories claim that Siona was instrumental in His translation from the One into

the Many. Sheeana. Do you think. . ."

"Let us not forget the Hadi Benotto translation of God's own holy words,"

another priest interrupted. "Shai-hulud referred many times to Siona."

"Not always with favor," Stiros reminded them. "Remember her full name: Siona

Ibn Fuad al-Seyefa Atreides."

"Atreides," another priest whispered.

"We must study her with care," Dromind said.

A young acolyte-messenger hurried up the hallway to the group and sought among

them until he spied Stiros. "Stiros," the messenger said, "you must clear this

hallway immediately."

"Why?" It was an indignant voice from the press of the rejected priests.

"She is to be moved into the High Priest's quarters," the messenger said.

"By whose orders?" Stiros demanded.

"High Priest Tuek himself says this," the messenger said. "They have been

listening." He waved a hand vaguely toward the direction from which he had

come.

All of the group in the hall understood. Rooms could be shaped to send voices

from them into other places. There were always listeners.

"What have they heard?" Stiros demanded. His old voice quavered.

"She asked if her quarters were the best. They are about to move her and she

must not find any of you out here."

"But what are we to do?" Stiros asked.

"Study her," Dromind said.

The hall was cleared immediately and all of them began the process of studying

Sheeana. The pattern born here would print itself on all of their lives over

the subsequent years. The routine that took shape around Sheeana produced

changes felt in the farthest reaches of the Divided God's influence. Two words

ignited the change: "Study her."

How naive she was, the priests thought. How curiously naive. But she could

read and she displayed an intense interest in the Holy Books she found in Tuek's

quarters. Her quarters now.

All was propitiation from the highest to the lowest. Tuek moved into the

quarters of his chief assistant and the bumping process moved downward.

Fabricators waited upon Sheeana and measured her. The finest stillsuit was

fashioned for her. She acquired new robes of priestly gold and white with

purple trim.

People began avoiding historian-locutor Dromind. He took to buttonholing his

fellows and expounding the history of the original Siona as though this said

something important about the present bearer of the ancient name.

"Siona was the mate of the Holy Duncan Idaho," Dromind reminded anyone who would

listen. "Their descendants are everywhere."

"Indeed? Pardon me for not listening further but I am really on an urgent

errand."

At first, Tuek was more patient with Dromind. The history was interesting and

its lessons obvious. "God has sent us a new Siona," Tuek said. "All should be

clear."

Dromind went away and returned with more tidbits from the past. "The accounts

from Dar-es-Balat take on a new meaning now," Dromind told his High Priest.

"Should we not make further tests and comparisons of this child?"

Dromind had braced the High Priest immediately after breakfast. The remains of

Tuek's meal still occupied the serving table on the balcony. Through the open

window, they could hear stirrings overhead in Sheeana's quarters.

Tuek put a cautioning finger to his lips and spoke in a hushed voice. "The Holy

Child goes of her own choice to the desert." He went to a wall map and pointed

to an area southwest of Keen. "Apparently this is an area that interests her or

. . . I should say, calls her."

"I am told she makes frequent use of dictionaries," Dromind said. "Surely, that

cannot be a --"

"She is testing us," Tuek said. "Do not be fooled."

"But Lord Tuek, she asks the most childish questions of Cania and Alhosa."

"Do you question my judgment, Dromind?"

Belatedly, Dromind realized he had overstepped the proper bounds. He fell

silent but his expression said many more words were compressed within him.

"God has sent her to weed out some evil that has crept into the ranks of the

anointed," Tuek said. "Go! Pray and ask your self if that evil has lodged

itself within you."

When Dromind had gone, Tuek summoned a trusted aide. "Where is the Holy Child?"

"She has gone out into the desert, Lord, to commune with her Father."

"To the southwest?"

"Yes, Lord."

"Dromind must be taken far out to the east and left on the sand. Plant several

thumpers to make sure he never returns."

"Dromind, Lord?"

"Dromind."

Even after Dromind was translated into the Mouth of God, the priests continued

to follow his original injunction. They studied Sheeana.

Sheeana also studied.

Gradually, so gradually that she could not identify the point of transition, she

recognized her great power over those around her. At first, it was a game, a

continual Children's Day with adults jumping to obey each childish whim. But it

appeared that no whim was too difficult.

Did she require a rare fruit for her table?

The fruit was served to her on a golden dish.

Did she glimpse a child far below on the teeming streets and require that child

as a playmate?

That child was hustled up to Sheeana's temple quarters. When fear and shock

passed, the child might even join in some game, which the priests and

priestesses observed intently. Innocent skipping about on the rooftop garden,

giggling whispers -- all were subjected to intense analysis. Sheeana found the

awe of such children a burden. She seldom called the same child back to her,

preferring to learn new things from new playmates.

The priests achieved no consensus about the innocence of such encounters. The

playmates were put through fearful interrogation until Sheeana discovered this

and raged at her guardians.

Inevitably, word of Sheeana spread throughout Rakis and off-planet. The

Sisterhood's reports accumulated. The years passed in a kind of sublimely

autocratic routine -- feeding Sheeana's curiosity. It was a curiosity that

appeared to have no limits. None of those among the immediate attendants

thought of this as education: Sheeana teaching the priests of Rakis and they

teaching her. The Bene Gesserit, however, observed this aspect of Sheeana's

life at once and watched it closely.

"She is in good hands. Leave her there until she is ready for us," Taraza

ordered. "Keep a defense force on constant alert and see that I get regular

reports."

Not once did Sheeana reveal her true origins nor what Shaitan had done to her

family and neighbors. That was a private thing between Shaitan and herself.

She thought of her silence as payment for having been spared.

Some things paled for Sheeana. She made fewer trips into the desert. Curiosity

continued but it became obvious that an explanation of Shaitan's behavior toward

her might not be found on the open sand. And although she knew there were

embassies of other powers on Rakis, the Bene Gesserit spies among her attendants

made sure that Sheeana did not express too much interest in the Sisterhood.

Soothing answers to dampen such interest were provided and metered out to

Sheeana as required.

The message from Taraza to her observers on Rakis was direct and pointed: "The

generations of preparation have become the years of refinement. We will move

only at the proper moment. There is no longer any doubt that this child is the

one."

In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other

force in human history. Show me someone who says "Something must be done!" and

I will show you a head full of vicious intentions that have no other outlet.

What we must strive for always! is to find the natural flow and go with it.

-The Reverend Mother Taraza, Conversational Record, BG File GSXXMAT9

The overcast sky lifted as the sun of Gammu climbed, picking up the scents of

grass and surrounding forest extracted and condensed by the morning dampness.

Duncan Idaho stood at a Forbidden Window inhaling the smells. This morning

Patrin had told him: "You are fifteen years of age. You must consider yourself

a young man. You no longer are a child."

"Is it my birthday?"

They were in Duncan's sleeping chamber where Patrin had just aroused him with a

glass of citrus juice.

"I do not know your birthday."

"Do gholas have birthdays?"

Patrin remained silent. It was forbidden to speak of gholas with the ghola.

"Schwangyu says you can't answer that question," Duncan said.

Patrin spoke with obvious embarrassment. "The Bashar wishes me to tell you that

your training class will be delayed this morning. He wishes you to do the leg

and knee exercises until you are called."

"I did those yesterday!"

"I merely convey the Bashar's orders." Patrin took the empty glass and left

Duncan alone.

Duncan dressed quickly. They would expect him for breakfast in the Commissary.

Damn them! He did not need their breakfast. What was the Bashar doing? Why

couldn't he start the classes on time? Leg and knee exercises! That was just

make-work because Teg had some other unexpected duty. Angrily, Duncan took a

Forbidden Route to a Forbidden Window. Let the damned guards be punished!

He found the odors coming through the open window evocative but could not place

the memories that lurked at the edges of his awareness. He knew there were

memories. Duncan found this frightening but magnetic -- like walking along the

edge of a cliff or openly confronting Schwangyu with his defiance. He had never

walked along the edge of a cliff nor openly confronted Schwangyu with defiance,

but he could imagine such things. Just seeing a filmbook holophoto of a cliffedge

path was enough to make his stomach tighten. As for Schwangyu, he often

imagined angry disobedience and suffered the same physical reaction.

Someone else is in my mind, he thought.

Not just in his mind -- in his body. He could sense other experiences as though

he had just awakened, knowing he had dreamed but unable to recall the dream.

This dream-stuff called up knowledge that he knew he could not possess.

Yet he did possess it.

He could name some of the trees he smelled out there but those names were not in

the library's records.

This Forbidden Window was forbidden because it pierced an outer wall of the Keep

and could be opened. It was often open, as now, for ventilation. The window

was reached from his room by climbing over a balcony rail and slipping through a

storeroom air shaft. He had learned to do this without the slightest

disturbance of rail or storeroom or shaft. Quite early, it had been made clear

to him that those trained by the Bene Gesserit could read extremely small signs.

He could read some of those signs himself, thanks to the teachings of Teg and

Lucilla.

Standing well back in the shadows of the upper hallway, Duncan focused on

rolling slopes of forest climbing to rocky pinnacles. He found the forest

compelling. The pinnacles beyond it possessed a magical quality. It was easy

to imagine that no human had ever touched that land. How good it would be to

lose himself there, to be only his own person without worrying that another

person dwelled within him. A stranger there.

With a sigh, Duncan turned away and returned to his room along his secret route.

Only when he was back in the safety of his room did he allow himself to say that

he had done it once more. No one would be punished for this venture.

Punishments and pain, which hung like an aura around the places forbidden to

him, only made Duncan exercise extreme caution when he broke the rules.

He did not like to think of the pain Schwangyu would cause him if she discovered

him at a Forbidden Window. Even the worst pain, though, would not cause him to

cry out, he told himself. He had never cried out even at her nastier tricks.

He merely stared back at her, hating her but absorbing her lesson. To him,

Schwangyu's lesson was direct: Refine his ability to move unobserved, unseen

and unheard, leaving no spoor to betray his passage.

In his room, Duncan sat on the edge of his cot and contemplated the blank wall

in front of him. Once, when he had stared at that wall, an image had formed

there -- a young woman with light amber hair and sweetly rounded features. She

looked out of the wall at him and smiled. Her lips moved without sound. Duncan

already had learned lip reading, though, and he read the words clearly.

"Duncan, my sweet Duncan."

Was that his mother? he wondered. His real mother?

Even gholas had real mothers somewhere back there. Lost in the time behind the

axlotl tanks there had been a living woman who bore him and . . . and loved him.

Yes, loved him because he was her child. If that face on the wall was his

mother, how had her image found its way there? He could not identify the face

but he wanted it to be his mother.

The experience frightened him but fear did not prevent him from wanting to

repeat it. Whoever that young woman was, her fleeting presence tantalized him.

The stranger within him knew that young woman. He felt sure of this.

Sometimes, he wanted to be that stranger only for an instant -- long enough to

gather up all of those hidden memories -- but he feared this desire. He would

lose his real self, he thought, if the stranger entered his awareness.

Would that be like death? he wondered.

Duncan had seen death before he was six. His guards had repelled intruders and

one of the guards was killed. Four intruders died as well. Duncan had watched

the five bodies brought into the Keep -- flaccid muscles, arms dragging. Some

essential thing was gone from them. Nothing remained to call up memories --

self-memories or stranger-memories.

The five were taken somewhere deep within the Keep. He heard a guard say later

that the four intruders were loaded with "shere." That was his first encounter

with the idea of an Ixian Probe.

"An Ixian Probe can raid the mind even of a dead person," Geasa explained.

"Shere is a drug that protects you from the probe. Your cells will be totally

dead before the drug effect is gone."

Adroit listening told Duncan the four intruders were being probed in other ways

as well. These other ways were not explained to him but he suspected this must

be something secret to the Bene Gesserit. He thought of it as another hellish

trick of the Reverend Mothers. They must animate the dead and extract

information from the unwilling flesh. Duncan visualized depersonalized muscles

performing at the will of a diabolical observer.

The observer was always Schwangyu.

Such images filled Duncan's mind despite every effort by his teachers to dispel

"foolishness invented by the ignorant." His teachers said these wild stories

were valuable only to create fear of the Bene Gesserit among the uninitiated.

Duncan refused to believe that he was of the initiated. Looking at a Reverend

Mother he always thought: I'm not one of them!

Lucilla was most persistent lately. "Religion is a source of energy," she said.

"You must recognize this energy. It can be directed for your own purposes."

Their purposes, not mine, he thought.

He imagined his own purposes and projected his own images of himself triumphant

over the Sisterhood, especially over Schwangyu. Duncan felt that his

imaginative projections were a subterranean reality that worked on him from that

place where the stranger dwelled. But he learned to nod and give the appearance

that he, too, found such religious credulity amusing.

Lucilla recognized the dichotomy in him. She told Schwangyu: "He thinks

mystical forces are to be feared and, if possible, avoided. As long as he

persists in this belief he cannot learn to use our most essential knowledge."

They met for what Schwangyu called "a regular assessment session," just the two

of them in Schwangyu's study. The time was shortly after their light supper.

The sounds of the Keep around them were those of transition -- night patrols

beginning, off-duty personnel enjoying one of their brief free-time periods.

Schwangyu's study had not been completely insulated from such things, a

deliberate contrivance of the Sisterhood's renovators. The trained senses of a

Reverend Mother could detect many things from the sounds around her.

Schwangyu felt more and more at a loss in these "assessment sessions." It was

increasingly obvious that Lucilla could not be won over to those opposing

Taraza. Lucilla also was immune to a Reverend Mother's manipulative

subterfuges. Most damnable of all, Lucilla and Teg between them were imparting

highly volatile abilities to the ghola. Dangerous in the extreme. Added to all

of her other problems, Schwangyu nurtured a growing respect for Lucilla.

"He thinks we use occult powers to practice our arts," Lucilla said. "How did

he arrive at such a peculiar idea?"

Schwangyu felt the disadvantage imposed by this question. Lucilla already knew

this had been done to weaken the ghola. Lucilla was saying: "Disobedience is a

crime against our Sisterhood!"

"If he wants our knowledge, he will surely get it from you," Schwangyu said. No

matter how dangerous, in Schwangyu's view, this was certainly a truth.

"His desire for knowledge is my best lever," Lucilla said, "but we both know

that is not enough." There was no reproof in Lucilla's tone but Schwangyu felt

it nevertheless.

Damn her! She's trying to win me over! Schwangyu thought.

Several responses entered Schwangyu's mind: "I have not disobeyed my orders."

Pah! A disgusting excuse! "The ghola has been treated according to standard

Bene Gesserit training practices." Inadequate and untrue. And this ghola was

not a standard object of education. There were depths in him that could only be

matched by a potential Reverend Mother. And that was the problem!

"I have made mistakes," Schwangyu said.

There! That was a double-pronged answer that another Reverend Mother could

appreciate.

"You made no mistake when you damaged him," Lucilla said.

"But I failed to anticipate that another Reverend Mother might expose the flaws

in him," Schwangyu said.

"He wants our powers only to escape us," Lucilla said. "He's thinking: Someday

I'll know as much as they do and then I'll run away."

When Schwangyu did not respond, Lucilla said: "That was clever. If he runs, we

will have to hunt him down and destroy him ourselves."

Schwangyu smiled.

"I will not make your mistake," Lucilla said. "I tell you openly what I know

you would see anyway. I now understand why Taraza sent an Imprinter to one so

young."

Schwangyu's smile vanished. "What are you doing?"

"I am bonding him to me the way we bond all of our acolytes to their teachers.

I am treating him with candor and loyalty as one of our own."

"But he's male!"

"So the spice agony will be denied him, but nothing else. He is, I think,

responding."

"And when the time comes for the ultimate stage of imprinting?" Schwangyu

asked.

"Yes, that will be delicate. You think it will destroy him. That, of course,

was your plan."

"Lucilla, the Sisterhood is not unanimous in following Taraza's designs for this

ghola. Certainly, you know this."

It was Schwangyu's most powerful argument and the fact that it had been reserved

for this moment said much. The fears that they might produce another Kwisatz

Haderach were deep-seated and the dissension in the Bene Gesserit comparably

powerful.

"He is primitive genetic stock and not bred to be a Kwisatz Haderach," Lucilla

said.

"But the Tleilaxu have interfered with his genetic inheritance!"

"Yes; at our orders. They have sped up his nerve and muscle responses."

Is that all they have done?" Schwangyu asked.

"You've seen the cell studies," Lucilla said.

"If we could do as much as the Tleilaxu we would not need them," Schwangyu said.

"We would have our own axlotl tanks."

"You think they have hidden something from us," Lucilla said.

"They had him completely outside our observation for nine months!"

"I have heard all of these arguments," Lucilla said.

Schwangyu threw up her hands in a gesture of capitulation. "He's all yours,

then, Reverend Mother. And the consequences are on your head. But you will not

remove me from this post no matter what you report to Chapter House."

"Remove you? Certainly not. I don't want your faction sending someone unknown

to us."

"There is a limit to the insults I will take from you," Schwangyu said.

"And there's a limit to how much treachery Taraza will accept," Lucilla said.

"If we get another Paul Atreides or, the Gods forbid, another Tyrant, it will be

Taraza's doing," Schwangyu said. "Tell her I said so."

Lucilla stood. "You may as well know that Taraza left entirely at my discretion

how much melange I feed this ghola. I have already begun increasing his intake

of the spice."

Schwangyu pounded both fists on her desk. "Damn you all! You will destroy us

yet!"

The Tleilaxu secret must be in their sperm. Our tests prove that their sperm

does not carry forward in a straight genetic fashion. Gaps occur. Every

Tleilaxu we have examined has hidden his inner self from us. They are naturally

immune to an Ixian Probe! Secrecy at the deepest levels, that is their ultimate

armor and their ultimate weapon.

-Bene Gesserit Analysis, Archives Code: BTXX441WOR

On a morning of Sheeana's fourth year in priestly sanctuary, the reports of

their spies brought a gleam of special interest to the Bene Gesserit watchers on

Rakis.

"She was on the roof, you say?" the Mother Commander of the Rakian Keep asked.

Tamalane, the commander, had served previously on Gammu and knew more than most

about what the Sisterhood hoped to conjoin here. The spies' report had

interrupted Tamalane's breakfast of cifruit confit laced with melange. The

messenger stood at ease beside the table while Tamalane resumed eating as she

reread the report.

"On the roof, yes, Reverend Mother," the messenger said. Tamalane glanced up at

the messenger, Kipuna, a Rakian native acolyte being groomed for sensitive local

duties. Swallowing a mouthful of her confit, Tamalane said: " 'Bring them

back!' Those were her exact words?"

Kipuna nodded curtly. She understood the question. Had Sheeana spoken with

preemptory command?

Tamalane resumed scanning the report, looking for the sensitive signals. She

was glad they had sent Kipuna herself. Tamalane respected the abilities of this

Rakian woman. Kipuna had the soft round features and fuzzy hair common among

much of the Rakian priestly class, but there was no fuzzy brain under that hair.

"Sheeana was displeased," Kipuna said. "The 'thopter passed nearby the rooftop

and she saw the two manacled prisoners in it quite clearly. She knew they were

being taken to death in the desert. "

Tamalane put down the report and smiled. "So she ordered the prisoners brought

back to her. I find her choice of words fascinating."

"Bring them back?" Kipuna asked. "That seems a simple enough order. How is it

fascinating?"

Tamalane admired the directness of the acolyte's interest. Kipuna was not about

to pass up a chance at learning how a real Reverend Mother's mind worked.

"It was not that part of her performance that interested me," Tamalane said.

She bent to the report, reading aloud: " 'You are servants unto Shaitan, not

servants unto servants.' " Tamalane looked up at Kipuna. "You saw and heard

all of this yourself?"

"Yes, Reverend Mother. It was judged important that I report to you personally

should you have other questions."

"She still calls him Shaitan," Tamalane said. "How that must gall them! Of

course, the Tyrant himself said it: 'They will call me Shaitan.' "

"I have seen the reports out of the hoard found at Dar-es-Balat," Kipuna said.

"There was no delay in bringing back the two prisoners?" Tamalane asked.

"As quickly as a message could be transmitted to the 'thopter, Reverend Mother.

They were returned within minutes."

"So they are watching her and listening all the time. Good. Did Sheeana give

any sign that she knew the two prisoners? Did any message pass between them?"

"I am sure they were strangers to her, Reverend Mother. Two ordinary people of

the lower orders, rather dirty and poorly clothed. They smelled of the unwashed

from the perimeter hovels."

"Sheeana ordered the manacles removed and then she spoke to this unwashed pair.

Her exact words now: What did she say?"

" 'You are my people.' "

"Lovely, lovely," Tamalane said. "Sheeana then ordered that these two be taken

away, bathed and given new clothes before being released. Tell me in your own

words what happened next."

"She summoned Tuek who came with three of his councillor-attendants. It was . .

. almost an argument."

"Memory-trance, please," Tamalane said. "Replay the exchange for me."

Kipuna closed her eyes, breathed deeply and fell into memory-trance. Then:

"Sheeana says, 'I do not like it when you feed my people to Shaitan.'

Councillor Stiros says, 'They are sacrificed to Shai-hulud!' Sheeana says, 'To

Shaitan!' Sheeana stamps her foot in anger. Tuek says, 'Enough, Stiros. I

will not hear more of this dissension.' Sheeana says, 'When will you learn?'

Stiros starts to speak but Tuek silences him with a glare and says, 'We have

learned, Holy Child.' Sheeana says, 'I want --' "

"Enough," Tamalane said.

The acolyte opened her eyes and waited silently.

Presently, Tamalane said, "Return to your post, Kipuna. You have done very

well, indeed."

"Thank you, Reverend Mother."

"There will be consternation among the priests," Tamalane said.

"Sheeana's wish is their command because Tuek believes in her. They will stop

using the worms as instruments of punishment."

"The two prisoners," Kipuna said.

"Yes, very observant of you. The two prisoners will tell what happened to them.

The story will be distorted. People will say that Sheeana protects them from

the priests."

"Isn't that exactly what she's doing, Reverend Mother?"

"Ahhhh, but consider the options open to the priests. They will increase their

alternative forms of punishment -- whippings and certain deprivations. While

fear of Shaitan eases because of Sheeana, fear of the priests will increase."

Within two months, Tamalane's reports to Chapter House contained confirmation of

her own words.

"Short rations, especially short water rations, have become the dominant form of

punishment," Tamalane reported. "Wild rumors have penetrated the farthest

reaches of Rakis and soon will find lodging on many other planets as well."

Tamalane considered the implications of her report with care. Many eyes would

see it, including some not in sympathy with Taraza. Any Reverend Mother would

be able to call up an image of what must be happening on Rakis. Many on Rakis

had seen Sheeana's arrival atop a wild worm from the desert. The priestly

response of secrecy had been flawed from the beginning. Curiosity unsatisfied

tended to create its own answers. Guesses were often more dangerous than facts.

Previous reports had told of the children brought to play with Sheeana. The

much-garbled stories of such children were repeated with increasing distortions

and those distortions had been dutifully sent on to Chapter House. The two

prisoners, returned to the streets in their new finery, only compounded the

growing mythology. The Sisterhood, artists in mythology, possessed on Rakis a

ready-made energy to be subtly amplified and directed.

"We have fed a wish-fulfillment belief into the populace," Tamalane reported.

She thought of the Bene Gesserit-originated phrases as she reread her latest

report.

"Sheeana is the one we have long awaited."

It was a simple enough statement that its meaning could be spread without

unacceptable distortion.

"The Child of Shai-hulud comes to chastise the priests!"

That one had been a bit more complicated. A few priests died in dark alleys as

a result of popular fervency. This had fed a new alertness into the corps of

priestly enforcers with predictable injustices inflicted upon the populace.

Tamalane thought of the priestly delegation that had waited upon Sheeana as a

result of turmoil among Tuek's councillors. Seven of them led by Stiros had

intruded upon Sheeana's luncheon with a child from the streets. Knowing that

this would happen Tamalane had been prepared and a secret recording of the

incident had been brought to her, the words audible, every expression visible,

the thoughts quite apparent to a Reverend Mother's trained eye.

"We were sacrificing to Shai-hulud!" Stiros protested.

"Tuek told you not to argue with me about that," Sheeana said.

How the priestesses smiled at the discomfiture of Stiros and the other priests!

"But Shai-hulud --" Stiros began.

"Shaitan!" Sheeana corrected him and her expression was easily read: Did these

stupid priests know nothing?

"But we have always thought --"

"You were wrong!" Sheeana stamped a foot.

Stiros feigned the need for instruction. "Are we to believe that Shai-hulud,

the Divided God, is also Shaitan?"

What a complete fool he was, Tamalane thought. Even a pubescent girl could

confound him, as Sheeana proceeded to do.

"Any child of the streets knows this almost as soon as she can walk!" Sheeana

ranted.

Stiros spoke slyly: "How do you know what is in the minds of street children?"

"You are evil to doubt me!" Sheeana accused. It was an answer she had learned

to use often, knowing it would get back to Tuek and cause trouble.

Stiros knew this only too well. He waited with downcast eyes while Sheeana,

speaking with heavy patience as one telling an old fable to a child, explained

to him that either god or devil or both could inhabit the worm of the desert.

Humans had only to accept this. It was not left to humans to decide such

things.

Stiros had sent people into the desert for speaking such heresy. His expression

(so carefully recorded for Bene Gesserit analysis) said such wild concepts were

always springing up from the muck at the bottom of the Rakian heap. But now!

He had to contend with Tuek's insistence that Sheeana spoke gospel truth!

As she looked at the recording, Tamalane thought the pot was boiling nicely.

This she reported to Chapter House. Doubts flogged Stiros; doubts everywhere

except among the populace in their devotion to Sheeana. Spies close to Tuek

said he was even beginning to doubt the wisdom of his decision to translate the

historian-locutor, Dromind.

"Was Dromind right to doubt her?" Tuek demanded of those around him.

"Impossible!" the sycophants said.

What else could they say? The High Priest could make no mistake in such

decisions. God would not allow it. Sheeana clearly confounded him, though.

She put the decisions of many previous High Priests into a terrible limbo.

Reinterpretation was being demanded on all sides.

Stiros kept pounding at Tuek: "What do we really know about her?"

Tamalane had a full account of the most recent such confrontation. Stiros and

Tuek alone, debating far into the night, just the two of them (they thought) in

Tuek's quarters, comfortably ensconced in rare blue chairdogs, melange-laced

confits close at hand. Tamalane's holophoto record of the meeting showed a

single yellow glowglobe drifting on its suspensors close above the pair, the

light dimmed to ease the strain on tired eyes.

"Perhaps that first time, leaving her in the desert with a thumper, was not a

good test," Stiros said.

It was a sly statement. Tuek was noted for not having an excessively

complicated mind. "Not a good test? Whatever do you mean?"

"God might wish us to perform other tests."

"You have seen her yourself! Many times in the desert talking to God!"

"Yes!" Stiros almost pounced. Clearly, it was the response he wanted. "If she

can stand unharmed in the presence of God, perhaps she can teach others how this

is accomplished."

"You know this angers her when we suggest it."

"Perhaps we have not approached the problem in quite the right way."

"Stiros! What if the child is right? We serve the Divided God. I have been

thinking long and earnestly upon this. Why would God divide? Is this not God's

ultimate test?"

The expression on Stiros' face said this was exactly the kind of mental

gymnastics his faction feared. He tried to divert the High Priest but Tuek was

not to be shifted from a single-track plunge into metaphysics.

"The ultimate test," Tuek insisted. "To see the good in evil and the evil in

good."

Stiros' expression could only be described as consternation. Tuek was God's

Supreme Anointed. No priest was allowed to doubt that! The thing that might

now arise if Tuek went public with such a concept would shake the foundations of

priestly authority! Clearly, Stiros was asking himself if the time had not come

to translate his High Priest.

"I would never suggest that I might debate such profound ideas with my High

Priest," Stiros said. "But perhaps I can offer a proposal that might resolve

many doubts."

"Propose then," Tuek said.

"Subtle instruments could be introduced in her clothing. We might listen when

she talks to --"

"Do you think God would not know what we did?"

"Such a thought never crossed my mind!"

"I will not order her taken into the desert," Tuek said.

"But if it is her own idea to go?" Stiros assumed his most ingratiating

expression. "She has done this many times."

"But not recently. She appears to have lost her need to consult with God."

"Could we not offer suggestions to her?" Stiros asked.

"Such as?"

"Sheeana, when will you speak again with your Father? Do you not long to stand

once more in His presence?"

"That has more the sound of prodding than suggestion."

"I am only proposing that --"

"This Holy Child is no simpleton! She talks to God, Stiros. God might punish

us sorely for such presumption."

"Did God not put her here for us to study?" Stiros asked.

This was too close to the Dromind heresy for Tuek's liking. He sent a baleful

stare at Stiros.

"What I mean," Stiros said, "is that surely God means us to learn from her."

Tuek himself had said this many times, never hearing in his own words a curious

echo of Dromind's words.

"She is not to be prodded and tested," Tuek said.

"Heaven forbid!" Stiros said. "I will be the soul of holy caution. And

everything I learn from the Holy Child will be reported to you immediately."

Tuek merely nodded. He had his own ways to be sure Stiros spoke the truth.

The subsequent sly proddings and testings were reported immediately to Chapter

House by Tamalane and her subordinates.

"Sheeana has a thoughtful look," Tamalane reported.

Among the Reverend Mothers on Rakis and those to whom they reported, this

thoughtful look had an obvious interpretation. Sheeana's antecedents had been

deduced long ago. Stiros' intrusions were making the child homesick. Sheeana

kept a wise silence but she clearly thought much about her life in a pioneer

village. Despite all of the fears and perils, those obviously had been happy

times for her. She would remember the laughter, poling the sand for its

weather, hunting scorpions in the crannies of the village hovels, smelling out

spice fragments in the dunes. From Sheeana's repeated trips to the area, the

Sisterhood had made a reasonably accurate guess as to the location of the lost

village and what had happened to it. Sheeana often stared at one of Tuek's old

maps on the wall of her quarters.

As Tamalane expected, one morning Sheeana stabbed a finger at the place on the

wall map where she had gone many times. "Take me there," Sheeana commanded her

attendants.

A 'thopter was summoned.

While priests listened avidly in a 'thopter hovering far overhead, Sheeana once

more confronted her nemesis in the sand. Tamalane and her advisors, tuned into

the priestly circuits, observed just as avidly.

Nothing even remotely suggesting a village remained on the duneswept waste where

Sheeana ordered herself deposited. She used a thumper this time however.

Another of Stiros' sly suggestions accompanied by careful instructions on use of

the ancient means to summon the Divided God.

A worm came.

Tamalane watched on her own relay projector, thinking the worm only a middling

monster. Its length she estimated at about fifty meters. Sheeana stood only

about three meters in front of the gaping mouth. The huffing of the worm's

interior fires was clearly audible to the observers.

"Will you tell me why you did it?" Sheeana demanded.

She did not flinch from the worm's hot breath. Sand crackled beneath the

monster but she gave no sign that she heard.

"Answer me!" Sheeana commanded.

No voice came from the worm but Sheeana appeared to be listening, her head

cocked to one side.

"Then go back where you came from," Sheeana said. She waved the worm away.

Obediently, the worm backed off and returned beneath the sands.

For days, while the Sisterhood spied upon them with glee, the priests debated

that sparse encounter. Sheeana could not be questioned lest she learn that she

had been overheard. As before, she refused to discuss anything about her visits

to the desert.

Stiros continued his sly prodding. The result was precisely what the Sisterhood

expected. Without any warning, Sheeana would awaken some days and say: "Today,

I will go into the desert."

Sometimes she used a thumper, sometimes she danced her summons. Far out on the

sands beyond the sight of Keen or any other inhabited place, the worms came to

her. Sheeana alone in front of a worm talked to it while others listened.

Tamalane found the accumulated recordings fascinating as they passed through her

hands on their way to Chapter House.

"I should hate you!"

What a turmoil that caused among the priests! Tuek wanted an open debate:

"Should all of us hate the Divided God at the same time we love Him?"

Stiros barely shut off this suggestion with the argument that God's wishes had

not been made clear.

Sheeana asked one of her gigantic visitors: "Will you let me ride you again?"

When she approached, the worm retreated and would not let her mount.

On another occasion, she asked: "Must I stay with the priests?"

This particular worm proved to be the target of many questions, and among them:

"Where do people go when you eat them?"

"Why are people false to me?"

"Should I punish the bad priests?"

Tamalane laughed at that final question, thinking of the turmoil it would cause

among Tuek's people. Her spies duly reported the dismay of the priests.

"How does He answer her?" Tuek asked. "Has anyone heard God respond?"

"Perhaps He speaks directly into her soul," a councillor ventured.

"That's it!" Tuek leaped at this offering. "We must ask her what God tells her

to do."

Sheeana refused to be drawn into such discussions.

"She has a pretty fair assessment of her powers," Tamalane reported. "She's not

going into the desert very much now despite Stiros' proddings. As we might

expect, the attraction has waned. Fear and elation will carry her just so far

before paling. She has, however, learned an effective command:

"Go away!"

The Sisterhood marked this as an important development. When even the Divided

God obeyed, no priest or priestess was about to question her authority to issue

such a command.

"The priests are building towers in the desert," Tamalane reported. "They want

more secure places from which to observe Sheeana when she does go out there."

The Sisterhood had anticipated this development and had even done some of its

own prodding to speed up the projects.

Each tower had its own windtrap, its own maintenance staff, its own water

barrier, gardens and other elements of civilization. Each was a small community

spreading the established areas of Rakis farther and farther into the domain of

the worms.

Pioneer villages no longer were necessary and Sheeana got the credit for this

development.

"She is our priestess," the populace said.

Tuek and his councillors spun on the point of a pin: Shaitan and Shai-hulud in

one body? Stiros lived in daily fear that Tuek would announce the fact.

Stiros' advisors finally rejected the suggestion that Tuek be translated.

Another suggestion that Priestess Sheeana have a fatal accident was greeted with

horror by all, even Stiros finding it too great a venture.

"Even if we remove this thorn, God may visit us with an even more terrible

intrusion," he said. And he warned: "The oldest books say that a little child

shall lead us."

Stiros was only the most recent among those who looked upon Sheeana as something

not quite mortal. It was observable that those around her, Cania included, had

come to love Sheeana. She was so ingenuous, so bright and responsive.

Many observed that this growing affection for Sheeana extended even to Tuek.

For the people touched by this power, the Sisterhood had an immediate

recognition. The Bene Gesserit knew a label for this ancient effect: expanding

worship. Tamalane reported profound changes moving through Rakis as people

everywhere on the planet began praying to Sheeana instead of to Shaitan or even

to Shai-hulud.

"They see that Sheeana intercedes for the weakest people," Tamalane reported.

"It is a familiar pattern. All goes as ordered. When do you send the ghola?"

The outer surface of a balloon is always larger than the center of the damned

thing! That's the whole point of the Scattering!

-Bene Gesserit response to an Ixian suggestion that new investigative probes be

sent out among the Lost Ones

One of the Sisterhood's swifter lighters took Miles Teg up to the Guild

Transport circling Gammu. He did not like leaving the Keep at this moment but

the priorities were obvious. He also had a gut reaction about this venture. In

his three centuries of experience, Teg had learned to trust his gut reactions.

Matters were not going well on Gammu. Every patrol, every report of remote

sensors, the accounts of Patrin's spies in the cities -- everything fueled Teg's

disquiet.

Mentat fashion, Teg felt the movement of forces around the Keep and within it.

His ghola charge was threatened. The order for him to report aboard the Guild

Transport prepared for violence, however, came from Taraza herself with an

unmistakable crypto-identifier on it.

On the lighter taking him upward, Teg set himself for battle. Those

preparations he could make had been made. Lucilla was warned. He felt

confident about Lucilla. Schwangyu was another matter. He fully intended to

discuss with Taraza a few essential changes in the Gammu Keep. First, though,

he had another battle to win. Teg had not the slightest doubt that he was

entering combat.

As his lighter moved in to dock, Teg looked out a port and saw the gigantic

Ixian symbol within the Guild cartouche on the Transport's dark side. This was

a ship the Guild had converted to Ixian mechanism, substituting machines for the

traditional navigator. There would be Ixian technicians aboard to service the

equipment. A genuine Guild navigator would be there, too. The Guild had never

quite learned to trust a machine even while they paraded these converted

Transports as a message to Tleilaxu and Rakians.

"You see: we do not absolutely require your melange!"

This was the announcement contained in that giant symbol of Ix on the

spaceship's side.

Teg felt the slight lurch of the docking grapples and took a deep, quieting

breath. He felt as he always did just before battle: Empty of all false

dreams. This was a failure. The talking had failed and now came the contest of

blood . . . unless he could prevail in some other way. Combat these days was

seldom a massive thing but death was there nonetheless. That represented a more

permanent kind of failure. If we cannot adjust our differences peacefully we

are less than human.

An attendant with the unmistakable signs of Ix in his speech guided Teg to the

room where Taraza waited. All along the corridors and in the pneumotubes

carrying him to Taraza, Teg looked for signs to confirm the secret warning in

the Mother Superior's message. All seemed serene and ordinary -- the attendant

properly deferential toward the Bashar. "I was a Tireg commander at Andioyu,"

the attendant said, naming one of the almost-battles where Teg had prevailed.

They came to an ordinary oval hatch in the wall of an ordinary corridor. The

hatch opened and Teg entered a white-walled room of comfortable dimensions --

sling chairs, low side tables, glowglobes tuned to yellow. The hatch slid into

its seals behind him with a solid thump, leaving his guide behind him in the

corridor.

A Bene Gesserit acolyte parted the gossamer hangings that concealed a passage on

Teg's right. She nodded to him. He had been seen. Taraza would be notified.

Teg suppressed a trembling in his calf muscles.

Violence?

He had not misinterpreted Taraza's secret warning. Were his preparations

adequate? There was a black sling chair at his left, a long table in front of

it and another chair at the end of the table. Teg went to this side of the room

and waited with his back to the wall. The brown dust of Gammu still clung to

his boot toes, he noted.

Peculiar smell in the room. He sniffed. Shere! Had Taraza and her people

armed themselves against an Ixian Probe? Teg had taken his usual shere capsule

before embarking on the lighter. Too much knowledge in his head that might be

useful to an enemy. The fact that Taraza left the smell of shere around her

quarters had another implication: It was a statement to some observer whose

presence she could not prevent.

Taraza entered through the gossamer hangings. She appeared tired, he thought.

He found this remarkable because the Sisters were capable of concealing fatigue

until almost ready to drop. Was she actually low in energy or was this another

gesture for hidden observers?

Pausing just into the room, Taraza studied Teg. The Bashar appeared much older

than when she had last seen him, Taraza thought. Duty on Gammu was having its

effect, but she found this reassuring. Teg was doing his job.

"Your quick response is appreciated, Miles," she said.

Appreciated! Their agreed word for "We are being watched secretly by a

dangerous foe."

Teg nodded while his gaze went to the hangings where Taraza had entered.

Taraza smiled and moved farther into the room. No signs of the melange cycle in

Teg, she observed. Teg's advanced years always raised the suspicion that he

might resort to the leavening effect of the spice. Nothing about him revealed

even the faintest hint of the melange addiction that even the strongest

sometimes turned to when they felt their end approaching. Teg wore his old

uniform jacket of Supreme Bashar but without the gold starbursts at shoulder and

collar. This was a signal she recognized. He said: "Remember how I earned

this in your service. I have not failed you this time, either."

The eyes that studied her were level; no hint of judgment escaped them. His

entire appearance spoke of quiet within, everything at variance with what she

knew must be occurring in him at this moment. He awaited her signal.

"Our ghola must be awakened at the first opportunity," she said. She waved a

hand to silence him as he started to respond. "I have seen Lucilla's reports

and I know he is too young. But we are required to act."

She spoke for the watchers, he realized. Were her words to be believed?

"I now give you the order to awaken him," she said and she flexed her left wrist

in the confirmation gesture of their secret language.

It was true! Teg glanced at the hangings that concealed the passage where

Taraza had entered. Who was it listening there?

He put his Mentat talents to the problem. There were missing pieces but that

did not stop him. A Mentat could work without certain pieces if he had enough

to create a pattern. Sometimes, the sketchiest outline was enough. It supplied

the hidden shape and then he could fit the missing pieces to complete a whole.

Mentats seldom had all the data they might desire, but he was trained to sense

patterns, to recognize systems and wholeness. Teg reminded himself now that he

also had been trained in the ultimate military sense: You trained a recruit to

train a weapon, to aim the weapon correctly.

Taraza was aiming him. His assessment of their situation had been confirmed.

"Desperate attempts will be made to kill or capture our ghola before you can

awaken him," she said.

He recognized her tone: the coldly analytic offering of data to a Mentat. She

saw that he was in Mentat mode, then.

The Mentat pattern-search rolled through his mind. First, there was the

Sisterhood's design for the ghola, largely unknown to him, but ranging somehow

around the presence of a young female on Rakis who (so they said) could command

worms. Idaho gholas: charming persona and with something else that had made

the Tyrant and the Tleilaxu repeat him countless times. Duncans by the

shipload! What service did this ghola provide that the Tyrant had not let him

remain among the dead? And the Tleilaxu: They had decanted Duncan Idaho gholas

from their axlotl tanks for millennia, even after the death of the Tyrant. The

Tleilaxu had sold this ghola to the Sisterhood twelve times and the Sisterhood

had paid in the hardest currency: melange from their own precious stores. Why

did the Tleilaxu accept in payment something they produced so copiously?

Obvious: to deplete the Sisterhood's supplies. A special form of greed there.

The Tleilaxu were buying supremacy -- a power game!

Teg focused on the quietly waiting Mother Superior. "The Tleilaxu have been

killing our gholas to control our timing," he said.

Taraza nodded but did not speak. So there was more. Once again, he fell into

Mentat mode.

The Bene Gesserit were a valuable market for the Tleilaxu melange, not the only

source because there was always the trickle from Rakis, but valuable, yes; very

valuable. It was not reasonable that the Tleilaxu would alienate a valuable

market unless they had a more valuable market standing ready.

Who else had an interest in Bene Gesserit activities? The Ixians without a

doubt. But Ixians were not a good market for melange. The Ixian presence on

this ship spoke of their independence. Since Ixians and Fish Speakers made

common cause, the Fish Speakers could be set aside from this pattern quest.

What great power or assemblage of powers in this universe possessed . . .

Teg froze that thought as though he had applied the dive brakes in a 'thopter,

letting his mind float free while he sorted other considerations.

Not in this universe.

The pattern took shape. Wealth. Gammu assumed a new role in his Mentat

computations. Gammu had been gutted long ago by the Harkonnens, abandoned as a

festering carcass, which the Danians had restored. There was a time, though,

when even Gammu's hopes were gone. Without hopes there had not even been

dreams. Climbing from that cesspool, the population had employed only the

basest pragmatism. If it works, it is good.

Wealth.

In his first survey of Gammu he had noted the numbers of banking houses. They

were even marked, some of them, as Bene Gesserit -- safe. Gammu served as the

fulcrum for manipulation of enormous wealth. The bank he had visited to study

its use as an emergency contact came back fully into his Mentat awareness. He

had realized at once that the place did not confine itself to purely planetary

business. It was a bankers' bank.

Not just wealth but WEALTH.

A Prime Pattern development did not come into Teg's mind but he had enough for a

Testing Projection. Wealth not of this universe. People from the Scattering.

All of this Mentat sorting had taken only a few seconds. Having reached a

testing point, Teg set himself loose-of-muscle and nerve, glanced once at Taraza

and strode across to the concealed entry. He noted that, Taraza gave no sign of

alarm at his movements. Whipping aside the hangings, Teg confronted a man

almost as tall as himself: military-style clothing with crossed spears at the

collar tabs. The face was heavy, the jaws wide; green eyes. A look of

surprised alertness, one hand poised above a pocket that bulged obviously with a

weapon.

Teg smiled at the man, let the hangings fall and returned to Taraza.

"We are being observed by people from the Scattering," he said.

Taraza relaxed. Teg's performance had been memorable.

The hangings swished aside. The tall stranger entered and stopped about two

paces from Teg. A glacial expression of anger gripped his features.

"I warned you not to tell him!" The voice was a grating baritone with an accent

new to Teg.

"And I warned you about the powers of this Mentat Bashar," Taraza said. A look

of loathing flashed across her features.

The man subsided and a subtle look of fear came over his face. "Honored Matre,

I --"

"Don't you dare call me that!" Taraza's body tensed in a fighting posture that

Teg had never before seen her display.

The man inclined his head slightly. "Dear lady, you do not control the

situation here. I must remind you that my orders --"

Teg had heard enough. "Through me, she does control here," he said. "Before

coming here I set certain protective measures in motion. This . . ." he glanced

around him and returned his attention to the intruder, whose face now bore a

wary expression " . . . is not a no-ship. Two of our no-ship monitors have you

in their sights at this moment."

"You would not survive!" the man barked.

Teg smiled amiably. "No one on this ship would survive." He clenched his jaw

to key the nerve signal and activate the tiny pulsetimer in his skull. It

played its graphic signals against his visual centers. "And you don't have much

time in which to make a decision."

"Tell him how you knew to do this," Taraza said.

"The Mother Superior and I have our own private means of communication," Teg

said. "But further than that, there was no need for her to warn me. Her

summons was enough. The Mother Superior on a Guild Transport at a time like

this? Impossible!"

"Impasse," the man growled.

"Perhaps," Teg said. "But neither Guild nor Ix will risk a total and all-out

attack by Bene Gesserit forces under the command of a leader trained by me. I

refer to the Bashar Burzmali. Your support has just dissolved and vanished."

"I told him nothing of this," Taraza said. "You have just witnessed the

performance of a Mentat Bashar, which I doubt could be equaled in your universe.

Think of that if you consider going against Burzmali, a man trained by this

Mentat."

The intruder looked from Taraza to Teg and back to Taraza. "This is the way out

of our seeming impasse," Teg said. "The Mother Superior Taraza and her

entourage leave with me. You must decide immediately. Time is running out."

"You're bluffing." There was no force in the words.

Teg faced Taraza and bowed. "It has been a great honor to serve you, Reverend

Mother Superior. I bid you farewell."

"Perhaps death will not part us," Taraza said. It was the traditional farewell

of a Reverend Mother to a Sister-equal.

"Go!" The heavy-featured man dashed to the corridor hatchway and flung it open,

revealing two Ixian guards, looks of surprise on their faces. His voice hoarse,

the man ordered: "Take them to their lighter."

Still relaxed and calm, Teg said: "Summon your people, Mother Superior." To

the man standing at the hatchway, Teg said: "You value your own skin too much

to be a good soldier. None of my people would have made such an error."

"There are true Honored Matres aboard this ship," the man grated. "I am sworn

to protect them."

Teg grimaced and turned to where Taraza was leading her people from the

adjoining room: two Reverend Mothers and four acolytes. Teg recognized one of

the Reverend Mothers: Darwi Odrade. He had seen her before only at a distance

but the oval face and lovely eyes were arresting: so like Lucilla.

"Do we have time for introductions?" Taraza asked.

"Of course, Mother Superior."

Teg nodded and grasped the hand of each woman as Taraza presented them.

As they left, Teg turned to the uniformed stranger. "One must always observe

the niceties," Teg said. "Otherwise we are less than human."

Not until they were on the lighter, Taraza seated beside him and her entourage

nearby, did Teg ask the overriding question.

"How did they take you?"

The lighter was plunging planetward. The screen in front of Teg showed that the

Ix-branded Guildship obeyed his command to remain in orbit until his party was

safely behind its planetary defenses.

Before Taraza could respond, Odrade leaned across the aisle separating them and

said: "I have countermanded the Bashar's orders to destroy that Guildship,

Mother."

Teg swiveled his head sharply and glared at Odrade. "But they took you captive

and . . ." He scowled. "How did you know I --"

"Miles!"

Taraza's voice conveyed overwhelming reproof. He grinned ruefully. Yes, she

knew him almost as well as he knew himself . . . better in some respects.

"They did not just capture us, Miles," Taraza said. "We allowed ourselves to be

taken. Ostensibly, I was escorting Dar to Rakis. We left our no-ship at

Junction and asked for the fastest Guild Transport. All of my Council,

including Burzmali, agreed that these intruders from the Scattering would

subvert the Transport and take us to you, aiming to pick up all the pieces of

the ghola project."

Teg was aghast. The risk!

"We knew you would rescue us," Taraza said. "Burzmali was standing by in case

you failed."

"That Guildship you've spared," Teg said, "will summon assistance and attack our

--"

"They will not attack Gammu," Taraza said. "Too many diverse forces from the

Scattering are assembled on Gammu. They would not dare alienate so many."

"I wish I were as certain of that as you appear to be," Teg said.

"Be certain, Miles. Besides, there are other reasons for not destroying the

Guildship. Ix and the Guild have been caught taking sides. That's bad for

business and they need all of the business they can get."

"Unless they have more important customers offering greater profits!"

"Ahhhhh, Miles." She spoke in a musing voice. "What we latter-day Bene

Gesserit really do is try to let matters achieve a calmer tone, a balance. You

know this."

Teg found this true but he locked on one phrase: ". . . latter-day . . ." The

words conveyed a sense of summation-at-death. Before he could question this,

Taraza continued:

"We like to settle the most passionate situations off the battlefield. I must

admit we have the Tyrant to thank for that attitude. I don't suppose you've

ever thought of yourself as a product of the Tyrant's conditioning, Miles, but

you are."

Teg accepted this without comment. It was a factor in the entire spread of

human society. No Mentat could avoid it as a datum.

"That quality in you, Miles, drew us to you in the first place," Taraza said.

"You can be damnably frustrating at times but we wouldn't have you any other

way."

By subtle revelations in tone and manner, Teg realized that Taraza was not

speaking solely for his benefit, but was also directing her words at her

entourage.

"Have you any idea, Miles, how maddening it is to hear you argue both sides of

an issue with equal force? But your simpatico is a powerful weapon. How

terrified some of our foes have been to find you confronting them where they had

not the slightest suspicion you might appear!"

Teg allowed himself a tight smile. He glanced at the women seated across the

aisle from them. Why was Taraza directing such words at this group? Darwi

Odrade appeared to be resting, head back, eyes closed. Several of the others

were chatting among themselves. None of this was conclusive to Teg. Even Bene

Gesserit acolytes could follow several trains of thought simultaneously. He

returned his attention to Taraza.

"You really feel things the way the enemy feels them," Taraza said. "That is

what I mean. And, of course, when you're in that mental frame there is no enemy

for you."

"Yes, there is!"

"Don't mistake my words, Miles. We have never doubted your loyalty. But it's

uncanny how you make us see things we have no other way of seeing. There are

times when you are our eyes."

Darwi Odrade, Teg saw, had opened her eyes and was looking at him. She was a

lovely woman. Something disturbing about her appearance. As with Lucilla, she

reminded him of someone in his past. Before Teg could follow this thought,

Taraza spoke.

"Has the ghola this ability to balance between opposing forces?" she asked.

"He could be a Mentat," Teg said.

"He was a Mentat in one incarnation, Miles."

"Do you really want him awakened so young?"

"It is necessary, Miles. Deadly necessary."

The failure of CHOAM? Quite simple: They ignore the fact that larger

commercial powers wait at the edges of their activities, powers that could

swallow them the way a slig swallows garbage. This is the true threat of the

Scattering -- to them and to us all.

-Bene Gesserit Council notes, Archives #SXX90CH

Odrade spared only part of her awareness to the conversation between Teg and

Taraza. Their lighter was a small one, its passenger quarters cramped. It

would use atmospherics to dampen its descent, she knew, and she prepared herself

for the buffeting. The pilot would be sparing of their suspensors on such a

craft, saving energy.

She used these moments as she used all such time now to gird herself for the

coming necessities. Time pressed; a special calendar drove her. She had looked

at a calendar before leaving Chapter House, caught as often happened to her by

the persistence of time and its language: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks,

months, years . . . Standard Years, to be precise. Persistence was an

inadequate word for the phenomenon. Inviolability was more like it. Tradition.

Never disturb tradition. She held the comparisons firmly in mind, the ancient

flow of time imposed on planets that did not tick to the primitive human clock.

A week was seven days. Seven! How powerful that number remained. Mystical.

It was enshrined in the Orange Catholic Bible. The Lord made a world in six

days "and on the seventh day He rested."

Good for Him! Odrade thought. We all should rest after great labors.

Odrade turned her head slightly and looked across the aisle at Teg. He had no

idea how many memories of him she possessed. She could mark how the years had

treated that strong face. Teaching the ghola had drained his energies, she saw.

That child in the Gammu Keep must be a sponge absorbing anything and everything

around him.

Miles Teg, do you know how we use you? she wondered.

It was a thought that weakened her but she allowed it to persist in her

awareness almost with a feeling of defiance. How easy it would be to love that

old man! Not as a mate, of course . . . but love, nonetheless. She could feel

the bond tugging at her and recognized it with the fine edge of her Bene

Gesserit abilities. Love, damnable love, weakening love.

Odrade had felt this tugging with the first mate she had been sent to seduce.

Curious sensation. Her years of Bene Gesserit conditioning had made her wary of

it. None of her proctors had allowed her the luxury of that unquestioning

warmth, and she had learned in time the reasons behind such isolating care. But

there she was, sent by the breeding mistresses, ordered to get that close to a

single individual, to let him enter her. All of the clinical data lay there in

her awareness and she could read the sexual excitement in her partner even as

she allowed it in herself. She had, after all, been carefully prepared for this

role by men the Breeding Mistresses selected and conditioned with exquisite

nicety for just such training.

Odrade sighed and looked away from Teg, closing her eyes in remembrance.

Training Males never let their emotions reflect a bonding abandonment to their

students. It was a necessary flaw in the sexual education.

That first seduction upon which she had been sent: She had been quite

unprepared for the melting ecstasy of a simultaneous orgasm, a mutuality and

sharing as old as humankind . . . older! And with powers capable of

overwhelming the reason. The look on her male companion's face, the sweet kiss,

his total abandonment of all self-protective reserves, unguarded and supremely

vulnerable. No Training Male had ever done that! Desperately, she grasped for

the Bene Gesserit lessons. Through those lessons, she saw the essence of this

man on his face, felt that essence in her deepest fibers. For just an instant,

she permitted an equal response, experiencing a new height of ecstasy that none

of her teachers had hinted might be attainable. For that instant, she

understood what had happened to the Lady Jessica and the other Bene Gesserit

failures.

This feeling was love!

Its power frightened her (as the Breeding Mistresses had known it would) and she

fell back into the careful Bene Gesserit conditioning, allowing a mask of

pleasure to take over the brief natural expression on her face, employing

calculated caresses where natural caresses would have been easier (but less

effective).

The male responded as expected, stupidly. It helped to think of him as stupid.

Her second seduction had been easier. She could still call up the features of

that first one, though, doing it sometimes with a calloused sense of wonder.

Sometimes, his face came to her of itself and for no reason she could identify

immediately.

With the other males she had been sent to breed, the memory markers were

different. She had to hunt her past for the look of them. The sensory

recordings of those experiences did not go as deep. Not so with that first one!

Such was the dangerous power of love.

And look at the troubles this hidden force had caused the Bene Gesserit over the

millennia. The Lady Jessica and her love for her Duke had been only one example

among countless others. Love clouded reason. It diverted the Sisters from

their duties. Love could be tolerated only where it caused no immediate and

obvious disruptions or where it served the larger purposes of the Bene Gesserit.

Otherwise it was to be avoided.

Always, though, it remained an object of disquieting watchfulness.

Odrade opened her eyes and glanced again at Teg and Taraza. The Mother Superior

had taken up a new subject. How irritating Taraza's voice could be at times!

Odrade closed her eyes and listened to the conversation, tied to those two

voices by some link in her awareness that she could not avoid.

"Very few people realize how much of the infrastructure in a civilization is

dependency infrastructure," Taraza said. "We have made quite a study of this."

Love is a dependency-infrastructure, Odrade thought. Why had Taraza hit on this

subject at this time? The Mother Superior seldom did anything without deep

motives. "Dependency infrastructure is a term that includes all things

necessary for a human population to survive at existing or increased numbers,"

Taraza said.

"Melange?" Teg asked.

"Of course, but most people look at the spice and say, 'How nice it is that we

can have it and it can give us so much longer lives than were enjoyed by our

ancestors.' "

"Providing they can afford it." Teg's voice had a bite in it, Odrade noted.

"As long as no single power controls all of the market, most people have

enough," Taraza said.

"I learned economics at my mother's knee," Teg said. "Food, water, breathable

air, living space not contaminated by poisons -- there are many kinds of money

and the value changes according to the dependency."

As she listened to him, Odrade almost nodded in agreement. His response was her

own. Don't belabor the obvious, Taraza! Get to your point.

"I want you to remember your mother's teachings very clearly," Taraza said. How

mild her voice was suddenly! Taraza's voice changed abruptly then and she

snapped: "Hydraulic despotism!"

She does that shift of emphasis well, Odrade thought. Memory spewed up the data

like a spigot suddenly opened full force. Hydraulic despotism: central control

of an essential energy such as water, electricity, fuel, medicines, melange . .

. Obey the central controlling power or the energy is shut off and you die!

Taraza was talking once more: "There's another useful concept that I'm sure

your mother taught you -- the key log."

Odrade was very curious now. Taraza was headed somewhere important with this

conversation. Key log: a truly ancient concept from the days before suspensors

when lumbermen sent their fallen timber rushing down rivers to central mill

sites. Sometimes the logs jammed up in the river and an expert was brought in

to find the one log, the key log, which would free the jam when removed. Teg,

she knew, would have an intellectual understanding of the term but she and

Taraza could call up actual witnesses from Other Memories, see the explosion of

broken bits of wood and water as a jam was released.

"The Tyrant was a key log," Taraza said. "He created the jam and he released

it."

The lighter began trembling sharply as it took its first bite of Gammu's

atmosphere. Odrade felt the tightness of her restraining harness for a few

seconds, then the craft's passage became steadier. Conversation stopped for

this interval, then Taraza continued:

"Beyond the so-called natural dependencies are some religions that have been

created psychologically. Even physical necessities can have such an underground

component."

"A fact the Missionaria Protectiva understands quite well," Teg said. Again,

Odrade heard that undercurrent of deep resentment in his voice. Taraza

certainly must hear it, too. What was she doing? She could weaken Teg!

"Ahhh, yes," Taraza said. "Our Missionaria Protectiva. Humans have such a

powerful need that their own belief structure be the 'true belief.' If it gives

you pleasure or a sense of security and if it is incorporated into your belief

structure, what a powerful dependency that creates!"

Again, Taraza fell silent while their lighter went through another atmospheric

buffeting.

"I wish he would use his suspensors!" Taraza complained.

"It saves fuel," Teg said. "Less dependency."

Taraza chuckled. "Oh, yes, Miles. You know the lesson well. I see your

mother's hand in it. Damn the dam when the child strikes out in a dangerous

direction."

"You think of me as a child?" he asked.

"I think of you as someone who has just had his first direct encounter with the

machinations of the so-called Honored Mattes."

So that's it, Odrade thought. And with a feeling of shock, Odrade realized that

Taraza was aiming her words at a broader target than just Teg.

She's talking to me!

"These Honored Matres, as they call themselves," Taraza said, "have combined

sexual ecstasy and worship. I doubt that they have even guessed at the

dangers."

Odrade opened her eyes and looked across the aisle at the Mother Superior.

Taraza's gaze was fixed intently on Teg, an unreadable expression except for the

eyes, which burned with the necessity for him to understand.

"Dangers," Taraza repeated. "The great mass of humankind possesses an

unmistakable unit-identity. It can be one thing. It can act as a single

organism."

"So the Tyrant said," Teg countered.

"So the Tyrant demonstrated! The Group Soul was his to manipulate. There are

times, Miles, when survival demands that we commune with the soul. Souls, you

know, are always seeking outlet."

"Hasn't communing with souls gone out of style in our time?" Teg asked. Odrade

did not like the bantering tone in his voice and noted that it aroused a

matching anger in Taraza.

"You think I talk about fashions in religion?" Taraza demanded, her highpitched

voice insistently harsh. "We both know religions can be created! I'm

talking about these Honored Matres who ape some of our ways but have none of our

deeper awareness. They dare place themselves at the center of worship!"

"A thing the Bene Gesserit always avoids," he said. "My mother said that

worshipers and the worshiped are united by the faith."

"And they can be divided!"

Odrade saw Teg suddenly fall into Mentat mode, an unfocused stare in his eyes,

his features placid. She saw now part of what Taraza was doing. The Mentat

rides Roman, one foot on each steed. Each foot is based on a different reality

as the pattern-search hurtles him forward. He must ride different realities to

a single goal.

Teg spoke in a Mentat's musing, unaccented voice: "Divided forces will battle

for supremacy."

Taraza gave a sigh of pleasure almost sensual in its natural venting.

"Dependency infrastructure," Taraza said. "These women from the Scattering

would control dividing forces, all of those forces trying mightily to take the

lead. That military officer on the Guildship, when he spoke of his Honored

Matres, spoke with both awe and hatred. I'm sure you heard it in his voice,

Miles. I know how well your mother taught you."

"I heard." Teg was once more focused on Taraza, hanging on her every word as

was Odrade.

"Dependencies," Taraza said. "How simple they can be and how complex. Take,

for example, tooth decay."

"Tooth decay?" Teg was shocked off his Mentat track and Odrade, observing this,

saw that his reaction was precisely what Taraza wanted. Taraza was playing her

Mentat Bashar with a fine hand.

And I am supposed to see this and learn from it, Odrade thought.

"Tooth decay," Taraza repeated. "A simple implant at birth prevents this bane

for most of humankind. Still, we must brush the teeth and otherwise care for

them. It is so natural to us that we seldom think about it. The devices we use

are assumed to be wholly ordinary parts of our environment. Yet the devices,

the materials in them, the instructors in tooth care and the Suk monitors, all

have their interlocked relationships."

"A Mentat does not need interdependencies explained to him," Teg said. There

was still curiosity in his voice but with a definite undertone of resentment.

"Quite," Taraza said. "That is the natural environment of a Mentat's thinking

process."

"Then why do you belabor this?"

"Mentat, look at what you now know of these Honored Matres and tell me: What is

their flaw?"

Teg spoke without hesitation: "They can only survive if they continue to

increase the dependency of those who support them. It's an addict's dead-end

street."

"Precisely. And the danger?"

"They could take much of humankind down with them."

"That was the Tyrant's problem, Miles. I'm sure he knew it. Now, pay attention

to me with great care. And you, too, Dar." Taraza looked across the aisle and

met Odrade's gaze. "Both of you listen to me. We of the Bene Gesserit are

setting very powerful . . . elements adrift in the human current. They may

jam up. They are sure to cause damage. And we.. ."

Once more, the lighter entered a period of severe buffeting. Conversation was

impossible while they clung to their seats and listened to the roaring, creaking

around them. When this interruption eased, Taraza raised her voice.

"If we survive this damnable machine and get down to Gammu, you must go aside

with Dar there, Miles. You have seen the Atreides Manifesto. She will tell you

about it and prepare you. That is all."

Teg turned and looked at Odrade. Once more, her features tugged at his

memories: a remarkable likeness to Lucilla, but there was something else. He

put this aside. The Atreides Manifesto? He had read it because it came to him

from Taraza with instructions that he do so. Prepare me? For what?

Odrade saw the questioning look on Teg's face. Now, she understood Taraza's

motive. The Mother Superior's orders took on a new meaning as did words from

the Manifesto itself.

"Just as the universe is created by the participation of consciousness, the

prescient human carries that creative faculty to its ultimate extreme. This was

the profoundly misunderstood power of the Atreides bastard, the power that he

transmitted to his son, the Tyrant."

Odrade knew those words with an author's intimacy but they came back to her now

as though she had never before encountered them.

Damn you, Tar! Odrade thought. What if you're wrong?

At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place,

predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers.

Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a

single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For

the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is

a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough

of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a

filter through which chaos is sifted into order.

-Analysis of the Tyrant, the Taraza File: BG Archives

Teg's thoughts were in turmoil as he returned to Gammu from the Guildship. He

stepped from the lighter at the black-charred edge of the Keep's private landing

field and looked around him as though for the first time. Almost noon. So

little time had passed and so much had changed.

To what extent would the Bene Gesserit go in imparting an essential lesson? he

wondered. Taraza had dislodged him from his familiar Mentat processes. He felt

that the whole incident on the Guildship had been staged just for him. He had

been shaken from a predictable course. How strange Gammu appeared as he crossed

the guarded strip to the entry pits.

Teg had seen many planets, learned their ways and how they printed themselves on

their inhabitants. Some planets had a big yellow sun that sat in close and kept

living things warm, evolving, growing. Some planets had little shimmer-suns

that hung far away in a dark sky, and their light touched very little.

Variations existed within and even outside this range. Gammu was a yellow-green

variation with a day of 31.27 standard hours and a 2.6 SY. Teg had thought he

knew Gammu.

When the Harkonnens were forced to abandon it, colonists left behind by the

Scattering came from the Danian group, calling it by the Halleck name given to

it in the great remapping. The colonists had been known as Caladanian in those

days but millennia tended to shorten some labels.

Teg paused at the entryway to the protective revetments that led from the field

down beneath the Keep. Taraza and her party lagged behind him. He saw Taraza

was talking intently to Odrade.

Atreides Manifesto, he thought.

Even on Gammu, few admitted to either Harkonnen or Atreides ancestry, although

the genotypes were visible here -- especially the dominant Atreides: those

long, sharp noses, the high foreheads and sensual mouths. Often, the pieces

were scattered -- the mouth on one face, those piercing eyes on another and

countless mixtures. Sometimes, though, one person carried it all and then you

saw the pride, that inner knowledge:

"I am one of them!"

Gammu's natives recognized it and gave it walkway room but few labeled it.

Underlying all of this was what the Harkonnens had left behind -- genetic lines

tracing far away into the dawn times of Greek and Pathan and Mameluke, shadows

of ancient history that few outside of professional historians or those trained

by the Bene Gesserit could even name.

Taraza and her party caught up with Teg. He heard her say to Odrade: "You must

tell Miles all of it."

Very well, she would tell him, he thought. He turned and led the way past the

inner guards to the long passage under the pillboxes into the Keep proper.

Damn the Bene Gesserit! he thought. What were they really doing here on Gammu?

Plenty of Bene Gesserit signs could be seen on this planet: the back-breeding

to fix selected traits, and here and there a visible emphasis on seductive eyes

for women.

Teg returned a guard captain's salute without changing focus. Seductive eyes,

yes. He had seen this soon after his arrival at the ghola's Keep and especially

during his first inspection tour of the planet. He had seen himself in many

faces, too, and recalled the thing old Patrin had mentioned so many times.

"You have the Gammu look, Bashar."

Seductive eyes! That guard captain back there had them. She and Odrade and

Lucilla were alike in this. Few people paid much attention to the importance of

eyes when it came to seduction, he thought. It took a Bene Gesserit upbringing

to make that point. Big breasts in a woman and hard loins in a man (that

tightly muscular look to the buttocks) -- these were naturally important in

sexual matchings. But without the eyes, the rest of it could go for nothing.

Eyes were essential. You could drown in the right kind of eyes, he had learned,

sink right into them and be unaware of what was being done to you until penis

was firmly clasped in vagina.

He had noted Lucilla's eyes immediately after his arrival on Gammu and had

walked cautiously. No doubts about how the Sisterhood used her talents!

There was Lucilla now, waiting at the central inspection and decontamination

chamber. She gave him the flickering handsign that all was well with the ghola.

Teg relaxed and watched as Lucilla and Odrade confronted each other. The two

women had remarkably similar features despite the age difference. Their bodies

were quite different, though, Lucilla more solid against Odrade's willowy form.

The guard captain of the seductive eyes came up beside Teg and leaned close to

him. "Schwangyu has just learned who you brought back with you," she said,

nodding toward Taraza. "Ahhh, there she is now."

Schwangyu stepped from a lift tube and crossed to Taraza, giving only an angry

glare to Teg.

Taraza wanted to surprise you, he thought. We all know why.

"You don't appear happy to see me," Taraza said, addressing Schwangyu.

"I am surprised, Mother Superior," Schwangyu said. "I had no idea." She

glanced once more at Teg, a look of venom in her eyes.

Odrade and Lucilla broke off their mutual examination. "I had heard about it,

of course," Odrade said, "but it is a stopper to confront yourself in the face

of another person."

"I warned you," Taraza said.

"What are your orders, Mother Superior?" Schwangyu asked. It was as close as

she could come to asking the purpose of Taraza's visit.

"I would like a private word with Lucilla," Taraza said.

"I'll have quarters prepared for you," Schwangyu said.

"Don't bother," Taraza said. "I'm not staying. Miles has already arranged for

my transport. Duty requires my presence at Chapter House. Lucilla and I will

talk outside in the courtyard." Taraza put a finger to her cheek. "Oh, and I'd

like to watch the ghola unobserved for a few minutes. I'm sure Lucilla can

arrange it."

"He's taking the more intense training quite well," Lucilla said as the two

moved off toward a lift tube.

Teg turned his attention to Odrade, noting as his gaze passed across Schwangyu's

face the intensity of her anger. She was not trying to conceal it.

Was Lucilla a sister or a daughter of Odrade? Teg wondered. It occurred to him

suddenly that there must be a Bene Gesserit purpose behind the resemblance.

Yes, of course -- Lucilla was an Imprinter!

Schwangyu overcame her anger. She looked with curiosity at Odrade. "I was just

about to take lunch, Sister," Schwangyu said. "Would you care to join me?"

"I must have a word alone with the Bashar," Odrade said. "If it is all right,

perhaps we could remain here for our talk? I must not be seen by the ghola."

Schwangyu scowled, not trying to hide her upset from Odrade. They knew at

Chapter House where loyalties lay! But no one . . . no one! would remove her

from this post of observational command. Opposition had its rights!

Her thoughts were clear even to Teg. He noted the stiffness of Schwangyu's back

as she left them.

"It is bad When Sister is turned against Sister," Odrade said.

Teg gave a handsign to his guard captain, ordering her to clear the area.

Alone, Odrade said. Alone it would be. To Odrade, he said: "This is one of my

areas. No spies or other means of observing us here."

"I thought as much," Odrade said.

"We have a service room over there." Teg nodded to his left. "Furniture, even

chairdogs if you prefer."

"I hate it when they try to cuddle me," she said. "Could we talk here?" She

put a hand under Teg's arm. "Perhaps we could walk a bit. I got so stiff

sitting in that lighter."

"What is it you're supposed to tell me?" he asked as they strolled.

"My memories are no longer selectively filtered," she said. "I have them all,

only on the female side, naturally."

"So?" Teg pursed his lips. This was not the overture he had expected. Odrade

appeared more like one who would take off on a direct approach.

"Taraza says you have read the Atreides Manifesto. Good. You know it will

cause upset in many quarters."

"Schwangyu already has made it the subject of a diatribe against 'you Atreides.'

"

Odrade stared at him solemnly. As the reports all said, Teg remained an

imposing figure, but she had known that without the reports.

"We are both Atreides, you and I," Odrade said.

Teg came to full alert.

"Your mother explained that to you in detail," Odrade said, "when you took your

first school leave back to Lernaeus."

Teg stopped and stared down at her. How could she know this? To his knowledge,

he had never before met and conversed with this remote Darwi Odrade. Was he the

subject of special discussions at Chapter House? He held his silence, forcing

her to carry the conversation.

"I will recount a conversation between a man and my birthmother," Odrade said.

"They are in bed and the man says: 'I fathered a few children when I first

escaped from the close bondage of the Bene Gesserit, back when I thought myself

an independent agent, free to enlist and fight anywhere I chose.' "

Teg did not try to conceal his surprise. Those were his own words! Mentat

memory told him Odrade had them down as accurately as a mechanical recorder.

Even the tone!

"More?" she asked as he continued to stare at her. "Very well. The man says:

'That was before they sent me to Mentat training, of course. What an eye-opener

that was! I had never been out of the Sisterhood's sight for an instant! I was

never a free agent.' "

"Not even when I spoke those words," Teg said.

"True." She urged him by pressure on his arm as they continued their stroll

across the chamber. "The children you fathered all belonged to the Bene

Gesserit. The Sisterhood takes no chances that our genotype will be sent into

the wild gene pool."

"Let my body go to Shaitan, their precious genotype remains in Sisterhood care,"

he said.

"My care," Odrade said. "I am one of your daughters."

Again, he forced her to stop.

"I think you know who my mother was," she said. She held up a hand for silence

as he started to respond. "Names are not necessary."

Teg studied Odrade's features, seeing the recognizable signs there. Mother and

daughter were matched. But what of Lucilla?

As though she heard his question, Odrade said: "Lucilla is from a parallel

breeding line. Quite remarkable, isn't it, what careful breed-matching can

achieve?"

Teg cleared his throat. He felt no emotional attachment to this newly revealed

daughter. Her words and other important signals of her performance demanded his

primary attention.

"This is no casual conversation," he said. "Is this all of what you were to

reveal to me? I thought the Mother Superior said. . ."

"There is more," Odrade agreed. "The Manifesto -- I am its author. I wrote it

at Taraza's orders and following her detailed instructions."

Teg glanced around the large chamber as though to make sure no one overheard.

He spoke in a lowered voice: "The Tleilaxu are spreading it far and wide!"

"Just as we hoped."

"Why are you telling me this? Taraza said you were to prepare me for . . ."

"There will come a time when you must know our purpose. It is Taraza's wish

that you make your own decisions then, that you really become a free agent."

Even as she spoke, Odrade saw the Mentat glaze in his eyes.

Teg breathed deeply. Dependencies and key logs! He felt the Mentat sense of an

enormous pattern just beyond the reach of his accumulated data. He did not even

consider for an instant that some form of filial devotion had prompted these

revelations. There was a fundamentalist, dogmatic, and ritualistic essence

apparent in all Bene Gesserit training despite every effort to prevent this.

Odrade, this daughter out of his past, was a full Reverend Mother with

extraordinary powers of muscle and nerve control -- full memories on the female

side! She was one of the special ones! She knew tricks of violence that few

humans ever suspected. Still, that similarity, that essence remained and a

Mentat always saw it.

What does she want?

Affirmation of his paternity? She already had all of the confirmation she could

need.

Observing her now, the way she waited so patiently for his thoughts to resolve,

Teg reflected that it often was said with truth that Reverend Mothers no longer

were completely members of the human race. They moved somehow outside the main

flow, perhaps parallel to it, perhaps diving into it occasionally for their own

purposes, but always removed from humankind. They removed themselves. It was

an identifying mark of the Reverend Mother, a sense of extra identity that made

them closer to the long-dead Tyrant than to the human stock from which they

sprang.

Manipulation. That was their mark. They manipulated everyone and everything.

"I am to be the Bene Gesserit eyes," Teg said. "Taraza wants me to make a human

decision for all of you."

Obviously pleased, Odrade squeezed his arm. "What a father I have!"

"Do you really have a father?" he asked and he recounted for her what he had

been thinking about the Bene Gesserit removing themselves from humanity.

"Outside humanity," she said. "What a curious idea. Are Guild navigators also

outside their original humanity?"

He thought about this. Guild navigators diverged widely from humankind's more

common shape. Born in space and living out their lives in tanks of melange gas,

they distorted the original form, elongated and repositioned limbs and organs.

But a young navigator in estrus and before entering the tank could breed with a

norm. It had been demonstrated. They became non-human but not in the way of

the Bene Gesserit.

"Navigators are not your mental kin," he said. "They think human. Guiding a

ship through space, even with prescience to find the safe way, has a pattern a

human can accept."

"You don't accept our pattern?"

"As far as I can, but somewhere in your development you shift outside the

original pattern. I think you may perform a conscious act even to appear human.

This way you hold my arm right now, as though you really were my daughter."

"I am your daughter but I'm surprised you think so little of us."

"Quite the contrary: I stand in awe of you."

"Of your own daughter?"

"Of any Reverend Mother."

"You think I exist only to manipulate lesser creatures?"

"I think you no longer really feel human. There's a gap in you, something

missing, something you've removed. You no longer are one of us."

"Thank you," Odrade said. "Taraza told me you would not hesitate to answer

truthfully, but I knew that for myself."

"For what have you prepared me?"

"You will know it when it occurs; that is all I can say . . . all I am permitted

to say."

Manipulating again! he thought. Damn them!

Odrade cleared her throat. She appeared about to say something more but she

remained silent as she guided Teg around and strolled with him back across the

chamber.

Even though she had known what Teg must say, his words pained her. She wanted

to tell him that she was one of those who still felt human, but his judgment of

the Sisterhood could not be denied.

We are taught to reject love. We can simulate it but each of us is capable of

cutting it off in an instant.

There were sounds behind them. They stopped and turned. Lucilla and Taraza

emerged from a lift tube speaking idly about their observations of the ghola.

"You are absolutely right to treat him as one of us," Taraza said.

Teg heard but made no comment as they awaited the approach of the two women.

He knows, Odrade thought. He will not ask me about my birthmother. There was

no bonding, no real imprint. Yes, he knows.

Odrade closed her eyes and memory startled her by producing of itself an image

of a painting. The thing occupied a space on the wall of Taraza's morning room.

Ixian artifice had preserved the painting in the finest hermetically sealed

frame behind a cover of invisible plaz. Odrade often stopped in front of the

painting, feeling each time that her hand might reach out and actually touch the

ancient canvas so cunningly preserved by the Ixians.

Cottages at Cordeville.

The artist's name for his work and his own name were preserved on a burnished

plate beneath the painting: Vincent Van Gogh.

The thing dated from a time so ancient that only rare remnants such as this

painting remained to send a physical impression down the ages. She had tried to

imagine the journeys that painting had taken, the serial chance that had brought

it intact to Taraza's room.

The Ixians had been at their best in the preservation and restoration. An

observer could touch a dark spot on the lower left corner of the frame.

Immediately, you were engulfed in the true genius, not only of the artist, but

of the Ixian who had restored and preserved the work. His name was there on the

frame: Martin Buro. When touched by the human finger, the dot became a sense

projector, a benign spin-off of the technology that had produced the Ixian

Probe. Buro had restored not only the painting but the painter -- Van Gogh's

feeling -- accompaniment to each brush stroke. All had been captured in the

brush strokes, recorded there by human movements.

Odrade had stood there engrossed through the whole performance so many times she

felt she could recreate the painting independently.

Recalling this experience so near to Teg's accusation, she knew at once why her

memory had reproduced the image for her, why that painting still fascinated her.

For the brief space of that replay she always felt totally human, aware of the

cottages as places where real people dwelled, aware in some complete way of the

living chain that had paused there in the person of the mad Vincent Van Gogh,

paused to record itself.

Taraza and Lucilla stopped about two paces from Teg and Odrade. There was a

smell of garlic on Taraza's breath.

"We stopped for a small bite to eat," Taraza said. "Would you like anything?"

It was exactly the wrong question. Odrade freed her hand from Teg's arm. She

turned quickly and wiped her eyes on her cuff. Looking up once more at Teg, she

saw surprise on his face. Yes, she thought, those were real tears!

"I think we've done everything here that we can," Taraza said.

"It's time you were on your way to Rakis, Dar."

"Past time," Odrade said.

Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual

regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.

-Chenoeh: "Conversations with Leto II"

Hedley Tuek, High Priest of the Divided God, had grown increasingly angry with

Stiros. Although too old himself ever to hope for the High Priest's bench,

Stiros had sons, grandsons, and numerous nephews. Stiros had transferred his

personal ambitions to his family. A cynical man, Stiros. He represented a

powerful faction in the priesthood, the so-called "scientific community," whose

influence was insidious and pervasive. They veered dangerously close to heresy.

Tuek reminded himself that more than one High Priest had been lost in the

desert, regrettable accidents. Stiros and his faction were capable of creating

such an accident.

It was afternoon in Keen and Stiros had just departed, obviously frustrated.

Stiros wanted Tuek to go into the desert and personally observe Sheeana's next

venture there. Suspicious of the invitation, Tuek declined.

A strange argument ensued, full of innuendo and vague references to Sheeana's

behavior plus wordy attacks on the Bene Gesserit. Stiros, always suspicious of

the Sisterhood, had taken an immediate dislike to the new commander of the Bene

Gesserit Keep on Rakis, this . . . what, was her name? Oh, yes, Odrade. Odd

name but then the Sisters often took odd names. That was their privilege. God

Himself had never spoken against the basic goodness of the Bene Gesserit.

Against individual Sisters, yes, but the Sisterhood itself had shared God's Holy

Vision.

Tuek did not like the way Stiros spoke of Sheeana. Cynical. Tuek had finally

silenced Stiros with pronouncements delivered here in the Sanctus with its high

altar and images of the Divided God. Prismatic beam-relays cast thin wedges of

brilliance through drifting incense from burning melange onto the double line of

tall pillars that led up to the altar. Tuek knew his words went directly to God

from this setting.

"God works through our latter-day Siona," Tuek had told Stiros, noting the

confusion on the old councillor's face. "Sheeana is the living reminder of

Siona, that human instrument who translated Him into His present Divisions."

Stiros raged, saying things he would not dare repeat before the full Council.

He presumed too much on his long association with Tuek.

"I tell you she is sitting here surrounded by adults intent upon justifying

themselves to her and --"

"And to God!" Tuek could not let such words pass.

Leaning close to the High Priest, Stiros grated: "She is at the center of an

educational system geared to anything her imagination demands. We deny her

nothing!"

"Nor should we."

It was as though Tuek had not spoken. Stiros said, "Cania has provided her with

recordings from Dar-es-Balat!"

"I am the Book of Fate," Tuek intoned, quoting God's own words from the hoard at

Dar-es-Balat.

"Exactly! And she listens to every word!"

"Why does this disturb you?" Tuek asked in his calmest tone.

"We don't test her knowledge. She tests ours!"

"God must want it so."

No mistaking the bitter anger on Stiros' face. Tuek observed this and waited

while the old councillor marshaled new arguments. Resources for such arguments

were, of course, enormous. Tuek did not deny this. It was the interpretations

that mattered. Which was why a High Priest must be the final interpreter.

Despite (or perhaps because of) their way of viewing history, the priesthood

knew a great deal of how God had come to reside on Rakis. They had Dar-es-Balat

itself and all of its contents -- the earliest known no-chamber in the universe.

For millennia, while Shai-hulud translated the verdant planet of Arrakis into

desert-Rakis, Dar-es-Balat waited under the sands. From that Holy Hoard, the

priesthood possessed God's own voice, His printed words and even holophotos.

Everything was explained and they knew that the desert surface of Rakis

reproduced the original form of the planet, the way it looked in the beginning

when it was the only known source of the Holy Spice.

"She asks about God's family," Stiros said. "Why should she have to ask about -

-"

"She tests us. Do we give Them Their proper places? The Reverend Mother

Jessica to her son, Muad'dib, to his son, Leto II -- the Holy Triumvirate of

Heaven."

"Leto III," Stiros muttered. "What of the other Leto who died at Sardaukar

hands? What of him?"

"Careful, Stiros," Tuek intoned. "You know my great-grandfather pronounced upon

that question from this very bench. Our Divided God was reincarnated with part

of Him remaining in heaven to mediate the Ascendancy. That part of Him became

nameless then, as the True Essence of God should always be!"

"Oh?"

Tuek heard the terrible cynicism in the old man's voice. Stiros' words seemed

to tremble in the incense-laden air, inviting terrible retribution.

"Then why does she ask how our Leto was transformed into the Divided God?"

Stiros demanded.

Did Stiros question the Holy Metamorphosis? Tuek was aghast. He said: "In

time, she will enlighten us."

"Our feeble explanations must fill her with dismay," Stiros sneered.

"You go too far, Stiros!"

"Indeed? You do not think it enlightening that she asks how the sandtrout

encapsulate most of Rakis' water and recreate the desert?"

Tuek tried to conceal his growing anger. Stiros did represent a powerful

faction in the priesthood, but his tone and his words raised questions that had

been answered by High Priests long ago. The Metamorphosis of Leto II had given

birth to uncounted sandtrout, each carrying a Bit of Himself. Sandtrout to

Divided God: The sequence was known and worshiped. To question this denied

God.

"You sit here and do nothing!" Stiros accused. "We are pawns of --"

"Enough!" Tuek had heard all he wanted to hear of this old man's cynicism.

Drawing his dignity around him, Tuek spoke the words of God:

"Your Lord knows very well what is in your heart. Your soul suffices this day

as a reckoner against you. I need no witnesses. You do not listen to your

soul, but listen instead to your anger and your rage."

Stiros retired in frustration.

After considerable thought, Tuek enrobed himself in his most suitable finery of

white, gold, and purple. He went to visit Sheeana.

Sheeana was in the roof garden atop the central priestly complex, there with

Cania and two others -- a young priest named Baldik, who was in Tuek's private

service, and an acolyte priestess named Kipuna, who behaved too much like a

Reverend Mother for Tuek's liking. The Sisterhood had its spies here, of

course, but Tuek did not like to be aware of it. Kipuna had taken over much of

Sheeana's physical training and there had grown a rapport between child and

acolyte priestess that aroused Cania's jealousy. Even Cania, however, could not

stand in the way of Sheeana's commands.

The four of them stood beside a stone bench almost in the shadow of a ventilator

tower. Kipuna held Sheeana's right hand, manipulating the child's fingers.

Sheeana was growing tall, Tuek noted. Six years she had been his charge. He

could see the first beginnings of breasts poking out her robe. There was not a

breath of wind on the rooftop and the air felt heavy in Tuek's lungs.

Tuek glanced around the garden to assure himself that his security arrangements

were not being ignored. One never knew from what quarter danger might appear.

Four of Tuek's own personal guards, well armed but concealing it, shared the

rooftop at a distance -- one at each corner. The parapet enclosing the garden

was a high one, just the guards' heads standing above the rim. The only

building higher than this priestly tower was Keen's primary windtrap about a

thousand meters to the west.

Despite the visible evidence that his security orders were being carried out,

Tuek sensed danger. Was God warning him? Tuek still felt disturbed by Stiros'

cynicism. Was it wrong to allow Stiros that much latitude?

Sheeana saw Tuek approaching and stopped the odd finger-flexing exercises she

was performing at Kipuna's instructions. Giving every appearance of

knowledgeable patience, the child stood silently with her gaze fixed on the High

Priest, forcing her companions to turn and watch with her.

Sheeana did not find Tuek a fearsome figure. She rather liked the old man

although some of his questions were so bumbling. And his answers! Quite by

accident, she had discovered the question that most disturbed Tuek.

"Why?"

Some of the attendant priests interpreted her question aloud as: "Why do you

believe this?" Sheeana immediately picked up on this and thereafter her

probings of Tuek and the others took the unvarying form:

"Why do you believe this?"

Tuek stopped about two paces from Sheeana and bowed. "Good afternoon, Sheeana."

He twisted his neck nervously against the collar of his robe. The sun felt hot

on his shoulders and he wondered why the child chose to be out here so often.

Sheeana maintained her probing stare at Tuek. She knew this gaze disturbed him.

Tuek cleared his throat. When Sheeana looked at him that way, he always

wondered: Is it God looking at me through her eyes?

Cania spoke. "Sheeana has been asking today about the Fish Speakers."

In his most unctuous tones, Tuek said: "God's own Holy Army."

"All of them women?" Sheeana asked. She spoke as though she could not believe

it. To those at the base of Rakian society, Fish Speakers were a name from

ancient history, people cast out in the Famine Times.

She is testing me, Tuek thought. Fish Speakers. The modern carriers of the

name had only a small trading-spying delegation on Rakis, composed of both men

and women. Their ancient origins no longer were significant to their current

activities, mostly working as an arm of Ix.

"Men always served the Fish Speakers in an advisory capacity," Tuek said. He

watched carefully to see how Sheeana would respond.

"Then there were always the Duncan Idahos," Cania said.

"Yes, yes, of course: the Duncans." Tuek tried not to scowl. That woman was

always interrupting! Tuek did not like being reminded of this aspect to God's

historical presence on Rakis. The recurrent ghola and his position in the Holy

Army carried overtones of Bene Tleilax indulgence. But there was no avoiding

the fact that Fish Speakers had guarded the Duncans from harm, acting of course

at the behest of God. The Duncans were holy, no doubt of it, but in a special

category. By God's own account, He had killed some of the Duncans himself,

obviously translating them immediately into heaven.

"Kipuna has been telling me about the Bene Gesserit," Sheeana said.

How the child's mind darted around!

Tuek cleared his throat, recognizing his own ambivalent attitude toward the

Reverend Mothers. Reverence was demanded for those who were "Beloved of God,"

such as the Saintly Chenoeh. And the first High Priest had constructed a

logical account of how the Holy Hwi Noree, Bride of God, had been a secret

Reverend Mother. Honoring these special circumstances, the priesthood felt an

irritating responsibility toward the Bene Gesserit, which was carried out

chiefly by selling melange to the Sisterhood at a price ridiculously below that

charged by the Tleilaxu.

In her most ingenuous tones, Sheeana said: "Tell me about the Bene Gesserit,

Hedley."

Tuek glanced sharply at the adults around Sheeana, trying to catch a smile on

their faces. He did not know how to deal with Sheeana calling him by his first

name that way. In one sense, it was demeaning. In another sense, she honored

him by such intimacy.

God tests me sorely, he thought.

"Are the Reverend Mothers good people?" Sheeana asked.

Tuek sighed. The records all confirmed that God harbored reservations about the

Sisterhood. God's words had been examined carefully and submitted finally to a

High Priest's interpretation. God did not let the Sisterhood threaten his

Golden Path. That much was clear.

"Many of them are good," Tuek said.

"Where is the nearest Reverend Mother?" Sheeana asked.

"At the Sisterhood's Embassy here in Keen," Tuek said.

"Do you know her?"

"There are many Reverend Mothers in the Bene Gesserit Keep," he said.

"What's a Keep?"'

"That's what they call their home here."

"One Reverend Mother must be in charge. Do you know that one?"

"I knew her predecessor, Tamalane, but this one is new. She has only just

arrived. Her name is Odrade."

"That's a funny name."

Tuek's own thought, but he said: "One of our historians tells me it is a form

of the name Atreides."

Sheeana reflected upon this. Atreides. That was the family that had brought

Shaitan into being. Before the Atreides there had been only the Fremen and

Shai-hulud. The Oral History, which her people preserved against all priestly

prohibition, chanted the begats of the most important people on Rakis. Sheeana

had heard these names many nights in her village.

"Muad'dib begat the Tyrant."

"The Tyrant begat Shaitan."

Sheeana did not feel like arguing truth with Tuek. Anyway, he looked tired

today. She said merely: "Bring me this Reverend Mother Odrade."

Kipuna hid a gloating smile behind her hand.

Tuek stepped back, aghast. How could he comply with such a demand? Even the

Rakian priesthood did not command the Bene Gesserit! What if the Sisterhood

refused him? Could he offer a gift of melange in exchange? That might be a

sign of weakness. The Reverend Mothers might bargain! No harder bargainers

lived than the Sisterhood's cold-eyed Reverend Mothers. This new one, this

Odrade, looked to be one of the worst.

All of these thoughts fled through Tuek's mind in an instant.

Cania intruded, giving Tuek the needed approach. "Perhaps Kipuna could convey

Sheeana's invitation," Cania said.

Tuek darted a glance at the young acolyte priestess. Yes! Many suspected

(Cania among them, obviously) that Kipuna spied for the Bene Gesserit. Of

course, everyone on Rakis spied for someone. Tuek put on his most gracious

smile as he nodded to Kipuna.

"Do you know any of the Reverend Mothers, Kipuna?"

"Some of them are known to me, My Lord High Priest," Kipuna said.

At least she still shows the proper deference!

"Excellent," Tuek said. "Would you be so kind as to start this gracious

invitation from Sheeana moving up through the Sisterhood's embassy."

"I will do my poor best, My Lord High Priest."

"I'm sure you will!"

Kipuna began a prideful turn toward Sheeana, the knowledge of success growing

within her. Sheeana's request had been ridiculously easy to ignite, given the

techniques provided by the Sisterhood. Kipuna smiled and opened her mouth to

speak. A movement at the parapet about forty meters behind Sheeana caught

Kipuna's attention. Something glinted in the sunlight there. Something small

and . . .

With a strangled cry, Kipuna grabbed up Sheeana, hurled her at the startled Tuek

and shouted: "Run!" With that, Kipuna dashed toward the swiftly advancing

brightness -- a tiny seeker trailing a long length of shigawire.

In his younger days, Tuek had played batball. He caught Sheeana instinctively,

hesitated for an instant and then recognized the danger. Whirling with the

squirming, protesting girl in his arms, Tuek dashed through the open door of the

stair tower. He heard the door slam behind him and Cania's rapid footsteps

close on his heels.

"What is it? What is it?" Sheeana pounded her fists against Tuek's chest as

she shouted.

"Hush, Sheeana! Hush!" Tuek paused on the first landing. Both a chute and

suspensor-drop led from this landing into the building's core. Cania stopped

beside Tuek, her panting loud in the narrow space.

"It killed Kipuna and two of your guards," Cania gasped. "Cut them up! I saw

it. God preserve us!"

Tuek's mind was a maelstrom. Both the chute and the suspensor-drop system were

enclosed wormholes through the tower. They could be sabotaged. The attack on

the roof might be only one element in a far more complex plot.

"Put me down!" Sheeana insisted. "What's happening?"

Tuek eased her to the floor but kept one of her hands clutched in his hand. He

bent over her, "Sheeana, dear, someone is trying to harm us."

Sheeana's mouth formed a silent "O," then: "They hurt Kipuna?"

Tuek looked up at the roof door. Was that an ornithopter he heard up there?

Stiros! Conspirators could take three vulnerable people into the desert so

easily!

Cania had regained her breath. "I hear a 'thopter," she said. "Shouldn't we be

getting away from here?"

"We will go down by the stairs," Tuek said.

"But the --"

"Do as I say!"

Keeping a firm hold on Sheeana's hand, Tuek led the way down to the next

landing. In addition to the chute and suspensor access, this landing had a door

into a wide curving hall. Only a few short steps beyond the door lay the

entrance to Sheeana's quarters, once Tuek's own quarters. Again he hesitated.

"Something's happening on the roof," Cania whispered.

Tuek looked down at the fearfully silent child beside him. Her hand felt

sweaty.

Yes, there was some sort of uproar on the roof -- shouts, the hiss of burners,

much running about. The roof door, now out of sight above them, crashed open.

This decided Tuek. He flung open the door into the hallway and dashed out into

the arms of a tightly grouped wedge of black-robed women. With an empty sense

of defeat, Tuek recognized the woman at the point of the wedge: Odrade!

Someone plucked Sheeana away from him and hustled her back into the press of

robed figures. Before Tuek or Cania could protest, hands were clapped over

their mouths. Other hands pinioned them against a wall of the hallway. Some of

the robed figures went through the doorway and up the stairs.

"The child is safe and that's all that's important for the moment," Odrade

whispered. She looked into Tuek's eyes. "Make no outcry." The hand was

removed from his mouth. Using Voice, she said: "Tell me about the roof!"

Tuek found himself complying without reservation. "A seeker towing a long

shigawire. It came over the parapet. Kipuna saw it and --"

"Where is Kipuna?"

"Dead. Cania saw it." Tuek described Kipuna's brave dash toward the threat.

Kipuna dead! Odrade thought. She concealed a fiercely angry sense of loss.

What a waste. There must be admiration for such a brave death, but the loss!

The Sisterhood always needed such courage and devotion, but it also required the

genetic wealth Kipuna had represented. It was gone, taken by these stumbling

fools!

At a gesture from Odrade, the hand was removed from Cania's mouth. "Tell me

what you saw," Odrade said.

"The seeker whipped the shigawire around Kipuna's neck and. . ." Cania

shuddered.

The dull thump of an explosion reverberated above them, then silence. Odrade

waved a hand. Robed women spread along the hallway, moving silently out of

sight beyond the curve. Only Odrade and two others, both chill-eyed younger

women with intense expressions, remained beside Tuek and Cania. Sheeana was

nowhere to be seen.

"The Ixians are in this somewhere," Odrade said.

Tuek agreed. That much shigawire . . . "Where have you taken the child?" he

asked.

"We are protecting her," Odrade said. "Be still." She tipped her head,

listening.

A robed woman sped back around the curve of the hallway and whispered something

in Odrade's ear. Odrade produced a tight smile.

"It is over," Odrade said. "We will go to Sheeana."

Sheeana occupied a softly cushioned blue chair in the main room of her quarters.

Black-robed women stood in a protective arc behind her. The child appeared to

Tuek quite recovered from the shock of the attack and escape but her eyes

glittered with excitement and unasked questions. Sheeana's attention was

directed at something off to Tuek's right. He stopped and looked there, gasping

at what he saw.

A naked male body lay against the wall in an oddly crumpled position, the head

twisted until the chin lay back over the left shoulder. Open eyes stared out

with the emptiness of death.

Stiros!

The shredded rags of Stiros' robe, obviously torn from him violently, lay in an

untidy heap near the body's feet.

Tuek looked at Odrade.

"He was in on it," she said. "There were Face Dancers with the Ixians."

Tuek tried to swallow in a dry throat.

Cania shuffled past him toward the body. Tuek could not see her face but

Cania's presence reminded him that there had been something between Stiros and

Cania in their younger days. Tuek moved instinctively to place himself between

Cania and the seated child.

Cania stopped at the body and nudged it with a foot. She turned a gloating

expression on Tuek. "I had to make sure he was really dead," she said.

Odrade glanced at a companion. "Get rid of the body." She looked at Sheeana.

It was Odrade's first chance for a more careful study of the child since leading

the assault force here to deal with the attack on the temple complex.

Tuek spoke behind Odrade. "Reverend Mother, could you explain please what --

Odrade interrupted without turning. "Later."

Sheeana's expression quickened at Tuek's words. "I thought you were a Reverend

Mother!"

Odrade merely nodded. What a fascinating child. Odrade experienced the

sensations she felt while standing in front of the ancient painting in Taraza's

quarters. Some of the fire that had gone into the work of art inspired Odrade

now. Wild inspiration! That was the message from the mad Van Gogh. Chaos

brought into magnificent order. Was that not part of the Sisterhood's coda?

This child is my canvas, Odrade thought. She felt her hand tingle to the

feeling of that ancient brush. Her nostrils flared to the smells of oils and

pigments.

"Leave me alone with Sheeana," Odrade ordered. "Everybody out."

Tuek started to protest but stopped when one of Odrade's robed companions

gripped his arm. Odrade glared at him.

"The Bene Gesserit have served you before," she said. "This time, we saved your

life."

The woman holding Tuek's arm tugged at him.

"Answer his questions," Odrade said. "But do it somewhere else."

Cania took a step toward Sheeana. "That child is my --"

"Leave!" Odrade barked, all the powers of Voice in the command.

Cania froze.

"You almost lost her to a bumbling lot of conspirators!" Odrade said, glaring

at Cania. "We will consider whether you get any further opportunity to

associate with Sheeana."

Tears started in Cania's eyes but Odrade's condemnation could not be denied.

Turning, Cania fled with the others.

Odrade returned her attention to the watchful child.

"We've been a long time waiting for you," Odrade said. "We will not give those

fools another opportunity to lose you."

Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal

niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the

clout?

-Bene Gesserit Council Proceedings: Archives #XOX232

Immediately after Taraza and her party left Gammu, Teg threw himself into his

work. New in-Keep procedures had to be laid out, holding Schwangyu at arm's

length from the ghola. Taraza's orders.

"She can observe all she wants. She can't touch."

In spite of the work pressures, Teg found himself staring into space at odd

moments, prey to free-floating anxiety. The experience of rescuing Taraza's

party from the Guildship and Odrade's odd revelations did not fit into any data

classification he constructed.

Dependencies . . . key logs . . .

Teg found himself seated in his own workroom, an assignment schedule projected

in front of him with shift changes to approve and, for a moment, he had no idea

of the time or even the date. It took a moment to relocate himself.

Midmorning. Taraza and her party had been gone two days. He was alone. Yes,

Patrin had taken over this day's training schedule with Duncan, freeing Teg for

the command decisions.

The workroom around Teg felt alien. Yet, when he looked at each element in it,

he found each thing familiar. Here was his own personal data console. His

uniform jacket had been draped neatly across a chair-back beside him. He tried

to fall into Mentat mode and found his own mind resisting. He had not

encountered that phenomenon since training days.

Training days.

Taraza and Odrade between them had thrown him back into some form of training.

Self-training.

In a detached way, he felt his memory offering up a long-ago conversation with

Taraza. How familiar it was. He was right there, caught in the moments of his

own memory-snare.

Both he and Taraza had been quite tired after making the decisions and taking

the actions to prevent a bloody confrontation -- the Barandiko incident.

Nothing but a hiccough in history now but at the time it had demanded all of

their combined energies.

Taraza invited him into the small parlor of her quarters on her no-ship after

the agreement was signed. She spoke casually, admiring his sagacity, the way he

had seen through to the weaknesses that would force a compromise.

They had been awake and active for almost thirty hours and Teg was glad for the

opportunity to sit while Taraza dialed her foodrink installation. It dutifully

produced two tall glasses of creamy brown liquid.

Teg recognized the smell as she handed him his glass. It was a quick source of

energy, a pick-me-up that the Bene Gesserit seldom shared with outsiders. But

Taraza no longer considered him an outsider.

His head tipped back, Teg took a long swallow of the drink, his gaze on the

ornate ceiling of Taraza's small parlor. This no-ship was an old-fashioned

model, built in the days when more care had been taken with decoration --

heavily incised cornices, baroque figures carved in every surface.

The taste of the drink pushed his memory back into childhood, the heavy infusion

of melange . . .

"My mother made this for me whenever I was overly strenuous," he said, looking

at the glass in his hand. He already could feel the calming energy flow through

his body.

Taraza took her own drink to a chairdog opposite him, a fluffy white bit of

animate furniture that fitted itself to her with the ease of long familiarity.

For Teg, she had provided a traditional green upholstered chair, but she saw his

glance flick across the chairdog and grinned at him.

"Tastes differ, Miles." She sipped her drink and sighed. "My, that was

strenuous but it was good work. There were moments when it was right on the

edge of getting very nasty."

Teg found himself touched by her relaxation. No pose, no ready-made mask to set

them apart and define their separate roles in the Bene Gesserit hierarchy. She

was being obviously friendly and not even a hint of seductiveness. So this was

just what it seemed to be -- as much as that could be said about any encounter

with a Reverend Mother.

With quick elation, Teg realized that he had become quite adept at reading Alma

Mavis Taraza, even when she adopted one of her masks.

"Your mother taught you more than she was told to teach you," Taraza said. "A

wise woman but another heretic. That's all we seem to be breeding nowadays."

"Heretic?" He was caught by resentment.

"That's a private joke in the Sisterhood," Taraza said. "We're supposed to

follow a Mother Superior's orders with absolute devotion. And we do, except

when we disagree."

Teg smiled and took a deep draught of his drink.

"It's odd," Taraza said, "but while we were in that tight little confrontation I

found myself reacting to you as I would to one of my Sisters."

Teg felt the drink warming his stomach. It left a tingling in his nostrils. He

placed the empty glass on a side table and spoke while looking at it. "My

eldest daughter . . ."

"That would be Dimela. You should have let us have her, Miles."

"It was not my decision."

"But one word from you . . ." Taraza shrugged. "Well, that's past. What about

Dimela?"

"She thinks I'm often too much like one of you."

"Too much?"

"She is fiercely loyal to me, Mother Superior. She doesn't really understand

our relationship and --"

"What is our relationship?"

"You command and I obey."

Taraza looked at him over the lip of her glass. When she put down the glass,

she said: "Yes, you've never really been a heretic, Miles. Perhaps . . .

someday . . ."

He spoke quickly, wanting to divert Taraza from such ideas. "Dimela thinks the

long use of melange makes many people become like you."

"Is that so? Isn't it odd, Miles, that a geriatric potion should have so many

side effects?"

"I don't find that odd."

"No, of course you wouldn't." She drained her glass and put it aside. "I was

addressing the way a significant life extension has produced in some people, you

especially, a profound knowledge of human nature."

"We live longer and observe more," he said.

"I don't think it's quite that simple. Some people never observe anything.

Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb

persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift

them out of that false serenity."

"I've never been able to strike an acceptable balance sheet for the spice," he

said, referring to a common Mentat process of data sorting.

Taraza nodded. Obviously, she found the same difficulty. "We of the Sisterhood

tend to be more single-track than Mentats," she said. "We have routines to

shake ourselves out of it but the condition persists."

"Our ancestors have had this problem for a long time," he said.

"It was different before the spice," she said.

"But they lived such short lives."

"Fifty, one hundred years; that doesn't seem very long to us, but still . . ."

"Did they compress more into the available time?"

"Oh, they were frenetic at times."

She was giving him observations from her Other Memories, he realized. Not the

first time he had shared in such ancient lore. His mother had produced such

memories on occasion, but always as a lesson. Was Taraza doing that now?

Teaching him something?

"Melange is a many-handed monster," she said.

"Do you sometimes wish we had never found it?"

"The Bene Gesserit would not exist without it."

"Nor the Guild."

"But there would have been no Tyrant, no Muad'dib. The spice gives with one

hand and takes with all of its others."

"Which hand contains that which we desire?" he asked. "Isn't that always the

question?"

"You're an oddity, you know that, Miles? Mentats so seldom dip into philosophy.

I think it's one of your strengths. You are supremely able to doubt."

He shrugged. This turn in the conversation disturbed him.

"You are not amused," she said. "But cling to your doubts anyway. Doubt is

necessary to a philosopher."

"So the Zensunni assure us."

"All mystics agree on it, Miles. Never underestimate the power of doubts. Very

persuasive. S'tori holds up doubt and surety in a single hand."

Really quite surprised, he asked: "Do Reverend Mothers practice Zensunni

rituals?" He had never even suspected this before.

"Just once," she said. "We achieve an exalted form of s'tori, total. It

involves every cell."

"The spice agony," he said.

"I was sure your mother told you. Obviously, she never explained the affinity

with the Zensunni."

Teg swallowed past a lump in his throat. Fascinating! She gave him a new

insight into the Bene Gesserit. This changed his entire concept, including his

image of his own mother. They were removed from him into an unattainable place

where he could never follow. They might think of him as a comrade on occasion

but he could never enter the intimate circle. He could simulate, no more. He

would never be like Muad'dib or the Tyrant.

"Prescience," Taraza said.

The word shifted his attention. She had changed the subject but not changed it.

"I was thinking about Muad'dib," he said.

"You think he predicted the future," she said.

"That is the Mentat teaching."

"I hear the doubt in your voice, Miles. Did he predict or did he create?

Prescience can be deadly. The people who demand that the oracle predict for

them really want to know next year's price on whalefur or something equally

mundane. None of them wants an instant-by-instant prediction of his personal

life."

"No surprises," Teg said.

"Exactly. If you possessed such fore-knowledge, your life would become an

unutterable bore."

"You think Muad'dib life was a bore?"

"And the Tyrant's, too. We think their entire lives were devoted to trying to

break out of chains they themselves created."

"But they believed . . ."

"Remember your philosopher's doubts, Miles. Beware! The mind of the believer

stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe."

Teg sat silently for a moment. He sensed the fatigue that had been driven

beyond his immediate awareness by the drink, sensed also the way his thoughts

were roiled by the intrusion of new concepts. These were things that he had

been taught would weaken a Mentat, yet he felt strengthened by them.

She is teaching me, he thought. There is a lesson here.

As though projected into his mind and outlined there in fire, he found his

entire Mentat-attention fixated on the Zensunni admonition that was taught to

every beginning student in the Mentat School:

By your belief in granular singularities, you deny all movement -- evolutionary

or devolutionary. Belief fixes a granular universe and causes that universe to

persist. Nothing can be allowed to change because that way your non-moving

universe vanishes. But it moves of itself when you do not move. It evolves

beyond you and is no longer accessible to you.

"The oddest thing of all," Taraza said, sinking into tune with this mood she had

created, "is that the scientists of Ix cannot see how much their own beliefs

dominate their universe."

Teg stared at her, silent and receptive.

"Ixian beliefs are perfectly submissive to the choices they make on how they

will look at their universe," Taraza said. "Their universe does not act of

itself but performs according to the kinds of experiments they choose."

With a start, Teg came out of the memories and awoke to find himself in the

Gammu Keep. He still sat in the familiar chair in his workroom. A glance

around the room showed nothing moved from where he had put it. Only a few

minutes had passed but the room and its contents no longer were alien. He

dipped into and out of Mentat mode. Restored.

The smell and taste of the drink Taraza had given him so long ago still tingled

on his tongue and in his nostrils. A Mentat blink and he knew he could call up

the scene entire once more -- the low light of shaded glowglobes, the feeling of

the chair beneath him, the sounds of their voices. It was all there for replay,

frozen into a time-capsule of isolated memory.

Calling up that old memory created a magical universe where his abilities were

amplified beyond his wildest expectations. No atoms existed in that magical

universe, only waves and awesome movements all around. He was forced there to

discard all barriers built of belief and understanding. This universe was

transparent. He could see through it without any interfering screens upon which

to project its forms. The magical universe reduced him to a core of active

imagination where his own image-making abilities were the only screen upon which

any projection might be sensed.

There, I am both the performer and the performed!

The workroom around Teg wavered into and out of his sensory reality. He felt

his awareness constricted to its tightest purpose and yet that purpose filled

his universe. He was open to infinity.

Taraza did this deliberately! he thought. She has amplified me!

A feeling of awe threatened him. He recognized how his daughter, Odrade, had

drawn upon such powers to create the Atreides Manifesto for Taraza. His own

Mentat powers were submerged in that greater pattern.

Taraza was demanding a fearful performance from him. The need for such a thing

both challenged and terrified him. It could very well mean the end of the

Sisterhood.

The basic rule is this: Never support weakness; always support strength.

-The Bene Gesserit Coda

"How is it that you can order the priests around?" Sheeana asked. "This is

their place."

Odrade answered casually but picked her words to fit the knowledge she knew

Sheeana already possessed: "The priests have Fremen roots. They've always had

Reverend Mothers somewhere near. Besides, child, you order them around, too."

"That's different."

Odrade suppressed a smile.

Little more than three hours had passed since her assault force had broken the

attack on the temple complex. In that time, Odrade had set up a command center

in Sheeana's quarters, carried on the necessary business of assessment and

preliminary retaliation, all the while prompting and observing Sheeana.

Simulflow.

Odrade glanced around the room she had chosen as command center. A scrap of

Stiros' ripped garments still lay near the wall in front of her. Casualties.

The room was an oddly shaped place. No two walls parallel. She sniffed. Still

a residual smell of ozone from the snoopers with which her people had assured

the privacy of these quarters.

Why the odd shape? The building was ancient, remodeled and added to many times,

but that did not explain this room. A pleasantly rough texture of creamy stucco

on walls and ceiling. Elaborate spice-fiber hangings flanked the two doors. It

was early evening and sunlight filtered by lattice shades stippled the wall

opposite the windows. Silver-yellow glowglobes hovered near the ceiling, all

tuned to match the sunlight. Muted street sounds came through the ventilators

beneath the windows. The soft pattern of orange rugs and gray tiles on the

floor spoke of wealth and security but Odrade suddenly did not feel secure.

A tall Reverend Mother came from the adjoining communications room. "Mother

Commander," she said, "the messages have been sent to Guild, Ix, and Tleilaxu."

Odrade spoke absently. "Acknowledged."

The messenger returned to her duties.

"What are you doing?" Sheeana asked.

"Studying something."

Odrade pursed her lips in thought. Their guides through the temple complex had

brought them along a maze of hallways and stairs, glimpses of courtyards through

arches, then into a splendid Ixian suspensor-tube system, which carried them

silently to another hallway, more stairs, another curved hallway . . . finally,

into this room.

Once more, Odrade swept her gaze around the room.

"Why are you studying this room?" Sheeana asked.

"Hush, child!"

The room was an irregular polyhedron with the smaller side to the left. About

thirty-five meters long, half that at the widest. Many low divans and chairs in

various degrees of comfort. Sheeana sat in queenly splendor on a bright yellow

chair with wide soft arms. Not a chairdog in the place. Much brown and blue

and yellow fabric. Odrade stared at the white lattice of a ventilator above a

painting of mountains on the wider end wall. A cool breeze came through the

ventilators below the windows and wafted toward the ventilator above the

painting.

"This was Hedley's room," Sheeana said.

"Why do you annoy him by using his first name, child?"

"Does that annoy him?"

"Don't play word games with me, child! You know it annoys him and that's why

you do it."

"Then why did you ask?"

Odrade ignored this while continuing her careful study of the room. The wall

opposite the painting stood at an oblique angle to the outer wall. She had it

now. Clever! This room had been constructed so that even a whisper here could

be heard by someone beyond the high ventilator. No doubt the painting concealed

another airway to carry sounds from this room. No snooper, sniffer, or other

instrument would detect such an arrangement. Nothing would "beep" at a spying

eye or ear. Only the wary senses of someone trained in deception had winkled it

out.

A hand signal summoned a waiting acolyte. Odrade's fingers flickered in silent

communication: "Find out who is listening beyond that ventilator." She nodded

toward the ventilator above the painting. "Let them continue. We must know to

whom they report."

"How did you know to come and save me?" Sheeana asked. The child had a lovely

voice but it needed training, Odrade thought. There was a steadiness to it,

though, that could be shaped into a powerful instrument.

"Answer me!" Sheeana ordered.

The imperious tone startled Odrade, arousing quick anger, which she was forced

to suppress. Corrections would have to be made immediately!

"Calm yourself, child," Odrade said. She pitched the command in a precise tenor

and saw it take effect.

Again, Sheeana startled her: "That's another kind of Voice. You're trying to

calm me. Kipuna told me all about Voice."

Odrade turned squarely facing Sheeana and looked down at her. Sheeana's first

grief had passed but there was still anger when she spoke of Kipuna.

"I am busy shaping our response to that attack," Odrade said. "Why do you

distract me? I should think you would want them punished."

"What will you do to them? Tell me! What will you do?"

A surprisingly vindictive child, Odrade thought. That would have to be curbed.

Hatred was as dangerous an emotion as love. The capacity for hatred was the

capacity for its opposite.

Odrade said: "I have sent Guild, Ix, and Tleilaxu the message we always

dispatch when we have been annoyed. Three words: 'You will pay.' "

"How will they pay?"

"A proper Bene Gesserit punishment is being fashioned. They will feel the

consequences of their behavior."

"But what will you do?"

"In time, you may learn. You may even learn how we design our punishment. For

now, there is no need that you know."

A sullen look came over Sheeana's face. She said: "You're not even angry.

Annoyed. That's what you said."

"Curb your impatience, child! There are things you do not understand."

The Reverend Mother from the communications room returned, glanced once at

Sheeana and spoke to Odrade. "Chapter House acknowledges receipt of your

report. They approve your response."

When the Reverend Mother from communications remained standing there, Odrade

said: "There is more?"

A flickering glance to Sheeana spoke of the woman's reservations. Odrade held

up her right palm, the signal for silent communication.

The Reverend Mother responded, her fingers dancing with unleashed excitement:

"Taraza's message -- The Tleilaxu are the pivotal element. Guild must be made

to pay dearly for its melange. Shut down Rakian supply to them. Throw Guild

and Ix together. They will overextend selves in face of crushing competition

from the Scattering. Ignore Fish Speakers for now. They fall with Ix. Master

of Masters responds to us from Tleilaxu. He goes to Rakis. Trap him."

Odrade smiled softly to acknowledge that she understood. She watched the other

woman leave the room. Not only did Chapter House agree with actions taken on

Rakis, a suitable Bene Gesserit punishment had been fashioned with fascinating

speed. Obviously Taraza and her advisors had anticipated this moment.

Odrade allowed herself a sigh of relief. The message to Chapter House had been

terse: an outline account of the attack, the list of the Sisterhood's

casualties, identification of the attackers and a confirming note to Taraza that

Odrade already had transmitted the required warning to the guilty: "You will

pay."

Yes, those fool attackers now knew the hornet's nest had been aroused. That

would create fear -- an essential part of the punishment.

Sheeana squirmed in her chair. Her attitude said she would now try a new

approach. "One of your people said there were Face Dancers." She gestured with

her chin toward the roof.

What a vast reservoir of ignorance this child was, Odrade thought. That

emptiness would have to be filled. Face Dancers! Odrade thought about the

bodies they had examined. The Tleilaxu had finally sent their Face Dancers into

action. It was a test of the Bene Gesserit, of course. These new ones were

extremely difficult to detect. They still gave off the characteristic smell of

their unique pheromones, though. Odrade had sent that datum in her message to

Chapter House.

The problem now was to keep the Bene Gesserit knowledge secret. Odrade summoned

an acolyte messenger. Indicating the ventilator with a flick of her eyes,

Odrade spoke silently with her fingers: "Kill those who listen!"

"You are too interested in Voice, child," Odrade said, speaking down to Sheeana

in the chair. "Silence is a most valuable tool for learning."

"But could I learn Voice? I want to learn it."

"I am telling you to be silent and to learn by your silence."

"I command you to teach me Voice!"

Odrade reflected on Kipuna's reports. Sheeana had established effective Voice

control over most of those around her. The child had learned it on her own. An

intermediate level Voice for a limited audience. She was a natural. Tuek and

Cania and the others were frightened by Sheeana. Religious fantasies

contributed to that fear, of course, but Sheeana's mastery of Voice pitch and

tone displayed an admirable unconscious selectivity.

The indicated response to Sheeana was obvious, Odrade knew. Honesty. It was a

most powerful lure and it served more than one purpose.

"I am here to teach you many things," Odrade said, "but I do not do this at your

command."

"Everyone obeys me!" Sheeana said.

She's barely into puberty and already at Aristocrat level, Odrade thought. Gods

of our own making! What can she become?

Sheeana slipped out of her chair and stood looking up at Odrade with a

questioning expression. The child's eyes were on a level with Odrade's

shoulders. Sheeana was going to be tall, a commanding presence. If she

survived.

"You answer some of my questions but you won't answer others," Sheeana said.

"You said you'd been waiting for me but you won't explain. Why won't you obey

me?"

"A foolish question, child."

"Why do you keep calling me child?"

"Are you not a child?"

"I menstruate."

"But you're still a child."

"The priests obey me."

"They're afraid of you."

"You aren't?"

"No, I'm not."

"Good! It gets tiresome when people only fear you."

"The priests think you come from God."

"Don't you think that?"

"Why should I? We --" Odrade broke off as an acolyte messenger entered. The

acolyte's fingers danced in silent communication: "Four priests listened. They

have been killed. All were minions of Tuek."

Odrade waved the messenger away.

"She talks with her fingers," Sheeana said. "How does she do that?"

"You ask too many of the wrong questions, child. And you haven't told me why I

should consider you an instrument of God."

"Shaitan spares me. I walk on the desert and when Shaitan comes, I talk to

him."

"Why do you call him Shaitan instead of Shai-hulud?"

"Everybody asks that same stupid question!"

"Then give me your stupid answer."

The sullen expression returned to Sheeana's face. "It's because of how we met."

"And how did you meet?"

Sheeana tipped her head to one side and looked up at Odrade for a moment, then:

"That's a secret."

"And you know how to keep secrets?"

Sheeana straightened and nodded but Odrade saw uncertainty in the movement. The

child knew when she was being led into an impossible position!

"Excellent!" Odrade said. "The keeping of secrets is one of a Reverend

Mother's most essential teachings. I'm glad we won't have to bother with that

one."

"But I want to learn everything!"

Such petulance in her voice. Very poor emotional control.

"You must teach me everything!" Sheeana insisted.

Time for the whip, Odrade thought. Sheeana had spoken and postured sufficiently

that even a fifth-grade acolyte could feel confident of controlling her now.

Using the full power of Voice, Odrade said: "Don't take that tone with me,

child! Not if you wish to learn anything!"

Sheeana went rigid. She was more than a minute absorbing what had happened to

her and then relaxing. Presently, she smiled, a warm and open expression. "Oh,

I'm so glad you came! It's been so boring lately."

Nothing surpasses the complexity of the human mind.

-Leto II: Dar-es-Balat Records

The Gammu night, often quickly foreboding in this latitude, was almost two hours

away. Gathering clouds shadowed the Keep. At Lucilla's command, Duncan had

returned to the courtyard for an intense session of self-directed practice.

Lucilla observed from the parapet where she had first watched him.

Duncan moved in the tumbling twists of the Bene Gesserit eightfold combat,

hurling his body across the grass, rolling, flipping himself from side to side,

darting up and then down.

It was a fine display of random dodging, Lucilla thought. She could see no

predictable pattern in his movements and the speed was dazzling. He was almost

sixteen SY and already coming onto the platform potential of his prana-bindu

endowment.

The carefully controlled movements of his training exercises revealed so much!

He had responded quickly when she first ordered these evening sessions. The

initial step of her instructions from Taraza had been accomplished. The ghola

loved her. No doubt of it. She was mother-fixed to him. And it had been

accomplished without seriously weakening him, although Teg's anxieties had been

aroused.

My shadow is on this ghola but he is not a supplicant nor a dependent follower,

she reassured herself. Teg worries about it for no reason.

Just that morning, she had told Teg, "Wherever his strengths dictate, he

continues to express himself freely."

Teg should see him right now, she thought. These new practice movements were

largely Duncan's own creation.

Lucilla suppressed a gasp of appreciation at a particularly nimble leap, which

took Duncan almost to the center of the courtyard. The ghola was developing a

nerve-muscle equilibrium that, given time, might be matched to a psychological

equilibrium at least equal to Teg's. The cultural impact of such an achievement

would be awesome. Look at all those who gave instinctive allegiance to Teg and,

through Teg, to the Sisterhood.

We have the Tyrant to thank for much of that, she thought.

Before Leto II, no widespread system of cultural adjustments had ever endured

long enough to approach the balance that the Bene Gesserit held as an ideal. It

was this equilibrium -- "flowing along the blade of a sword" -- that fascinated

Lucilla. It was why she lent herself so unreservedly to a project whose total

design she did not know, but which demanded of her a performance that instinct

labeled repugnant.

Duncan is so young!

What the Sisterhood required of her next had been spelled out explicitly by

Taraza: the Sexual Imprint. Only that morning, Lucilla had posed naked before

her mirror, forming the attitudes and motions of face and body that she knew she

would use to obey Taraza's orders. In artificial repose, Lucilla had seen her

own face appear like that of a prehistoric love goddess -- opulent with flesh

and the promise of softness into which an aroused male might hurl himself.

In her education, Lucilla had seen ancient statues from the First Times, little

stone figures of human females with wide hips and sagging breasts that assured

abundance for a suckling infant. At will, Lucilla could produce a youthful

simulation of that ancient form.

In the courtyard below Lucilla, Duncan paused a moment and appeared to be

thinking out his next movements. Presently, he nodded to himself, leaped high

and twisted in the air, landing like a springbok on one leg, which kicked him

sideways into gyrations more akin to dance than to combat.

Lucilla drew her mouth into a tight line of resolution.

Sexual Imprint.

The secret of sex was no secret at all, she thought. The roots were attached to

life itself. This explained, of course, why her first command-seduction for the

Sisterhood had planted a male face in her memory. The Breeding Mistress had

told her to expect this and not be alarmed by it. But Lucilla had realized then

that the Sexual Imprint was a two-edged sword. You might learn to flow along

the edge of the blade but you could be cut by it. Sometimes, when that male

face of her first command-seduction returned unbidden into her mind, Lucilla

felt confounded by it. The memory came so frequently at the peak of an intimate

moment, forcing her to great efforts of concealment.

"You are strengthened thus," the Breeding Mistresses reassured her.

Still, there were times when she felt that she had trivialized something better

left a mystery.

A feeling of sourness at what she must do swept over Lucilla. These evenings

when she observed Duncan's training sessions had been her favorite times each

day. The lad's muscular development showed such definite progress -- moving in

the growth of sensitive muscle and nerve links -- all of the prana-bindu marvels

for which the Sisterhood was so famous. The next step was almost upon her,

though, and she no longer could sink into watchful appreciation of her charge.

Miles Teg would come out presently, she knew. Duncan's training would move

again into the practice room with its more deadly weapons.

Teg.

Once more, Lucilla wondered about him. She had felt herself more than once

attracted to him in a particular way that she recognized immediately. An

Imprinter enjoyed some latitude in selecting her own breeding partners, provided

she had no prior commitments nor contrary orders. Teg was old but his records

suggested he might still be virile. She would not be able to keep the child, of

course, but she had learned to deal with that.

Why not? she had asked herself.

Her plan had been simple in the extreme. Complete the Imprint on the ghola and

then, registering her intent with Taraza, conceive a child by the redoubtable

Miles Teg. Practical introductory seduction had been indicated, but Teg had not

succumbed. His Mentat cynicism stopped her one afternoon in the dressing

chamber off the Weapons Room.

"My breeding days are over, Lucilla. The Sisterhood should be satisfied with

what I already have given."

Teg, clad only in black exercise leotards, finished wiping his sweaty face with

a towel and dropped the towel into a hamper. He spoke without looking at her:

"Would you please leave me now?"

So he saw through her overtures!

She should have anticipated that, Teg being who he was. Lucilla knew she might

still seduce him. No Reverend Mother of her training should fail, not even with

a Mentat of Teg's obvious powers.

Lucilla stood there a moment undecided, her mind automatically planning how to

circumvent this preliminary rejection. Something stopped her. Not anger at the

rejection, not the remote possibility that he might indeed be proof against her

wiles. Pride and its possible fall (there was always that possibility) had

little to do with it.

Dignity.

There was a quiet dignity in Teg and she had the certain knowledge of what his

courage and prowess had already given to the Sisterhood. Not quite sure of her

motives, Lucilla turned away from him. Possibly it was the underlying gratitude

that the Sisterhood felt toward him. To seduce Teg now would be demeaning, not

only of him but of herself. She could not bring herself to such an action, not

without a direct order from a superior.

As she stood on the parapet, some of these memories clouded her senses. There

was movement in the shadows at the doorway from the Weapons Wing. Teg could be

glimpsed there. Lucilla took a firmer grip on her responses and focused on

Duncan. The ghola had stopped his controlled tumbling across the lawn. He

stood quietly, breathing deeply, his attention aimed upward at Lucilla. She saw

perspiration on his face and in dark blotchings on his light blue singlesuit.

Leaning over the parapet, Lucilla called down to him: "That was very good,

Duncan. Tomorrow, I will begin teaching you more of the foot-fist

combinations."

The words came out of her without censoring and she knew their source at once.

They were for Teg standing in the shadowed doorway down there, not for the

ghola. She was saying to Teg: "See! You aren't the only one who teaches him

deadly abilities."

Lucilla realized then that Teg had insinuated himself further into her psyche

than she should permit. Grimly, she swung her gaze to the tall figure emerging

from the doorway's shadows. Duncan already was running toward the Bashar.

As Lucilla focused on Teg, reaction flashed through her ignited by the most

elemental Bene Gesserit responses. The steps of this reaction could be defined

later: Something wrong! Danger! Teg is not Teg! In the reactive flash,

however, none of this took separate form. She responded, hurling all the volume

of Voice she could muster:

"Duncan! Down!"

Duncan dropped flat on the grass, his attention riveted to the Teg-figure

emerging from the Weapons Wing. There was a field-model lasgun in the man's

hands.

Face Dancer! Lucilla thought. Only hyperalertness revealed him to her. One of

the new ones!

"Face Dancer!" Lucilla shouted.

Duncan kicked himself sideways and leaped up, twisting flat in the air at least

a meter off the ground. The speed of his reaction shocked Lucilla. She had not

known any human could move that fast! The lasgun's first bolt cut beneath

Duncan as he seemed to float in the air.

Lucilla jumped to the parapet and dropped to a handhold on the window ledge of

the next lower level. Before she was stopped, her right hand shot out and found

the protruding rainspout that memory told her was there. Her body arched

sideways and she dropped to a window ledge at the next level. Desperation drove

her even though she knew she would be too late.

Something crackled on the wall above her. She saw a molten line cut toward her

as she flung herself to the left, twisting and dropping onto the lawn. Her gaze

captured the scene around her in a flashing deit-grasp as she landed.

Duncan moved toward the attacker, dodging and twisting in a terrifying replay of

his practice session. The speed of his movements!

Lucilla saw indecision in the face of the false Teg.

She darted toward the Face Dancer, feeling the creature's thoughts: Two of them

after me!

Failure was inevitable, though, and Lucilla knew it even as she ran. The Face

Dancer had only to shift his weapon into full burn at close range. He could

lace the air in front of him. Nothing could penetrate such a defense. As she

cast about in her mind, desperately seeking some way to defeat the attacker, she

saw red smoke appear on the false Teg's breast. A line of red darted upward at

an oblique angle through the muscles of the arm holding the lasgun. The arm

fell away like a piece dropping from a statue. The shoulder tipped away from

the torso in a spout of blood. The figure toppled, dissolving into more red

smoke and blood spray, crumbling into pieces on the steps, all dark tans and

blue-tinged reds.

Lucilla smelled the distinctive Face Dancer pheromones as she stopped. Duncan

came up beside her. He peered past the dead Face Dancer at movement in the

hallway.

Another Teg emerged behind the dead one. Lucilla identified the reality: Teg

himself.

"That's the Bashar," Duncan said.

Lucilla experienced a small surge of pleasure that Duncan had learned this

identity-lesson so well: how to recognize your friends even if you only saw

bits of them. She pointed to the dead Face Dancer. "Smell him."

Duncan inhaled. "Yes, I have it. But he wasn't a very good copy. I saw what

he was as soon as you did."

Teg emerged into the courtyard carrying a heavy lasgun cradled across his left

arm. His right hand held a firm grip on the stock and trigger. He swept his

gaze around the courtyard, then focused on Duncan and finally on Lucilla.

"Bring Duncan inside," Teg said.

It was the order of a battlefield commander, depending only on superior

knowledge of what should be done in the emergency. Lucilla obeyed without

question.

Duncan did not speak as she led him by the hand past the bloody meat that had

been the Face Dancer, then into the Weapons Wing. Once inside, he glanced back

at the sodden heap and asked: "Who let him in?"

Not: "How did he get in?" she observed. Duncan already had seen past the

inconsequentials to the heart of their problem.

Teg strode ahead of them toward his own quarters. He stopped at the door,

glanced inside and motioned for Lucilla and Duncan to follow.

In Teg's bedroom there was the thick smell of burned flesh and wisps of smoke

dominated by the charred barbecue odor that Lucilla so detested: cooked human

meat! A figure in one of Teg's uniforms lay face down on the floor where it had

fallen off his bed.

Teg rolled the figure over with one boot toe, exposing the face: staring eyes,

a rictus grin. Lucilla recognized one of the perimeter guards, one of those who

had come to the Keep with Schwangyu, so the Keep's records said.

"Their point man," Teg said. "Patrin took care of him and we put one of my

uniforms on him. It was enough to fool the Face Dancers because we didn't let

them see the face before we attacked. They didn't have time to make a memory

print."

"You know about that?" Lucilla was startled.

"Bellonda briefed me thoroughly!"

Abruptly, Lucilla saw the further significance of what Teg said. She suppressed

a swift flare of anger. "How did you let one of them get into the courtyard?"

His voice mild, Teg said: "There was rather urgent activity in here. I had to

make a choice, which turned out to be the right one."

She did not try to hide her anger. "The choice to let Duncan fend for himself?"

"To leave him in your care or let other attackers get themselves firmly

entrenched inside. Patrin and I had a bad time clearing this wing. We had our

hands full." Teg glanced at Duncan. "He came through very well, thanks to our

training."

"That . . . that thing almost got him!"

"Lucilla!" Teg shook his head. "I had it timed. You two could last at least a

minute out there. I knew you would throw yourself in that thing's path and

sacrifice yourself to save Duncan. Another twenty seconds."

At Teg's words, Duncan turned a shiny-eyed look on Lucilla. "Would you have

done that?"

When Lucilla did not respond, Teg said: "She would have done that. "

Lucilla did not deny it. She remembered now, though, the incredible speed with

which Duncan had moved, the dazzling shifts of his attack.

"Battle decisions," Teg said, looking at Lucilla.

She accepted this. As usual, Teg had made the correct choice. She knew,

though, that she would have to communicate with Taraza. The prana-bindu

accelerations in this ghola went beyond anything she had expected. She

stiffened as Teg straightened to full alert, his gaze on the doorway behind her.

Lucilla whirled.

Schwangyu stood there, Patrin behind her, another heavy lasgun over his arm.

Its muzzle, Lucilla noted, was aimed at Schwangyu.

"She insisted," Patrin said. There was an angry set to the old aide's face.

The deep lines beside his mouth pointed downward.

"There's a trail of bodies clear out to the south pillbox," Schwangyu said.

"Your people won't let me out there to inspect. I command you to countermand

those orders immediately."

"Not until my clean-up crews are finished," Teg said.

"They're still killing people out there! I can hear it!" A venomous edge had

entered Schwangyu's voice. She glared at Lucilla.

"We're also questioning people out there," Teg said.

Schwangyu shifted her glare to Teg. "If it's too dangerous here then we will

take the . . . the child to my quarters. Now!"

"We will not do that," Teg said. His tone was low-key but positive.

Schwangyu stiffened with displeasure. Patrin's knuckles went white on the stock

of his lasgun. Schwangyu swung her gaze past the gun and up to Lucilla's

appraising stare. The two women looked into each other's eyes.

Teg allowed the moment to hold for a beat, then said: "Lucilla, take Duncan

into my sitting room." He nodded toward a door behind him.

Lucilla obeyed, pointedly keeping her body between Schwangyu and Duncan the

whole time.

Once behind the closed door, Duncan said: "She almost called me 'the ghola.'

She's really upset."

"Schwangyu has let several things slip past her guard," Lucilla said.

She glanced around Teg's sitting room, her first view of this part of his

quarters: the Bashar's inner sanctum. It reminded her of her own quarters --

that same mixture of orderliness and casual disarray. Reading spools lay in a

clutter on a small table beside an old-fashioned chair upholstered in soft gray.

The spool reader had been swung aside as though its user had just stepped out

for a moment, intending to return soon. A Bashar's black uniform jacket lay

across a nearby hard chair with sewing material in a small open box atop it.

The jacket's cuff showed a carefully patched hole.

So he does his own mending.

This was an aspect of the famous Miles Teg she had not expected. If she had

thought about it, she would have said Patrin would absorb such chores.

"Schwangyu let the attackers in, didn't she?" Duncan asked.

"Her people did." Lucilla did not hide her anger. "She has gone too far. A

pact with the Tleilaxu!"

"Will Patrin kill her?"

"I don't know nor do I care!"

Outside the door, Schwangyu spoke with anger, her voice loud and quite clear:

"Are we just going to wait here, Bashar?"

"You can leave anytime you wish." That was Teg.

"But I can't enter the south tunnel!"

Schwangyu sounded petulant. Lucilla knew it for something the old woman did

deliberately. What was she planning? Teg must be very cautious now. He had

been clever out there, revealing for Lucilla the gaps in Schwangyu's control,

but they had not plumbed Schwangyu's resources. Lucilla wondered if she should

leave Duncan here and return to Teg's side.

Teg said: "You can go now but I advise you not to return to your quarters."

"And why not?" Schwangyu sounded surprised, really surprised and not covering

it well.

"One moment," Teg said.

Lucilla became aware of shouting at a distance. A heavy thumping explosion

sounded from nearby and then another one more distant. Dust sifted from the

cornice above the door to Teg's sitting room.

"What was that?" Schwangyu again, her voice overly loud.

Lucilla moved to place herself between Duncan and the wall to the hallway.

Duncan stared at the door, his body poised for defense.

"That first blast was what I expected them to do." Teg again. "The second, I

fear, was what they did not expect."

A whistle piped nearby loud enough to cover something Schwangyu said.

"That's it Bashar!" Patrin.

"What is happening?" Schwangyu demanded.

"The first explosion, dear Reverend Mother, was your quarters being destroyed by

our attackers. The second explosion was us destroying the attackers."

"I just got the signal, Bashar!" Patrin again. "We got them all. They came

down by floater from the no-ship just as you expected."

"The ship?" Teg's voice was full of angry demand.

"Destroyed the instant it came through the space fold. No survivors."

"You fools!" Schwangyu screamed. "Do you know what you've done?"

"I carried out my orders to protect that boy from any attack," Teg said. "By

the way, weren't you supposed to be in your quarters at this hour?"

"What?"

"They were after you when they blasted your quarters. The Tleilaxu are very

dangerous, Reverend Mother."

"I don't believe you!"

"I suggest you go look. Patrin, let her pass."

As she listened, Lucilla heard the unspoken argument. The Mentat Bashar had

been trusted here more than a Reverend Mother and Schwangyu knew it. She would

be desperate. That was clever, suggesting her quarters had been destroyed. She

might not believe it, though. Foremost in Schwangyu's mind now would be the

realization that both Teg and Lucilla recognized her complicity in the attack.

There was no telling how many others were aware of this. Patrin knew, of

course.

Duncan stared at the closed door, his head tipped slightly to the right. There

was a curious expression on his face, as though he saw through the door and

actually watched the people out there.

Schwangyu spoke, the most careful control in her voice. "I don't believe my

quarters were destroyed." She knew Lucilla was listening.

"There is only one way to make sure," Teg said.

Clever! Lucilla thought. Schwangyu could not make a decision until she was

certain whether the Tleilaxu had acted treacherously.

"You will wait here for me, then! That's an order!" Lucilla heard the swish of

Schwangyu's robes as the Reverend Mother departed.

Very bad emotional control, Lucilla thought. What this revealed about Teg,

though, was equally disturbing. He did it to her! Teg had kept a Reverend

Mother off balance.

The door in front of Duncan swung open. Teg stood there, one hand on the latch.

"Quick!" Teg said. "We must be out of the Keep before she returns."

"Out of the Keep?" Lucilla did not hide her shock.

"Quick, I say! Patrin has prepared a way for us."

"But I must --"

"You must nothing! Come as you are. Follow me or we will be forced to take

you."

"Do you really think you could take a . . ." Lucilla broke off. This was a new

Teg in front of her and she knew he would not have made such a threat unless he

was prepared to carry it out.

"Very well," she said. She took Duncan's hand and followed Teg out of his

quarters.

Patrin stood in the hallway looking to his right. "She's gone," the old man

said. He looked at Teg. "You know what to do, Bashar?"

"Pat!"

Lucilla had never before heard Teg use the batman's diminutive name.

Patrin grinned, a gleaming full-toothed smile. "Sorry, Bashar. The excitement,

you know. I'll leave you to it, then. I have my part to play."

Teg waved Lucilla and Duncan down the hallway to the right. She obeyed and

heard Teg close on her heels. Duncan's hand was sweaty in her hand. He pulled

free and strode beside her without looking back.

The suspensor-drop at the end of the hallway was guarded by two of Teg's own

people. He nodded to them. "Nobody follows."

They spoke in unison: "Right, Bashar."

Lucilla realized as she entered the drop with Duncan and Teg that she had chosen

sides in a dispute whose workings she did not fully understand. She could feel

the movements of the Sisterhood's politics like a swift current of water pouring

all around her. Usually, the movement remained mostly a gentle wave washing the

strand, but now she sensed a great destructive surge preparing to thunder its

surf upon her.

Duncan spoke as they emerged into the sorting chamber for the south pillbox.

"We should all be armed," he said.

"We will be very soon," Teg said. "And I hope you're prepared to kill anyone

who tries to stop us."

The significant fact is this: No Bene Tleilax female has ever been seen away

from the protection of their core planets. (Face Dancer mules who simulate

females do not count in this analysis. They cannot be breeders.) The Tleilaxu

sequester their females to keep them from our hands. This is our primary

deduction. It must also be in the eggs that the Tleilaxu Masters conceal their

most essential secrets.

-Bene Gesserit Analysis -- Archives #XOXTM99 ..... 041

"So we meet at last," Taraza said.

She stared across the two meters of open space between their chairs at Tylwyth

Waff. Her analysts assured her that this man was Tleilaxu Master of Masters.

What an elfin little figure he was to hold so much power. The prejudices of

appearance must be discarded here, she warned herself.

"Some would not believe this possible," Waff said.

He had a piping little voice, Taraza noted; something else to be measured by

different standards.

They sat in the neutrality of a Guild no-ship with Bene Gesserit and Tleilaxu

monitors clinging to the Guildship's hull like predatory birds on a carcass.

(The Guild had been cravenly anxious to placate the Bene Gesserit. "You will

pay." The Guild knew. Payment had been exacted from them before.) The small

oval room in which they met was conventionally copper-walled and "spy-proof."

Taraza did not believe this for an instant. She presumed also that the bonds

between Guild and Tleilaxu, forged of melange, still existed in full force.

Waff did not try to delude himself about Taraza. This woman was far more

dangerous than any Honored Matre. If he killed Taraza, she would be replaced

immediately by someone just as dangerous, someone with every essential piece of

information possessed by the present Mother Superior.

"We find your new Face Dancers very interesting," Taraza said.

Waff grimaced involuntarily. Yes, far more dangerous than the Honored Matres,

who were not yet even blaming the Tleilaxu for the loss of an entire no-ship.

Taraza glanced at the small double-faced digital clock on the low side table at

her right, a position where the clock could be read easily by either of them.

The Waff-side face had been matched to his internal clock. She noted that the

two internal-time readings stood within ten seconds of synchronization at an

arbitrary midafternoon. It was one of the niceties of this confrontation where

even the positioning and spacing between their chairs had been specified in the

arrangements.

The two of them were alone in the room. The oval space around them was about

six meters in its long dimension, half that in width. They occupied identical

sling chairs of peg-fastened wood, which supported orange fabric; not a bit of

metal or other foreign material in either of them. The only other furnishing of

the room was the side table with its clock. The table was a thin black surface

of plaz on three spindly wooden legs. Each of the principals in this meeting

had been snooped with care. Each had three personal guards outside the room's

one hatch. Taraza did not think the Tleilaxu would try a Face Dancer exchange,

not under the present circumstances!

"You will pay."

The Tleilaxu, too, were extremely aware of their vulnerability, especially now

that they knew a Reverend Mother could expose the new Face Dancers.

Waff cleared his throat. "I do not expect us to reach an agreement," he said.

"Then why did you come?"

"I seek an explanation of this odd message we have received from your Keep on

Rakis. For what are we supposed to pay?"

"I beg of you, Ser Waff, drop these foolish pretenses in this room. There are

facts known to both of us that cannot be avoided."

"Such as?"

"No female of the Bene Tleilax has ever been provided to us for breeding." And

she thought: Let him sweat that one! It was damnably frustrating not to have a

line of Tleilaxu Other Memories for Bene Gesserit investigation and Waff would

know it.

Waff scowled. "Surely you don't think I would bargain with the life of --" He

broke off and shook his head. "I cannot believe this is the payment you would

ask."

When Taraza did not respond, Waff said: "The stupid attack on the Rakian temple

was undertaken independently by people on the scene. They have been punished."

Expected gambit number three, Taraza thought.

She had participated in numerous analysis-briefings before this meeting, if one

could call them briefings. Analyses there had been in excess. Very little was

known about this Tleilaxu Master, this Tylwyth Waff. Some extremely important

optional projections had been arrived at by inference (if these proved to be

true). The trouble was that some of the most interesting data came from

unreliable sources. One salient fact could be depended upon, however: The

elfin figure seated across from her was deadly dangerous.

Waff's gambit number three engaged her attention. It was time to respond.

Taraza produced a knowing smile.

"That is precisely the kind of lie we expected from you," she said.

"Do we begin with insults?" He spoke without heat.

"You set the pattern. Let me warn you that you will not be able to deal with us

the way you dealt with those whores from the Scattering."

Waff's frozen stare invited Taraza to a daring gambit. The Sisterhood's

deductions, based partly on the disappearance of an Ixian conference ship, were

accurate! Maintaining her same smile, she now pursued the optional conjecture

line as though it were known fact. "I think," she said, "the whores might like

to learn that they have had Face Dancers among them."

Waff suppressed his anger. These damnable witches! They knew! Somehow, they

knew! His councillors had been extremely doubtful about this meeting. A

substantial minority had recommended against it. The witches were so . . . so

devilish. And their retaliations!

Time to shift his attention to Gammu, Taraza thought. Keep him off balance.

She said: "Even when you subvert one of us, as you did with Schwangyu on Gammu,

you learn nothing of value!"

Waff flared: "She thought to . . . to hire us like a band of assassins! We

only taught her a lesson!"

Ahhhh, his pride shows itself, Taraza thought. Interesting. The implications

of a moral structure behind such pride must be explored.

"You've never really penetrated our ranks," Taraza said.

"And you have never penetrated the Tleilaxu!" Waff managed to produce this

boast with passable calm. He needed time to think! To plan!

"Perhaps you would like to know the price of our silence," Taraza suggested.

She took Waff's stony glare for agreement and added: "For one thing, you will

share with us everything you learn about those Scattering-spawned whores who

call themselves Honored Matres."

Waff shuddered. Much had been confirmed by killing the Honored Matres. The

sexual intricacies! Only the strongest psyche could resist entanglement in such

ecstasies. The potential of this tool was enormous! Must that be shared with

these witches?

"Everything you learn from them," Taraza insisted.

"Why do you call them whores?"

"They try to copy us, yet they sell themselves for power and make a mockery of

everything we represent. Honored Matres!"

"They outnumber you at least ten thousand to one! We have seen the evidence."

"One of us could defeat them all," Taraza said.

Waff sat in silence, studying her. Was that merely a boast? You could never be

sure when it came to the Bene Gesserit witches. They did things. The dark side

of the magic universe belonged to them. On more than one occasion the witches

had blunted the Shariat. Was it God's will that the true believers pass through

another trial?

Taraza allowed the silence to continue building its own tensions. She sensed

Waff's turmoil. It reminded her of the Sisterhood's preliminary conference in

preparation for this meeting with him. Bellonda had asked the question of

deceptive simplicity:

"What do we really know about the Tleilaxu?"

Taraza had felt the answer surge into every mind around the Chapter House

conference table: We may know for sure only what they want us to know.

None of her analysts could avoid the suspicion that the Tleilaxu had

deliberately created a masking-image of themselves. Tleilaxu intelligence had

to be measured against the fact that they alone controlled the secret of the

axlotl tanks. Was that a lucky accident as some suggested? Then why had others

been unable to duplicate this accomplishment in all of these millennia?

Gholas.

Were the Tleilaxu using the ghola process for their own kind of immortality?

She could see suggestive hints in Waff's actions . . . nothing definite but

highly suspicious.

At the Chapter House conferences, Bellonda had returned repeatedly to their

basic suspicions, hammering at them: "All of it . . . all of it, I say!

Everything in our archives could be garbage fit only for slig fodder!"

This allusion had caused some of the more relaxed Reverend Mothers around the

table to shudder.

Sligs!

Those slowly creeping crosses between giant slugs and pigs might provide meat

for some of the most expensive meals in their universe but the creatures

themselves embodied everything the Sisterhood held repugnant about the Tleilaxu.

Sligs had been one of the earliest Bene Tleilax barter items, a product grown in

their tanks and formed with the helical core from which all life took its

shapes. That the Bene Tleilax made them added to the aura of obscenity around a

creature whose multimouths ground incessantly on almost any garbage, passing

that garbage swiftly into excrement that not only smelled of the sty but was

slimy.

"The sweetest meat this side of heaven," Bellonda had quoted from a CHOAM

promotion.

"And it comes from obscenity," Taraza had added.

Obscenity.

Taraza thought of this as she stared at Waff. For what possible reason might

people build around themselves a mask of obscenity? Waff's flare of pride could

not be fitted neatly into that image.

Waff coughed lightly into his hand. He felt the pressure of the seams where he

had concealed two of his potent dart-throwers. The minority among his

councillors had advised: "As with the Honored Matres, the winner in this

encounter with the Bene Gesserit will be the one who emerges carrying the most

secret information about the other. Death of the opponent guarantees success."

I might kill her but what then?

Three more full Reverend Mothers waited outside that hatch. Doubtless Taraza

had a signal prepared for the instant the hatch was opened. Without that

signal, violence and disaster were sure to ensue. He did not believe for an

instant that even his new Face Dancers could overcome those Reverend Mothers out

there. The witches would be on full alert. They would have recognized the

nature of Waff's guards.

"We will share," Waff said. The admissions implicit in this hurt him but he

knew he had no alternatives. Taraza's brag about relative abilities might be

inaccurate because of its extreme claim, but he sensed truth in it nonetheless.

He had no illusions, however, about what would ensue if the Honored Matres

learned what had actually happened to their envoys. The missing no-ship could

not yet be laid at the Tleilaxu door. Ships did vanish. Deliberate

assassination was another matter altogether. The Honored Matres surely would

try to exterminate such a brash opponent. If only as an example. Tleilaxu

returned from the Scattering said as much. Having seen Honored Matres, Waff now

believed those stories.

Taraza said: "My second agenda item for this meeting is our ghola."

Waff squirmed in the sling chair.

Taraza felt repelled by Waff's tiny eyes, the round face with its snub nose and

too-sharp teeth.

"You have been killing our gholas to control the movement of a project in which

you have no part other than to provide a single element," Taraza accused.

Waff once more wondered if he must kill her. Was nothing hidden from these

damnable witches? The implication that the Bene Gesserit had a traitor in the

Tleilaxu core could not be ignored. How else could they know?

He said: "I assure you, Reverend Mother Superior, that the ghola --

"Assure me of nothing! We assure ourselves." A look of sadness on her face,

Taraza shook her head slowly from side to side. "And you think we don't know

that you sold us damaged goods."

Waff spoke quickly: "He meets every requirement imposed by your contract!"

Again, Taraza shook her head from side to side. This diminutive Tleilaxu Master

had no idea what he was revealing here. "You have buried your own scheme in his

psyche," Taraza said. "I warn you, Ser Waff, that if your alterations obstruct

our design, we will wound you deeper than you think possible."

Waff passed a hand across his face, feeling the perspiration on his forehead.

Damnable witches! But she did not know everything. The Tleilaxu returned from

the Scattering and the Honored Matres she maligned so bitterly had provided the

Tleilaxu with a sexually loaded weapon that would not be shared, no matter the

promises made here!

Taraza digested Waff's reactions silently and decided on a bold lie. "When we

captured your Ixian conference ship, your new Face Dancers did not die quite

fast enough. We learned a great deal."

Waff poised himself on the edge of violence.

Bullseye! Taraza thought. The bold lie had opened an avenue of revelation into

one of the more outrageous suggestions from her advisors. It did not seem

outrageous now. "The Tleilaxu ambition is to produce a complete prana-bindu

mimic," her advisor had suggested.

"Complete?"

All of the Sisters at the conference had been astonished by the suggestion. It

implied a form of mental copy going beyond the memory print about which they

already knew.

The advisor, Sister Hesterion from Archives, had come armed with a tightly

organized list of supporting material. "We already know that what an Ixian

Probe does mechanically, the Tleilaxu do with nerves and flesh. The next step

is obvious."

Seeing Waff's reaction to her bold lie, Taraza continued to watch him carefully.

He was at his most dangerous right now.

A look of rage came over Waff's face. The things the witches knew were too

dangerous! He did not doubt Taraza's claim in the slightest. I must kill her

no matter the consequences to me! We must kill them all. Abominations! It's

their word and it describes them perfectly.

Taraza correctly interpreted his expression. She spoke quickly: "You are in

absolutely no danger from us as long as you do not injure our designs. Your

religion, your way of life, those are your business."

Waff hesitated, not so much from what Taraza said as from the reminder of her

powers. What else did they know? To continue in a subservient position,

though! After rejecting such an alliance with the Honored Matres. And with

ascendancy so near after all of those millennia. Dismay filled him. The

minority among his councillors had been right after all: "There can be no bond

between our peoples. Any accord with powindah forces is a union based upon

evil."

Taraza still sensed the potential violence in him. Had she pushed him too far?

She held herself in defensive readiness. An involuntary jerking of his arms

alerted her. Weapons in his sleeves! Tleilaxu resources were not to be

underestimated. Her snoopers had detected nothing.

"We know about the weapons you carry," she said. Another bold lie suggested

itself. "If you make a mistake now, the whores will also learn how you use

those weapons."

Waff took three shallow breaths. When he spoke, he had himself under control:

"We will not be Bene Gesserit satellites!"

Taraza responded in an even-toned, soothing voice: "I have not by word or

action suggested such a role for you."

She waited. There was no change in Waff's expression, no slightest shift in the

unfocused glare he directed at her.

"You threaten us," he muttered. "You demand that we share everything we --"

"Share!" she snapped. "One does not share with unequal partners."

"And what would you share with us?" he demanded.

She spoke with the chiding tone she would use to a child: "Ser Waff, ask

yourself why you, a ruling member of your oligarchy, came to this meeting?"

His voice still firmly controlled, Waff countered: "And why did you, Mother

Superior of the Bene Gesserit, come here?"

She spoke mildly: "To strengthen us."

"You did not say what you would share," he accused. "You still hope for

advantage."

Taraza continued to watch him carefully. She had seldom sensed such suppressed

rage in a human. "Ask me openly what you want," she said.

"And you will give it out of your great generosity!"

"I will negotiate."

"Where was the negotiation when you ordered me . . . ORDERED ME! to --

"You came here firmly resolved to break any agreement we made," she said. "Not

once have you tried to negotiate! You sit in front of someone willing to

bargain with you and you can only --"

"Bargain?" Waff's memory was hurled back to the Honored Matre's anger at that

word.

"I said it," Taraza said. "Bargain."

Something like a smile twitched the corners of Waff's mouth. "You think I have

authority to bargain with you?"

"Have a care, Ser Waff," she said. "You have the ultimate authority. It

resides in that final ability to destroy an opponent utterly. I have not

threatened that, but you have." She glanced at his sleeves.

Waff sighed. What a quandary. She was powindah! How could one bargain with a

powindah?

"We have a problem that cannot be resolved by rational means," Taraza said.

Waff hid his surprise. Those were the very words the Honored Matre had used!

He cringed inwardly at what that might signify. Could Bene Gesserit and Honored

Matres make common cause? Taraza's bitterness argued otherwise, but when were

the witches to be trusted?

Once more, Waff wondered if he dared sacrifice himself to eliminate this witch.

What would it serve? Others among them surely knew what she knew. It would

only precipitate the disaster. There was that internal dispute among the

witches, but, again, that might just be another ruse.

"You ask us to share something," Taraza said. "What if I were to offer you some

of our prize human bloodlines?"

There was no mistaking how Waff's interest quickened.

He said: "Why should we come to you for such things? We lave our tanks and we

can pick up genetic examples almost anywhere."

"Examples of what?" she asked.

Waff sighed. You could never escape that Bene Gesserit incisiveness. It was

like a sword thrust. He guessed that he had revealed things to her that led

naturally to this subject. The damage already had been done. She correctly

deduced (or spies had told her!) that the wild pool of human genes held little

interest for the Tleilaxu with their more sophisticated knowledge of life's

innermost language. It never paid to underestimate either the Bene Gesserit or

the products of their breeding programs. God Himself knew they had produced

Muad'dib and the Prophet!

"What more would you demand in exchange for this?" he asked.

"Bargaining at last!" Taraza said. "We both know, of course, that I am offering

breeding mothers of the Atreides line." And she thought: "Let him hope for

that! They will look like Atreides but they will not be Atreides!"

Waff felt his pulse quicken. Was this possible? Did she have the slightest

idea what the Tleilaxu might learn from an examination of such source material?

"We would want first selection of their offspring," Taraza said.

"No!"

"Alternate first selection, then?"

"Perhaps. "

"What do you mean, perhaps?" She leaned forward. Waff's intensity told her she

was on a hot trail.

"What else would you ask of us?"

"Our breeding mothers must have unfettered access to your genetic laboratories."

"Are you mad?" Waff shook his head in exasperation. Did she think the Tleilaxu

would give away their strongest weapon just like that?

"Then we will accept a fully operational axlotl tank."

Waff merely stared at her.

Taraza shrugged. "I had to try."

"I suppose you did."

Taraza sat back and reviewed what she had learned here. Waff's reaction to that

Zensunni probe had been interesting. "A problem that cannot be resolved by

rational means." The words had produced a subtle effect on him. He had seemed

to rise out of some place within himself, a questioning look in his eyes. Gods

preserve us all! Is Waff a secret Zensunni?

No matter the dangers, this had to be explored. Odrade must be armed with every

possible advantage on Rakis.

"Perhaps we have done all we can for now," Taraza said. "There is time to

complete our bargain. God alone in His infinite mercy has given us infinite

universes where anything may happen."

Waff clapped his hands once without thinking. "The gift of surprises is the

greatest gift of all!" he said.

Not just Zensunni, Taraza thought. Sufi also. Sufi! She began to readjust her

perspective on the Tleilaxu. How long have they been holding this close to

their breasts?

"Time does not count itself," Taraza said, probing. "One has only to look at

any circle."

"Suns are circles," Waff said. "Each universe is a circle." He held his breath

waiting for her response.

"Circles are enclosures," Taraza said, picking the proper response out of her

Other Memories. "Whatever encloses and limits must expose itself to the

infinite."

Waff raised his hands to show her his palms then dropped his arms into his lap.

His shoulders lost some of their tense upward thrust. "Why did you not say

these things at the beginning?" he asked.

I must exercise great care, Taraza cautioned herself. The admissions in Waff's

words and manner required careful review.

"What has passed between us reveals nothing unless we speak more openly," she

said. "Even then, we would only be using words."

Waff studied her face, trying to read in that Bene Gesserit mask some

confirmation of the things implied by her words and manner. She was powindah,

he reminded himself. The powindah could never be trusted . . . but if she

shared the Great Belief . . .

"Did God not send His Prophet to Rakis, there to test us and teach us?" he

asked.

Taraza delved deep into her Other Memories. A Prophet on Rakis? Muad'dib? No

. . . that did not square with either Sufi or Zensunni beliefs in . . .

The Tyrant! She closed her mouth into a grim line. "What one cannot control

one must accept," she said.

"For surely that is God's doing," Waff replied.

Taraza had seen and heard enough. The Missionaria Protectiva had immersed her

in every known religion. Other Memories reinforced this knowledge and filled it

out. She felt a great need to get herself safely away from this room. Odrade

must be alerted!

"May I make a suggestion?" Taraza asked.

Waff nodded politely.

"Perhaps there is here the substance of a greater bond between us than we

imagined," she said. "I offer you the hospitality of our Keep on Rakis and the

services of our commander there."

"An Atreides?" he asked.

"No," Taraza lied. "But I will, of course, alert our Breeding Mistresses to

your needs."

"And I will assemble the things you require in payment," he said. "Why will the

bargain be completed on Rakis?"

"Is that not the proper place?" she asked. "Who could be false in the home of

the Prophet?"

Waff sat back in his chair, his arms relaxed in his lap. Taraza certainly knew

the proper responses. It was a revelation he had never expected.

Taraza stood. "Each of us listens to God personally," she said.

And together in the kehl, he thought. He looked up at her, reminding himself

that she was powindah. None of them could be trusted. Caution! This woman

was, after all, a Bene Gesserit witch. They were known to create religions for

their own ends. Powindah!

Taraza went to the hatch, opened it and gave her security signal. She turned

once more toward Waff who still sat in his chair. He has not penetrated our

true design, she thought. The ones we send to him must be chosen with extreme

care. He must never suspect that he is part of our bait.

His elfin features composed, Waff stared back at her.

How bland he looked, Taraza thought. But he could be trapped! An alliance

between Sisterhood and Tleilaxu offered new attractions. But on our terms!

"Until Rakis," she said.

What social inheritances went outward with the Scattering? We know those times

intimately. We know both the mental and physical settings. The Lost Ones took

with them a consciousness confined mostly to manpower and hardware. There was a

desperate need for room to expand driven by the myth of Freedom. Most had not

learned the deeper lesson of the Tyrant, that violence builds its own limits.

The Scattering was wild and random movement interpreted as growth (expansion).

It was goaded by a profound fear (often unconscious) of stagnation and death.

-The Scattering: Bene Gesserit Analysis (Archives)

Odrade lay full length on her side along the ledge of the bow window, her cheek

lightly touching the warm plaz through which she could see the Great Square of

Keen. Her back was supported by a red cushion, which smelled of melange as did

many things here on Rakis. Behind her lay three rooms, small but efficient and

well removed from both Temple and Bene Gesserit Keep. This removal had been a

requirement of the Sisterhood's agreement with the priests.

"Sheeana must be guarded more securely," Odrade had insisted.

"She cannot become the ward of only the Sisterhood!" Tuek had objected.

"Nor of the priests," Odrade countered.

Six stories below Odrade's bow window vantage, an enormous bazaar spread out in

loosely organized confusion, almost filling the Great Square. The silvered

yellow light of a lowering sun washed the scene with brilliance, picking out the

bright colors of canopies, drawing long shadows across the uneven ground. There

was a dusty radiance about the light where scattered clumps of people milled

about patched umbrellas and the jumbled alignments of wares.

The Great Square was not actually square. It stretched out around the bazaar a

full kilometer across from Odrade's window and easily twice that distance to the

left and right -- a giant rectangle of packed earth and old stones, which had

been churned into bitter dust by daytime shoppers braving the heat in hopes of

gaining a bargain then.

As evening advanced, a different sense of activity unfolded beneath Odrade --

more people arriving, a quickening and more frenetic pulse to the movement.

Odrade tipped her head to peer down sharply at the ground near her building.

Some of the merchants directly beneath her window had wandered off to their

nearby quarters. They would return soon, after a meal and short siesta, ready

to make full use of those more valuable hours when people in the open could

breathe air that did not burn their throats.

Sheeana was overdue, Odrade noted. The priests dared not delay much longer.

They would be working frantically now, firing questions at Sheeana, admonishing

her to remember that she was God's own emissary to His Church. Reminding

Sheeana of many contrived allegiances that Odrade would have to ferret out and

make humorous before dispatching such trivia into proper perspective.

Odrade arched her back and went through a silent minute of tiny exercises to

relieve tensions. She admitted to a certain sympathy for Sheeana. The girl's

thoughts would be chaos right now. Sheeana knew little or nothing about what to

expect once she came fully under a Reverend Mother's tutelage. There was little

doubt that the young mind was cluttered with myths and other misinformation.

As my mind was, Odrade thought.

She could not avoid remembrance at a moment such as this. Her immediate task

was clear: exorcism, not only for Sheeana but for herself.

She thought the haunting thoughts of a Reverend Mother in her memories: Odrade,

age five, the comfortable house on Gamma. The road outside the house is lined

with what pass for middle-echelon mansions in the planet's seacoast cities --

low one-story buildings on wide avenues. The houses reach far down to an

outcurving sea frontage where they are much wider than along the avenues. Only

on the sea side do they become more expansive and less jealous of every square

meter.

Odrade's Bene Gesserit-honed memory rolled through that faraway house, its

occupants, the avenue, the playmates. She felt the tightness in her breast that

told her such memories were attached to later events.

The Bene Gesserit creche on Al Dhanab's artificial world, one of the original

Sisterhood safe planets. (Later, she learned that the Bene Gesserit once

considered making the entire planet into a no-chamber. Energy requirements

defeated this plan.)

The creche was a cascade of variety to a child from Gammu's comforts and

friendships. Bene Gesserit education included intense physical training. There

were regular admonishments that she could not hope to become a Reverend Mother

without passage through much pain and frequent periods of seemingly hopeless

muscular exercises.

Some of her companions failed at this stage. They left to become nurses,

servants, laborers, casual breeders. They filled niches of necessity wherever

the Sisterhood required them. There were times when Odrade felt longingly that

this failure might not be a bad life -- fewer responsibilities, lesser goals.

That had been before she emerged from Primary Training.

I thought of it as emerging, coming through victorious. I came out the other

side.

Only to find herself immersed in new and harsher demands.

Odrade sat up on her Rakian window ledge and pushed her cushion aside. She

turned her back on the bazaar. It was becoming noisier out there. Damned

priests! They were stretching delay to its absolute limits!

I must think about my own childhood because that will help me with Sheeana, she

thought. Immediately, she sneered at her own weakness. Another excuse!

It took some postulants at least fifty years to become Reverend Mothers. This

was ground into them during Secondary Training: a lesson of patience. Odrade

showed an early penchant for deep study. There was consideration that she might

become one of the Bene Gesserit Mentats and probably an Archivist. This idea

was dropped on the discovery that her talents lay in a more profitable

direction. She was aimed at more sensitive duties in Chapter House.

Security.

That wild talent among the Atreides often had this employment. Care with

details, that was Odrade's hallmark. She knew her sisters could predict some of

her actions simply from their deep knowledge of her. Taraza did it regularly.

Odrade had overheard the explanation from Taraza's own lips:

"Odrade's persona is exquisitely reflected in her performance of duties."

There was a joke in Chapter House: "Where does Odrade go when she's off duty?

She goes to work."

Chapter House imposed little need to adopt the covering masks that a Reverend

Mother used automatically on the Outside. She might show emotions momentarily,

deal openly with mistakes of her own and of others, feel sad or bitter or even,

sometimes, happy. Men were available -- not for breeding, but for occasional

solace. All such Bene Gesserit Chapter House males were quite charming and a

few were even sincere in their charm. These few, of course, were much in

demand.

Emotions.

Recognition twisted through Odrade's mind.

So I come to it as I always do.

Odrade felt the warm evening sunlight of Rakis on her back. She knew where her

body sat, but her mind opened itself to the coming encounter with Sheeana.

Love!

It would be so easy and so dangerous.

In this moment, she envied the Station Mothers, the ones allowed to live out a

lifetime with a mated breeding partner. Miles Teg came from such a union.

Other Memories told her how it had been for the Lady Jessica and her Duke. Even

Muad'dib had chosen that form of mating.

It is not for me.

Odrade admitted to a bitter jealousy that she had not been permitted such a

life. What were the compensations of the life into which she had been guided?

"A life without love can be devoted more intensely to the Sisterhood. We

provide our own forms of support to the initiated. Do not worry about sexual

enjoyment. That is available whenever you feel the need."

With charming men!

Since the days of the Lady Jessica, through the Tyrant's times and beyond, many

things had changed . . . including the Bene Gesserit. Every Reverend Mother

knew it.

A deep sigh shuddered through Odrade. She glanced back over her shoulder at the

bazaar. Still no sign of Sheeana.

I must not love this child!

It was done. Odrade knew she had played out the mnemonic game in its required

Bene Gesserit form. She swiveled her body and sat cross-legged on the ledge.

It was a commanding view of the bazaar and over the rooftops of the city and its

basin. Those few remnant hills out there south of here were, she knew, the last

of what had been the Shield Wall of Dune, the high ramparts of basement rock

breached by Muad'dib and his sandworm-mounted legions.

Heat danced from the ground beyond the qanat and canal that protected Keen from

intrusions by the new worms. Odrade smiled softly. The priests found nothing

strange in moating their communities to keep their Divided God from intruding

upon them.

We will worship you, God, but don't bother us. This is our religion, our city.

You see, we no longer call this place Arrakeen. Now, it's Keen. The planet no

longer is Dune or Arrakis. Now, it's Rakis. Keep your distance, God. You are

the past and the past is an embarrassment.

Odrade stared at those distant hills dancing in the heat shimmer. Other

Memories could superimpose the ancient landscape. She knew that past.

If the priests delay bringing Sheeana much longer I will punish them.

Heat still filled the bazaar below her, held there by storage in the ground and

the thick walls surrounding the Great Square. Temperature diffusion was

amplified by the smoke of many small fires lighted in the surrounding buildings

and among the tent-sheltered congeries of life scattered through the bazaar. It

had been a hot day, well above thirty-eight degrees. This building, though, had

been a Fish Speaker Center in the old days and was cooled by Ixian machinery

with evaporation pools on the roof.

We will be comfortable here.

And they would be as secure as Bene Gesserit protective measures could make

them. Reverend Mothers walked those halls out there. The priests had their

representatives in the building but none of those would intrude where Odrade did

not want them. Sheeana would meet with them here on occasion but the occasions

would be only as Odrade permitted.

It is happening, Odrade thought. Taraza's plan moves ahead.

Fresh in Odrade's mind was the latest communication from Chapter House. What

that revealed about the Tleilaxu filled Odrade with excitement that she

carefully dampened. This Waff, this Tleilaxu Master, would be a fascinating

study.

Zensunni! And Sufi!

"A ritual pattern frozen for millennia," Taraza said.

Unspoken in Taraza's report was another message. Taraza is placing her complete

confidence in me. Odrade felt strength flow into her from this awareness.

Sheeana is the fulcrum. We are the lever. Our strength will come from many

sources.

Odrade relaxed. She knew that Sheeana would not permit the priests to delay

much longer. Odrade's own patience had suffered the assaults of anticipation.

It would be worse for Sheeana.

They had become conspirators, Odrade and Sheeana. The first step. It was a

marvelous game to Sheeana. She had been born and bred to distrust priests.

What fun to have an ally at last!

Some form of activity stirred the people directly below Odrade's window. She

peered downward, curious. Five naked men there had linked arms in a circle.

Their robes and stillsuits lay in a pile at one side watched over by a darkskinned

young girl in a long brown dress of spice fiber. Her hair was bound by

a red rag.

Dancers!

Odrade had seen many reports of this phenomenon but this was her first personal

view of it since arriving. The onlookers included a trio of tall Priest

Guardians in yellow helmets with high crests. The Guardians wore short robes

that freed their legs for action, and each carried a metal-clad staff.

As the dancers circled, the watchful crowd grew predictably restive. Odrade

knew the pattern. Soon, there would be a chanting outcry and a great melee.

Heads would be cracked. Blood would flow. People would scream and run about.

Eventually, it would all subside without official intervention. Some would go

away weeping. Some would depart laughing. And the Priest Guardians would not

interfere.

The pointless insanity of this dance and its consequences had fascinated the

Bene Gesserit for centuries. Now it held Odrade's rapt attention. The

devolution of this ritual had been followed by the Missionaria Protectiva.

Rakians called it "Dance Diversion." They had other names for it, as well, and

the most significant was "Siaynoq." This dance was what had become of the

Tyrant's greatest ritual, his moment of sharing with his Fish Speakers.

Odrade recognized and respected the energy in this phenomenon. No Reverend

Mother could fail to see that. The waste of it, however, disturbed her. Such

things should be channeled and focused. This ritual needed some useful

employment. All it did now was drain away forces that might prove destructive

to the priests if left untapped.

A sweet fruit odor wafted into Odrade's nostrils. She sniffed and looked at the

vents beside her window; heat from the mob and the warmed earth created an

updraft. This carried odors from below through the Ixian vents. She pressed

her forehead and nose against the plaz to peer directly downward. Ahhh, the

dancers or the mob had tipped over a merchant's stall. The dancers were

stomping in the fruit. Yellow pulp spurted up to their thighs.

Odrade recognized the fruit merchant among the onlookers, a familiar wizened

face she had seen several times at his stall beside her building's entrance. He

appeared unconcerned by his loss. Like all the others around him, he

concentrated his attention on the dancers. The five naked men moved with a

disjointed high lift of their feet, an unrhythmic and seemingly uncoordinated

display, which came around periodically to a repeated pattern -- three of the

dancers with both feet on the ground and the other two held aloft by their

partners.

Odrade recognized it. This was related to the ancient Fremen way of

sandwalking. This curious dance was a fossil with roots in the need to move

without signaling your presence to a worm.

People began to crowd nearer the dancers out of the bazaar's great rectangle,

hopping upward like children's toys to raise their eyes above the throng for a

glimpse of the five naked men.

Odrade saw Sheeana's escort then, movement far off to the right where a wide

avenue entered the square. Animal-track symbols on a building there said the

wide avenue was God's Way. Historical awareness said the avenue had been Leto

II's route into the city from his high-walled Sareer far off to the south. With

a care for details, one could still discern some of the forms and patterns that

had been the Tyrant's city of Onn, the festival center built around the more

ancient city of Arrakeen. Onn had obliterated many marks of Arrakeen but some

avenues persisted: some buildings were too useful to replace. Buildings

inevitably defined streets.

Sheeana's escort came to a stop where the avenue debouched into the bazaar.

Yellow-helmeted Guardians probed ahead, clearing a path with their staves. The

guards were tall: When grounded, the thick, two-meter staff would come only to

the shoulders of the shortest among them. Even in the most disordered crowd you

could not miss a Priest Guardian, but Sheeana's protectors were the tallest of

the tall.

They were in motion once more leading their party toward Odrade. Their robes

swung open at each stride revealing the slick gray of the best stillsuits. They

walked straight ahead, fifteen of them in a shallow vee which skirted the

thicker clusters of stalls.

A loose band of priestesses with Sheeana at their center marched behind the

guards. Odrade caught glimpses of Sheeana's distinctive figure, that sunstreaked

hair and proudly upthrust face, within her escort. It was the yellowhelmeted

Priest Guardians, though, who attracted Odrade's attention. They moved

with an arrogance conditioned into them from infancy. These guards knew they

were better than the ordinary folk. And the ordinary folk reacted predictably

by opening a way for Sheeana's party.

It was all done so naturally that Odrade could see the ancient pattern of it as

though she watched another ritual dance, which had not changed in millennia.

As she had often done, Odrade thought of herself now as an archeologist, not one

who sifted the dusty detritus of the ages but rather a person who focused where

the Sisterhood frequently concentrated its awareness: on the ways people

carried their past within them. The Tyrant's own design was apparent here.

Sheeana's approach was a thing laid down by the God Emperor himself.

Beneath Odrade's window the five naked men continued to dance. Among the

onlookers, however, Odrade saw a new awareness. Without any concerted turning

of heads toward the approaching phalanx of Priest Guardians, the watchers below

Odrade knew.

Animals always know when the herders arrive.

Now, the crowd's restiveness produced a quicker pulse. They would not be denied

their chaos! A clod of dirt flew from the throng's outskirts and struck the

ground near the dancers. The five men did not miss a step in their extended

pattern but their speed increased. The length of the series between repetitions

spoke of remarkable memories.

Another clod of dirt flew from the crowd and struck a dancer's shoulder. None

of the five men faltered.

The crowd began to scream and chant. Some shouted curses. The chanting became

a hand-clapping intrusion onto the dancers' movements.

Still, the pattern did not change.

The mob's chanting became a harsh rhythm, repeated shouts that echoed against

the Great Square's wails. They were trying to break the dancers' pattern.

Odrade sensed a profound importance in the scene below her.

Sheeana's party had come more than halfway across the bazaar. They moved

through the wider lanes between stalls and turned now directly toward Odrade.

The crowd was at its densest about fifty meters ahead of the Priest Guardians.

The Guardians moved at a steady pace, disdainful of those who scurried aside.

Under the yellow helmets, eyes were fixed straight ahead, staring over the mob.

Not one of the advancing Guardians gave any outward sign that he saw mob or

dancers or any other barrier that might impede him.

The mob stopped its chanting abruptly as though an invisible conductor had waved

his hand for silence. The five men continued to dance. The silence below

Odrade was charged with a power that made her neck hairs stand up. Directly

below Odrade, the three Priest Guardians among the onlookers turned as one man

and moved out of view into her building.

Deep within the crowd, a woman shouted a curse.

The dancers gave no sign that they heard.

The mob crowded forward, diminishing the space around the dancers by at least

half. The girl who guarded the dancers' stillsuits and robes no longer was

visible.

Onward, Sheeana's phalanx marched, the priestesses and their young charge

directly behind.

Violence erupted off to Odrade's right. People there began striking each other.

More missiles arced toward the five dancing men. The mob resumed its chant in a

quicker beat.

At the same time, the rear of the crowd parted for the Guardians. Watchers

there did not take their attention from the dancers, did not pause in their

contributions to the growing chaos, but a way was opened through them.

Absolutely captivated, Odrade stared downward. Many things occurred

simultaneously: the melee, the people cursing and striking each other, the

continuing chant, the implacable advance of the Guardians.

Within the shield of priestesses, Sheeana could be seen darting her gaze from

side to side, trying to see the excitement around her.

Some within the crowd produced clubs and struck out at the people around them,

but nobody threatened the Guardians or any other member of Sheeana's party.

The dancers continued to prance within a tightening circle of watchers.

Everyone crowded close against Odrade's building, forcing her to press her head

against the plaz and peer at a sharp angle downward.

The Guardians leading Sheeana's party advanced through a widening lane amidst

this chaos. The priestesses looked neither left nor right. Yellow-helmeted

Guardians stared straight ahead.

Disdain was too feeble a word for this performance, Odrade decided. And it was

not correct to say that the swirling mob ignored the incoming party. Each was

aware of the other but they existed in separate worlds, observing the strict

rules of that separation. Only Sheeana ignored the secret protocol, hopping

upward to try for a glimpse past the bodies shielding her.

Directly beneath Odrade, the mob surged forward. The dancers were overwhelmed

by the crush, swept aside like ships caught in a gigantic wave. Odrade saw

spots of naked flesh being pummeled and thrust from hand to hand through the

screaming chaos. Only by the most intense concentration could Odrade separate

the sounds being carried up to her.

It was madness! '

None of the dancers resisted. Were they being killed? Was it a sacrifice? The

Sisterhood's analyses did not even begin to touch this actuality.

Yellow helmets moved aside beneath Odrade, opening a way for Sheeana and her

priestesses to pass into the building, then the Guardians closed ranks. They

turned and formed a protective arc around the building's entrance. They held

their staves horizontally and overlapped at waist height.

The chaos beyond them began to subside. None of the dancers was visible but

there were casualties, people sprawled on the ground, others staggering. Bloody

heads could be seen.

Sheeana and the priestesses were out of Odrade's view in the building. Odrade

sat back and tried to sort out what she had just witnessed.

Incredible.

Absolutely none of the Sisterhood's accounts or holophoto records captured this

thing! Part of it was the smells -- dust, sweat, an intense concentration of

human pheromones. Odrade took a deep breath. She felt herself trembling

inside. The mob had become individuals who moved out into the bazaar. She saw

weepers. Some cursed. Some laughed.

The door behind Odrade burst open. Sheeana entered laughing. Odrade whirled

and glimpsed her own guards and some of the priestesses in the hallway before

Sheeana closed the door.

The girl's dark brown eyes glittered with excitement. Her narrow face, already

beginning to soften with the curves she would display as an adult, was tense

with suppressed emotion. The tension dissolved as she focused on Odrade.

Very good, Odrade thought, as she observed this. Lesson one of the bonding

already has begun.

"You saw the dancers?" Sheeana demanded, whirling and skipping across the floor

to stop in front of Odrade. "Weren't they beautiful? I think they're so

beautiful! Cania didn't want me to look. She says it's dangerous for me to

take part in Siaynoq. But I don't care! Shaitan would never eat those

dancers!"

With a sudden outflowing awareness, which she had experienced before only during

the spice agony, Odrade saw through to the total pattern of what she had just

witnessed in the Great Square. It had needed only Sheeana's words and presence

to make the thing clear.

A language!

Deep within the collective awareness of these people they carried, all

unconsciously, a language that could say things to them they did not want to

hear. The dancers spoke it. Sheeana spoke it. The thing was composed of voice

tones and movements and pheromones, a complex and subtle combination that had

evolved the way all languages evolved.

Out of necessity.

Odrade grinned at the happy girl standing in front of her. Now, Odrade knew how

to trap the Tleilaxu. Now, she knew more of Taraza's design.

I must accompany Sheeana into the desert at the first opportunity. We will wait

only for the arrival of this Tleilaxu Master, this Waff. We will take him with

us!

Liberty and Freedom are complex concepts. They go back to religious ideas of

Free Will and are related to the Ruler Mystique implicit in absolute monarchs.

Without absolute monarchs patterned after the Old Gods and ruling by the grace

of a belief in religious indulgence, Liberty and Freedom would never have gained

their present meaning. These ideals owe their very existence to past examples

of oppression. And the forces that maintain such ideas will erode unless

renewed by dramatic teaching or new oppressions. This is the most basic key to

my life.

-Leto II, God Emperor of Dune: Dar-es-Balat Records

Some thirty kilometers into the thick forest northeast of the Gammu Keep, Teg

kept them waiting under the cover of a life-shield blanket until the sun dipped

behind the high ground to the west.

"Tonight, we go a new direction," he said.

For three nights now, he had led them through tree-enclosed darkness with a

masterful demonstration of Mentat Memory, each step directed precisely along the

track that Patrin had laid out for him.

"I'm stiff from too much sitting," Lucilla complained. "And it's going to be

another cold night."

Teg folded the life-shield blanket and put it in the top of his pack. "You two

can start moving around a bit," he said. "But we won't leave here until full

dark."

Teg sat up with his back against the bole of a thickly branched conifer, looking

out from the deeper shadows as Lucilla and Duncan moved into the glade. The two

of them stood there a moment, shivering as the last of the day's warmth fled

into the night's chill. Yes, it would be cold again tonight, Teg thought, but

they would have little chance to think about that.

The unexpected.

Schwangyu would never expect them still to be this close to the Keep and on

foot.

Taraza should have been more emphatic in her warnings about Schwangyu, Teg

thought. Schwangyu's violent and open disobedience of a Mother Superior defied

tradition. Mentat logic would not accept the situation without more data.

His memory brought up a saying from school days, one of those warning aphorisms

by which a Mentat was supposed to rein in his logic.

"Given a trail of logic, occam's razor laid out with impeccable detail, the

Mentat may follow such logic to personal disaster. "

So logic was known to fail.

He thought back to Taraza's behavior on the Guildship and immediately afterward.

She wanted me to know I would be completely on my own. I must see the problem

in my own way, not in her way.

So the threat from Schwangyu had to be a real threat that he discovered and

faced and solved on his own.

Taraza had not known what would happen to Patrin because of all this.

Taraza did not really care what happened to Patrin. Or to me. Or to Lucilla.

But what about the ghola?

Taraza must care!

It was not logical that she would . . . Teg dumped this line of reasoning.

Taraza did not want him to act logically. She wanted him to do exactly what he

was doing, what he had always done in the tight spots.

The unexpected.

So there was a species of logic to all of this but it kicked the performers out

of the nest into chaos.

From which we must make our own order.

Grief welled up in his consciousness. Patrin! Damn you, Patrin! You knew and

I didn't! What will I do without you?

Teg could almost hear the old aide's response, that stiffly formal voice Patrin

always used when he was chiding his commander.

"You will do your best, Bashar."

The most coldly progressive reasoning said Teg would never again see Patrin in

the flesh nor hear the old man's actual voice. Still . . . the voice remained.

The person persisted in memory.

"Shouldn't we be going?"

It was Lucilla, standing close in front of his position beneath the tree.

Duncan waited beside her. Both of them had shouldered their packs.

While he sat thinking, night had fallen. Rich starlight created vague shadows

in the glade. Teg lifted himself to his feet, took his pack and, bending to

avoid the low branches, emerged into the glade. Duncan helped Teg shoulder his

pack.

"Schwangyu will consider this eventually," Lucilla said. "Her searchers will

come after us here. You know it."

"Not until they have followed out the false trail and found the end of it," Teg

said. "Come."

He led the way westward through an opening in the trees.

Three nights he had led them along what he called "Patrin's memory-path." As he

walked on this fourth night, Teg berated himself for not projecting the logical

consequences of Patrin's behavior.

I understood the depths of his loyalty but I did not project that loyalty into a

most obvious result. We were together so many years I thought I knew his mind

as I knew my own. Patrin, damn you! There was no need for you to die!

Teg admitted to himself then that there had been a need. Patrin had seen it.

The Mentat had not permitted himself to see it. Logic could move just as

blindly as any other faculty.

As the Bene Gesserit often said and demonstrated.

So we walk. Schwangyu does not expect this.

Teg was forced to admit that walking the wild places of Gammu created a whole

new perspective for him. This entire region had been allowed to overgrow with

plant life during the Famine Times and the Scattering. It had been replanted

later but mostly as a random wilderness. Secret trails and private landmarks

guided today's access. Teg imagined Patrin as a youth learning this region --

that rocky butte visible in starlight through a gap in the trees, that spiked

promontory, these lanes through giant trees.

"They will expect us to make a run for a no-ship, " he and Patrin had agreed,

fleshing out their plan. "The decoy must take the searchers in that direction."

Patrin had not said that he would be the decoy.

Teg swallowed past a lump in his throat.

Duncan could not be protected in the Keep, he justified himself.

That was true.

Lucilla had jittered through their first day under the life-shield that

protected them from discovery by the instruments of aerial searchers.

"We must get word to Taraza!"

"When we can."

"What if something happens to you? I must know all of your escape plan."

"If something happens to me, you will not be able to follow Patrin's path.

There isn't time to put it in your memory."

Duncan took little part in the conversation that day. He watched them silently

or dozed, awakening fitful and with an angry look in his eyes.

On the second day under the shielding blanket, Duncan suddenly demanded of Teg:

"Why do they want to kill me?"

"To frustrate the Sisterhood's plan for you," Teg said.

Duncan glared at Lucilla. "What is that plan?"

When Lucilla did not answer, Duncan said: "She knows. She knows because I'm

supposed to depend on her. I'm supposed to love her!"

Teg thought Lucilla concealed her dismay quite well. Obviously, her plans for

the ghola had fallen into disarray, all of the sequencing thrown out of joint by

this flight.

Duncan's behavior revealed another possibility: Was the ghola a latent

Truthsayer? What additional powers had been bred into this ghola by the sly

Tleilaxu?

At their second nightfall in the wilderness, Lucilla was full of accusations.

"Taraza ordered you to restore his original memories! How can you do that out

here?"

"When we reach sanctuary."

A silent and acutely alert Duncan accompanied them that night. There was a new

vitality in him. He had heard!

Nothing must harm Teg, Duncan thought. Wherever and whatever sanctuary might

be, Teg must reach it safely. Then, I will know!

Duncan was not sure what he would know but now he fully accepted the prize in

it. This wilderness must lead to that goal. He recalled staring out at the

wild places from the Keep and how he had thought to be free here. That sense of

untouched freedom had vanished. The wilderness was only a path to something

more important.

Lucilla, bringing up the rear of this march, forced herself to remain calm,

alert, and to accept what she could not change. Part of her awareness held

firmly to Taraza's orders:

"Stay close to the ghola and, when the moment comes, complete your assignment."

One pace at a time, Teg's body measured out the kilometers. This was the fourth

night. Patrin had estimated four nights to reach their goal.

And what a goal!

The emergency escape plan centered on a discovery Patrin had made here as a

teenager of one of Gammu's many mysteries. Patrin's words came back to Teg:

"On the excuse of a personal reconnaissance, I returned to the place two days

ago. It is untouched. I am still the only person who has ever been there."

"How can you be sure?"

"I took my own precautions when I left Gammu years ago, little things that would

be disturbed by another person. Nothing has been moved."

"A Harkonnen no-globe?"

"Very ancient but the chambers are still intact and functioning."

"What about food, water.. . "

"Everything you could want or need is there, laid down in the nullentropy bins

at the core."

Teg and Patrin made their plans, hoping they would never have to use this

emergency bolt hole, holding the secret of it close while Patrin replayed for

Teg the hidden way to this childhood discovery.

Behind Teg, Lucilla let out a small gasp as she tripped over a root.

I should have warned her, Teg thought. Duncan obviously was following Teg's

lead by sound. Lucilla, just as obviously, had much of her attention on her own

private thoughts.

Her facial resemblance to Darwi Odrade was remarkable, Teg told himself. Back

there at the Keep, the two women side by side, he had marked the differences

dictated by their differing ages. Lucilla's youth showed itself in more

subcutaneous fat, a rounding of the facial flesh. But the voices! Timbre,

accent, tricks of atonal inflection, the common stamp of Bene Gesserit speech

mannerisms. They would be almost impossible to tell apart in the dark.

Knowing the Bene Gesserit as he did, Teg knew this was no accident. Given the

Sisterhood's propensity for doubling and redoubling its prized genetic lines to

protect the investment, there had to be a common ancestral source.

Atreides, all of us, he thought.

Taraza had not revealed her design for the ghola, but just being within that

design gave Teg access to the growing shape of it. No complete pattern, but he

could already sense a wholeness there.

Generation after generation, the Sisterhood dealing with the Tleilaxu, buying

Idaho gholas, training them here on Gammu, only to have them assassinated. All

of that time waiting for the right moment. It was like a terrible game, which

had come into frenetic prominence because a girl capable of commanding the worms

had appeared on Rakis.

Gammu itself had to be part of the design. Caladanian marks all over the place.

Danian subtleties piled atop the more brutal ancient ways. Something other than

population had come out of the Danian Sanctuary where the Tyrant's grandmother,

the Lady Jessica, had lived out her days.

Teg had seen the overt and covert marks when he made his first reconnaissance

tour of Gammu.

Wealth!

The signs were here to be read. It flowed around their universe, moving

amoebalike to insinuate itself into any place where it could lodge. There was

wealth from the Scattering on Gammu, Teg knew. Wealth so great that few

suspected (or could imagine) its size and power.

He stopped walking abruptly. Physical patterns in the immediate landscape

demanded his full attention. Ahead of them lay an exposed ledge of barren rock,

its identifying markers planted in his memory by Patrin. This passage would be

one of the more dangerous.

"No caves or heavy growth to conceal you. Have the blanket ready. "

Teg removed the life-shield from his pack and carried it over his arm. Once

more he indicated that they should continue. The dark weave of the shield

fabric hissed against his body as he moved.

Lucilla was becoming less of a cipher, he thought. She aspired to a Lady in

front of her name. The Lady Lucilla. No doubt that had a pleasing sound to

her. A few such titled Reverend Mothers were appearing now that Major Houses

were emerging from the long obscurity imposed by the Tyrant's Golden Path.

Lucilla, the Seductress-Imprinter.

All such women of the Sisterhood were sexual adepts. Teg's own mother had

educated him in the workings of that system, sending him to well-selected local

women when he was quite young, sensitizing him to the signs he must observe

within himself as well as in the women. It was a forbidden training outside of

Chapter House surveillance, but Teg's mother had been one of the Sisterhood's

heretics.

"You will have a need for this, Miles."

No doubt there had been some prescience in her. She had armed him against the

Imprinters who were trained in orgasmic amplification to fix the unconscious

ties -- male to female.

Lucilla and Duncan. An imprint on her would be an imprint on Odrade.

Teg almost heard the pieces go snick as they locked together in his mind. Then

what of the young woman on Rakis? Would Lucilla teach the techniques of

seduction to her imprinted pupil, arm him to ensnare the one who commanded

worms?

Not enough data yet for a Prime Computation.

Teg paused at the end of the dangerous open rock passage. He put away the

blanket and sealed his pack while Duncan and Lucilla waited close behind. Teg

heaved a sigh. The blanket always worried him. It did not have the deflective

powers of a full battle shield but if a lasgun's beam hit the thing the

consequent quick-fire could be fatal.

Dangerous toys!

This was how Teg always classified such weapons and mechanical devices. Better

to rely on your wits, your own flesh, and the Five Attitudes of the Bene

Gesserit Way as his mother had taught him.

Use the instruments only when they are absolutely required to amplify the flesh:

that was the Bene Gesserit teaching.

"Why are we stopping?" Lucilla whispered.

"I am listening to the night," Teg said.

Duncan, his face a ghostly blur in the tree-filtered starlight, stared at Teg.

Teg's features reassured him. They were lodged somewhere in an unavailable

memory, Duncan thought. I can trust this man.

Lucilla suspected that they were stopping here because Teg's old body demanded

respite but she could not bring herself to say this. Teg said his escape plan

included a way of getting Duncan to Rakis. Very well. That was all that

mattered for the moment.

She already had figured out that this sanctuary somewhere ahead of them must

involve a no-ship or a no-chamber. Nothing else would suffice. Somehow, Patrin

had been the key to it. Teg's few hints had revealed that Patrin was the source

of their escape route.

Lucilla had been the first to realize how Patrin would have to pay for their

escape. Patrin was the weakest link. He remained behind where Schwangyu could

capture him. Capture of the decoy was inevitable. Only a fool would suppose

that a Reverend Mother of Schwangyu's powers would be incapable of wresting

secrets from a mere male. Schwangyu would not even require the heavy

persuasion. The subtleties of Voice and those painful forms of interrogation

that remained a Sisterhood monopoly -- the agony box and nerve-node pressures --

those were all she would require.

The form Patrin's loyalty would take had been clear to Lucilla then. How could

Teg have been so blind?

Love!

That long, trusting bond between the two men. Schwangyu would act swiftly and

brutally. Patrin knew it. Teg had not examined his own certain knowledge.

Duncan's voice shocked her from these thoughts.

" 'Thopter! Behind us!"

"Quick!" Teg whipped the blanket from his pack and threw it over them. They

huddled in earth-smelling darkness, listening to the ornithopter pass above

them. It did not pause or return.

When they felt certain they had not been detected, Teg once more led them up

Patrin's memory-track.

"That was a searcher," Lucilla said. "They are beginning to suspect . . . or

Patrin . . ."

"Save your energy for walking," Teg snapped.

She did not press him. They both knew Patrin was dead. Argument over this had

been exhausted.

This Mentat goes deep, Lucilla told herself.

Teg was the child of a Reverend Mother and that mother had trained him beyond

the permitted limits before the Sisterhood took him into their manipulative

hands. The ghola was not the only one here with unknown resources.

Their trail turned back and forth upon itself, a game track climbing a steep

hill through thick forest. Starlight did not penetrate the trees. Only the

Mentat's marvelous memory kept them on the path.

Lucilla felt duff underfoot. She listened to Teg's movements, reading them to

guide her feet.

How silent Duncan is, she thought. How closed in upon himself. He obeyed

orders. He followed where Teg led them. She sensed the quality of Duncan's

obedience. He kept his own counsel. Duncan obeyed because it suited him to do

so -- for now. Schwangyu's rebellion had planted something wildly independent

in the ghola. And what things of their own had the Tleilaxu planted in him?

Teg stopped at a level spot beneath tall trees to regain his wind. Lucilla

could hear him breathing deeply. This reminded her once more that the Mentat

was a very old man, far too old for these exertions. She spoke quietly:

"Are you all right, Miles?"

"I'll tell you when I'm not."

"How much farther?" Duncan asked.

"Only a short way now."

Presently, he resumed his course through the night. "We must hurry," he said.

"This saddle-back ridge is the last bit."

Now that he had accepted the fact of Patrin's death, Teg's thoughts swung like a

compass needle to Schwangyu and what she must be experiencing. Schwangyu would

feel her world falling in around her. The fugitives had been gone four nights!

People who could elude a Reverend Mother this way might do anything! Of course,

the fugitives probably were off-planet by now. A no-ship. But what if . . .

Schwangyu's thoughts would be full of what-ifs.

Patrin had been the fragile link but Patrin had been well trained in the removal

of fragile links, trained by a master -- Miles Teg.

Teg dashed dampness from his eyes with a quick shake of his head. Immediate

necessity required that core of internal honesty which he could not avoid. Teg

had never been a good liar, not even to himself. Quite early in his training,

he had realized that his mother and the others involved in his upbringing had

conditioned him to a deep sense of personal honesty.

Adherence to a code of honor.

The code itself, as he recognized its shape in him, attracted Teg's fascinated

attention. It began with recognition that humans were not created equal, that

they possessed different inherited abilities and experienced different events in

their lives. This produced people of different accomplishments and different

worth.

To obey this code, Teg realized early that he must place himself accurately into

the flow of observable hierarchies accepting that a moment might come when he

could evolve no further.

The code's conditioning went deep. He could never find its ultimate roots. It

obviously was attached to something intrinsic to his humanity. It dictated with

enormous power the limits of behavior permitted to those above as well as to

those below him in the hierarchical pyramid.

The key token of exchange: loyalty.

Loyalty went upward and downward, lodging wherever it found a deserving

attachment. Such loyalties, Teg knew, were securely locked into him. He felt

no doubts that Taraza would support him in everything except a situation

demanding that he be sacrificed to the survival of the Sisterhood. And that was

right in itself. That was where the loyalties of all of them eventually lodged.

I am Taraza's Bashar. That is what the code says.

And this was the code that had killed Patrin.

I hope you suffered no pain, old friend.

Once more, Teg paused under the trees. Taking his fighting knife from its boot

sheath, he scratched a small mark in a tree beside him.

"What are you doing?" Lucilla demanded.

"This is a secret mark," Teg said. "Only the people I have trained know about

it. And Taraza, of course."

"But why are you . . ."

"I will explain later."

Teg moved forward, stopping at another tree where he made the tiny mark, a thing

which an animal might make with a claw, something to blend into the natural

forms of this wilderness.

As he worked his way ahead, Teg realized he had come to a decision about

Lucilla. Her plans for Duncan must be deflected. Every Mentat projection Teg

could make about Duncan's safety and sanity required this. The awakening of

Duncan's pre-ghola memories must come ahead of any Imprint by Lucilla. It would

not be easy to block her, Teg knew. It required a better liar than he had ever

been to dissemble for a Reverend Mother.

It must be made to appear accidental, the normal outcome of the circumstances.

Lucilla must never suspect opposition.

Teg held few illusions about succeeding against an aroused Reverend Mother in

close quarters. Better to kill her. That, he thought he could do. But the

consequences! Taraza could never be made to see such a bloody act as obedience

to her orders.

No, he would have to bide his time, wait and watch and listen.

They emerged into a small open area with a high barrier of volcanic rock close

ahead of them. Scrubby bushes and low thorn trees grew close against the rock,

visible as dark blotches in the starlight.

Teg saw the blacker outline of a crawl space under the bushes.

"It's belly crawling from here in," Teg said.

"I smell ashes," Lucilla said. "Something's been burned here."

"This is where the decoy came," Teg said. "He left a charred area just down to

our left -- simulating the marks of a no-ship's take-off burn."

Lucilla's quickly indrawn breath was audible. The audacity! Should Schwangyu

dare bring in a prescient searcher to follow Duncan's tracks (because Duncan

alone among them had no Siona blood in his ancestry to shield him) all of the

marks would agree that they had come this way and fled off-planet in a no-ship .

. . provided . . .

"But where are you taking us?" she asked.

"It's a Harkonnen no-globe," Teg said. "It has been here for millennia and now

it's ours."

Quite naturally, holders of power wish to suppress wild research. Unrestricted

questing after knowledge has a long history of producing unwanted competition.

The powerful want a "safe line of investigations," which will develop only those

products and ideas that can be controlled and, most important, that will allow

the larger part of the benefits to be captured by inside investors.

Unfortunately, a random universe full of relative variables does not insure such

a "safe line of investigations."

-Assessment of Ix, Bene Gesserit Archives

Hedley Tuek, High Priest and titular ruler of Rakis, felt himself inadequate to

the demands just imposed upon him.

Dust-fogged night enveloped the city of Keen, but here in his private audience

chamber the brilliance of many glowglobes dispelled shadows. Even here, in the

heart of the Temple, though, the wind could be heard, a distant moan, this

planet's periodic torment.

The audience chamber was an irregular room seven meters long and four meters at

its widest end. The opposite end was almost imperceptibly narrower. The

ceiling, too, made a gentle slope in that direction. Spice fiber hangings and

clever shadings in light yellows and grays concealed these irregularities. One

of the hangings covered a focusing horn that carried even the smallest sounds to

listeners outside the room.

Only Darwi Odrade, the new commander of the Bene Gesserit Keep on Rakis, sat

with Tuek in the audience chamber. The two of them faced each other across a

narrow space defined by their soft green cushions.

Tuek tried to conceal a grimace. The effort twisted his normally imposing

features into a revealing mask. He had taken great care in preparing himself

for this night's confrontations. Dressers had smoothed his robe over his tall,

rather stout figure. Golden sandals covered his long feet. The stillsuit under

his robe was only for display: no pumps or catchpockets, no uncomfortable and

time-consuming adjustments required. His silky gray hair was combed long to his

shoulders, a suitable frame for his square face with its wide thick mouth and

heavy chin. His eyes fell abruptly into a look of benevolence, an expression he

had copied from his grandfather. This was how he had looked on entering the

audience chamber to meet Odrade. He had felt himself altogether imposing, but,

now, he suddenly felt naked and disheveled.

He's really a rather empty-headed fellow, Odrade thought.

Tuek was thinking: I cannot discuss that terrible Manifesto with her! Not with

a Tleilaxu Master and those Face Dancers listening in the other room. What ever

possessed me to allow that?

"It is heresy, pure and simple," Tuek said.

"But you are only one religion among many," Odrade countered. "And with people

returning from the Scattering, the proliferation of schisms and variant beliefs

. . ."

"We are the only true belief!" Tuek said.

Odrade hid a smile. He said it right on cue. And Waff surely heard him. Tuek

was remarkably easy to lead. If the Sisterhood was right about Waff, Tuek's

words would enrage the Tleilaxu Master.

In a deep and portentous tone, Odrade said: "The Manifesto raises questions

that all must address, believers and non-believers alike."

"What has all this to do with the Holy Child?" Tuek demanded. "You told me we

must meet on matters concerning --"

"Indeed! Don't try to deny that you know there are many people who are

beginning to worship Sheeana. The Manifesto implicates --"

"Manifesto! Manifesto! It is a heretical document, which will be obliterated.

As for Sheeana, she must be returned to our exclusive care!"

"No." Odrade spoke softly.

How agitated Tuek was, she thought. His stiff neck moved minimally as he turned

his head from side to side. The movements pointed to a wall hanging on Odrade's

right, defining the place as though Tuek's head carried an illuminating beam to

reveal that particular hanging. What a transparent man, this High Priest. He

might just as well announce that Waff listened to them somewhere behind that

hanging.

"Next, you will spirit her away from Rakis," Tuek said.

"She stays here," Odrade said. "Just as we promised you."

"But why can't she . . ."

"Come now! Sheeana has made her wishes clear and I'm sure her words have been

reported to you. She wishes to be a Reverend Mother."

"She already is the --"

"M'Lord Tuek! Don't try to dissemble with me. She has stated her wishes and we

are happy to comply. Why should you object? Reverend Mothers served the

Divided God in the Fremen times. Why not now?"

"You Bene Gesserit have ways of making people say things they do not want to

say," Tuek accused. "We should not be discussing this privately. My

councillors --"

"Your councillors would only muddy our discussion. The implications of the

Atreides Manifesto --"

"I will discuss only Sheeana!" Tuek drew himself up in what he thought of as

his posture of adamant High Priest.

"We are discussing her," Odrade said.

"Then let me make it clear that we require more of our people in her entourage.

She must be guarded at all --"

"The way she was guarded on that rooftop?" Odrade asked.

"Reverend Mother Odrade, this is Holy Rakis! You have no rights here that we do

not grant!"

"Rights? Sheeana has become the target, yes the target! of many ambitions and

you wish to discuss rights?"

"My duties as High Priest are clear. The Holy Church of the Divided God will --

"

"M'Lord Tuek! I am trying very hard to maintain the necessary courtesies. What

I do is for your benefit as well as our own. The actions we have taken --"

"Actions? What actions?" The words were pressed from Tuek with a hoarse

grunting. These terrible Bene Gesserit witches! Tleilaxu behind him and a

Reverend Mother in front! Tuek felt like a ball in a fearsome game, bounced

back and forth between terrifying energies. Peaceful Rakis, the secure place of

his daily routines, had vanished and he had been projected into an arena whose

rules he did not fully understand.

"I have sent for the Bashar Miles Teg," Odrade said. "That is all. His advance

party should arrive soon. We are going to reinforce your planetary defenses."

"You dare to take over --"

"We take over nothing. At your own father's request, Teg's people redesigned

your defenses. The agreement under which this was done contains, at your

father's insistence, a clause requiring our periodic review."

Tuek sat in dazed silence. Waff, that ominous little Tleilaxu, had heard all of

this. There would be conflict! The Tleilaxu wanted a secret agreement setting

melange prices. They would not permit Bene Gesserit interference.

Odrade had spoken of Tuek's father and now Tuek wished only that his long-dead

father sat here. A hard man. He would have known how to deal with these

opposing forces. He had always handled the Tleilaxu quite well. Tuek recalled

listening (just as Waff listened now!) to a Tleilaxu envoy named Wose . . . and

another one named Pook. Ledden Pook. What odd names they had.

Tuek's confused thoughts abruptly offered up another name. Odrade had just

mentioned it: Teg! Was that old monster still active?

Odrade was speaking once more. Tuek tried to swallow in a dry throat as he

leaned forward, forcing himself to pay attention.

"Teg will also look into your on-planet defenses. After that rooftop fiasco --"

"I officially forbid this interference with our internal affairs," Tuek said.

"There is no need. Our Priest Guardians are adequate to --"

"Adequate?" Odrade shook her head sadly. "What an inadequate word, given the

new circumstances on Rakis."

"What new circumstances?" There was terror in Tuek's voice.

Odrade merely sat there staring at him.

Tuek tried to force some order into his thoughts. Could she know about the

Tleilaxu listening back there? Impossible! He inhaled a trembling breath.

What was this about the defenses of Rakis? The defenses were excellent, he

reassured himself. They had the best Ixian monitors and no-ships. More than

that, it was to the advantage of all independent powers that Rakis remain

equally independent as another source of the spice.

To the advantage of everyone except the Tleilaxu with the damnable melange

overproduction from their axlotl tanks!

This was a shattering thought. A Tleilaxu Master had heard every word spoken in

this audience chamber!

Tuek called on Shai-hulud, the Divided God, to protect him. That terrible

little man back there said he spoke also for Ixians and Fish Speakers. He

produced documents. Was that the "new circumstances" of which Odrade spoke?

Nothing remained long hidden from the witches!

The High Priest could not repress a shudder at the thought of Waff: that round

little head, those glittering eyes; that pug nose and those sharp teeth in that

brittle smile. Waff looked like a slightly enlarged child until you met those

eyes and heard him speak in his squeaky voice. Tuek recalled that his own

father had complained of those voices: "The Tleilaxu say such terrible things

in their childish voices!"

Odrade shifted on her cushions. She thought of Waff listening out there. Had

he heard enough? Her own secret listeners certainly would be asking themselves

that question now. Reverend Mothers always replayed these verbal contests,

seeking improvements and new advantages for the Sisterhood.

Waff has heard enough, Odrade told herself. Time to shift the play.

In her most matter-of-fact tones, Odrade said: "M'Lord Tuek, someone important

is listening to what we say here. Is it polite that such a person listen

secretly?"

Tuek closed his eyes. She knows!

He opened his eyes and met Odrade's unrevealing stare. She looked like someone

who might wait through eternity for his response.

"Polite? I . . . I . . ."

"Invite the secret listener to come sit with us," Odrade said.

Tuek passed a hand across his damp forehead. His father and grandfather, High

Priests before him, had laid down ritual responses for most occasions, but

nothing for a moment such as this. Invite the Tleilaxu to sit here? In this

chamber with . . . Tuek was reminded suddenly that he did not like the smell of

Tleilaxu Masters. His father had complained of that: "They smell of disgusting

food!"

Odrade got to her feet. "I would much rather look upon those who hear my

words," she said. "Shall I go myself and invite the hidden listener to --"

"Please!" Tuek remained seated but lifted a hand to stop her. "I had little

choice. He comes with documents from Fish Speakers and Ixians. He said he

would help us to return Sheeana to our --"

"Help you?" Odrade looked down at the sweating priest with something akin to

pity. This one thought he ruled Rakis?

"He is of the Bene Tleilax," Tuek said. "He is called Waff and --"

"I know what he is called and I know why he is here, M'Lord Tuek. What

astonishes me is that you would allow him to spy on -"

"It is not spying! We were negotiating. I mean, there are new forces to which

we must adjust our --"

"New forces? Oh, yes: the whores from the Scattering. Does this Waff bring

some of them with him?"

Before Tuek could respond, the audience chamber's side door opened. Waff

entered right on cue, two Face Dancers behind him.

He was told not to bring Face Dancers! Odrade thought.

"Just you!" Odrade said, pointing. "Those others were not invited, were they,

M'Lord ?"

Tuek lifted himself heavily to his feet, noting the nearness of Odrade,

remembering all of the terrible stories about the Reverend Mothers' physical

prowess. The presence of Face Dancers added to his confusion. They always

filled him with such terrible misgivings.

Turning toward the door and trying to compose his features into a look of

invitation, Tuek said: "Only . . . only Ambassador Waff, please."

Speech hurt Tuek's throat. This was worse than terrible! He felt naked before

these people.

Odrade gestured to a cushion near her. "Waff is it? Please come and sit down."

Waff nodded to her as though he had never seen her before. How polite! With a

gesture to his Face Dancers that they remain outside, he crossed to the

indicated cushion but stood waiting beside it.

Odrade saw a flux of tensions move through the little Tleilaxu. Something like

a snarl flickered across his lips. He still had those weapons in his sleeves.

Was he about to break their agreement?

It was time, Odrade knew, for Waff's suspicions to regain all of their original

strength and more. He would be feeling trapped by Taraza's maneuverings. Waff

wanted his breeding mothers! The reek of his pheromones announced his deepest

fears. He carried in his mind, then, his part of their agreement -- or at least

a form of that sharing. Taraza did not expect Waff really to share all of the

knowledge he had gained from the Honored Matres.

"M'Lord Tuek tells me you have been . . . ahhh, negotiating," Odrade said. Let

him remember that word! Waff knew where the real negotiation must be concluded.

As she spoke, Odrade sank to her knees, then back onto her cushion, but her feet

remained positioned to throw her out of any line of attack from Waff.

Waff glanced down at her and at the cushion she had indicated for him. Slowly,

he sank onto his cushion but his arms remained on his knees, the sleeves

directed at Tuek.

What is he doing? Odrade wondered. Waff's movements said he was embarked on a

plan of his own.

Odrade said: "I have been trying to impress upon the High Priest the importance

of the Atreides Manifesto to our mutual --"

"Atreides!" Tuek blurted. He almost collapsed onto his cushion. "It cannot be

Atreides."

"A very persuasive manifesto," Waff said, reinforcing Tuek's obvious fears.

At least that was according to plan, Odrade thought. She said: "The promise of

s'tori cannot be ignored. Many people equate s'tori with the presence of their

god."

Waff sent a surprised and angry stare at her.

Tuek said: "Ambassador Waff tells me that Ixians and Fish Speakers are alarmed

by that document, but I have reassured him that --"

"I think we may ignore the Fish Speakers," Odrade said. "They hear the noise of

god everywhere."

Waff recognized the cant in her words. Was she jibing at him? She was right

about the Fish Speakers, of course. They had been so far weaned from their old

devotions that they influenced very little and whatever they did influence could

be guided by the new Face Dancers who now led them.

Tuek tried to smile at Waff. "You spoke of helping us to . . ."

"Time for that later," Odrade interrupted. She had to keep Tuek's attention on

the document that disturbed him so much. She paraphrased from the Manifesto:

"Your will and your faith -- your belief system -- dominate your universe."

Tuek recognized the words. He had read the terrible document. This Manifesto

said God and all of His works were no more than human creations. He wondered

how he should respond. No High Priest could let such a thing go unchallenged.

Before Tuek could find words, Waff locked eyes with Odrade and responded in a

way he knew she would interpret correctly. Odrade could do no less, being who

she was.

"The error of prescience," Waff said. "Isn't that what this document calls it?

Isn't that where it says the mind of the believer stagnates?"

"Exactly!" Tuek said. He felt thankful for the Tleilaxu intervention. That was

precisely the core of this dangerous heresy!

Waff did not look at him, but continued to stare at Odrade. Did the Bene

Gesserit think their design inscrutable? Let her meet a greater power. She

thought herself so strong! But the Bene Gesserit could not really know how the

Almighty guarded the future of the Shariat!

Tuek was not to be stopped. "It assaults everything we hold sacred! And it's

being spread everywhere!"

"By the Tleilaxu," Odrade said.

Waff lifted his sleeves, directing his weapons at Tuek. He hesitated only

because he saw that Odrade had recognized part of his intentions.

Tuek stared from one to the other. Was Odrade's accusation true? Or was that

just another Bene Gesserit trick?

Odrade saw Waff's hesitation and guessed its reason. She cast through her mind,

seeking an answer to his motivations. What advantage could the Tleilaxu gain by

killing Tuek? Obviously, Waff aimed to substitute one of his Face Dancers for

the High Priest. But what would that gain him?

Sparring for time, Odrade said: "You should be very cautious, Ambassador Waff."

"When has caution ever governed great necessities?" Waff asked.

Tuek lifted himself to his feet and moved heavily to one side, wringing his

hands. "Please! These are holy precincts. It is wrong to discuss heresies

here unless we plan to destroy them." He looked down on Waff. "It's not true,

is it? You are not the authors of that terrible document?"

"It is not ours," Waff agreed. Damn that fop of a priest! Tuek had moved well

to one side and once more presented a moving target.

"I knew it!" Tuek said, striding around behind Waff and Odrade.

Odrade kept her gaze on Waff. He planned murder! She was sure of it.

Tuek spoke from behind her. "You do not know how you wrong us, Reverend Mother.

Ser Waff has asked that we form a melange cartel. I explained that our price to

you must remain unchanged because one of you was the grandmother of God."

Waff bowed his head, waiting. The priest would come back into range. God would

not permit a failure.

Tuek stood behind Odrade looking down at Waff. A shudder passed through the

priest. Tleilaxu were so . . . so repellent and amoral. They could not be

trusted. How could Waff's denial be accepted?

Not wavering from her contemplation of Waff, Odrade said: "But, M'Lord Tuek,

was not the prospect of increased income attractive to you?" She saw Waff's

right arm come around slightly, almost aimed at her. His intentions became

clear.

"M'Lord Tuek," Odrade said, "this Tleilaxu intends to murder us both."

At her words, Waff jerked both arms up, trying to aim at the two separated and

difficult targets. Before his muscles responded, Odrade was under his guard.

She heard the faint hiss of dart throwers but felt no sting. Her left arm came

up in a slashing blow to break Waff's right arm. Her right foot broke his left

arm.

Waff screamed.

He had never suspected such speed in the Bene Gesserit. It was almost a match

for what he had seen in the Honored Matre on the Ixian conference ship. Even

through his pain he realized that he must report this. Reverend Mothers command

synaptic bypasses under duress!

The door behind Odrade burst open. Waff's Face Dancers rushed into the chamber.

But Odrade already was behind Waff, both hands on his throat. "Stop or he

dies!" she shouted.

The two froze.

Waff squirmed under her hands.

"Be still!" she commanded. Odrade glanced at Tuek sprawled on the floor to her

right. One dart had hit its target.

"Waff has killed the High Priest," Odrade said, speaking for her own secret

listeners.

The two Face Dancers continued to stare at her. Their indecision was easy to

see. None of them, she saw, had realized how this played into Bene Gesserit

hands. Trap the Tleilaxu indeed!

Odrade spoke to the Face Dancers. "Remove yourselves and that body to the

corridor and close the door. Your Master has done a foolish thing. He will

have need of you later." To Waff, she said: "For the moment, you need me more

than you need your Face Dancers. Send them away."

"Go," Waff squeaked.

When the Face Dancers continued to stare at her, Odrade said: "If you do not

leave immediately, I will kill him and then I will dispatch both of you."

"Do it!" Waff screamed.

The Face Dancers took this as the command to obey their Master. Odrade heard

something else in Waff's voice. He obviously would have to be talked out of

suicidal hysteria.

Once she was alone with him, Odrade removed the exhausted weapons from his

sleeves and pocketed them. They could be examined in detail later. There was

little she could do for his broken bones except render him briefly unconscious

and set them. She improvised splints from cushions and torn strips of green

fabric from the High Priest's furnishings.

Waff reawakened quickly. He groaned when he looked at Odrade.

"You and I are now allies," Odrade said. "The things that have transpired in

this chamber have been heard by some of my people and by representatives from a

faction that wants to replace Tuek with one of their own number."

It was too fast for Waff. He was a moment grasping what she had said. His mind

fastened, though, on the most important thing.

"Allies?"

"I imagine Tuek was difficult to deal with," she said. "Offer him obvious

benefits and he invariably waffled. You have done some of the priests a favor

by killing him."

"They are listening now?" Waff squeaked.

"Of course. Let us discuss your proposed spice monopoly. The late lamented

High Priest said you mentioned this. Let me see if I can deduce the extent of

your offer."

"My arms," Waff moaned.

"You're still alive," she said. "Be thankful for my wisdom. I could have

killed you."

He turned his head away from her. "That would have been better."

"Not for the Bene Tleilax and certainly not for my Sisterhood," she said. "Let

me see. Yes, you promised to provide Rakis with many new spice harvesters, the

new airborne ones, which only touch the desert with their sweeper heads."

"You listened!" Waff accused.

"Not at all. A very attractive proposal, since I'm sure the Ixians are

providing them free for their own reasons. Shall I continue?"

"You said we are allies."

"A monopoly would force the Guild to buy more Ixian navigation machines," she

said. "You would have the Guild in the jaws of your crusher."

Waff lifted his head to glare at her. The movement sent agony through his

broken arms and he groaned. Despite the pain, he studied Odrade through almost

lidded eyes. Did the witches really believe that was the extent of the Tleilaxu

plan? He hardly dared hope the Bene Gesserit were so misled.

"Of course that was not your basic plan," Odrade said.

Waff's eyes snapped wide open. She was reading his mind! "I am dishonored," he

said. "When you saved my life you saved a useless thing." He sank back.

Odrade inhaled a deep breath. Time to use the results of the Chapter House

analyses. She leaned close to Waff and whispered in his ear: "The Shariat

needs you yet."

Waff gasped.

Odrade sat back. That gasp said it all. Analysis confirmed.

"You thought you had better allies in the people from the Scattering," she said.

"Those Honored Matres and other hetairas of that ilk. I ask you: does the slig

make alliance with its garbage?"

Waff had heard that question uttered only in khel. His face pale, he breathed

in shallow gasps. The implications in her words! He forced himself to ignore

the pain in his arms. Allies, she said. She knew about the Shariat! How could

she possibly know?

"How can either of us be unmindful of the many advantages in an alliance between

Bene Tleilax and Bene Gesserit?" Odrade asked.

Alliance with the powindah witches? Waff's mind was filled with turmoil. The

agony of his arms was held so tentatively at bay. This moment felt so fragile!

He tasted acid bile on the back of his tongue.

"Ahhhh," Odrade said. "Do you hear that? The priest, Krutansik, and his

faction have arrived outside our door. They will propose that one of your Face

Dancers assume the guise of the late Hedley Tuek. Any other course would cause

too much turmoil. Krutansik is a fairly wise man who has held himself in the

background until now. His Uncle Stiros groomed him well."

"What does your Sisterhood gain from alliance with us?" Waff managed.

Odrade smiled. Now she could speak the truth. That was always much easier and

often the most powerful argument.

"Our survival in the face of the storm that is brewing among the Scattered

Ones," she said. "Tleilaxu survival, too. The farthest thing from our desires

is an end to those who preserve the Great Belief."

Waff cringed. She spoke it openly! Then he understood. What matter if others

heard? They could not see through to the secrets beneath her words.

"Our breeding mothers are ready for you," Odrade said. She stared hard into his

eyes and made the handsign of a Zensunni priest.

Waff felt a tight band release itself from his breast. The unexpected, the

unthinkable, the unbelievable thing was true! The Bene Gesserit were not

powindah! All the universe would yet follow the Bene Tleilax into the True

Faith! God would not permit otherwise. Especially not here on the planet of

the Prophet!

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more

than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old

routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept.

Who enjoys appearing inept?

-A Guide to Trial and Error in Government, Bene Gesserit Archives

The reports, the summations and scattered tidbits lay in rows across the long

table where Taraza sat. Except for the night watch and essential services,

Chapter House Core slumbered around her. Only the familiar sounds of

maintenance activities penetrated her private chambers. Two glowglobes hovered

over her table, bathing the dark wood surface and rows of ridulian paper in

yellow light. The window beyond her table was a dark mirror reflecting the

room.

Archives!

The holoprojector flickered with its continuing production above the tabletop --

more bits and pieces that she had summoned.

Taraza rather distrusted Archivists, which she knew was an ambivalent attitude

because she recognized the underlying necessity for data. But Chapter House

Records could only be viewed as a jungle of abbreviations, special notations,

coded insertions, and footnotes. Such material often required a Mentat for

translation or, what was worse, in times of extreme fatigue demanded that she

delve into Other Memories. All Archivists were Mentats, of course, but this did

not reassure Taraza. You could never consult Archival Records in a

straightforward manner. Much of the interpretation that emerged from that

source had to be accepted on the word of the ones who brought it or (hateful!)

you had to rely on the mechanical search by the holosystem. This, in its turn,

required a dependency on those who maintained the system. It gave functionaries

more power than Taraza cared to delegate.

Dependencies!

Taraza hated dependency. This was a rueful admission, reminding her that few

developing situations were ever precisely what you imagined they would be. Even

the best of Mentat projections accumulated errors . . . given enough time.

Still, every move the Sisterhood made required the consultation of Archives and

seemingly endless analyses. Even ordinary commerce demanded it. She found this

a frequent irritation. Should they form this group? Sign that agreement?

There always came the moment during a conference when she was forced to

introduce a note of decision:

"Analysis by Archivist Hesterion accepted."

Or, as was often the case: "Archivists' report rejected; not pertinent."

Taraza leaned forward to study the holoprojection: "Possible breeding plan for

Subject Waff."

She scanned the numbers, gene plans from the cell sample forwarded by Odrade.

Fingernail scrapings seldom produced enough material for a secure analysis but

Odrade had done quite well under the cover of setting the man's broken bones.

Taraza shook her head at the data. Offspring would surely be like all the

previous ones the Bene Gesserit had attempted with Tleilaxu: The females would

be immune to memory probing; males, of course, would be an impenetrable and

repellent chaos.

Taraza sat back and sighed. When it came to breeding records, the monumental

cross-referencing assumed staggering proportions. Officially, it was the

"College of Ancestral Pertinence," CAP to the Archivists. Among the Sisters at

large, it was known as the "Stud Record," which, although accurate, failed to

convey the sense of detail listed under the proper Archival headings. She had

asked for Waff's projections to be carried out into three hundred generations,

an easy and rather rapid task, sufficient for all practical purposes. Threehundred-

Gen mainlines (such as Teg, his collaterals and siblings) had proved

themselves dependable for millennia. Instinct told her it would be bootless to

waste more time on the Waff projections.

Fatigue welled up in Taraza. She put her head in her hands and rested them for

a moment on the table, feeling the coolness of the wood.

What if I am wrong about Rakis?

Opposition arguments could not be shuffled away into Archival dust. Damn this

dependency on computers! The Sisterhood had carried its main lines in computers

even back in the Forbidden Days after the Butlerian Jihad's wild smashing of

"the thinking machines." In these "more enlightened" days, one tended not to

question the unconscious motives behind that ancient orgy of destruction.

Sometimes, we make very responsible decisions for unconscious reasons. A

conscious search of Archives or Other Memories carries no guarantees.

Taraza released one of her hands and slapped it against the tabletop. She did

not like dealing with the Archivists who came trotting in with answers to her

questions. A disdainful lot they were, full of secret jokes. She had heard

them comparing their CAP work to stock breeding, to Farm Forms and Animal Racing

Authority. Damn their jokes! The right decision now was far more important

than they could possibly imagine. Those serving sisters who only obeyed orders

did not have Taraza's responsibilities.

She lifted her head and looked across the room at the niche with its bust of

Sister Chenoeh, the ancient one who had met and conversed with the Tyrant.

You knew, Taraza thought. You were never a Reverend Mother but still you knew.

Your reports show it. How did you know to make the right decision?

Odrade's request for military assistance required an immediate answer. The time

limits were too tight. But with Teg, Lucilla, and the ghola missing, the

contingency plan had to be brought into play.

Damn Teg!

More of his unexpected behavior. He could not leave the ghola in jeopardy, of

course. Schwangyu's actions had been predictable.

What had Teg done? Had he gone to ground in Ysai or one of the other major

cities on Gammu? No. If that were the case, Teg would have reported by now

through one of the secret contacts they had prepared. He possessed a complete

list of those contacts and had investigated some of them personally.

Obviously, Teg did not place full trust in the contacts. He had seen something

during his inspection tour that he had not passed along through Bellonda.

Burzmali would have to be called in and briefed, of course. Burzmali was the

best, trained by Teg himself; prime candidate for Supreme Bashar. Burzmali must

be sent to Gammu.

I'm playing a hunch, Taraza thought.

But if Teg had gone to ground, the trail started on Gammu. The trail could have

ended there as well. Yes, Burzmali to Gammu. Rakis must wait. There were

certain obvious attractions in this move. It would not alert the Guild. The

Tleilaxu and the ones from the Scattering, however, would certainly rise to the

bait. If Odrade failed to trap the Tleilaxu . . . no, Odrade would not fail.

That one had become almost a certainty.

The unexpected.

You see, Miles? I have learned from you.

None of this deflected the opposition within the Sisterhood, though.

Taraza put both palms flat on her table and pressed hard, as though trying to

sense the people out there in Chapter House, the ones who shared Schwangyu's

opinions. Vocal opposition had subsided but that always meant the violence was

being readied.

What shall I do?

The Mother Superior was supposed to be immune to indecision in a crisis. But

the Tleilaxu connection had unbalanced their data. Some of the recommendations

for Odrade appeared obvious and already had been transmitted. That much of the

plan was plausible and simple.

Take Waff into the desert far beyond unwanted eyes. Contrive a situation-inextremis

and the consequent religious experience in the old and reliable pattern

dictated by the Missionaria Protectiva. Test whether the Tleilaxu were using

the ghola process for their own kind of immortality. Odrade was perfectly

capable of carrying out that much of the revised plan. It depended heavily on

this young woman, Sheeana, though.

The worm itself is the unknown.

Taraza reminded herself that today's worm was not the original worm of Rakis.

Despite Sheeana's demonstrated command over them, they were unpredictable. As

Archives would say, they had no track record. Taraza held little doubt that

Odrade had made an accurate deduction about the Rakians and their dances. That

was a plus.

A language.

But we do not yet speak it. That was a negative.

I must make a decision tonight!

Taraza sent her surface awareness roaming backward along that unbroken line of

Mothers Superior, all of those female memories encapsulated within the fragile

awareness of herself and two others -- Bellonda and Hesterion. It was a

tortuous track through Other Memories, which she felt too tired to follow.

Right at the edge of the track would be observations of Muad'dib, the Atreides

bastard who had shaken the universe twice -- once by dominating the Imperium

with his Fremen hordes, and then by spawning the Tyrant.

If we are defeated this time it could be the end of us, she thought. We could

be swallowed whole by these hell-spawned females from the Scattering.

Alternatives presented themselves: The female child on Rakis could be passed

into the Sisterhood's core to live out her life somewhere at the end of a noship's

flight. An ignominious retreat.

So much depended on Teg. Had he failed the Sisterhood at last or had he found

an unexpected way to conceal the ghola?

I must find a way to delay, Taraza thought. We must give Teg time to

communicate with us. Odrade will have to drag out the plan on Rakis.

It was dangerous but it had to be done.

Stiffly, Taraza lifted herself from her chairdog and went to the darkened window

across from her. Chapter House Planet lay in star-shadowed darkness. A refuge:

Chapter House Planet. Such planets were not even recipients of names anymore;

only numbers somewhere in Archives. This planet had seen fourteen hundred years

of Bene Gesserit occupancy but even that must be considered temporary. She

thought of the guardian no-ships orbiting overhead: Teg's own defense system in

depth. Still, Chapter House remained vulnerable.

The problem had a name: "accidental discovery."

It was an eternal flaw. Out there in the Scattering, humankind expanded

exponentially, swarming across unlimited space. The Tyrant's Golden Path secure

at last. Or was it? Surely, the Atreides worm had planned more than the simple

survival of the species.

He did something to us that we have not yet unearthed -- even after all of these

millennia. I think I know what he did. My opposition says otherwise.

It was never easy for a Reverend Mother to contemplate the bondage they had

suffered under Leto II as he whipped his Imperium for thirty-five hundred years

along his Golden Path.

We stumble when we review those times.

Seeing her own reflection in the window's dark plaz, Taraza glared at herself.

It was a grim face and the fatigue easily visible.

I have every right to be tired and grim!

She knew that her training had channeled her deliberately into negative

patterns. These were her defenses and her strengths. She remained distant in

all human relationships, even in the seductions she had performed for the

Breeding Mistresses. Taraza was the perpetual devil's advocate and this had

become a dominant force in the entire Sisterhood, a natural consequence of her

elevation to Mother Superior. Opposition developed easily in that environment.

As the Sufis said: Rot at the core always spreads outward.

What they did not say was that some rots were noble and valuable.

She reassured herself now with her more dependable data: The Scattering took

the Tyrant's lessons outward in the human migrations, changed in unknown ways

but ultimately submissive to recognition. And in time, a way would be found to

nullify a no-ship's invisibility. Taraza did not think the people of the

Scattering had found this -- at least not the ones skulking back into the places

that had spawned them.

There was absolutely no safe course through the conflicting forces, but she

thought the Sisterhood had armed itself as well as it could. The problem was

akin to that of a Guild navigator threading his ship through the folds of space

in a way that avoided collisions and entrapments.

Entrapments, they were the key, and there was Odrade springing the Sisterhood's

traps on the Tleilaxu.

When Taraza thought about Odrade, which was often in these crisis times, their

long association reasserted itself. It was as though she looked at a faded

tapestry in which some figures remained bright. Brightest of all, assuring

Odrade's position close to the seats of Sisterhood command, was her capacity for

cutting across details and getting at the surprising meat of a conflict. It was

a form of that dangerous Atreides prescience working secretly within her. Using

this hidden talent was the one thing that had aroused the most opposition, and

it was the one argument that Taraza admitted had the most validity. That thing

working far below the surface, its hidden movements indicated only by occasional

turbulence, that was the problem!

"Use her but stand ready to eliminate her," Taraza had argued. "We will still

have most of her offspring."

Taraza knew she could depend on Lucilla . . . provided Lucilla had found

sanctuary somewhere with Teg and the ghola. Alternate assassins existed at the

Keep on Rakis, of course. That weapon might have to be armed soon.

Taraza experienced a sudden turmoil within herself. Other Memories advised

caution in the utmost. Never again lose control of the breeding lines! Yes, if

Odrade escaped an elimination attempt, she would be alienated forever. Odrade

was a full Reverend Mother and some of those must still remain out there in the

Scattering -- not among the Honored Matres the Sisterhood had observed . . . but

still . . .

Never Again! That was the operational motto. Never another Kwisatz Haderach or

another Tyrant.

Control the breeders: Control their offspring.

Reverend Mothers did not die when their flesh died. They sank farther and

farther into the Bene Gesserit living core until their casual instructions and

even their unconscious observations became a part of the continuing Sisterhood.

Make no mistakes about Odrade!

The response to Odrade required specific tailoring and exquisite care. Odrade,

who allowed certain limited affections, "a mild warmth," she called them, argued

that emotions provided valuable insights if you did not let them govern you.

Taraza saw this mild warmth as a way into the heart of Odrade, a vulnerable

opening.

I know what you think of me, Dar, with your mild warmth toward an old companion

from school days. You think I am a potential danger to the Sisterhood but that

I can be saved from myself by watchful "friends."

Taraza knew that some of her advisors shared Odrade's opinion, listened quietly

and reserved judgment. Most of them still followed the Mother Superior's lead

but many knew of Odrade's wild talent and had recognized Odrade's doubts. Only

one thing kept most of the Sisters in line and Taraza did not try to delude

herself about it.

Every Mother Superior acted out of a profound loyalty to her Sisterhood.

Nothing must endanger Bene Gesserit continuity, not even herself. In her

precise and harshly self-judgmental way, Taraza examined her relationship to the

Sisterhood's continuing life.

Obviously, there was no immediate necessity to eliminate Odrade. Yet, Odrade

was now so close to the center of the ghola design that little occurring there

could escape her sensitive observation. Much that had not been revealed to her

would become known. The Atreides Manifesto had been almost a gamble. Odrade,

the obvious person to produce the Manifesto, could only achieve a deeper insight

as she wrote the document, but the words themselves were the ultimate barrier to

revelation.

Waff would appreciate that, Taraza knew.

Turning from the dark window, Taraza went back to her chairdog. The moment of

crucial decision -- go or no-go -- could be delayed but intermediate steps must

be taken. She composed a sample message in her mind and examined it while

sending a summons to Burzmali. The Bashar's favorite student would have to be

sent into action but not as Odrade wanted.

The message to Odrade was essentially simple:

"Help is on the way. You are on the scene, Dar. Where safety of girl Sheeana

is concerned, use own judgment. In all other matters that do not conflict with

my orders, carry out the plan."

There. That was it. Odrade had her instructions, the essentials that she would

accept as "the plan" even while she would recognize an incomplete pattern.

Odrade would obey. The "Dar" was a nice touch, Taraza thought. Dar and Tar.

That opening into Odrade's limited warmth would not be well shielded from the

Dar-and-Tar direction.

The long table on the right is set for a banquet of roast desert hare in sauce

cepeda. The other dishes, clockwise to the right from the far end of the table,

are aplomage sirian, chukka under glass, coffee with melange (note the hawk

crest of the Atreides on the urn), pot-a-oie and, in the Balut crystal bottle,

sparkling Caladan wine. Note the ancient poison detector concealed in the

chandelier.

-Dar-es-Balat, Description at a Museum Display

Teg found Duncan in the tiny dining alcove off the no-globe's gleaming kitchen.

Pausing in the passage to the alcove, Teg studied Duncan carefully: eight days

here and the lad appeared finally to have recovered from the peculiar rage that

had seized him as they entered the globe's access tube.

They had come through a shallow cave musky with the odors of a native bear. The

rocks at the back of the lair were not rocks, although they would have deceived

even the most sophisticated examination. A slight protrusion in the rocks would

shift if you knew or stumbled upon the secret code. That circular and twisting

movement opened the entire rear wall of the cave.

The access tube, brilliantly lighted automatically once they sealed the portal

behind them, was decorated with Harkonnen griffins on walls and ceiling. Teg

was struck by the image of a young Patrin stumbling into this place for the

first time (The shock! The awe! The elation!) and he failed to observe

Duncan's reaction until a low growl swelled in the enclosed space.

Duncan stood growling (almost a moan), fists clenched, gaze fixed on a Harkonnen

griffin along the right-hand wall. Rage and confusion warred for supremacy on

his face. He lifted both fists and crashed them against the raised figure,

drawing blood from his hands.

"Damn them to the deepest pits of hell!" he shouted.

It was an oddly mature curse issuing from the youthful mouth.

The instant the words were out Duncan relapsed into uncontrolled shudders.

Lucilla put an arm around him and stroked his neck in a soothing, almost sensual

way, until the shuddering subsided.

"Why did I do that?" Duncan whispered.

"You will know when your original memories are restored," she said.

"Harkonnens," Duncan whispered and blood suffused his face. He looked up at

Lucilla. "Why do I hate them so much?"

"Words cannot explain it," she said. "You will have to wait for the memories."

"I don't want the memories!" Duncan shot a startled look at Teg. "Yes! Yes, I

do want them."

Later as he looked up at Teg in the no-globe's dining alcove, Duncan's memory

obviously returned to that moment.

"When, Bashar?"

"Soon."

Teg glanced around the area. Duncan sat alone at the auto-scrubbed table, a cup

of brown liquid in front of him. Teg recognized the smell: one of the many

melange-laced items from the nullentropy bins. The bins were a treasure house

of exotic foods, clothing, weapons, and other artifacts -- a museum whose value

could not be calculated. There was a thin layer of dust all through the globe

but no deterioration of the things stored here. Every bit of the food was laced

with melange, not at an addict level unless you were a glutton, but always

noticeable. Even the preserved fruit had been dusted with the spice.

The brown liquid in Duncan's cup was one of the things Lucilla had tasted and

pronounced capable of sustaining life. Teg did not know precisely how Reverend

Mothers did this, but his own mother had been capable of it. One taste and they

knew the contents of food or drink.

A glance at the ornate clock set into the wall at the closed end of the alcove

told Teg it was later than he thought, well into the third hour of their

arbitrary afternoon. Duncan should still be up on the elaborate practice floor

but they both had seen Lucilla take off into the globe's upper reaches and Teg

saw this as a chance for them to talk unobserved.

Pulling up a chair, Teg seated himself on the opposite side of the table.

Duncan said, "I hate those clocks!"

"You hate everything here," Teg said, but he took a second look at the clock.

It was another antique, a round face with two analog hands and a digital second

counter. The two hands were priapean -- naked human figures: a large male with

enormous phallus and a smaller female with legs spread wide. Each time the two

clock hands met, the male appeared to enter the female.

"Gross," Teg agreed. He pointed to Duncan's drink: "You like that?"

"It's all right, sir. Lucilla says I should have it after exercise."

"My mother used to make me a similar drink for after heavy exertions," Teg said.

He leaned forward and inhaled, remembering the aftertaste, the cloying melange

in his nostrils.

"Sir, how long must we stay here?" Duncan asked.

"Until we are found by the right people or until we're sure we will not be

found."

"But . . . cut off in here, how will we know?"

"When I judge it's time, I'll take the life-shield blanket and start keeping

watch outside."

"I hate this place!"

"Obviously. But have you learned nothing about patience?"

Duncan grimaced. "Sir, why are you keeping me from being alone with Lucilla?"

Teg, exhaling as Duncan spoke, locked on the partial exhalation and then resumed

breathing. He knew, though, that the lad had observed. If Duncan knew, then

Lucilla must know!

"I don't think Lucilla knows what you're doing, sir," Duncan said, "but it's

getting pretty obvious." He glanced around him. "If this place didn't take so

much of her attention . . . Where does she dash off to like that?"

"I think she's up in the library."

"Library!"

"I agree it's primitive but it's also fascinating." Teg lifted his gaze to the

scrollwork on the nearby kitchen ceiling. The moment of decision had arrived.

Lucilla could not be depended upon to remain distracted much longer. Teg shared

her fascination, though. It was easy to lose yourself in these marvels. The

whole no-globe complex, some two hundred meters in diameter, was a fossil

preserved intact from the time of the Tyrant.

When she spoke about it, Lucilla's voice took on a husky, whispering quality.

"Surely, the Tyrant must have known about this place."

Teg's Mentat awareness had been immersed immediately in this suggestion. Why

did the Tyrant permit Family Harkonnen to squander so much of their last

remaining wealth on such an enterprise?

Perhaps for that very reason -- to drain them.

The cost in bribes and Guild shipping from the Ixian factories must have been

astronomical.

"Did the Tyrant know that one day we would need this place?" Lucilla asked.

No avoiding the prescient powers that Leto II had so often demonstrated, Teg

agreed.

Looking at Duncan seated across from him, Teg felt his neck hairs rising. There

was something eerie about this Harkonnen hideaway, as though the Tyrant himself

might have been here. What had happened to the Harkonnens who built it? Teg

and Lucilla had found absolutely no clues to why the globe had been abandoned.

Neither of them could wander through the no-globe without experiencing an acute

sense of history. Teg was constantly confounded by unanswered questions.

Lucilla, too, commented on this.

"Where did they go? There's nothing in my Other Memories to give the slightest

clue."

"Did the Tyrant lure them out and kill them?"

"I'm going back to the library. Perhaps today I'll find something."

For the first two days of their occupation, the globe had received a careful

examination by Lucilla and Teg. A silent and sullen Duncan tagged along as

though he feared to be left alone. Each new discovery awed them or shocked

them.

Twenty-one skeletons preserved in transparent plaz along a wall near the core!

Macabre observers of everyone who passed through there to the machinery chambers

and the nullentropy bins.

Patrin had warned Teg about the skeletons. On one of his first youthful

examinations of the globe, Patrin had found records that said the dead ones were

the artisans who had built the place, all slain by the Harkonnens to preserve

the secret.

Altogether, the globe was a remarkable achievement, an enclosure cut out of

Time, sealed away from everything external. After all of these millennia, its

frictionless machinery still created a mimetic projection that even the most

modern instruments could not distinguish from the background of dirt and rock.

"The Sisterhood must acquire this place intact!" Lucilla kept saying. "It's a

treasure house! They even kept their family's breeding records!"

That wasn't all the Harkonnens had preserved here. Teg kept finding himself

repelled by subtle and gross touches on almost everything in the globe. Like

that clock! Clothing, instruments for maintaining the environment, for

education and pleasure -- everything had been marked by that Harkonnen

compulsion to flaunt their uncaring sense of superiority to all other people and

all other standards.

Once more, Teg thought of Patrin as a youth in this place, probably no older

than the ghola. What had prompted Patrin to keep it a secret even from his wife

of so many years? Patrin had never touched on the reasons for secrecy, but Teg

made his own deductions. An unhappy childhood. The need for his own secret

place. Friends who were not friends but only people waiting to sneer at him.

None of those companions could be permitted to share such a wonder. It was his!

This was more than a place of lonely security. It had been Patrin's private

token of victory.

"I spent many happy hours there, Bashar. Everything still works. The records

are ancient but excellent once you grasp the dialect. There is much knowledge

in the place. But you will understand when you get there. You will understand

many things I have never told you."

The antique practice floor showed signs of Patrin's frequent usage. He had

changed the weapons coding on some of the automata in a way Teg recognized. The

time-counters told of muscle-torturing hours at the complicated exercises. This

globe explained those abilities which Teg had always found so remarkable in

Patrin. Natural talents had been honed here.

The automata of the no-globe were another matter.

Most of them represented defiance of the ancient proscriptions against such

devices. More than that, some had been designed for pleasure functions that

confirmed the more revolting stories Teg had heard about the Harkonnens. Pain

as pleasure! In its own way, these things explained the primly unbending

morality that Patrin had taken away from Gammu.

Revulsion created its own patterns.

Duncan took a deep swallow of his drink and looked at Teg over the lip of the

cup.

"Why did you come down here alone when I asked you to complete that last round

of exercises?" Teg asked.

"The exercises made no sense." Duncan put down his cup.

Well, Taraza, you were wrong, Teg thought. He has struck out for complete

independence sooner than you predicted.

Also, Duncan had stopped addressing his Bashar as "sir."

"You disobey me?"

"Not exactly."

"Then exactly what is it you're doing?"

"I have to know!"

"You won't like me very much when you do know."

Duncan looked startled. "Sir?"

Ahhhh, the "sir" is back!

"I have been preparing you for certain kinds of very intense pain," Teg said.

"It is necessary before we can restore your original memories."

"Pain, sir?"

"We know of no other way to bring back the original Duncan Idaho -- the one who

died."

"Sir, if you can do that, I will be nothing but grateful."

"So you say. But you may very well see me then as just one more whip in the

hands of those who have recalled you to life."

"Isn't it better to know, sir?"

Teg passed the back of a hand across his mouth. "If you hate me . . . can't say

I'd blame you."

"Sir, if you were in my place, is that how you would feel?" Duncan's posture,

tone of voice, facial expression -- all showed trembling confusion.

So far so good, Teg thought. The procedural steps were laid out with a

precision that demanded that every response from the ghola be interpreted with

care. Duncan was now filled with uncertainty. He wanted something and he

feared that thing.

"I'm only your teacher, not your father!" Teg said.

Duncan recoiled at the harsh tone. "Aren't you my friend?"

"That's a two-way street. The original Duncan Idaho will have to answer that

for himself."

A veiled look entered Duncan's eyes. "Will I remember this place, the Keep,

Schwangyu and . . ."

"Everything. You'll undergo a kind of double-vision memory for a time, but

you'll remember it all."

A cynical look came over the young face and, when he spoke, it was with

bitterness. "So you and I will become comrades."

All of a Bashar's command and presence in his voice, Teg followed the

reawakening instructions precisely.

"I'm not particularly interested in becoming your comrade." He fixed a

searching glare on Duncan's face. "You might make Bashar someday. I think it

possible you have the right stuff. But I'll be long dead by then."

"You're only comrades with Bashars?"

"Patrin was my comrade and he never rose above squad leader."

Duncan looked into his empty cup and then at Teg. "Why didn't you order

something to drink? You worked hard up there, too."

Perceptive question. It did not do to underestimate this youth. He knew that

food sharing was one of the most ancient rituals of association.

"The smell of yours was enough," Teg said. "Old memories. I don't need them

right now."

"Then why did you come down here?"

There it was, revealed in the young voice -- hope and fear. He wanted Teg to

say a particular thing.

"I wanted to take a careful measurement of how far those exercises have carried

you," Teg said. "I needed to come down here and look at you."

"Why so careful?"

Hope and fear! It was time for the precise shift of focus.

"I've never trained a ghola before."

Ghola. The word lay suspended between them, hanging on the cooking smells that

the globe's filters had not scrubbed from the air. Ghola! It was laced with

spice pungency from Duncan's empty cup.

Duncan leaned forward without speaking, his expression eager. Lucilla's

observation came into Teg's mind: "He knows how to use silence."

When it became obvious that Teg would not expand on that simple statement,

Duncan sank back with a disappointed look. The left corner of his mouth turned

downward, a sullen, festering expression. Everything focused inward the way it

had to be.

"You did not come down here to be alone," Teg said. "You came here to hide.

You're still hiding in there and you think no one will ever find you."

Duncan put a hand in front of his mouth. It was a signal gesture for which Teg

had been waiting. The instructions for this moment were clear: "The ghola

wants the original memories wakened and fears this utterly. That is the major

barrier you must sunder."

"Take your hand away from your mouth!" Teg ordered.

Duncan dropped his hand as though it had been burned. He stared at Teg like a

trapped animal.

"Speak the truth," Teg's instructions warned. "At this moment, every sense

afire, the ghola will see into your heart."

"I want you to know," Teg said, "that what the Sisterhood has ordered me to do

to you, that this is distasteful to me."

Duncan appeared to crouch into himself. "What did they order you to do?"

"The skills I was ordered to give you are flawed."

"F-flawed?"

"Part of it was comprehensive training, the intellectual part. In that respect,

you have been brought to the level of regimental commander."

"Better than Patrin?"

"Why must you be better than Patrin?"

"Wasn't he your comrade?"

"Yes."

"You said he never rose above squad leader!"

"Patrin was fully capable of taking over command of an entire multi-planet

force. He was a tactical magician whose wisdom I employed on many occasions."

"But you said he never --"

"It was his choice. The low rank gave him the common touch that we both found

useful many times."

"Regimental commander?" Duncan's voice was little more than a whisper. He

stared at the tabletop.

"You have an intellectual grasp of the functions, a bit impetuous but experience

usually smooths that out. Your weapons skills are superior for your age."

Still not looking at Teg, Duncan asked: "What is my age . . . sir?"

Just as the instructions cautioned: The ghola will dance all around the central

issue. "What is my age?" How old is a ghola.

His voice coldly accusing, Teg said: "If you want to know your ghola-age, why

don't you ask that?"

"Wha . . . what is that age, sir?"

There was such a weight of misery in the youthful voice that Teg felt tears

start in the corners of his eyes. He had been warned about this, too. "Do not

reveal too much compassion!" Teg covered the moment by clearing his throat. He

said: "That's a question only you can answer."

The instructions were explicit: "Turn it back on him! Keep him focused inward.

Emotional pain is as important to this process as the physical pain."

A deep sigh shuddered through Duncan. He closed his eyes tightly. When Teg had

first seated himself at the table, Duncan had thought: Is this the moment?

Will he do it now? But Teg's accusing tone, the verbal attacks, were completely

unexpected. And now Teg sounded patronizing.

He's patronizing me!

Cynical anger surged into Duncan. Did Teg think him such a fool that he could

be taken in by the most common ploy of a commander? Tone of voice and attitude

alone can subjugate another's will. Duncan sensed something else in the

patronizing, though: a core of plasteel that would not be penetrated.

Integrity . . . purpose. And Duncan had seen the tears start, the covering

gesture.

Opening his eyes and looking directly at Teg, Duncan said: "I don't mean to be

disrespectful or ungrateful or rude, sir. But I can't go on without answers."

Teg's instructions were clear: "You will know when the ghola reaches the point

of desperation. No ghola will try to hide this. It is intrinsic to their

psyche. You will recognize it in voice and posture."

Duncan had almost reached the critical point. Silence was mandatory for Teg

now. Force Duncan to ask his questions, to take his own course.

Duncan said: "Did you know that I once thought of killing Schwangyu?"

Teg opened his mouth and closed it without a sound. Silence! But the lad was

serious!

"I was afraid of her," Duncan said. "I don't like being afraid." He lowered

his gaze. "You once told me that we only hate what's really dangerous to us."

"He will approach it and retreat, approach and retreat. Wait until he plunges."

"I don't hate you," Duncan said, looking once more at Teg. "I resented it when

you said ghola to my face. But Lucilla's right: We should never resent the

truth even when it hurts."

Teg rubbed his own lips. The desire to speak filled him but it was not yet

plunge time.

"Doesn't it surprise you that I considered killing Schwangyu?" Duncan asked.

Teg held himself rigid. Even the shaking of his head would be taken as a

response.

"I thought of slipping something into her drink," Duncan said. "But that's a

coward's way and I'm not a coward. Whatever else, I'm not that."

Teg remained silently immobile.

"I think you really care what happens to me, Bashar," Duncan said. "But you're

right: we will never be comrades. If I survive, I will surpass you. Then . .

. it will be too late for us to be comrades. You spoke the truth."

Teg was unable to prevent himself from inhaling a deep breath of Mentat

realization: no avoiding the signs of strength in the ghola. Somewhere

recently, perhaps in this very alcove just now, the youth had ceased being a

youth and had become a man. The realization saddened Teg. It went so fast! No

normal growing-up in between.

"Lucilla does not really care what happens to me the way you do," Duncan said.

"She's just following her orders from that Mother Superior, Taraza."

Not yet! Teg cautioned himself. He wet his lips with his tongue.

"You have been obstructing Lucilla's orders," Duncan said. "What is it she's

supposed to do to me?"

The moment had come. "What do you think she's supposed to do?" Teg demanded.

"I don't know!"

"The original Duncan Idaho would know."

"You know! Why won't you tell me?"

"I'm only supposed to help restore your original memories."

"Then do it!"

"Only you can really do it."

"I don't know how!"

Teg sat forward on the edge of his chair, but did not speak. Plunge point? He

sensed something lacking in Duncan's desperation.

"You know I can read lips, sir," Duncan said. "Once I went up to the tower

observatory. I saw Lucilla and Schwangyu down below talking. Schwangyu said:

'Never mind that he's so young! You've had your orders.' "

Once more cautiously silent, Teg stared back at Duncan. It was like Duncan to

move around secretly in the Keep, spying, seeking knowledge. And he had seated

himself in that memory-mode now, not realizing that he still was spying and

seeking . . . but in a different way.

"I didn't think she was supposed to kill me," Duncan said. "But you know what

she was supposed to do because you've been obstructing her." Duncan pounded a

fist on the table. "Answer me, damn you!"

Ahhhh, full desperation!

"I can only tell you that what she intends conflicts with my orders. I was

commanded by Taraza herself to strengthen you and guard you from harm."

"But you said my training was . . . was flawed!"

"Necessary. It was done to prepare you for your original memories."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"You already know."

"I don't, I tell you! Please teach me!"

"You do many things without having been taught them. Did we teach you

disobedience?"

"Please help me!" It was a desperate wail.

Teg forced himself to chilly remoteness. "What in the nether hell do you think

I'm doing?"

Duncan clenched both fists and pounded them on the table, making his cup dance.

He glared at Teg. Abruptly, an odd expression came over Duncan's face --

something grasping in his eyes.

"Who are you?" Duncan whispered.

The key question!

Teg's voice was a lash striking out at a suddenly defenseless victim: "Who do

you think I am?"

A look of utter desperation twisted Duncan's features. He managed only a

gasping stutter: "You're . . . you're . . ."

"Duncan! Stop this nonsense!" Teg jumped to his feet and stared down with

assumed rage.

"You're . . ."

Teg's right hand shot out in a swift arc. The open palm cracked against

Duncan's cheek. "How dare you disobey me?" Left hand out, another rocking

slap. "How dare you?"

Duncan reacted so swiftly that Teg experienced an electric instant of absolute

shock. Such speed! Although there were separate elements in Duncan's attack,

it occurred in one fluid blur: a leap upward, both feet on the chair, rocking

the chair, using that motion to slash the right arm down at Teg's vulnerable

shoulder nerves.

Responding out of trained instincts, Teg dodged sideways and flailed his left

leg over the table into Duncan's groin. Teg still did not completely escape.

The heel of Duncan's hand continued downward to strike beside the knee of Teg's

flailing leg. It numbed the whole leg.

Duncan sprawled across the tabletop, trying to slide backward in spite of the

disabling kick. Teg supported himself, left hand on table, and chopped with the

other hand to the base of Duncan's spine, into the nexus deliberately weakened

by the exercises of the past few days.

Duncan groaned as paralyzing agony shot through his body. Another person would

have been immobilized, screaming, but Duncan merely groaned as he clawed toward

Teg, continuing the attack.

Relentless in the necessities of the moment, Teg proceeded to create greater

pain in his victim, making sure each time that Duncan saw the attacker's face at

the instant of greatest agony.

"Watch his eyes." the instructions warned. And Bellonda, reinforcing the

procedure, had cautioned: "His eyes will seem to look through you but he will

call you Leto."

Much later, Teg found difficulty in recalling each detail of his obedience to

the reawakening procedure. He knew that he continued to function as commanded

but his memory went elsewhere, leaving the flesh free to carry out his orders.

Oddly, his trick memory fastened onto another act of disobedience: the Cerbol

Revolt, himself at middle age but already a Bashar with a formidable reputation.

He had donned his best uniform without its medals (a subtle touch, that) and had

presented himself in the scorching noon heat of Cerbol's battle-plowed fields.

Completely unarmed in the path of the advancing rebels!

Many among the attackers owed him their lives. Most of them had once given him

their deepest allegiance. Now, they were in violent disobedience. And Teg's

presence in their path said to those advancing soldiers:

"I will not wear the medals that tell what I did for you when we were comrades.

I will not be anything that says I am one of you. I wear only the uniform that

announces that I am still the Bashar. Kill me if that is how far you will carry

your disobedience."

When most of the attacking force threw down their arms and came forward, some of

their commanders bent the knee to their old Bashar and he remonstrated: "You

never needed to bow to me or get on your knees! Your new leaders have taught

you bad habits."

Later, he told the rebels he shared some of their grievances. Cerbol had been

badly misused. But he also warned them:

"One of the most dangerous things in the universe is an ignorant people with

real grievances. That is nowhere near as dangerous, however, as an informed and

intelligent society with grievances. The damage that vengeful intelligence can

wreak, you cannot even imagine. The Tyrant would seem a benevolent father

figure by comparison with what you were about to create!"

It was all true, of course, but in a Bene Gesserit context, and it helped little

with what he was commanded to do to the Duncan Idaho ghola -- creating mental

and physical agony in an almost helpless victim.

Easiest to recall was the look in Duncan's eyes. They did not change focus, but

glared directly up into Teg's face, even at the instant of the final screaming

shout:

"Damn you, Leto! What are you doing?"

He called me Leto.

Teg limped backward two steps. His left leg tingled and ached where Duncan had

struck it. Teg realized that he was panting and at the end of his reserves. He

was much too old for such exertions and the things he had just done made him

feel dirty. The reawakening procedure was thoroughly fixed in his awareness,

though. He knew that gholas once had been awakened by conditioning them

unconsciously to attempt murder on someone they loved. The ghola psyche,

shattered and forced to reassemble, was always psychologically scarred. This

new technique left the scars in the one who managed the process.

Slowly, moving against the outcry of muscles and nerves that had been stunned by

agony, Duncan slid backward off the table and stood leaning against his chair,

trembling and glaring at Teg.

Teg's instructions said: "You must stand very quietly. Do not move. Let him

look at you as he will."

Teg stood unmoving as he had been instructed. Memory of the Cerbol Revolt left

his mind: He knew what he had done then and now. In a way, the two times were

similar. He had told the rebels no ultimate truths (if such existed); only

enough to lure them back into the fold. Pain and its predictable consequences.

"This is for your own good."

Was it really good, what they did to this Duncan Idaho ghola?

Teg wondered what was occurring in Duncan's consciousness. Teg had been told as

much as was known about these moments, but he could see that the words were

inadequate. Duncan's eyes and face gave abundant evidence of internal turmoil -

- a hideous twisting of mouth and cheeks, the gaze darting this way and that.

Slowly, exquisite in its slowness, Duncan's face relaxed. His body continued to

tremble. He felt the throbbing of his body as a distant thing, aches and

darting pains that had happened to someone else. He was here, though, in this

immediate moment -- whatever and wherever this was. His memories would not

mesh. He felt suddenly out of place in flesh too young, not fitted to his preghola

existence. The darting and twisting of awareness was all internal now.

Teg's instructors had said: "He will have ghola-imposed filters on his preghola

memories. Some of the original memories will come flooding back. Other

recollections will return more slowly. There will be no meshing, though, until

he recalls that original moment of death." Bellonda had then given Teg the

known details of that fatal moment.

"Sardaukar," Duncan whispered. He looked around him at the Harkonnen symbols

that permeated the no-globe. "The Emperor's crack troops wearing Harkonnen

uniforms!" A wolfish grin twisted his mouth. "How they must have hated that!"

Teg remained silently watchful.

"They killed me," Duncan said. It was a flatly unemotional statement, all the

more chilling for its positive delivery. A violent shudder passed through him

and the trembling subsided. "At least a dozen of them in that little room." He

looked directly at Teg. "One of them got through at me like a meat cleaver

right down on my head." He hesitated, his throat working convulsively. His

gaze remained on Teg. "Did I buy Paul enough time to escape?"

"Answer all of his questions truthfully."

"He escaped."

Now, they came to a testing moment. Where had the Tleilaxu acquired the Idaho

cells? The Sisterhood's tests said they were original, but suspicions remained.

The Tleilaxu had done something of their own to this ghola. His memories could

be a valuable clue to that thing.

"But the Harkonnens . . ." Duncan said. His memories from the Keep meshed.

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes!" A fierce laugh shook him. He sent a roaring victory shout

at the long-dead Baron Vladimir Harkonnen: "I paid you back, Baron! Oh, I did

it to you for all of the ones you destroyed!"

"You remember the Keep and the things we taught you?" Teg asked.

A puzzled frown drew deep crease lines across Duncan's forehead. Emotional pain

warred with his physical pains. He nodded in response to Teg's question. There

were two lives, one that had been walled off behind the axlotl tanks and another

. . . another . . . Duncan felt incomplete. Something remained suppressed

within him. The reawakening was not finished. He stared angrily at Teg. Was

there more? Teg had been brutal. Necessary brutality? Was this how you had to

restore a ghola?

"I . . ." Duncan shook his head from side to side like a great wounded animal

in front of the hunter.

"Do you have all of your memories?" Teg insisted.

"All? Oh, yes. I remember Gammu when it was Giedi Prime -- the oil-soaked,

blood-soaked hell hole of the Imperium! Yes, indeed, Bashar. I was your

dutiful student. Regimental commander!" Again, he laughed, throwing his head

back in an oddly adult gesture for that young body.

Teg experienced the sudden release of a deep satisfaction, far deeper than

relief. It had worked as they said it would.

"Do you hate me?" he asked.

"Hate you? Didn't I tell you I would be grateful?"

Abruptly, Duncan lifted his hands and peered at them. He shifted his gaze

downward at his youthful body. "What a temptation!" he muttered. He dropped

his hands and focused on Teg's face, tracing the lines of identity. "Atreides,"

he said. "You're all so damned alike!"

"Not all," Teg said.

"I'm not talking about appearance, Bashar." His eyes went out of focus. "I

asked my age." There was a long silence, then: "Gods of the deep! So much

time has passed!"

Teg said what he had been instructed to say: "The Sisterhood has need of you."

"In this immature body? What am I supposed to do?"

"Truly, I don't know, Duncan. The body will mature and I presume a Reverend

Mother will explain matters to you."

"Lucilla?"

Abruptly, Duncan looked up at the ornate ceiling, then at the alcove and its

baroque clock. He remembered coming here with Teg and Lucilla. This place was

the same but it was different. "Harkonnens," he whispered. He sent a glowering

look at Teg. "Do you know how many of my family the Harkonnens tortured and

killed?"

"One of Taraza's Archivists gave me a report."

"A report? You think words can tell it?"

"No. But that was the only answer I had to your question."

"Damn you, Bashar! Why do you Atreides always have to be so truthful and

honorable?"

"I think it's bred into us."

"That's quite right." The voice was Lucilla's and came from behind Teg.

Teg did not turn. How much had she heard? How long had she been there?

Lucilla came up to stand beside Teg but her attention was on Duncan. "I see

that you've done it, Miles."

"Taraza's orders to the letter," Teg said.

"You have been very clever, Miles," she said. "Much more clever than I

suspected you could be. That mother of yours should have been severely punished

for what she taught you."

"Ahhhh, Lucilla the seductress," Duncan said. He glanced at Teg and returned

his attention to Lucilla. "Yes, now I can answer my other question -- what

she's supposed to do."

"They're called Imprinters," Teg said.

"Miles," Lucilla said, "if you have complicated my task in ways that prevent me

from carrying out my orders, I will have you roasted on a skewer."

The emotionless quality of her voice sent a shudder through Teg. He knew her

threat was a metaphor, but the implications in the threat were real.

"A punishment banquet!" Duncan said. "How nice."

Teg addressed himself to Duncan: "There's nothing romantic about what we've

done to you, Duncan. I've assisted the Bene Gesserit in more than one

assignment that left me feeling dirty, but never dirtier than this one."

"Silence!" Lucilla ordered. The full force of Voice was in the command.

Teg let it flow through him and past him as his mother had taught, then: "Those

of us who give our true loyalty to the Sisterhood have only one concern:

survival of the Bene Gesserit. Not survival of any individual but of the

Sisterhood itself. Deceptions, dishonesties -- those are empty words when the

question is the Sisterhood's survival."

"Damn that mother of yours, Miles!" Lucilla paid him the compliment of not

hiding her rage.

Duncan stared at Lucilla. Who was she? Lucilla? He felt his memories stirring

of themselves. Lucilla was not the same person . . . not the same at all, and

yet . . . bits and pieces were the same. Her voice. Her features. Abruptly,

he saw again the face of the woman he had glimpsed on the wall of his room at

the Keep.

"Duncan, my sweet Duncan."

Tears fell from Duncan's eyes. His own mother -- another Harkonnen victim.

Tortured . . . who knew what else? Never seen again by her "sweet Duncan."

"Gods, I wish I had one of them to kill right now," Duncan moaned.

Once more, he focused on Lucilla. Tears blurred her features and made the

comparisons easier. Lucilla's face blended with that of the Lady Jessica,

beloved of Leto Atreides. Duncan glanced at Teg, back to Lucilla, shaking the

tears from his eyes as he moved. The memory faces dissolved into that of the

real Lucilla standing in front of him. Similarities . . . but never the same.

Never again the same.

Imprinter.

He could guess the meaning. A pure Duncan Idaho wildness arose in him. "Is it

my child you want in your womb, Imprinter? I know you're not called mothers for

nothing."

Her voice cold, Lucilla said: "We'll discuss it another time."

"Let us discuss it in a congenial place," Duncan said. "Perhaps I'll sing you a

song. Not as good as old Gurney Halleck would do it but good enough to prepare

for a little bedsport."

"You find this amusing?" she asked.

"Amusing? No, but I am reminded of Gurney. Tell me, Bashar, have you brought

him back from the dead, too?"

"Not to my knowledge," Teg said.

"Ahhhh, there was a singing man!" Duncan said. "He could be killing you while

he sang and never miss a note."

Her manner still icy, Lucilla said: "We of the Bene Gesserit have learned to

avoid music. It evokes too many confusing emotions. Memory-emotions, of

course."

It was meant to awe him with a reminder of all those Other Memories and the Bene

Gesserit powers these implied but Duncan only laughed louder.

"What a shame that is," he said. "You miss so much of life." And he began

humming an old Halleck refrain:

"Review friends, troops long past review. . ."

But his mind whirled elsewhere with the rich new flavor of these reborn moments

and once more he felt the eager touch of something powerful that remained buried

within him. Whatever it was, it was violent and it concerned Lucilla, the

Imprinter. In imagination, he saw her dead and her body awash in blood.

People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called

happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our

designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give

it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most

people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to

call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape,

then people will follow.

-Leadership Secrets of the Bene Gesserit

With a silent Waff about twenty paces ahead of them, Odrade and Sheeana walked

down a weed-fringed road beside a spice-storage yard. All of them wore new

desert robes and glistening stillsuits. The gray nulplaz fence that defined the

yard beside them held bits of grass and cottony seedpods in its meshes. Looking

at the seedpods, Odrade thought of them as life trying to break through a human

intervention.

Behind them, the blocky buildings that had arisen around Dar-es-Balat baked in

the sunlight of early afternoon. Hot dry air burned her throat when she inhaled

too quickly. Odrade felt dizzy and at war within herself. Thirst nagged at

her. She walked as though balanced on the edge of a precipice. The situation

she had created at Taraza's command might explode momentarily.

How fragile it is!

Three forces balanced, not really supporting each other but joined by motives

that could shift in an instant and topple the whole alliance. The military

people sent by Taraza did not reassure Odrade. Where was Teg? Where was

Burzmali? For that matter, where was the ghola? He should be here by now. Why

had she been ordered to delay matters?

Today's venture would certainly delay matters! Although it had Taraza's

blessing, Odrade thought this excursion into the desert of the worms might be a

permanent delay. And there was Waff. If he survived, would there be any pieces

for him to pick up?

Despite the healing applications of the Sisterhood's best quicknit amplifiers,

Waff said his arms still ached where Odrade had broken them. He was not

complaining, merely providing information. He appeared to accept their fragile

alliance, even the modifications that incorporated the Rakian priestly cabal.

No doubt he was reassured that one of his own Face Dancers occupied the High

Priest's bench in the guise of Tuek. Waff spoke forcefully when he demanded his

"breeding mothers" from the Bene Gesserit and, consequently, withheld his part

of their bargain.

"Only a small delay while the Sisterhood reviews the new agreement," Odrade

explained. "Meanwhile . . ."

Today was "meanwhile."

Odrade put aside her misgivings and began to enter the mood of this venture.

Waff's behavior fascinated her, especially his reaction on meeting Sheeana:

quite plainly fearful and more than a little in awe.

The minion of his Prophet.

Odrade glanced sideways at the girl walking dutifully beside her. There was the

real leverage for shaping these events into the Bene Gesserit design.

The Sisterhood's breakthrough into the reality behind Tleilaxu behavior excited

Odrade. Waff's fanatic "true faith" gained shape with each new response from

him. She felt fortunate just to be here studying a Tleilaxu Master in a

religious setting. The very grit under Waff's feet ignited behavior that she

had been trained to identify.

We should have guessed, Odrade thought. The manipulations of our own

Missionaria Protectiva should have told us how the Tleilaxu did it: keeping

themselves to themselves, blocking off every intrusion for all of those plodding

millennia.

They did not appear to have copied the Bene Gesserit structure. And what other

force could do such a thing? It was a religion. The Great Belief!

Unless the Tleilaxu are using their ghola system as a kind of immortality.

Taraza could be right. Reincarnated Tleilaxu Masters would not be like Reverend

Mothers -- no Other Memories, only personal memories. But prolonged!

Fascinating!

Odrade looked ahead at Waff's back. Plodding. It appeared to come naturally to

him. She recalled that he called Sheeana "Alyama." Another confirming

linguistic insight into Waff's Great Belief. It meant "Blessed One." The

Tleilaxu had kept an ancient language not only alive but unchanged.

Did Waff not know that only powerful forces such as religions did that?

We have the roots of your obsession in our grasp, Waff! It is not unlike some

that we have created. We know how to manipulate such things for our own

purposes.

Taraza's communication burned in Odrade's awareness: "The Tleilaxu plan is

transparent: Ascendancy. The human universe must be made into a Tleilaxu

universe. They could not hope to achieve such a goal without help from the

Scattering. Ergo."

The Mother Superior's reasoning could not be denied. Even the opposition within

that deep schism that threatened to shatter the Sisterhood agreed. But the

thought of those human masses in the Scattering, their numbers exploding

exponentially, produced a lonely sense of desperation in Odrade.

We are so few compared to them.

Sheeana stooped and picked up a pebble. She looked at it a moment and then

threw it at the fence beside them. The pebble sailed through the meshes without

touching them.

Odrade took a firmer grip on herself. The sounds of their footsteps on the

blown sand that drifted across this little-used roadway seemed suddenly overloud.

The spindly causeway leading out over the Dar-es-Balat ring-qanat and

moat lay no more than two hundred paces ahead at the end of this narrow road.

Sheeana spoke: "I am doing this because you ordered it, Mother. But I still

don't know why."

Because this is the crucible where we test Waff and, through him, reshape the

Tleilaxu!

"It is a demonstration," Odrade said.

That was true. It was not the whole truth, but it served.

Sheeana walked head down, gaze intent on where she placed each step. Was this

how she always approached her Shaitan? Odrade wondered. Thoughtful and remote?

Odrade heard a faint thwocking sound high up behind her. The watchful

ornithopters were arriving. They would keep their distance, but many eyes would

observe this demonstration.

"I will dance," Sheeana said. "That usually calls a big one."

Odrade felt her heartbeat quicken. Would the "big one" continue to obey Sheeana

despite the presence of two companions?

This is suicidal madness!

But it had to be done: Taraza's orders.

Odrade glanced at the fenced spice yard beside them. The place appeared oddly

familiar. More than deja vu. Inner certainty informed by Other Memories told

her this place remained virtually unchanged from ancient times. The design of

the spice silos in the yard was as old as Rakis: oval tanks on tall legs, metal

and plaz insects waiting stilt-legged to leap upon their prey. She suspected an

unconscious message from the original designers: Melange is both boon and bane.

Beneath the silos, a sandy wasteland where no growth was permitted spread out

beside mud-walled buildings, an amoeba arm of Dar-es-Balat reaching almost to

the qanat edge. The Tyrant's long-hidden no-globe had produced a teeming

religious community that hid most of its activities behind windowless walls and

underground.

The secret working of our unconscious desires!

Once more, Sheeana spoke: "Tuek is different."

Odrade saw Waff's head lift sharply. He had heard. He would be thinking: Can

we conceal things from the Prophet's messenger?

Too many people already knew that a Face Dancer masqueraded as Tuek, Odrade

thought. The priestly cabal, of course, believed they were giving the Tleilaxu

enough netting in which to snare not only the Bene Tleilax but the Sisterhood as

well.

Odrade smelled the biting odors of chemicals that had been used to kill wild

growth in the spice storage yard. The odors forced her attention back to

necessities. She did not dare indulge in mental wanderings out here! It would

be so easy for the Sisterhood to become caught in its own trap.

Sheeana stumbled and emitted a small cry, more irritation than pain. Waff

turned his head sharply and looked at Sheeana before returning his attention to

the roadway. The child had merely stumbled on a break in the road surface, he

saw. Drifted sand concealed places where the roadway had been cracked. The

faery structure of the causeway ahead of him appeared sound, however. Not

substantial enough to support one of the Prophet's descendants, but more than

enough for a supplicant human to cross it into the desert.

Waff thought of himself chiefly as a supplicant.

I come as a beggar into the land of thy messenger, God.

He had his suspicions about Odrade. The Reverend Mother had brought him here to

drain him of his knowledge before killing him. With God's help, I may surprise

her yet. He knew his body was proof against an Ixian Probe, although she

obviously did not have such a cumbersome device on her person. But it was the

strength of his own will and confidence in God's grace that reassured Waff.

And what if the hand they hold out to us is held out in sincerity?

That, too, would be God's doing.

Alliance with the Bene Gesserit, firm control of Rakis: What a dream that was!

The Shariat ascendant at last and the Bene Gesserit as missionaries.

When Sheeana again missed her footing and uttered another small sound of

complaint, Odrade said: "Don't favor yourself, child!"

Odrade saw Waff's shoulders stiffen. He did not like that peremptory manner

with his "Blessed One." There was backbone in the little man. Odrade

recognized it as the strength of fanaticism. Even if the worm came to kill him,

Waff would not flee. Faith in God's will would carry him directly into his own

death -- unless he were shaken out of his religious security.

Odrade suppressed a smile. She could follow his thinking process: God will

soon reveal His Purpose.

But Waff was thinking about his cells growing in the slow renewal at Bandalong.

No matter what happened here, his cells would carry on for the Bene Tleilax . .

. and for God -- a serial Waff always serving the Great Belief.

"I can smell Shaitan, you know," Sheeana said.

"Right now?" Odrade looked up at the causeway ahead of them. Waff already was

a few steps onto that arching surface.

"No, only when he comes," Sheeana said.

"Of course you can, child. Anyone could."

"I can smell him a long way off."

Odrade inhaled deeply through her nose, sorting the smells from the background

of burnt flint: faint whiffs of melange . . . ozone, something distinctly acid.

She motioned for Sheeana to precede her single-file onto the causeway. Waff was

holding his steady twenty paces ahead. The causeway dipped down to the desert

some sixty meters ahead of him.

I will taste the sand at the first opportunity, Odrade thought. That will tell

me many things.

As she mounted the causeway over the water moat, she looked off to the southwest

at a low barrier along the horizon. Abruptly, Odrade was confronted by a

compelling Other Memory. There was none of the crispness in it of actual

vision, but she recognized it -- a mingling of images from the deepest sources

within her.

Damn! she thought. Not now!

There was no escape. Such intrusions came with purpose, an unavoidable demand

upon her awareness.

Warning!

She squinted at the horizon, allowing the Other Memory to superimpose itself: a

long-ago high barrier far away out there . . . people moving along the top of

it. There was a faery bridge in that memory-distance, insubstantial and

beautiful. It linked one part of that vanished barrier to another part and she

knew without seeing it that a river ran beneath that long-gone bridge. The

Idaho River! Now, the superimposed image provided movement: objects falling

from the bridge. They were too far away to identify but she had the labels for

this image projection now. With a sense of horror and elation, she identified

that scene.

The faery bridge was collapsing! Tumbling into the river below it.

This vision was not some random destruction. This was classical violence

carried in many memories, which had come down to her in the moments of spice

agony. Odrade could classify the finely tuned components of the image:

Thousands of her ancestors had watched that scene in imaginative reconstruction.

Not a real visual memory but an assemblage of accurate reports.

That is where it happened!

Odrade stopped and let the image projections have their way with her awareness.

Warning! Something dangerous had been identified. She did not try to dig out

the warning's substance. If she did that, she knew it could fall apart in

skeins, any one of which might be relevant, but the original certainty would

vanish.

This thing out there was fixed in the Atreides history. Leto II, the Tyrant,

had fallen to his dissolution from that faery bridge. The great worm of Rakis,

the Tyrant God Emperor himself, had been tumbled from that bridge on his wedding

peregrination.

There! Right there in the Idaho River beneath his destroyed bridge, the Tyrant

had been submerged in his own agony. Right there, the transubstantiation from

which the Divided God was born -- it all began there.

Why is that a warning?

Bridge and river had vanished from this land. The high wall that had enclosed

the Tyrant's dryland Sareer was eroded into a broken line on a heat-shimmering

horizon.

If a worm came now with its encapsulated pearl of the Tyrant's forever-dreaming

memory, would that memory be dangerous? So Taraza's opposition in the

Sisterhood argued.

"He will awaken!"

Taraza and her advisors denied even the possibility.

Still, this claxon from Odrade's Other Memories could not be shunted aside.

"Reverend Mother, why have we stopped?"

Odrade felt her awareness lurch back into an immediate present that demanded her

attention. Out there in that warning vision was where the Tyrant's endless

dream began but other dreams intruded. Sheeana stood in front of her with a

puzzled expression.

"I was looking out there." Odrade pointed. "That was where Shai-hulud began,

Sheeana."

Waff stopped at the end of the causeway, one step short of the encroaching sand

and now about forty paces ahead of Odrade and Sheeana. Odrade's voice brought

him to stiff alertness but he did not turn. Odrade could feel the displeasure

in his posture. Waff would not like even a hint of cynicism directed at his

Prophet. He always suspected cynicism from Reverend Mothers. Especially where

religious matters were concerned. Waff was not yet ready to accept that the

long-detested and feared Bene Gesserit might share his Great Belief. That

ground would have to be filled in with care-as was always the way with the

Missionaria Protectiva.

"They say there was a big river," Sheeana said.

Odrade heard the lilting note of derision in Sheeana's voice. The child learned

quickly!

Waff turned and scowled at them. He heard it, too. What was he thinking about

Sheeana now?

Odrade held Sheeana's shoulder with one hand and pointed with the other. "There

was a bridge right there. The great wall of the Sareer was left open there to

permit the passage of the Idaho River. The bridge spanned that break."

Sheeana sighed. "A real river," she whispered.

"Not a qanat and too big for a canal," Odrade said.

"I've never seen a river," Sheeana said.

"That was where they dumped Shai-hulud into the river," Odrade said. She

gestured to her left. "Over on this side, many kilometers in that direction, he

built his palace."

"There's nothing over there but sand," Sheeana said.

"The palace was torn down in the Famine Times," Odrade said. "People thought

there was a hoard of spice in it. They were wrong, of course. He was much too

clever for that."

Sheeana leaned close to Odrade and whispered: "There is a great treasure of the

spice, though. The chantings tell about it. I've heard it many times. My . .

. they say it's in a cave."

Odrade smiled. Sheeana referred to the Oral History, of course. And she had

almost said: "My father . . ." meaning her real father who had died in this

desert. Odrade already had lured that story from the girl.

Still whispering close to Odrade's ear, Sheeana said: "Why is that little man

with us? I don't like him."

"It is necessary for the demonstration," Odrade said.

Waff took that moment to step off the causeway onto the first soft slope of open

sand. He moved with care but no visible hesitation. Once on the sand, he

turned, his eyes glistening in the hot sunlight, and stared first at Sheeana and

then at Odrade.

Still that awe in him when he looks at Sheeana, Odrade thought. What great

things he believes he will discover here. He will be restored. And the

prestige!

Sheeana sheltered her eyes with one hand and studied the desert.

"Shaitan likes the heat," Sheeana said. "People hide inside when it's hot but

that's when Shaitan comes."

Not Shai-hulud, Odrade thought. Shaitan! You predicted it well, Tyrant. What

else did you know about our times?

Was it really the Tyrant out there dormant in all of his worm descendants?

None of the analyses Odrade had studied gave a sure explanation of what had

driven one human being to make himself into a symbiote with that original worm

of Arrakis. What went through his mind in the millennia of that awful

transformation? Was any of that, even the smallest fragment, preserved in

today's Rakian worms?

"He is near, Mother," Sheeana said. "Do you smell him?"

Waff peered apprehensively at Sheeana.

Odrade inhaled deeply: a rich swelling of cinnamon on the bitter flint

undertones. Fire, brimstone -- the crystal-banked inferno of the great worm.

She stooped and brought up a pinch of blown sand to her tongue. All of the

background was there: the Dune of Other Memory and the Rakis of this day.

Sheeana pointed at an angle to her left, directly into the light breeze from the

desert. "Out there. We must hurry."

Without waiting for permission from Odrade, Sheeana ran lightly down the

causeway, past Waff and out onto the first dune. She stopped there until Odrade

and Waff caught up with her. Off the dune face she led them, up another with

sand clogging their passage, out along a great curving barracan with wisps of

dusty saltation blowing from its crest. Soon, they had put almost a kilometer

between themselves and the water-girded security of Dar-es-Balat.

Again, Sheeana stopped.

Waff came to a panting halt behind her. Perspiration glistened where his

stillsuit hood crossed his brow.

Odrade stopped a pace behind Waff. She took deep, calming breaths while she

peered past Waff to where Sheeana's attention was fixed.

A furious tide of sand had poured across the desert beyond the dune where they

stood, driven by a storm wind. Bedrock lay exposed in a long narrow avenue of

giant boulders, which lay scattered and upturned like the broken building blocks

of a mad promethean. Through this wild maze, the sand had poured like a river,

leaving its signature in deep scratches and gouges, then plunging off a low

escarpment to lose itself in more dunes.

"Down there," Sheeana said, pointing at the avenue of bedrock. Off their dune

she went, sliding and scrambling in spilled sand. At the bottom, she stopped

beside a boulder at least twice her height.

Waff and Odrade paused just behind her.

The slipface of another giant barracan, sinuous as the back of a sporting whale,

lifted into the silver-blue sky beside them.

Odrade used the pause to recompose her oxygen balance. That mad run had made

great demands on flesh. Waff, she noted, was red-faced and breathing deeply.

The flinty cinnamon smell was oppressive in the confined passage. Waff sniffed

and rubbed at his nose with the back of a hand. Sheeana lifted herself on one

toe, pivoted and darted ten paces across the rocky avenue. She put one foot up

on the sandy incline of the outer dune and lifted both arms to the sky. Slowly

at first and then with increasing tempo, she began to dance, moving up onto the

sand.

The 'thopter sounds grew louder overhead.

"Listen!" Sheeana called, not pausing in her dance.

It was not to the 'thopters that she called their attention. Odrade turned her

head to present both ears to a new sound intruding on their rock-tumbled maze.

A sibilant hiss, subterranean and muted by sand -- it became louder with

shocking swiftness. There was heat in it, a noticeable warming of the breeze

that twisted down their rocky avenue. The hissing swelled to a crescendo roar.

Abruptly, the crystal-ringed gaping of a gigantic mouth lifted over the dune

directly above Sheeana.

"Shaitan!" Sheeana screamed, not breaking the rhythm of her dance. "Here I am,

Shaitan!"

As it crested the dune, the worm dipped its mouth downward toward Sheeana. Sand

cascaded around her feet, forcing her to stop her dance. The smell of cinnamon

filled the rocky defile. The worm stopped above them.

"Messenger of God," Waff breathed.

Heat dried the perspiration on Odrade's exposed face and made the automatic

insulation of her stillsuit puff outward perceptibly. She inhaled deeply,

sorting the components behind that cinnamon assault. The air around them was

sharp with ozone and swiftly oxygen rich. Her senses at full alert, Odrade

stored impressions.

If I survive, she thought.

Yes, this was valuable data. The day might come when others would use it.

Sheeana backed out of the spilled sand onto the exposed rock. She resumed her

dance, moving more wildly, flinging her head at each turn. Hair whipped across

her face and each time she whirled to confront the worm, she screamed "Shaitan!"

Daintily, like a child on unfamiliar ground, the worm once more moved forward.

It slid across the dune crest, curled itself down onto the exposed rock and

presented its burning mouth slightly above and about two paces from Sheeana.

As it stopped, Odrade became conscious of the deep furnace rumbling of the worm.

She could not tear her gaze away from the reflections of lambent orange flames

within the creature. It was a cave of mysterious fire.

Sheeana stopped her dance. She clenched both fists at her sides and stared back

at the monster she had summoned.

Odrade took timed breaths, the controlled pacing of a Reverend Mother gathering

all of her powers. If this was the end -- well, she had obeyed Taraza's orders.

Let the Mother Superior learn what she would from the watchers overhead.

"Hello, Shaitan," Sheeana said. "I have brought a Reverend Mother and a man of

the Tleilaxu with me."

Waff slumped to his knees and bowed.

Odrade slipped past him to stand beside Sheeana.

Sheeana breathed deeply. Her face was flushed.

Odrade heard the click-ticking of their overworked stillsuits. The hot,

cinnamon-drenched air around them was charged with the sounds of this meeting,

all dominated by the murmurous burning within the quiescent worm.

Waff came up beside Odrade, his trancelike gaze fixed on the worm.

"I am here," he whispered.

Odrade silently cursed him. Any unwarranted noise could attract this beast onto

them. She knew what Waff was thinking, though: No other Tleilaxu had ever

stood this close to a descendant of his Prophet. Not even the Rakian priests

had ever done this!

With her right hand, Sheeana made a sudden downward gesture. "Down to us,

Shaitan!" she said.

The worm lowered its gaping mouth until the internal firepit filled the rocky

defile in front of them.

Her voice little more than a whisper, Sheeana said: "See how Shaitan obeys me,

Mother?"

Odrade could feel Sheeana's control over the worm, a pulse of hidden language

between child and monster. It was uncanny.

Her voice rising in impudent arrogance, Sheeana said: "I will ask Shaitan to

let us ride him!" She scrambled up the slipface of the dune beside the worm.

Immediately, the great mouth lifted to follow her movements. "Stay there!"

Sheeana shouted. The worm stopped.

It's not her words that command it, Odrade thought. Something else . . .

something else . . .

"Mother, come with me," Sheeana called.

Thrusting Waff ahead of her, Odrade obeyed. They scrambled up the sandy slope

behind Sheeana. Dislodged sand spilled down beside the waiting worm, piling up

in the defile. Ahead of them, the worm's tapering tail curved along the dune

crest. Sheeana led them at a sand-clotted trot to the very tip of the thing.

There, she gripped the leading edge of a ring in the corrugated surface and

scrambled up onto her desert beast.

More slowly, Odrade and Waff followed. The worm's warm surface felt non-organic

to Odrade, as though it were some Ixian artifact.

Sheeana skipped forward along the back and squatted just behind its mouth where

the rings bulged thick and wide.

"Like this," Sheeana said. She leaned forward and clutched beneath the leading

edge of a ring, lifting it slightly to expose pink softness underneath.

Waff obeyed her immediately but Odrade moved with more caution, storing

impressions. The ring surface was as hard as plascrete and covered with tiny

encrustations. Odrade's fingers probed the softness under the leading edge. It

pulsed faintly. The surface around them lifted and fell with an almost

imperceptible rhythm. Odrade heard a tiny rasping with each movement.

Sheeana kicked the worm surface behind her.

"Shaitan, go!" she said.

The worm did not respond.

"Please, Shaitan," Sheeana pleaded.

Odrade heard the desperation in Sheeana's voice. The child was so confident of

her Shaitan but Odrade knew that the girl had been allowed to ride only that

first time. Odrade had the full story from death-wish to priestly confusion but

none of it told her what would happen next.

Abruptly, the worm lurched into motion. It lifted sharply, twisted to the left

and made a tight curve out of the rocky defile, then moved directly away from

Dar-es-Balat into the open desert.

"We go with God!" Waff shouted.

The sound of his voice shocked Odrade. Such wildness! She sensed the power in

his faith. The thwock-thwock of following ornithopters came from overhead. The

wind of their passage whipped past Odrade full of ozone and the hot furnace

odors stirred up by the friction of the rushing behemoth.

Odrade glanced over her shoulders at the 'thopters, thinking how easy it would

be for enemies to rid this planet of a troublesome child, an equally troublesome

Reverend Mother and a despised Tleilaxu -- all in one violently vulnerable

moment on the open desert. The priestly cabal might attempt it, she knew,

hoping that Odrade's own watchers up there would be too late to prevent it.

Would curiosity and fear hold them back?

Odrade admitted to a mighty curiosity herself.

Where is this thing taking us?

Certainly, it was not headed toward Keen. She lifted her head and peered past

Sheeana. On the horizon directly ahead lay that tell-tale indentation of fallen

stones, that place where the Tyrant had been spilled from the surface of his

faery bridge.

The place of Other Memory warning.

Abrupt revelation locked Odrade's mind. She understood the warning. The Tyrant

had died at a place of his own choosing. Many deaths had left their imprint on

that place but his the greatest. The Tyrant chose his peregrination route with

purpose. Sheeana had not told her worm to go there. It moved that way of its

own volition. The magnet of the Tyrant's endless dream drew it back to the

place where the dream began.

There was this drylander who was asked which was more important, a literjon of

water or a vast pool of water? The drylander thought a moment and then said:

"The literjon is more important. No single person could own a great pool of

water. But a literjon you could hide under your cloak and run away with it. No

one would know."

-The Jokes of Ancient Dune, Bene Gesserit Archives

It was a long session in the no-globe's practice hall, Duncan in a mobile cage

driving the exercise, adamant that this particular training series would

continue until his new body had adapted to the seven central attitudes of combat

response against attack from eight directions. His green singlesuit was dark

with perspiration. Twenty days they had been at this one lesson!

Teg knew the ancient lore that Duncan revived here but knew it by different

names and sequencing. Before they had been into it five days, Teg doubted the

superiority of modern methods. Now, he was convinced that Duncan did something

completely new -- mixing the old with what he had learned in the Keep.

Teg sat at his own control console, as much an observer as a participant. The

consoles that guided the dangerous shadow forces in this practice had required

mental adjustment by Teg, but he felt familiar with them now and moved the

attack with facility and frequent inspiration.

A simmering Lucilla glanced into the hall occasionally. She watched and then

left without comment. Teg did not know what Duncan was doing about the

Imprinter but there was a feeling that the reawakened ghola played a delaying

game with his seductress. She would not allow that to continue long, Teg knew,

but it was out of his hands. Duncan no longer was "too young" for the

Imprinter. That young body carried a mature male mind with experiences from

which to make his own decisions.

Duncan and Teg had been on the floor with only one break all morning. Hunger

pangs gnawed at Teg but he felt reluctant to halt the session. Duncan's

abilities had climbed to a new level today and he was still improving.

Teg, seated in a fixed console's cage seat, twisted the attack forces into a

complex maneuver, striking from left, right, and above.

The Harkonnen armory had produced an abundance of these exotic weapons and

training instruments, some of which Teg had known only from historical accounts.

Duncan knew them all, apparently, and with an intimacy that Teg admired.

Hunter-seekers geared to penetrate a force shield were part of the shadow system

they used now.

"They automatically slow down to go through the shield," Duncan explained in his

young-old voice. "Too fast a strike, of course, and the shield repels."

"Shields of that type have almost gone out of fashion," Teg said. "A few

societies maintain them as a kind of sport but otherwise . . ."

Duncan executed a riposte of blurred speed that dropped three hunter-seekers to

the floor damaged enough to require the no-globe's maintenance services. He

removed the cage and damped the system but left it idling while he came over to

Teg, breathing deeply but easily. Looking past Teg, Duncan smiled and nodded.

Teg whirled but there was only the flick of Lucilla's gown as she left them.

"It's like a duel," Duncan said. "She tries to thrust through my guard and I

counterattack."

"Have a care," Teg said. "That's a full Reverend Mother."

"I've known a few of them in my time, Bashar."

Once more, Teg found himself confounded. He had been warned that he would have

to readjust to this different Duncan Idaho but he had not fully anticipated the

constant mental demands of that readjustment. The look in Duncan's eyes right

now was disconcerting.

"Our roles are changed a bit, Bashar," Duncan said. He picked up a towel from

the floor and mopped his face.

"I'm no longer sure of what I can teach you," Teg admitted. He wished, though,

that Duncan would take his warning about Lucilla. Did Duncan imagine that the

Reverend Mothers of those ancient days were identical with the women of today?

Teg thought that highly unlikely. In the way of all other life, the Sisterhood

evolved and changed.

It was obvious to Teg that Duncan had come to a decision about his place in

Taraza's machinations. Duncan was not merely biding his time. He was training

his body to a personally chosen peak and he had made a judgment about the Bene

Gesserit.

He has made that judgment on insufficient data, Teg thought.

Duncan dropped the towel and looked at it for a moment. "Let me be the judge of

what you can teach me, Bashar." He turned and stared narrowly at Teg seated in

the cage.

Teg inhaled deeply. He smelled the faint ozone from all of this durable

Harkonnen equipment ticking away in readiness for Duncan's return to action.

The ghola's perspiration carried a bitter dominant.

Duncan sneezed.

Teg sniffed, recognizing the omnipresent dust of their activities. It could be

more tasted than smelled at times. Alkaline. Over it all was the fragrance of

the air scrubbers and oxy regenerators. There was a distinct floral aroma built

into the system but Teg could not identify the flower. In the month of their

occupation, the globe also had taken on human odors, slowly insinuated into the

original composite -- perspiration, cooking smells, the never-quite-suppressed

acridity of waste reclamation. To Teg, these reminders of their presence were

oddly offensive. And he found himself sniffing and listening for sounds of

intrusion -- something more than the echoing passage of their own footsteps and

the subdued metallic clashings from the kitchen area.

Duncan's voice intruded: "You're an odd man, Bashar."

"What do you mean?"

"There's your resemblance to the Duke Leto. The facial identity is weird. He

was a bit shorter than you but the identity . . ." He shook his head, thinking

of the Bene Gesserit designs behind those genetic markers in Teg's face -- that

hawk look, the crease lines and that inner thing, that certainty of moral

superiority.

How moral and how superior?

According to the records he had seen at the Keep (and Duncan was sure they had

been placed there especially for him to discover) Teg's reputation was an almost

universal thing throughout human society of this age. At the Battle of Markon,

it had been enough for the enemy to know that Teg was there opposite them in

person. They sued for terms. Was that true?

Duncan looked at Teg in the console cage and put this question to him.

"Reputation can be a beautiful weapon," Teg said. "It often spills less blood."

"At Arbelough, why did you go to the front with your troops?" Duncan asked.

Teg showed surprise. "Where did you learn that?"

"At the Keep. You might have been killed. What would that have served?"

Teg reminded himself that this young flesh standing over him held unknown

knowledge, which must guide Duncan's quest for information. It was in that

unknown area, Teg suspected, that Duncan was most valuable to the Sisterhood.

"We took severe losses at Arbelough on the preceding two days," Teg said. "I

failed to make a correct assessment of the enemy's fear and fanaticism."

"But the risk of . . ."

"My presence at the front said to my own people: 'I share your risks.' "

"The Keep's records said Arbelough had been perverted by Face Dancers. Patrin

told me you vetoed your aides when they urged you to sweep the planet clean,

sterilize it and --"

"You were not there, Duncan."

"I am trying to be. So you spared your enemy against all advice."

"Except for the Face Dancers."

"But then you walked unarmed through the enemy ranks and before they had laid

down their weapons."

"To assure them they would not be mistreated."

"That was very dangerous."

"Was it? Many of them came over to us for the final assault on Kroinin where we

broke the anti-Sisterhood forces."

Duncan stared hard at Teg. Not only did this old Bashar resemble Duke Leto in

appearance, but he also had that same Atreides charisma: a legendary figure

even among his former enemies. Teg had said he was descended from Ghanima of

the Atreides, but there had to be more in it than that. The ways of the Bene

Gesserit breeding mastery awed him.

"We will go back to the practice now," Duncan said.

"Don't damage yourself."

"You forget, Bashar. I remember a body as young as this one and right here on

Giedi Prime."

"Gammu!"

"It was properly renamed but my body still recalls the original. That is why

they sent me here. I know it."

Of course he would know it, Teg thought.

Restored by the brief respite, Teg introduced a new element in the attack and

sent a sudden burn-line against Duncan's left side.

How easily Duncan parried the attack!

He was using an oddly mixed variation on the five attitudes, each response

seemingly invented before it was required.

"Each attack is a feather floating on the infinite road," Duncan said. His

voice gave no hint of exertion. "As the feather approaches, it is diverted and

removed."

As he spoke, he parried the shifting attack and countered.

Teg's Mentat logic followed the movements into what he recognized as dangerous

places. Dependencies and key logs!

Duncan shifted over to attack, moving ahead of it, pacing his movements rather

than responding. Teg was forced to his utmost abilities as the shadow forces

burned and flickered across the floor. Duncan's weaving figure in its mobile

cage danced along the space between them. Not one of Teg's hunter-seekers or

burn-line counters touched the moving figure. Duncan was over them, under them,

seeming totally unafraid of the real pain that this equipment could bring him.

Once more, Duncan increased the speed of his attack.

A bolt of pain shot up Teg's left arm from his hand on the controls to his

shoulder.

With a sharp exclamation, Duncan shut down the equipment. "Sorry, Bashar. That

was superb defense on your part but I'm afraid age defeated you."

Once more, Duncan crossed the floor and stood over Teg.

"A little pain to remind me of the pain I caused you," Teg said. He rubbed his

tingling arm.

"Blame the heat of the moment," Duncan said. "We have done enough for now."

"Not quite," Teg said. "It is not enough to strengthen only your muscles."

At Teg's words Duncan felt an alerting sensation throughout his body. He sensed

the disorganized touch of that uncompleted thing that the reawakening had failed

to arouse. Something crouched within him, Duncan thought. It was like a coiled

spring waiting for release.

"What more would you do?" Duncan asked. His voice sounded hoarse.

"Your survival is in the balance here," Teg said. "All of this is being done to

save you and get you to Rakis."

"For Bene Gesserit reasons, which you say you do not know!"

"I don't know them, Duncan."

"But you're a Mentat."

"Mentats require data to make projections."

"Do you think Lucilla knows?"

"I'm not sure but let me warn you again about her. She has orders to get you to

Rakis prepared for what you must do there."

"Must?" Duncan shook his head from side to side. "Am I not my own person with

rights to make my own choices? What do you think you've reawakened here, a

damned Face Dancer capable only of obeying orders?"

"Are you telling me you will not go to Rakis?"

"I'm telling you I will make my own decisions when I know what it is I'm to do.

I'm not a hired assassin."

"You think I am, Duncan?"

"I think you're an honorable man, someone to be admired. Give me credit for

having my own standards of duty and honor."

"You've been given another chance at life and --"

"But you are not my father and Lucilla is not my mother. Imprinter? For what

does she hope to prepare me?"

"It may be that she does not know, Duncan. Like me, she may have only part of

the design. Knowing how the Sisterhood works, that is highly likely."

"So the two of you just train me and deliver me to Arrakis. Here's the package

you ordered!"

"This is a far different universe than the one where you were originally born,"

Teg said. "As it was in your day, we still have a Great Convention against

atomics and the pseudoatomics of lasgun-shield interaction. We still say that

sneak attacks are forbidden. There are pieces of paper scattered around to

which we have put our names and we --"

"But the no-ships have changed the basis for all of those treaties," Duncan

said. "I think I learned my history fairly well at the Keep. Tell me, Bashar,

why did Paul's son have the Tleilaxu provide him with my ghola-self, hundreds of

me! for all those thousands of years?"

"Paul's son?"

"The Keep's records call him the God Emperor. You name him Tyrant."

"Oh. I don't think we know why he did it. Perhaps he was lonely for someone

from --"

"You brought me back to confront the worm!" Duncan said.

Is that what we're doing? Teg wondered. He had considered this possibility more

than once, but it was only a possibility, not a projection. Even so, there had

to be something more in Taraza's design. Teg sensed this with every fiber of

his Mentat training. Did Lucilla know? Teg did not delude himself that he

could pry revelation from a full Reverend Mother. No . . . he would have to

bide his time, wait and watch and listen. In his own way, this obviously was

what Duncan had decided. It was a dangerous course if he thwarted Lucilla!

Teg shook his head. "Truly, Duncan, I do not know."

"But you follow orders."

"By my oath to the Sisterhood."

"Deceptions, dishonesties -- those are empty words when the question is the

Sisterhood's survival," Duncan quoted him.

"Yes, I said that," Teg agreed.

"I trust you now because you said it," Duncan said. "But I do not trust

Lucilla."

Teg dropped his chin to his breast. Dangerous . . . dangerous . . .

Much more slowly than once he had done, Teg brought his attention out of such

thoughts and went through the mental cleansing process, concentrating on the

necessities laid upon him by Taraza.

"You are my Bashar."

Duncan studied the Bashar for a moment. Fatigue lines were obvious on the old

man's face. Duncan was reminded suddenly of Teg's great age, wondering if it

ever tempted men such as Teg to seek out the Tleilaxu and become gholas.

Probably not. They knew they might become Tleilaxu puppets.

This thought flooded Duncan's awareness, holding him immobile so plainly that

Teg, lifting his gaze, saw it at once.

"Is something wrong?"

"The Tleilaxu have done something to me, something that has not yet been

exposed," Duncan husked.

"Exactly what we feared!" It was Lucilla speaking from the doorway behind Teg.

She advanced to within two paces of Duncan. "I have been listening. You two

are very informative."

Teg spoke quickly, hoping to blunt the anger he sensed in her. "He has mastered

the seven attitudes today."

"He strikes like fire," Lucilla said, "but remember that we of the Sisterhood

flow like water and fill in every place." She glanced down at Teg. "Do you not

see that our ghola has gone beyond the attitudes?"

"No fixed position, no attitude," Duncan said.

Teg looked up sharply at Duncan, who stood with his head erect, his forehead

smooth, his eyes clear as he returned Teg's gaze. Duncan had grown surprisingly

in the short time since being awakened to his original memories.

"Damn you, Miles!" Lucilla muttered.

But Teg kept his attention on Duncan. The youth's entire body seemed wired to a

new kind of vigor. There was a poise about him that had not been there before.

Duncan shifted his attention to Lucilla. "You think you will fail in your

assignment?"

"Surely not," she said. "You're still a male."

And she thought: Yes, that young body must flow hot with the juices of

procreation. Indeed, the hormonal igniters are all intact and susceptible to

arousing. His present stance, though, and the way he looked at her, forced her

to raise her awareness to new, energy-demanding levels.

"What have the Tleilaxu done to you?" she demanded.

Duncan spoke with a flippancy that he did not feel: "O Great Imprinter, if I

knew I would tell you."

"You think it's a game we play?" she demanded.

"I do not know what it is we play at!"

"By now, many people know we are not on Rakis where we would have been expected

to flee," she said.

"And Gammu swarms with people returned from the Scattering," Teg said. "They

have the numbers to explore many possibilities here."

"Who would suspect the existence of a lost no-globe from the Harkonnen days?"

Duncan asked.

"Anyone who made the association between Rakis and Dar-es-Balat," Teg said.

"If you think this is a game, consider the urgencies of the play," Lucilla said.

She pivoted on one foot to concentrate on Teg. "And you have disobeyed Taraza!"

"You are wrong! I have done exactly what she ordered me to do. I am her Bashar

and you forget how well she knows me."

With an abruptness that shocked her to silence, the subtleties of Taraza's

maneuverings impressed themselves upon Lucilla . . .

We are pawns!

What a delicate touch Taraza always demonstrated in the way she moved her pawns

about. Lucilla did not feel diminished by the realization that she was a pawn.

That was knowledge bred and trained into every Reverend Mother of the

Sisterhood. Even Teg knew it. Not diminished, no. The thing around them had

escalated in Lucilla's awareness. She felt awed by Teg's words. How shallow

had been her previous view of the forces within which they were enmeshed. It

was as though she had seen only the surface of a turbulent river and, from that,

had glimpsed the currents beneath. Now, however, she felt the flow all around

her and a dismaying realization.

Pawns are expendable.

By your belief in singularities, in granular absolutes, you deny movement, even

the movement of evolution! While you cause a granular universe to persist in

your awareness, you are blind to movement. When things change, your absolute

universe vanishes, no longer accessible to your self-limiting perceptions. The

universe has moved beyond you.

-First Draft, Atreides Manifesto, Bene Gesserit Archives

Taraza put her hands beside her temples, palms flat in front of her ears, and

pressed inward. Even her fingers could feel the tiredness in there: right

between the hands -- fatigue. A brief flicker of eyelids and she fell into the

relaxation trance. Hands against head were the sole focal points of fleshly

awareness.

One hundred heartbeats.

She had practiced this regularly since learning it as a child, one of her first

Bene Gesserit skills. Exactly one hundred heartbeats. After all of those years

of practice, her body could pace them automatically by an unconscious metronome.

When she opened her eyes at the count of one hundred, her head felt better. She

hoped she would have at least two more hours in which to work before fatigue

overcame her once more. Those one hundred heartbeats had given her extra years

of wakefulness in her lifetime.

Tonight, though, thinking of that old trick sent her memories spiraling

backward. She found herself caught in her own childhood, the dormitory with the

Sister Proctor pacing the aisle at night to make sure they all remained properly

asleep in their beds.

Sister Baram, the Night Proctor.

Taraza had not thought of that name in years. Sister Baram had been short and

fat, a failed Reverend Mother. Not for any immediately visible reason, but the

Medical Sisters and their Suk doctors had found something. Baram had never been

permitted to try the spice agony. She had been quite forthcoming about what she

knew of her defect. It had been discovered while she was still in her teens:

periodic nerve tremors, which manifested when she began to sink into sleep. A

symptom of something deeper that had caused her to be sterilized. The tremors

made Baram wakeful in the night. Aisle patrol was a logical assignment.

Baram had other weaknesses not detected by her superiors. A wakeful child

toddling to the washroom could lure Baram into low-voiced conversation. Naive

questions elicited mostly naive answers, but sometimes Baram imparted useful

knowledge. She had taught Taraza the relaxation trick.

One of the older girls had found Sister Baram dead in the washroom one morning.

The Night Proctor's tremors had been the symptom of a fatal defect, a fact

important mostly to the Breeding Mistresses and their endless records.

Because the Bene Gesserit did not usually schedule the full "solo death

education" until well into the acolyte stage, Sister Baram was the first dead

person Taraza had seen. Sister Baram's body had been found partly beneath a

washbasin, the right cheek pressed to the tile floor, her left hand caught in

the plumbing under a sink. She had tried to pull her failing body upright and

death had caught her in the attempt, exposing that last motion like an insect

caught in amber.

When they rolled Sister Baram over to carry her away, Taraza saw the red mark

where a cheek had been pressed to the floor. The Day Proctor explained this

mark with a scientific practicality. Any experience could be turned into data

for these potential Reverend Mothers to incorporate later into their acolyte

"Conversations With Death."

Post Mortem lividity.

Seated at her Chapter House table, all of those years removed from the event,

Taraza was forced to use her carefully focused powers of concentration to dispel

that memory, leaving her free to deal with the work spread before her. So many

lessons. So fearfully full, her memory. So many lifetimes stored there. It

reaffirmed her sense of being alive to see the work in front of her. Things to

do. She was needed. Eagerly, Taraza bent to her labors.

Damn the necessity to train the ghola on Gammu!

But this ghola required it. Familiarity with dirt underfoot preceded the

required restoration of that original persona.

It had been wise to send Burzmali into the Gammu arena. If Miles had really

found a hideaway . . . if he were to emerge now, he would need all the help he

could get. Once more, she considered whether it was time to play the prescient

game. So dangerous! And the Tleilaxu had been alerted that their replacement

ghola might be required.

"Ready him for delivery."

Her mind swung to the Rakis problem. That fool Tuek should have been monitored

more carefully. How long could a Face Dancer safely impersonate him? There was

no faulting Odrade's on-scene decision, though. She had put the Tleilaxu into

an untenable position. The impersonator could be exposed, plunging the Bene

Tleilax into a sink of hatred.

The game within the Bene Gesserit design had become very delicate. For

generations now, they had held out to the Rakian priesthood the bait of a Bene

Gesserit alliance. But now! The Tleilaxu must consider that they had been

chosen instead of the priests. Odrade's three-cornered alliance, let the

priests think every Reverend Mother would take the Oath of Subservience to the

Divided God. The Priestly Council would stutter with excitement at the

prospect. The Tleilaxu, of course, saw the chance to monopolize melange,

controlling at last the one source independent of them.

A rap at Taraza's door told her the acolyte had arrived with tea. It was a

standing order when the Mother Superior worked late. Taraza glanced at the

table chrono, an Ixian device so accurate it would gain or lose only one second

in a century: 1:23:11 A.M.

She called to admit the acolyte. The girl, a pale blond with coldly observant

eyes, entered and bent to arrange the contents of her tray beside Taraza.

Taraza ignored the girl and stared at the work remaining on the table. So much

to do. Work was more important than sleep. But her head ached and she felt the

telltale dazed sensation akin to a stunned brain that told her the tea would

provide little relief. She had worked herself into mental starvation and it

would have to be put right before she could even stand. Her shoulders and back

throbbed.

The acolyte started to leave but Taraza motioned for her to wait. "Rub my back

please, Sister."

The acolyte's educated hands slowly worked out the constrictions in Taraza's

back. Good girl. Taraza smiled at this thought. Of course she was good. No

lesser creature could be assigned to the Mother Superior.

When the girl had gone, Taraza sat silently in deep thought. So little time.

She begrudged every minute of sleep. There was no escaping it, though.

Eventually, the body made its unavoidable demands. She had pressed herself

beyond easy recuperation for days now. Ignoring the tea laid out beside her,

Taraza arose and went down the hall to her tiny sleeping cell. There, she left

a call with the Night Guard for 11:00 A.M. and composed herself fully robed on

the hard cot.

Quietly, she regulated her breathing, insulated her senses from distraction and

fell into the between-state.

Sleep did not come.

She went through her full repertoire and still sleep evaded her.

Taraza lay there for a long time, recognizing at last the futility of willing

herself to sleep with any of the techniques at her disposal. The between-state

would have to do its slow mending first. Meanwhile, her mind continued to

churn.

The Rakian priesthood she had never considered to be a central problem. Already

caught up in religion, the priests could be manipulated by religion. They saw

the Bene Gesserit chiefly as a power that could enforce their dogma. Let them

continue to think this. It was bait that would blind them.

Damn that Miles Teg! Three months of silence, and no favorable report from

Burzmali, either. Charred ground, signs of a no-ship's lift-off. Where could

Teg have gone? The ghola might be dead. Teg had never before done such a

thing. Old Reliability. That was why she had chosen him. That and his

military skills and his likeness to the old Duke Leto -- all of the things they

had prepared in him.

Teg and Lucilla. A perfect team.

If not dead, was the ghola beyond their reach? Did the Tleilaxu have him?

Attackers from the Scattering? Many things were possible. Old Reliability.

Silent. Was his silence a message? If so, what was he trying to say'?

With both Schwangyu and Patrin dead, there was the smell of conspiracy around

the Gammu events, Could Teg be someone planted long ago by the Sisterhood's

enemies? Impossible! His own family was proof against such doubts. Teg's

daughter at the family home was as mystified as anyone.

Three months now and not a word.

Caution. She had warned Teg to exercise the utmost caution in protecting the

ghola. Teg had seen the great danger on Gammu. Schwangyu's last reports made

that clear.

Where could Teg and Lucilla have taken the ghola?

Where had they acquired a no-ship? Conspiracy?

Taraza's mind kept circling around her deep suspicions. Was it Odrade's doing?

Then who conspired with Odrade? Lucilla? Odrade and Lucilla had never met

before that brief encounter on Gammu. Or had they? Who bent close to Odrade

and breathed a mutual air weighted with whispers? Odrade gave no sign, but what

proof was that? Lucilla's loyalty had never been doubted. They both functioned

perfectly as assigned. But so would conspirators.

Facts! Taraza hungered for facts. The bed rustled beneath her and her senseinsulation

collapsed, shattered by worries as much as by the sound of her own

movements. Resignedly, Taraza once more composed herself for relaxation.

Relaxation and then sleep.

Ships from the Scattering flitted through Taraza's fatigue-fogged imagination.

Lost Ones returned in their uncounted no-ships. Was that where Teg found a

ship? This possibility was being explored as quietly as they could on Gammu and

elsewhere. She tried counting imaginary ships but they refused to proceed in

the orderly fashion required for sleep induction. Taraza came alert without

moving on her cot.

Her deepest mind was trying to reveal something. Fatigue had blocked that path

of communication but now -- she sat up fully awake.

The Tleilaxu had been dealing with people returned from the Scattering. With

these whorish Honored Mattes and with returned Bene Tleilax as well. Taraza

sensed a single design behind events. The Lost Ones did not return out of

simple curiosity about their roots. The gregarious desire to reunite all of

humankind was not enough in itself to bring them back. The Honored Matres

clearly came with dreams of conquest.

But what if the Tleilaxu sent out in the Scattering had not carried with them

the secret of the axlotl tanks? What then? Melange. The orange-eyed whores

obviously used an inadequate substitute. The people of the Scattering might not

have solved the mystery of the Tleilaxu tanks. They would know about axlotl

tanks and try to recreate them. But if they failed -- melange!

She began to explore this projection.

The Lost Ones ran out of the true melange their ancestors took into the

Scattering. What sources did they have then? The worms of Rakis and the

original Bene Tleilax. The whores would not dare reveal their true interest.

Their ancestors believed that the worms could not be transplanted. Was it

possible the Lost Ones had found a suitable planet for the worms? Of course it

was possible. They might begin bargaining with the Tleilaxu as a diversion.

Rakis would be their real target. Or the reverse could be true.

Transportable wealth.

She had seen Teg's reports on the wealth being accumulated on Gammu. Some among

the ones returning had coinages and other negotiable chips. That much was plain

from the banking activities.

What greater currency was there, though, than the spice?

Wealth. That was it, of course. And whatever the chips, the bargaining had

begun.

Taraza grew aware of voices outside her door. The acolyte Sleep-Guard was

arguing with someone. The voices were low but Taraza heard enough to bring her

into full alert.

"She left a wake-up for late morning," the Sleep-Guard protested.

Someone else whispered: "She said she was to be told the moment I returned."

"I tell you she is very tired. She needs --"

"She needs to be obeyed! Tell her I'm back!"

Taraza sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the cot. Her feet found the

floor. Gods! How her knees ached. It pained her, too, that she could not

place the intruding whisper, the person arguing with her guard.

Whose return did I . . . Burzmali!

"I'm awake," Taraza called.

Her door opened and the Sleep-Guard leaned in. "Mother Superior, Burzmali has

returned from Gammu."

"Send him in at once!" Taraza activated a single glowglobe at the head of her

cot. Its yellow light washed away the room's darkness.

Burzmali entered and closed the door behind him. Without being told. he

touched the sound-insulation switch on the door and all outside noises vanished.

Privacy? It was bad news then.

She looked up at Burzmali. He was a short, slender fellow with a sharply

triangular face narrowing to a thin chin. Blond hair swept over a high

forehead. His widely spaced green eyes were alert and watchful. He looked far

too young for the responsibilities of a Bashar, but then Teg had looked even

younger at Arbelough. We are getting old, damn it. She forced herself to relax

and place her trust in the fact that Teg had trained this man and expressed full

confidence in him.

"Tell me the bad news," Taraza said.

Burzmali cleared his throat. "Still no sign of the Bashar and his party on

Gammu, Mother Superior." He had a heavy, masculine voice.

And that's not the worst of it, Taraza thought. She saw the clear signs of

Burzmali's nervousness.

"Let's have it all," she ordered. "Obviously, you have completed your

examination of the Keep's ruins."

"No survivors," he said. "The attackers were thorough."

"Tleilaxu?"

"Possible."

"You have doubts?"

"The attackers used that new Ixian explosive, 12-Uri. I . . . I think it may

have been used to mislead us. There were mechanical brain-probe holes in

Schwangyu's skull, too."

"What of Patrin?"

"Exactly as Schwangyu reported. He blew himself up in that decoy ship. They

identified him from bits of two fingers and one intact eye. There was nothing

left big enough to probe."

"But you have doubts! Get to them!"

"Schwangyu left a message that only we might read."

"In the wear marks on furniture?"

"Yes, Mother Superior, and --"

"Then she knew she would be attacked and had time to leave a message. I saw

your earlier report on the devastation of the attack."

"It was quick and totally overpowering. The attackers did not try to take

captives."

"What did she say?"

"Whores."

Taraza tried to contain her shock, although she had been expecting that word.

The effort to remain calm almost drained her energies. This was very bad.

Taraza permitted herself a deep sigh. Schwangyu's opposition had persisted to

the end. But then, seeing disaster, she had made a proper decision. Knowing

she would die without the opportunity to transfer her Memory Lives to another

Reverend Mother, she had acted from the most basic loyalty. If you can do

nothing else, arm your Sisters and frustrate the enemy.

So the Honored Matres have acted!

"Tell me about your search for the ghola," Taraza ordered.

"We were not the first searchers over that ground, Mother Superior. There was

much additional burning of trees and rocks and underbrush."

"But it was a no-ship?"

"The marks of a no-ship."

Taraza nodded to herself. A silent message from Old Reliability?

"How closely did you examine the area?"

"I flew over it but on a routine trip from one place to another."

Taraza motioned Burzmali to a chair near the foot of her cot. "Sit down and

relax. I want you to do some guessing for me."

Burzmali lowered himself carefully onto the chair. "Guessing?"

"You were his favorite student. I want you to imagine that you are Miles Teg.

You know you must get the ghola out of the Keep. You do not place your full

trust in anyone around you, not even in Lucilla. What will you do?"

"An unexpected thing, of course."

"Of course."

Burzmali rubbed his narrow chin. Presently, he said: "I trust Patrin. I trust

him fully."

"All right, you and Patrin. What do you do?"

"Patrin is a native of Gammu."

"I have been wondering about that myself," she said.

Burzmali looked at the floor in front of him. "Patrin and I will make an

emergency plan long before it is needed. I always prepare secondary ways of

dealing with problems."

"Very good. Now -- the plan. What do you do?"

"Why did Patrin kill himself?" Burzmali asked.

"You're sure that's what he did."

"You saw the reports. Schwangyu and several others were sure of it. I accept

it. Patrin was loyal enough to do that for his Bashar."

"For you! You are Miles Teg now. What plan have you and Patrin concocted?"

"I would not deliberately send Patrin to certain death."

"Unless?"

"Patrin did that on his own. He might if the plan originated with him and not

with . . . me. He might do it to protect me, to make sure no one discovered the

plan."

"How could Patrin summon a no-ship without our learning of it?"

"Patrin was a Gammu native. His family goes back to the Giedi Prime days."

Taraza closed her eyes and turned her head away from Burzmali. So Burzmali

followed the same suggestive tracks that she had been probing in her mind. We

knew Patrin's origins. What was the significance of that Gammu association?

Her mind refused to speculate. This was what came of allowing herself to become

too tired! She looked once more at Burzmali.

"Did Patrin find a way to make secret contact with family and old friends?"

"We've explored every contact we could find."

"Depend on it; you haven't traced them all."

Burzmali shrugged. "Of course not. I have not acted on that assumption."

Taraza took a deep breath. "Go back to Gammu. Take with you as much help as

our Security can spare. Tell Bellonda those are my orders. You must insinuate

agents into every walk of life. Find out who Patrin knew. What of his

surviving family? Friends? Winkle them out."

"That will cause a stir no matter how careful we are. Others will know."

"That cannot be helped. And Burzmali!"

He was on his feet. "Yes, Mother Superior?"

"The other searchers: You must stay ahead of them."

"May I use a Guild navigator?"

"No!"

"Then how --"

"Burzmali, what if Miles and Lucilla and our ghola are still on Gammu?"

"I've already told you that I do not accept the idea of their leaving in a noship!"

For a long silent period, Taraza studied the man standing at the foot of her

cot. Trained by Miles Teg. The old Bashar's favorite student. What was

Burzmali's trained instinct suggesting.

In a low voice, she prompted: "Yes?"

"Gammu was Giedi Prime, a Harkonnen place."

"What does that suggest to you?"

"They were rich, Mother Superior. Very rich."

"So?"

"Rich enough to accomplish the secret installation of a no-room . . . even of

a large no-globe."

"There are no records! Ix has never even vaguely suggested such a thing. They

have not probed on Gammu for . . ."

"Bribes, third-party purchases, many transshipments," Burzmali said. "The

Famine Times were very disruptive and before that there were all those millennia

of the Tyrant."

"When the Harkonnens kept their heads down or lost them. Still, I will admit

the possibility."

"Records could have been lost," Burzmali said.

"Not by us or the other governments that survived. What prompts this line of

speculation?"

"Patrin."

"Ahhhhh."

He spoke quickly: "If such a thing were discovered, a Gammu native might know

about it."

"How many of them would know? Do you think they could have kept such a secret

for . . . Yes! I see what you mean. If it were a secret of Patrin's family .

. .

"I have not dared question any of them about it."

"Of course not! But where would you look . . . without alerting . . .

"That place on the mountain where the no-ship marks were left."

"It would require you to go there in person!"

"Very hard to conceal from spies," he agreed. "Unless I went with a very small

force and seemingly on another purpose."

"What other purpose?"

"To place a funeral marker in memory of my old Bashar."

"Suggesting that we know he is dead? Yes!"

"You've already asked the Tleilaxu to replace our ghola."

"That was a simple precaution and does not bear on . . . Burzmali, this is

extremely dangerous. I doubt we can mislead the kinds of people who will

observe you on Gammu."

"The mourning of myself and the people I take with me will be dramatic and

believable."

"The believable does not necessarily convince a wary observer."

"Do you not trust my loyalty and the loyalty of the people I will take with me?"

Taraza pursed her lips in thought. She reminded herself that fixed loyalty was

a thing they had learned to improve upon from the Atreides pattern. How to

produce people who command the utmost devotion. Burzmali and Teg both were fine

examples.

"It might work," Taraza agreed. She stared speculatively at Burzmali. Teg's

favorite student could be right!

"Then I'll go," Burzmali said. He turned to leave.

"One moment," Taraza said.

Burzmali turned. "You will saturate yourselves with shere, all of you. And if

you're captured by Face Dancers -- these new ones! -- you must burn your own

heads or shatter them completely. Take the necessary precautions."

The suddenly sobered expression on Burzmali's face reassured Taraza. He had

been proud of himself for a moment there. Better to dampen his pride. No need

for him to be reckless.

We have long known that the objects of our palpable sense experiences can be

influenced by choice -- both conscious choice and unconscious. This is a

demonstrated fact that does not require that we believe some force within us

reaches out and touches the universe. I address a pragmatic relationship

between belief and what we identify as "real." All of our judgments carry a

heavy burden of ancestral beliefs to which we of the Bene Gesserit tend to be

more susceptible than most. It is not enough that we are aware of this and

guard against it. Alternative interpretations must always receive our

attention.

-Mother Superior Taraza: Argument in Council

"God will judge us here," Waff gloated.

He had been doing that at unpredictable moments all during this long ride across

the desert. Sheeana appeared not to notice but Waff's voice and comments had

begun to wear on Odrade. The Rakian sun had moved far down to the west but the

worm that carried them appeared untiring in its drive across the ancient Sareer

toward the remnant mounds of the Tyrant's barrier wall.

Why this direction? Odrade wondered.

No answer satisfied. The fanaticism and renewed danger from Waff, though,

demanded immediate response. She called up the cant of the Shariat that she

knew drove him.

"Let God do the judging and not men."

Waff scowled at the taunting note in her voice. He looked at the horizon ahead

and then up at the 'thopters, which kept pace with them.

"Men must do God's work," he muttered.

Odrade did not answer. Waff had been deflected into his doubts and now would be

asking himself: Did these Bene Gesserit witches really share the Great Belief?

Her thoughts dove back into the unanswered questions, tumbling through all she

knew about the worms of Rakis. Personal memories and Other Memories wove a mad

montage. She could visualize robed Fremen atop a worm even larger than this

one, each rider leaning back against a long hooked pole that dug into a worm's

rings as her hands now gripped this one. She felt the wind against her cheeks,

the robe whipping against her shanks. This ride and others merged into a long

familiarity.

It has been a long time since an Atreides rode this way.

Was there a clue to their destination back in Dar-es-Balat? How could there be?

But it had been so hot and her mind had been questing forward to what might

happen on this venture into the desert. She had not been as alert as she might

have been.

In common with every other community on Rakis, Dar-es-Balat pulled inward from

its edges during the heat of the early afternoon. Odrade recalled the chafing

of her new stillsuit while she waited in a building's shadows near the western

limits of Dar-es-Balat. She waited for the separate escorts to bring Sheeana

and Waff from the safe houses where Odrade had installed them.

What a tempting target she had made. But they had to be certain of Rakian

compliance. The Bene Gesserit escorts delayed deliberately.

"Shaitan likes the heat," Sheeana had said.

Rakians hid from the heat but the worms came out then. Was that a significant

fact, revealing the reason for this worm to take them in a particular direction?

My mind is bouncing around like a child's ball!

What did it signify that Rakians hid from the sun while a little Tleilaxu, a

Reverend Mother, and a wild young girl went coursing across the desert atop a

worm? It was an ancient pattern on Rakis. Nothing surprising about it at all.

The ancient Fremen had been mostly nocturnal, though. Their modern descendants

depended more on shade to protect them from the hottest sunlight.

How safe the priests felt behind their guardian moats!

Every resident of a Rakian urban center knew the qanat was out there, water

running slick in shadowed darkness, trickles diverted to feed the narrow canals

whose evaporation was recaptured in the windtraps.

"Our prayers protect us," they said, but they knew very well what really

protected them.

"His holy presence is seen in the desert."

The Holy Worm.

The Divided God.

Odrade looked down at the worm rings in front of her. And here he is!

She thought of the priests among the watchers in the 'thopters overhead. How

they loved to spy on others! She had felt them watching her back in Dar-es-

Balat while she awaited the arrival of Sheeana and Waff. Eyes behind the high

grills of hidden balconies. Eyes peering through slits in thick walls. Eyes

concealed behind mirror-plaz or staring out from shadowed places.

Odrade had forced herself to ignore the dangers while she marked the passage of

time by the movement of the shadow line on a wall above her: a sure clock in

this land where few kept other than suntime.

Tensions had built, amplified by the need to appear unconcerned. Would they

attack? Would they dare, knowing that she had taken her own precautions? How

angry were the priests at being forced to join the Tleilaxu in this secret

triumvirate? Her Reverend Mother advisors from the Keep had not liked this

dangerous baiting of the priests.

"Let one of us be the bait!"

Odrade had been adamant: "They would not believe it. Suspicions would keep

them away. Besides, they are sure to send Albertus."

So Odrade had waited in the Dar-es-Balat courtyard, green-shadowed in the depths

where she stood looking upward at the sunline six stories overhead -- past lacy

balustrades at each balconied level: green plants, brilliant red, orange, and

blue flowers, a rectangle of silvery sky above the tiers.

And the hidden eyes.

Motion at the wide street door to her right! A single figure in priestly gold,

purple, and white let himself into the courtyard. She studied him, looking for

signs that the Tleilaxu might have extended their sway by another Face Dancer

mimic. But this was a man, a priest she recognized: Albertus, the senior of

Dar-es-Balat.

Just as we expected.

Albertus moved through the wide atrium and across the courtyard toward her,

walking with careful dignity. Were there dangerous portents in him? Would he

signal his assassins? She glanced upward at the tiered balconies: little

flickering motions at the higher levels. The approaching priest was not alone.

But neither am I!

Albertus came to a stop two paces from Odrade and looked up at her from where he

had kept his attention -- on the intricate gold and purple designs of the

courtyard's tiled floor.

He has weak bones, Odrade thought.

She gave no sign of recognition. Albertus was one of those who knew that his

High Priest had been replaced by a Face Dancer mimic.

Albertus cleared his throat and took a trembling breath.

Weak bones! Weak flesh!

While the thought amused Odrade, it did not reduce her wariness. Reverend

Mothers always noted that sort of thing. You looked for the marks of the

breeding. Such selectivity as existed in the ancestry of Albertus carried

flaws, elementals that the Sisterhood would try to correct in his descendants if

it ever appeared worthwhile to breed him. This would be considered, of course.

Albertus had risen to a position of power, doing it quietly but definitely, and

it must be determined whether that implied valuable genetic material. Albertus

had been poorly educated, though. A first-year acolyte could have handled him.

Conditioning among the Rakian priesthood had degenerated badly since the old

Fish Speaker days.

"Why are you here?" Odrade demanded, making it as much an accusation as a

question.

Albertus trembled. "I bring a message from your people, Reverend Mother."

"Then say it!"

"There has been a slight delay, something about the route here being known by

too many."

That, at least, was the story they had agreed to tell the priests. But the

other things on the face of Albertus were easy to read. Secrets shared with him

were dangerously close to exposure.

"I almost wish I had ordered you killed," Odrade said.

Albertus recoiled two full paces. His eyes went vacant, as though he had died

right there in front of her. She recognized the reaction. Albertus had entered

that fully revelatory phase where fear gripped his scrotum. He knew that this

terrible Reverend Mother Odrade might pass a death sentence upon him quite

casually or kill him with her own hands. Nothing he said or did would escape

her awful scrutiny.

"You have been considering whether to kill me and destroy our Keep at Keen,"

Odrade accused.

Albertus trembled violently. "Why do you say such things, Reverend Mother?"

There was a revealing whine in his voice.

"Don't try to deny it," she said. "I wonder how many have found you as easy to

read as I do? You are supposed to be a keeper of secrets. You are not supposed

to be walking around with all of our secrets written on your face!"

Albertus fell to his knees. She thought he would grovel.

"But your own people sent me!"

"And you were only too happy to come and decide whether it might be possible to

kill me."

"Why would we --"

"Silence! You do not like it that we control Sheeana. You are fearful of the

Tleilaxu. Matters have been taken from your priestly hands and things have been

set in motion that terrify you."

"Reverend Mother! What are we to do? What are we to do?"

"You will obey us! More than that, you will obey Sheeana! You fear what we

venture this day? You have greater things to fear!"

She shook her head in mock dismay, knowing the effect all of this was having on

poor Albertus. He cringed beneath the weight of her anger.

"On your feet!" she ordered. "And remember that you are a priest and the truth

is demanded of you!"

Albertus stumbled to his feet and kept his head bowed. She could see his body

responding to the decision that he abandon subterfuge. What a trial that must

be for him! Dutiful to the Reverend Mother who so obviously read his heart, now

he must be dutiful to his religion. He must confront the ultimate paradox of

all religions:

God knows!

"You hide nothing from me, nothing from Sheeana, and nothing from God," Odrade

said.

"Forgive me, Reverend Mother."

"Forgive you? It is not in my power to forgive you nor should you ask it of me.

You are a priest!"

He lifted his gaze to Odrade's angry face.

The paradox was upon him completely now. God was surely here! But God was

usually a long way away and confrontations could be put off. Tomorrow was

another day of life. Surely it was. And it was acceptable if you permitted

yourself a few small sins, perhaps a lie or two. For the time being only. And

maybe a big sin if temptations were great. Gods were supposed to be more

understanding of great sinners. There would be time to make amends.

Odrade stared at Albertus with the analyzing eye of the Missionaria Protectiva.

Ahhh, Albertus, she thought. But now you stand in the presence of a fellow

human who knows all of the things you believed were secrets between you and your

god.

For Albertus, his present situation could be little different from death and

that ultimate submission to the final judgment of his god. That surely

described the unconscious setting for the way Albertus let his will power

crumble now. All of his religious fears had been called up and were focused on

a Reverend Mother.

In her driest tones, not even compelling him with Voice, Odrade said: "I want

this farce ended immediately."

Albertus tried to swallow. He knew he could not lie. He might know a remote

capability of lying but that was useless. Submissively, he looked up at

Odrade's forehead where the line of her stillsuit cap had been drawn tightly

across her brow. He spoke in little more than a whisper:

"Reverend Mother, it is only that we feel deprived. You and the Tleilaxu go

into the desert with our Sheeana. Both of you will learn from her and . . ."

His shoulders sagged. "Why do you take the Tleilaxu?"

"Sheeana wishes it," Odrade lied.

Albertus opened his mouth and closed it without speaking. She could see

acceptance flood through him.

"You will return to your fellows with my warning," Odrade said. "The survival

of Rakis and of your priesthood depend utterly on how well you obey me. You

will not hinder us in the slightest! And as to these puerile plots against us -

- Sheeana reveals to us your every evil thought!"

Albertus surprised her then. He shook his head and emitted a dry chuckle.

Odrade already had noted that many of these priests enjoyed discomfiture but had

not suspected that they might find amusement in their own failures.

"I find your laughter shallow," she said.

Albertus shrugged and restored some of his facial mask. Odrade had seen several

such masks on him. Facades! He wore them in layers. And far down under all of

that defensiveness lay the someone who cared, the one she had exposed here so

briefly. These priests had a dangerous way of falling into florid explanations,

though, when taxed too heavily with questions.

I must restore the one who cares, Odrade thought. She cut him off as he started

to speak.

"No more! You will wait upon me when I return from the desert. For now, you

are my messenger. Carry my message accurately and you will win a greater reward

than you have ever imagined. Fail and you will suffer the agonies of Shaitan!"

Odrade watched Albertus scurry out of the courtyard, shoulders hunched, his head

thrust forward as though he could not get his mouth within speaking distance of

his peers soon enough.

On the whole, she thought, it had gone well. A calculated risk and very

dangerous to her personally. She was sure there had been assassins on the

balconies above her waiting for a signal from Albertus. And now, the fear he

carried back with him was a thing the Bene Gesserit understood intimately

through millennia of manipulations. As contagiously virulent as any plague.

The teaching Sisters called it "a directed hysteria." It had been directed

(aimed was more accurate) at the heart of the Rakian priesthood. It could be

relied upon, especially with the reinforcement that now would be set in motion.

The priests would submit. Only the few immune heretics were to be feared now.

This is the awe-inspiring universe of magic: There are no atoms, only waves and

motions all around. Here, you discard all belief in barriers to understanding.

You put aside understanding itself. This universe cannot be seen, cannot be

heard, cannot be detected in any way by fixed perceptions. It is the ultimate

void where no preordained screens occur upon which forms may be projected. You

have only one awareness here -- the screen of the magi: Imagination! Here, you

learn what it is to be human. You are a creator of order, of beautiful shapes

and systems, an organizer of chaos.

-The Atreides Manifesto, Bene Gesserit Archives

"What you are doing is too dangerous," Teg said. "My orders are to protect you

and strengthen you. I cannot permit this to continue."

Teg and Duncan stood in the long, wood-paneled hallway just outside the noglobe's

practice floor. It was late afternoon by the clock of their arbitrary

routine and Lucilla had just swept away in anger after a vituperative

confrontation.

Every meeting between Duncan and Lucilla lately had taken on the nature of a

battle. Just now, she had stood in the doorway to the practice hall, a solid

figure saved from being stolid by her softening curves, the seductive movements

obvious to both males.

"Stop it, Lucilla!" Duncan had ordered.

Only her voice betrayed her anger: "How long do you think I will wait to carry

out my orders?"

"Until you or someone else tells me that I --"

"Taraza requires things of you that none of us here knows!" Lucilla said.

Teg tried to soothe the mounting angers: "Please. Isn't it enough that Duncan

continues to improve his performance? In a few days, I will start keeping

regular watch outside. We can --"

"You can stop interfering with me, damn you!" Lucilla snapped. She whirled and

stalked away.

As he saw the hard resolution on Duncan's face now, something furious began to

work in Teg. He felt impelled by the necessities of their isolated situation.

His intellect, that marvelously honed Mentat instrument, was shielded here from

the mental uproar to which it adjusted on the outside. He thought that if he

could only silence his mind, bring everything to stillness, all things would

become clear to him.

"Why are you holding your breath, Bashar?"

Duncan's voice impaled Teg. It required a supreme act of will to resume normal

breathing. He felt the emotions of his two companions in the no-globe as an ebb

and flow temporarily removed from other forces.

Other forces.

Mentat awareness could be an idiot in the presence of other forces that swept

through the universe. There might exist in the universe people whose lives were

infused with powers he could not imagine. Before such forces he would be chaff

moved on the froth of wild currents.

Who could plunge into such an uproar and emerge intact?

"What can Lucilla possibly do if I continue to resist her?" Duncan asked.

"Has she used Voice on you?" Teg asked. His own voice sounded remote to him.

"Once."

"You resisted?" Remote surprise lurked somewhere within Teg.

"I learned the way of that from Paul Muad'dib himself."

"She is capable of paralyzing you and --"

"I think her orders prohibit violence."

"What is violence, Duncan?"

"I'm going to the showers, Bashar. Are you coming?"

"In a few minutes." Teg took a deep breath, sensing how close he was to

exhaustion. This afternoon on the practice floor and afterward had drained him.

He watched Duncan leave. Where was Lucilla? What was she planning? How long

could she wait? That was the central question and it put the no-globe's

peculiar emphasis on their isolation from Time.

Again, he sensed that ebb and flow which their three lives influenced. I must

talk to Lucilla! Where has she gone? The library? No! There is something

else I must do first.

Lucilla sat in the room she had chosen for her personal quarters. It was a

small space with an ornate bed filling an inset into one wall. Gross and subtle

signs around her said this had been the room of a favorite Harkonnen hetaira.

Pastel blues with darker blue accents shaded the fabrics. Despite the baroque

carvings on bed, alcove, ceiling, and every functioning appurtenance, the room

itself could be swept out of her consciousness once she relaxed here. She lay

back on the bed and closed her eyes against the sexually gross figures on the

alcove ceiling.

Teg will have to be dealt with.

It would have to be done in such a way that it did not offend Taraza or weaken

the ghola. Teg presented a special problem in many ways, especially in the way

his mental processes could dip into and out of deeper sources akin to those of

the Bene Gesserit.

The Reverend Mother who bore him, of course!

Something passed from such a mother to such a child. It began in the womb and

probably did not end even when they were finally separated. He had never

undergone the all-ravening transmutation that produced Abominations . . . no,

not that. But he had subtle and real powers. Those born of Reverend Mothers

learned things impossible to others.

Teg knew precisely how Lucilla viewed love in all of its manifestations. She

had seen it on his face that once in his quarters at the Keep.

"Calculating witch!"

He might as well have spoken it aloud.

She recalled the way she had favored him with her benign smile and dominating

expression. That had been a mistake, demeaning to both of them. She sensed in

such thoughts a latent sympathy for Teg. Somewhere within her, despite all of

the careful Bene Gesserit training, there were chinks in her armor. Her

teachers had warned her about that many times.

"To be capable of inducing real love, you must feel it, but only temporarily.

And once is enough!"

Teg's reactions to the Duncan Idaho ghola said much. Teg was both drawn to and

repelled by their young charge.

As I am.

Perhaps it had been a mistake not to seduce Teg.

In her sex education, where she had been taught to gain strength from

intercourse rather than lose herself in it, her teachers had emphasized analysis

and historical comparisons, of which there were many in a Reverend Mother's

Other Memories.

Lucilla focused her thoughts on Teg's male presence. Doing this, she could feel

a female response, her flesh wanting Teg close to her and aroused to sexual peak

-- ready for the moment of mystery.

Faint amusement crept into Lucilla's awareness. Not orgasm. No scientific

labels! It was purest Bene Gesserit cant: moment of mystery, the Imprinter's

ultimate specialty. Immersion in the long Bene Gesserit continuity required

this concept. She had been taught to believe deeply in a duality: the

scientific knowledge by which the Breeding Mistresses guided them but, at the

same time, the moment of mystery that confounded all knowledge. Bene Gesserit

history and science said the procreative drive must remain irretrievably buried

in the psyche. It could not be removed without destroying the species.

The safety net.

Lucilla gathered her sexual forces around her now as only a Bene Gesserit

Imprinter could. She began to focus her thoughts on Duncan. By now, he would

be in the showers and thinking about this evening's training session with his

Reverend Mother-teacher.

I will go to my student presently, she thought. The important lesson must be

taught or he will not be fully prepared for Rakis.

Those were Taraza's instructions.

Lucilla swung the focus of her thoughts fully onto Duncan. It was almost as

though she saw him standing naked under the shower.

How little he understood of what there might be to learn!

Duncan sat alone in the dressing cubicle off the showers which adjoined the

practice hall. He was immersed in a deep sadness. This brought remembered

pains to old wounds that this young flesh had never experienced.

Some things never changed! The Sisterhood was at its old-old games again.

He looked up and around this dark-paneled Harkonnen place. Arabesques were

carved into walls and ceiling, strange designs in the tesserae of the floor.

Monsters and lovely human bodies intermingled across the same defining lines.

Only a flicker of attention separated one from the other.

Duncan looked down at this body that the Tleilaxu and their axlotl tanks had

produced for him. It still felt strange at moments. He had been a man of many

adult experiences in the last instant he remembered from his pre-ghola life --

fighting off a swarm of Sardaukar warriors, giving his young Duke a chance to

escape.

His Duke! Paul had been no older than this flesh then. Conditioned, though,

the way the Atreides always were: Loyalty and honor above all else.

The way they conditioned me after they saved me from the Harkonnens.

Something within him could not evade that ancient debt. He knew its source. He

could outline the process by which it had been embedded in him.

There it remained.

Duncan glanced at the tiled floor. Words had been worked in the tile along the

cubicle's splashboard. It was a script that one part of him identified as an

ancient thing from the old Harkonnen times but that another part of him found to

be an all-too-familiar Galach.

"CLEAN SWEET CLEAN BRIGHT CLEAN PURE CLEAN"

The ancient script repeated itself around the room's perimeter as though the

words themselves might create something that Duncan knew was alien to the

Harkonnens of his memories.

Over the door to the showers, more script:

"CONFESS THY HEART AND FIND PURITY"

A religious admonition in a Harkonnen stronghold? Had the Harkonnens changed in

the centuries after his death? Duncan found this hard to believe. These words

were things that the builders probably had thought appropriate.

He felt rather than heard Lucilla enter the room behind him. Duncan stood and

fastened the clips of the tunic he had appropriated from the nullentropy bins

(but only after removing all Harkonnen insignia!).

Without turning, he said: "What now, Lucilla?"

She stroked the fabric of the tunic along his left arm. "The Harkonnens had

rich tastes."

Duncan spoke quietly: "Lucilla, if you touch me again without my permission, I

will try to kill you. I will try so hard that you very likely will have to kill

me."

She recoiled.

He stared into her eyes. "I am not some damned stud for the witches!"

"Is that what you think we want of you?"

"Nobody has said what you want of me but your actions are obvious!"

He stood poised on the balls of his feet. The unawakened thing within him

stirred and sent his pulse racing.

Lucilla studied him carefully. Damn that Miles Teg! She had not expected

resistance to take this form. There was no doubting Duncan's sincerity. Words

by themselves no longer would serve. He was immune to Voice.

Truth.

It was the only weapon left to her.

"Duncan, I do not know precisely what it is Taraza expects you to do on Rakis.

I can guess but my guess may be wrong."

"Guess, then."

"There is a young girl on Rakis, barely into her teens. Her name is Sheeana.

The worms of Rakis obey her. Somehow, the Sisterhood must gather this talent

into its own store of abilities."

"What could I possibly. . .

"If I knew, I certainly would tell you now."

He heard her sincerity unmasked by her desperation.

"What does your talent have to do with this?" he demanded.

"Only Taraza and her councillors know."

"They want some hold on me, something from which I cannot escape!"

Lucilla already had arrived at this deduction but she had not expected him to

see it that quickly. Duncan's youthful face concealed a mind that worked in

ways she had not yet fathomed. Lucilla's thoughts raced.

"Control the worms and you could revive the old religion." It was Teg's voice

from the doorway behind Lucilla.

I did not hear him arrive!

She whirled. Teg stood there with one of the antique Harkonnen lasguns held

casually across his left arm, its muzzle directed at her.

"This is to insure that you listen to me," he said.

"How long have you been there listening?"

Her angry glare did not change his expression.

"From the moment you admitted you don't know what Taraza expects of Duncan," Teg

said. "Nor do I. But I can make a few Mentat projections -- nothing firm yet

but all of them suggestive. Tell me if I am wrong."

"About what?"

He glanced at Duncan. "One of the things you were told to do was to make him

irresistible to most women."

Lucilla tried to conceal her dismay. Taraza had warned her to conceal this from

Teg as long as possible. She saw that concealment no longer was possible. Teg

had read her reaction with those damnable abilities imparted to him by his

damnable mother!

"A great deal of energy is being gathered and aimed at Rakis," Teg said. He

looked steadily at Duncan. "No matter what the Tleilaxu have buried in him, he

has the stamp of ancient humankind in his genes. Is that what the Breeding

Mistresses need?"

"A damned Bene Gesserit stud!" Duncan said.

"What do you intend to do with that weapon?" Lucilla asked. She nodded at the

antique lasgun in Teg's hands.

"This? I didn't even put a charge cartridge in it." He lowered the lasgun and

leaned it into a corner beside him.

"Miles Teg, you will be punished!" Lucilla grated.

"That will have to wait," he said. "It's almost night outside. I've been out

there under the life-shield. Burzmali has been here. He has left his sign to

tell me he read the message I scratched with those animal marks on the trees."

A glittering alertness came into Duncan's eyes.

"What will you do?" Lucilla asked.

"I have left new marks arranging a rendezvous. Right now, we are all going up

to the library. We are going to study the maps. We will commit them to memory.

At the very least, we should know where we are when we run."

She gave him the benefit of a curt nod.

Duncan noted her movement with only part of his awareness. His mind already had

leaped ahead to the ancient equipment in the Harkonnen library. He had been the

one to show both Lucilla and Teg how to use it correctly, calling up an ancient

map of Giedi Prime dating from the time when the no-globe had been built.

With Duncan's pre-ghola memory as guide and his own more modern knowledge of the

planet, Teg had tried to bring the map up to date.

"Forest Guard Station" became "Bene Gesserit Keep."

"Part of it was a Harkonnen hunting lodge," Duncan had said. "They hunted human

game raised and conditioned specifically for that purpose."

Towns vanished under Teg's updating. Some cities remained but received new

labels. "Ysai," the nearest metropolis, had been marked "Barony" on the

original map.

Duncan's eyes went hard in memory. "That's where they tortured me."

When Teg exhausted his memory of the planet, much was marked unknown but there

were frequent curly-ended Bene Gesserit symbols to identify the places where

Taraza's people had told Teg he might find temporary sanctuary.

Those were the places Teg wanted committed to memory.

As he turned to lead them up to the library, Teg said: "I will erase the map

when we have learned it. There's no telling who might find this place and study

it."

Lucilla swept past him. "It's on your head, Miles!" she said.

Teg called after her retreating back: "A Mentat tells you that I did what was

required of me."

She spoke without turning: "How logical!"

This room reconstructs a bit of the desert of Dune. The sandcrawler directly in

front of you dates from the Atreides times. Grouped around it, moving clockwise

from your left, are a small harvester, a carryall, a primitive spice factory and

the other support equipment. All are explained at each station. Note the

illuminated quotation above the display: "FOR THEY SHALL SUCK OF THE ABUNDANCE

OF THE SEAS AND OF THE TREASURE IN THE SAND." This ancient religious quotation

was oft repeated by the famous Gurney Halleck.

-Guide Announcement, Museum of Dar-es-Balat

The worm did not slow its relentless progress until just before dusk.. By then,

Odrade had played out her questions and still had no answers. How did Sheeana

control the worms? Sheeana said she was not steering her Shaitan in this

direction. What was this hidden language to which the desert monster responded?

Odrade knew that her Sister-guardians up there in the 'thopters that paced them

would be exhausting the same questions plus one more.

Why did Odrade let this ride continue?

They might even hazard a few guesses: She does not call us in because that

might disturb the beast. She does not trust us to pluck her party from its

back.

The truth was far simpler: curiosity.

The hissing passage of the worm could have been a surging vessel breasting seas.

The dry flinty odors of overheated sand, swept across them by a following wind,

said otherwise. Only open desert stretched around them now, kilometer after

kilometer of whaleback dunes as regular in their spacing as ocean waves.

Waff had been silent for a long period. He crouched in a miniature reproduction

of Odrade's position, his attention directed ahead, a blank expression on his

face. His most recent statement:

"God guard the faithful in the hour of our trial!"

Odrade thought of him as living proof that a strong enough fanaticism could

endure for ages. Zensunni and the old Sufi survived in the Tleilaxu. It was

like a deadly microbe that had lain dormant all of those millennia, waiting for

the right host to feed its virulence.

What will happen to the thing I planted in the Rakian priesthood? she wondered.

Saint Sheeana was a certainty.

Sheeana sat on a ring of her Shaitan, her robe pulled up to expose her thin

shanks. She gripped the ring with both hands between her legs.

She had said that her first worm ride went directly to the city of Keen. Why

there? Had the worm simply been taking her to her own kind?

This one beneath them now certainly had a different goal. Sheeana no longer

questioned but then Odrade had ordered her to remain silent and practice the low

trance. That, at least, would assure that every last detail of this experience

could be recalled easily from her memory. If there were a hidden language

between Sheeana and worm, they would find it later.

Odrade peered at the horizon. The remnant base of the ancient wall around the

Sareer was only a few kilometers ahead. Long shadows from it lay across the

dunes, telling Odrade that the remnant was higher than she had originally

suspected. It was a shattered and broken outline now, with great boulders

strewn along its base. The notch where the Tyrant had tumbled from his bridge

into the Idaho River lay well to their right, at least three kilometers off

their path. No river flowed there now.

Waff stirred beside her. "I heed Thy call, God," he said. "It is Waff of the

Entio who prays in Thy Holy Place."

Odrade swiveled her gaze toward him without moving her head. Entio? Her Other

Memories knew an Entio, a tribal leader in the great Zensunni Wandering, long

before Dune. What was this? What ancient memories did these Tleilaxu keep

alive?

Sheeana broke her silence. "Shaitan is slowing."

The remains of the ancient wall blocked their way. It loomed at least fifty

meters over the highest dunes. The worm turned slightly to the right and moved

between two giant boulders that towered above them. It came to a stop. The

long ridged back lay parallel to a mostly intact section of the wall's base.

Sheeana stood and looked at the barrier.

"What is this place?" Waff asked. He raised his voice above the sound of the

'thopters circling overhead.

Odrade released her tiring grip and flexed her fingers. She continued to kneel

while she studied their surroundings. Shadows from the tumbled boulders drew

hard lines on sand spills and smaller rocks. Seen close up, not twenty meters

away, the wall revealed cracks and fissures, dark openings into the ancient

foundation.

Waff stood and massaged his hands.

"Why have we been brought here?" he asked. His voice was faintly plaintive.

The worm twitched.

"Shaitan wants us to get off," Sheeana said.

How does she know? Odrade wondered. The worm's movement had not been enough to

make any of them stumble. It could have been some private reflex after the long

journey.

But Sheeana faced the ancient wall's foundation, sat down on the curve of the

worm and slid off. She dropped in a crouch on soft sand.

Odrade and Waff moved forward and watched with fascination as Sheeana slogged

through the sand to the front of the creature. There, Sheeana placed both hands

on her hips and faced the gaping mouth. Hidden flames played orange light

across the young face.

"Shaitan, why are we here?" Sheeana demanded.

Again, the worm twitched.

"He wants all of you off him," Sheeana called.

Waff looked at Odrade. "If God wishes thee to die, He causes thy steps to lead

thee to the place of thy death."

Odrade gave him back a paraphrase from the cant of the Shariat: "Obey God's

messenger in all things."

Waff sighed. Doubt was plain on his face. But he turned and was first off the

worm, dropping just ahead of Odrade. They followed Sheeana's example, moving to

the front of the creature. Odrade, every sense alert, fixed her gaze on

Sheeana.

It was much hotter in front of the gaping mouth. The familiar bite of melange

filled the air around them.

"We are here, God," Waff said.

Odrade, getting more than a little tired of his religious awe, spared a glance

for their surroundings -- the shattered rocks, the eroded barrier reaching into

the dusky sky, sand sloping against the time-scarred stones, and the slow

scorching huff-huff of the worm's internal fires.

But where is here? Odrade wondered. What is special about this place to make

it the worm's destination?

Four of the watching 'thopters passed in line overhead. The sound of their wing

fans and the hissing jets momentarily drowned out the worm's background

rumblings.

Shall I call them down? Odrade wondered. It would take only a hand signal.

Instead, she lifted two hands in the signal for the watchers to remain aloft.

Evening's chill was on the sand now. Odrade shivered and adjusted her

metabolism to the new demands. She felt confident that the worm would not

engulf them with Sheeana beside them.

Sheeana turned her back on the worm. "He wants us to be here," she said.

As though her words were a command, the worm twisted its head away from them and

slid off through the tall scattering of giant boulders. They could hear it

speeding away back into the desert.

Odrade faced the base of the ancient wall. Darkness would be upon them soon but

enough light remained in the high desert's long dusk that they might yet see

some explanation of why the creature had brought them here. A tall fissure in

the rock wall to her right seemed as good a place to investigate as any.

Keeping part of her attention on the sounds from Waff, Odrade climbed a sandy

incline toward the dark opening. Sheeana kept pace with her.

"Why are we here, Mother?"

Odrade shook her head. She heard Waff following.

The fissure directly in front of her was a shadowy hole into darkness. Odrade

stopped and held Sheeana beside her. She judged the opening to be about a meter

wide and some four times that in height. The rocky sides were curiously smooth,

as though polished by human hands. Sand had drifted into the opening. Light

from the setting sun reflected off the sand to bathe one side of the opening in

a wash of gold.

Waff spoke from behind them: "What is this place?"

"There are many old caves," Sheeana said. "Fremen hid their spice in caves."

She inhaled deeply through her nose. "Do you smell it, Mother?"

There was a definite melange odor to the place, Odrade agreed.

Waff moved past Odrade and into the fissure. He turned there, looking up at the

walls where they met in a sharp angle above him. Facing Odrade and Sheeana, he

backed farther into the opening, his attention on the walls. Odrade and Sheeana

stepped closer to him. With an abrupt hissing of spilled sand, Waff vanished

from their sight. In the same instant, the sand all around Odrade and Sheeana

slipped forward into the fissure, dragging both of them with it. Odrade grabbed

Sheeana's hand.

"Mother!" Sheeana cried.

The sound echoed from invisible rock walls as they slid down a long slope of

spilling sand into concealing darkness. The sand drifted them to a stop in a

final wash of gentle movement. Odrade, in sand up to her knees, extricated

herself and pulled Sheeana with her onto a hard surface.

Sheeana started to speak but Odrade said: "Hush! Listen!"

There was a grating disturbance off to the left.

"Waff?"

"I'm in it up to my waist." There was terror in his voice.

Odrade spoke dryly. "God must want it that way. Pull yourself out gently. It

feels like rock under our feet. Gently now! We don't need another avalanche."

As her eyes adjusted, Odrade looked up the sand slope down which they had

tumbled. The opening where they had entered this place was a distant slit of

dusky gold far away above them.

"Mother," Sheeana whispered. "I'm scared."

"Say the Litany Against Fear," Odrade ordered. "And be still. Our friends know

we are here. They will help us get out."

"God has brought us to this place," Waff said.

Odrade did not respond. In the silence, she pursed her lips and gave a highpitched

whistle, listening for the echoes. Her ears told her they were in a

large space with some sort of low obstruction behind them. She turned her back

on the narrow fissure and gave another whistle.

The low barrier lay about a hundred meters away.

Odrade freed her hand from Sheeana's. "Stay right here, please. Waff?"

"I hear the 'thopters," he said.

"We all hear them," Odrade said. "They are landing. We will have help

presently. Meanwhile, please stay where you are and remain silent. I need the

silence."

Whistling and listening for the echoes, placing each foot carefully, Odrade

worked her way deeper into the darkness. An outstretched hand encountered a

rough rock surface. She felt along it. Only about waist high. She could feel

nothing beyond it. The echoes of her whistles said it was a smaller space there

and partly enclosed.

A voice called from high behind her. "Reverend Mother! Are you there?"

Odrade turned, cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted: "Stay back!

We've been spilled into a deep cave. Bring a light and a long rope."

A tiny dark figure moved back out of the distant opening. The light up there

was growing dimmer. She lowered her cupped hands and spoke into the darkness.

"Sheeana? Waff? Come toward me about ten paces and wait there."

"Where are we, Mother?" Sheeana asked.

"Patience, child."

A low, muttering sound came from Waff. Odrade recognized the ancient words of

the Islamiyat. He was praying. Waff had dropped all attempts to conceal his

origins from her. Good. The believer was a receptacle for her to feed with the

sweets of the Missionaria Protectiva.

Meanwhile, the possibilities of this place where the worm had brought them

excited Odrade. Guided by one hand on the rock barrier, she explored along it

to her left. The top was quite smooth in places. All of it sloped inward away

from her. Other Memories offered a sudden projection:

Catchbasin!

This was a Fremen water storage basin. Odrade inhaled deeply, testing for

moisture. The air was flint dry.

A bright light from the fissure stabbed downward, driving away the darkness. A

voice called from the opening and Odrade recognized it as one of her Sisters.

"We can see you!"

Odrade stepped back from the low barrier and turned, peering all around. Waff

and Sheeana stood about sixty meters away staring at their surroundings. The

chamber was roughly circular, some two hundred meters in diameter. A rock dome

arched high overhead. She examined the low barrier beside her: yes, a Fremen

catchbasin. She could discern the small rock island in its center where a

captive worm could be kept ready to spill into the water. Other Memories

replayed that agonized, twisting death which produced the spice poison to ignite

a Fremen orgy.

A low arch framed more darkness on the far side of the basin. She could see the

spillway there where water had been brought down from a windtrap. There would

be more catchbasins back there, an entire complex of them designed to hold a

wealth of moisture for an ancient tribe. She knew the name of this place now.

"Sietch Tabr," Odrade whispered.

The words ignited a flood of useful memories. This had been Stilgar's place in

the time of Muad'dib. Why did that worm bring us to Sietch Tabr?

A worm took Sheeana to the City of Keen. That others might know of her? Then

what was there to know here? Were there people back there in that darkness?

Odrade sensed no indications of life in that direction.

Her Sister at the opening interrupted these thoughts. "We've had to ask for the

rope to be brought from Dar-es-Balat! The people at the museum say this is

probably Sietch Tabr! They thought it had been destroyed!"

"Send down a light so I can explore it," Odrade called.

"The priests ask that we leave it undisturbed!"

"Send me a light!" Odrade insisted.

Presently, a dark object tumbled down the sandslope in a small spill of sand.

Odrade sent Sheeana scampering for it. A touch on the switch and a bright beam

went lancing at the dark archway beyond the catchbasin. Yes, more basins there.

And beside this basin, a narrow stairway cut into the rock. The steps led

upward, turning and removing themselves from her view.

Odrade bent and whispered in Sheeana's ear. "Watch Waff carefully. If he moves

after us, call out."

"Yes, Mother. Where are we going?"

"I must look at this place. I am the one who has been brought here for a

purpose." She raised her voice and addressed Waff: "Waff, please wait there

for the rope."

"What have you been whispering?" he demanded. "Why must I wait? What are you

doing?"

"I have been praying," Odrade said. "Now, I must continue this pilgrimage

alone."

"Why alone?"

In the old language of the Islamiyat, she said: "It is written."

That stopped him!

Odrade led the way at a fast walk toward the rock stairs.

Sheeana, hurrying along beside Odrade, said: "We must tell people about this

place. The old Fremen caves are safe from Shaitan."

"Be still, child," Odrade said. She aimed the light up into the stairway. It

curved through the rock, angling sharply to the right up there. Odrade

hesitated. The warning sense of danger she had felt at the beginning of this

venture came back intensified. It was an almost palpable thing within her.

What is up there?

"Wait here, Sheeana," Odrade said. "Don't let Waff follow me."

"How can I stop him?" Sheeana glanced fearfully back across the chamber where

Waff stood.

"Tell him it is God's will that he remain. Say it this way . . .

Odrade bent close to Sheeana and repeated the words in Waff's ancient language,

then: "Say nothing else. Stand in his way and repeat it if he tries to pass."

Sheeana mouthed the new words quietly. She had them, Odrade saw. The girl was

quick.

"He's afraid of you," Odrade said. "He won't try to harm you."

"Yes, Mother." Sheeana turned, folded her arms across her breast and looked

across the chamber at Waff.

Aiming the light ahead of her, Odrade went up the rock stairs. Sietch Tabr!

What surprise have you left for us here, old worm?

In a long low hallway at the top of the stairs, Odrade came on the first desertmummified

bodies. There were five of them, two men and three women, no

identifying marks or clothing on them. They had been completely stripped and

left for the desert's dryness to preserve. Dehydration had pulled skin and

flesh tightly around the bones. The bodies were propped in a row, their feet

extended across the passage. Odrade was forced to step over each of these

macabre obstructions.

She passed her handlight across each body as she went. They had been stabbed

almost identically. A slashing blade had been thrust upward just below the arch

of the sternum.

Ritual killings?

Dryly puckered flesh had been withdrawn from the wounds, leaving a dark spot to

mark them. These bodies were not from Fremen times, Odrade knew. Fremen death

stills made ashes of all flesh to recover a body's water.

Odrade probed ahead with her light and paused to consider her position.

Discovery of the bodies intensified her sense of peril. I should have brought a

weapon. But that would have aroused Waff's suspicions.

The persistence of that inner warning could not be evaded. This relic of Sietch

Tabr was perilous.

The beam of her light revealed another stairway at the end of this hall.

Cautiously, Odrade moved forward. At the first step, she sent the beam of her

light probing upward. Shallow steps. Only a little way up, more rock -- a

wider space up there. Odrade turned and sent the light stabbing around this

hallway. Chips and burn marks scarred the rock walls. Once more, she looked up

the stairway.

What is up there?

The sense of danger was intense.

One slow step at a time, pausing often, Odrade climbed. She emerged into a

larger passage hewn through the native rock. More bodies greeted her. These

had been abandoned in the disarray of their final moments. Again, she saw only

mummified flesh stripped of clothing. They lay scattered along this wider

passage -- twenty of them. She wove her way around them. Some had been stabbed

in the same way as the five on the lower level. Some had been slashed and

hacked and burned by lasgun beams. One had been beheaded and the skin-masked

skull lay against a wall of the passage like a ball abandoned from some terrible

game.

This new passage led straight ahead past openings into small chambers on both

sides. She saw nothing of value in the small chambers where she sent her

probing light: a few scattered strands of spice fiber, small spills of melted

rock, melt bubbles occasionally on floors, walls, and ceilings.

What violence was this?

Suggestive stains could be seen on some of the chamber floors. Spilled blood?

One chamber had a tiny mound of brown cloth in a corner. Scraps of torn fabric

scattered under Odrade's foot.

There was dust. Dust everywhere. Her feet stirred it up in passing.

The passage ended at an archway that gave onto a deep ledge. She sent her light

beyond the ledge: an enormous chamber, far larger than the one down below. Its

curved ceiling went so high she knew it must extend into the rock base of the

great wall. Wide, shallow steps led down from the ledge onto the chamber floor.

Hesitantly, Odrade went down the steps and out onto the floor. She sent her

light sweeping all around. Other passages led out of the great chamber. Some,

she saw, had been blocked by stone and the stones torn away to be left scattered

on the ledge and on this great floor.

Odrade sniffed the air. Carried on the dust stirred up by her feet there was a

definite smell of melange. The smell wove through her sense of peril. She

wanted to leave, hurry back to the others. But the danger was a beacon. She

had to learn where that beacon led.

She knew where she was now, though. This was the great gathering chamber of

Sietch Tabr, site of countless Fremen spice orgies and tribal convocations.

Here, the Naib Stilgar had presided. Gurney Halleck had been here. The Lady

Jessica. Paul Muad'dib. Chani, mother of Ghanima. Here, Muad'dib trained his

fighters. The original Duncan Idaho was here . . . and the first Idaho ghola!

Why have we been brought here? What is the danger?

It was here, right here! She could feel it. °

In this place, the Tyrant had concealed a spice hoard. Bene Gesserit records

said the hoard had filled this entire chamber to the ceiling and into many of

the surrounding passages as well.

Odrade pivoted, her gaze following the path of her light. Over there was the

ledge of the Naibs. And there, the deeper Royal Ledge Muad'dib had

commissioned.

And there is the archway where I entered.

She sent her light along the floor, noting places where searchers had chipped

and burned the rock seeking more of the Tyrant's fabulous hoard. Fish Speakers

had taken most of that melange, its hiding place revealed by the Idaho ghola who

had been consort of the famed Siona. The records said subsequent searchers had

found more caches hidden behind false walls and floors. There were many

authenticated accounts and the verifications of Other Memories. The Famine

Times had seen violence here when desperate searchers won through to this place.

That might explain the bodies. Many had fought just for the chance to search

Sietch Tabr.

As she had been taught, Odrade tried to use her sense of danger as a guide. Did

the miasma of past violence cling to these stones after all of those millennia?

That was not her warning. Her warning was something immediate. Odrade's left

foot encountered an uneven place on the floor. Her light picked out a dark line

in the dust. She scattered the dust with a foot, revealing a letter and then an

entire word burned in a flowing script.

Odrade read the word silently and then aloud.

"Arafel."

She knew this word. Reverend Mothers of the Tyrant's time had impressed it into

the Bene Gesserit consciousness, tracing its roots out to the most ancient

sources.

"Arafel: the cloud darkness at the end of the universe."

Odrade felt the gasping accumulation of her warning sense. It focused on that

single word.

"The Tyrant's holy judgment," the priests called that word. "The cloud darkness

of holy judgment!"

She moved out along the word, staring down at it, noting the curling at the end

that trailed off into a small arrow. She looked where the arrow pointed.

Someone else had seen the arrow and had cut into the ledge where it pointed.

Odrade crossed to where the searcher's burner had left a darker pool of melted

rock on the chamber floor. Streams of melted stone ran out in fingers away from

the ledge, each finger trailing from a deep hole burned into the rock of the

ledge.

Bending, Odrade peered into each hole with her light: Nothing. She sensed the

treasure hunter's excitement riding on her warning-fear. The extent of the

wealth this chamber had once held staggered imagination. In the worst of the

old times, a hand-carried luggage case could hold enough spice to buy a planet.

And the Fish Speakers had squandered this hoard, losing it in squabbles and

shattering misjudgments and ordinary foolishness too picayune for history to

record. They had been glad to accept Ixian alliance when the Tleilaxu broke the

melange monopoly.

Did the searchers find it all? The Tyrant was superbly clever.

Arafel.

At the end of the universe.

Had he sent a message down the eons to the Bene Gesserit of today?

She cast the beam of her light once more around the chamber and then upward.

The ceiling described an almost perfect half globe overhead. It had been

intended, she knew, as a model of the night sky seen from the entrance to Sietch

Tabr. But even by the time of Liet Kynes, the first planetologist here, the

original stars painted on that ceiling had been gone, lost in the tiny rock

chippings of small quakes and the everyday abrasions of life.

Odrade's breath quickened. The sense of peril had never been greater. The

danger beacon shone within her! Quickly, she trotted directly across to the

steps where she had descended to this floor. Turning there, she cast backward

in her mind for Other Memories to limn this place. They came slowly, forcing

past that heart-pounding sense of doom. Pointing the beam of her light upward

and peering along it, Odrade placed those ancient memories over the scene in

front of her.

Bits of reflected brilliance! '

Other Memories positioned them: indicators of the stars in a long-gone sky and

right there! The silvery-yellow half circle of the Arrakeen sun. She knew it

for a sunset sign.

The Fremen day starts at night.

Arafel!

Keeping her light on that sunset marker, she mounted the steps backward and went

around the chamber on the ledge to the exact position she had seen in Other

Memories.

Nothing remained of that ancient sun arc.

Searchers had chipped at the wall where it had been. Stone bubbles glistened

where a burner had been passed along the wall. No breaks entered the original

rock.

By the tightness in her chest, Odrade knew she teetered on the edge of a

dangerous discovery. The beacon had led her here!

Arafel . . . at the edge of the universe. Beyond the setting sun!

She swept her light right and left. Another passage entrance opened on her

left. Stones that had blocked it lay scattered on the ledge. Her heart

pounding, Odrade slipped through the opening and found a short hall plugged with

melted stone at the end. On her right, directly behind where the sunset marker

had been, she found a small room thick with the smell of melange. Odrade

entered the room and saw more signs of chipping and burning on walls and

ceiling. The danger sense was oppressive here. She chanted the Litany Against

Fear silently while she swept the beam of her light over the room. The place

was almost square, about two meters on a side. The ceiling was less than half a

meter above her head. Cinnamon pulsed in her nostrils. She sneezed and,

blinking, saw a tiny discoloration on the floor beside the threshold.

More marks of that ancient search?

Bending close with her light held at a sharp angle on one side, she saw that she

had glimpsed only the shadow of something etched deeply into the rock. Dust

concealed most of it. She knelt and brushed the dust aside. Very thin etching

and very deep. Whatever this was, it had been meant to endure. The last

message of a lost Reverend Mother? This was a known Bene Gesserit artifice.

She pressed sensitive fingertips against the etching and reconstructed its

tracery in her mind.

Recognition leaped into her awareness: one word -- inscribed in ancient

Chakobsa, "Here."

This was no ordinary "here" to mark an ordinary place but the accented and

emphatic "here" that said: "You have found me!" Her hammering heart emphasized

it.

Odrade rested her handlight on the floor near her right knee and let her fingers

explore the threshold beside that ancient summons. The stonework appeared

unbroken to the eye but her fingers detected a tiny discontinuity. She pressed

the discontinuity, twisted, turned, changed the angle of pressure several times

and repeated her effort.

Nothing.

Sitting back on her heels, Odrade studied the situation.

"Here."

The warning sense had grown even more acute. She could feel it as a pressure on

her breathing.

Withdrawing slightly, she pulled her light back and lay full length on the floor

to stare narrowly along the base of the threshold. Here! Could she place a

tool there beside that word and lever the threshold? No . . . a tool was not

indicated. This thing had the smell of the Tyrant, not of a Reverend Mother.

She tried to push the threshold sideways. Nothing moved.

Feeling the tensions and danger sense accentuated by frustration, Odrade stood

and kicked at the threshold beside the etched word. It moved! Something grated

roughly against sand over her head.

Odrade dodged backward as sand cascaded onto the floor in front of her. A deep

rumbling sound filled the tiny chamber. The stones shook under her feet. The

floor tipped downward in front of her toward the doorway, opening a space under

the door and its wall.

Once more, Odrade found herself precipitated forward and down into an unknown.

Her light tumbled with her, its beam rolling over and over. She saw mounds of

dark reddish brown in front of her. Cinnamon filled her nostrils.

She fell beside her light onto a soft mounding of melange. The opening through

which she had fallen lay out of reach some five meters overhead. She grabbed up

her light. Its beam picked out wide stone steps cut into the rock beside the

opening. Something written on the risers but she saw only that there was a way

out. Her first panic subsided, but the sense of danger left her almost

breathless, forcing the movements of her chest muscles.

Left and right she sent the beam of her light into this place where she had

fallen. It was a long room directly beneath the passage she had taken from the

great chamber. The entire length of it was piled with melange!

Odrade probed upward with her light and saw why no searcher tapping on that

passage floor overhead had detected this chamber. Criss-crossed rock bracings

transferred all strain deep into the stone walls. Anyone tapping overhead would

get back the sounds of solid rock.

Once more, Odrade looked at the melange around her. Even at today's tankdeflated

prices, she knew she was standing on a treasure. This hoard would

measure many long tons.

Is that the danger?

The warning sense within her remained just as acute as ever. The Tyrant's

melange was not what she should fear. The triumvirate would make an equitable

distribution of this lot and that would be the end of it. A bonus in the ghola

project.

Another danger remained. She could not avoid the warning.

Again, she sent the light beam along the mounded melange. Her attention was

drawn to the strip of wall above the spice. More words! Still in Chakobsa,

written with a cutter in a fine flowing script, there was another message:

"A REVEREND MOTHER WILL READ MY WORDS!"

Something cold settled in Odrade's guts. She moved to her right with the light,

plowing through an empire's ransom in melange. There was more to the message:

"I BEQUEATH TO YOU MY FEAR AND LONELINESS. TO YOU I GIVE THE CERTAINTY THAT THE

BODY AND SOUL OF THE BENE GESSERIT WILL MEET THE SAME FATE AS ALL OTHER BODIES

AND ALL OTHER SOULS."

Another paragraph of the message beckoned to the right of this one. She plowed

through the cloying melange and stopped to read.

"WHAT IS SURVIVAL IF YOU DO NOT SURVIVE WHOLE? ASK THE BENE TLEILAX THAT! WHAT

IF YOU NO LONGER HEAR THE MUSIC OF LIFE? MEMORIES ARE NOT ENOUGH UNLESS THEY

CALL YOU TO NOBLE PURPOSE!"

There was more of it on the narrow end wall of the long chamber. Odrade

stumbled through the melange and knelt to read:

"WHY DID YOUR SISTERHOOD NOT BUILD THE GOLDEN PATH? YOU KNEW THE NECESSITY.

YOUR FAILURE CONDEMNED ME, THE GOD EMPEROR, TO MILLENNIA OF PERSONAL DESPAIR."

The words "God Emperor" were not in Chakobsa but in the language of the

Islamiyat, where they conveyed an explicit second meaning to any speaker of that

tongue:

"Your God and Your Emperor because you made me so."

Odrade smiled grimly. That would drive Waff into a religious frenzy! The

higher he went, the easier to shatter his security.

She did not doubt the accuracy of the Tyrant's accusation, nor the potential in

his prediction that the Sisterhood could end. The sense of danger had led her

to this place unerringly. Something more had been at work, too. The worms of

Rakis still moved to the Tyrant's ancient beat. He might slumber in his endless

dream but monstrous life, a pearl in each worm to remind it, carried on as the

Tyrant had predicted.

What was it he had told the Sisterhood in his own time? She recalled his words:

"When I am gone, they must call me Shaitan, Emperor of Gehenna. The wheel must

turn and turn along the Golden Path."

Yes -- that was what Taraza had meant. "But don't you see? The common people

of Rakis have been calling him Shaitan for more than a thousand years."

So Taraza had known this thing. Without ever seeing these words, she had known.

I see your design, Taraza. And now I know the burden of fear you have carried

all these years. I can feel it every bit as deeply as you do.

Odrade knew then that this warning sense would not leave until she ended, or the

Sisterhood vanished from existence, or the peril was resolved.

Odrade lifted her light, got to her feet and slogged through the melange to the

wide steps out of this place. At the steps, she recoiled. More of the Tyrant's

words had been cut into each riser. Trembling, she read them as they moved

upward to the opening.

"MY WORDS ARE YOUR PAST,

"MY QUESTIONS ARE SIMPLE:

"WITH WHOM DO YOU ALLY?

"WITH THE SELF-IDOLATORS OF TLEILAX?

"WITH MY FISH SPEAKER BUREAUCRACY?

"WITH THE COSMOS-WANDERING GUILD?

"WITH HARKONNEN BLOOD SACRIFICERS?

"WITH A DOGMATIC SINK OF YOUR OWN CREATION?

"HOW WILL YOU MEET YOUR END?

"AS NO MORE THAN A SECRET SOCIETY?"

Odrade climbed past the questions, reading them a second time as she went.

Noble purpose? What a fragile thing that always was. And how easily distorted.

But the power was there immersed in constant peril. It was all spelled out on

the walls and stairs of that chamber. Taraza knew without having it explained.

The Tyrant's meaning was clear:

"Join me!"

As she emerged into the small room, finding a narrow ledge along which she could

swing herself to the door, Odrade looked down at the treasure she had found.

She shook her head in wonder at Taraza's wisdom. So that was how the Sisterhood

might end. Taraza's design was clear, all the pieces in place. Nothing

certain. Wealth and power, it was all the same in the end. The noble design

had been started and it must be completed even if that meant the death of the

Sisterhood.

What poor tools we have chosen!

That girl waiting back there in the deep chamber below the desert, that girl and

the ghola being prepared on Rakis.

I speak your language now, old worm. It has no words but I know the heart of

it.

Our fathers ate manna in the desert,

In the burning place where whirlwinds came.

Lord, save us from that horrible land!

Save us, oh-h-h-h-h save us

From that dry and thirsty land.

-Songs of Gurney Halleck, Museum of Dar-es-Balat

Teg and Duncan, both heavily armed, emerged from the no-globe with Lucilla into

the coldest part of the night. The stars were like needlepoints overhead, the

air absolutely still until they disturbed it.

The dominant smell in Teg's nostrils was the brittle mustiness of snow. The

odor infused every breath and when they exhaled, fat clouds of vapor puffed

around their faces.

Tears of cold started in Duncan's eyes. He had been thinking much of old Gurney

as they prepared to leave the no-globe, Gurney with his cheek scarred by a

Harkonnen inkvine whip. Trusted companions would be needed now, Duncan thought.

He did not trust Lucilla much and Teg was old, old. Duncan could see Teg's eyes

glinting in the starlight.

Slinging a heavy antique lasgun over his left shoulder, Duncan thrust his hands

deep into his pockets for warmth. He had forgotten how cold this planet could

get. Lucilla seemed impervious to it, obviously drawing warmth from one of her

Bene Gesserit tricks.

Looking at her, Duncan realized he had never trusted the witches much, not even

the Lady Jessica. It was easy to think of them as traitors, devoid of any

loyalty except to their own Sisterhood. They had so damned many secret tricks!

Lucilla had given up her seductive ways, though. She knew he meant what he had

said. He could feel her anger simmering. Let her simmer!

Teg stood quite still, his attention focused outward, listening. Was it right

to trust the single plan he and Burzmali had worked out? They had no backup.

Was it only eight days ago they had settled on it? It felt longer despite the

press of preparations. He glanced at Duncan and Lucilla. Duncan carried a

heavy old Harkonnen lasgun, the long field model. Even the extra charge

cartridges were heavy. Lucilla had refused to carry more than a single tiny

lasgun in her bodice. One small burst was all it held. An assassin's toy.

"We of the Sisterhood are noted for going into battle with only our skills as

weapons," she said. "It diminishes us to change that pattern."

She had knives in her leg sheaths, though. Teg had seen them. Poison on them,

too, he suspected.

Teg hefted the long weapon in his own hands: a modern field-style lasgun he had

brought from the Keep. Over his shoulder, a mate to Duncan's weapon hung from

its sling.

I must rely on Burzmali, Teg told himself. I trained him; I know his qualities.

If he says we trust these new allies, we trust them.

Burzmali had been obviously overjoyed to find his old commander alive and safe.

But it had snowed since their last encounter and the snow lay all around them, a

tabula rasa upon which all tracks would be written. They had not counted on

snow. Were there traitors in Weather Management?

Teg shivered. The air was cold. It felt like the chill of off-planet space,

empty and giving starlight free access to the forest glade around them. The

thin light reflected cleanly off the snow-covered ground and the white dusting

on the rocks. Dark outlines of conifers and the leafless branches of deciduous

trees displayed only their whitely diffused edges. All else was deepest shadow.

Lucilla blew on her fingers and leaned close to Teg to whisper: "Shouldn't he

be here by now?"

He knew that was not her real question. "Can Burzmali be trusted?" That was

her question. She had been asking it one way and another ever since Teg had

explained the plan to her eight days ago.

All he could say was: "I have staked my life on it."

"Our lives, too!"

Teg too disliked the accumulated uncertainties, but all plans relied ultimately

on the skills of those who executed them.

"You're the one who insisted we must get out of there and go on to Rakis," he

reminded her. He hoped she could see his smile, a gesture to take the sting out

of his words.

Lucilla was not placated. Teg had never seen a Reverend Mother this obviously

nervous. She would be even more nervous if she knew of their new allies! Of

course, there was the fact that she had failed to carry out her full assignment

from Taraza. How that must gall her!

"We took an oath to protect the ghola," she reminded him.

"Burzmali has taken that same oath."

Teg glanced at Duncan standing silently between them. Duncan gave no sign that

he heard the argument or shared the nervousness. An ancient composure held his

features motionless. He was listening to the night, Teg realized, doing what

all three of them should be doing just now. There was an odd look of ageless

maturity on his young features.

If ever I needed trusted companions, it's now! Duncan thought. His mind had

gone questing backward into the Giedi Prime days of his pre-ghola roots. This

was what they had called "a Harkonnen night." Safe within the warm shielding of

their suspensor-buoyed armor, the Harkonnens had enjoyed hunting their subjects

on such nights. A wounded fugitive could die of the cold. The Harkonnens knew!

Damn their souls!

Predictably, Lucilla caught Duncan's attention with a look that said: "We have

unfinished business, you and I."

Duncan turned his face up into the starlight, making sure she could see his

smile, an offensive and knowing look that caused Lucilla to stiffen inwardly.

He slipped the heavy lasgun from his shoulder and checked it. She noted the

ornate scrollwork on its stock and along the barrel. It was an antique but

still it gave off a deadly sense of purpose. Duncan rested it over his left

arm, right hand on the grip, finger on the trigger, exactly as Teg was carrying

his own modern weapon.

Lucilla turned her back on her companions and sent her senses probing onto the

hillside above them and below. Even as she moved, sound erupted all around.

Globs of sound filled their night -- a great burst of rumblings off to the

right, then silence. Another burst from downslope. Silence. From upslope! On

all sides!

At the first sound, all three of them crouched into the shelter of the rocks

outside the no-globe's cave entrance.

The sounds filling their night carried little definition: intrusive racketing,

partly mechanical, partly squeaks and wails and hisses. Intermittently, a

subterranean drumming made the ground vibrate.

Teg knew these sounds. There was a battle going on out there. He could hear

the background hissing of burners and, in the distant sky, the lancing beams of

armored lasguns.

Something flashed overhead -trailing blue and red sparks. Another and another!

The earth trembled. Teg inhaled through his nose: burned acid and a suggestion

of garlic.

No-ships! Many of them!

They were landing in the valley below the ancient no-globe.

"Back inside!" Teg ordered.

As he spoke, he saw it was too late. People were moving in from all around

them. Teg lifted his long lasgun and aimed it downslope toward the loudest of

the intrusive noises and the nearest detectable movement. Many people could be

heard shouting down there. Free glowglobes moved among the screening trees, set

loose by whoever came from there. The dancing lights drifted upslope on a cold

breeze. Dark figures moved in the shifting illumination.

"Face Dancers!" Teg grunted, recognizing the attackers. Those drifting lights

would be clear of the trees within seconds and on his position in less than a

minute!

"We've been betrayed!" Lucilla said.

A great shout roared from the hill above them: "Bashar!" Many voices!

Burzmali? Teg asked himself. He glanced back in that direction and then down

at the steadily advancing Face Dancers. No time to pick and choose. He leaned

toward Lucilla. "That's Burzmali above us. Take Duncan and run!"

"But what if --"

"It's your only chance!"

"You fool!" she accused, even as she turned to obey.

Teg's "Yes!" did nothing to ease her fears. This was what came of depending on

the plans of others!

Duncan had other thoughts. He understood what Teg was about to do -- sacrifice

himself that two might escape. Duncan hesitated, looking at the advancing

attackers below them.

Seeing the hesitation, Teg blared at him: "This is a battle order! I am your

commander!"

It was the closest thing to Voice Lucilla had ever heard from a man. She gaped

at Teg.

Duncan saw only the face of the Old Duke telling him to obey. It was too much.

He grabbed Lucilla's arm, but before hustling her up the slope, he said: "We'll

lay down a covering fire once we're clear!"

Teg did not respond. He crouched against a snow-dusted rock as Lucilla and

Duncan scrambled away. He knew he must sell himself dearly now. And there must

be something else: the unexpected. A final signature from the old Bashar.

The advancing attackers were coming up faster, exchanging excited shouts.

Setting his lasgun on maxibeam, Teg pressed the trigger. A fiery arc swept

across the slope below him. Trees burst into flame and crashed. People

screamed. The weapon would not perform long at this discharge level but while

it did the carnage produced its desired effect.

In the abrupt silence after that first sweep, Teg shifted his position to

another screening rock on his left and again sent a flaming lance down the dark

slope. Only a few of the drifting glowglobes had survived that first slashing

violence with its falling trees and dismembered bodies.

More screams greeted his second counterattack. He turned and scrambled across

the rocks to the other side of the no-globe's access cave. There, he sent

sweeping fire down the opposite slope. More screams. More flames and crashing

trees.

No answering fire came back.

They want us alive!

The Tleilaxu were prepared to spend whatever number of Face Dancer lives it

required to run his lasgun out of its charges!

Teg shifted the sling of the old Harkonnen weapon to a better position on his

shoulder, getting it ready to swing into action. He discarded the almost empty

charge in his modern lasgun, recharged it and rested the weapon across the

rocks. Teg doubted he would get the chance to recharge the second weapon. Let

them think down there that he had run out of charge cartridges. But there were

two Harkonnen handguns in his belt as a last resort. They would be potent at

close range. Some of the Tleilaxu Masters, the ones who ordered such carnage,

let them come closer!

Cautiously, Teg lifted his long lasgun from the rock and moved backward,

drifting up into the higher rocks, slipping left and then right. He paused

twice to sweep the slopes below him with short bursts as though conserving the

gun's charge. There was no sense in trying to conceal his movements. They

would have a life-tracer on him by now and, besides, there were the tracks in

the snow.

The unexpected! Could he suck them in close?

Well above the no-globe's access cave he found a deeper pocket in the rocks, its

bottom filled with snow. Teg dropped into this position, admiring the fine

field of fire this new vantage provided. He studied it briefly: protected

behind him by higher crags and open downslope on three sides. He lifted his

head cautiously and tried to see around the screening rocks upslope.

Only silence there.

Had that shout come from Burzmali's people? Even so, there was no guarantee

that Duncan and Lucilla could escape in these circumstances. It depended on

Burzmali now.

Is he as resourceful as I always thought?

There was no time to consider the possibilities or change a single element of

the situation. Battle had been joined. He was committed. Teg drew a deep

breath and peered downslope over the rocks.

Yes, they had recovered and were resuming the advance. Without telltale

glowglobes this time and silently now. No more shouts of encouragement. Teg

rested the long lasgun on a rock in front of him and swept a burning arc from

left to right in one long burst, letting it fade out at the end in an obvious

loss of charge.

Unslinging the old Harkonnen weapon, he readied it, waiting in silence. They

would expect him to flee up the hill. He crouched behind the screening rocks,

hoping there was enough movement above him to confuse the life-tracers. He

still heard people below him on that fire-wracked slope. Teg counted silently

to himself, spacing out the distance, knowing from long experience how much time

the attackers would require to come within deadly range. And he listened

carefully for another sound he knew from previous encounters with the Tleilaxu:

the sharp barking of commands in high-pitched voices.

There they were!

The Masters were spread out farther downslope than he had anticipated. Fearful

creatures! Teg set the old lasgun on maxibeam and lifted himself suddenly from

his protective cradle in the rocks.

He saw the arc of advancing Face Dancers in the light of burning trees and

brush. The high-pitched voices of command came from behind the advance, well

out of the dancing orange light.

Aiming over the heads of the nearest attackers, Teg sighted beyond the jumble of

flames and pressed the trigger: two long bursts, back and forth. He was

momentarily surprised by the extent of the destructive energy in the antique

weapon. The thing obviously was the product of superb craftsmanship but there

had been no way to test it in the no-globe.

This time, the screams carried a different pitch: high and frantic!

Teg lowered his aim and cleared the immediate slope of Face Dancers, letting

them feel the full force of the beam, revealing that he carried more than one

weapon. Back and forth he swept the deadly arc, giving the attackers plenty of

time to see the charge ebb into a final sputter.

Now! They had been sucked in once and would be more cautious. There just might

be a chance to join Duncan and Lucilla. This thought full in his mind, Teg

turned and scrambled out of his shelter across the upslope rocks. At his fifth

step, he thought he had run into a hot wall. There was time for his mind to

recognize what had happened: the shocking blast of a stunner full into his face

and chest! It came from directly upslope where he had sent Duncan and Lucilla.

Chagrin filled Teg as he fell into darkness.

Others could do the unexpected, too!

All organized religions face a common problem, a tender spot through which we

may enter and shift them to our designs: How do they distinguish hubris from

revelation?

-Missionaria Protectiva, the Inner Teachings

Odrade kept her gaze carefully away from the cool green of the quadrangle below

her where Sheeana sat with one of the teaching Sisters. The teaching Sister was

the best, precisely fitted to this next phase in Sheeana's education. Taraza

had chosen them all with care.

We proceed with your plan, Odrade thought. But did you anticipate, Mother

Superior, how we might be marked by a chance discovery here on Rakis?

Or was it chance?

Odrade sent her gaze over the lower rooftops to the spread of the Sisterhood's

central stronghold on Rakis. Rainbow tiles baked out there in glaring noon

light.

All of this ours.

This was, she knew, quite the largest embassy the priests permitted in their

holy city of Keen. And her presence in this Bene Gesserit stronghold defied the

agreement she had made with Tuek. But that had been before the discoveries at

Sietch Tabr. Besides, Tuek no longer really existed. The Tuek who marched the

priestly precincts was a Face Dancer living out a precarious charade.

Odrade brought her thoughts back to Waff, who stood with two guardian Sisters,

behind her, waiting near the door of this penthouse sanctuary with its fine view

through armor-plaz windows and its impressive black furnishings into which a

robed Reverend Mother might blend with only the lighter shades of her face

visible to a visitor.

Had she gauged Waff correctly? Everything had been done precisely according to

Missionaria Protectiva teachings. Had she opened the crack in his psychic armor

sufficiently? He should be goaded to speak soon. Then she would know.

Waff stood back there calmly enough. She could see his reflection in the plaz.

He gave no sign of understanding that the two tall, dark-haired Sisters flanking

him were there to prevent his possible violence. But he certainly knew.

My guardians, not his.

He stood with his head bent to conceal his features from her but she knew he was

uncertain. That part was sure. Doubts could be like a starving animal and she

had fed those hungry doubts well. He had been so sure that their venture into

the desert would be the occasion for his death. His Zensunni and Sufi beliefs

were telling him now that God's will preserved him there.

Surely, though, Waff was reviewing now his agreement with the Bene Gesserit,

seeing at last the ways he had compromised his people, how he had put his

precious Tleilaxu civilization in terrible jeopardy. Yes, his composure was

wearing thin, but only Bene Gesserit eyes detected this. It would be time soon

to begin rebuilding his awareness into a pattern more amenable to the

Sisterhood's needs. Let him stew a bit longer.

Odrade returned her attention to the view, loading the suspense of this delay.

The Bene Gesserit had chosen this embassy location because of the extensive

rebuilding that had changed the entire northeastern quarter of the old city.

They could build and remodel here in their own way and for their own purposes.

Ancient structures designed for easy access by people on foot, wide lanes for

official groundcars and occasional squares in which ornithopters might land --

all of that had been changed.

Keeping up with the times.

These new buildings stood much closer to the green-planted avenues whose tall

and exotic trees flaunted their enormous water consumption. 'Thopters were

relegated to rooftop landing pads on selected buildings. Pedestrian lanes clung

to narrow elevations attached to the buildings. Coin-operated, key-operated and

palm-identification liftslots had been inset into the new buildings, their

glowing energy fields masked by dark brown, vaguely transparent covers. The

liftslots were spines of darker color in the flat gray of plascrete and plaz.

Humans dimly seen in the tubes gave the effect of impurities moving up and down

in otherwise pure mechanical sausages.

All in the name of modernization.

Waff stirred behind her and cleared his throat.

Odrade did not turn. The two guardian Sisters knew what she was doing and gave

no sign. Waff's mounting nervousness was merely confirmation that all went

well.

Odrade did not feel that all was going truly well.

She interpreted the view out her window as just another disquieting symptom of

this disquieting planet. Tuek, she recalled, had not liked this modernization

of his city. He had complained that some way must be found to stop it and

preserve the old landmarks. His Face Dancer replacement continued that

argument.

How like Tuek himself this new Face Dancer was. Did such Face Dancers think for

themselves or just play out their parts in accordance with a Master's orders?

Were they still mules, these new ones? How much different were these Face

Dancers from the fully human?

Things about the deception worried Odrade.

The false Tuek's councillors, the ones fully involved in what they thought of as

"the Tleilaxu plot," spoke of public support for modernization and openly

gloated that they had their way at last. Albertus regularly reported everything

to Odrade. Each new report worried her more. Even the obvious subservience of

Albertus bothered her.

"Of course, the councillors do not mean public public support," Albertus said.

She could only agree. The behavior of the councillors signaled that they had

powerful backing among the middle echelons of the priesthood, among the climbers

who dared joke about their Divided God at weekend parties . . . among those

being soothed by the hoard Odrade had found at Sietch Tabr.

Ninety thousand long tons! Half a year's harvest from the deserts of Rakis.

Even a third of it represented a significant bargaining chip in the new

balances.

I wish I had never met you, Albertus.

She had wanted to restore in him the one who cares. What she had actually done

was easily recognized by one trained in the Missionaria Protectiva's ways.

A groveling sycophant!

It made no difference now that his subservience was driven by an absolute belief

in her holy association with Sheeana. Odrade had never before focused on how

easily the Missionaria Protectiva's teachings destroyed human independence.

That was always the goal, of course: Make them followers, obedient to our

needs.

The Tyrant's words in that secret chamber had done more than ignite her fears

for the Sisterhood's future.

"I bequeath to you my fear and loneliness."

From that millennial distance, he had planted doubts in her as surely as she had

planted them in Waff.

She saw the Tyrant's questions as though they had been limned with glowing light

on her inner eye.

"WITH WHOM DO YOU ALLY?"

Are we no more than a secret society? How will we meet our end? In a dogmatic

stink of our own creation?

The Tyrant's words had been burned into her consciousness. Where was the "noble

purpose" in what the Sisterhood did? Odrade could almost hear Taraza's sneering

response to such a question.

"Survival, Dar! That's all the noble purpose we need. Survival! Even the

Tyrant knew that!"

Perhaps even Tuek had known it. And what had that bought him in the end?

Odrade felt a haunting sympathy for the late High Priest. Tuek had been a

superb example of what a tightly knit family could produce. Even his name was a

clue: unchanged from Atreides days on this planet. The founding ancestor had

been a smuggler, confidant of the first Leto. Tuek had come from a family that

held firmly to its roots, saying: "There is something worth preserving in our

past." The example this set for descendants was not lost on a Reverend Mother.

But you failed, Tuek.

These blocks of modernization visible out her window were a sign of that failure

-- sops to the rising power elements in Rakian society, those elements that the

Sisterhood had worked so long to foster and strengthen. Tuek had seen this as a

harbinger of the day when he would be too weak politically to prevent the things

implied by such modernization:

A shorter and more upbeat ritual.

New songs, more in the modern manner.

Changes in the dancing. ("Traditional dances take so long!")

Above all, fewer ventures into the dangerous desert for the young postulants

from the powerful families.

Odrade sighed and glanced back at Waff. The little Tleilaxu chewed his lower

lip. Good!

Damn you, Albertus! I would welcome your rebellion!

Behind the closed doors of the Temple, the transition of the High Priesthood

already was being debated. The new Rakians spoke of the need "to keep up with

the times." They meant: "Give us more power!"

It has always been this way, Odrade thought. Even in the Bene Gesserit.

Still, she could not escape the thought: poor Tuek.

Albertus reported that Tuek, just before his death and replacement by the Face

Dancer, had warned his kin they might not retain familial control of the High

Priesthood when he died. Tuek had been more subtle and resourceful than his

enemies expected. His family already was calling in its debts, gathering its

resources to retain a power base.

And the Face Dancer in Tuek's place revealed much by his mimic performance. The

Tuek family had not yet learned of the substitution and one might almost believe

the original High Priest had not been replaced, so good was this Face Dancer.

Observing that Face Dancer in action betrayed much to the watchful Reverend

Mothers. That, of course, was one of the things that had Waff squirming now.

Odrade turned abruptly on one heel and strode across to the Tleilaxu Master.

Time to have at him!

She stopped two paces from Waff and glared down at him. Waff met her gaze with

defiance.

"You've had enough time to consider your position," she accused. "Why do you

remain silent?"

"My position? You think you give us a choice?"

"Man is but a pebble dropped in a pool," she quoted at him from his own beliefs.

Waff took a trembling breath. She spoke the proper words, but what lay behind

such words? They no longer sounded right coming from the mouth of a powindah

woman.

When Waff did not respond, Odrade continued her quotation: "And if man is but a

pebble, then all his works can be no more."

An involuntary shudder swept through Odrade, causing a look of carefully masked

surprise in the watchful guardian Sisters. That shudder was not part of the

required performance.

Why do I think of the Tyrant's words at this moment?

Odrade wondered.

"THE BODY AND SOUL OF THE BENE GESSERIT WILL MEET THE SAME FATE AS ALL OTHER

BODIES AND ALL OTHER SOULS."

His barb had gone deep into her.

How was I made so vulnerable? The answer leaped into her awareness: The

Atreides Manifesto!

Composing those words under Taraza's watchful guidance opened a flaw within me.

Could that have been Taraza's purpose: to make Odrade vulnerable? How could

Taraza have known what would be found here on Rakis? The Mother Superior not

only displayed no prescient abilities, she tended to avoid this talent in

others. On the rare occasions when Taraza had demanded such a performance of

Odrade herself, the reluctance had been obvious to the trained eye of a Sister.

Yet she made me vulnerable.

Had it been an accident?

Odrade sank into a swift recital of the Litany Against Fear, only a few

eyeblinks but in that time Waff visibly came to a decision.

"You would force it upon us," he said. "But you do not know what powers we have

reserved for such a moment." He lifted his sleeves to show where the dart

throwers had been. "These were but paltry toys by comparison with our real

weapons."

"The Sisterhood has never doubted this," Odrade said.

"Is it to be violent conflict between us?" he asked.

"It is your choice to make," she said.

"Why do you court violence?"

"There are those who would love to see Bene Gesserit and Bene Tleilax at each

other's throats," Odrade said. "Our enemies would enjoy stepping in to pick up

the pieces after we had weakened ourselves sufficiently."

"You state the argument for agreement but you give my people no room to

negotiate! Perhaps your Mother Superior gave you no authority to negotiate!"

How tempting it was to pass it all back into Taraza's hands, just as Taraza

wanted. Odrade glanced at the guardian Sisters. The two faces were masks

betraying nothing. What did they really know? Would they realize if she went

against Taraza's orders?

"Do you have such authority?" Waff persisted.

Noble purpose, Odrade thought. Surely, the Tyrant's Golden Path demonstrated at

least one quality of such purpose.

Odrade decided on a creative truth. "I have such authority," she said. Her own

words made it true. Having taken the authority, she made it impossible for

Taraza to deny it. Odrade knew, though, that her own words committed her to a

course sharply divergent from the sequential steps of Taraza's design.

Independent action. The very thing she had desired of Albertus.

But I am on the scene and know what is needed.

Odrade glanced at the guardian Sisters. "Remain here, please, and see that we

are not disturbed." To Waff, she said: "We might as well be comfortable." She

indicated two chairdogs set at right angles to each other across the room.

Odrade waited until they were seated before resuming the conversation. "We

require a degree of candor between us that diplomacy seldom allows. Too much

hangs in the balance for us to engage in shallow evasions."

Waff looked at her strangely. He said: "We know there is dissension in your

highest councils. Subtle overtures have been made to us. Is this part of . .

."

"I am loyal to the Sisterhood," she said. "Even those who approached you had no

other loyalty."

"Is this another trick of --"

"No tricks!"

"With the Bene Gesserit there are always tricks," he accused.

"What is it you fear from us? Name it."

"Perhaps I have learned too much from you for you to allow me to go on living."

"Could I not say the same of you?" she asked. "Who else knows of our secret

affinity? This is no powindah female talking to you here!"

She had ventured the word with some trepidation, but the effect could not have

been more revealing. Waff was visibly shaken. He was a long minute recovering.

Doubts remained, though, because she had planted them in him.

"What do words prove?" he asked. "You might still take the things you have

learned from me and leave my people nothing. You still hold the whip over us."

"I carry no weapons in my sleeves," Odrade said.

"But in your mind is knowledge that could ruin us!" He glanced back at the

guardian Sisters.

"They are part of my arsenal," Odrade agreed. "Shall I send them away?"

"And in their minds everything they have heard here," he said. He returned his

wary gaze to Odrade. "Better if you all sent your memories away!"

Odrade pitched her voice in its most reasonable tones. "What would we gain by

exposing your missionary zeal before you are ready to move? Would it serve us

to blacken your reputation by revealing where you have placed your new Face

Dancers? Oh, yes, we know about Ix and the Fish Speakers. Once we had studied

your new ones, we went searching for them."

"You see!" His voice was dangerously edged.

"I see no other way to prove our affinity than to reveal something equally

damaging about ourselves," Odrade said.

Waff was speechless.

"We would plant the worms of the Prophet on uncounted planets of the

Scattering," she said. "What would the Rakian priesthood say and do if you

revealed that?"

The guardian Sisters looked at her with thinly masked amusement. They thought

she was lying.

"I have no guards with me," Waff said. "When only one person knows a dangerous

thing, how easy it is to gain that person's eternal silence."

She lifted her empty sleeves.

He looked at the guardian Sisters.

"Very well," Odrade said. She glanced at the Sisters and gave a subtle handsign

to reassure them. "Wait outside, please, Sisters."

When the door closed behind them, Waff returned to his doubts. "My people have

not searched these rooms. What do I know of the things that could be hidden

here to record our words?"

Odrade shifted into the language of the Islamiyat. "Then perhaps we should

speak another tongue, one known only to us."

Waff's eyes glittered. In the same tongue, he said: "Very well! I will gamble

on it. And I ask you to tell me the real cause of dissension among the . . .

the Bene Gesserit."

Odrade allowed herself a smile. With the change of language, Waff's entire

personality, his whole manner, changed. He was performing exactly as expected.

None of his doubts had been reinforced in this tongue!

She responded with an equal confidence: "Fools fear that we may bring back

another Kwisatz Haderach! That is what a few of my Sisters argue."

"There is no more need of such a one," Waff said. "The one who could be many

places simultaneously has been and he has gone. He came only to bring the

Prophet."

"God would not send such a message twice," she said.

It was the very sort of thing Waff had heard often in this tongue. He no longer

thought it strange that a woman could utter such words. The language and the

familiar words were enough.

"Has Schwangyu's death restored unity among your Sisters?" he asked.

"We have a common enemy," Odrade said.

"The Honored Matres!"

"You were wise to kill them and learn from them."

Waff leaned forward, completely caught up in his familiar tongue and the flow of

their conversation. "They rule with sex!" he exulted. "Remarkable techniques

of orgasmic amplification! We --" Belatedly, he became aware of who was

sitting in front of him hearing all of this.

"We already know such techniques," Odrade reassured him. "It will be

interesting to compare, but there are obvious reasons why we have never tried to

ride to power on such a dangerous conveyance. Those whores are just stupid

enough to make that mistake!"

"Mistake?" He was clearly puzzled.

"They are holding the reins in their own hands!" she said. "As the power

grows, their control of it must grow. The thing will shatter of its own

momentum!"

"Power, always power," Waff muttered. Another thought struck him. "Are you

saying this was how the Prophet fell?"

"He knew what he was doing," she said. "Millennia of enforced peace followed by

the Famine Times and the Scattering. A message of direct results. Remember!

He did not destroy the Bene Tleilax or the Bene Gesserit."

"For what do you hope from an alliance between our two peoples?" Waff asked.

"Hope is one thing, survival another," she said.

"Always pragmatism," Waff said. "And some among you fear that you may restore

the Prophet on Rakis with all of his powers intact?"

"Did I not say it?" The language of the Islamiyat was particularly potent in

this questioning form. It placed the burden of proof on Waff.

"So they doubt God's hand in the creation of your Kwisatz Haderach," he said.

"Do they also doubt the Prophet?"

"Very well, let us have it all out in the open," Odrade said, and launched

herself on the chosen course of. deception: "Schwangyu and those who supported

her broke away from the Great Belief. We harbor no anger toward any Bene

Tleilax for having killed them. They saved us the trouble."

Waff accepted this utterly. Given the circumstances, it was precisely what

could be expected. He knew he had revealed much here that might better have

been held in reserve but there were still things the Bene Gesserit did not know.

And the things he had learned!

Odrade shocked him totally then by saying: "Waff, if you think your descendants

from the Scattering have returned to you unchanged, then foolishness has become

your way of life."

He held himself silent.

"You have all of the pieces in your hands," she said. "Your descendants belong

to the whores of the Scattering. And if you think any of them will abide by an

agreement, then your stupidity goes beyond description!"

Waff's reactions told her she had him. The pieces were clicking into place.

She had told him truth where it was required. His doubts were refocused where

they belonged: against the people of the Scattering. And it had been done in

his own tongue.

He tried to speak past a constriction in his throat and was forced to massage

his throat before speech returned. "What can we do?"

"It's obvious. The Lost Ones have their eyes on us as just one more conquest.

They think of it as cleaning up behind them. Common prudence."

"But they are so many!"

"Unless we unite in a common plan to defeat them, they will chew us up the way a

slig chews up its dinner."

"We cannot submit to powindah filth! God will not permit it!"

"Submit? Who suggests that we submit?"

"But the Bene Gesserit always use that ancient excuse: 'If you can't beat them,

join them.' "

Odrade smiled grimly. "God will not permit you to submit! Do you suggest He

would permit it of us?"

"Then what is your plan? What would you do against such numbers?"

"Exactly what you plan to do: convert them. When you say the word, the

Sisterhood will openly espouse the true faith."

Waff sat in stunned silence. So she knew the heart of the Tleilaxu plan. Did

she know also how the Tleilaxu would enforce it?

Odrade stared at him, openly speculative. Grasp the beast by the balls if you

must, she thought. But what if the projection by the Sisterhood's analysts was

wrong? This whole negotiation would be a joke in that case. And there was that

look in the back of Waff's eyes, that suggestion of older wisdom . . . much

older than his flesh. She spoke with more confidence than she felt:

"What you have achieved with gholas from your tanks and kept secretly for

yourselves alone, others will pay a great price to achieve."

Her words were sufficiently cryptic (Were others listening?) but Waff did not

doubt for an instant that the Bene Gesserit knew even this thing.

"Will you demand a share in that as well?" he asked. The words rasped in his

dry throat.

"Everything! We will share everything."

"What will you bring to this great sharing?"

"Ask."

"All of your breeding records."

"They are yours."

"Breeding mothers of our choice."

"Name them."

Waff gasped. This was far more than the Mother Superior had offered. It was

like a blossom opening in his awareness. She was right about the Honored

Matres, naturally -- and about the Tleilaxu descendants from the Scattering. He

had never completely trusted them. Never!

"You will want an unrestricted source of melange, of course," he said.

"Of course."

He stared at her, hardly believing the extent of his good fortune. The axlotl

tanks would offer immortality only to those who espoused the Great Belief. No

one would dare attack and attempt to seize a thing they knew the Tleilaxu would

destroy rather than lose. And now! He had gained the services of the most

powerful and enduring missionary force known. Surely, the hand of God was

visible here. Waff was first awed and then inspired. He spoke softly to

Odrade.

"And you, Reverend Mother, how do you name our accord?" "Noble purpose," she

said. "You already know the Prophet's words from Sietch Tabr. Do you doubt

him?"

"Never! But . . . but there is one thing: What do you propose with that ghola

of Duncan Idaho and the girl, Sheeana?"

"We will breed them, of course. And their descendants will speak for us to all

of those descendants of the Prophet."

"On all of those planets where you would take them!"

"On all of those planets," she agreed.

Waff sat back. I have you, Reverend Mother! he thought. We will rule this

alliance, not you. The ghola is not yours; he is ours!

Odrade saw the shadow of his reservations in Waff's eyes but knew she had

ventured as much as she dared. More would reawaken doubts. Whatever happened,

she had committed the Sisterhood to this course. Taraza could not escape this

alliance now.

Waff squared his shoulders, a curiously juvenile gesture belied by the ancient

intelligence peering from his eyes. "Ahhhh, one thing more," he said, every bit

the Master of Masters speaking his own language and commanding all of those who

heard him. "Will you also help spread this . . . this Atreides Manifesto?"

"Why not? I wrote it."

Waff jerked forward. "You?"

"Did you think someone of lesser abilities could have done it?"

He nodded, convinced without further argument. This was fuel for a thought that

had entered his own mind, a final point in their alliance: The powerful minds

of Reverend Mothers would advise the Tleilaxu at every turn! What did it matter

that they were outnumbered by those whores of the Scattering? Who could match

such combined wisdom and insurmountable weapons?

"The title of the Manifesto is valid, too," Odrade said. "I am a true

descendant of the Atreides."

"Would you be one of our breeders?" he ventured.

"I am almost past the age of breeding, but I am yours to command."

I remember friends from wars all but we forgot.

All of them distilled into each wound we caught.

Those wounds are all the painful places where we fought.

Battles better left behind, ones we never sought.

What is it that we spent and what was it we bought?

-Songs of the Scattering

Burzmali based his planning on the best of what he had learned from his Bashar,

keeping his own counsel about multiple options and fallback positions. That was

a commander's prerogative! Necessarily, he learned everything he could about

the terrain.

In the time of the Old Empire and even under the reign of Muad'dib, the region

around the Gammu Keep had been a forest reserve, high ground rising well above

the oily residue that tended to cover Harkonnen land. On this ground, the

Harkonnens had grown some of the finest pilingitam, a wood of steady currency,

always valued by the supremely rich. From the most ancient times, the

knowledgeable had preferred to surround themselves with fine woods rather than

with the mass-produced artificial materials known then as polastine, polaz, and

pormabat latterly: tine, laz, and bat). As far back as the Old Empire there

had been a pejorative label for the small rich and Families Minor arising from

the knowledge of a rare wood's value.

"He's a three P-O," they said, meaning that such a person surrounded himself

with cheap copies made from declasse substances. Even when the supremely rich

were forced to employ one of the distressful three P-Os, they disguised it where

possible behind O-P (the Only P), pilingitam.

Burzmali knew all of this and more as he set his people to searching for a

strategically situated pilingitam near the no-globe. The wood of the tree had

many qualities that endeared it to master artisans: Newly cut, it worked like a

softwood; dried and aged, it endured as a hardwood. It absorbed many pigments

and the finish could be made to appear as though it occurred naturally within

the grain. More important, pilingitam was anti-fungal and no known insect had

ever considered it a suitable dinner. Lastly, it was fire-resistant, and aged

specimens of the living tree grew outward from an enlarged and empty tube at the

core.

"We will do the unexpected," Burzmali told his searchers.

He had noted the distinctive lime green of pilingitam leaves during his first

overflight of the region. The forests of this planet had been raided and

otherwise logged off during the Famine Times but venerable O-Ps were still

nurtured among the evergreens and hardwoods replanted at the Sisterhood's

orders.

Burzmali's searchers found one such O-P dominating a ridge above the no-globe

site. It spread its leaves over almost three hectares. On the afternoon of the

critical day, Burzmali placed decoys at a distance from this position and opened

a tunnel from a shallow swale into the pilingitam's roomy core. There, he set

up his command post and the backup necessities for escape.

"The tree is a life form," he explained to his people. "It will mask us from

tracers."

The unexpected.

Nowhere in his planning did Burzmali assume that all of his actions would go

undetected. He could only spread his vulnerability.

When the attack came, he saw that it appeared to follow a predicted pattern. He

had anticipated that attackers would rely on no-ships and great numbers as they

had in the assault on the Gammu Keep. The Sisterhood's analysts assured him

that the major threat was from forces out of the Scattering -- descendants of

the Tleilaxu deployed by wildly brutal women calling themselves Honored Matres.

He saw this as overconfidence and not audacity. A real audacity was in the

arsenal of every student taught by the Bashar Miles Teg. It also helped that

Teg could be relied upon to improvise within the limits of a plan.

Through his relays, Burzmali followed the scrambling escape of Duncan and

Lucilla. Troopers with com-helmets and night lenses created a great display of

activity at the decoy positions while Burzmali and his select reserves kept

watch on the attackers, never betraying their position. Teg's movements were

easily followed by his violent response to the attackers.

Burzmali noted with approval that Lucilla did not pause when she heard the

battle sounds intensify. Duncan, however, tried to stop and almost ruined the

plan. Lucilla saved the moment by jabbing Duncan in a sensitive nerve and

barking: "You can't help him!"

Hearing her voice clearly through his helmet amplifiers, Burzmali cursed under

his breath. Others would hear her, too! No doubt they already were tracking

her, though.

Burzmali issued a subvocal command through the microphone implanted in his neck

and prepared to abandon his post. He kept most of his attention on the approach

of Lucilla and Duncan. If all went as planned, his people would bring down the

pair of them while two helmetless and suitably garbed troopers continued the

flight toward the decoy positions.

In the interim, Teg was creating an admirable path of destruction through which

a groundcar might escape.

An aide intruded on Burzmali: "Two attackers are closing in behind the Bashar!"

Burzmali waved the man aside. He could give little thought to Teg's chances.

Everything had to be focused on saving the ghola. Burzmali's thoughts were

intense as he watched:

Come on! Run! Run, damn you!

Lucilla held a similar thought as she urged Duncan forward, keeping herself

close behind him to shield him from the rear. Everything about her was

marshaled for ultimate resistance. Everything in her breeding and training came

to the fore in these moments. Never give up! To give up was to pass her

consciousness into the Memory Lives of a Sister or into oblivion. Even

Schwangyu had redeemed herself in the end by reverting to total resistance and

had died admirably in the Bene Gesserit tradition, resisting to the last.

Burzmali had reported it through Teg. Lucilla, assembling her uncounted lives,

thought: I can do no less!

She followed Duncan down into a shallow swale beside the bole of a giant

pilingitam and, when people arose out of the darkness to drag them down, she

almost responded in berserker mode but a voice speaking Chakobsa in her ear

said: "Friends!" This delayed her response for a heartbeat while she saw the

decoys continue the flight out of the swale. That more than anything else

revealed the plan and the identity of the people holding them against the rich

leafy smells of the earth. When the people slid Duncan ahead of her into a

tunnel aimed at the giant tree and (still in Chakobsa) cautioned speed, Lucilla

knew she was caught in a typical Teg-style audacity.

Duncan saw it, too. At the stygian outlet of the tunnel, he identified her by

smell and tapped out a message against her arm in the old Atreides silent battle

language.

"Let them lead."

The form of the message startled her momentarily until she realized that the

ghola of course would know this communication method.

Without speaking, the people around them removed Duncan's bulky antique lasgun

and hustled the fugitives into the hatch of a vehicle that she did not identify.

A brief red light flared in the darkness.

Burzmali spoke subvocally to his people: "There they go!"

Twenty-eight groundcars and eleven flitter-thopters scrambled from the decoy

positions. A proper diversion, Burzmali thought.

Pressure in Lucilla's ears told her a hatch had been sealed. Again the red

light flared and went dark.

Explosives shattered the great tree around them and their vehicle, now

identifiable as an armored groundcar, surged up and out on suspensors and jets.

Lucilla could follow their course only by flashes of fire and the twisting

patterns of stars visible through frames of oval plaz. The enclosing suspensor

field made the motions eerie, sensed only by the eyes. They sat cradled in

plasteel seats while their car rocketed downslope directly across Teg's holdout

position, shifting and darting in violent changes of direction. None of this

wild motion transmitted itself to the flesh of the occupants. There were only

the dancing blurs of trees and brush, some of them burning, and then the stars.

They were hugging the tops of the forest wreckage left by Teg's lasguns! Only

then did she dare to hope that they might win free. Abruptly, their vehicle

trembled into slow flight. The visible stars, framed by the tiny ovals of plaz,

tipped and were obscured by a dark obstruction. Gravity returned and there was

dim light. Lucilla saw Burzmali fling open a hatch on her left.

"Out!" he snapped. "Not a second to spare!"

Duncan ahead of her, Lucilla scrambled out of the hatch onto damp earth.

Burzmali thumped her back, grabbed Duncan's arm and hustled them away from the

car. "Quick! This way!" They crashed through tall bushes onto a narrow paved

roadway. Burzmali, a hand on each of them now, rushed them across the road and

pushed them flat in a ditch. He whipped a life-shield blanket over them and

lifted his head to look back in the direction from which they had come.

Lucilla peered past him and saw starlight on a snowy slope. She felt Duncan

stir beside her.

Far up the slope, a speeding groundcar, its jet-pod modifications visible

against the stars, lifted on a plume of red, climbing, climbing . . . climbing.

Suddenly, it darted off to the right.

"Ours?" Duncan whispered.

"Yes."

"How did it get up there without showing a . . ."

"An abandoned aqueduct tunnel," Burzmali whispered. "The car was programmed to

go on automatic." He continued to stare at the distant red plume. Abruptly, a

gigantic burst of blue light rolled outward from the faraway red tracery. The

light was followed immediately by a dull thump.

"Ahhhhh," Burzmali breathed.

Duncan, his voice low, said: "They are supposed to think you overloaded your

drive."

Burzmali shot a startled look at the young face, ghostly gray in starlight.

"Duncan Idaho was one of the finest pilots in Atreides service," Lucilla said.

It was an esoteric bit of knowledge and it served its purpose. Burzmali saw

immediately that he was not just guardian of two fugitives. His charges

possessed abilities that could be used if needed.

Blue and red sparks flashed across the sky where the modified groundcar had

exploded. The no-ships were sniffing that distant globe of hot gases. What

would the sniffers decide? The blue and red sparks slipped down behind the

starlit bulges of the hills.

Burzmali whirled at the sound of footsteps on the roadway. Duncan had a handgun

out so swiftly that Lucilla gasped. She put a restraining hand on his arm but

he shook it off. Didn't he see that Burzmali had accepted this intrusion?

A voice called softly from the roadway above them: "Follow me. Hurry."

The speaker, a moving blot of darkness, jumped down beside them and went

crashing through a gap in the bushes lining the road. Dark spots on the snowy

slope beyond the screening bushes resolved themselves into at least a dozen

armed figures. Five of this party grouped themselves around Duncan and Lucilla

and urged them silently along a snow-covered trail beside the bushes. The rest

of the armed party ran openly down across the snowslope into a dark line of

trees.

Within a hundred paces, the five silent figures formed their party into single

file, two of their number ahead, three behind, the fugitives sheltered between

them with Burzmali leading and Lucilla close behind Duncan. They came presently

to a cleft in dark rocks and under a ledge where they waited, listening to more

modified groundcars thunder into the air behind them.

"Decoys upon decoys," Burzmali whispered. "We overload them with decoys. They

know we must flee in panic as fast as possible. Now, we will wait nearby in

concealment. Later, we will proceed slowly . . . on foot."

"The unexpected," Lucilla whispered.

"Teg?" It was Duncan, his voice little more than a breath.

Burzmali leaned close to Duncan's left ear: "I think they got him." Burzmali's

whisper carried a deep tone of sadness.

One of their dark companions said: "Quickly now. Down here."

They were herded through the narrow cleft. Something emitted a creaking sound

nearby. Hands hustled them into an enclosed passage. The creaking sounded from

behind them.

"Get that door fixed," someone said.

Light flared around them.

Duncan and Lucilla stared around at a large, richly furnished room apparently

cut into rock. Soft carpets covered the floor -- dark reds and golds with a

figured pattern like repetitive battlements worked in pale green. A bundle of

clothing lay in a jumble on a table near Burzmali, who was in low-voiced

conversation with one of their escort: a fair-haired man with high forehead and

piercing green eyes.

Lucilla listened carefully. The words were understandable, relating how guards

had been posted, but the green-eyed man's accent was one she had never before

heard, a tumble of gutturals and consonants clicked off with surprising

abruptness.

"Is this a no-chamber?" she asked.

"No." The answer was supplied by a man behind her speaking in that same accent.

"The algae protect us."

She did not turn toward the speaker but looked up instead at the light yellowgreen

algae thick on the ceiling and walls. Only a few patches of dark rock

were visible near the floors.

Burzmali broke off his conversation. "We are safe here. The algae is grown

especially for this. Life scanners report only the presence of plant life and

nothing else that the algae shields."

Lucilla pivoted on one heel, sorting the room's details: that Harkonnen griffin

worked into a crystal table, the exotic fabrics on chairs and couches. A

weapons rack against one wall held two rows of long field-style lasguns of a

design she had never before seen. Each was bell-mouthed and with a curling gold

guard over the trigger.

Burzmali had returned to his conversation with the green-eyed man. It was an

argument over how they would be disguised. She listened with part of her mind

while she studied the two members of their escort remaining in the room. The

other three from the escort had filed out through a passage near the weapons

cabinet, an opening covered by a thick hanging of shimmering silvery threads.

Duncan, she saw, was watching her responses with care, his hand on the small

lasgun in his belt.

People of the Scattering? Lucilla wondered. What are their loyalties?

Casually, she crossed to Duncan's side and, using the finger-touch language on

his arm, relayed her suspicions. Both of them looked at Burzmali. Treachery?

Lucilla went back to her study of the room. Were they being watched by unseen

eyes?

Nine glowglobes lighted the space, creating their own peculiar islands of

intense illumination. It reached outward into a common concentration near where

Burzmali still talked to the green-eyed man. Part of the light came directly

from the drifting globes, all of them tuned into rich gold, and part of it was

reflected more softly off the algae. The result was a lack of dark shadows,

even under the furnishings.

The shimmering silver threads of the inner doorway parted. An old woman entered

the room. Lucilla stared at her. The woman had a seamed face as dark as old

rosewood. Her features were sharply defined in a narrow frame of straggling

gray hair that fell almost to her shoulders. She wore a long black robe worked

with golden threads in a pattern of mythological dragons. The woman stopped

behind a settee and placed her deeply veined hands on the back.

Burzmali and his companion broke off their conversation.

Lucilla looked from the old woman down to her own robe. Except for the golden

dragons, the garments were similar in design, the hoods draped back onto the

shoulders. Only in the side cut and the way it opened down the front was the

design of the dragon robe different.

When the woman did not speak, Lucilla looked to Burzmali for explanation.

Burzmali stared back at her with a look of intense concentration. The old woman

continued to study Lucilla silently.

The intensity of attention filled Lucilla with disquiet. Duncan felt it, too,

she saw. He kept his hand on the small lasgun. The long silence while eyes

examined her amplified her unease. There was something almost Bene Gesserit

about the way the old woman just stood there looking.

Duncan broke the silence, demanding of Burzmali: "Who is she?"

"I'm the one who'll save your skins," the old woman said. She had a thin voice

that crackled weakly, but that same strange accent.

Lucilla's Other Memories brought up a suggestive comparison for the old woman's

garment: Similar to that worn by ancient playfems.

Lucilla almost shook her head. Surely this woman was too old for such a role.

And the shape of the mythic dragons worked into the fabric differed from those

supplied by memory. Lucilla returned her attention to the old face: eyes humid

with the illnesses of age. A dry crust had settled into the creases where each

eyelid touched the channels beside her nose. Far too old for a playfem.

The old woman spoke to Burzmali. "I think she can wear it well enough." She

began divesting herself of her dragon robe. To Lucilla she said: "This is for

you. Wear it with respect. We killed to get it for you."

"Who did you kill?" Lucilla demanded.

"A postulant of the Honored Matres!" There was pride in the old woman's husky

tone.

"Why should I wear that robe?" Lucilla demanded.

"You will trade garments with me," the old woman said.

"Not without explanation." Lucilla refused to accept the robe being extended to

her.

Burzmali took one step forward. "You can trust her."

"I am a friend of your friends," the old woman said. She shook the robe in

front of Lucilla. "Here, take it."

Lucilla addressed Burzmali. "I must know your plan."

"We both must know it," Duncan said. "On whose authority are we asked to trust

these people?"

"Teg's," Burzmali said. "And mine." He looked at the old woman. "You can tell

them, Sirafa. We have time."

"You will wear this robe while you accompany Burzmali into Ysai," Sirafa said.

Sirafa, Lucilla thought. The name had almost the sound of a Bene Gesserit

Lineal Variant.

Sirafa studied Duncan. "Yes, he is small enough yet. He will be disguised and

conveyed separately."

"No!" Lucilla said. "I am commanded to guard him!"

"You are being foolish," Sirafa said. "They will be looking for a woman of your

appearance accompanied by someone of this young man's appearance. They will not

be looking for a playfem of the Honored Matres with her companion of the night .

. . nor for a Tleilaxu Master and his entourage."

Lucilla wet her lips with her tongue. Sirafa spoke with the confident assurance

of a House Proctor.

Sirafa draped the dragon robe over the back of the settee. She stood revealed

in a clinging black leotard that concealed nothing of a body still lithe and

supple, even well rounded. The body looked much younger than the face. As

Lucilla looked at her, Sirafa passed her palms across her forehead and cheeks,

smoothing them backward. Age lines grew shallow and a younger face was

revealed.

A Face Dancer?

Lucilla stared hard at the woman. There were none of the other Face Dancer

stigmata. Still . . .

"Get your robe off!" Sirafa ordered. Now her voice was younger and even more

commanding.

"You must do it," Burzmali pleaded. "Sirafa will take your place as another

decoy. It's the only way we'll get through."

"Get through to what?" Duncan asked.

"To a no-ship," Burzmali said.

"And where will that take us?" Lucilla demanded.

"To safety," Burzmali said. "We will be loaded with shere but I cannot say

more. Even shere wears off in time."

"How will I be disguised as a Tleilaxu?" Duncan asked.

"Trust us that it will be done," Burzmali said. He kept his attention on

Lucilla. "Reverend Mother?"

"You give me no choice," Lucilla said. She undid the quick fasteners and

dropped her robe. She removed the small handgun from her bodice and tossed it

onto the settee. Her own leotard was light gray and she saw Sirafa making note

of this and of the knives in their leg sheaths.

"We sometimes wear black undergarments," Lucilla said as she slipped into the

dragon robe. The fabric looked heavy but felt light. She pivoted in it,

sensing the way it flared and fitted itself to her body almost as though it had

been made just for her. There was a rough spot at the neck. She reached up and

ran a finger along it.

"That is where the dart struck her," Sirafa said. "We moved fast but the acid

scarred the fabric slightly. It is not visible to the eye."

"Is the appearance correct?" Burzmali asked Sirafa.

"Very good. But I will have to instruct her. She must make no mistakes or they

will have both of you like that!" Sirafa clapped her hands for emphasis.

Where have I seen that gesture? Lucilla asked herself.

Duncan touched the back of Lucilla's right arm, his fingers secretly quicktalking:

"That hand clap! A mannerism of Giedi Prime."

Other Memories confirmed this for Lucilla. Was this woman part of an isolated

community preserving archaic ways?

"The lad should go now," Sirafa said. She gestured to the two remaining members

of the escort. "Take him to the place."

"I don't like this," Lucilla said.

"We have no choice!" Burzmali barked.

Lucilla could only agree. She was relying on Burzmali's oath of loyalty to the

Sisterhood, she knew. And Duncan was not a child, she reminded herself. His

prana-bindu reactions had been conditioned by the old Bashar and herself. There

were abilities in the ghola that few people outside of the Bene Gesserit could

match. She watched silently as Duncan and the two men left through the

shimmering curtain.

When they were gone, Sirafa came around the settee and stood in front of

Lucilla, hands on hips. Their gazes met at a level.

Burzmali cleared his throat and fingered the rough pile of clothing on the table

beside him.

Sirafa's face, especially the eyes, held a remarkably compelling quality. The

eyes were light green with clear whites. No lens or other artifice masked them.

"You have the right look about you," Sirafa said. "Remember that you are a

special kind of playfem and Burzmali is your customer. No ordinary person would

interfere with that."

Lucilla heard a veiled hint in this. "But there are those who might interfere?"

"Embassies from great religions are on Gammu now," Sirafa said. "Some you have

never encountered. They are from what you call the Scattering."

"And what do you call it?"

"The Seeking." Sirafa raised a placating hand. "Do not fear! We have a common

enemy."

"The Honored Matres?"

Sirafa turned her head to the left and spat on the floor. "Look at me, Bene

Gesserit! I was trained only to kill them! That is my only function and

purpose!"

Lucilla spoke carefully: "From what we know, you must be very good."

"In some things, perhaps I am better than you. Now listen! You are a sexual

adept. Do you understand?"

"Why would priests interfere?"

"You call them priests? Well . . . yes. They would not interfere for any

reason you might imagine. Sex for pleasure, the enemy of religion, eh?"

"Accept no substitutes for holy joy," Lucilla said.

"Tantrus protect you, woman! There are different priests from the Seeking, ones

who do not mind offering immediate ecstasy instead of a promised hereafter."

Lucilla almost smiled. Did this self-styled killer of Honored Matres think she

could advise a Reverend Mother on religions?

"There are people here who go about disguised as priests," Sirafa said. "Very

dangerous. The most dangerous of all are those who follow Tantrus and claim

that sex is the exclusive worship of their god."

"How will I know them?" Lucilla heard sincerity in Sirafa's voice and a sense

of foreboding.

"That is not a concern. You must never act as though you recognize such

distinctions. Your first concern is to make sure of your pay. You, I think,

should ask fifty solari."

"You have not told me why they would interfere." Lucilla glanced back at

Burzmali. He had laid out the rough clothing and was taking off his battle

fatigues. She returned her attention to Sirafa.

"Some follow an ancient convention that grants them the right to disrupt your

arrangement with Burzmali. In actuality, some will be testing you."

"Listen carefully," Burzmali said. "This is important."

Sirafa said: "Burzmali will be dressed as a field worker. Nothing else could

disguise his weapon's calluses. You will address him as Skar, a common name

here."

"But how do I deal with a priest's interruption?"

Sirafa produced a small pouch from her bodice and passed it to Lucilla, who

hefted it in one hand. "That contains two hundred and eighty-three solari. If

someone identifying himself as a divine . . . You remember that? Divine?"

"How could I forget it?" Lucilla's voice was almost a sneer but Sirafa paid no

heed.

"If such a one interferes, you will return fifty solari to Burzmali with your

regrets. Also, in that pouch is your playfem card in the name of Pira. Let me

hear you say your name."

"Pira."

"No! Accent much harder on the 'a'!"

"Pira!"

"That is passable. Now listen to me with extreme care. You and Burzmali will

be on the streets late. It will be expected that you have had previous

customers. There must be evidence. Therefore, you will . . . ahhh, entertain

Burzmali before leaving here. You understand?"

"Such delicacy!" Lucilla said.

Sirafa took it as a compliment and smiled, but it was a tightly controlled

expression. Her reactions were so alien!

"One thing," Lucilla said. "If I must entertain a divine, how will I find

Burzmali afterward?"

"Skar!"

"Yes. How will I find Skar?"

"He will wait nearby wherever you go. Skar will find you when you emerge."

"Very well. If a divine interrupts, I return one hundred solari to Skar and --"

"Fifty!"

"I think not, Sirafa." Lucilla shook her head slowly from side to side. "After

being entertained by me, the divine will know that fifty solari is too small a

sum."

Sirafa pursed her lips and glanced past Lucilla at Burzmali. "You warned me

about her kind but I did not suppose that . . ."

Using only a touch of Voice, Lucilla said: "You suppose nothing unless you hear

it from me!"

Sirafa scowled. She was obviously startled by Voice, but her tone was just as

arrogant when she resumed. "Do I presume that you need no explanation of sexual

variations?"

"A safe assumption," Lucilla said.

"And I do not need to tell you that your robe identifies you as a fifth-stage

adept in the Order of Hormu?"

It was Lucilla's turn to scowl. "What if I show abilities beyond this fifth

stage?"

"Ahhhhh," Sirafa said. "You will continue to heed my words, then?"

Lucilla nodded curtly.

"Very good," Sirafa said. "May I presume you can administer vaginal pulsing?"

"I can."

"From any position?"

"I can control any muscle in my body!"

Sirafa glanced past Lucilla at Burzmali. "True?"

Burzmali spoke from close behind Lucilla: "Or she would not claim it."

Sirafa looked thoughtful, her focus on Lucilla's chin. "This is a complication,

I think."

"Lest you get the wrong idea," Lucilla said, "the abilities I was taught are not

usually marketed. They have another purpose."

"Oh, I'm sure they do," Sirafa said. "But sexual agility is a --"

"Agility!" Lucilla allowed her tone to convey the full weight of a Reverend

Mother's outrage. No matter that this might be what Sirafa hoped to achieve,

she had to be put in her place! "Agility, you say? I can control genital

temperature. I know and can arouse the fifty-one excitation points. I --"

"Fifty-one? But there are only --"

"Fifty-one!" Lucilla snapped. "And the sequencing plus the combinations number

two thousand and eight. Furthermore, in combination with the two hundred and

five sexual positions

"Two hundred and five?" Sirafa was clearly startled. "Surely, you don't mean -

-"

"More, actually, if you count minor variations. I am an Imprinter, which means

I have mastered the three hundred steps of orgasmic amplification!"

Sirafa cleared her throat and wet her lips with her tongue. "I must warn you

then to restrain yourself. Keep your full abilities unexpressed or . . ." Once

more, she looked at Burzmali. "Why didn't you warn me?"

"I did."

Lucilla clearly heard amusement in his voice but did not look back to confirm

it.

Sirafa inhaled and expelled two hard breaths. "If any questions are asked, you

will say you are about to undergo testing for advancement. That may quiet

suspicion."

"And if I'm asked about the test."

"Oh, that is easy. You smile mysteriously and remain silent."

"What if I'm asked about this Order of Hormu?"

"Threaten to report the questioner to your superiors. The questions should

stop."

"And if they don't?"

Sirafa shrugged. "Make up any story you like. Even a Truthsayer would be

amused by your evasions."

Lucilla held her face in repose while she thought about her situation. She

heard Burzmali -- Skar! -- stirring directly behind her. She saw no serious

difficulties in carrying out this deception. It might even provide an amusing

interlude she could recount later at Chapter House. Sirafa, she noted, was

grinning at Burz -- Skar! Lucilla turned and looked at her customer.

Burzmali stood there naked, his battle garb and helmet neatly stacked beside the

small mound of rough clothing.

"I can see that Skar does not object to your preparations for this venture,"

Sirafa said. She waved a hand at his stiffly upcocked penis. "I will leave

you, then."

Lucilla heard Sirafa depart through the shimmering curtain. Filling Lucilla's

thoughts was an angry realization:

"This should be the ghola here now!"

It is your fate, forgetfulness. All of the old lessons of life, you lose and

gain and lose and gain again.

-Leto II, the Voice of Dar-es-Balat

"In the name of our Order and its unbroken Sisterhood, this account has been

judged reliable and worthy of entry into the Chronicles of Chapter House."

Taraza stared at the words on her display projection with an expression of

distaste. Morning light painted a fuzz of yellow reflections in the projection,

making the words there appear dimly mysterious.

With an angry motion, Taraza pushed herself back from the projection table,

arose and went to a south window. The day was young yet and the shadows long in

her courtyard.

Shall I go in person?

Reluctance filled her at this thought. These quarters felt so . . . so secure.

But that was foolishness and she knew it in every fiber. The Bene Gesserit had

been here more than fourteen hundred years and still Chapter House Planet must

be considered only temporary.

She rested her left hand on the smooth frame of the window. Each of her windows

had been positioned to focus the attention on a splendid view. The room -- its

proportions, furnishing, colors -- all reflected architects and builders who had

worked single-mindedly to create a sense of support for the occupants.

Taraza tried to immerse herself in that supportive feeling and failed.

The arguments she had just experienced left a bitterness in this room even

though the words had been voiced in the mildest tones. Her councillors had been

stubborn and (she agreed without reservation) for understandable reasons.

Make ourselves into missionaries? And for the Tleilaxu?

She touched a control plate beside the window and opened it. A warm breeze

perfumed by spring blossoms from the apple orchards wafted into the room. The

Sisterhood was proud of the fruit they grew here at the power center of all

their strongholds. No finer orchards existed at any of the Keeps and Dependent

Chapters that wove the Bene Gesserit web through most of the planets humans had

occupied under the Old Imperium.

"By their fruits, ye shall know them," she thought. Some of the old religions

can still produce wisdom.

From her high vantage, Taraza could see the entire southern sprawl of Chapter

House buildings. The shadow of a nearby watchtower drew a long uneven line

across rooftops and courtyards.

When she thought about it, she knew this was a surprisingly small establishment

to contain so much power. Beyond the ring of orchards and gardens lay a careful

checkerboard of private residences, each with its surrounding plantation.

Retired Sisters and selected loyal families occupied these privileged estates.

Sawtoothed mountains, their tops often brilliant with snow, drew the western

limits. The spacefield lay twenty kilometers eastward. All around this core of

Chapter House were open plains where grazed a peculiar breed of cattle, a cattle

so susceptible to alien odors they would stampede in raucous bellowing at the

slightest intrusion of people not marked by the local smell. The innermost

homes with their pain-fenced plantings had been sited by an early Bashar in such

a way that no one could move through the twisting ground-level channels day or

night without being observed.

It all appeared so haphazard and casual, yet there was harsh order in it. And

that, Taraza knew, personified the Sisterhood.

The clearing of a throat behind her reminded Taraza that one of those who had

argued most vehemently in Council remained waiting patiently in the open

doorway.

Waiting for my decision.

The Reverend Mother Bellonda wanted Odrade "killed out of hand." No decision

had been reached.

You've really done it this time, Dar. I expected your wild independence. I

even wanted it. But this!

Bellonda, old, fat and florid, cold-eyed and valued for her natural viciousness,

wanted Odrade condemned as a traitor.

"The Tyrant would have crushed her immediately!" Bellonda argued.

Is that all we learned from him? Taraza wondered.

Bellonda argued that Odrade was not only an Atreides but also a Corrino. There

were emperors and vice-regents and powerful administrators to a very large

number in her ancestry.

With all of the power hunger this implies.

"Her ancestors survived Salusa Secundus!" Bellonda kept repeating. "Have we

learned nothing from our breeding experiences?"

We learned how to create Odrades, Taraza thought.

After surviving the spice agony, Odrade had been sent to Al Dhanab, an

equivalent of Salusa Secundus, there to be conditioned deliberately on a planet

of constant testing: high cliffs and dry gorges, hot winds and frigid winds,

little moisture and too much. It was judged a suitable proving ground for

someone whose destiny might take her to Rakis. Tough survivors emerged from

such conditioning. The tall, supple, and muscular Odrade was one of the

toughest.

How can I salvage this situation?

Odrade's most recent message said that any peace, even the Tyrant's millennia of

suppression, radiated a false aura that could be fatal to those who trusted it

too much. That was both the strength and flaw in Bellonda's argument.

Taraza lifted her gaze to Bellonda waiting in the doorway.

She is too fat! She flaunts that before us!

"We can no more eliminate Odrade than we can eliminate the ghola," Taraza said.

Bellonda's voice came low and level: "Both are now too dangerous to us. Look

how Odrade weakens you with her account of those words at Sietch Tabr!"

"Has the Tyrant's message weakened me, Bell?"

"You know what I mean. The Bene Tleilax have no morals."

"Quit changing the subject, Bell. Your thoughts are darting around like an

insect among the blossoms. What is it you really smell here?"

"The Tleilaxu! They made that ghola for their own purposes. And now Odrade

wants us to --"

"You're repeating yourself, Bell."

"The Tleilaxu take shortcuts. Their view of genetics is not our view. It is

not a human view. They make monsters."

"Is that what they do?"

Bellonda came into the room, walked around the table and stood close to Taraza,

blocking the Mother Superior's view of the niche and its statuette of Chenoeh.

"Alliance with the priests of Rakis, yes, but not with the Tleilaxu."

Bellonda's robes rustled as she gestured with a clenched fist.

"Bell! The High Priest is now a mimic Face Dancer. Ally with him, you mean?"

Bellonda shook her head angrily. "Believers in Shai-hulud are legion! You find

them everywhere. What will be their reaction to us if our part in the deception

is ever exposed?"

"No you don't, Bell! We have seen to it that only the Tleilaxu are vulnerable

there. In that, Odrade's right."

"Wrong! If we ally with them we are both vulnerable. We will be forced to

serve the Tleilaxu design. It will be worse than our long subservience to the

Tyrant."

Taraza saw the vicious glinting of Bellonda's eyes. Her reaction was

understandable. No Reverend Mother could contemplate the special bondage they

had endured under the God Emperor without at least some chilling remembrances.

Whipped along against their will, never sure of Bene Gesserit survival from one

day to the next.

"You think we assure our spice supply by such a stupid alliance?" Bellonda

demanded.

It was the same old argument, Taraza saw. Without melange and the agony of its

transformation, there could be no Reverend Mothers. The whores from the

Scattering surely had melange as one of their targets -- the spice and the Bene

Gesserit mastery of it.

Taraza returned to her table and sank into her chairdog, leaning back while it

molded itself to her contours. It was a problem. A peculiar Bene Gesserit

problem. Although they searched and experimented constantly, the Sisterhood had

never found a substitute for the spice. The Spacing Guild might want melange to

trance-form its navigators, but they could substitute Ixian machinery. Ix and

its subsidiaries competed in the Guild's markets. They had alternatives.

We have none.

Bellonda crossed to the other side of Taraza's table, put both fists on the

smooth surface and leaned forward to look down at the Mother Superior.

"And we still don't know what the Tleilaxu did to our ghola!"

"Odrade will find out."

"Not reason enough to forgive her treachery!"

Taraza spoke in a low voice: "We waited for this moment through generation

after generation and you would abort the project just like that." She slapped a

palm lightly against the table.

"The precious Rakian project is no longer our project," Bellonda said. "It may

never have been."

All of her considerable mental powers in hard focus, Taraza reexamined the

implications of this familiar argument. It was a thing spoken frequently in the

wrangling session they had concluded earlier.

Was the ghola scheme something set in motion by the Tyrant? If so, what could

they do about it now? What should they do about it?

During the long dispute, the Minority Report had been in all of their minds.

Schwangyu might be dead but her faction survived and it looked now as though

Bellonda had joined them. Was the Sisterhood blinding itself to a fatal

possibility? Odrade's report of that hidden message on Rakis could be

interpreted as an ominous warning. Odrade emphasized this by reporting how she

had been alerted by her inner sense of alarm. No Reverend Mother could treat

such an event lightly.

Bellonda straightened and folded her arms across her breast. "We never

completely escape the teachers of our childhood nor any of the patterns that

formed us, do we?"

That was an argument peculiar to Bene Gesserit disputes. It reminded them of

their own particular susceptibility.

We are the secret aristocrats and it is our offspring who inherit the power.

Yes, we are susceptible to that and Miles Teg is a superb example.

Bellonda found a straight chair and sat down, bringing her eyes level with

Taraza's. "At the height of the Scattering," she said, "we lost some twenty

percent of our failures."

"It is not failures who are coming back to us."

"But the Tyrant surely knew this would happen!"

"The Scattering was his goal, Bell. That was his Golden Path, humankind's

survival!"

"But we know how he felt about the Tleilaxu and yet he did not exterminate them.

He could have and he did not!"

"He wanted diversity."

Bellonda pounded a fist on the table. "He certainly got that!"

"We've been through all of these arguments over and over, Bell, and I still see

no way to escape what Odrade has done."

"Subservience!"

"Not at all. Were we ever totally subservient to one of the pre-Tyrant

emperors? Not even to Muad'dib!"

"We're still in the Tyrant's trap," Bellonda accused. "Tell me, why have the

Tleilaxu continued to produce his favorite ghola? Millennia, and still that

ghola keeps coming out of their tanks like a dancing doll."

"You think the Tleilaxu still follow a secret order from the Tyrant? If so,

then you argue for Odrade. She has created admirable conditions for us to

examine this."

"He ordered nothing of the kind! He merely made that particular ghola

deliciously attractive to the Bene Tleilax."

"And not to us?"

"Mother Superior, we must get ourselves out of the Tyrant's trap now! And by

the most direct method."

"The decision is mine, Bell. I still lean toward a cautious alliance."

"Then at the very least let us kill the ghola. Sheeana can have children. We

could --"

"This is not now and never was purely a breeding project!"

"But it could be. What if you're wrong about the power behind the Atreides

prescience?"

"All of your proposals lead to alienation from Rakis and from the Tleilaxu,

Bell. "

"The Sisterhood could weather fifty generations on our present stockpiles of

melange. More with rationing."

"You think fifty generations is a long time, Bell? Don't you see that this very

attitude is why you are not sitting in my chair?"

Bellonda pushed herself back from the table, her chair scraping harshly against

the floor. Taraza could see that she was not convinced. Bellonda no longer

could be trusted. She might be the one who would have to die. And where was

the noble purpose in that?

"This gets us nowhere," Taraza said. "Leave me."

When she was alone, Taraza once more considered Odrade's message. Ominous. It

was easy to see why Bellonda and others reacted violently. But that showed a

dangerous lack of control.

It is not yet time to write the Sisterhood's final will and testament.

In an odd way, Odrade and Bellonda shared the same fear but came to different

decisions because of that fear. Odrade's interpretation of that message in the

stones of Rakis conveyed an old warning:

This, too, shall pass away.

Are we to end now, crushed by ravenous hordes from the Scattering?

But the secret of the axlotl tanks was almost within the Sisterhood's grasp.

If we gain that, nothing can stop us!

Taraza swung her gaze around the details of her room. The Bene Gesserit power

was still here. Chapter House remained concealed behind a moat of no-ships, its

location unrecorded except in the minds of her own people. Invisibility.

Temporary invisibility! Accidents occurred.

Taraza squared her shoulders. Take precautions but don't live in their shadows,

constantly furtive. The Litany Against Fear served a useful purpose when

avoiding shadows.

From anyone but Odrade, the warning message with its disturbing implications

that the Tyrant still guided his Golden Path would have been far less fearsome.

That damnable Atreides talent!

"No more than a secret society?"

Taraza gritted her teeth in frustration.

"Memories are not enough unless they call you to noble purpose!"

And what if it was true that the Sisterhood no longer heard the music of life?

Damn him! The Tyrant could still touch them.

What is he trying to tell us? His Golden Path could not be in peril. The

Scattering had seen to that. Humans had spread their kind outward on uncounted

courses like the spines of a hedgehog.

Had he seen a vision of the Scattered Ones returning? Could he possibly have

anticipated this bramble patch at the foot of his Golden Path?

He knew we would suspect his powers. He knew it!

Taraza thought about the mounting reports of the Lost Ones who were returning to

their roots. A remarkable diversity of people and artifacts accompanied by a

remarkable degree of secrecy and wide evidence of conspiracy. No-ships of a

peculiar design, weapons and artifacts of breathtaking sophistication. Diverse

peoples and diverse ways.

Some, astonishingly primitive. At least on the surface.

And they wanted much more than melange. Taraza recognized the peculiar form of

mysticism that drove the Scattered Ones back: "We want your elder secrets!"

The message of the Honored Matres was clear enough, too: "We will take what we

want."

Odrade has it all right in her hands, Taraza thought. She had Sheeana. Soon,

if Burzmali succeeded, she would have the ghola. She had the Tleilaxu Master of

Masters. She could have Rakis itself!

If only she were not an Atreides.

Taraza glanced at the projected words still dancing above her tabletop: a

comparison of this newest Duncan Idaho with all of the slain ones. Each new

ghola had been slightly different from its predecessors. That was clear enough.

The Tleilaxu were perfecting something. But what? Was the clue hidden in these

new Face Dancers? The Tleilaxu obviously sought an undetectable Face Dancer,

mimics whose mimicry reached perfection, shape-copiers who copied not only the

surface memories of their victims but the deepest thoughts and identity as well.

It was a form of immortality even more enticing than the one the Tleilaxu

Masters used at present. That obviously was why they followed this course.

Her own analysis agreed with the majority of her advisors: Such a mimic would

become the copied person. Odrade's reports on the Face Dancer Tuek were highly

suggestive. Even the Tleilaxu Masters might not be able to shake such a Face

Dancer out of its mimic shape and behavior.

And its beliefs.

Damn Odrade! She had painted her Sisters into a corner. They had no choice

except to follow Odrade's lead and Odrade knew it!

How did she know it? Was it that wild talent again?

I cannot act blindly. I must know.

Taraza went through the well-remembered regimen to restore a sense of calm. She

dared not make momentous decisions in a frustrated mood. A long look at the

statuette of Chenoeh helped. Lifting herself from the chairdog, Taraza returned

to her favorite window.

It often soothed her to stare out at this landscape, observing how the distances

changed with the daily movement of sunlight and shifts in the planet's wellmanaged

weather.

Hunger prodded her.

I will eat with the acolytes and lay Sisters today.

It helped at times to gather the young around her and remember the persistence

of the eating rituals, the daily timing -- morning, noon, and evening. That

formed a reliable cement. She enjoyed watching her people. They were like a

tide speaking of deeper things, of unseen forces and greater powers that

persisted because the Bene Gesserit had found the ways of flowing with that

persistence.

These thoughts renewed Taraza's balance. Nagging questions could be placed

temporarily at a distance. She could look at them without passion.

Odrade and the Tyrant were right: Without noble purpose we are nothing.

One could not escape, though, the fact that critical decisions were being made

on Rakis by a person who suffered from those recurring Atreides flaws. Odrade

had always displayed typical Atreides weakness. She had been positively

benevolent to erring acolytes. Affections developed out of such behavior!

Dangerous and mind-clouding affections.

This weakened others, who then were required to compensate for such laxity.

More competent Sisters were called upon to take erring acolytes in hand and

correct the weaknesses. Of course, Odrade's behavior had exposed these flaws in

acolytes. One must admit this. Perhaps Odrade reasoned thus.

When she thought this way, something subtle and powerful shifted in Taraza's

perceptions. She was forced to put down a deep sense of loneliness. It

rankled. Melancholy could be quite as mind-clouding as affection . . . or even

love. Taraza and her watchful Memory Sisters ascribed such emotional responses

to awareness of mortality. She was forced to confront the fact that one day she

would be no more than a set of memories in someone else's living flesh.

Memories and accidental discoveries, she saw, had made her vulnerable. And just

when she needed every available faculty!

But I am not yet dead.

Taraza knew how to restore herself. And she knew the consequences. Always

after these bouts of melancholy she regained an even firmer grip on her life and

its purposes. Odrade's flawed behavior was a source of her Mother Superior's

strength.

Odrade knew it. Taraza smiled grimly at this awareness. The Mother Superior's

authority over her Sisters always became stronger when she returned from

melancholy. Others had observed this but only Odrade knew about the rage.

There!

Taraza realized that she had confronted the distressful seeds of her

frustration.

Odrade had clearly recognized on several occasions what sat at the core of the

Mother Superior's behavior. A giant howl of rage against the uses others had

made of her life. The power of that suppressed rage was daunting even though it

could never be expressed in a way that vented it. That rage must never be

allowed to heal. How it hurt! Odrade's awareness made the pain even more

intense.

Such things did what they were supposed to do, of course. Bene Gesserit

impositions developed certain mental muscles. They built up layers of

callousness that could never be revealed to outsiders. Love was one of the most

dangerous forces in the universe. They had to protect themselves against it. A

Reverend Mother could never become intimately personal, not even in the services

of the Bene Gesserit.

Simulation: We play the necessary role that saves us. The Bene Gesserit will

persist!

How long would they be subservient this time? Another thirty-five hundred

years? Well, damn them all! It would still be only a temporary thing.

Taraza turned her back on the window and its restorative view. She did feel

restored. New strength flowed into her. There was strength enough to overcome

that gnawing reluctance which had kept her from making the essential decision.

I will go to Rakis.

She no longer could evade the source of her own reluctance.

I may have to do what Bellonda wants.

Survival of self, of species, and of environment, these are what drive humans.

You can observe how the order of importance changes in a lifetime. What are the

things of immediate concern at a given age? Weather? The state of the

digestion? Does she (or he) really care? All of those various hungers that

flesh can sense and hope to satisfy. What else could possibly matter?

-Leto II to Hwi Noree, His Voice: Dar-es-Balat

Miles Teg awoke in darkness to find himself being carried on a litter sling

supported by suspensors. By their faint energy glow, he could see the tiny

suspensor bulbs in an updangling row around him.

There was a gag in his mouth. His hands were securely tied behind his back.

His eyes remained uncovered.

So they don't care what I see.

Who they were he could not tell. The bobbing motions of the dark shapes around

him suggested they were descending uneven terrain. A trail? The litter sling

rode smoothly on its suspensors. He could sense the faint humming from the

suspensors when his party stopped to negotiate the turn of a difficult passage.

Now and then through some intervening obstruction, he saw the flickering of a

light ahead. They entered the lighted area presently and stopped. He saw a

single glowglobe about three meters off the ground, tethered on a pole and

moving gently in a cold breeze. By its yellow glow he discerned a shack in the

center of a muddy clearing, many tracks in trampled snow. He saw bushes and a

few sparse trees around the clearing. Someone passed a brighter handlight

across his face. Nothing was said but Teg saw a hand gesture toward the shack.

He had seldom seen such a dilapidated structure. It looked ready to collapse at

the slightest touch. He bet himself that the roof leaked.

Once more, his party lurched into motion, swinging him toward the shack. He

studied his escort in the dim light -- faces muffled to the eyes in a cover that

obscured mouths and chins. Hoods hid their hair. The clothing was bulky and

concealed body details except for the general articulation of arms and legs.

The pole-tethered glowglobe went dark.

A door opened in the shack, sending a brilliant glare across the clearing. His

escort hustled him inside and left him there. He heard the door close behind

them.

It was almost blindingly bright inside after the darkness. Teg blinked until

his eyes adapted to the change. With an odd sense of displacement, he looked

around him. He had expected the shack's interior to match its exterior but here

was a neat room almost bare of furnishings -- only three chairs, a small table

and . . . he drew in a sharp breath: an Ixian Probe! Couldn't they smell the

shere on his breath?

If they were that unaware, let them use the probe. It would be agony for him

but they would get nothing from his mind.

Something clicked behind him and he heard motion. Three people came into his

field of vision and ranged themselves around the foot of the litter. They

stared at him silently. Teg moved his attention across the three. The one on

his left wore a dark singlesuit with open lapels. Male. He had the squarish

face Teg had seen on some Gammu natives -- small, beady eyes that stared

straight through Teg. It was the face of an inquisitor, one who would not be

moved by your agony. The Harkonnens had imported a lot of those in their day.

Single-purpose types who could create pain without the slightest change of

expression.

The one directly at Teg's feet wore bulky clothing of black and gray similar to

that of the escort but the hood was thrown back to reveal a bland face under

closely cropped gray hair. The face gave nothing away and the clothing revealed

little. No telling if this one was male or female. Teg recorded the face:

wide forehead, square chin, large green eyes above a knife-ridged nose; a tiny

mouth pursed around a moue of distaste.

The third member of this group held Teg's attention longest: tall, a tailored

black singlesuit with a severe black jacket over it. Perfectly fitted.

Expensive. No decorations or insignia. Male definitely. The man affected

boredom and this gave Teg a tag for him. Narrow, supercilious face, brown eyes,

thin-lipped mouth. Bored, bored, bored! All of this in here was an unwarranted

demand on his very important time. He had vital business elsewhere and these

other two, these underlings, must be made to realize that.

That one, Teg thought, is the official observer.

The bored one had been sent by the masters of this place to watch and report

what he saw. Where was his datacase? Ahhhh, yes: There it was, propped

against a wall behind him. Those cases were like a badge for such

functionaries. On his inspection tour, Teg had seen these people walking the

streets of Ysai and other Gammu cities. Small, thin cases. The more important

the functionary, the smaller the case. This one's case would barely contain a

few dataspools and a tiny comeye. He would never be without an 'eye to link him

with his superiors. Thin case: This was an important functionary.

Teg found himself wondering what the observer would say if Teg asked: "What

will you tell them about my composure?"

The answer was already there on that bored face. He would not even answer. He

was not here to answer. When this one leaves, Teg thought, he will walk with

long strides. His attention will be on distances where only he knows what

powers await him. He will slap that case against his leg to remind himself of

his importance and to call the attention of these others to his badge of

authority.

The bulky figure at Teg's feet spoke, a compelling voice and definitely female

in those vibrant tones.

"See how he holds himself and watches us? Silence will not break him. I told

you that before we entered. You are wasting our time and we do not have all

that much time for such nonsense."

Teg stared at her. Something vaguely familiar in the voice. It had some of

that compelling quality found in a Reverend Mother. Was that possible?

The heavy-faced Gammu type nodded. "You are right, Materly. But I do not give

the orders here."

Materly? Teg wondered. Name or title?

Both of them looked at the functionary. That one turned and bent to his

datacase. He removed a small comeye from it and stood with the screen concealed

from his companions and Teg. The 'eye came alight with a green glow, which cast

a sickly illumination over the observer's features. His self-important smile

vanished. He moved his lips silently, words formed only for someone on that

'eye to see.

Teg hid his ability to read lips. Anyone trained by the Bene Gesserit could

read lips from almost any angle where they were visible. This man spoke a

version of Old Galach.

"It is the Bashar Teg for sure," he said. "I have made identification."

The green light danced on the functionary's face while he stared into the 'eye.

Whoever communicated with him was in agitated movement if that light meant

anything.

Again, the functionary's lips moved soundlessly: "None of us doubts that he has

been conditioned against pain and I can smell shere on him. He will . . ."

He fell silent as the green light once more danced on his face.

"I do not make excuses." His lips shaped the Old Galach words with care. "You

know we will do our best but I recommend that we pursue with vigor all other

means of intercepting the ghola."

The green light winked off.

The functionary clipped the 'eye to his waist, turned toward his companions and

nodded once.

"The T-probe," the woman said.

They swung the probe over Teg's head.

She called it a T-probe, Teg thought. He looked up at the hood as they brought

it over him. There was no Ixian stamp on the thing.

Teg experienced an odd sense of deja vu. He had the feeling that his own

captivity here had occurred many times before. No single-incident deja vu, it

was a deeply familiar recognition: the captive and the interrogators -- these

three . . . the probe. He felt emptied. How could he know this moment? He had

never personally employed a probe but he had studied their use thoroughly. The

Bene Gesserit often used pain but relied mostly on Truthsayers. Even more than

that, the Sisterhood believed that some equipment could put them too much under

Ixian influence. It was an admission of weakness, a sign that they could not do

without such despicable devices. Teg had even suspected there was something in

this attitude of a hangover from the Butlerian Jihad, rebellion against machines

that could copy out the essence of a human's thoughts and memories.

Deja vu!

Mentat logic demanded of him: How do I know this moment? He knew that he had

never before been a captive. It was such a ridiculous switch of roles. The

great Bashar Teg a captive? He could almost smile. But that deep sense of

familiarity persisted.

His captors positioned the hood directly over his head and began releasing the

medusa contacts one at a time, fixing them to his scalp. The functionary

watched his companions work, producing small signs of impatience on an otherwise

emotionless face.

Teg moved his attention across the three faces. Which one of these would act

the part of "friend"? Ahhhh, yes: the one called Materly. Fascinating. Was

it a form of Honored Matre? But neither of the others deferred to her as one

would expect from what Teg had heard of those returning Lost Ones.

These were people from the Scattering, though -- except possibly for the squarefaced

male in the brown singlesuit. Teg studied the woman with care: the matt

of gray hair, the quiet composure in those widely spaced green eyes, the

slightly protruding chin with its sense of solidity and reliability. She had

been chosen well for "friend." Materly's face was a map of respectability,

someone you could trust. Teg saw a withdrawn quality in her, though. She was

one who would also observe carefully to catch the moment when she must become

involved. Surely, she was Bene Gesserit-trained at the very least.

Or trained by the Honored Matres.

They finished attaching the contacts to his head. The Gammu type swung the

probe's console into position where all three could watch the display. The

probe's screen was concealed from Teg.

The woman removed Teg's gag, confirming his judgment. She would be the source

of comfort. He moved his tongue around in his mouth, restoring sensation. His

face and chest still felt a bit numb from the stunner that had brought him down.

How long ago had that been? But if he was to believe the silent words of the

functionary, Duncan had escaped.

The Gammu type looked to the observer.

"You may begin, Yar," the functionary said.

Yar? Teg wondered. Curious name. Almost had a Tleilaxu sound. But Yar was

not a Face Dancer . . . or a Tleilaxu Master. Too big for one and no stigmata

of the other. As one trained by the Sisterhood, Teg felt confident of this.

Yar touched a control on the probe's console.

Teg heard himself grunt with pain. Nothing had prepared him for that much pain.

They must have turned their devil's machine to maximum for the first thrust. No

question about it! They knew he was a Mentat. A Mentat could remove himself

from some demands of flesh. But this was excruciating! He could not escape it.

Agony shivered through his entire body, threatening to blank out his

consciousness. Could shere shield him from this?

The pain diminished gradually and went away, leaving only quivering memories.

Again!

He thought suddenly that the spice agony must be like this for a Reverend

Mother. Surely, there could be no greater pain. He fought to remain silent but

heard himself grunting, moaning. Every ability he had ever learned, Mentat and

Bene Gesserit, was called into play, keeping him from forming words, from

begging for surcease, from promising to tell them anything if they would only

stop.

Once more the agony receded and then surged back.

"Enough!" That was the woman. Teg groped for her name.

Materly?

Yar spoke in a sullen voice: "He's loaded with shere, enough to last him a year

at least." He gestured at his console. "Blank."

Teg breathed in shallow gasps. The agony! It continued to increase despite

Materly's demand.

"I said enough!" Materly snapped.

Such sincerity, Teg thought. He felt the pain recede, withdrawing as though

every nerve were being removed from his body, pulled out like threads of the

remembered agony.

"It is wrong what we're doing," Materly said. "This man is --"

"He is like any other man," Yar said. "Shall I attach the special contact to

his penis?"

"Not while I'm here!" Materly said.

Teg felt himself almost taken in by her sincerity. The last of the agony

threads left his flesh and he lay there with a feeling that he had been

suspended off the surface that supported him. The sense of deja vu remained.

He was here and not here. He had been here and he had not.

"They will not like it if we fail," Yar said. "Are you prepared to face them

with another failure?"

Materly shook her head sharply. She bent over to bring her face into Teg's line

of vision through the medusa tangle of probe contacts. "Bashar, I am sorry for

what we do. Believe me. This is not of my making. Please, I find all of this

disgusting. Tell us what we need to know and let me make you comfortable."

Teg formed a smile for her. She was good! He shifted his gaze to the watchful

functionary. "Tell your masters for me. She is very good at this."

Blood darkened the functionary's face. He scowled. "Give him the maximum,

Yar." His voice was a clipped tenor without any of the deep training apparent

in Materly's voice.

"Please!" Materly said. She straightened but kept her attention on Teg's eyes.

Teg's Bene Gesserit teachers had taught him that: "Watch the eyes! Observe how

they change focus. As the focus moves outward, the awareness moves inward."

He focused deliberately on her nose. It was not an ugly face. Rather

distinctive. He wondered what the figure might be under those bulky clothes.

"Yar!" That was the functionary.

Yar adjusted something on his console and pressed a switch.

The agony that surged through Teg now told him the previous level had, indeed,

been lower. With the new pain came an odd clarity. Teg found himself almost

capable of removing his awareness from this intrusion. All of that pain was

happening to someone else. He had found a haven where little touched him.

There was pain. Agony even. He accepted reports about these sensations. That

was partly the shere's doing, of course. He knew that and was thankful.

Materly's voice intruded: "I think we're losing him. Better ease off."

Another voice responded but the sound faded into stillness before Teg could

identify the words. He realized abruptly that he had no anchor point for his

awareness. Stillness! He thought he heard his heart beating rapidly in fear

but he was not sure. All was stillness, profound quiet with nothing behind it.

Am I still alive?

He found a heartbeat then, but no certainty that it was his own. Thump-thump!

Thump-thump! It was a sensation of movement and no sound. He could not fix the

source.

What is happening to me?

Words blazoned in brilliant white against a black background played across his

visual centers:

"I'm back to one-third."

"Leave it at that. See if we can read him through his physical reactions."

"Can he still hear us?"

"Not consciously."

None of Teg's instructions had told him a probe could do its evil work in the

presence of shere. But they called this a T-probe. Could bodily reactions

provide a clue to suppressed thoughts? Were there revelations to be explored by

physical means?

Again, words played against Teg's visual centers: "Is he still isolated?"

"Completely."

"Make sure. Take him a little deeper."

Teg tried to lift his awareness above his fears.

I must remain in control!

What might his body reveal if he had no contact with it? He could imagine what

they were doing and his mind registered panic but his flesh could not feel it.

Isolate the subject. Give him nowhere to seat his identity.

Who had said that? Someone. The sense of deja vu returned in full force.

I am a Mentat, he reminded himself. My mind and its workings are my center. He

possessed experiences and memories upon which a center could rely.

Pain returned. Sounds. Loud! Much too loud!

"He's hearing again." That was Yar.

"How can that be?" The functionary's tenor.

"Perhaps you've set it too low." Materly.

Teg tried to open his eyes. The lids would not obey. He remembered then. They

had called it a T-probe. This was no Ixian device. This was something from the

Scattering. He could identify where it took over his muscles and senses. It

was like another person sharing his flesh, preempting his own reactive patterns.

He allowed himself to follow the workings of this machine's intrusions. It was

a hellish device! It could order him to blink, fart, gasp, shit, piss --

anything. It could command his body as though he had no thinking part in his

own behavior. He was relegated to the role of observer.

Odors assailed him -- disgusting odors. He would not command himself to frown

but he thought of frowning. That was sufficient. These odors had been elicited

by the probe. It was playing his senses, learning them.

"Do you have enough to read him?" The functionary's tenor.

"He's still hearing us!" Yar.

"Damn all Mentats!" Materly.

"Dit, Dat, and Dot," Teg said, naming the puppets of the Winter Show from his

childhood on long-ago Lernaeus.

"He's talking!" The functionary.

Teg felt his awareness being blocked off by the machine. Yar was doing

something at the console. Still, Teg knew his own Mentat logic had told him

something vital: These three were puppets. Only the puppet masters were

important. How the puppets moved -- that told you what the puppet masters were

doing.

The probe continued to intrude. Despite the force being applied, Teg felt his

awareness matching the thing. It was learning him but he was also learning it.

He understood now. The whole spectrum of his senses could be copied into this

T-probe and identified, tagged for Yar to call up when needed. An organic chain

of responses existed within Teg. The machine could trace those out as though it

made a duplicate of him. The shere and his Mentat resistance shunted the

searchers away from his memories but everything else could be copied.

It will not think like me, he reassured himself.

The machine would not be the same as his nerves and flesh. It would not have

Teg-memories or Teg-experiences. It had not been born of woman. It had never

traveled down a birth canal and emerged into this astonishing universe.

Part of Teg's awareness applied a memory marker, telling him that this

observation revealed something about the ghola.

Duncan was decanted from an axlotl tank.

The observation came to Teg with a sudden sharp biting of acid on his tongue.

The T-probe again!

Teg allowed himself to flow through a multiple simultaneous awareness. He

followed the T-probe's workings and continued to explore this observation about

the ghola, all the while listening for Dit, Dat, and Dot. The three puppets

were oddly silent. Yes, waiting for their T-probe to complete its task.

The ghola: Duncan was an extension of cells that had been born of a woman

impregnated by a man.

Machine and ghola!

Observation: The machine cannot share that birth experience except in a

remotely vicarious way sure to miss important personal nuances.

Just as it was missing other things in him right now.

The T-probe was replaying smells. With each induced odor, memories revealed

their presence in Teg's mind. He felt the great speed of the T-probe but his

own awareness lived outside of that headlong rushing search, able to entangle

him for as long as he desired in the memories being called up here.

There!

That was the hot wax he had spilled on his left hand when only fourteen and a

student in the Bene Gesserit school. He recalled school and laboratory as

though his only existence were there at this moment. The school is attached to

Chapter House. By being admitted here, Teg knew he had the blood of Siona in

his veins. No prescient could track him here.

He saw the lab and smelled the wax -- a compound of artificial esters and the

natural product of bees kept by failed Sisters and their helpers. He turned his

memory to a moment when he watched bees and people at their labors in the apple

orchards.

The workings of the Bene Gesserit social structure appeared so complicated until

you saw through to the necessities: food, clothing, warmth, communication,

learning, protection from enemies (a subset of the survival drive). Bene

Gesserit survival took some adjustments before it could be understood. They did

not procreate for the sake of humankind in general. No unmonitored racial

involvement! They procreated to extend their own powers, to continue the Bene

Gesserit, deeming that a sufficient service to humankind. Perhaps it was.

Procreative motivation went deep and the Sisterhood was so thorough.

A new smell assailed him.

He recognized the wet wool of his clothing as he came into the command pod after

the Battle of Ponciard. The smell filled his nostrils and elicited the ozone of

the pod's instruments, the sweat of the other occupants. Wool! The Sisterhood

had always thought it a bit odd of him, the way he preferred natural fabrics and

shunned the synthetics turned out in captive factories.

No more did he care for chairdogs.

I don't like the smells of oppression in any form.

Did these puppets -- Dit, Dat, and Dot -- know how oppressed they were?

Mentat logic sneered at him. Were not wool fabrics also a product of captive

factories?

It was different.

Part of him argued otherwise. Synthetics could be stored almost indefinitely.

Look how long they had endured in the nullentropy bins of the Harkonnen noglobe.

"I still prefer woolens and cottons!"

So be it!

"But how did I come by such a preference?"

It is an Atreides prejudice. You inherited it.

Teg shunted the smells aside and concentrated on the total movement of the

intrusive probe. He found presently that he could anticipate the thing. It was

a new muscle. He allowed himself to flex it while he continued to examine the

induced memories for valuable insights.

I sit outside my mother's door on Lernaeus.

Teg removed part of his awareness and watched the scene: age eleven. He is

talking to a small Bene Gesserit acolyte who came as part of the escort for

Somebody Important. The acolyte is a tiny thing with red-blond hair and a

doll's face. Upturned nose, green-gray eyes. The SI is a black-robed Reverend

Mother of truly ancient appearance. She has gone behind that nearby door with

Teg's mother. The acolyte, who is named Carlana, is trying her fledgling skills

on the young son of the house.

Before Carlana utters twenty words, Miles Teg recognizes the pattern. She is

trying to pry information out of him! This was one of the first lessons in

delicate dissembling taught by his mother. There were, after all, people who

might question a young boy about a Reverend Mother's household, hoping thereby

to gain salable information. There is always a market for data about Reverend

Mothers.

His mother explained: "You judge the questioner and fit your responses

according to the susceptibilities." None of this would have served against a

full Reverend Mother, but against an acolyte, especially this one!

For Carlana, he produces an appearance of coy reluctance. Carlana has an

inflated view of her own attractions. He allows her to overcome his reluctance

after a suitable marshaling of her forces. What she gets is a handful of lies,

which, if she ever repeats them to the SI behind that closed door, are sure to

win Carlana a severe censuring if not something more painful.

Words from Dit, Dat, and Dot: "I think we have him now."

Teg recognized Yar's voice yanking him out of old memories. "Fit your responses

according to the susceptibilities." Teg heard the words in his mother's voice.

Puppets.

Puppet masters.

The functionary speaks: "Ask the simulation where they have taken the ghola."

Silence and then a faint humming.

"I'm not getting anything." Yar.

Teg hears their voices with painful sensitivity. He forces his eyes to open

against the opposing commands of the probe.

"Look!" Yar says.

Three sets of eyes stare back at Teg. How slowly they move. Dit, Dat, and Dot:

the eyes go blink . . . blink . . . at least a minute between blinks. Yar is

reaching for something on his console. His fingers will take a week to reach

their destination.

Teg explores the bindings on his hands and arms. Ordinary rope! Taking his

time, he squirms his fingers into contact with the knots. They loosen, slowly

at first, and then flying apart. He moves on to the straps holding him to the

sling litter. These are easier: simple slip locks. Yar's hand is not even a

fourth of the way to the console.

Blink . . . blink . . . blink . . .

The three sets of eyes show faint surprise.

Teg releases himself from the medusa tangle of probe contacts. Pop-pop-pop!

The grippers fly away from him. He is surprised to notice a slow start of

bleeding on the back of his right hand where it has brushed the probe contacts

aside.

Mentat projection: I am moving with dangerous speed.

But now he is off the litter. Functionary is reaching a slow-slow hand toward a

bulge in a side pocket. Teg's hand crushes the functionary's throat.

Functionary will never again touch that little lasgun he always carries. Yar's

outstretched hand is still not a third of the way to the probe console. There

is definite surprise in his eyes, though. Teg doubts that the man even sees the

hand that breaks his neck. Materly is moving a bit faster. Her left foot is

coming toward where Teg had been just the flick of an instant previously. Still

too slow! Materly's head is thrown back, the throat exposed for Teg's downchopping

hand.

How slowly they fall to the floor!

Teg became aware of perspiration pouring from him but he could not spare time to

worry about this.

I knew every move they would make before they made it! What has happened to me?

Mentat projection: The probe agony has lifted me to a new level of ability.

Intense hunger pangs made him aware of the energy drain. He pushed the

sensation aside, feeling himself return to a normal time beat. Three dull

sounds: bodies falling to the floor.

Teg examined the probe console. Definitely not Ixian. Similar controls,

though. He shorted out the data storage system, erasing it.

Room lights?

Controls beside the door from the outside. He extinguished the lights, took

three deep breaths. A whirling blur of motion erupted into the night.

The ones who had brought him here, clad in their bulky clothing against the

winter chill, barely had time to turn toward the odd sound before the whirling

blur struck them down.

Teg returned to normal time-beat more quickly. Starlight showed him a trail

leading downslope through thick brush. He slipped and slid on the snow-churned

mud for a space and then found the way to balance himself, anticipating the

terrain. Each step went where he knew it must go. He found himself presently

in an open space that looked out across a valley.

The lights of a city and a great black rectangle of building near the center.

He knew this place: Ysai. The puppet masters were there.

I am free!

There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow vertical opening

where a single board had been removed from a tall wooden fence. Each day a wild

ass of the desert passed outside the fence and across the narrow opening --

first the nose, then the head, the forelegs, the long brown back, the hindlegs,

and lastly the tail. One day, the man leaped to his feet with the light of

discovery in his eyes and he shouted for all who could hear him: "It is

obvious! The nose causes the tail!"

-Stories of the Hidden Wisdom, from the Oral History of Rakis

Several times since coming to Rakis, Odrade had found herself caught in the

memory of that ancient painting which occupied such a prominent place on the

wall of Taraza's Chapter House quarters. When the memory came, she felt her

hands tingle to the touch of the brush. Her nostrils swelled to the induced

smells of oils and pigments. Her emotions assaulted the canvas. Each time,

Odrade emerged from the memory with new doubts that Sheeana was her canvas.

Which of us paints the other?

It had happened again this morning. Still dark outside the Rakian Keep's

penthouse where she quartered with Sheeana: An acolyte entered softly to waken

Odrade and tell her that Taraza would arrive shortly. Odrade looked up at the

softly illuminated face of the dark-haired acolyte and immediately that memorypainting

flashed into her awareness.

Which of us truly creates another?

"Let Sheeana sleep a bit longer," Odrade said before dismissing the acolyte.

"Will you breakfast before the Mother Superior's arrival?" the acolyte asked.

"We will wait upon Taraza's pleasure."

Arising, Odrade went through a swift toilet and donned her best black robe. She

strode then to the east window of the penthouse common room and looked out in

the direction of the spacefield. Many moving lights cast a glow on the dusty

sky there. She activated all of the room's glowglobes to soften the exterior

view. The globes became reflected golden starbursts on the thick armor-plaz of

the windows. The dusky surface also reflected a dim outline of her own

features, showing the fatigue lines clearly.

I knew she would come, Odrade thought.

Even as she thought this, the Rakian sun came over the dust-blurred horizon like

a child's orange ball thrust into view. Immediately, there was the heat-bounce

that so many observers of Rakis had mentioned. Odrade turned away from the view

and saw the hall door open.

Taraza entered with a rustle of robes. A hand closed the door behind her,

leaving the two of them alone. The Mother Superior advanced on Odrade, black

hood up and the cowl framing her face. It was not a reassuring sight.

Recognizing the disturbance in Odrade, Taraza played on it. "Well, Dar, I think

we finally meet as strangers."

The effect of Taraza's words startled Odrade. She correctly interpreted the

threat but fear left her, spilling out as though it were water poured from a

jug. For the first time in her life, Odrade recognized the precise moment of

crossing a dividing line. This was a line whose existence she thought few of

her Sisters suspected. As she crossed it, she realized that she had always

known it was there: a place where she could enter the void and float free. She

no longer was vulnerable. She could be killed but she could not be defeated.

"So it's not Dar and Tar anymore," Odrade said.

Taraza heard the clear, uninhibited tone of Odrade's voice and interpreted this

as confidence. "Perhaps it never was Dar and Tar," she said, her voice icy. "I

see that you think you have been extremely clever."

The battle has been joined, Odrade thought. But I do not stand in the path of

her attack.

Odrade said: "The alternatives to alliance with the Tleilaxu could not be

accepted. Especially when I recognized what it was you truly sought for us."

Taraza felt suddenly weary. It had been a long trip despite the space-folding

leaps of her no-ship. The flesh always knew when it had been twisted out of its

familiar rhythms. She chose a soft divan and sat down, sighing in the luxurious

comfort.

Odrade recognized the Mother Superior's fatigue and felt immediate sympathy.

They were suddenly two Reverend Mothers with common problems.

Taraza obviously sensed this. She patted the cushion beside her and waited for

Odrade to be seated.

"We must preserve the Sisterhood," Taraza said. "That is the only important

thing."

"Of course."

Taraza fixed her gaze searchingly on Odrade's familiar features. Yes, Odrade,

too, is weary. "You have been here, intimately touching the people and the

problem," Taraza said. "I want . . . no, Dar, I need your views."

"The Tleilaxu give the appearance of full cooperation," Odrade said, "but there

is dissembling in this. I have begun to ask myself some extremely disturbing

questions."

"Such as?"

"What if the axlotl tanks are not . . . tanks?"

"What do you mean?"

"Waff reveals the kinds of behavior you see when a family tries to conceal a

deformed child or a mad uncle. I swear to you, he is embarrassed when we begin

to touch on the tanks."

"But what could they possibly . . .

"Surrogate mothers."

"But they would have to be . . ." Taraza fell silent, shocked by the

possibilities this question opened.

"Who has ever seen a Tleilaxu female?" Odrade asked.

Taraza's mind was filled with objections: "But the precise chemical control,

the need to limit variables . . ." She threw her hood back and shook her hair

free. "You are correct: we must question everything. This, though . . . this

is monstrous."

"He is still not telling the full truth about our ghola."

"What does he say?"

"No more than what I have already reported: a variation on the original Duncan

Idaho and meeting all of the prana-bindu requirements we specified."

"That does not explain why they killed or tried to kill our previous purchases."

"He swears the holy oath of the Great Belief that they acted out of shame

because the eleven previous gholas did not live up to expectations."

"How could they know? Does he suggest they have spies among . . ."

"He swears not. I taxed him with this and he said that a successful ghola would

be sure to create a visible disturbance among us."

"What visible disturbance? What is he . . ."

"He will not say. He returns each time to the claim that they have met their

contractual obligations. Where is the ghola, Tar?"

"What . . . oh. On Gammu."

"I hear rumors of . . ."

"Burzmali has the situation well in hand." Taraza closed her mouth tightly,

hoping that was the truth. The most recent report did not fill her with

confidence.

"You obviously are debating whether to have the ghola killed," Odrade said.

"Not just the ghola!"

Odrade smiled. "Then it's true that Bellonda wants me permanently eliminated."

"How did you . . ."

"Friendships can be a very valuable asset at times, Tar."

"You tread on dangerous ground, Reverend Mother Odrade."

"But I am not stumbling, Mother Superior Taraza. I am thinking long hard

thoughts about the things Waff has revealed about those Honored Matres."

"Tell me some of your thoughts." There was implacable determination in Taraza's

voice.

"Let us make no mistakes about this," Odrade said. "They have surpassed the

sexual skills of our Imprinters."

"Whores!"

"Yes, they employ their skills in a way ultimately fatal to themselves and

others. They have been blinded by their own power."

"Is that the extent of your long hard thoughts?"

"Tell me, Tar, why did they attack and obliterate our Keep on Gammu?"

"Obviously they were after our Idaho ghola, to capture him or kill him."

"Why would that be so important to them?"

"What are you trying to say?" Taraza demanded.

"Could the whores have been acting upon information revealed to them by the

Tleilaxu? Tar, what if this secret thing Waff's people have introduced into our

ghola is something that would make the ghola a male equivalent of the Honored

Matres?"

Taraza put a hand to her mouth and dropped it quickly when she saw how much the

gesture revealed. It was too late. No matter. They were still two Reverend

Mothers together.

Odrade said: "And we have ordered Lucilla to make him irresistible to most

women."

"How long have the Tleilaxu been dealing with those whores?" Taraza demanded.

Odrade shrugged. "A better question is this: How long have they been dealing

with their own Lost Ones returned from the Scattering? Tleilaxu speak to

Tleilaxu and many secrets could be revealed."

"A brilliant projection on your part," Taraza said. "What probability value do

you attach to it?"

"You know that as well as I do. It would explain many things."

Taraza spoke bitterly. "What do you think of your alliance with the Tleilaxu

now?"

"More necessary than ever. We must be on the inside. We must be where we can

influence those who contend."

"Abomination!" Taraza snapped.

"What?"

"This ghola is like a recording device in human shape. They have planted him in

our midst. If the Tleilaxu get their hands on him they will know many things

about us."

"That would be clumsy."

"And typical of them!"

"I agree that there are other implications in our situation," Odrade said. "But

such arguments only tell me that we dare not kill the ghola until we have

examined him ourselves."

"That might be too late! Damn your alliance, Dar! You gave them a hold on us .

. . and us a hold on them -- and neither of us dares let go."

"Is that not the perfect alliance?"

Taraza sighed. "How soon must we give them access to our breeding records?"

"Soon. Waff is pressing the matter."

"Then, will we see their axlotl . . . tanks?"

"That is, of course, the lever I am using. He has given his reluctant

agreement."

"Deeper and deeper into each other's pockets," Taraza growled.

Her tone all innocence, Odrade said: "A perfect alliance, just as I said."

"Damn, damn, damn," Taraza muttered. "And Teg has reawakened the ghola's

original memories!"

"But has Lucilla . . ."

"I don't know!" Taraza turned a grim expression on Odrade and recounted the

most recent reports from Gammu: Teg and his party located, the briefest of

accounts about them and nothing from Lucilla; plans made to bring them out.

Her own words produced an unsettling picture in Taraza's mind. What was this

ghola? They had always known the Duncan Idahos were not ordinary gholas. But

now, with augmented nerve and muscle capabilities plus this unknown thing the

Tleilaxu had introduced -- it was like holding a burning club. You knew you

might have to use the club for your own survival but the flames approached at a

terrifying speed.

Odrade spoke in a musing tone: "Have you ever tried to imagine what it must be

like for a ghola suddenly to awaken in renewed flesh?"

"What? What are you . . ."

"Realizing that your flesh was grown from the cells of a cadaver," Odrade said.

"He remembers his own death."

"The Idahos were never ordinary people," Taraza said.

"The same may be said for these Tleilaxu Masters."

"What are you trying to say?"

Odrade rubbed her own forehead, taking a moment to review her thoughts. This

was so difficult with someone who rejected affection, with someone who thrust

outward from a core of rage. Taraza had no . . . no simpatico. She could not

assume the flesh and senses of another except as an exercise in logic.

"A ghola's awakening must be a shattering experience," Odrade said, lowering her

hand. "Only the ones with enormous mental resilience would survive."

"We assume that the Tleilaxu Masters are more than they appear to be."

"And the Duncan Idahos?"

"Of course. Why else would the Tyrant keep buying them from the Tleilaxu?"

Odrade saw that the argument was pointless. She said: "The Idahos were

notoriously loyal to the Atreides and we must remember that I am Atreides."

"You think loyalty will bind this one to you?"

"Especially after Lucilla --"

"That may be too dangerous!"

Odrade sat back into a corner of the divan. Taraza wanted certainty. And the

lives of the serial gholas were like melange, presenting a different taste in

different surroundings. How could they be sure of their ghola?

"The Tleilaxu meddle with the forces that produced our Kwisatz Haderach," Taraza

muttered.

"You think that's why they want our breeding records?"

"I don't know! Damn you, Dar! Don't you see what you've done?"

"I think I had no choice," Odrade said.

Taraza produced a cold smile. Odrade's performance remained superb but she

needed to be put in her place.

"You think I would have done the same?" Taraza asked.

She still does not see what has happened to me, Odrade thought. Taraza had

expected her pliant Dar to act with independence but the extent of that

independence had shaken the High Council. Taraza refused to see her own hand in

this.

"Customary practice," Odrade said.

The words struck Taraza like a slap in the face. Only the hard training of a

Bene Gesserit lifetime prevented her from striking out violently at Odrade.

Customary practice!

How many times had Taraza herself revealed this as a source of irritation, a

constant goad to her carefully capped rage? Odrade had heard it often.

Odrade quoted the Mother Superior now: "Immovable custom is dangerous. Enemies

can find a pattern and use it against you."

The words were forced from Taraza: "That is a weakness, yes."

"Our enemies thought they knew our way," Odrade said. "Even you, Mother

Superior, thought you knew the limits within which I would perform. I was like

Bellonda. Before she even spoke, you knew what Bellonda would say."

"Have we made a mistake, not elevating you above me?" Taraza asked. She spoke

from her deepest allegiance.

"No, Mother Superior. We walk a delicate path but both of us can see where we

must go."

"Where is Waff now?" Taraza asked.

"Asleep and well guarded."

"Summon Sheeana. We must decide whether to abort that part of the project."

"And take our lumps?"

"As you say, Dar."

Sheeana was still sleepy and rubbing her eyes when she appeared in the common

room but she obviously had taken the time to splash water on her face and dress

in a clean white robe. Her hair was still damp.

Taraza and Odrade stood near an eastern window with their backs to the light.

"This is Sheeana, Mother Superior," Odrade said.

Sheeana came fully alert with an abrupt stiffening of her back. She had heard

of this powerful woman, this Taraza, who ruled the Sisterhood from a distant

citadel called Chapter House. Sunlight was bright in the window behind the two

women, shining full into Sheeana's face, dazzling her. It left the faces of the

two Reverend Mothers partly obscured, the black outlines of their figures fuzzy

in the brilliance.

Acolyte instructors had prepared her against this encounter: "You stand at

attention before the Mother Superior and speak respectfully. Respond only when

she speaks to you."

Sheeana stood at rigid attention the way she had been told.

"I am informed that you may become one of us," Taraza said.

Both women could see the effect of this on the girl. By now, Sheeana was more

fully aware of a Reverend Mother's accomplishments. The powerful beam of truth

had been focused on her. She had begun to grasp at the enormous body of

knowledge the Sisterhood had accumulated over the millennia. She had been told

about selective memory transmission, about the workings of Other Memories, about

the spice agony. And here before her stood the most powerful of all Reverend

Mothers, one from whom nothing was hidden.

When Sheeana did not respond, Taraza said: "Have you nothing to say, child?"

"What is there to say, Mother Superior? You have said it all."

Taraza sent a searching glance at Odrade. "Have you any other little surprises

for me, Dar?"

"I told you she was superior," Odrade said.

Taraza returned her attention to Sheeana. "Are you proud of that opinion,

child?"

"It frightens me, Mother Superior."

Still holding her face as immobile as she could, Sheeana breathed more easily.

Say only the deepest truth you can sense, she reminded herself. Those warning

words from a teacher carried more meaning now. She kept her eyes slightly

unfocused and aimed at the floor directly in front of the two women, avoiding

the worst of the brilliant sunlight. She still felt her heart beating too

rapidly and knew the Reverend Mothers would detect this. Odrade had

demonstrated it many times.

"Well it should frighten you," Taraza said.

Odrade asked: "Do you understand what is being said to you, Sheeana?"

"The Mother Superior wishes to know if I am fully committed to the Sisterhood,"

Sheeana said.

Odrade looked at Taraza and shrugged. There was no need for more discussion of

this between them. That was the way of it when you were part of one family as

they were in the Bene Gesserit.

Taraza continued her silent study of Sheeana. It was a heavy gaze, energydraining

for Sheeana, who knew she must remain silent and permit that scorching

examination.

Odrade put down feelings of sympathy. Sheeana was like herself as a young girl,

in so many ways. She had that globular intellect which expanded on all surfaces

the way a balloon expanded when filled. Odrade recalled how her own teachers

had been admiring of this, but wary, just the way Taraza was now wary. Odrade

had recognized this wariness while even younger than Sheeana and held no doubts

that Sheeana saw it here. Intellect had its uses.

"Mmmmmm," Taraza said.

Odrade heard the humming sound of the Mother Superior's internal reflections as

part of a simulflow. Odrade's own memory had surged backward. The Sisters who

had brought Odrade her food when she studied late had always loitered to observe

her in their special way, just as Sheeana was watched and monitored at all

times. Odrade had known about those special ways of observing from an early

age. That was, after all, one of the great lures of the Bene Gesserit. You

wanted to be capable of such esoteric abilities. Sheeana certainly possessed

this desire. It was the dream of every postulant.

That such things might be possible for me!

Taraza spoke finally: "What is it you think you want from us, child?"

"The same things you thought you wanted when you were my age, Mother Superior."

Odrade suppressed a smile. Sheeana's wild sense of independence had skated

close to insolence there and Taraza certainly recognized this.

"You think that is a proper use for the gift of life?" Taraza asked.

"It is the only use I know, Mother Superior."

"Your candor is appreciated but I warn you to be careful in your use of it,"

Taraza said.

"Yes, Mother Superior."

"You already owe us much and you will owe us more," Taraza said. "Remember

that. Our gifts do not come cheaply."

Sheeana has not the vaguest appreciation of what she will pay for our gifts,

Odrade thought.

The Sisterhood never let its initiates forget what they owed and must repay.

You did not repay with love. Love was dangerous and Sheeana already was

learning this. The gift of life? A shudder began to course through Odrade and

she cleared her throat to compensate.

Am I alive? Perhaps when they took me away from Mama Sibia I died. I was alive

there in that house but did I live after the Sisters removed me?

Taraza said: "You may leave us now, Sheeana."

Sheeana turned on one heel and left the room but not before Odrade saw the tight

smile on the young face. Sheeana knew she had passed the Mother Superior's

examination.

When the door closed behind Sheeana, Taraza said: "You mentioned her natural

ability with Voice. I heard it, of course. Remarkable."

"She kept it well bridled," Odrade said. "She has learned not to try it on us."

"What do we have there, Dar?"

"Perhaps someday a Mother Superior of extraordinary abilities."

"Not too extraordinary?"

"We will have to see."

"Do you think she is capable of killing for us?"

Odrade was startled and showed it. "Now?"

"Yes, of course."

"The ghola?"

"Teg would not do it," Taraza said. "I even have doubts about Lucilla. Their

reports make it clear that he is capable of forging powerful bonds of . . . of

affinity."

"Even as I?"

"Schwangyu herself was not completely immune."

"Where is the noble purpose in such an act?" Odrade asked. "Isn't this what the

Tyrant's warning has --"

"Him? He killed many times!"

"And paid for it."

"We pay for everything we take, Dar."

"Even for a life?"

"Never forget for one instant, Dar, that a Mother Superior is capable of making

any necessary decision for the Sisterhood's survival!"

"So be it," Odrade said. "Take what you want and pay for it."

It was the proper reply but it reinforced the new strength Odrade felt, this

freedom to respond in her own way within a new universe. Where had such

toughness originated? Was it something out of her cruel Bene Gesserit

conditioning? Was it from her Atreides ancestry? She did not try to fool

herself that this came from a decision never again to follow another's moral

guidance rather than her own. This inner stability upon which she now stationed

herself was not a pure morality. Not bravado, either. Those were never enough.

"You are very like your father," Taraza said. "Usually, it's the dam who

provides most of the courage but this time I think it was the father."

"Miles Teg is admirably courageous but I think you oversimplify," Odrade said.

"Perhaps I do. But I have been right about you at every turn, Dar, even back

there when we were student postulants."

She knows! Odrade thought.

"We don't need to explain it," Odrade said. And she thought: It comes from

being born who I am, trained and shaped the way I was . . . the way we both

were: Dar and Tar.

"It's something in the Atreides line that we have not fully analyzed," Taraza

said.

"No genetic accidents?"

"I sometimes wonder if we've suffered any real accidents since the Tyrant,"

Taraza said.

"Did he stretch out back there in his citadel and look across the millennia to

this very moment?"

"How far back would you reach for the roots?" Taraza asked.

Odrade said: "What really happens when a Mother Superior commands the Breeding

Mistresses: 'Have that one go breed with that one'?"

Taraza produced a cold smile.

Odrade felt herself suddenly at the crest of a wave, awareness pushing all of

her over into this new realm. Taraza wants my rebellion! She wants me as her

opponent!

"Will you see Waff now?" Odrade asked.

"First, I want your assessment of him."

"He sees us as the ultimate tool to create the 'Tleilaxu Ascendancy.' We are

God's gift to his people."

"They have been waiting a long time for this," Taraza said. "To dissemble so

carefully, all of them for all of those eons!"

"They have our view of time," Odrade agreed. "That was the final thing to

convince them we share their Great Belief."

"But why the clumsiness?" Taraza asked. "They are not stupid."

"It diverted our attention from how they were really using their ghola process,"

Odrade said. "Who could believe stupid people would do such a thing?"

"And what have they created?" Taraza asked. "Only the image of evil stupidity?"

"Act stupid long enough and you become stupid," Odrade said. "Perfect the

mimicry of your Face Dancers and . . ."

"Whatever happens, we must punish them," Taraza said. "I see that clearly.

Have him brought up here."

After Odrade had given the order and while they waited, Taraza said: "The

sequencing of the ghola's education became a shambles even before they escaped

from the Gammu Keep. He leaped ahead of his teachers to grasp things that were

only implied and he did this at an alarmingly accelerated rate. Who knows what

he has become by now?"

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the

past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the

future as well.

-Leto II, His Voice, from Dar-es-Balat

Duncan followed his guide through the dawn light at a punishing clip. The man

might look old but he was as springy as a gazelle and seemed incapable of

tiring.

Only a few minutes ago they had put aside their night goggles. Duncan was glad

to be rid of them. Everything outside the reach of the glasses had been black

in the dim starlight filtering through heavy branches. There had been no world

ahead of him beyond the range of the glasses. The view at both sides jerked and

flowed -- now a clump of yellow bushes, now two silver-bark trees, now a stone

wall with a plasteel gate cut into it and guarded by the flickering blue of a

burn-shield, then an arched bridge of native rock, all green and black

underfoot. After that, an arched entry of polished white stone. The structures

all appeared very old and expensive, maintained by costly handwork.

Duncan had no idea where he was. None of this terrain recalled his memories of

the long-lost Giedi Prime days.

Dawn revealed that they were following a tree-shielded animal track up a

hillside. The climb became steep. Occasional glimpses through trees on their

left revealed a valley. A hanging mist stood guard over the sky, hiding the

distances, enclosing them as they climbed. Their world became progressively a

smaller place as it lost its connection with a larger universe.

At one brief pause, not for rest but for listening to the forest around them,

Duncan studied his mist-capped surroundings. He felt dislodged, removed from a

universe that possessed sky and the open features that linked it to other

planets.

His disguise was simple: Tleilaxu cold-weather garments and cheek pads to make

his face appear rounder. His curly black hair had been straightened by some

chemical applied with heat. The hair was then bleached to a sandy blond and

hidden under a dark watchcap. All of his genital hair had been shaved away. He

hardly recognized himself in the mirror they held up for him.

A dirty Tleilaxu!

The artisan who created this transformation was an old woman with glittering

gray-green eyes. "You are now a Tleilaxu Master," she said. "Your name is

Wose. A guide will take you to the next place. You will treat him like a Face

Dancer if you meet strangers. Otherwise, do as he commands."

They led him out of the cave complex along a twisting passage, its walls and

ceiling thick with the musky green algae. In starlighted darkness, they thrust

him from the passage into a chilly night and the hands of an unseen man -- a

bulky figure in padded clothing.

A voice behind Duncan whispered: "Here he is, Ambitorm. Get him through."

The guide spoke in an accent of gutturals: "Follow me." He clipped a lead cord

to Duncan's belt, adjusted the night goggles and turned away. Duncan felt the

cord tug once and they were off.

Duncan recognized the use of the cord. It was not something to keep him close

behind. He could see this Ambitorm clearly enough with the night goggles. No,

the cord was to spill him quickly if they met danger. No need for a command.

For a long time during the night they crisscrossed small ice-lined watercourses

on a flatland. The light of Gammu's early moons penetrated the covering growth

only occasionally. They emerged finally onto a low hill with a view of bushy

wasteland all silvery with snow cover in the moonlight. Down into this they

went. The bushes, about twice the height of the guide, arched over muddy animal

passages little larger than the tunnels where they had begun this journey. It

was warmer here, the warmth of a compost heap. Almost no light penetrated to a

ground spongy with rotted vegetation. Duncan inhaled the fungal odors of

decomposing plant life. The night goggles showed him a seemingly endless

repetition of thick growth on both sides. The cord linking him to Ambitorm was

a tenuous grip on an alien world.

Ambitorm discouraged conversation. He said "Yes," when Duncan asked

confirmation of the man's name, then: "Don't talk."

The whole night was a disquieting traverse for Duncan. He did not like being

thrown back into his own thoughts. Giedi Prime memories persisted. This place

was like nothing he remembered from his pre-ghola youth. He wondered how

Ambitorm had learned the way through here and how he remembered it. One animal

tunnel appeared much like another.

In the steady, jogging pace there was time for Duncan's thoughts to roam.

Must I permit the Sisterhood to use me? What do I owe them?

And he thought of Teg, that last gallant stand to permit two of them to escape.

I did the same for Paul and Jessica.

It was a bond with Teg and it touched Duncan with grief. Teg was loyal to the

Sisterhood. Did he buy my loyalty with that last brave act?

Damn the Atreides!

The night's exertions increased Duncan's familiarity with his new flesh. How

young this body was! A small lurch of recollection and he could see that last

pre-ghola memory; he could feel the Sardaukar blade strike his head -- a

blinding explosion of pain and light. Knowledge of his certain death and then .

. . nothing until that moment with Teg in the Harkonnen no-globe.

The gift of another life. Was it more than a gift or something less? The

Atreides were demanding another payment from him.

For a time just before dawn, Ambitorm led him at a sloshing run along a narrow

stream whose icy chill penetrated the waterproof insulated boots of Duncan's

Tleilaxu garments. The watercourse reflected bush-shadowed silver from the

light of the planet's pre-dawn moon setting ahead of them.

Daylight saw them come out into the larger, tree-shielded animal track and up

the steep hill. This passage emerged onto a narrow rocky ledge below a ridgetop

of sawtoothed boulders. Ambitorm led him behind a screen of dead brown bushes,

their tops dirty with wind-blown snow. He released the cord from Duncan's belt.

Directly in front of them was a shallow declivity in the rocks, not quite a

cave, but Duncan saw that it would offer some protection unless they got a hard

wind over the bushes behind them. There was no snow on the floor of the place.

Ambitorm went to the back of the declivity and carefully removed a layer of icy

dirt and several flat rocks, which concealed a small pit. He lifted a round

black object from the pit and busied himself over it.

Duncan squatted under the overhang and studied his guide. Ambitorm had a

dished-in face with skin like dark brown leather. Yes, those could be the

features of a Face Dancer. Deep creases cut into the skin at the edges of the

man's brown eyes. Creases radiated from the sides of the thin mouth and lined

the wide brow. They spread out beside the flat nose and deepened the cleft of a

narrow chin. Creases of time all over his face.

Appetizing odors began to arise from the black object in front of Ambitorm.

"We will eat here and wait a bit before we continue," Ambitorm said.

He spoke Old Galach but with that guttural accent which Duncan had never heard

before, an odd stress on adjacent vowels. Was Ambitorm from the Scattering or a

Gammu native? There obviously had been many linguistic drifts since the Dune

days of Muad'dib. For that matter, Duncan recognized that all of the people in

the Gammu Keep, including Teg and Lucilla, spoke a Galach that had shifted from

the one he had learned as a pre-ghola child.

"Ambitorm," Duncan said. "Is that a Gammu name?"

"You will call me Tormsa," the guide said.

"Is that a nickname?"

"It is what you will call me."

"Why did those people back there call you Ambitorm."

"That was the name I gave them."

"But why would you . . ."

"You lived under the Harkonnens and you did not learn how to change your

identity?"

Duncan fell silent. Was that it? Another disguise. Ambi . . . Tormsa had not

changed his appearance. Tormsa. Was it a Tleilaxu name?

The guide extended a steaming cup toward Duncan. "A drink to restore you, Wose.

Drink it fast. It will keep you warm."

Duncan closed both hands around the cup. Wose. Wose and Tormsa. Tleilaxu

Master and his Face Dancer companion.

Duncan lifted the cup toward Tormsa in the ancient gesture of Atreides battle

comrades, then put it to his lips. Hot! But it warmed him as it went down.

The drink had a faintly sweet flavor over some vegetable tang. He blew on it

and drank it down as he saw Tormsa was doing.

Odd that I should not suspect poison or some drug, Duncan thought. But this

Tormsa and the others last night had something of the Bashar about them. The

gesture to a battle comrade had come naturally.

"Why are you risking your life this way?" Duncan asked.

"You know the Bashar and you have to ask?"

Duncan fell silent, abashed.

Tormsa leaned forward and recovered Duncan's cup. Soon, all evidence of their

breakfast lay hidden under the concealing rocks and dirt.

That food spoke of careful planning, Duncan thought. He turned and squatted on

the cold ground. The mist was still out there beyond the screening bushes.

Leafless limbs cut the view into odd bits and pieces. As he watched, the mist

began to lift, revealing the blurred outlines of a city at the far edge of the

valley.

Tormsa squatted beside him. "Very old city," he said. "Harkonnen place.

Look." He passed a small monoscope to Duncan. "That is where we go tonight."

Duncan put the monoscope to his left eye and tried to focus the oil lens. The

controls felt unfamiliar, not at all like those he had learned as a pre-ghola

youth or had been taught at the Keep. He removed it from his eye and examined

it.

"Ixian?" he asked.

"No. We made it." Tormsa reached over and pointed out two tiny buttons raised

above the black tube. "Slow, fast. Push left to cycle out, right to cycle

back."

Again, Duncan lifted the scope to his eye.

Who were the we who had made this thing?

A touch of the fast button and the view leaped into his gaze. Tiny dots moved

in the city. People! He increased the amplification. The people became small

dolls. With them to give him scale, Duncan realized that the city at the

valley's edge was immense . . . and farther away than he had thought. A single

rectangular structure stood in the center of the city, its top lost in the

clouds. Gigantic.

Duncan knew this place now. The surroundings had changed but that central

structure lay fixed in his memory.

How many of us vanished into that black hellhole and never returned?

"Nine hundred and fifty stories," Tormsa said, seeing where Duncan's gaze was

directed. "Forty-five kilometers long, thirty kilometers wide. Plasteel and

armor-plaz, all of it."

"I know." Duncan lowered the scope and returned it to Tormsa. "It was called

Barony."

"Ysai," Tormsa said.

"That's what they call it now," Duncan said. "I have some different names for

it."

Duncan took a deep breath to put down the old hatreds. Those people were all

dead. Only the building remained. And the memories. He scanned the city

around that enormous structure. The place was a sprawling mass of warrens.

Green spaces lay scattered throughout, each of them behind high walls. Single

residences with private parks, Teg had said. The monoscope had revealed guards

walking the wall tops.

Tormsa spat on the ground in front of him. "Harkonnen place."

"They built to make people feel small," Duncan said.

Tormsa nodded. "Small, no power in you."

The guide had become almost loquacious, Duncan thought.

Occasionally during the night, Duncan had defied the order for silence and tried

to make conversation.

"What animals made these passages?"

It had seemed a logical question for people trotting along an obvious animal

track, even the musty smell of beasts in it.

"Do not talk!" Tormsa snapped.

Later, Duncan asked why they could not get a vehicle of some sort and escape in

that. Even a groundcar would be preferable to this painful march across country

where one route felt much like another.

Tormsa stopped them in a patch of moonlight and looked at Duncan as though he

suspected his charge had suddenly become bereft of sense.

"Vehicles can follow!"

"No one can follow us when we're on foot?"

"Followers also must be on foot. Here, they will be killed. They know."

What a weird place! What a primitive place.

In the shelter of the Bene Gesserit Keep, Duncan had not realized the nature of

the planet around him. Later, in the no-globe, he had been removed from contact

with the outside. He had pre-ghola and ghola memories, but how inadequate those

were! When he thought about it now, he realized there had been clues. It was

obvious that Gammu possessed rudimentary weather control. And Teg had said that

the orbiting monitors that guarded the planet from attack were of the best.

Everything for protection, damned little for comfort! It was like Arrakis in

that respect.

Rakis, he corrected himself.

Teg. Did the old man survive? A captive? What did it mean to be captured here

in this age? It had meant brutal slavery in the old Harkonnen days. Burzmali

and Lucilla . . . He glanced at Tormsa.

"Will we find Burzmali and Lucilla in the city?"

"If they get through."

Duncan glanced down at his clothing. Was it a sufficient disguise? A Tleilaxu

Master and companion? People would think the companion a Face Dancer, of

course. Face Dancers were dangerous.

The baggy trousers were of some material Duncan had never before seen. It felt

like wool to the hand, but he sensed that it was artificial. When he spat on

it, spittle did not adhere and the smell was not of wool. His fingers detected

a uniformity of texture that no natural material could present. The long soft

boots and watchcap were of the same fabric. The garments were loose and puffy

except at the ankles. Not quilted, though. Insulated by some trick of

manufacture that trapped dead air between the layers. The color was a mottled

green and gray -- excellent camouflage here.

Tormsa was dressed in similar garments.

"How long do we wait here?" Duncan asked.

Tormsa shook his head for silence. The guide was seated now, knees up, arms

wrapped around his legs, head cradled against his knees, eyes looking outward

over the valley.

During the night's trip, Duncan had found the clothing remarkably comfortable.

Except for that once in the water, his feet stayed warm but not too warm. There

was plenty of room in trousers, shirt, and jacket for his body to move easily.

Nothing abraded his flesh.

"Who makes clothing such as this?" Duncan asked.

"We made it," Tormsa growled. "Be silent."

This was no different than the pre-awakening days at the Sisterhood's Keep,

Duncan thought. Tormsa was saying: "No need for you to know."

Presently, Tormsa stretched out his legs and straightened. He appeared to

relax. He glanced at Duncan. "Friends in the city signal that there are

searchers overhead."

" 'Thopters?"

"Yes."

"Then what do we do?"

"You must do what I do and nothing else."

"You're just sitting there."

"For now. We will go down into the valley soon."

"But how --"

"When you traverse such country as this you become one of the animals that live

here. Look at the tracks and see how they walk and how they lie down for a

rest."

"But can't the searchers tell the difference between . . ."

"If the animals browse, you make the motions of browsing. If searchers come,

you continue to do what it was you were doing, what any animal would do.

Searchers will be high in the air. That is lucky for us. They cannot tell

animal from human unless they come down."

"But won't they --"

"They trust their machines and the motions they see. They are lazy. They fly

high. That way, the search goes faster. They trust their own intelligence to

read their instruments and tell which is animal and which is human."

"So they'll just go by us if they think we're wild animals."

"If they doubt, they will scan us a second time. We must not change the pattern

of movements after being scanned."

It was a long speech for the usually taciturn Tormsa. He studied Duncan

carefully now. "You understand?"

"How will I know when we're being scanned?"

"Your gut will tingle. You will feel in your stomach the fizz of a drink that

no man should swallow."

Duncan nodded. "Ixian scanners."

"Let it not alarm you," Tormsa said. "Animals here are accustomed to it.

Sometimes, they may pause, but only for an instant and then they go on as if

nothing has happened. Which, for them, is true. It is only for us that

something evil may happen."

Presently, Tormsa stood. "We will go down into the valley now. Follow closely.

Do exactly what I do and nothing else."

Duncan fell into step behind his guide. Soon, they were under the covering

trees. Sometime during the night's passage, Duncan realized, he had begun to

accept his place in the schemes of others. A new patience was taking over his

awareness. And there was excitement goaded by curiosity.

What kind of a universe had come out of the Atreides times? Gammu. What a

strange place Giedi Prime had become.

Slowly but distinctly, things were being revealed and each new thing opened a

view to more that could be learned. He could feel patterns taking shape. One

day, he thought, there would be a single pattern and then he would know why they

had brought him back from the dead.

Yes, it was a matter of opening doors, he thought. You opened one door and that

let you into a place where there were other doors. You chose a door in this new

place and examined what that revealed to you. There might be times when you

were forced to try all of the doors but the more doors you opened, the more

certain you became of which door to open next. Finally, a door would open into

a place you recognized. Then you could say: "Ahhhh, this explains everything."

"Searchers come," Tormsa said. "We are browsing animals now." He reached up to

a screening bush and tore down a small limb.

Duncan did the same.

"I must rule with eye and claw -- as the hawk among lesser birds."

-Atreides assertion (Ref: BG Archives)

At daybreak, Teg emerged from the concealing windbreaks beside a main road. The

road was a wide, flat thoroughfare -- beam-hardened and kept bare of plant life.

Ten lanes, Teg estimated, suitable for both vehicle and foot traffic. There was

mostly foot traffic on it at this hour.

He had brushed most of the dust off his clothing and made sure there were no

signs of rank on it. His gray hair was not as neat as he usually preferred but

he had only his fingers for a comb.

Traffic on the road was headed toward the city of Ysai many kilometers across

the valley. The morning was cloudless with a light breeze in his face moving

toward the sea somewhere far behind him.

During the night he had come to a delicate balance with his new awareness.

Things flickered in his second vision: knowledge of things around him before

those things occurred, awareness of where he must put his foot in the next step.

Behind this lay the reactive trigger that he knew could snap him into the

blurring responses that flesh should not be able to accommodate. Reason could

not explain the thing. He felt that he walked precariously along the cutting

edge of a knife.

Try as he might, he could not resolve what had happened to him under the Tprobe.

Was it akin to what a Reverend Mother experienced in the spice agony?

But he sensed no accumulation of Other Memories out of his past. He did not

think the Sisters could do what he did. The doubled vision that told him what

to anticipate from every movement within the range of his senses seemed a new

kind of truth.

Teg's Mentat teachers had always assured him there was a form of living-truth

not susceptible to proof by the marshaling of ordinary facts. It was carried

sometimes in fables and poetry and often went contrary to desires, so he had

been told.

"The most difficult experience for a Mentat to accept," they said.

Teg had always reserved judgment on this pronouncement but now he was forced to

accept it. The T-probe had thrust him over a threshold into a new reality.

He did not know why he chose this particular moment to emerge from hiding,

except that it fitted him into an acceptable flow of human movement.

Most of that movement on the road was composed of market gardeners towing

panniers of vegetables and fruit. The panniers were supported behind them on

cheap suspensors. Awareness of that food sent sharp hunger pains through him

but he forced himself to ignore them. With experience of more primitive planets

in his long service to the Bene Gesserit, he saw this human activity as little

different from that of farmers leading loaded animals. The foot traffic struck

him as an odd mixture of ancient and modern -- farmers afoot, their produce

floating behind them on perfectly ordinary technological devices. Except for

the suspensors this scene was very like a similar day in humankind's most

ancient past. A draft animal was a draft animal, even if it came off an

assembly line in an Ixian factory.

Using his new second vision, Teg chose one of the farmers, a squat, dark-skinned

man with heavy features and thickly calloused hands. The man walked with a

defiant sense of independence. He towed eight large panniers piled with roughskinned

melons. The smell of them was a mouth-watering agony to Teg as he

matched his stride to that of the farmer. Teg strode for a few minutes in

silence, then ventured: "Is this the best road to Ysai?"

"It is a long way," the man said. He had a guttural voice, something cautious

in it.

Teg glanced back at the loaded panniers.

The farmer looked sidelong at Teg. "We go to a market center. Others take our

produce from there to Ysai."

As they talked, Teg realized the farmer had guided (almost herded) him close to

the edge of the road. The man glanced back and jerked his head slightly,

nodding forward. Three more farmers came up beside them and closed in around

Teg and his companion until tall panniers concealed them from the rest of the

traffic.

Teg tensed. What were they planning? He sensed no menace, though. His doubled

vision detected nothing violent in his immediate vicinity.

A heavy vehicle sped past them and on ahead. Teg knew of its passage only by

the smell of burned fuel, the wind that shook the panniers, the thrumming of a

powerful engine and sudden tension in his companions. The high panniers

completely hid the passing vehicle.

"We have been looking for you to protect you, Bashar," the farmer beside him

said. "There are many who hunt you but none of them with us along here."

Teg shot a startled glance at the man.

"We served with you at Renditai," the farmer said.

Teg swallowed. Renditai? He was a moment recalling it -- only a minor skirmish

in his long history of conflicts and negotiations.

"I am sorry but I do not know your name," Teg said.

"Be glad that you do not know our names. It is better that way."

"But I'm grateful."

"This is a small repayment, which we are glad to make, Bashar."

"I must get to Ysai," Teg said.

"It is dangerous there."

"It is dangerous everywhere."

"We guessed you would go to Ysai. Someone will come soon and you will ride in

concealment. Ahhhh, here he comes. We have not seen you here, Bashar. You

have not been here."

One of the other farmers took over the towing of his companion's load, pulling

two strings of panniers while the farmer Teg had chosen hustled Teg under a tow

rope and into a dark vehicle. Teg glimpsed shiny plasteel and plaz as the

vehicle slowed only briefly for the pickup. The door closed sharply behind him

and he found himself on a soft upholstered seat, alone in the back of a

groundcar. The car picked up speed and soon was beyond the marching farmers.

The windows around Teg had been darkened, giving him a dusky view of the passing

scene. The driver was a shaded silhouette.

This first chance to relax in warm comfort since his capture almost lured Teg

into sleep. He sensed no threats. His body still ached from the demands he had

made on it and from the agonies of the T-probe.

He told himself, though, that he must stay awake and alert.

The driver leaned sideways and spoke over his shoulder without turning: "They

have been hunting for you for two days, Bashar. Some think you already offplanet."

Two days?

The stunner and whatever else they had done to him had left him unconscious for

a long time. This only added to his hunger. He tried to make the fleshembedded

chrono play against his vision centers and it only flickered as it had

done each time he consulted it since the T-probe. His time sense and all

references to it were changed.

So some thought he had left Gammu.

Teg did not ask who hunted him. Tleilaxu and people from the Scattering had

been in that attack and the subsequent torture.

Teg glanced around his conveyance. It was one of those beautiful old pre-

Scattering groundcars, the marks of the finest Ixian manufacture on it. He had

never before ridden in one but he knew about them. Restorers picked them up to

renew, rebuild -- whatever they did that brought back the ancient sense of

quality. Teg had been told that such vehicles often were found abandoned in

strange places -- in old broken-down buildings, in culverts, locked away in

machinery warehouses, in farm fields.

Again, his driver leaned slightly sideways and spoke over one shoulder: "Do you

have an address where you wish to be taken in Ysai, Bashar?"

Teg called up his memory of the contact points he had identified on his first

tour of Gammu and gave one of these to the man. "Do you know that place?"

"It is mostly a meeting and drinking establishment, Bashar. I hear they serve

good food, too, but anyone can enter if he has the price."

Not knowing why he had made that particular choice, Teg said: "We will chance

it." He did not think it necessary to tell the driver that there were private

dining rooms at the address.

The mention of food brought back sharp hunger cramps. Teg's arms began to

tremble and he was several minutes restoring calmness. Last night's activities

had almost drained him, he realized. He sent a searching gaze around the car's

interior, wondering if there might be food or drink concealed here. The car's

restoration had been accomplished with loving care but he saw no hidden

compartments.

Such cars were not all that rare in some quarters, he knew, but all of them

spoke of wealth. Who owned this one? Not the driver, certainly. That one had

all the signs of a hired professional. But if a message had been sent to bring

this car then others knew of Teg's location.

"Will we be stopped and searched?" Teg asked.

"Not this car, Bashar. The Planetary Bank of Gammu owns it."

Teg absorbed this silently. That bank had been one of his contact points. He

had studied key branches carefully on his inspection tour. This memory drew him

back into his responsibilities as guardian of the ghola.

"My companions," Teg ventured. "Are they . . ."

"Others have that in hand, Bashar. I cannot say."

"Can word be taken to . . ."

"When it is safe, Bashar."

"Of course."

Teg sank back into the cushions and studied his surroundings. These groundcars

had been built with much plaz and almost indestructible plasteel. It was other

things that went sour with age -- upholstery, headliners, the electronics, the

suspensor installations, the ablative liners of the turbofan ducts. And the

adhesives deteriorated no matter what you did to preserve them. The restorers

had made this one look as though it had just been cranked out of the factory --

all subdued glowing in the metals, upholstery that molded itself to him with a

faint sound of crinkling. And the smell: that indefinable aroma of newness, a

mixture of polish and fine fabrics with just a hint of ozone bite underneath

from the smoothly working electronics. Nowhere in it, though, was there the

smell of food.

"How long to Ysai?" Teg asked.

"Another half hour, Bashar. Is there a problem that requires more speed? I

don't want to attract . . ."

"I am very hungry."

The driver glanced left and right. There were no more farmers around them here.

The roadway was almost empty except for two heavy transport pods with their

tractors holding to the right verge and a large lorry hauling a towering

automatic fruit picker.

"It is dangerous to delay for long," the driver said. "But I know a place where

I think I can at least get you a quick bowl of soup."

"Anything would be welcome. I have not eaten for two days and there has been

much activity."

They came to a crossroads and the driver turned left onto a narrow track through

tall, evenly spaced conifers. Presently, he turned onto a one-lane drive

through the trees. The low building at the end of this track was built of dark

stones and had a blackplaz roof. The windows were narrow and glistened with

protective burner nozzles.

The driver said: "Just a minute, sir." 'He got out and Teg had his first look

at the man's face: extremely thin with a long nose and tiny mouth. The visible

tracery of surgical reconstruction laced his cheeks. The eyes glowed silver,

obviously artificial. He turned away and went into the house. When he

returned, he opened Teg's door. "Please be quick, sir. The one inside is

heating soup for you. I have said you are a banker. No need to pay."

The ground was icy crisp underfoot. Teg had to stoop slightly for the doorway.

He entered a dark hallway, wood-paneled and with a well-lighted room at the end.

The smell of food there drew him like a magnet. His arms were trembling once

more. A small table had been set beside a window with a view of an enclosed and

covered garden. Bushes heavy with red flowers almost concealed the stone wall

that defined the garden. Yellow hotplaz gleamed over the space, bathing it in a

summery artificial light. Teg sank gratefully into the single chair at the

table. White linen, he saw, with an embossed edge. A single soup spoon.

A door creaked at his right and a squat figure entered carrying a bowl from

which steam arose. The man hesitated when he saw Teg, then brought the bowl to

the table and placed it in front of Teg. Alerted by that hesitation, Teg forced

himself to ignore the tempting aroma drifting to his nostrils and concentrated

instead on his companion.

"It is good soup, sir. I made it myself."

An artificial voice. Teg saw the scars at the sides of the jaw. There was the

look of an ancient mechanical about this man -- an almost neckless head attached

to thick shoulders, arms that seemed oddly jointed at both shoulders and elbows,

legs that appeared to swing only from the hips. He stood motionless now but he

had entered here with a slightly jerking sway that said he was mostly

replacement artificials. The look of suffering in his eyes could not be

avoided.

"I know I'm not pretty, sir," the man rasped. "I was ruined in the Alajory

explosion."

Teg had no idea what the Alajory explosion might have been but it obviously was

presumed he knew. "Ruined," however, was an interesting accusation against

Fate.

"I was wondering if I knew you," Teg said.

"No one here knows anyone else," the man said. "Eat your soup." He pointed

upward at the coiled tip of quiescent snooper, the glow of its lights revealing

that it read its surroundings and found no poison. "The food is safe here."

Teg looked at the dark brown liquid in his bowl. Lumps of solid meat were

visible in it. He reached for the spoon. His trembling hand made two attempts

before grasping the spoon and even then he sloshed most of the liquid out of the

spoon before he could lift it a millimeter.

A steadying hand gripped Teg's wrist and the artificial voice spoke softly in

Teg's ear: "I do not know what they did to you, Bashar, but no one will harm

you here without crossing my dead body."

"You know me?"

"Many would die for you, Bashar. My son lives because of you."

Teg allowed himself to be helped. It was all he could do to swallow the first

spoonful. The liquid was rich, hot and soothing. His hand steadied presently

and he nodded to the man to release the wrist.

"More, sir?"

Teg realized then that he had emptied the bowl. It was tempting to say "yes"

but the driver had said to make haste.

"Thank you, but I must go."

"You have not been here," the man said.

When they were once more back on the main road, Teg sat back against the

groundcar's cushions and reflected on the curious echoing quality of what the

ruined man had said. The same words the farmer had used: "You have not been

here." It had the feeling of a common response and it said something about

changes in Gammu since Teg had surveyed the place.

They entered the outskirts of Ysai presently and Teg wondered if he should

attempt a disguise. The ruined man had recognized him quickly.

"Where do the Honored Matres hunt for me now?" Teg asked.

"Everywhere, Bashar. We cannot guarantee your safety but steps are being taken.

I will make it known where I have delivered you."

"Do they say why they hunt me?"

"They never explain, Bashar."

"How long have they been on Gammu?"

"Too long, sir. Since I was a child and I was a baltern at Renditai."

A hundred years at least, Teg thought. Time to gather many forces into their

hands . . . if Taraza's fears were to be credited.

Teg credited them.

"Trust no one those whores can influence," Taraza had said.

Teg sensed no threat to him in his present position, though. He could only

absorb the secrecy that obviously enclosed him now. He did not press for more

details.

They were well into Ysai and he glimpsed the black bulk of the ancient Harkonnen

seat of Barony through occasional gaps between the walls that enclosed the great

private residences. The car turned onto a street of small commercial

establishments: cheap buildings constructed for the most part of salvaged

materials that displayed their origins in poor fits and unmatched colors. Gaudy

signs advised that the wares inside were the finest, the repair services better

than those elsewhere.

It was not that Ysai had deteriorated or even gone to seed, Teg thought. Growth

here had been diverted into something worse than ugly. Someone had chosen to

make this place repellent. That was the key to most of what he saw in the city.

Time had not stopped here, it had retreated. This was no modern city full of

bright transport pods and insulated usiform buildings. This was random jumbles,

ancient structures joined to ancient structures, some built to individual tastes

and some obviously designed with some long-gone necessity in mind. Everything

about Ysai was joined in a proximity whose disarray just managed to avoid chaos.

What saved it, Teg knew, was the old pattern of thoroughfares along which this

hodgepodge had been assembled. Chaos was held at bay, although what pattern

there was in the streets conformed to no master plan. Streets met and crossed

at odd angles, seldom squared. Seen from the air, the place was a crazy quilt

with only the giant black rectangle of ancient Barony to speak of an organizing

plan. The rest of it was architectural rebellion.

Teg saw suddenly that this place was a lie plastered over with other lies, based

on previous lies, and such a mad mixup that they might never dig through to a

usable truth. All of Gammu was that way. Where could such insanity have had

its beginnings? Was it the Harkonnens' doing?

"We are here, sir."

The driver drew up to the curb in front of a windowless building face, all flat

black plasteel and with a single ground-level door. No salvaged material in

this construction. Teg recognized the place: the bolt hole he had chosen.

Unidentified things flickered in Teg's second vision but he sensed no immediate

menace. The driver opened Teg's door and stood to one side.

"Not much activity here at this hour, sir. I would get inside quickly."

Without a backward glance, Teg darted across the narrow walk and into the

building -- a small brightly lighted foyer of polished white plaz and only banks

of comeyes to greet him. He ducked into a lift tube and punched the remembered

coordinates. This tube, he knew, angled upward through the building to the

fifty-seventh floor rear where there were some windows. He remembered a private

dining room of dark reds and heavy brown furnishings, a hard-eyed female with

the obvious signs of Bene Gesserit training, but no Reverend Mother.

The tube disgorged him into the remembered room but there was no one to receive

him. Teg glanced around at the solid brown furnishings. Four windows along the

far wall were concealed behind thick maroon draperies.

Teg knew he had been seen. He waited patiently, using his newly learned

doubling-vision to anticipate trouble. There was no indication of attack. He

took up a position to one side of the tube outlet and glanced around him once

more.

Teg had a theory about the relationship between rooms and their windows -- the

number of windows, their placement, their size, height from the floor,

relationship of room size to window size, the elevation of the room, windows

curtained or draped, and all of this Mentat-interpreted against knowledge of the

uses to which a room was put. Rooms could be fitted to a kind of pecking order

defined with extreme sophistication. Emergency uses might throw such

distinctions out the window but they otherwise were quite reliable.

Lack of windows in an aboveground room conveyed a particular message. If humans

occupied such a room, it did not necessarily mean secrecy was the main goal. He

had seen unmistakable signs in scholastic settings that windowless schoolrooms

were both a retreat from the exterior world and a strong statement of dislike

for children.

This room, however, presented something different: conditional secrecy plus the

need to keep occasional watch on that exterior world. Protective secrecy when

required. His opinion was reinforced when he crossed the room and twitched one

of the draperies aside. The windows were tripled armor-plaz. So! Keeping

watch on that world outside might draw attack. That was the opinion of whoever

had ordered the room protected this way.

Once more, Teg twitched the drapery aside. He glanced at the corner glazing.

Prismatic reflectors there amplified the view along the adjacent wall to both

sides and from roof to ground.

Well!

His previous visit had not given him time for this closer examination but now he

made a more positive assessment. A very interesting room. Teg dropped the

drapery and turned just in time to see a tall man enter from the tube slot.

Teg's doubled vision provided a firm prediction on the stranger. This man

brought concealed danger. The newcomer was plainly military -- the way he

carried himself, the quick eye for details that only a trained and experienced

officer would observe. And there was something else in his manner that made Teg

stiffen. This was a betrayer! A mercenary available to the highest bidder.

"Damned nasty the way they treated you," the man greeted Teg. The voice was a

deep baritone with an unconscious assumption of personal power in it. The

accent was one Teg had never before heard. This was someone from the

Scattering! A Bashar or equivalent, Teg estimated.

Still, there was no indication of immediate attack.

When Teg did not answer, the man said: "Oh, sorry: I'm Muzzafar. Jafa

Muzzafar, regional commander for the forces of Dur."

Teg had never heard of the forces of Dur.

Questions crowded Teg's mind but he kept them to himself. Anything he said here

might betray weakness.

Where were the people who had met him here before? Why did I choose this place?

The decision had been made with such inner assurance.

"Please be comfortable," Muzzafar said, indicating a small divan with a low

serving table in front of it. "I assure you that none of what has happened to

you was of my doing. Tried to put a stop to it when I heard but you'd already .

. . left the scene."

Teg heard the other thing in this Muzzafar's voice now: caution bordering on

fear. So this man had either heard about or seen the shack and the clearing.

"Damned clever of you," Muzzafar said. "Having your attack force wait until

your captors were concentrating on trying to get information out of you. Did

they learn anything?"

Teg shook his head silently from side to side. He felt on the edge of being

ignited in a blurred response to attack, yet he sensed no immediate violence

here. What were these Lost Ones doing? But Muzzafar and his people had made a

wrong assessment of what had happened in the room of the T-probe. That was

clear.

"Please, be seated," Muzzafar said.

Teg took the proffered seat on the divan.

Muzzafar sat in a deep chair facing Teg at a slight angle on the other side of

the serving table. There was a crouching sense of alertness in Muzzafar. He

was prepared for violence.

Teg studied the man with interest. Muzzafar had revealed no real rank -- only

commander. Tall fellow with a wide, ruddy face and a big nose. The eyes were

gray-green and had the trick of focusing just behind Teg's right shoulder when

either of them spoke. Teg had known a spy once who did that.

"Well, well," Muzzafar said. "I've read and heard a great deal about you since

coming here."

Teg continued to study him silently. Muzzafar's hair had been cropped close and

there was a purple scar about three millimeters long across the scalp line above

the left eye. He wore an open bush jacket of light green and matching trousers

-- not quite a uniform but there was a neatness about him that spoke of

customary spit and polish. The shoes attested to this. Teg thought he probably

could see his own reflection in their light brown surfaces if he bent close.

"Never expected to meet you personally, of course," Muzzafar said. "Consider it

a great honor."

"I know very little about you except that you command a force from the

Scattering," Teg said.

"Mmmmmph! Not much to know, really."

Once more, hunger pangs gripped Teg. His gaze went to the button beside the

tube slot, which, he remembered, would summon a waiter. This was a place where

humans did the work usually assigned to automata, an excuse for keeping a large

force assembled at the ready.

Misinterpreting Teg's interest in the tube slot, Muzzafar said: "Please don't

think of leaving. Having my own medic come in to take a look at you. Shouldn't

be but a moment. Appreciate it if you'd wait quietly until he arrives."

"I was merely thinking of placing an order for some food," Teg said.

"Advise you to wait until the doctor's had his look-see. Stunners leave some

nasty aftereffects."

"So you know about that."

"Know about the whole damned fiasco. You and your man Burzmali are a force to

be reckoned with."

Before Teg could respond, the tube slot disgorged a tall man in a jacketed red

singlesuit, a man so bone-skinny that his clothing gaped and flapped about him.

The diamond tattoo of a Suk doctor had been burned into his high forehead but

the mark was orange and not the customary black. The doctor's eyes were

concealed by a glistening orange cover that hid their true color.

An addict of some kind? Teg wondered. There was no smell of the familiar

narcotics around him, not even melange. There was a tart smell, though, almost

like some fruit.

"There you are, Solitz!" Muzzafar said. He gestured at Teg. "Give him a good

scan. Stunner hit him day before yesterday."

Solitz produced a recognizable Suk scanner, compact and fitting into one hand.

Its probe field produced a low hum.

"So you're a Suk doctor," Teg said, looking pointedly at the orange brand on the

forehead.

"Yes, Bashar. My training and conditioning are the finest in our ancient

tradition."

"I've never seen the identifying mark in that color," Teg said.

The doctor passed his scanner around Teg's head. "The color of the tattoo makes

no difference, Bashar. What is behind it is all that matters." He lowered the

scanner to Teg's shoulders, then down across the body.

Teg waited for the humming to stop.

The doctor stood back and addressed Muzzafar: "He is quite fit, Field Marshal.

Remarkably fit, considering his age, but he desperately needs sustenance."

"Yes . . . well, that's fine then, Solitz. Take care of that. The Bashar is

our guest."

"I will order a meal suited to his needs," Solitz said. "Eat it slowly,

Bashar." Solitz did a smart about-face that set his jacket and trousers

flapping. The tube slot swallowed him.

"Field Marshal?" Teg asked.

"A revival of ancient titles in the Dur," Muzzafar said.

"The Dur?" Teg ventured.

"Stupid of me!" Muzzafar produced a small case from a side pocket of his jacket

and extracted a thin folder. Teg recognized a holostat similar to one he had

carried himself during his long service -- pictures of home and family.

Muzzafar placed the holostat on the table between them and tapped the control

button.

The full-color image of a bushy green expanse of jungle came alive in miniature

above the tabletop.

"Home," Muzzafar said. "Frame bush in the center there." A finger indicated a

place in the projection. "First one that ever obeyed me. People laughed at me

for choosing the first one that way and sticking with it."

Teg stared at the projection, aware of a deep sadness in Muzzafar's voice. The

indicated bush was a spindly grouping of thin limbs with bright blue bulbs

dangling from the tips.

Frame bush?

"Rather thin thing, I know," Muzzafar said, removing his pointing finger from

the projection. "Not secure at all. Had to defend myself a few times in the

first months with it. Grew rather fond of it, though. They respond to that,

you know. It's the best home in all the deep valleys now, by the Eternal Rock

of Dur!"

Muzzafar stared at Teg's puzzled expression. "Damn! You don't have frame

bushes, of course. You must forgive my crashing ignorance. We've a great deal

to teach each other, I think."

"You called that home," Teg said.

"Oh, yes. With proper direction, once they learn to obey, of course, a frame

bush will grow itself into a magnificent residence. It only takes four or five

standards."

Standards, Teg thought. So the Lost Ones still used the Standard Year.

The tube slot hissed and a young woman in a blue serving gown backed into the

room towing a suspensor-buoyed hotpod, which she positioned near the table in

front of Teg. Her clothing was of the type Teg had seen during his original

inspection but the pleasantly round face she turned to him was unfamiliar. Her

scalp had been depilated, leaving an expanse of prominent veins. Her eyes were

watery blue and there was something cowed in her posture. She opened the hotpod

and the spicy odors of the food wafted across Teg's nostrils.

Teg was alerted but he sensed no immediate threat. He could see himself eating

the food without ill effect.

The young woman put a row of dishes on to the table in front of him and arranged

the eating implements neatly at one side.

"I've no snooper, but I'll taste the foods if you wish," Muzzafar said.

"Not necessary," Teg said. He knew this would raise questions but felt they

would suspect him of being a Truthsayer. Teg's gaze locked onto the food.

Without any conscious decision, he leaned forward and began eating. Familiar

with Mentat-hunger, he was surprised at his own reactions. Using the brain in

Mentat mode consumed calories at an alarming rate, but this was a new necessity

driving him. He felt his own survival controlling his actions. This hunger

went beyond anything of previous experience. The soup he had eaten with some

caution at the house of the ruined man had not aroused such a demanding

reaction.

The Suk doctor chose correctly, Teg thought. This food had been selected

directly out of the scanner's summation.

The young woman kept bringing more dishes from hotpods ordered via the tube

slot.

Teg had to get up in the middle of the meal and relieve himself in an adjoining

washroom, conscious there of the hidden comeyes that were keeping him under

surveillance. He knew by his physical reactions that his digestive system had

speeded up to a new level of bodily necessity. When he returned to the table,

he felt just as hungry as though he had not eaten.

The serving woman began to show signs of surprise and then alarm. Still, she

kept bringing more food at his demand. Muzzafar watched with growing amazement

but said nothing.

Teg felt the supportive replacement of the food, the precise caloric adjustment

that the Suk doctor had ordered. They obviously had not thought about quantity,

though. The girl obeyed his demands in a kind of walking shock.

Muzzafar spoke finally. "Must say I've never before seen anyone eat that much

at one sitting. Can't see how you do it. Nor why."

Teg sat back, satisfied at last, knowing he had aroused questions that could not

be answered truthfully.

"A Mentat thing," Teg lied. "I've been through a very strenuous time."

"Amazing," Muzzafar said. He arose.

When Teg started to stand, Muzzafar gestured for him to remain. "No need.

We've prepared quarters for you right next door. Safer not to move you yet."

The young woman departed with the empty hotpods.

Teg studied Muzzafar. Something had changed during the meal. Muzzafar watched

him with a coldly measuring stare.

"You've an implanted communicator," Teg said. "You have received new orders."

"It would not be advisable for your friends to attack this place," Muzzafar

said.

"You think that's my plan?"

"What is your plan, Bashar?"

Teg smiled.

"Very well." Muzzafar's gaze went out of focus as he listened to his

communicator. When he once more concentrated on Teg, his gaze had the look of a

predator. Teg felt himself buffeted by that gaze, recognizing that someone else

was coming to this room. The Field Marshal thought of this new development as

something extremely dangerous to his dinner guest but Teg saw nothing that could

defeat his new abilities.

"You think I am your prisoner," Teg said.

"By the Eternal Rock, Bashar! You are not what I expected!"

"The Honored Matre who is coming, what does she expect?" Teg asked.

"Bashar, I warn you: Do not take that tone with her. You have not the

slightest concept of what is about to happen to you."

"An Honored Matre is about to happen to me," Teg said.

"And I wish you well of her!"

Muzzafar pivoted and left via the tube slot.

Teg stared after him. He could see the flickering of second vision like a light

blinking around the tube slot. The Honored Matre was near but not yet ready to

enter this room. First, she would consult with Muzzafar. The Field Marshal

would not be able to tell this dangerous female anything really important.

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions

change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall

short.

-Mentat Handbook

Lucilla and Burzmali entered Ysai from the south into a lowerclass quarter with

widely spaced streetlights. It lacked only an hour of midnight and yet people

thronged the streets in this quarter. Some walked quietly, some chatted with

drug-enhanced vigor, some only watched expectantly. They wadded up at the

corners and held Lucilla's fascinated attention as she passed.

Burzmali urged her to walk faster, an eager customer anxious to get her alone.

Lucilla kept her covert attention on the people.

What did they do here? Those men waiting in the doorway: For what did they

wait? Workers in heavy aprons emerged from a wide passage as Lucilla and

Burzmali passed. There was a thick smell of rank sewage and perspiration about

them. The workers, almost equally divided between male and female, were tall,

heavy-bodied and with thick arms. Lucilla could not imagine what their

occupation might be but they were of a single type and they made her realize how

little she knew of Gammu.

The workers hawked and spat into the gutter as they emerged into the night.

Ridding themselves of some contaminant?

Burzmali put his mouth close to Lucilla's ear and whispered: "Those workers are

the Bordanos."

She risked a glance back at them where they walked toward a side street.

Bordanos? Ahhh, yes: people trained and bred to work the compression machinery

that harnessed sewer gases. They had been bred to remove the sense of smell and

the musculature of shoulders and arms had been increased. Burzmali guided her

around a corner and out of sight of the Bordanos.

Five children emerged from a dark doorway beside them and wheeled into line

following Lucilla and Burzmali. Lucilla noted their hands clutching small

objects. They followed with a strange intensity. Abruptly, Burzmali stopped

and turned. The children also stopped and stared at him. It was clear to

Lucilla that the children were prepared for some violence.

Burzmali clasped both hands in front of him and bowed to the children. He said:

"Guldur!"

When Burzmali resumed guiding her down the street, the children no longer

followed.

"They would have stoned us," he said.

"Why?"

"They are children of a sect that follows Guldur -- the local name for the

Tyrant."

Lucilla looked back but the children were no longer in sight. They had set off

in search of another victim.

Burzmali guided her around another corner. Now, they were in a street crowded

with small merchants selling their wares from wheeled stands -- food, clothing,

small tools, and knives. A singsong of shouts filled the air as the merchants

tried to attract buyers. Their voices had that end of the workday lift -- a

false brilliance composed of the hope that old dreams would be fulfilled, yet

colored by the knowledge that life would not change for them. It occurred to

Lucilla that the people of these streets pursued a fleeting dream, that the

fulfillment they sought was not the thing itself but a myth they had been

conditioned to seek the way racing animals were trained to chase after the

whirling bait on the endless oval of the racetrack.

In the street directly ahead of them a burly figure in a thickly padded coat was

engaged in loud-voiced argument with a merchant who offered a string bag filled

with the dark red bulbs of a sweetly acid fruit. The fruit smell was thick all

around them. The merchant complained: "You would steal the food from the

mouths of my children!"

The bulky figure spoke in a piping voice, the accent chillingly familiar to

Lucilla: "I, too, have children!"

Lucilla controlled herself with an effort.

When they were clear of the market street, she whispered to Burzmali: "That man

in the heavy coat back there -- a Tleilaxu Master!"

"Couldn't be," Burzmali protested. "Too tall."

"Two of them, one on the shoulders of the other."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure."

"I've seen others like that since we arrived, but I didn't suspect."

"Many searchers are in these streets," she said.

Lucilla found that she did not much care for the everyday life of the gutter

inhabitants on this gutter planet. She no longer trusted the explanation for

bringing the ghola here. Of all those planets on which the precious ghola could

have been raised, why had the Sisterhood chosen this one? Or was the ghola

truly precious? Could it be that he was merely bait?

Almost blocking the narrow mouth of an alley beside them was a man plying a tall

device of whirling lights.

"Live!" he shouted. "Live!"

Lucilla slowed her pace to watch a passerby step into the alleyway and pass a

coin to the proprietor, then lean into a concave basin made brilliant by the

lights. The proprietor stared back at Lucilla. She saw a man with a narrow

dark face, the face of a Caladanian primitive on a body only slightly taller

than that of a Tleilaxu Master. There had been a look of contempt on his

brooding face as he took the customer's money.

The customer lifted his face from the basin with a shudder and then left the

alley, staggering slightly, his eyes glazed.

Lucilla recognized the device. Users called it a hypnobong and it was outlawed

on all of the more civilized worlds.

Burzmali hurried her out of the view of the brooding hypnobong proprietor.

They came to a wider side street with a corner doorway set into the building

across from them. Foot traffic all around; not a vehicle in sight. A tall man

sat on the first step in the corner doorway, his knees drawn up close to his

chin. His long arms were wrapped around his knees, the thin-fingered hands

clasped tightly together. He wore a wide-brimmed black hat that shaded his face

from the streetlights, but twin gleams from the shadows under that brim told

Lucilla that this was no kind of human she had ever before encountered. This

was something about which the Bene Gesserit had only speculated.

Burzmali waited until they were well away from the seated figure before

satisfying her curiosity.

"Futar," he whispered. "That's what they call themselves. They've only

recently been seen here on Gammu."

"A Tleilaxu experiment," Lucilla guessed. And she thought: a mistake that has

returned from the Scattering. "What are they doing here?" she asked.

"Trading colony, so the natives here tell us."

"Don't you believe it. Those are hunting animals that have been crossed with

humans."

"Ahhh, here we are," Burzmali said.

He guided Lucilla through a narrow doorway into a dimly lighted eating

establishment. This was part of their disguise, Lucilla knew: Do what others

in this quarter did, but she did not relish eating in this place, not with what

she could interpret from the smells.

The place had been crowded but it was emptying as they entered.

"This commerciel was recommended highly," Burzmali said as they seated

themselves in a mechaslot and waited for the menu to be projected.

Lucilla watched the departing customers. Night workers from nearby factories

and offices, she guessed. They appeared anxious in their hurry, perhaps fearful

of what might be done to them if they were tardy.

How insulated she had been at the Keep, she thought. She did not like what she

was learning of Gammu. What a scruffy place this commerciel was! The stools at

the counter to her right had been scarred and chipped. The tabletop in front of

her had been scored and rubbed with gritty cleaners until it no longer could be

kept clean by the vacusweep whose nozzle she could see near her left elbow.

There was no sign of even the cheapest sonic to maintain cleanliness. Food and

other evidence of deterioration had accumulated in the table's scratches.

Lucilla shuddered. She could not avoid the feeling that it had been a mistake

to separate from the ghola.

The menu had been projected, she saw, and Burzmali already was scanning it.

"I will order for you," he said.

Burzmali's way of saying he did not want her to make a mistake by ordering

something a woman of the Hormu might avoid.

It galled her to feel dependent. She was a Reverend Mother! She was trained to

take command in any situation, mistress of her own destiny. How tiring all of

this was. She gestured at the dirty window on her left where people could be

seen passing on the narrow street.

"I am losing business while we dally, Skar."

There! That was in character.

Burzmali almost sighed. At last! he thought. She had begun to function once

more as a Reverend Mother. He could not understand her abstracted attitude, the

way she looked at the city and its people.

Two milky drinks slid from the slot onto the table. Burzmali drank his in one

swallow. Lucilla tested her drink on the tip of her tongue, sorting the

contents. An imitation caffiate diluted with a nut-flavored juice.

Burzmali gestured upward with his chin for her to drink it quickly. She obeyed,

concealing a grimace at the chemical flavors. Burzmali's attention was on

something over her right shoulder but she dared not turn. That would be out of

character.

"Come." He placed a coin on the table and hurried her out into the street. He

smiled the smile of an eager customer but there was wariness in his eyes.

The tempo of the streets had changed. There were fewer people. The shadowy

doors conveyed a deeper sense of menace. Lucilla reminded herself that she was

supposed to represent a powerful guild whose members were immune to the common

violence of the gutter. The few people on the street did make way for her,

eyeing the dragons of her robe with every appearance of awe.

Burzmali stopped at a doorway.

It was like the others along this street, set back slightly from the walkway, so

tall that it appeared narrower than it actually was. An old-fashioned security

beam guarded the entrance. None of the newer systems had penetrated to the

slum, apparently. The streets themselves were testimony to that: designed for

groundcars. She doubted that there was a roofpad in the entire area. No sign

of flitters or ,'thopters could be heard or seen. There was music, though -- a

faint susurration reminiscent of semuta. Something new in semuta addiction?

This would certainly be an area where addicts would go to ground.

Lucilla looked up at the face of the building as Burzmali moved ahead of her and

made their presence known by breaking the doorway beam.

There were no windows in the building's face. Only the faint glitterings of

surface 'eyes here and there in the dull sheen of ancient plasteel. They were

old-fashioned comeyes, she noted, much bigger than modern ones.

A door deep in the shadows swung inward on silent hinges.

"This way." Burzmali reached back and urged her forward with a hand on her

elbow.

They entered a dimly lighted hallway that smelled of exotic foods and bitter

essences. She was a moment identifying some of the things that assailed her

nostrils. Melange. She caught the unmistakable cinnamon ripeness. And yes,

semuta. She identified burned rice, higet salts. Someone was masking another

kind of cooking. There were explosives being made here. She thought of warning

Burzmali but reconsidered. It was not necessary for him to know and there might

be ears in this confined space to hear whatever she said.

Burzmali led the way up a shadowy flight of stairs with a dim glowstrip along

the slanting baseboard. At the top he found a hidden switch concealed behind a

patch in the patched and repatched wall. There was no sound when he pushed the

switch but Lucilla felt a change in the movement all around them. Silence. It

was a new kind of silence in her experience, a crouching preparation for flight

or violence.

It was cold in the stairwell and she shivered, but not from the chill.

Footsteps sounded beyond the doorway beside the patch-masked switch.

A gray-haired hag in a yellow smock opened the door and peered up at them past

her straggling eyebrows.

"It's you," she said, her voice wavering. She stood aside for them to enter.

Lucilla glanced swiftly around the room as she heard the door close behind them.

It was a room the unobservant might think shabby, but that was superficial.

Underneath, it was quality. The shabbiness was another mask, partly a matter of

this place having been fitted to a particularly demanding person: This goes

here and nowhere else! That goes over there and it stays there! The

furnishings and bric-a-brac looked a little worn but someone here did not object

to that. The room felt better this way. It was that kind of room.

Who possessed this room? The old woman? She was making her painful way toward

a door on their left.

"We are not to be disturbed until dawn," Burzmali said.

The old woman stopped and turned.

Lucilla studied her. Was this another who shammed advanced age? No. The age

was real. Every motion was diffused by unsteadiness -- a trembling of the neck,

a failure of the body that betrayed her in ways she could not prevent.

"Even if it's somebody important?" the old woman asked in her wavering voice.

The eyes twitched when she spoke. Her mouth moved only minimally to emit the

necessary sounds, spacing out her words as though she drew them from somewhere

deep within. Her shoulders, curved from years of bending at some fixed work,

would not straighten enough for her to look Burzmali in the eyes. She peered

upward past her brows instead, an oddly furtive posture.

"What important person are you expecting?" Burzmali asked.

The old woman shuddered and appeared to take a long time understanding.

"Impor-r-rtant people come here," she said.

Lucilla recognized the body signals and blurted it because Burzmali must know:

"She's from Rakis!"

The old woman's curious upward gaze locked on Lucilla. The ancient voice said:

"I was a priestess, Hormu Lady."

"Of course she's from Rakis," Burzmali said. His tone warned her not to

question.

"I would not harm you," the hag whined.

"Do you still serve the Divided God?"

Again, there was that long delay for the old woman to respond.

"Many serve the Great Guldur," she said.

Lucilla pursed her lips and once more scanned the room. The old woman had been

reduced greatly in importance. "I am glad I do not have to kill you," Lucilla

said.

The old woman's jaw drooped open in a parody of surprise while spittle dripped

from her lips.

This was a descendant of Fremen? Lucilla let her revulsion come out in a long

shudder. This mendicant bit of flotsam had been shaped from a people who walked

tall and proud, a people who died bravely. This one would die whining.

"Please trust me," the hag whined and fled the room.

"Why did you do that?" Burzmali demanded. "These are the ones who will get us

to Rakis!"

She merely looked at him, recognizing the fear in his question. It was fear for

her.

But I did not imprint him back there, she thought.

With a sense of shock she realized that Burzmali had recognized hate in her. I

hate them! she thought. I hate the people of this planet!

That was a dangerous emotion for a Reverend Mother. Still it burned in her.

This planet had changed her in a way she did not want. She did not want the

realization that such things could be. Intellectual understanding was one

thing; experience was another.

Damn them!

But they already were damned.

Her chest pained her. Frustration! There was no escaping this new awareness.

What had happened to these people?

People?

The shells were here but they no longer could be called fully alive. Dangerous,

though. Supremely dangerous.

"We must rest while we can," Burzmali said.

"I do not have to earn my money?" she demanded.

Burzmali paled. "What we did was necessary! We were lucky and were not stopped

but it could have happened!"

"And this place is safe?"

"As safe as I can make it. Everyone here has been screened by me or by my

people."

Lucilla found a long couch that smelled of old perfumes and composed herself

there to scour her emotions of the dangerous hate. Where hate entered, love

might follow! She heard Burzmali stretching out to rest on cushions against a

nearby wall. Soon, he was breathing deeply, but sleep evaded Lucilla. She kept

sensing crowds of memories, things thrust forward by the Others who shared her

inner storerooms of thinking. Abruptly, inner vision gave her a glimpse of a

street and faces, people moving in bright sunlight. It took a moment for her to

realize that she saw all of this from a peculiar angle -- that she was being

cradled in someone's arms. She knew then that this was one of her own personal

memories. She could place the one who held her, feel the warm heartbeat next to

a warm cheek.

Lucilla tasted the salt of her own tears.

She realized then that Gammu had touched her more deeply than any experience

since her first days in the Bene Gesserit schools.

Concealed behind strong barriers the heart becomes ice.

-Darwi Odrade, Argument in Council

It was a group filled with fierce tensions: Taraza (wearing secret mail under

her robe and mindful of the other precautions she had taken), Odrade (certain

that there could be violence and consequently wary), Sheeana (thoroughly briefed

on the probabilities here and shielded behind three Security Mothers who moved

with her like fleshly armor), Waff (worried that his reason might have been

clouded by some mysterious Bene Gesserit artifice), the false Tuek (giving every

evidence that he was about to erupt in rage), and nine of Tuek's Rakian

counselors (each angrily engaged in seeking ascendancy for self or family).

In addition, five guardian acolytes, bred and trained by the Sisterhood for

physical violence, stayed close to Taraza. Waff moved with an equal number of

new Face Dancers.

They had convened in the penthouse atop the Dar-es-Balat Museum. It was a long

room with a wall of plaz facing west across a roof garden of lacy greenery. The

interior was furnished with soft divans and was decorated with artful displays

from the Tyrant's no-room.

Odrade had argued against including Sheeana but Taraza remained adamant. The

girl's effect on Waff and some of the priesthood represented an overwhelming

advantage for the Bene Gesserit.

There were dolban screens over the long wall of windows to keep out the worst

glare of a westering sun. That the room faced west said something to Odrade.

The windows looked into the land of gloaming where Shai-hulud took his repose.

It was a room focused on the past, on death.

She admired the dolbans in front of her. They were flat black slats ten

molecules wide and rotating in a transparent liquid medium. Set automatically,

the best Ixian dolbans admitted a predetermined level of light without much

diminishing the view. Artists and antique dealers preferred them to polarizing

systems, Odrade knew, because they admitted a full spectrum of available light.

Their installation spoke of the uses to which this room was put -- a display

case for the best of the God Emperor's hoard. Yes -- there was a gown that had

been worn by his intended bride.

The priestly counselors were arguing fiercely among themselves at one end of the

room, ignoring the false Tuek. Taraza stood nearby listening. Her expression

said she thought the priests fools.

Waff stood with his Face Dancer entourage near the wide entrance door. His

attention shifted from Sheeana to Odrade to Taraza and only occasionally to the

arguing priests. Every movement Waff made betrayed his uncertainties. Would

the Bene Gesserit really support him? Could they together override Rakian

opposition by peaceful means?

Sheeana and her shielding escort came to stand beside Odrade. The girl still

showed stringy muscles, Odrade observed, but she was filling out and the muscles

had taken on a recognizable Bene Gesserit definition. The high planes of her

cheekbones had grown softer under that olive skin, the brown eyes more liquid,

but there were still red sunstreaks in her brown hair. The attention she spared

for the arguing priests said she was assessing what had been revealed to her in

the briefing.

"Will they really fight?" she whispered.

"Listen to them," Odrade said.

"What will the Mother Superior do?"

"Watch her carefully."

Both of them looked at Taraza standing in her group of muscular acolytes.

Taraza now looked amused as she continued to observe the priests.

The Rakian group had started their argument out in the roof garden. They had

brought it inside as the shadows lengthened. They breathed angrily, muttering

sometimes and then raising their voices. Did they not see how the mimic Tuek

watched them?

Odrade returned her attention to the horizon visible beyond the roof garden:

not another sign of life out there in the desert. Any direction you looked

outward from Dar-es-Balat showed empty sand. People born and raised here had a

different view of life and their planet than most of those priestly counselors.

This was not the Rakis of green belts and watered oases, which abounded in the

higher latitudes like flowered fingers pointing into the long desert tracks.

Out from Dar-es-Balat was the meridian desert that stretched like a cummerbund

around the entire planet.

"I have heard enough of this nonsense!" the false Tuek exploded. He pushed one

of the counselors roughly aside and strode into the middle of the arguing group,

pivoting to stare into each face. "Are you all mad?"

One of the priests (It was old Albertus, by the gods!) looked across the room at

Waff and called out: "Ser Waff! Will you please control your Face Dancer?"

Waff hesitated and then moved toward the disputants, his entourage close behind.

The false Tuek whirled and pointed a finger at Waff: "You! Stay where you are!

I will brook no Tleilaxu interference! Your conspiracy is quite clear to me!"

Odrade had been watching Waff as the mimic Tuek spoke. Surprise! The Bene

Tleilax Master had never before been addressed thus by one of his minions. What

a shock! Rage convulsed his features. Humming sounds like the noises of angry

insects came from his mouth, a modulated thing that clearly was some kind of

language. The Face Dancers of his entourage froze but the false Tuek merely

returned attention to his counselors.

Waff stopped humming. Consternation! His Face Dancer Tuek would not come to

heel! He lurched into motion toward the priests. The false Tuek saw it and

once more leveled a hand at him, the finger quivering.

"I told you to stay out of this! You might be able to do away with me but

you'll not saddle me with your Tleilaxu filth!"

That did it. Waff stopped. Realization came over him. He shot a glance at

Taraza, seeing her amused recognition of his predicament. Now, he had a new

target for his rage.

"You knew!"

"I suspected."

"You . . . you . . ."

"You fashioned too well," Taraza said. "It's your own doing."

The priests were oblivious to this exchange. They shouted at the false Tuek,

ordering him to shut up and remove himself, calling him a "damned Face Dancer!"

Odrade studied the object of this attack with care. How deep did the print go?

Had he really convinced himself that he was Tuek?

In a sudden lull, the mimic drew himself up with dignity and sent a scornful

glance at his accusers. "You all know me," he said. "You all know my years of

service to the Divided God Who is One God. I will go to Him now if your

conspiracy extends to that but remember this: He knows what is in your hearts!"

The priests looked as one man to Waff. None of them had seen a Face Dancer

replace their High Priest. There had been no body to see. Every bit of

evidence was the evidence of human voices saying things that might be lies.

Belatedly, several looked at Odrade. Her voice was one of those that had

convinced them.

Waff, too, was looking at Odrade.

She smiled and addressed herself to the Tleilaxu Master. "It suits our purposes

that the High Priesthood not pass into other hands at this time," she said.

Waff immediately saw the advantage to himself. This was a wedge between priests

and Bene Gesserit. This removed one of the most dangerous holds the Sisterhood

had on the Tleilaxu.

"It suits my purposes, too," he said.

As the priests once more lifted their voices in anger, Taraza came in right on

cue: "Which of you will break our accord?" she demanded.

Tuek thrust two of his counselors aside and strode across the room to the Mother

Superior. He stopped only a pace from her.

"What game is this?" he asked.

"We support you against those who would replace you," she said. "The Bene

Tleilax join us in this. It is our way of demonstrating that we, too, have a

vote in selecting the High Priest."

Several priestly voices were raised in unison: "Is he or is he not a Face

Dancer?"

Taraza looked benignly at the man in front of her: "Are you a Face Dancer?"

"Of course not!"

Taraza looked at Odrade, who said: "There seems to have been a mistake."

Odrade singled out Albertus among the priests and locked eyes with him.

"Sheeana," Odrade said, "what should the Church of the Divided God do now?"

As she had been briefed to do, Sheeana stepped out of her guardian enclosure and

spoke with all of the hauteur she had been taught: "They shall continue to

serve God!"

"The business of this meeting appears to have been concluded," Taraza said. "If

you need protection, High Priest Tuek, a squad of our guardians awaits in the

hall. They are yours to command."

They could see acceptance and understanding in him. He had become a creature of

the Bene Gesserit. He remembered nothing of his Face Dancer origins.

When the priests and Tuek had gone, Waff sent a single word at Taraza, speaking

in the language of the Islamiyat: "Explain!"

Taraza stepped away from her guards, appearing, to make herself vulnerable. It

was a calculated move they had debated in front of Sheeana. In the same

language, Taraza said: "We release our grip on the Bene Tleilax."

They waited while he weighed her words. Taraza reminded herself that the

Tleilaxu name for themselves could be translated as "the un-nameable." That was

a label often reserved for gods.

This god obviously had not extended the discovery in here to what might be

happening with his mimics among Ixians and Fish Speakers. Waff had more shocks

coming. He appeared quite puzzled, though.

Waff confronted many unanswered questions. He was not satisfied with his

reports from Gammu. It was a dangerous double game he played now. Did the

Sisterhood play a similar game? But the Tleilaxu Lost Ones could not be shunted

aside without inviting attack by the Honored Matres. Taraza herself had warned

of this. Did the old Bashar on Gammu still represent a force worthy of

consideration?

He voiced this question.

Taraza countered with her own question: "How did you change our ghola? What

did you hope to gain?" She felt certain she already knew. But the pose of

ignorance was necessary.

Waff wanted to say: "The death of all Bene Gesserit!" They were too dangerous.

Yet their value was incalculable. He sank into a sulking silence, looking at

the Reverend Mothers with a brooding expression that made his elfin features

even more childlike.

A petulant child, Taraza thought. She warned herself then that it was dangerous

to underestimate Waff. You broke the Tleilaxu egg only to find another egg

inside -- ad infinitum! Everything circled back to Odrade's suspicions about

the contentions that might still lead them to bloody violence in this room. Had

the Tleilaxu really revealed what they had learned from the whores and the other

Lost Ones? Was the ghola only a potential Tleilaxu weapon?

Taraza decided to prod him once more, using the approach of her Council's

"Analysis Nine." Still in the language of the Islamiyat, she said: "Would you

dishonor yourself in the land of the Prophet? You have not shared openly as you

said you would."

"We told you the sexual --"

"You do not share all!" she interrupted. "It's because of the ghola and we know

this."

She could see his reactions. He was a cornered animal. Such animals were

dangerous in the extreme. She had once seen a mongrel hound, a feral and tailtucked

survivor of ancient pets from Dan, cornered by a pack of youths. The

animal turned on its pursuers, slashing its way to freedom in totally unexpected

savagery. Two youths crippled for life and only one without injuries! Waff was

like that animal right now. She could see his hands longing for a weapon, but

Tleilaxu and Bene Gesserit had searched one another with exquisite care before

coming here. She felt sure he had no weapon. Still . . .

Waff spoke, baited suspense in his manner. "You think me unaware of how you

hope to rule us!"

"And there is the rot that the people of the Scattering took with them," she

said. "Rot at the core."

Waff's manner changed. It did not do to ignore the deeper implications of Bene

Gesserit thought. But was she sowing discord?

"The Prophet set a locator ticking in the minds of every human, Scattered or

not," Taraza said. "He has brought them back to us with all of the rot intact."

Waff ground his teeth. What was she doing? He entertained the mad thought that

the Sisterhood had clogged his mind with some secret drug in the air. They knew

things denied to others! He stared from Taraza to Odrade and back to Taraza.

He knew he was old with serial ghola resurrections but not old in the way of the

Bene Gesserit. These people were old! They seldom looked old but they were

old, old beyond anything he dared imagine.

Taraza was having similar thoughts. She had seen the flash of deeper awareness

in Waff's eyes. Necessity opened new doors of reason. How deep did the

Tleilaxu go? His eyes were so old! She had the feeling that whatever had been

a brain in these Tleilaxu Masters was now something else -- a holorecording from

which all weakening emotions had been erased. She shared the distrust of

emotions that she suspected in him. Was that a bond to unite them?

The tropism of common thoughts.

"You say you release your grip on us," Waff growled, "but I feel your fingers

around my throat."

"Then here is a grip on our throat," she said. "Some of your Lost Ones have

returned to you. Never has a Reverend Mother come back to us from the

Scattering."

"But you said you knew all of the --"

"We have other ways of gaining knowledge. What do you suppose happened to the

Reverend Mothers we sent out into the Scattering?"

"A common disaster?" He shook his head. This was absolutely new information.

None of the returned Tleilaxu had said anything at all about this. The

discrepancy fed his suspicions. Whom was he to believe?

"They were subverted," Taraza said.

Odrade, hearing the general suspicion voiced for the first time by the Mother

Superior, sensed the enormous power implicit in Taraza's simple statement.

Odrade was cowed by it. She knew the resources, the contingency plans, the

improvised ways a Reverend Mother might use to surmount barriers. Something Out

There could stop that?

When Waff did not respond, Taraza said: "You come to us with dirty hands."

"You dare say this?" Waff asked. "You who continue to deplete our resources in

the ways taught you by the Bashar's mother?"

"We knew you could afford the losses if you had resources from the Scattering,"

Taraza said.

Waff inhaled a trembling breath. So the Bene Gesserit knew even this. He saw

in part how they had learned it. Well, a way would have to be found to bring

the false Tuek back under control. Rakis was the prize the Scattered Ones

really sought and it might yet be demanded of the Tleilaxu.

Taraza moved even closer to Waff, alone and vulnerable. She saw her guards grow

tense. Sheeana took a small step toward the Mother Superior and was pulled back

by Odrade.

Odrade kept her attention on the Mother Superior and not on potential attackers.

Were the Tleilaxu truly convinced that the Bene Gesserit would serve them?

Taraza had tested the limits of it, no doubt of that. And in the language of

the Islamiyat. But she looked very alone out there away from her guards and so

near Waff and his people. Where would Waff's obvious suspicions lead him now?

Taraza shivered.

Odrade saw it. Taraza had been abnormally thin as a child and had never put on

an excess ounce of fat. This made her exquisitely sensitive to temperature

changes, intolerant of cold, but Odrade sensed no such change in the room.

Taraza had made a dangerous decision then, so dangerous that her body betrayed

her. Not dangerous to herself, of course, but dangerous to the Sisterhood.

There was the most awful Bene Gesserit crime: disloyalty to their own order.

"We will serve you in all ways except one," Taraza said. "We will never become

receptacles for gholas!"

Waff paled.

Taraza continued: "None of us is now nor will ever become . . ." she paused ".

. . an axlotl tank."

Waff raised his right hand in the start of a gesture every Reverend Mother knew:

the signal for his Face Dancers to attack.

Taraza pointed at his upraised hand. "If you complete that gesture, the

Tleilaxu will lose everything. The messenger of God --" Taraza nodded over a

shoulder toward Sheeana "-- will turn her back upon you and the words of the

Prophet will be dust in your mouths."

In the language of the Islamiyat, such words were too much for Waff. He lowered

his hand but he continued to glower at Taraza.

"My ambassador said we would share everything we know," Taraza said. "You said

you, too, would share. The messenger of God listens with the ears of the

Prophet! What pours forth from the Abdl of the Tleilaxu?"

Waff's shoulders sagged.

Taraza turned her back on him. It was an artful move but both she and the other

Reverend Mothers present knew she did it now in perfect safety. Looking across

the room at Odrade, Taraza allowed herself a smile that she knew Odrade would

interpret correctly. Time for a bit of Bene Gesserit punishment!

"The Tleilaxu desire an Atreides for breeding," Taraza said. "I give you Darwi

Odrade. More will be supplied."

Waff came to a decision. "You may know much about the Honored Matres," he said,

"but you --"

"Whores!" Taraza whirled on him.

"As you will. But there is a thing from them that your words reveal you do not

know. I seal our bargain by telling you this. They can magnify the sensations

of the orgasmic platform, transmitting this throughout a male body. They elicit

the total sensual involvement of the male. Multiple orgasmic waves are created

and may be continued by the . . . the female for an extended period."

"Total involvement?" Taraza did not try to hide her astonishment.

Odrade, too, listened with a sense of shock that she saw was shared by her

Sisters present, even the acolytes. Only Sheeana seemed not to understand.

"I tell you, Mother Superior Taraza," Waff said, a gloating smile on his face,

"that we have duplicated this with our own people. Myself even! In my anger, I

caused the Face Dancer who played the . . . female part to destroy itself. No

one . . . I say, no one! may have such a hold on me!"

"What hold?"

"If it had been one of these . . . these whores, as you call them, I would have

obeyed her without question in anything." He shuddered. "I barely had the will

to . . . to destroy . . ." He shook his head in bewilderment at the memory.

"Anger saved me."

Taraza tried to swallow in a dry throat. "How . . ."

"How is it done? Very well! But before I share this knowledge I warn you: If

one of you ever tries to use this power over one of us, bloody slaughter will

follow! We have prepared our Domel and all of our people to respond by killing

all Reverend Mothers they can find at the slightest sign that you seek this

power over us!"

"None of us would do that, but not because of your threat. We are restrained by

the knowledge that this would destroy us. Your bloody slaughter would not be

necessary."

"Oh? Then why does it not destroy these . . . these whores?"

"It does! And it destroys everyone they touch!"

"It has not destroyed me!"

"God protects you, my Abdl," Taraza said. "As He protects all of the faithful."

Convinced, Waff glanced around the room and back to Taraza. "Let all know that

I fulfill my bond in the land of the Prophet. This is the way of it, then . .

." He waved a hand to two of his Face Dancer guards. "We will demonstrate."

Much later, alone in the penthouse room, Odrade wondered if it had been wise to

let Sheeana see the whole performance. Well, why not? Sheeana already was

committed to the Sisterhood. And it would have aroused Waff's suspicions to

send Sheeana away.

There had been obvious sensual arousal in Sheeana as she watched the Face Dancer

performance. The Training Proctors would have to call in their male assistants

earlier than usual for Sheeana. What would Sheeana do then? Would she try this

new knowledge on the men? Inhibitions must be raised in Sheeana to prevent

that! She must be taught the dangers to herself.

The Sisters and acolytes present had controlled themselves well, storing what

they learned firmly in memory. Sheeana's education must be built on that

observation. Others mastered such internal forces.

The Face Dancer observers had remained inscrutable, but there had been things to

see in Waff. He said he would destroy the two demonstrators but what would he

do first? Would he succumb to temptation? What thoughts went through his mind

as he watched the Face Dancer male squirm in mind-blanking ecstasy?

In a way, the demonstration reminded Odrade of the Rakian dance she had seen in

the Great Square of Keen. In the short term, the dance had been deliberately

unrhythmic but the progression created a long-term rhythm that repeated itself

in some two hundred . . . steps. The dancers had stretched out their rhythm to

a remarkable degree.

As had the Face Dancer demonstrators.

Siaynoq become a sexual grip on uncounted billions in the Scattering!

Odrade thought about the dance, the long rhythm followed by chaotic violence.

Siaynoq's glorious focusing of religious energies had devolved into a different

kind of exchange. She thought about Sheeana's excited response to her glimpses

of that dance in the Great Square. Odrade remembered asking Sheeana: "What did

they share down there?"

"The dancers, silly!"

That response had not been permissible. "I've warned you about that tone,

Sheeana. Do you wish to learn immediately what a Reverend Mother can do to

punish you?"

The words played themselves like ghost messages in Odrade's mind as she looked

at the gathering darkness outside the Dar-es-Balat penthouse. A great

loneliness welled up in her. All the others had gone from this room.

Only the punished one remains!

How bright-eyed Sheeana had been in that room above the Great Square, her mind

so full of questions. "Why do you always talk about hurting and punishment?"

"You must learn discipline. How can you control others when you cannot control

yourself?"

"I don't like that lesson."

"None of us does very much . . . until later when we've learned the value of it

by experience."

As intended, that response had festered long in Sheeana's awareness. In the

end, she had revealed all she knew about the dance.

"Some of the dancers escape. Others go directly to Shaitan. The priests say

they go to Shai-hulud."

"What of the ones who survive?"

"When they recover, they must join a great dance in the desert. If Shaitan

comes there, they die. If Shaitan does not come, they are rewarded."

Odrade had seen the pattern. Sheeana's explanatory words had not been necessary

beyond that point, even though the recital had been allowed to continue. How

bitter Sheeana's voice had been!

"They get money, space in a bazaar, that kind of reward. The priests say they

have proved that they are human."

"Are the ones who fail not human?"

Sheeana had remained silent for a long time in deep thought. The track was

clear to Odrade, though: the Sisterhood's test of humanity! Her own passage

into the acceptable humanity of the Sisterhood had already been duplicated by

Sheeana. How soft that passage seemed in comparison to the other pains!

In the dim light of the museum penthouse, Odrade held up her right hand, looking

at it, remembering the agony box, and the gom jabbar poised at her neck ready to

kill her if she flinched or cried out.

Sheeana had not cried out, either. But she had known the answer to Odrade's

question even before the agony box.

"They are human but different."

Odrade spoke aloud in the empty room with its displays from the Tyrant's nochamber

hoard.

"What did you do to us, Leto? Are you only Shaitan talking to us? What would

you force us to share now?"

Was the fossil dance to become fossil sex?

"Who are you talking to, Mother?"

It was Sheeana's voice from the open doorway across the room. Her gray

postulant's robe was only a faint shape there, growing larger as she approached.

"Mother Superior sent me for you," Sheeana said as she came to a stop near

Odrade.

"I was talking to myself," Odrade said. She looked at the strangely quiet girl,

remembering the gut-wrenching excitement of that moment when the Fulcrum

Question had been asked of Sheeana.

"Do you wish to be a Reverend Mother?"

"Why are you talking to yourself, Mother?" There was a load of concern in

Sheeana's voice. The Teaching Proctors would have their hands full removing

those emotions.

"I was remembering when I asked you if you wished to be a Reverend Mother,"

Odrade said. "It prompted other thoughts."

"You said I must give myself to your direction in all things, holding back

nothing, disobeying you in nothing."

"And you said: 'Is that all?' "

"I didn't know very much, did I? I still don't know very much."

"None of us does, child. Except that we're all in the dance together. And

Shaitan will certainly come if the least of us fails."

When strangers meet, great allowance should be made for differences of custom

and training.

-The Lady Jessica, from "Wisdom of Arrakis"

The last greenish line of light fell out of the horizon before Burzmali gave the

signal for them to move. It was dark by the time they reached the far side of

Ysai and the perimeter road that was to lead them to Duncan. Clouds covered the

sky, reflecting the city's lights downward onto the shapes of the urban hovels

through which their guides directed them.

These guides bothered Lucilla. They appeared out of side streets and from

suddenly opened doorways to whisper new directions.

Too many people knew about the fugitive pair and their intended rendezvous!

She had come to grips with her hatred but the residue was a profound distrust of

every person they saw. Hiding this behind the mechanical attitudes of a playfem

with her customer had become increasingly difficult.

There was slush on the pedestrian way beside the road, most of it scattered

there by the passage of groundcars. Lucilla's feet were cold before they had

gone half a kilometer and she was forced to expend energy compensating for the

added bloodflow in her extremities.

Burzmali walked silently, his head down, apparently lost in his own worries.

Lucilla was not fooled. He heard every sound around them, saw every approaching

vehicle. He hustled them off the pathway each time a groundcar approached. The

cars went swishing past on their suspensors, the dirty slush flying from under

their fanskirts and peppering the bushes along the road. Burzmali held her down

beside him in the snow until he was sure the cars were out of sight and sound.

Not that anyone riding in them could hear much except their own whirling

passage.

They had been walking for two hours before Burzmali stopped and took stock of

the way ahead. Their destination was a perimeter community that had been

described to them as "completely safe." Lucilla knew better. No place on Gammu

was completely safe.

Yellow lights cast an undershot glow on the clouds ahead of them, marking the

location of the community. Their slushy progress took them through a tunnel

under the perimeter road and up a low hill planted to some sort of orchard. The

limbs were stark in the dim light.

Lucilla glanced upward. The clouds were thinning. Gammu had many small moons -

- fortress no-ships. Some of them had been placed by Teg but she glimpsed lines

of new ones sharing the guardian role. They appeared to be about four times the

size of the brightest stars and they often traveled together, which made their

reflected light useful but erratic because they moved fast -- up across the sky

and below the horizon in only a few hours. She glimpsed a string of six such

moons through a break in the clouds, wondering if they were part of Teg's

defense system.

Momentarily, she reflected on the inherent weakness of the siege mentality that

such defenses represented. Teg had been right about them. Mobility was the key

to military success but she doubted that he had meant mobility on foot.

There were no easy hiding places on the snow-whitened slope and Lucilla felt

Burzmali's nervousness. What could they do here if someone came? A snowcovered

depression led down from their position to the left, angling toward the

community. It was not a road but she thought it might be a path.

"Down this way," Burzmali said, leading them into the depression.

The snow came up to their calves.

"I hope these people are trustworthy," she said.

"They hate the Honored Matres," he said. "That's enough for me."

"The ghola had better be there!" She held back an even more angry response but

could not keep herself from adding: "Their hatred isn't enough for me."

It was better to expect the worst, she thought.

She had come to a reassuring thought about Burzmali, though. He was like Teg.

Neither of them pursued a course that would lead them into a dead end -- not if

they could help it. She suspected there were support forces concealed in the

bushes around them even now.

The snow-covered trail ended in a paved pathway, gently curved inward from the

edges and kept free of snow by a melt system. There was a trickle of dampness

in the center. Lucilla was several steps onto this path before she recognized

what it must be -- a magchute. It was an ancient magnetic transport base that

once had carried goods or raw materials to a pre-Scattering factory.

"It gets steeper here," Burzmali warned her. "They've carved steps in it but

watch it. They're not very deep."

They came presently to the end of the magchute. It stopped at a decrepit wall -

- local brick atop a plasteel foundation. The faint light of stars in a

clearing sky revealed crude workmanship in the bricks -- typical Famine-Times

construction. The wall was a mass of vines and mottled fungus. The growth did

little to conceal the cracked courses of the bricks and the crude efforts to

fill chinks with mortar. A single row of narrow windows looked down onto the

place where the magchute debouched into a mass of bushes and weeds. Three of

the windows glowed electric blue with some inner activity that was accompanied

by faint crackling sounds.

"This was a factory in the old days," Burzmali said.

"I have eyes and a memory," Lucilla snapped. Did this grunting male think her

completely devoid of intelligence?

Something creaked dismally off to their left. A patch of sod and weeds lifted

atop a cellar door accompanied by an upward glow of brilliant yellow light.

"Quick!" Burzmali led her at a swift run across thick vegetation and down a

flight of steps exposed by the lifting door. The door creaked closed behind

them in a grumbling of machinery.

Lucilla found herself in a large space with a low ceiling. Light came from long

lines of modern glowglobes strung along massive plasteel girders overhead. The

floor was swept clean but showed scratches and indentations of activity, the

locations no doubt of bygone machinery. She glimpsed movement far off across

the open space. A young woman in a version of Lucilla's dragon robe trotted

toward them.

Lucilla sniffed. There was a stink of acid in the room and undertones of

something foul.

"This was a Harkonnen factory," Burzmali said. "I wonder what they made here?"

The young woman stopped in front of Lucilla. She had a willowy figure, elegant

in shape and motion under the clinging robe. A subcutaneous glow came from her

face. It spoke of exercise and good health. The green eyes, though, were hard

and chilling in the way they measured everything they saw.

"So they sent more than one of us to watch this place," she said.

Lucilla put out a restraining hand as Burzmali started to respond. This woman

was not what she seemed. No more than I am! Lucilla chose her words carefully.

"We always know each other, it seems."

The young woman smiled. "I watched your approach. I could not believe my

eyes." She swept a sneering glance across Burzmali. "This was supposed to be a

customer?"

"And guide," Lucilla said. She noted the puzzlement on Burzmali's face and

prayed he would not ask the wrong question. This young woman was danger!

"Weren't we expected?" Burzmali asked.

"Ahhhh, it speaks," the young woman said, laughing. Her laugh was as cold as

her eyes.

"I prefer that you do not refer to me as 'it,' " Burzmali said.

"I call Gammu scum anything I wish," the young woman said. "Don't speak to me

of your preferences!"

"What did you call me?" Burzmali was tired and his anger came boiling up at

this unexpected attack.

"I call you anything I choose, scum!"

Burzmali had suffered enough. Before Lucilla could stop him, he uttered a low

growl and aimed a heavy slap at the young woman.

The blow did not land.

Lucilla watched in fascination as the woman dropped under the attack, caught

Burzmali's sleeve as one might catch a bit of fabric blowing in the wind and, in

a blindingly fast pirouette whose speed almost hid its delicacy, sent Burzmali

skidding across the floor. The woman dropped to a half crouch on one foot, the

other prepared to kick.

"I shall kill him now," she said.

Lucilla, not knowing what might happen next, folded her body sideways, barely

avoiding the woman's suddenly outthrust foot, and countered with a standard Bene

Gesserit sabard that dumped the young woman on her back doubled up where the

blow had caught her in the abdomen.

"A suggestion that you kill my guide is uncalled for, whatever your name is,"

Lucilla said.

The young woman gasped for breath, then, panting between words: "I am called

Murbella, Great Honored Matre. You shame me by defeating me with such a slow

attack. Why do you do that?"

"You needed a lesson," Lucilla said.

"I am only newly robed, Great Honored Matre. Please forgive me. I thank you

for the splendid lesson and will thank you every time I employ your response,

which I now commit to memory." She bowed her head, then leaped lightly to her

feet, an impish grin on her face.

In her coldest voice, Lucilla asked: "Do you know who I am?" Out of the

corners of her eyes, she saw Burzmali regain his feet with painful slowness. He

remained at one side, watching the women, but anger burned his face.

"From your ability to teach me that lesson, I see that you are who you are,

Great Honored Matre. Am I forgiven?" The impish grin had vanished from

Murbella's face. She stood with head bowed.

"You are forgiven. Is there a no-ship coming?"

"So they say here. We are prepared for it." Murbella glanced at Burzmali.

"He is still useful to me and it is required that he accompany me," Lucilla

said.

"Very good, Great Honored Matre. Does your forgiveness include your name?"

"No!"

Murbella sighed. "We have captured the ghola," she said. "He came as a

Tleilaxu from the south. I was just about to bed him when you arrived."

Burzmali hobbled toward them. Lucilla saw that he had recognized the danger.

This "completely safe" place had been infested by enemies! But the enemies

still knew very little.

"The ghola was not injured?" Burzmali asked.

"It still speaks," Murbella said. "How odd."

"You will not bed the ghola," Lucilla said. "That one is my special charge!"

"Fair game, Great Honored Matre. And I marked him first. He is already partly

subdued."

She laughed once more, with a callous abandonment that shocked Lucilla. "This

way. There is a place where you can watch."

May you die on Caladan!

-Ancient Drinking Toast

Duncan tried to remember where he was. He knew Tormsa was dead. Blood had

spurted from Tormsa's eyes. Yes, he remembered that clearly. They had entered

a dark building and light had flared abruptly all around them. Duncan felt an

ache in the back of his head. A blow? He tried to move and his muscles refused

to obey.

He remembered sitting at the edge of a wide lawn. There was some kind of

bowling game in progress -- eccentric balls that bounced and darted with no

apparent design. The players were young men in a common costume of . . . Giedi

Prime!

"They are practicing to be old men," he said. He remembered saying that.

His companion, a young woman, looked at him blankly.

"Only old men should play these outdoor games," he said.

"Oh?"

It was an unanswerable question. She put him down with only the simplest of

verbal gestures.

And betrayed me the next instant to the Harkonnens!

So that was a pre-ghola memory.

Ghola!

He remembered the Bene Gesserit Keep on Gammu. The library: holophotos and

triphotos of the Atreides Duke, Leto I. Teg's resemblance was not an accident:

a bit taller but otherwise it was all there -- that long, thin face with its

high-bridged nose, the renowned Atreides charisma . . .

Teg!

He remembered the old Bashar's last gallant stand in the Gammu night.

Where am I?

Tormsa had brought him here. They had been moving along an overgrown track on

the outskirts of Ysai. Barony. It started to snow before they were two hundred

meters up the track. Wet snow that clung to them. Cold, miserable snow that

set their teeth chattering within a minute. They paused to bring up their hoods

and close the insulated jackets. That was better. But it would be night soon.

Much colder.

"There is a shelter of sorts up ahead," Tormsa said. "We will wait there for

the night."

When Duncan did not speak, Tormsa said: "It won't be warm but it will be dry."

Duncan saw the gray outline of the place in about three hundred paces. It stood

out against the dirty snow some two stories tall. He recognized it immediately:

a Harkonnen counting outpost. Observers here had counted (and sometimes killed)

the people who passed. It was built of native dirt turned into one giant brick

by the simple expedient of preforming it in mud bricks and then superheating it

with a wide-bore burner, the kind the Harkonnens had used to control mobs.

As they came up to it, Duncan saw the remains of a full-field defensive screen

with fire-lance gaps aimed at the approaches. Someone had smashed the system a

long time ago. Twisted holes in the field net were partly overgrown with

bushes. But the fire-lance gaps remained open. Oh, yes -- to allow people

inside a view of the approaches.

Tormsa paused and listened, studying their surroundings with care.

Duncan looked at the counting station. He remembered them well. What

confronted him was a thing that had sprouted like a deformed growth from an

original tubular seed. The surface had been baked to a glassine finish. Warts

and protrusions betrayed where it had been superheated. The erosion of eons had

left fine scratches in it but the original shape remained. He looked upward and

identified part of the old suspensor lift system. Someone had jury-rigged a

block and tackle to the outbar.

So the opening through the full-field screen was of recent making.

Tormsa disappeared into this opening.

As though a switch had been thrown, Duncan's memory vision changed. He was in

the no-globe's library with Teg. The projector was producing a series of views

through modern Ysai. The idea of modern took on an odd overtone for him.

Barony had been a modern city, if you thought of modern as meaning

technologically usiform up to the norms of its time. It had relied exclusively

on suspensor guide-beams for transport of people and material -- all of them

high up. No ground-level openings. He was explaining this to Teg.

The plan translated physically into a city that used every possible square meter

of vertical and horizontal space for things other than movement of goods and

humans. The guide-beam openings required only enough head room and elbow room

for the universal transport pods.

Teg spoke: "The ideal shape would be tubular with a flat top for the

'thopters."

"The Harkonnens preferred squares and rectangles."

That was true.

Duncan remembered Barony with a clearness that made him shiver. Suspensor

tracks shot through it like worm holes -- straight, curved, flipping off at

oblique angles . . . up, down, sideways. Except for the rectangular absolute

imposed by Harkonnen whim, Barony was built to a particular population-design

criterion: maximum stuffing with minimum expenditure of materials.

"The flat top was the only human-oriented space in the damned thing!" He

remembered telling that to Teg and Lucilla both.

Up there on top were penthouses, guard stations at all the edges, at the

'thopter pads, at all the entries from below, around all of the parks. People

living on the top could forget about the mass of flesh squirming in close

proximity just below them. No smell or noise from that jumble was allowed on

top. Servants were forced to bathe and change into sanitary clothing before

emerging.

Teg had a question: "Why did that massed humanity permit itself to live in such

a crush?"

The answer was obvious and he explained it. The outside was a dangerous place.

The city's managers made it appear even more dangerous than it actually was.

Besides, few in there knew anything about a better life Outside. The only

better life they knew about was on top. And the only way up there was through

an absolutely abasing servility.

"It will happen and there's nothing you can do about it!"

That was another voice echoing in Duncan's skull. He heard it clearly.

Paul!

How odd it was, Duncan thought. There was an arrogance in the prescient like

the arrogance of the Mentat seated in his most brittle logic.

I never before thought of Paul as arrogant.

Duncan stared at his own face in a mirror. He realized with part of his mind

that this was a pre-ghola memory. Abruptly, it was another mirror, his own face

but different. That darkly rounded face had begun to shape into the harsher

lines it could have if it matured. He looked into his own eyes. Yes, those

were his eyes. He had heard someone describe his eyes once as "cave sitters."

They were deeply inset under the brows and riding atop high cheeks. He had been

told it was difficult to determine if his eyes were dark blue or dark green

unless the light were just right.

A woman said that. He could not remember the woman.

He tried to reach up and touch his hair but his hands would not obey. He

remembered then that his hair had been bleached. Who did that? An old woman.

His hair was no longer a cap of dark ringlets.

There was the Duke Leto staring at him in the doorway to the dining room on

Caladan.

"We will eat now," the Duke said. It was a royal command saved from arrogance

by a faint grin that said: "Somebody had to say it."

What is happening to my mind?

He remembered following Tormsa to the place where Tormsa said the no-ship would

meet them.

It was a large building bulking in the night. There were several smaller

outbuildings below the larger structure. They appeared to be occupied. Voices

and machine sounds could be heard in them. No faces showed at the narrow

windows. No door opened. Duncan smelled cooking as they passed the larger of

the outbuildings. This reminded him that they had only eaten dry strips of

leathery stuff that Tormsa called "travel food" that day.

They entered the dark building.

Light flared.

Tormsa's eyes exploded in blood.

Darkness.

Duncan looked at a woman's face. He had seen a face like this one before: a

single tride taken from a longer holo sequence. Where was that? Where had he

seen that? It was an almost oval face with just a small widening at the brow to

mar its curved perfection.

She spoke: "My name is Murbella. You will not remember that but I share it now

as I mark you. I have selected you."

I do remember you, Murbella.

Green eyes set wide under arched brows gave her features a focal region that

left chin and small mouth for later examination. The mouth was full-lipped and

he knew it could become pouting in repose.

The green eyes stared into his eyes. How cold that look. The power in it.

Something touched his cheek.

He opened his eyes. This was no memory! This was happening to him. It was

happening now!

Murbella! She had been here and she had left him. Now she was back. He

remembered awakening naked on a soft surface . . . a sleeping pad. His hands

recognized it. Murbella unclothed just above him, green eyes staring at him

with a terrible intensity. She touched him simultaneously in many places. A

soft humming issued from between her lips.

He felt the swift erection, painful in its rigidity.

No power of resistance remained in him. Her hands moved over his body. Her

tongue. The humming! All around him, her mouth touching him. The nipples of

her breasts grazed his cheeks, his chest. When he saw her eyes, he saw

conscious design.

Murbella had returned and she was doing it once more!

Over her right shoulder, he glimpsed a wide plaz window -- Lucilla and Burzmali

behind that barrier. A dream? Burzmali pressed his palms against the plaz.

Lucilla stood with folded arms, a look of mingled rage and curiosity on her

face.

Murbella murmured in his right ear: "My hands are fire."

Her body hid the faces behind the plaz. He felt the fire wherever she touched

him.

Abruptly, the flame engulfed his mind. Hidden places within him came alive. He

saw red capsules like a string of gleaming sausages passing before his eyes. He

felt feverish. He was an engorged capsule, excitement flaring throughout his

awareness. Those capsules! He knew them! They were himself . . . they were .

. .

All of the Duncan Idahos, original and the serial gholas flowed into his mind.

They were like bursting seedpods denying all other existence except themselves.

He saw himself crushed beneath a great worm with a human face.

"Damn you, Leto!"

Crushed and crushed and crushed . . . time and again.

"Damn you! Damn you! Damn you! . . ."

He died under a Sardaukar sword. Pain exploded into a bright glare swallowed by

darkness.

He died in a 'thopter crash. He died under the knife of a Fish Speaker

assassin. He died and died and died.

And he lived.

The memories flooded him until he wondered how he could hold them all. The

sweetness of a newborn daughter held in his arms. The musky odors of a

passionate mate. The cascade of flavors from a fine Danian wine. The panting

exertions of the practice floor.

The axlotl tanks!

He remembered emerging time after time: bright lights and padded mechanical

hands. The hands rotated him and, in the unfocused blurs of the newborn, he saw

a great mound of female flesh -- monstrous in her almost immobile grossness . .

. a maze of dark tubes linked her body to giant metal containers.

Axlotl tank?

He gasped in the grip of the serial memories that cascaded into him. All of

those lives! All of those lives!

Now, he remembered what the Tleilaxu had planted in him, the submerged awareness

that awaited only this moment of seduction by a Bene Gesserit Imprinter.

But this was Murbella and she was not Bene Gesserit.

She was here, though, ready at hand and the Tleilaxu pattern took over his

reactions.

Duncan hummed softly and touched her, moving with an agility that shocked

Murbella. He should not be this responsive! Not this way! His right hand

fluttered against the lips of her vagina while his left hand caressed the base

of her spine. At the same time, his mouth moved gently over her nose, down to

her lips, down to the crease of her left armpit.

And all the time he hummed softly in a rhythm that pulsed through her body,

lulling . . . weakening . . .

She tried to push away from him as he increased the pace of her responses.

How did he know to touch me there at just that instant? And there! And there!

Oh, Holy Rock of Dur, how does he know this?

Duncan marked the swelling of her breasts and saw the congestion in her nose.

He saw the way her nipples stood out stiffly, the areolae darkening around them.

She moaned and spread her legs wide.

Great Matre, help me!

But the only Great Matre she could think of was locked securely away from this

room, restrained by a bolted door and a plaz barrier.

Desperate energy flowed into Murbella. She responded in the only way she knew:

touching, caressing -- using all of the techniques she had learned so carefully

in the long years of her apprenticeship.

To each thing she did, Duncan produced a wildly stimulating countermove.

Murbella found that she no longer could control all of her own responses. She

was reacting automatically from some well of knowledge deeper than her training.

She felt her vaginal muscles tighten. She felt the swift release of lubricant

fluid. When Duncan entered her she heard herself groan. Her arms, her hands,

her legs, her entire body moved with both of the response systems -- welltrained

automation and the deeper, deeper plunging awareness of other demands.

How did he do this to me?

Waves of ecstatic contractions began in the smooth muscles of her pelvis. She

sensed his simultaneous response and felt the hard slap of his ejaculation.

This heightened her own response. Ecstatic pulsations drove outward from the

contractions in her vagina . . . outward . . . outward. The ecstasy engulfed

her entire sensorium. She saw a spreading blaze of whiteness against her

eyelids. Every muscle quivered with an ecstasy she had not imagined possible

for herself.

Again, the waves spread outward.

Again and again . . .

She lost count of the repetitions.

When Duncan moaned, she moaned and the waves swept outward once more.

And again . . .

There was no sensation of time or surroundings, only this immersion in a

continuing ecstasy.

She wanted it to go on forever and she wanted it to stop. This should not be

happening to a female! An Honored Matre must not experience this. These were

the sensations by which men were governed.

Duncan emerged from the response pattern that had been implanted in him. There

was something else he was supposed to do. He could not remember what it was.

Lucilla?

He imagined her dead in front of him. But this woman was not Lucilla; this was

. . . this was Murbella.

There was very little strength in him. He lifted himself off Murbella and

managed to sink back onto his knees. Her hands were fluttering in an agitation

he could not understand.

Murbella tried to push Duncan away from her and he was not there. Her eyes

snapped open.

Duncan knelt above her. She had no idea how much time had passed. She tried to

find the energy to sit up and failed. Slowly, reason returned.

She stared into Duncan's eyes, knowing now who this man must be. Man? He was

only a youth. But he had done things . . . things . . . All of the Honored

Matres had been warned. There was a ghola armed with forbidden knowledge by the

Tleilaxu. That ghola must be killed!

A small burst of energy surged into her muscles. She raised herself on her

elbows. Gasping for breath, she tried to roll away from him and fell back to

the soft surface.

By the Holy Rock of Dur! This male could not be permitted to live! He was a

ghola and he could do things permitted only to Honored Matres. She wanted to

strike out at him and, at the same time, she wanted to pull him back onto her

body. The ecstasy! She knew that whatever he asked of her at this moment she

would do. She would do it for him.

No! I must kill him!

Once more, she raised herself onto her elbows and, from there, managed to sit

up. Her weakened gaze crossed the window where she had confined the Great

Honored Matre and the guide. They still stood there looking at her. The man's

face was flushed. The face of the Great Honored Matre was as unmoving as the

Rock of Dur itself.

How can she just stand there after what she has seen here? The Great Honored

Matre must kill this ghola!

Murbella beckoned to the woman behind the plaz and rolled toward the locked door

beside the sleeping pad. She barely managed to unbolt and open the door before

falling back. Her eyes looked up at the kneeling youth. Sweat glistened on his

body. His lovely body . . .

No!

Desperation drove her off onto the floor. She was on her knees there and then,

mostly by will power, she stood. Energy was returning but her legs trembled as

she staggered around the foot of the sleeping pad.

I will do it myself without thinking. I must do it.

Her body swayed from side to side. She tried to steady herself and aimed a blow

at his neck. She knew this blow from long hours of practice. It would crush

the larynx. The victim would die of asphyxiation.

Duncan dodged the blow easily, but he was slow . . . slow.

Murbella almost fell beside him but the hands of the Great Honored Matre saved

her.

"Kill him," Murbella gasped. "He's the one we were warned about. He's the

one!"

Murbella felt hands on her neck, the fingers pressing fiercely at the nerve

bundles beneath the ears.

The last thing Murbella heard before unconsciousness was the Great Honored Matre

saying: "We will kill no one. This ghola goes to Rakis."

The worst potential competition for any organism can come from its own kind.

The species consumes necessities. Growth is limited by that necessity which is

present in the least amount. The least favorable condition controls the rate of

growth. (Law of the Minimum)

-From "Lessons of Arrakis"

The building stood back from a wide avenue behind a screen of trees and

carefully tended flowering hedges. The hedges had been staggered in a maze

pattern with man-high white posts to define the planted areas. No vehicle

entering or leaving could do so at any speed above a slow crawl. Teg's military

awareness took all of this in as the armored groundcar carried him up to the

door. Field Marshal Muzzafar, the only other occupant in the rear of the car,

recognized Teg's assessment and said:

"We're protected from above by a beam enfilading system." A soldier in

camouflage uniform with a long lasgun on a sling over one shoulder opened the

door and snapped to attention as Muzzafar emerged.

Teg followed. He recognized this place. It was one of the "safe" addresses

Bene Gesserit Security had provided for him. Obviously, the Sisterhood's

information was out of date. Recently out of date, though, because Muzzafar

gave no indication that Teg might know this place.

As they crossed to the door, Teg noted that another protective system he had

seen on his first tour of Ysai remained intact. It was a barely noticeable

difference in the posts along the trees-and-hedges barriers. Those posts were

scanlyzers operated from a room somewhere in the building. Their diamond-shaped

connectors "read" the area between them and the building. At the gentle push of

a button in the watchers' room, the scanlyzers would make small chunks of meat

out of any living flesh crossing their fields.

At the door, Muzzafar paused and looked at Teg. "The Honored Matre you are

about to meet is the most powerful of all who have come here. She does not

tolerate anything but complete obedience."

"I take it that you are warning me."

"I thought you would understand. Call her Honored Matre. Nothing else. In we

go. I've taken the liberty of having a new uniform made for you."

The room where Muzzafar ushered him was one Teg had not seen on his previous

visit. Small and crammed with ticking black-paneled boxes, it left little room

for the two of them. A single yellow glowglobe at the ceiling illuminated the

place. Muzzafar crowded himself into a corner while Teg got out of the grimed

and wrinkled singlesuit he had worn since the no-globe.

"Sorry I can't offer you a bath as well," Muzzafar said. "But we must not

delay. She gets impatient."

A different personality came over Teg with the uniform. It was a familiar black

garment, even to the starbursts at the collar. So he was to appear before this

Honored Matre as the Sisterhood's Bashar. Interesting. He was once more

completely the Bashar, not that this powerful sense of identity had ever left

him. The uniform completed it and announced it, though. In this garment there

was no need to emphasize in any other way precisely who he was.

"That's better," Muzzafar said as he led Teg out into the entry hallway and

through a door Teg remembered. Yes, this was where he had met the "safe"

contacts. He had recognized the room's function then and nothing appeared to

have changed it. Rows of microscopic comeyes lined the intersection of ceiling

and walls, disguised as silver guide strips for the hovering glowglobes.

The one who is watched does not see, Teg thought. And the Watchers have a

billion eyes.

His doubled vision told him there was danger here but nothing immediately

violent.

This room, about five meters long and four wide, was a place for doing very

high-level business. The merchandise would never be an actual exposure of

money. People here would see only portable equivalents of whatever passed for

currency -- melange, perhaps, or milky soostones about the size of an eyeball,

perfectly round, at once glossy and soft in appearance but radiant with rainbow

changes directed by whatever light fell on them or whatever flesh they touched.

This was a place where a danikin of melange or a small fold-pouch of soostones

would be accepted as a natural occurrence. The price of a planet could be

exchanged here with only a nod, an eyeblink or a low-voiced murmur. No wallets

of currency would ever be produced here. The closest thing might be a thin case

of translux out of whose poison-guarded interior would come thinner sheets of

ridulian crystal with very large numbers inscribed on them by unforgeable

dataprint.

"This is a bank," Teg said.

"What?" Muzzafar had been staring at the closed door in the opposite wall.

"Oh, yes. She'll be along presently."

"She is watching us now, of course."

Muzzafar did not answer but he looked gloomy.

Teg glanced around him. Had anything been changed since his previous visit? He

saw no significant alterations. He wondered if shrines such as this one had

undergone much change at all over the eons. There was a dewcarpet on the floor

as soft as brantdown and as white as the underbelly of a fur whale. It

shimmered with a false sense of wetness that only the eye detected. A bare foot

(not that this place had ever seen a bare foot) would feel caressing dryness.

There was a narrow table about two meters long almost in the center of the room.

The top was at least twenty millimeters thick. Teg guessed it was Danian

jacaranda. The deep brown surface had been polished to a sheen that drank the

vision and revealed far underneath veins like river currents. There were only

four admiral's chairs around the table, chairs crafted by a master artisan from

the same wood as the table, cushioned on seat and back with lyrleather of the

exact tone of the polished wood.

Only four chairs. More would have been an overstatement. He had not tried one

of the chairs before and he did not seat himself now, but he knew what his flesh

would find there -- comfort almost up to the level of a despised chairdog. Not

quite at that degree of softness and conformity to bodily shape, of course. Too

much comfort could lure the sitter into relaxation. This room and its

furnishings said: "Be comfortable here but remain alert."

You not only had to have your wits about you in this place but also a great

power of violence behind you, Teg thought. He had summed it up that way before

and his opinion had not changed.

There were no windows but the ones he had seen from the outside had danced with

lines of light-energy barriers to repel intruders and prevent escape. Such

barriers brought their own dangers, Teg knew, but the implications were

important. Just keeping the energy flow in them would feed a large city for the

lifetime of its longest-lived inhabitant.

There was nothing casual about this display of wealth.

The door that Muzzafar watched opened with a gentle click.

Danger!

A woman in a shimmering golden robe swept into the room. Lines of red-orange

danced in the fabric.

She is old!

Teg had not expected her to be this ancient. Her face was a wrinkled mask. The

eyes were deeply set green ice. Her nose was an elongated beak whose shadow

touched thin lips and repeated the sharp angle of the chin. A black skullcap

almost covered her gray hair.

Muzzafar bowed.

"Leave us," she said.

He left without a word, going out through the door by which she had entered.

When the door closed behind him, Teg said, "Honored Matre."

"So you recognize this as a bank." Her voice carried only a slight trembling.

"Of course."

"There are always means of transferring large sums or selling power," she said.

"I do not speak of the power that runs factories but of the power that runs

people."

"And that usually passes under the strange names of government or society or

civilization," Teg said.

"I suspected you would be very intelligent," she said. She pulled out a chair

and sat but did not indicate that Teg should seat himself. "I think of myself

as a banker. That saves a lot of muddy and distressful circumlocutions."

Teg did not respond. There seemed no need. He continued to study her.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" she demanded.

"I did not expect you to be this old," he said.

"Heh, heh, heh. We have many surprises for you, Bashar. Later, a younger

Honored Matre may murmur her name to mark you. Praise Dur if that happens."

He nodded, not understanding much of what she said.

"This is also a very old building," she said. "I watched you when you came in.

Does that surprise you, too?"

"No."

"This building has remained essentially unchanged for several thousand years.

It is built of materials that will last much longer still."

He glanced at the table.

"Oh, not the wood. But underneath, it's polastine, polaz, and pormabat. The

three P-Os are never sneered at where necessity calls for them."

Teg remained silent.

"Necessity," she said. "Do you object to any of the necessary things that have

been done to you?"

"My objections don't matter," he said. What was she getting at? Studying him,

of course. As he studied her.

"Do you think others have ever objected to what you did to them?"

"Undoubtedly."

"You're a natural commander, Bashar. I think you'll be very valuable to us."

"I've always thought I was most valuable to myself."

"Bashar! Look at my eyes!"

He obeyed, seeing little flecks of orange drifting in across the whites. The

sense of peril was acute.

"If you ever see my eyes fully orange, beware!" she said. "You will have

offended me beyond my ability to tolerate."

He nodded.

"I like it that you can command but you cannot command me! You command the muck

and that is the only function we have for such as you."

"The muck?"

She waved a hand, a negligent motion. "Out there. You know them. Their

curiosity is narrow gauge. No great issues ever enter their awareness."

"I thought that was what you meant."

"We work to keep it that way," she said. "Everything goes to them through a

tight filter, which excludes all but that which has immediate survival value."

"No great issues," he said.

"You are offended but it doesn't matter," she said. "To those out there, a

great issue is: 'Will I eat today?' 'Do I have shelter tonight that will not

be invaded by attackers or vermin?' Luxury? Luxury is the possession of a drug

or a member of the opposite sex who can, for a time, keep the beast at bay."

And you are the beast, he thought.

"I am taking some time with you, Bashar, because I see that you could be more

valuable to us even than Muzzafar. And he is extremely valuable indeed. Even

now, we are repaying him for bringing you to us in a receptive condition."

When Teg still remained silent, she chuckled. "You do not think you are

receptive?"

Teg held himself quiet. Had they given him some drug in his food? He saw the

flickering of doubled vision but the movements of violence had receded as the

orange flecks left the Honored Matre's eyes. Her feet were to be avoided,

though. They were deadly weapons.

"It's just that you think of the muck in the wrong way," she said. "Luckily,

they are most self-limiting. They know this somewhere in the damps of their

deepest consciousness but cannot spare the time to deal with that or anything

else except the immediate scramble for survival."

"They cannot be improved?" he asked.

"They must not be improved! Oh, we see to it that self-improvement remains a

great fad among them. Nothing real about it, of course."

"Another luxury they must be denied," he said.

"Not a luxury! Nonexistent! It must be occluded at all times behind a barrier

that we like to call protective ignorance."

"What you don't know cannot hurt you."

"I don't like your tone, Bashar."

Again, the orange flecks danced in her eyes. The sense of violence diminished,

however, as she once more chuckled. "The thing you beware of is the opposite of

what-you-don't-know. We teach that new knowledge can be dangerous. You see the

obvious extension: All new knowledge is non-survival!"

The door behind the Honored Matre opened and Muzzafar returned. It was a

changed Muzzafar, his face flushed, his eyes bright. He stopped behind the

Honored Matre's chair.

"One day, I will be able to permit you behind me this way," she said. "It is in

my power to do this."

What had they done to Muzzafar? Teg wondered. The man looked almost drugged.

"You do see that I have power?" she asked.

He cleared his throat. "That's obvious."

"I am a banker, remember? We have just made a deposit with our loyal Muzzafar.

Do you thank us, Muzzafar?"

"I do, Honored Matre." His voice was hoarse.

"I'm sure you understand this kind of power generally, Bashar," she said. "The

Bene Gesserit trained you well. They are quite talented but not, I fear, as

talented as we are."

"And I am told you are quite numerous," he said.

"Our numbers are not the key, Bashar. Power such as ours has a way of becoming

channeled so that it can be controlled by small numbers."

She was like a Reverend Mother, he thought, in the way she could appear to

answer without revealing much.

"In essence," she said, "power such as ours is allowed to become the substance

of survival for many people. Then, the threat of withdrawal is all that's

required for us to rule." She glanced over her shoulder. "Would you wish us to

withdraw our favor from you Muzzafar?"

"No, Honored Matre." He was actually trembling!

"You have found a new drug," Teg said.

Her laughter was spontaneous and loud, almost raucous. "No, Bashar! We have an

old one."

"And you would make an addict of me?"

"Like all the others we control, Bashar, you have a choice: death or

obedience."

"That is a rather old choice," he agreed. What was her immediate threat? He

could sense no violence. Quite the contrary. His doubled vision showed him

broken glimpses of extremely sensuous overtones. Did they think they could

imprint him?

She smiled at him, a knowing expression with something frigid under it.

"Will he serve us well, Muzzafar?"

"I believe so, Honored Matre."

Teg frowned in thought. There was something deeply evil about this pair. They

went against every morality by which he modeled his behavior. It was well to

remember that neither of them knew this strange thing that had speeded his

reactions.

They seemed to be enjoying his puzzled discomfiture.

Teg took some reassurance from the realization that neither of these two really

enjoyed life. He could see that in them clearly with eyes the Sisterhood had

educated. The Honored Matre and Muzzafar had forgotten or, most likely,

abandoned everything that supported the survival of joyous humans. He thought

they probably no longer were capable of finding a real wellspring of joy in

their own flesh. Theirs would have to be mostly a voyeur's existence, the

eternal observer, always remembering what it had been like before they had taken

the turning into whatever it was they had become. Even when they wallowed in

the performance of something that once had meant gratification, they would have

to reach for new extremes each time just to touch the edges of their own

memories.

The Honored Matre's grin widened, showing a line of gleaming white teeth. "Look

at him, Muzzafar. He has not the slightest conception of what we can do."

Teg heard this but he also saw with eyes trained by the Bene Gesserit. Not a

milligram of naivete remained in either of these two. Nothing was expected to

surprise them. Nothing could be truly new for them. Still, they plotted and

devised, hoping that this extreme would produce the remembered thrill. They

knew it would not, of course, and they expected to carry away from the

experience only more burning rage out of which to fashion another attempt at the

unreachable. That was how their thinking went.

Teg designed a smile for them, using all of the skills he had learned at Bene

Gesserit hands. It was a smile full of compassion, of understanding and real

pleasure in his own existence. He knew it for the most deadly insult he could

hurl at them and he saw it hit. Muzzafar glowered at him. The Honored Matre

went from orange-eyed rage to an abrupt surprise and then, quite slowly, to

dawning pleasure. She had not expected this! It was something new!

"Muzzafar," she said, the orange receding from her eyes, "bring the Honored

Matre who has been chosen to mark our Bashar."

Teg, his doubled vision showing the immediate peril, understood at last. He

could feel awareness of his own future spreading outward like waves as the power

grew in him. The wild change in him was continuing! He felt the energy expand.

With it came understanding and choices. He saw himself as the whirlwind

rampaging through this building -- bodies scattered behind him (Muzzafar and the

Honored Matre among them) and the whole complex looking like an abattoir when he

departed.

Must I do that? he wondered.

For each one he killed, more would have to be killed. He saw the necessity of

it, though, as he saw at last the Tyrant's design. The pain he could see for

himself almost made him cry out but he held it back.

"Yes, bring this Honored Matre to me," he said, knowing that this would be one

less for him to seek out and destroy elsewhere in the building. The room of the

scanlyzer controls must be taken out first.

O you who know what we suffer here, do not forget us in your prayers.

-Sign over Arrakeen Landing Field (Historical Records: Dar-es-Balat)

Taraza watched a snow-flutter of falling blossoms against the silvery sky of a

Rakian morning. There was an opalescent sheen to the sky that, despite all of

her preparatory briefings, she had not anticipated. Rakis held many surprises.

The smell of mock orange was powerful here at the edge of the Dar-es-Balat roof

garden, overriding all other odors.

Never believe that you have plumbed the depths of any place . . . or of any

human, she reminded herself.

Conversation was ended out here but not the echoes of the spoken thoughts they

had exchanged only minutes ago. All agreed, though, that it was time for

action. Soon, Sheeana would "dance a worm" for them and once more demonstrate

her mastery.

Waff and a new priestly representative would share this "holy event" but Taraza

was sure neither of them knew the real nature of what they were about to

witness. Waff bore watching, of course. He still carried that air of irritated

disbelief in everything he saw or heard. It was a strange mixture with his

underlying awe at being on Rakis. The catalyst was obviously his rage over the

fact that fools ruled here.

Odrade returned from the meeting room and stopped beside Taraza.

"I am extremely disquieted by the reports from Gammu," Taraza said. "Do you

bring something new?"

"No. Things are obviously still chaotic there."

"Tell me, Dar, what do you think we should do?"

"I keep remembering the Tyrant's words to Chenoeh: 'The Bene Gesserit are so

close to what they should be, yet so far.' "

Taraza pointed at the open desert beyond the museum city's qanat. "He's still

out there, Dar. I'm sure of it." Taraza turned to face Odrade. "And Sheeana

speaks to him."

"He told so many lies," Odrade said.

"But he didn't lie about his own incarnation. Remember what he said. 'Every

descendant part of me will carry some of my awareness locked away within it,

lost and helpless-pearls of me moving blindly in the sand, caught in an endless

dream.' "

"You bank a great deal on your belief in the power of that dream," Odrade said.

"We must recover the Tyrant's design! All of it!"

Odrade sighed but did not speak.

"Never underestimate the power of an idea," Taraza said. "The Atreides were

ever philosophers in their governance. Philosophy is always dangerous because

it promotes the creation of new ideas."

Still, Odrade did not respond.

"The worm carries it all within him, Dar! All of the forces he set in motion

are still in him."

"Are you trying to convince me or yourself, Tar?"

"I am punishing you, Dar. Just as the Tyrant is still punishing us."

"For not being what we should be? Ahh, here come Sheeana and the others."

"The worm's language, Dar. That is the important thing."

"If you say so, Mother Superior."

Taraza sent an angry stare at Odrade, who moved forward to greet the newcomers.

There was a disturbing gloom in Odrade.

The presence of Sheeana, though, restored Taraza's sense of purpose. An alert

little thing, Sheeana. Very good material. Sheeana had demonstrated her dance

the previous night, performing in the great museum room against a tapestry

background, an exotic dance against an exotic spice-fiber hanging with its image

of desert and worms. She appeared to be almost a part of the hanging, a figure

projected forward from the stylized dunes and their elaborately detailed

coursing worms. Taraza recalled how Sheeana's brown hair had been thrown

outward by the whirling movements of the dance, swinging in a fuzzy arc.

Sidelighting accented the reddish glints in her hair. Her eyes had been closed

but it was not a face in repose. Excitement betrayed itself in the passionate

set of her wide mouth, the flaring of her nostrils, the forward thrust of her

chin. Her motions had conveyed an inner sophistication that belied her youth.

The dance is her language, Taraza thought. Odrade is correct. Seeing it, we

will learn it.

Waff had something of a withdrawn look this morning. It was difficult to

determine if his eyes were looking outward or inward.

With Waff was Tulushan, a darkly handsome Rakian, the priesthood's chosen

representative at today's "holy event." Taraza, meeting him at the

demonstration dance, had found it extraordinary how Tulushan never needed to say

"but," and yet the word was always there in everything he uttered. A perfect

bureaucrat. He rightly expected to go far but those expectations would soon

encounter their ultimate surprise. She felt no pity for him at this knowledge.

Tulushan was a soft-faced youth of too few standards for such a position of

trust. There was more to him than met the eye, of course. And less.

Waff moved to one side in the garden, leaving Odrade and Sheeana with Tulushan.

The young priest was expendable, naturally. That explained much about why he

had been chosen for this venture. It told her that she had achieved the proper

level of potential violence. Taraza did not think, though, that any of the

priestly factions would dare harm Sheeana.

We will stay close to Sheeana.

They had spent a busy week since the demonstration of the whores' sexual

accomplishments. A very disturbing week, when it came to that. Odrade had been

kept busy with Sheeana. Taraza would have preferred Lucilla for this

educational chore but you made do with what was available and Odrade obviously

was the best available on Rakis for such teaching.

Taraza looked back toward the desert. They were waiting for the 'thopters from

Keen with their cargoes of Very Important Observers. The VIOs were not yet late

but crowding it as such people always did.

Sheeana seemed to be taking the sexual education well, although Taraza's

estimation of the Sisterhood's available teaching males on Rakis was not high.

Her first night here, Taraza had called in one of the servant males. Afterward,

she had judged it too much trouble for the little joy and forgetfulness it

provided. Besides, what was there to forget? To forget was to allow a

weakness.

Never forget!

That's what the whores did, though. They traded in forgetfulness. And they had

not the least awareness of the Tyrant's continuing viselike hold on human

destiny nor of the need to break that hold.

Taraza had listened secretly to the previous day's session between Sheeana and

Odrade.

What was I listening for?

Young girl and teacher had been out here in the roof garden, facing each other

on two benches, a portable Ixian damper hiding their words from anyone who did

not have the coded translator. The suspensor-buoyed damper hovered over the two

like a strange umbrella, a black disc projecting distortions that hid the

precise movements of lips and the sounds of voices.

To Taraza, standing within the long meeting room, the tiny translator in her

left ear, the lesson had occurred like an equally distorted memory.

When I was taught these things, we had not seen what the whores of the

Scattering could do.

"Why do we say it's the complexity of sex?" Sheeana asked. "The man you sent

last night kept saying that."

"Many believe they understand it, Sheeana. Perhaps no one has ever understood

it, because such words require more of the mind than they do of the flesh."

"Why must I not use any of the things we saw the Face Dancers do?"

"Sheeana, complexity hides within complexity. Great deeds and foul ones have

been done at the goading of sexual forces. We speak of 'sexual strength' and

'sexual energies' and such things as 'the overmounting urge of desire.' I don't

deny that such things are observable. But what we are looking at here is a

force so powerful that it can destroy you and everything you hold worthwhile."

"That's what I'm trying to understand. What is it the whores are doing wrong?"

"They ignore the species at its work, Sheeana. I think you can already sense

this. The Tyrant certainly knew about it. What was his Golden Path but a

vision of sexual forces at work recreating humankind endlessly?"

"And the whores don't create?"

"They mostly try to control their worlds with this force."

"They seem to be doing that."

"Ahhh, but what counterforces do they call forth?"

"I don't understand."

"You know about Voice and how it can control some people?"

"But not control everybody."

"Exactly. A civilization subjected to Voice over a long period develops ways of

adapting to this force, preventing manipulation by those who use Voice."

"So there are people who know how to resist the whores?"

"We see unmistakable signs of it. And that is one of the reasons we are here on

Rakis."

"Will the whores come here?"

"I'm afraid so. They want to control the core of the Old Empire because they

see us as an easy conquest."

"Aren't you afraid they'll win?"

"They won't win, Sheeana. Depend on it. But they are good for us."

"How is that?"

Sheeana's tone echoed Taraza's own shock at hearing such words from Odrade. How

much did Odrade suspect? In the next instant, Taraza understood and she

wondered if the lesson was equally understandable to the young girl.

"The core is static, Sheeana. We have been almost at a standstill for thousands

of years. Life and movement are 'out there' with the people of the Scattering

who resist the whores. Whatever we do, we must make that resistance even

stronger."

The sound of approaching 'thopters broke Taraza from her reverie of remembrance.

The VIOs were arriving from Keen. Still at some distance, but the sound carried

far in the clear air.

Odrade's teaching method was a good one, Taraza had to admit as she scanned the

sky for a first glimpse of the 'thopters. Apparently they were coming in low

and from the other side of the building. That was the wrong direction but

perhaps they had taken the VIOs on a short excursion over the remains of the

Tyrant's wall. Many people were curious about the place where Odrade had found

the spice hoard.

Sheeana, Odrade, Waff, and Tulushan went back into the long meeting room. They

had heard the 'thopters, too. Sheeana was anxious to show her power over the

worms. Taraza hesitated. There was a laboring sound in the approaching

'thopters. Were they overloaded? How many observers had they brought?

The first 'thopter lifted over the penthouse roof and Taraza saw the armored

cockpit. She recognized treachery even before the first beam arced out of the

machine, slicing through her legs below the knees. She fell heavily against a

potted tree, her legs completely severed. Another beam slashed out at her,

slicing at an angle across her hip. The 'thopter swept over her in an abrupt

roar of booster jets and banked away to the left.

Taraza clung to the tree, shunting the agony aside. She managed to cut off most

of the bloodflow from her wounds but the pain was great. Not as great as the

spice agony, though, she reminded herself. That helped but she knew she was

doomed. She heard shouts and the multiple sounds of violence all around the

museum now.

I have won! Taraza thought.

Odrade darted from the penthouse and bent over Taraza. They said nothing but

Odrade showed that she understood by putting her forehead to Taraza's temple.

It was the ages-old cue of the Bene Gesserit. Taraza began pouring her life

into Odrade -- Other Memories, hopes, fears . . . everything.

One of them might yet escape.

Sheeana watched from the penthouse, staying where she had been ordered to wait.

She knew what was happening out there in the roof garden. This was the ultimate

mystery of the Bene Gesserit and every postulant was aware of it.

Waff and Tulushan, already out of the room when the attack came, did not return.

Sheeana shuddered with apprehension.

Abruptly, Odrade stood and ran back into the penthouse. There was a wild look

in her eyes but she moved with purpose. Leaping up, she gathered glowglobes,

grabbing them in bundles by their toggle cords. She thrust several bundles into

Sheeana's hands and Sheeana felt her body grow lighter with the lift of the

globes' suspensor fields. Trailing more clusters of the globes beyond their

field range, Odrade hurried across to the narrow end of the room where a grill

in the wall indicated what she sought. With Sheeana's help, she lifted the

grill out of its slots, revealing a deep airshaft. The light of the clustered

glowglobes showed rough walls inside.

"Hold the globes close to get the maximum field effect," Odrade said. "Push

them away to lower yourself. In you go."

Sheeana clutched the toggle cords in a sweaty hand and hopped over the sill.

She let herself fall, then fearfully clutched the globes close. Light from

above told her Odrade was following.

At the bottom, they emerged into a pump room, the susurrations of many fans a

background for the sounds of violence from outside.

"We must get to the no-room and then to the desert," Odrade said. "All of these

machinery systems are interconnected. There will be a passage."

"Is she dead?" Sheeana whispered.

"Yes."

"Poor Mother Superior."

"I am the Mother Superior now, Sheeana. At least temporarily." She pointed

upward. "Those were the whores attacking us. We must hurry."

The world is for the living. Who are they?

We dared the dark to reach the white and warm.

She was the wind when the wind was in my way.

Alive at noon, I perished in her form.

Who rise from the flesh to spirit know the fall:

The word outleaps the world and light is all.

-Theodore Roethke (Historical Quotations: Dar-es-Balat)

It required little conscious volition for Teg to become the whirlwind. He had

recognized at last the nature of the threat from the Honored Matres.

Recognition fitted itself into the blurred requirements made upon him by the new

Mentat awareness that went with his magnified speed.

Monstrous threat required monstrous countermeasures. Blood spattered him as he

drove himself through the headquarters building, slaughtering everyone he met.

As he had learned from his Bene Gesserit teachers, the great problem of the

human universe lay in how you managed procreation. He could hear the voice of

his first teacher as he carried destruction through the building.

"You may think of this only as sexuality but we prefer the more basic term:

procreation. It has many facets and offshoots and it has apparently unlimited

energy. The emotion called 'love' is only one small aspect. "

Teg crushed the throat of a man standing rigidly in his path and, at last, found

the control room for the building's defenses. Only one man was seated in it,

his right hand almost touching a red key on the console in front of him.

With a slashing left hand, Teg almost decapitated the man. The body tipped

backward in slow motion, blood welling from the gaping neck.

The Sisterhood is right to call them whores!

You could drag humankind almost anywhere by manipulating the enormous energies

of procreation. You could goad humans into actions they would never have

believed possible. One of his teachers had said it directly:

"This energy must have an outlet. Bottle it up and it becomes monstrously

dangerous. Redirect it and it will sweep over anything in its path. This is an

ultimate secret of all religions."

Teg was conscious of leaving more than fifty bodies behind him as he left the

building. The last fatality was a soldier in camouflage uniform standing in the

open doorway, apparently about to enter.

As he ran past apparently unmoving people and vehicles, Teg's revved-up mind had

time to reflect on what he had left behind him. Was there any consolation, he

wondered, in the fact that the old Honored Matre's last living expression was

one of real surprise? Could he congratulate himself that Muzzafar would never

again see his frame bush home?

The necessity for what he had accomplished in a few heartbeats was very clear,

though, to one trained by the Bene Gesserit. Teg knew his history. There were

many paradise planets in the Old Empire, probably many more among the people of

the Scattering. Humans always seemed capable of trying that foolish experiment.

People in such places mostly lazed along. A quick-smart analysis said this was

because of the easy climates on such planets. He knew this for stupidity. It

was because sexual energy was easily released in such places. Let the

Missionaries of the Divided God or some denominational construct enter one of

these paradises and you got outrageous violence.

"We of the Sisterhood know," one of Teg's teachers had said. "We have put a

flame to that fuse more than once with our Missionaria Protectiva."

Teg did not stop running until he was in an alley at least five kilometers from

the abattoir that had been the headquarters for the old Honored Matre. He knew

that very little time had passed but there was something much more important

upon which he had to focus. He had not killed every occupant of that building.

There were eyes back there belonging to people who knew now what he could do.

They had seen him kill Honored Matres. They had seen Muzzafar topple dead at

his hands. The evidence of the bodies left behind and the slowed replay of

recordings would tell it all.

Teg leaned against a wall. Skin was torn from his left palm. He let himself

return to normal time as he watched blood oozing from the wound. The blood was

almost black.

More oxygen in my blood?

He was panting but not as much as these exertions would seem to require.

What has happened to me?

It was something from his Atreides ancestry, he knew. Crisis had tipped him

over into another dimension of human possibilities. Whatever the

transformation, it was profound. He could see outward now into many

necessities. And the people he had passed on his run to this alley had seemed

like statues.

Will I ever think of them as muck?

It could only happen if he let it happen, he knew. But the temptation was there

and he allowed himself a brief commiseration for the Honored Matres. Great

Temptation had toppled them into their own muck.

What to do now?

The main line lay open to him. There was a man here in Ysai, one man who would

be sure to know everyone Teg required. Teg looked around the alley. Yes, that

man was near.

The fragrance of flowers and herbs wafted to Teg from somewhere down this alley.

He moved toward this fragrance, aware that it led him where he needed to go and

that no violent attack awaited him here. This was, temporarily, a quiet

backwater.

He came to the fragrant source quickly. It was an inset doorway marked by a

blue awning with two words on it in modern Galach: "Personal Service."

Teg entered and saw immediately what he had found. They were to be seen at many

places in the Old Empire: eating establishments harking back to ancient times,

eschewing automata from kitchen to table. Most of them were "in"

establishments. You told friends about your latest "discovery" with an

admonition to them not to spread the word.

"Don't want to spoil it with crowding."

This idea had always amused Teg. You spread the word about such places but you

did it under the guise of keeping a secret.

Mouth-watering odors of cooking emerged from the kitchen at the rear. A waiter

passed bearing a tray from which steam lifted, carrying the promise of good

things.

A young woman in a short black dress with a white apron came up to him. "This

way, sir. We have a table open in the corner."

She held a chair for him to be seated with his back to the wall. "Someone will

be with you in a moment, sir." She passed him a stiff sheet of cheap doublethickness

paper. "Our menu is printed. I hope you won't mind."

He watched her leave. The waiter he had seen passed going the other way toward

the kitchen. The tray was empty.

Teg's feet had led him here as though he had been running on a fixed track. And

there was the man he required, dining nearby.

The waiter had stopped to talk to the man Teg knew held the answer to the next

moves required here. The two were laughing together. Teg scanned the rest of

the room: only three other tables occupied. An older woman sat at a table in

the far corner nibbling at some frosty confection. She was dressed in what Teg

thought must be the peak of current fashion, a clinging short red gown cut low

at the neck. Her shoes matched. A young couple sat at a table off to his

right. They saw no one except each other. An older man in a tightly fitted

old-fashioned brown tunic ate sparingly of a green vegetable dish near the door.

He had eyes only for his food.

The man talking to the waiter laughed loudly.

Teg stared at the back of the waiter's head. Tufts of blond hair sprang from

the nape of the waiter's neck like broken bunches of dead grass. The man's

collar was frayed beneath the tufted hair. Teg lowered his gaze. The waiter's

shoes were run over at the heels. The hem of his black jacket had been darned.

Was it thrift in this place? Thrift or some other form of economic pressure?

The odors from the kitchen did not suggest any stinting there. The tableware

was shining and clean. No cracked dishes. But the striped red and white cloth

on the table had been darned in several places, care taken to match the original

fabric.

Once more, Teg studied the other customers. They looked substantial. None of

the starving poor in this place. Teg had it registered then. Not only was this

an "in" place, somebody had designed it for just that effect. There was a

clever mind behind such an establishment. This was the kind of restaurant that

rising young executives revealed to make points with prospective customers or to

please a superior. The food would be superb and the portions generous. Teg

realized that his instincts had led him here correctly. He bent his attention

to the menu then, allowing hunger to enter his consciousness at last. The

hunger was at least as fierce as that which had astonished the late Field

Marshal Muzzafar.

The waiter appeared beside him with a tray on which were placed a small open box

and a jar from which wafted the pungent odor of newskin ointment.

"I see you have injured your hand, Bashar," the man said. He placed the tray on

the table. "Allow me to dress the injury before you order."

Teg lifted the injured hand and watched the swift competence of the treatment.

"You know me?" Teg asked.

"Yes, sir. And after what I've been hearing, it seems strange to see you in

full uniform. There." He finished the dressing.

"What have you been hearing?" Teg spoke in a low voice.

"That the Honored Matres hunt you."

"I've just killed some of them and many of their . . . What should we call

them?"

The man paled but he spoke firmly. "Slaves would be a good word, sir."

"You were at Renditai, weren't you," Teg said.

"Yes, sir. Many of us settled here afterward."

"I need food but I cannot pay you," Teg said.

"No one from Renditai has need of your money, Bashar. Do they know you came

this way?"

"I don't believe they do."

"The people here now are regulars. None of them would betray you. I will try

to warn you if someone dangerous comes. What did you wish to eat?"

"A great deal of food. I will leave the choice to you. About twice as much

carbohydrate as protein. No stimulants."

"What do you mean by a great deal, sir?"

"Keep bringing it until I tell you to stop . . . or until you feel I have

overstepped your generosity."

"In spite of appearances, sir, this is not a poor establishment. The extras

here have made me a rich man."

Score one for his assessment, Teg thought. The thrift here was a calculated

pose.

The waiter left and again spoke to the man at the central table. Teg studied

the man openly after the waiter went on into the kitchen. Yes, that was the

man. The diner concentrated on a plate heaped with some green-garnished pasta.

There was very little sign in this man of a woman's care, Teg thought. His

collar had been closed awry, the clingstraps tangled. Spots of the greenish

sauce soiled his left cuff. He was naturally righthanded but ate while his left

hand remained in the path of spillage. Frayed cuffs on his trousers. One

trouser hem, partly released from its threaded bondage, dragged at the heel.

Stockings mismatched -- one blue and one pale yellow. None of this appeared to

bother him. No mother or other woman had ever dragged this one back from a

doorway with orders to make himself presentable. His basic attitude was

announced in his whole appearance:

"What you see is as presentable as it gets."

The man looked up suddenly, a jerking motion as though he had been goosed. He

sent a brown-eyed gaze around the room, pausing at each face in turn as though

he looked for a particular visage. This done, he returned his attention to his

plate.

The waiter returned with a clear soup in which shreds of egg and some green

vegetables could be seen.

"While the rest of your meal is being prepared, sir," he said.

"Did you come here directly after Renditai?" Teg asked.

"Yes, sir. But I served with you also at Acline."

"The sixty-seventh Gammu," Teg said.

"Yes, sir!"

"We saved a good many lives that time," Teg said. "Theirs and ours."

When Teg still did not begin eating, the waiter spoke in a rather cold voice,

"Would you require a snooper, sir?"

"Not while you're serving me," Teg said. He meant what he said but he felt a

bit of a fraud because doubled vision told him the food was safe.

The waiter started to turn away, pleased.

"One moment," Teg said.

"Sir?"

"The man at that central table. He is one of your regulars?"

"Professor Delnay? Oh, yes, sir."

"Delnay. Yes, I thought so."

"Professor of martial arts, sir. And the history of same."

"I know. When it comes time to serve my dessert, please ask Professor Delnay if

he would join me."

"Shall I tell him who you are, sir?"

"Don't you think he already knows?"

"That would seem likely, sir, but still . . ."

"Caution where caution belongs," Teg said. "Bring on the food."

Delnay's interest was fully aroused long before the waiter relayed Teg's

invitation. The professor's first words as he seated himself across from Teg

were: "That was the most remarkable gastronomic performance I have ever seen.

Are you sure you can eat a dessert?"

"Two or three of them at least," Teg said.

"Astonishing!"

Teg sampled a spoonful of a honey-sweetened confection. He swallowed it, then:

"This place is a jewel."

"I have kept it a careful secret," Delnay said. "Except for a few close

friends, of course. To what do I owe the honor of your invitation?"

"Have you ever been . . . ah, marked by an Honored Matre?"

"Lords of perdition, no! I'm not important enough for that."

"I was hoping to ask you to risk your life, Delnay."

"In what way?" No hesitation. That was reassuring.

"There is a place in Ysai where my old soldiers meet. I want to go there and

see as many of them as possible."

"Through the streets in full regalia the way you are now?"

"In any way you can arrange it."

Delnay put a finger to his lower lip and leaned back to stare at Teg. "You're

not an easy figure to disguise, you know. However, there may be a way." He

nodded thoughtfully. "Yes." He smiled. "You won't like it, I'm afraid."

"What do you have in mind?"

"Some padding and other alterations. We will pass you off as a Bordano

overseer. You'll smell of the sewer, of course. And you'll have to carry it

off that you don't notice."

"Why do you think that will succeed?" Teg asked.

"Oh, there's going to be a storm tonight. Regular thing this time of year.

Laying down the moisture for next year's open crops. And filling the reservoirs

for the heated fields, you know."

"I don't understand your reasoning, but when I've finished another of these

confections, we'll go," Teg said.

"You'll like the place where we take refuge from the storm," Delnay said. "I'm

mad, you know, to do this. But the proprietor here said I was to help you or

never come here again."

It was an hour after dark when Delnay led him to the rendezvous point. Teg,

dressed in leathers and affecting a limp, was forced to use much of his mental

power to ignore his own odors. Delnay's friends had plastered Teg with sewage

and then hosed him off. The forced-air drying brought back most of the effluent

aromas.

A remote-reading weather station at the door of the meeting place told Teg it

had dropped fifteen degrees outside in the preceding hour. Delnay preceded him

and hurried away into a crowded room where there was much noise and the sound of

clinking glassware. Teg paused to study the doorside station. The wind was

gusting to thirty klicks, he saw. Barometric pressure down. He looked at the

sign above the station:

"A service to our customers."

Presumably, a service to the bar as well. Departing customers might well take

one look at these readings and return to the warmth and camaraderie behind them.

In a large fireplace with inglenook at the far end of the bar there was a real

fire burning. Aromatic wood.

Delnay returned, wrinkled his nose at Teg's smell and led him around the edge of

the crowd into a back room, then through this into a private bathroom. Teg's

uniform -- cleaned and pressed -- was laid out over a chair there.

"I'll be in the inglenook when you come out," Delnay said.

"In full regalia, eh?" Teg asked.

"It's only dangerous out in the streets," Delnay said. He went back the way

they had come.

Teg emerged presently and found his way to the inglenook through groups that

turned suddenly silent as people recognized him. Murmurous comments swept

through the room. "The old Bashar himself." "Oh, yes, it's Teg. Served with

him, I did. Know that face and figure anywhere."

Customers had crowded into the atavistic warmth of the fireside. There was a

rich smell of wet clothing and drink-fogged breaths there.

So the storm had driven this crowd into the bar? Teg looked at the battlehardened

military faces all around him, thinking that this was not a usual

gathering, no matter what Delnay said. The people here knew one another,

though, and had expected to meet one another here at this time.

Delnay was sitting on one of the benches in the inglenook, a glass containing an

amber drink in his hand.

"You put out the word to meet us here," Teg said.

"Isn't that what you wanted, Bashar?"

"Who are you, Delnay?"

"I own a winter farm a few klicks south of here and I have some banker friends

who will occasionally loan me a groundcar. If you want me to be more specific,

I'm like the rest of the people in this room -- someone who wants the Honored

Matres off our necks."

A man behind Teg asked: "Is it true that you killed a hundred of them today,

Bashar?"

Teg spoke dryly without turning. "The number is greatly exaggerated. Could I

have a drink, please?"

From his greater height, Teg scanned the room while someone was getting him a

glass. When it was thrust into his hand, it was, as he expected, the deep blue

of Danian Marinete. These old soldiers knew his preferences.

The drinking activity in the room continued but at a more subdued pace. They

were waiting for him to state his purpose.

Gregarious human nature got a natural boost on such a stormy night, Teg thought.

Band together behind the fire in the mouth of the cave, fellow tribesmen!

Nothing dangerous will get past us, especially when the beasts see our fire.

How many other similar gatherings were there around Gammu on such a night? he

wondered, sipping his drink. Bad weather could mask movements that the gathered

companions did not want observed. The weather might also keep certain people

inside who were otherwise not supposed to remain inside.

He recognized a few faces from his past-officers and ordinary soldiers -- a

mixed bag. For some of them, he had good memories: reliable people. Some of

them would die tonight.

The noise level began to increase as people relaxed in his presence. No one

pressed him for an explanation. They knew that about him, too. Teg set his own

timetable.

The sounds of conversation and laughter were of a kind he knew must have

accompanied such gatherings since the dawn times when humans clustered for

mutual protection. Clinking of glassware, sudden bursts of laughter, a few

quiet chuckles. Those would be the ones more conscious of their personal power.

Quiet chuckles said you could be amused but you did not have to make a guffawing

fool of yourself. Delnay was a quiet chuckler.

Teg glanced up and saw that the beamed ceiling had been built conventionally

low. It made the enclosed space seem at once more extended and yet more

intimate. Careful attention to human psychology here. It was a thing he had

observed many places on this planet. It was a care to keep a damper on unwanted

awareness. Make them feel comfortable and secure. They were not, of course,

but don't let that get through to them.

For a few moments longer, Teg watched the drinks being distributed by the

skilled waiting staff: dark local beers and some expensive imports. Scattered

along the bar and on the softly illuminated tables were bowls containing crispfried

local vegetables, heavily salted. Such an obvious move to heighten thirst

apparently offended no one. It was merely expected in this trade. The beers

would be heavily salted, too, of course. They always were. Brewers knew how to

kick off the thirst response.

Some of the groups were getting louder. The drinks had begun to work their

ancient magic. Bacchus was here! Teg knew that if this gathering were allowed

to run its natural course, the room would reach a crescendo later in the night

and then gradually, very gradually, the noise level would subside. Someone

would go look at the doorside weather station. Depending on what that one saw,

the place might wind down immediately or continue at the more subdued pace for

some time. He realized then that somewhere behind the bar there would be a way

to distort the weather station's readouts. This bar would not overlook such a

way of extending its trade.

Get 'em inside and keep 'em here by any means they don't find objectionable.

The people behind this institution would fall in with the Honored Matres and not

blink an eye.

Teg put his drink aside and called out: "May I have your attention, please?"

Silence.

Even the waiting staff stopped in what they were doing.

"Some of you guard the doors," Teg said. "No one goes in or out until I give

the order. Those back doors, too, if you please."

When this had been sorted out, he stared carefully around the room, picking the

ones his doubled vision and old military experience told him could be most

trusted. What he had to do now had become quite plain to him. Burzmali,

Lucilla, and Duncan were out there at the edge of his new vision, their needs

easily seen.

"I presume you can get your hands on weapons rather quickly," he said.

"We came prepared, Bashar!" Someone out in the room shouted. Teg heard the

drink in that voice but also the old adrenaline pumping that would be so dear to

these people.

"We are going to capture a no-ship," Teg said.

That grabbed them. No other artifact of civilization was as closely guarded.

These ships came to the landing fields and other places and they left. Their

armored surfaces bristled with weapons. Crews were on constant alert in

vulnerable locations. Trickery might succeed; open assault stood little chance.

But here in this room Teg had reached a new awareness, driven by necessity and

the wild genes in his Atreides ancestry. The positions of the no-ships on and

around Gammu were visible to him. Bright dots occupied his inner vision and,

like threads leading from one bauble to another, his doubled vision saw the way

through this maze.

Oh, but I do not want to go, he thought.

The thing driving him would not be denied.

"Specifically, we are going to capture a no-ship from the Scattering," he said.

"They have some of the best. You, you and you and you." He pointed, singling

out individuals. "You will stay here and see that no one leaves or communicates

with anyone outside of this establishment. I think you will be attacked. Hold

out as long as you can. The rest of you, get your weapons and let's go."

Justice? Who asks for justice. We make our own justice. We make it here on

Arrakis -- win or die. Let us not rail about justice as long as we have arms

and the freedom to use them.

-Leto I: Bene Gesserit Archives

The no-ship came in low over the Rakian sands. Its passage stirred up dusty

whirlwinds that drifted around it as it settled in a crunching disturbance of

the dunes. The silvered yellow sun was sinking into a horizon disturbed by the

heat devils of a long hot day. The no-ship sat there creaking, a glistening

steely ball whose presence could be detected by the eyes and ears but not by any

prescient or long-range instrument. Teg's doubled vision made him confident

that no unwanted eyes saw his arrival.

"I want the armored 'thopters and cars out there in no more than ten minutes,"

he said.

People stirred into action behind him.

"Are you certain they're here, Bashar?" The voice was that of a drinking

companion from the Gammu bar, a trusted officer from Renditai whose mood no

longer was that of someone recapturing the thrills of his youth. This one had

seen old friends die in the battle on Gammu. As with most of the others who

survived to come here, he had left a family whose fate he did not know. There

was a touch of bitterness in his voice, as though he were trying to convince

himself that he had been tricked into this venture.

"They will be here soon," Teg said. "They will arrive riding on the back of a

worm."

"How do you know that?"

"It was all arranged."

Teg closed his eyes. He did not need eyes to see the activity all around him.

This was like so many command posts he had occupied: an oval room of

instruments and people who operated them, officers waiting to obey.

"What is this place?" someone asked.

"Those rocks to the north of us," Teg said. "See them? They were a high cliff

once. It was called Wind Trap. There was a Fremen sietch there, little more

than a cave now. A few Rakian pioneers live in it."

"Fremen," someone whispered. "Gods! I want to see that worm coming. I never

thought I'd ever see such a thing."

"Another one of your unexpected arrangements, eh?" asked the officer of the

growing bitterness.

What would he say if I revealed my new abilities? Teg wondered. He might think

I concealed purposes that would not bear close examination. And he would be

right. That man is on the edge of a revelation. Would he remain loyal if his

eyes were opened? Teg shook his head. The officer would have little choice.

None of them had much choice except to fight and die.

It was true, Teg thought then, that the process of arranging conflicts involved

the hoodwinking of large masses. How easy it was to fall into the attitude of

the Honored Matres.

Muck!

The hoodwinking was not as difficult as some supposed. Most people wanted to be

led. That officer back there had wanted it. There were deep tribal instincts

(powerful unconscious motivations) to account for this. The natural reaction

when you began to recognize how easily you were led was to look for scapegoats.

That officer back there wanted a scapegoat now.

"Burzmali wants to see you," someone off to Teg's left said.

"Not now," Teg said.

Burzmali could wait. He would have his day of command soon enough. Meanwhile,

he was a distraction. There would be time later for him to skirt dangerously

near the role of scapegoat.

How easy it was to produce scapegoats and how readily they were accepted! This

was especially true when the alternative was to find yourself either guilty or

stupid or both. Teg wanted to say for all of those around him:

"Look to the hoodwinking! Then you'll know our true intentions!"

The communications officer on Teg's left said: "That Reverend Mother is with

Burzmali now. She insists they be allowed in to see you."

"Tell Burzmali I want him to go back and stay with Duncan," Teg said. "And have

him look in on Murbella, make sure she's secured. Lucilla can come in."

It had to be, Teg thought.

Lucilla was increasingly suspicious about the changes in him. Trust a Reverend

Mother to see the difference.

Lucilla swept in, her robes swishing to accent her vehemence. She was angry but

concealing it well.

"I demand an explanation, Miles!"

That was a good opening line, he thought. "Of what?" he said.

"Why didn't we just go in at the --"

"Because the Honored Matres and their Tleilaxu companions from the Scattering

hold most of the Rakian centers."

"How . . . how do you . . ."

"They've killed Taraza, you know," he said.

That stopped her, but not for long. "Miles, I insist that you tell me --"

"We don't have much time," he said. "The next satellite passage will show us on

the surface here."

"But the defenses of Rakis --"

"Are as vulnerable as any other defenses when they become static," he said.

"The families of the defenders are down here. Take the families and you have

effective control of the defenders."

"But why are we out here in --"

"To pick up Odrade and that girl with her. Oh, and their worm, too."

"What will we do with a --"

"Odrade will know what to do with the worm. She's your Mother Superior now, you

know."

"So you're going to whisk us off into --"

"You'll whisk yourselves! My people and I will remain to create a diversion."

That brought a shocked silence throughout the command station.

Diversion, Teg thought. What an inadequate word.

The resistance he had in mind would create hysteria among the Honored Matres,

especially when they were made to believe the ghola was here. Not only would

they counterattack, they eventually would resort to sterilization procedures.

Most of Rakis would become a charred ruin. There was little likelihood that any

humans, worms, or sandtrout would survive.

"The Honored Matres have been trying to locate and capture a worm without

success," he said. "I really don't understand how they could be so blind in

their concept of how you transplant one of them."

"Transplant?" Lucilla was floundering. Teg had seldom seen a Reverend Mother

at such a loss. She was trying to assemble the things he had said. The

Sisterhood had some of the Mentats' capabilities, he had observed. A Mentat

could come to a qualified conviction without sufficient data. He thought that

he would be long out of her reach (or the reach of any other Reverend Mother)

before she assembled this data. Then there would be a scrambling for his

offspring! They would pick up Dimela for their Breeding Mistresses, of course.

And Odrade. She would not escape.

They had the key to the Tleilaxu axlotl tanks, too. It would be only a matter

of time now until the Bene Gesserit overcame its scruples and mastered that

source of the spice. A human body produced it!

"We're in danger here, then," Lucilla said.

"Some danger, yes. The trouble with the Honored Matres is that they're too

wealthy. They make the mistakes of the wealthy."

"Depraved whores!" she said.

"I suggest you get to the entry port," he said. "Odrade will be here soon."

She left him without another word.

"Armor is all out and deployed," the communications officer said.

"Alert Burzmali to be ready for command here," Teg said. "The rest of us will

be going out soon."

"You expect all of us to join you?" That was the one who looked for a

scapegoat.

"I am going out," Teg said. "I will go alone if necessary. Only those who wish

need join me."

After that, all of them would come, he thought. Peer pressure was little

understood by anyone except those trained by the Bene Gesserit.

It grew silent in the command station except for the faint hummings and clicks

of instruments. Teg fell to thinking about the "depraved whores."

It was not correct to call them depraved, he thought. Sometimes, the supremely

rich did become depraved. That came from believing that money (power) could buy

anything and everything. And why shouldn't they believe this? They saw it

happening every day. It was easy to believe in absolutes.

Hope springs eternal and all of that gornaw!

It was like another faith. Money would buy the impossible.

Then came depravity.

It was not the same for the Honored Matres. They were, somehow, beyond

depravity. They had come through it; he could see that. But now they were into

something else so far beyond depravity that Teg wondered if he really wanted to

know about it.

The knowledge was there, though, inescapable in his new awareness. Not one of

those people would hesitate an instant before consigning an entire planet to

torture if that meant personal gain. Or if the payoff were some imagined

pleasure. Or if the torture produced even a few more days or hours of living.

What pleased them? What gratified? They were like semuta addicts. Whatever

simulated pleasure for them, they required more of it every time.

And they know this!

How they must rage inside! Caught in such a trap! They had seen it all and

none of it was enough -- not good enough nor evil enough. They had entirely

lost the knack of moderation.

They were dangerous, though. And perhaps he was wrong about one thing: Perhaps

they no longer remembered what it had been like before the awful transformation

of that strange tart-smelling stimulant that painted orange in their eyes.

Memories of memories could become distorted. Every Mentat was sensitized to

this flaw in himself.

"There's the worm!"

It was the communications officer.

Teg swiveled in his chair and looked at the projection, a miniature holo of the

exterior to the southwest. The worm with its two tiny dots of human passengers

was a distant sliver of wriggling movement.

"Bring Odrade in here alone when they arrive," he said. "Sheeana -- that's the

young girl -- will remain behind to help herd that worm into the hold. It will

obey her. Be sure Burzmali is standing ready nearby. We won't have much time

for the transfer of command."

When Odrade entered the command station she was still breathing hard and exuding

the smells of the desert, a compound of melange, flint, and human perspiration.

Teg sat in his chair apparently resting. His eyes remained closed.

Odrade thought she had caught the Bashar in an uncharacteristic attitude of

repose, almost pensive. He opened his eyes then and she saw the change about

which Lucilla had only been able to blurt a small warning -- along with a few

hasty words about the ghola's transformation. What was it that had happened to

Teg? He was almost posing for her, daring her to see it in him. The chin was

firm and held slightly upthrust in his normal attitude of observation. The

narrow face with its webwork of age lines had lost none of its alertness. The

long, thin nose so characteristic of the Corrinos and Atreides in his ancestry

had grown a bit longer with advancing years. But the gray hair remained thick

and that small peak at the forehead centered the observing gaze . . .

On his eyes!

"How did you know to meet us here?" Odrade demanded. "We had no idea where the

worm was taking us."

"There are very few inhabited places here in the meridian desert," he said.

"Gambler's choice. This seemed likely."

Gambler's choice? She knew the Mentat phrase but had never understood it.

Teg lifted himself from his chair. "Take this ship and go to the place you know

best," he said.

Chapter House? She almost said it but thought of the others around her, these

military strangers Teg had assembled. Who were they? Lucilla's brief

explanation did not satisfy.

"We change Taraza's design somewhat," Teg said. "The ghola does not stay. He

must go with you."

She understood. They would need Duncan Idaho's new talents to counter the

whores. He was no longer merely bait for the destruction of Rakis.

"He will not be able to leave the no-ship's concealment, of course," Teg said.

She nodded. Duncan was not shielded from prescient searchers . . . such as the

Guild navigators.

"Bashar!" It was the communications officer. "We've been bleeped by a

satellite!"

"All right, you ground hogs!" Teg shouted. "Everybody outside! Get Burzmali

in here."

A hatch at the rear of the station flew open. Burzmali lunged through.

"Bashar, what are we --"

"No time! Take over!" Teg lifted himself from his command chair and waved for

Burzmali to take it. "Odrade here will tell you where to go." On an impulse

that he knew was partly vindictive, Teg grasped Odrade's left arm, leaned close,

and kissed her cheek. "Do what you must, daughter," he whispered. "That worm

in the hold may soon be the only one in the universe."

Odrade saw it then: Teg knew Taraza's complete design and intended to carry out

his Mother Superior's orders to the very end.

"Do what you must." That said it all.

We are not looking at a new state of matter but at a newly recognized

relationship between consciousness and matter, which provides a more penetrating

insight into the workings of prescience. The oracle shapes a projected inner

universe to produce new external probabilities out of forces that are not

understood. There is no need to understand these forces before using them to

shape the physical universe. Ancient metal workers had no need to understand

the molecular and submolecular complexities of their steel, bronze, copper,

gold, and tin. They invented mystical powers to describe the unknown while they

continued to operate their forges and wield their hammers.

-Mother Superior Taraza, Argument in Council

The ancient structure in which the Sisterhood secreted its Chapter House, its

Archives, and the offices of its most sacrosanct leadership did not just make

sounds in the night. The noises were more like signals. Odrade had learned to

read those signals over her many years here. That particular sound there, that

strained creaking was a wooden beam in the floor not replaced in some eight

hundred years. It contracted in the night to produce those sounds.

She had Taraza's memories to expand on such signals. The memories were not

fully integrated; there had been very little time. Here at night in Taraza's

old working room, Odrade used a few available moments to continue the

integration.

Dar and Tar, one at last.

That was a quite identifiable Taraza comment.

To haunt the Other Memories was to exist on several planes simultaneously, some

of them very deep, but Taraza remained near the surface. Odrade allowed herself

to sink farther into the multiple existences. Presently, she recognized a self

who was currently breathing but remote while others demanded that she plunge

into the all-enfolding visions, everything complete with smells, touches,

emotions -- all of the originals held intact within her own awareness.

It is unsettling to dream another's dreams.

Taraza again.

Taraza who had played such a dangerous game with the future of the entire

Sisterhood hanging in the balance! How carefully she had timed the leaking of

word to the whores that the Tleilaxu had built dangerous abilities into the

ghola. And the attack on the Gammu Keep confirmed that the information had

reached its source. The brutal nature of that attack, though, had warned Taraza

that she had little time. The whores would be sure to assemble forces for the

total destruction of Gammu -- just to kill that one ghola.

So much had depended on Teg.

She saw the Bashar there in her own assemblage of Other Memories: the father

she had never really known.

I didn't know him at the end, either.

It could be weakening to dig into those memories, but she could not escape the

demands of that luring reservoir.

Odrade thought of the Tyrant's words: "The terrible field of my past! Answers

leap up like a frightened flock blackening the sky of my inescapable memories."

Odrade held herself like a swimmer balanced just below the water's surface.

I most likely will be replaced, Odrade thought. I may even be reviled.

Bellonda certainly was not giving easy agreement to the new state of command.

No matter. Survival of the Sisterhood was all that should concern any of them.

Odrade floated up out of the Other Memories and lifted her gaze to look across

the room into the shadowy niche where the bust of a woman could be discerned in

the low light of the room's glowglobes. The bust remained a vague shape in its

shadows but Odrade knew that face well: Chenoeh, guardian symbol of Chapter

House.

"There but for the grace of God . . ."

Every sister who came through the spice agony (as Chenoeh had not) said or

thought that same thing, but what did it really mean? Careful breeding and

careful training produced the successful ones in sufficient numbers. Where was

the hand of God in that? God certainly was not the worm they had brought from

Rakis. Was the presence of God felt only in the successes of the Sisterhood?

I fall prey to the pretensions of my own Missionaria Protectiva!

She knew that these were similar to thoughts and questions that had been heard

in this room on countless occasions. Bootless! Still, she could not bring

herself to remove that guardian bust from the niche where it had reposed for so

long.

I am not superstitious, she told herself. I am not a compulsive person. This

is a matter of tradition. Such things have a value well known to us.

Certainly, no bust of me will ever be so honored.

She thought of Waff and his Face Dancers dead with Miles Teg in the terrible

destruction of Rakis. It did not do to dwell on the bloody attrition being

suffered in the Old Empire. Better to think about the muscles of retribution

being created by the blundering violence of the Honored Matres.

Teg knew!

The recently concluded Council session had subsided in fatigue without firm

conclusions. Odrade counted herself lucky to have diverted attention into a few

immediate concerns dear to them all.

The punishments: Those had occupied them for a time. Historical precedents

fleshed out the Archival analyses to a satisfying form. Those assemblages of

humans who allied themselves with the Honored Matres were in for some shocks.

Ix would certainly overextend itself. They had not the slightest appreciation

of how competition from the Scattering would crush them.

The Guild would be shunted aside and made to pay dearly for its melange and its

machinery. Guild and Ix, thrown together, would fall together.

The Fish Speakers could be mostly ignored. Satellites of Ix, they were already

fading into a past that humans would abandon.

And the Bene Tleilax. Ah, yes, the Tleilaxu. Waff had succumbed to the Honored

Mattes. He had never admitted it but the truth was plain. "Just once and with

one of my own Face Dancers."

Odrade smiled grimly, remembering her father's bitter kiss.

I will have another niche made, she thought. I will commission another bust:

Miles Teg, the Great Heretic!

Lucilla's suspicions about Teg were disquieting, though. Had he been prescient

at last and able to see the no-ships? Well, the Breeding Mistresses could

explore those suspicions.

"We have laagered up!" Bellonda accused.

They all knew the meaning of that word: they had retreated into a fortress

position for the long night of the whores.

Odrade realized she did not much care for Bellonda, the way she laughed

occasionally to expose those wide, blunt teeth.

They had discussed the cell samples from Sheeana for a long time. The "proof of

Siona" was there. She had the ancestry that shielded her from prescience and

could leave the no-ship.

Duncan was an unknown.

Odrade turned her thoughts to the ghola out there in the grounded no-ship.

Lifting herself from the chair, she crossed to the dark window and looked in the

direction of the distant landing field.

Did they dare risk releasing Duncan from the shielding of that ship? The cell

studies said he was a mixture of many Idaho gholas -- some descendant of Siona.

But what of the taint from the original?

No. He must remain confined.

And what of Murbella? -- pregnant Murbella? An Honored Matre dishonored.

"The Tleilaxu intended for me to kill the Imprinter," Duncan said.

"Will you try to kill the whore?" That was Lucilla's question.

"She is not an Imprinter," Duncan said.

The Council had discussed at length the possible nature of the bonding between

Duncan and Murbella. Lucilla maintained there was no bonding at all, that the

two remained wary opponents.

"Best not to risk putting them together."

The sexual prowess of the whores would have to be studied at length, though.

Perhaps a meeting between Duncan and Murbella in the no-ship could be risked.

With careful protective measures, of course.

Lastly, she thought about the worm in the no-ship's hold -- a worm nearing the

moment of its metamorphosis. A small earth-dammed basin filled with melange

awaited that worm. When the moment came, it would be lured out by Sheeana into

the bath of melange and water. The resulting sandtrout could then begin their

long transformation.

You were right, father. It was so simple when you looked at it clearly.

No need to seek a desert planet for the worms. The sandtrout would create their

own habitat for Shai-hulud. It was not pleasant to think of Chapter House

Planet transformed into vast areas of wasteland but it had to be done.

The "Last Will and Testament of Miles Teg," which he had planted in the noship's

submolecular storage systems, could not be discredited. Even Bellonda

agreed to that.

Chapter House required a complete revision of all its historical records. A new

look had been demanded of them by what Teg had seen of the Lost Ones -- the

whores from the Scattering.

"You seldom learn the names of the truly wealthy and powerful. You see only

their spokesmen. The political arena makes a few exceptions to this but does

not reveal the full power structure."

The Mentat philosopher had chewed deep into everything they accepted and what he

disgorged did not agree with Archival dependence upon "our inviolate

summations."

We knew it, Miles, we just never faced up to it. We're all going to be digging

in our Other Memories for the next few generations.

Fixed data, storage systems could not be trusted.

"If you destroy most copies, time will take care of the rest."

How Archives had raged at that telling pronouncement by the Bashar!

"The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical

accounts divert attention from the secret influences around the recorded

events."

That was the one that had brought down Bellonda. She had taken it up on her

own, admitting: "The few histories that escape this restrictive process vanish

into obscurity through obvious processes."

Teg had listed some of the processes: "Destruction of as many copies as

possible, burying the too revealing accounts in ridicule, ignoring them in the

centers of education, insuring that they are not quoted elsewhere and, in some

cases, elimination of the authors."

Not to mention the scapegoat process that brought death to more than one

messenger bearing unwelcome news, Odrade thought. She recalled an ancient ruler

who kept a pikestaff handy with which to kill messengers who brought bad news.

"We have a, good base of information upon which to build a better understanding

of our past," Odrade had argued. "We've always known that what was at stake in

conflicts was the determination of who would control the wealth or its

equivalent."

Maybe it was not a real "noble purpose" but it would do for the time being.

I am avoiding the central issue, she thought.

Something would have to be done about Duncan Idaho and they all knew it.

With a sigh, Odrade summoned a 'thopter and prepared herself for the short trip

to the no-ship.

Duncan's prison was at least comfortable, Odrade thought when she entered it.

This had been the ship commander's quarters lately occupied by Miles Teg. There

were still signs of his presence here -- a small holostat projector revealing a

scene of his home on Lernaeus; the stately old house, the long lawn, the river.

Teg had left a sewing kit behind on a bedside table.

The ghola sat in a sling chair staring at the projection. He looked up

listlessly when Odrade entered.

"You just left him back there to die, didn't you?" Duncan asked.

"We do what we must," she said. "And I obeyed his orders."

"I know why you're here," Duncan said. "And you're not going to change my mind.

I'm not a damned stud for the witches. You understand me?"

Odrade smoothed her robe and sat on the edge of the bed facing Duncan. "Have

you examined the record my father left for us?" she asked.

"Your father?"

"Miles Teg was my father. I commend his last words to you. He was our eyes

there at the end. He had to see the death on Rakis. The 'mind at its

beginning' understood dependencies and key logs."

When Duncan looked puzzled, she explained: "We were trapped too long in the

Tyrant's oracular maze."

She saw how he sat up more alertly, the feline movements that spoke of muscles

well conditioned to attack.

"There is no way you can escape alive from this ship," she said. "You know

why."

"Siona."

"You are a danger to us but we would prefer that you lived a useful life."

"I'm still not going to breed for you, especially not with that little twit from

Rakis."

Odrade smiled, wondering how Sheeana would respond to that description.

"You think it's funny?" Duncan demanded.

"Not really. But we'll still have Murbella's child, of course. I guess that

will have to satisfy us."

"I've been talking to Murbella on the com," Duncan said. "She thinks she's

going to be a Reverend Mother, that you're going to accept her into the Bene

Gesserit."

"Why not? Her cells pass the proof of Siona. I think she will make a superb

Sister."

"Has she really taken you in?"

"You mean, have we failed to observe that she thinks she will go along with us

until she learns our secrets and then she will escape? Oh, we know that,

Duncan."

"You don't think she can get away from you?"

"Once we get them, Duncan, we never really lose them."

"You don't think you lost the Lady Jessica?"

"She came back to us in the end."

"Why did you really come out here to see me?"

"I thought you deserved an explanation of the Mother Superior's design. It was

aimed at the destruction of Rakis, you see. What she really wanted was the

elimination of almost all of the worms."

"Great Gods below! Why?"

"They were an oracular force holding us in bondage. Those pearls of the

Tyrant's awareness magnified that hold. He didn't predict events, he created

them."

Duncan pointed toward the rear of the ship. "But what about . . ."

"That one? It's just one now. By the time it reaches sufficient numbers to be

an influence once more, humankind will have gone its own way beyond him. We'll

be too numerous by then, doing too many different things on our own. No single

force will rule all of our futures completely, never again."

She stood.

When he did not respond, she said: "Within the imposed limits, which I know you

appreciate, please think about the kind of life you want to lead. I promise to

help you in any way I can."

"Why would you do that?"

"Because my ancestors loved you. Because my father loved you."

"Love? You witches can't feel love!"

She stared down at him for almost a minute. The bleached hair was growing out

dark at the roots and curling once more into ringlets, especially at his neck,

she saw.

"I feel what I feel," she said. "And your water is ours, Duncan Idaho."

She saw the Fremen admonition have its effect on him and then turned away and

was passed out of the room by the guards.

Before leaving the ship, she went back to the hold and stared down at the

quiescent worm on its bed of Rakian sand. Her viewport looked down from some

two hundred meters onto the captive. As she looked, she shared a silent laugh

with the increasingly integrated Taraza.

We were right and Schwangyu and her people were wrong. We knew he wanted out.

He had to want that after what he did.

She spoke aloud in a soft whisper, as much for herself as for the nearby

observers stationed there to watch for the moment when metamorphosis began in

that worm.

"We have your language now," she said.

There were no words in the language, only a moving, dancing adaptation to a

moving, dancing universe. You could only speak the language, not translate it.

To know the meaning you had to go through the experience and even then the

meaning changed before your eyes. "Noble purpose" was, after all, an

untranslatable experience. But when she looked down at the rough, heat-immune

hide of that worm from the Rakian desert, Odrade knew what she saw: the visible

evidence of noble purpose.

Softly, she called down to him: "Hey! Old worm! Was this your design?"

There was no answer but then she had not really expected an answer.

Frank Herbert was born in Tacoma, Washington, and educated at the University of

Washington, Seattle. He worked a wide variety of jobs -- including TV

cameraman, radio commentator, oyster diver, jungle survival instructor, lay

analyst, creative writing teacher, reporter and editor of several West Coast

newspapers -- before becoming a full-time writer.

In 1952, Herbert began publishing science fiction with "Looking for Something?"

in Startling Stories. But his true emergence as a writer of major stature did

not occur until 1965, with the publication of Dune. Dune Messiah, Children of

Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune followed,

completing the saga that the Chicago Tribune would call "one of the monuments of

modern science fiction." Herbert is also the author of some twenty other books,

including The Jesus Incident, The Dosadi Experiment, and Destination: Void. He

died in 1986.