“I, the Reverend Mother Ramallo, whose voice speaks as a multitude, say this to you,” the old woman said. “It is fitting that Chani enter the Sayyadina.”
“It is fitting,” the crowd responded.
The old woman nodded, whispered: “I give her the silver skies, the golden desert and its shining rocks, the green fields that will be. I give these to Sayyadina Chani. And lest she forget that she’s servant of us all, to her fall the menial tasks in this Ceremony of the Seed. Let it be as Shai-hulud will have it.” She lifted a brown-stick arm, dropped it.
Jessica, feeling the ceremony close around her with a current that swept her beyond all turning back, glanced once at Paul’s question-filled face, then prepared herself for the ordeal.
“Let the watermasters come forward,” Chani said with only the slightest quaver of uncertainty in her girl-child voice.
Now, Jessica felt herself at the focus of danger, knowing its presence in the watchfulness of the throng, in the silence.
A band of men made its way through a serpentine path opened in the crowd, moving up from the back in pairs. Each pair carried a small skin sack, perhaps twice the size of a human head. The sacks sloshed heavily.
The two leaders deposited their load at Chani’s feet on the ledge and stepped back.
Jessica looked at the sack, then at the men. They had their hoods thrown back, exposing long hair tied in a roll at the base of the neck. The black pits of their eyes stared back at her without wavering.
A furry redolence of cinnamon arose from the sack, wafted across Jessica. The spice? she wondered.
“Is there water?” Chani asked.
The watermaster on the left, a man with a purple scar line across the bridge of his nose, nodded once. “There is water, Sayyadina,” he said, “but we cannot drink of it.”
“Is there seed?” Chani asked.
“There is seed,” the man said.
Chani knelt and put her hands to the sloshing sack. “Blessed is the water and its seed.”
There was familiarity to the rite, and Jessica looked back at the Reverend Mother Ramallo. The old woman’s eyes were closed and she sat hunched over as though asleep.
“Sayyadina Jessica,” Chani said.
Jessica turned to see the girl staring up at her.
“Have you tasted the blessed water?” Chani asked.
Before Jessica could answer, Chani said: “It is not possible that you have tasted the blessed water. You are outworlder and unprivileged.”
A sigh passed through the crowd, a sussuration of robes that made the nape hairs creep on Jessica’s neck.
“The crop was large and the maker has been destroyed,” Chani said. She began unfastening a coiled spout fixed to the top of the sloshing sack.
Now, Jessica felt the sense of danger boiling around her. She glanced at Paul, saw that he was caught up in the mystery of the ritual and had eyes only for Chani.
Has he seen this moment in time? Jessica wondered. She rested a hand on her abdomen, thinking of the unborn daughter there, asking herself: Do I have the right to risk us both?
Chani lifted the spout toward Jessica, said: “Here is the Water of Life, the water that is greater than water—Kan, the water that frees the soul. If you be a Reverend Mother, it opens the universe to you. Let Shai-hulud judge now.”
Jessica felt herself torn between duty to her unborn child and duty to Paul. For Paul, she knew, she should take that spout and drink of the sack’s contents, but as she bent to the proffered spout, her senses told her its peril.
The stuff in the sack had a bitter smell subtly akin to many poisons that she knew, but unlike them, too.
“You must drink it now,” Chani said.
There’s no turning back, Jessica reminded herself. But nothing in all her Bene Gesserit training came into her mind to help her through this instant.
What is it? Jessica asked herself. Liquor? A drug?
She bent over the spout, smelled the esthers of cinnamon, remembering then the drunkenness of Duncan Idaho. Spice liquor? she asked herself. She took the siphon tube in her mouth, pulled up only the most minuscule sip. It tasted of the spice, a faint bite acrid on the tongue.
Chani pressed down on the skin bag. A great gulp of the stuff surged into Jessica’s mouth and before she could help herself, she swallowed it, fighting to retain her calmness and dignity.
“To accept a little death is worse than death itself,” Chani said. She stared at Jessica, waiting.
And Jessica stared back, still holding the spout in her mouth. She tasted the sack’s contents in her nostrils, in the roof of her mouth, in her cheeks, in her eyes—a biting sweetness, now.
Cool.
Again, Chani sent the liquid gushing into Jessica’s mouth.
Delicate.
Jessica studied Chani’s face—elfin features—seeing the traces of Liet-Kynes there as yet unfixed by time.
This is a drug they feed me, Jessica told herself.
But it was unlike any other drug of her experience, and Bene Gesserit training included the taste of many drugs.
Chani’s features were so clear, as though outlined in light.
A drug.
Whirling silence settled around Jessica. Every fiber of her body accepted the fact that something profound had happened to it. She felt that she was a conscious mote, smaller than any subatomic particle, yet capable of motion and of sensing her surroundings. Like an abrupt revelation—the curtains whipped away—she realized she had become aware of a psychokinesthetic extension of herself. She was the mote, yet not the mote.
The cavern remained around her—the people. She sensed them: Paul, Chani, Stilgar, the Reverend Mother Ramallo.
Reverend Mother!
At the school there had been rumors that some did not survive the Reverend Mother ordeal, that the drug took them.
Jessica focused her attention on the Reverend Mother Ramallo, aware now that all this was happening in a frozen instant of time—suspended time for her alone.
Why is time suspended? she asked herself. She stared at the frozen expressions around her, seeing a dust mote above Chani’s head, stopped there.
Waiting.
The answer to this instant came like an explosion in her consciousness : her personal time was suspended to save her life.
She focused on the psychokinesthetic extension of herself, looking within, and was confronted immediately with a cellular core, a pit of blackness from which she recoiled.
That is the place where we cannot look, she thought. There is the place the Reverend Mothers are so reluctant to mention—the place where only a Kwisatz Haderach may look.
This realization returned a small measure of confidence, and again she ventured to focus on the psychokinesthetic extension, becoming a mote-self that searched within her for danger.
She found it within the drug she had swallowed.
The stuff was dancing particles within her, its motions so rapid that even frozen time could not stop them. Dancing particles. She began recognizing familiar structures, atomic linkages: a carbon atom here, helical wavering… a glucose molecule. An entire chain of molecules confronted her, and she recognized a protein… a methyl-protein configuration.
Ah-h-h!
It was a soundless mental sigh within her as she saw the nature of the poison.
With her psychokinesthetic probing, she moved into it, shifted an oxygen mote, allowed another carbon mote to link, reattached a linkage of oxygen… hydrogen.
The change spread… faster and faster as the catalyzed reaction opened its surface of contact.
The suspension of time relaxed its hold upon her, and she sensed motion. The tube spout from the sack was touched to her mouth-gently, collecting a drop of moisture.
Chani’s taking the catalyst from my body to change the poison in that sack, Jessica thought. Why?
Someone eased her to a sitting position. She saw the old Reverend Mother Ramallo being brought to sit beside her on the carpeted ledge.
A dry hand touched her neck.
And there was another psychokinesthetic mote within her awareness! Jessica tried to reject it, but the mote swept closer… closer.
They touched!
It was like an ultimate simpatico, being two people at once: not telepathy, but mutual awareness.
With the old Reverend Mother!
But Jessica saw that the Reverend Mother didn’t think of herself as old. An image unfolded before the mutual mind’s eye: a young girl with a dancing spirit and tender humor.
Within the mutual awareness, the young girl said, “Yes, that is how I am.”
Jessica could only accept the words, not respond to them.
“You’ll have it all soon, Jessica,” the inward image said.
This is hallucination, Jessica told herself.
“You know better than that,” the inward image said. “Swiftly now, do not fight me. There isn’t much time. We….” There came a long pause, then: “You should’ve told us you were pregnant!”
Jessica found the voice that talked within the mutual awareness. “Why?”
“This changes both of you! Holy Mother, what have we done?”
Jessica sensed a forced shift in the mutual awareness, saw another mote-presence with the inward eye. The other mote darted wildly here, there, circling. It radiated pure terror.
“You’ll have to be strong,” the old Reverend Mother’s image-presence said. “Be thankful it’s a daughter you carry. This would’ve killed a male fetus. Now… carefully, gently… touch your daughter-presence. Be your daughter-presence. Absorb the fear… soothe… use your courage and your strength… gently now… gently….”
The other whirling mote swept near, and Jessica compelled herself to touch it.
Terror threatened to overwhelm her.
She fought it the only way she knew: “I shall not fear. Fear is the mind killer…. ”
The litany brought a semblance of calm. The other mote lay quiescent against her.
Words won’t work, Jessica told herself.
She reduced herself to basic emotional reactions, radiated love, comfort, a warm snuggling of protection.
The terror receded.
Again, the presence of the old Reverend Mother asserted itself, but now there was a tripling of mutual awareness—two active and one that lay quietly absorbing.
“Time compels me,” the Reverend Mother said within the awareness. “I have much to give you. And I do not know if your daughter can accept all this while remaining sane. But it must be: the needs of the tribe are paramount.”
“What—”
“Remain silent and accept!”
Experiences began to unroll before Jessica. It was like a lecture strip in a subliminal training projector at the Bene Gesserit school… but faster… blindingly faster.
Yet… distinct.
She knew each experience as it happened: there was a lover—virile, bearded, with the Fremen eyes, and Jessica saw his strength and tenderness, all of him in one blink-moment, through the Reverend Mother’s memory.
There was no time now to think of what this might be doing to the daughter fetus, only time to accept and record. The experiences poured in on Jessica—birth, life, death—important matters and unimportant, an outpouring of single-view time.
Why should a fall of sand from a clifftop stick in the memory? she asked herself.
Too late, Jessica saw what was happening: the old woman was dying and, in dying, pouring her experiences into Jessica’s awareness as water is poured into a cup. The other mote faded back into pre-birth awareness as Jessica watched it. And, dying-in-conception, the old Reverend Mother left her life in Jessica’s memory with one last sighing blur of words.
“I’ve been a long time waiting for you,” she said. “Here is my life.”
There it was, encapsuled, all of it.
Even the moment of death.
I am now a Reverend Mother, Jessica realized.
And she knew with a generalized awareness that she had become, in truth, precisely what was meant by a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. The poison drug had transformed her.
This wasn’t exactly how they did it at the Bene Gesserit school, she knew. No one had ever introduced her to the mysteries of it, but she knew.
The end result was the same.
Jessica sensed the daughter-mote still touching her inner awareness, probed it without response.
A terrible sense of loneliness crept through Jessica in the realization of what had happened to her. She saw her own life as a pattern that had slowed and all life around her speeded up so that the dancing interplay became clearer.
The sensation of mote-awareness faded slightly, its intensity easing as her body relaxed from the threat of the poison, but still she felt that other mote, touching it with a sense of guilt at what she had allowed to happen to it.
I did it, my poor, unformed, dear little daughter, I brought you into this universe and exposed your awareness to all its varieties without any defenses.
A tiny outflowing of love-comfort, like a reflection of what she had poured into it, came from the other mote.
Before Jessica could respond, she felt the adab presence of demanding memory. There was something that needed doing. She groped for it, realizing she was being impeded by a muzziness of the changed drug permeating her senses.
I could change that, she thought. I could take away the drug action and make it harmless. But she sensed this would be an error. I’m within a rite of joining.
Then she knew what she had to do.
Jessica opened her eyes, gestured to the watersack now being held above her by Chani.
“It has been blessed,” Jessica said. “Mingle the waters, let the change come to all, that the people may partake and share in the blessing.”
Let the catalyst do its work, she thought. Let the people drink of it and have their awareness of each other heightened for awhile. The drug is safe now… now that a Reverend Mother has changed it.
Still, the demanding memory worked on her, thrusting. There was another thing she had to do, she realized, but the drug made it difficult to focus.
Ah-h-h-h-h … the old Reverend Mother.
“I have met the Reverend Mother Ramallo,” Jessica said. “She is gone, but she remains. Let her memory be honored in the rite.”
Now, where did I get those words? Jessica wondered.
And she realized they came from another memory, the life that had been given to her and now was part of herself. Something about that gift felt incomplete, though.
“Let them have their orgy, ” the other-memory said within her. “They’ve little enough pleasure out of living. Yes, and you and I need this little time to become acquainted before I recede and pour out through your memories. Already, I feel myself being tied to bits of you. Ah-h-h, you’ve a mind filled with interesting things. So many things I’d never imagined.”
And the memory-mind encapsulated within her opened itself to Jessica, permitting a view down a wide corridor to other Reverend Mothers until there seemed no end to them.
Jessica recoiled, fearing she would become lost in an ocean of oneness. Still, the corridor remained, revealing to Jessica that the Fremen culture was far older than she had suspected.
There had been Fremen on Poritrin, she saw, a people grown soft with an easy planet, fair game for Imperial raiders to harvest and plant human colonies on Bela Tegeuse and Salusa Secundus.
Oh, the wailing Jessica sensed in that parting.
Far down the corridor, an image-voice screamed: “They denied us the Hajj!”
Jessica saw the slave cribs on Bela Tegeuse down that inner corridor, saw the weeding out and the selecting that spread men to Rossak and Harmonthep. Scenes of brutal ferocity opened to her like the petals of a terrible flower. And she saw the thread of the past carried by Sayyadina after Sayyadina—first by word of mouth, hidden in the sand chanteys, then refined through their own Reverend Mothers with the discovery of the poison drug on Rossak … an
d now developed to subtle strength on Arrakis in the discovery of the Water of Life.
Far down the inner corridor, another voice screamed: “Never to forgive! Never to forget!”
But Jessica’s attention was focused on the revelation of the Water of Life, seeing its source: the liquid exhalation of a dying sandworm, a maker. And as she saw the killing of it in her new memory, she suppressed a gasp.
The creature was drowned!
“Mother, are you all right?”
Paul’s voice intruded on her, and Jessica struggled out of the inner awareness to stare up at him, conscious of duty to him, but resenting his presence.
I’m like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness—until one day the ability to feel is forced into them.
The thought hung in her mind, an enclosing awareness.
And I say: “Look! I have no hands!” But the people all around me say: “What are hands?”
“Are you all right?” Paul repeated.
“Yes.”
“Is this all right for me to drink?” He gestured to the sack in Chani’s hands. “They want me to drink it.”
She heard the hidden meaning in his words, realized he had detected the poison in the original, unchanged substance, that he was concerned for her. It occurred to Jessica then to wonder about the limits of Paul’s prescience. His question revealed much to her.
“You may drink it,” she said. “It has been changed.” And she looked beyond him to see Stilgar staring down at her, the dark-dark eyes studying.
“Now, we know you cannot be false,” he said.
She sensed hidden meaning here, too, but the muzziness of the drug was overpowering her senses. How warm it was and soothing. How beneficent these Fremen to bring her into the fold of such companionship.
Paul saw the drug take hold of his mother.
He searched his memory—the fixed past, the flux-lines of the possible futures. It was like scanning through arrested instants of time, disconcerting to the lens of the inner eye. The fragments were difficult to understand when snatched out of the flux.
Dune dc-1 Page 45