ChapterHouse: Dune dc-6

by Frank Herbert

  "Mind at its beginning," Duncan called it. "Awakening of your True Self. I felt I had been plunged into a magic universe. My awareness was a circle and then a globe. Arbitrary forms became transient. The table was not a table. Then I fell into a trance - everything around me had a shimmering quality. Nothing was real. This passed and I felt I had lost the one reality. My table was a table once more. "

  She had studied the Bene Gesserit manual "On Awakening a Ghola's Original Memories." Duncan was diverging from those instructions. Why?

  He left the child and approached Murbella.

  "I have to talk to Sheeana," he said as he passed her. "There's got to be a better way."

  ***

  Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.

  - Mentat Fixe (adacto)

  Idaho, seated alone at his console, encountered an entry he had stored in Shipsystems during his first days of confinement, and found himself dumped (he applied the word later) into attitudes and sensory awareness of that earlier time. It no longer was afternoon of a frustrating day in the no-ship. He was back there, stretched between then and now the way serial ghola lives linked this incarnation to his original birth.

  Immediately, he saw what he had come to call "the net" and the elderly couple defined by criss-crossed lines, bodies visible through a shimmering of jeweled ropes - green, blue, gold, and a silver so brilliant it made his eyes ache.

  He sensed godlike stability in these people, but something common about them. The word ordinary came to mind. The by-now-familiar garden landscape stretched out behind them: floral bushes (roses, he thought), rolling lawns, tall trees.

  The couple stared back at him with an intensity that made Idaho feel naked.

  New power in the vision! It no longer was confined to the Great Hold, an increasingly compulsive magnet drawing him down there so frequently he knew the watchdogs were alerted.

  Is he another Kwisatz Haderach?

  There was a level of suspicion the Bene Gesserit could achieve that would kill him if it grew. And they were watching him now! Questions, worried speculations. Despite this, he could not turn away from the vision.

  Why did that elderly couple look so familiar? Someone from his past? Family?

  Mentat riffling of his memories produced nothing to fit the speculation. Round faces. Abbreviated chins. Fat wrinkles at the jowls. Dark eyes. The net obscured their color. The woman wore a long blue and green dress that concealed her feet. A white apron stained with green covered the dress from ample bosom to just below her waist. Garden tools dangled from apron loops. She carried a trowel in her left hand. Her hair was gray. Wisps of it had escaped a confining green scarf and blew around her eyes, emphasizing laughter lines there. She appeared... grandmotherly.

  The man suited her as though created by the same artist as a perfect match. Bib overalls over a mounded stomach. No hat. Those same dark eyes with reflections twinkling in them. A brush of close-cropped wiry gray hair.

  He had the most benign expression Idaho had ever seen. Up-curved smile creases at the corners of his mouth. He held a small shovel in his left hand, and on his extended right palm he balanced what appeared to be a small metal ball. The ball emitted a piercing whistle that made Idaho clap his hands over his ears. This did not stop the sound. It faded away of itself. He lowered his hands.

  Reassuring faces. That thought aroused Idaho's suspicions because now he recognized the familiarity. They looked somewhat like Face Dancers, even to the pug noses.

  He leaned forward but the vision kept its distance. "Face Dancers," he whispered.

  Net and elderly couple vanished.

  They were replaced by Murbella in practice-floor leotards of glistening ebony. He had to reach out and touch her before he could believe she really stood there.

  "Duncan? What is it? You're all sweaty."

  "I... think it's something the damned Tleilaxu planted in me. I keep seeing... I think they're Face Dancers. They... they look at me and just now... a whistle. It hurt."

  She glanced up at the comeyes but did not appear worried. This was something the Sisters could know without it presenting immediate dangers... except possibly to Scytale.

  She sank to her haunches beside him and put a hand on his arm. "Something they did to your body in the tanks?"

  "No!"

  "But you said..."

  "My body's not just a piece of new baggage for this trip. It has all of the chemistry and substance I ever had. It's my mind that's different."

  That worried her. She knew the Bene Gesserit concern over wild talents. "Damn that Scytale!"

  "I'll find it," he said.

  He closed his eyes and heard Murbella stand. Her hand went away from his arm.

  "Maybe you shouldn't do that, Duncan."

  She sounded far away.

  Memory. Where did they hide the secret thing? Deep in the original cells? Until this moment, he had thought of his memory as a Mentat tool. He could call up his own images from long-ago moments in front of mirrors. Close up, examining an age wrinkle. Looking at a woman behind him - two faces in the mirror and his face full of questions.

  Faces. A succession of masks, different views of this person he called myself. Slightly imbalanced faces. Hair sometimes gray, sometimes the jet karakul of his current life. Sometimes humorous, sometimes grave and seeking inward for wisdom to meet a new day. Somewhere in all of that lay a consciousness that observed and deliberated. Someone who made choices. The Tleilaxu had tampered with that.

  Idaho felt his blood pumping hard and knew danger was present. This was what he was intended to experience... but not by the Tleilaxu. He had been born with it.

  This is what it means to be alive.

  No memory from his other lives, nothing the Tleilaxu had done to him, none of that changed his deepest awareness one whit.

  He opened his eyes. Murbella still stood near but her expression was veiled. So that's how she will look as a Reverend Mother.

  He did not like this change in her.

  "What happens if the Bene Gesserit fail?" he asked.

  When she did not reply, he nodded. Yes. That's the worst assumption. The Sisterhood down history's sewerpipe. And you don't want that, my beloved.

  He could see it in her face when she turned and left him.

  Looking up at the comeyes, he said: "Dar. I must talk to you, Dar."

  No response from any of the mechanisms around him. He had not expected one. Still, he knew he could talk to her and she would have to listen.

  "I've been coining at our problem from the other direction," he said. And he imagined the busy whirring of recorders as they spun the sounds of his voice into ridulian crystals. "I've been getting into the minds of Honored Matres. I know I've done it. Murbella resonates."

  That would alert them. He had an Honored Matre of his own. But had was not the proper word. He did not have Murbella. Not even in bed. They had each other. Matched the way those people in his vision appeared to be matched. Was that what he saw there? Two older people sexually trained by Honored Matres?

  "I look at another issue now," he said. "How to overcome the Bene Gesserit."

  That threw down the gauntlet.

  "Episodes," he said. A word Odrade was fond of using.

  "That's how we have to see what's happening to us. Little episodes. Even the worst-case assumption has to be screened against that background. The Scattering has a magnitude that dwarfs anything we do."

  There! That demonstrated his value to the Sisters. It put Honored Matres in a better perspective. They were back here in the Old Empire. Fellow dwarves. He knew Odrade would see it. Bell would make her see it.

  Somewhere out there in the Infinite Universe, a jury had brought in a verdict against Honored Matres. Law and its managers had n
ot prevailed for the hunters. He suspected that his vision had shown him two of the jurors. And if they were Face Dancers, they were not Scytale's Face Dancers. Those two people behind the shimmering net belonged to no one but themselves.

  ***

  Major flaws in government arise from a fear of making radical internal changes even though a need is clearly seen.

  - Darwi Odrade

  For Odrade, the first melange of the morning was always different. Her flesh responded like a starveling who clutched at sweet fruit. Then followed the slow, penetrating and painful restoration.

  This was the fearful thing about melange addiction.

  She stood at the window of her sleeping chamber waiting for the effect to run its course. Weather Control, she noted, had achieved another morning rain. The landscape was washed clean, everything immersed in a romantic haze, all edges blurred and reduced to essences like old memories. She opened the window. Damp cold air blew across her face, drawing recollections around her the way one put on a familiar garment.

  She inhaled deeply. Smells after a rain! She remembered the essentials of life amplified and smoothed by falling water but these rains were different. They left a flinty aftersmell she could taste. Odrade did not like it. The message was not of things washed clean but of life resentful, wanting all rain stopped and locked away. This rain no longer gentled and brought fullness. It carried inescapable awareness of change.

  Odrade closed the window. At once, she was back in the familiar odors of her quarters, and that constant smell of shere from the metering implants required of everyone who knew the location of Chapterhouse. She heard Streggi enter, the slip-slip sounds of the desert map being changed.

  An efficient sound in Streggi's movements. Weeks of close association had confirmed Odrade's first judgment. Reliable. Not brilliant but supremely sensitive to Mother Superior's needs. Look how quietly she moved. Transfer Streggi's sensitivity to the needs of young Teg and they had his required height and mobility. A horse? Much more.

  Odrade's melange assimilation reached its peak and subsided. Streggi's reflection in the window showed her waiting for assignment. She knew these moments were given over to the spice. At her stage, she would be looking forward to the day when she entered this mysterious enhancement.

  I wish her well of it.

  Most Reverend Mothers followed the teaching and seldom thought of their spice as addiction. Odrade knew it every morning for what it was. You took your spice during the day as your body demanded, following a pattern of early training: dosage minimal, just enough to whet the metabolic system and drive it into peak performance. Biological necessities meshed more smoothly with melange. Food tasted better. Barring accident or fatal assault, you lived much longer than you could without it. But you were addicted.

  Her body restored, Odrade blinked and considered Streggi. Curiosity about the morning's long ritual was plain in her. Speaking to Streggi's reflection in the window, Odrade said: "Have you learned about melange withdrawal?"

  "Yes, Mother Superior."

  Despite warnings to keep awareness of addiction low key, it was never more than an eyeblink away from Odrade and she felt the accumulated resentments. Mental preparations as an acolyte (firmly impressed in the Agony) had been eroded by Other Memory and accumulations of time. The admonition: "Withdrawal removes an essential of your life and, if it occurs in late middle age, can kill you." How little that meant now.

  "Withdrawal has intense meaning for me," Odrade said. "I am one of those for whom the morning melange is painful. I'm sure they told you this happens."

  "I'm sorry, Mother Superior."

  Odrade studied the map. It showed a longer finger of desert thrusting northward and a pronounced widening of drylands to the southeast of Central where Sheeana had her station. Presently, Odrade returned her attention to Streggi, who was watching Mother Superior with new interest.

  Brought up short by thoughts of the spice's darker side!

  "The uniqueness of melange is seldom considered in our age," Odrade said. "All of the old narcotics in which humans have indulged possess a remarkable factor in common - all except the spice. They all brought shorter life and pain."

  "We were told, Mother Superior."

  "But you probably were not told that a fact of governance could be obscured by our concern with Honored Matres. There's an energy greed in governments (yes, even in ours) that can dump you into a trap. If you serve me, you will feel it in your guts because every morning you will watch me suffer. Let knowledge of it sink into you, this deadly trap. Don't become uncaring pushers, caught in a system that displaces life with careless death as Honored Matres do. Remember: Acceptable narcotics can be taxed to pay salaries or otherwise create jobs for uncaring functionaries."

  Streggi was puzzled. "But melange extends our lives, increases health and arouses appetites for -"

  She was stopped by Odrade's scowl.

  Right out of the Acolyte Manual!

  "It has this other side, Streggi, and you see it in me. The Acolyte Manual does not lie. But melange is a narcotic and we are addicted. "

  " I know it's not gentle with everyone, Mother Superior. But you said Honored Matres don't use it."

  "The substitute they employ replaces melange with few benefits except to prevent withdrawal agonies and death. It is parallel addictive."

  "And the captive?"

  "Murbella used it and now she uses melange. They are interchangeable. Interesting?"

  "I... suppose we will learn more of this. I notice, Mother Superior, that you never call them whores."

  "As acolytes do? Ahh, Streggi, Bellonda has been a bad influence. Oh, I recognize the pressures." As Streggi started to protest. "Acolytes feel the threat. They look at Chapterhouse and think of it as their fortress for the long night of the whores."

  "Something like that, Mother Superior." Extremely hesitant.

  "Streggi, this planet is only another temporary place. Today we go south and impress that upon you. Find Tamalane, please, and tell her to make the arrangements we discussed for our visit to Sheeana. Speak to no one else about it."

  "Yes, Mother Superior. Do you mean I will accompany you?"

  "I want you by my side. Tell the one you are training that she now has full charge of my map."

  As Streggi left, Odrade thought of Sheeana and Idaho. She wants to talk to him and he wants to talk to her.

  Comeye analysis noted that these two sometimes conversed by hand-signals while hiding most of the movements with their bodies. It had the look of an old Atreides battle language. Odrade recognized some of it but not enough to determine content. Bellonda wanted an explanation from Sheeana. "Secrets!" Odrade was more cautious. "Let it go a bit. Perhaps something interesting will come of it."

  What does Sheeana want?

  Whatever Duncan had in mind it concerned Teg. Creating the pain required for Teg to recover his original memories went against Duncan's grain.

  Odrade had noted this when she interrupted Duncan at his console yesterday.

  "You're late, Dar." Not looking up from whatever it was he did there. Late? It was early evening.

  He had been calling her Dar frequently for several years, a goad, a reminder that he resented his fishtank existence. The goad irritated Bellonda, who argued against "his damned familiarities." He called Bellonda "Bell," of course. Duncan was generous with his needle.

  Remembering this, Odrade paused before entering her workroom. Duncan had slammed a fist onto the counter beside his console. "There's got to be a better way for Teg!"

  A better way? What does he have in mind?

  Movement down the corridor beyond the workroom brought her out of this reflection. Streggi returning from Tamalane. Streggi entered the Acolyte Ready Room. Giving the word to her replacement on the desert map.

  A stack of Archival records waited on Odrade's table. Bellonda! Odrade stared at the pile. No matter how much she tried to delegate there was always this organized residue that her councillors insiste
d only Mother Superior could handle. Much of this new lot came from Bellonda's demand for "suggestions and analyses."

  Odrade touched her console. "Bell!"

  The voice of an Archives clerk responded: "Mother Superior?"

  "Get Bell up here! I want her in front of me as fast as her fat legs can move!"

  It was less than a minute. Bellonda stood in front of the worktable like a chastened acolyte. They all knew that tone in Mother Superior's voice.

  Odrade touched the stack on her table and jerked her hand back as though shocked. "What in the name of Shaitan is all of that?"

  "We judged it significant."

  "You think I have to see everything and anything? Where's the keynoting? This is sloppy work, Bell! I'm not stupid and neither are you. But this... in the face of this..."

  "I delegate as much as -"

  "Delegate? Look at this! Which must I see and which may I delegate? Not one keynote!"

  "I'll see that it's corrected immediately."

  "Indeed you will, Bell. Because Tam and I are going south today, an unannounced inspection tour and a visit with Sheeana. And while I'm gone, you will sit in my chair. See how you like this daily deluge!"

  "Will you be out of touch?"

  "I'll have a lightline and Ear-C at all times."

  Bellonda breathed easier.

  " I suggest, Bell, that you get back to Archives and put someone in charge who will take responsibility. I'm damned if you're not beginning to act like bureaucrats. Covering your asses!"

  "Real boats rock, Dar."

  Was that Bell attempting humor? All was not lost!

  Odrade waved a hand over her projector and there was Tamalane in the Transport Hall. "Tam?"

  "Yes?" Without turning from an assignment list.

  "How soon can we leave?"

  "About two hours."

  "Call me when you're ready. Oh, and Streggi goes with us. Make room for her." Odrade blanked the projection before Tamalane could respond.