ChapterHouse: Dune dc-6

by Frank Herbert

  There were things she should be doing, Odrade knew. Tam and Bell were not the only sources of Mother Superior's concerns.

  Sixteen planets remaining to us... and that includes Buzzell, definitely a place in peril. Only sixteen! She pushed that thought aside. No time for it.

  Murbella. Should I call her and... No. That can wait. The new Board of Proctors? Let Bell deal with that. Community disbandings?

  Siphoning personnel into a new Scattering had forced consolidations. Staying ahead of the desert! It was depressing and she did not feel she could face it today. I'm always fidgety before a trip.

  Abruptly, Odrade fled the workroom and went stalking the corridors, looking into how her charges were performing, pausing in doorways, noting what the students read, how they behaved in their everlasting prana-bindu exercises.

  "What are you reading there?" demanded of a young second-stage acolyte at a projector in a semi-darkened room.

  "The diaries of Tolstoy, Mother Superior."

  That knowing look in the acolyte's eyes said: "Do you have his words directly in Other Memory?" The question was right there on the edge of the girl's tongue! They were always trying such petty gambits when they caught her alone.

  "Tolstoy was a family name!" Odrade snapped. "By your mention of diaries, I presume you refer to Count Leo Nikolayevich."

  "Yes, Mother Superior." Abashedly aware of censure.

  Softening, Odrade threw a quotation at the girl: " 'I am not a river, I am a net.' He spoke those words at Yasnaya Polyana when he was only twelve. You'll not find them in his diaries but they are probably the most significant words he ever uttered."

  Odrade turned away before the acolyte could thank her. Always teaching!

  She wandered down to the main kitchens then and inspected them, tracing inner edges of racked pots for grease, noting the cautious way even the teaching chef observed her progress.

  The kitchen was steamy with good smells from lunch preparations. There was a restorative sound of chopping and stirring but the usual banter stopped at her entrance.

  She went around the long counter with its busy cooks to the teaching chef's raised platform. He was a great beefy man with prominent cheekbones, his face as florid as the meats over which he ministered. Odrade had no doubts he was one of history's great chefs. His name suited him: Placido Salat. He was assured of a warm place in her thoughts for several reasons, including the fact that he had trained her personal chef. Important visitors in the days before Honored Matres had received a kitchen tour and a taste of specialties.

  "May I introduce our senior chef, Placido Salat?"

  His beef placido (lower case his choice) was the envy of many. Almost raw and served with an herbed and spicy mustard sauce that did not obscure the meat.

  Odrade thought the dish too exotic but never judged it aloud.

  When she had Salat's full attention (after a slight interruption to correct a sauce) Odrade said: "I'm hungry for something special, Placido."

  He recognized the opening. This was how she always began a request for her "special dish."

  "Perhaps an oyster stew," he suggested.

  It's a dance, Odrade thought. They both knew what she wanted.

  "Excellent!" she agreed and went into the required performance. "But it must be treated gently, Placido, the oysters not overcooked. Some of our own powdered dry celery in the broth."

  "And perhaps a bit of paprika?"

  "I always prefer it that way. Be extremely careful with the melange. A breath of it and no more."

  "Of course, Mother Superior!" Eyes rolling in horror at the thought he might use too much melange. "So easy for the spice to dominate."

  "Cook the oysters in clam nectar, Placido. I would prefer you watch over them yourself, stirring gently until the edges of the oysters just start to curl."

  "Not a second longer, Mother Superior."

  "Heat some quite creamy milk on the side. Don't boil it!"

  Placido displayed astonishment that she might suspect him of boiling the milk for her oyster stew.

  "A small pat of butter in the serving bowl," Odrade said. "Pour the combined broth over it."

  "No sherry?"

  "How glad I am that you are taking personal charge of my special dish, Placido. I forgot the sherry." (Mother Superior never forgot anything and they all knew it but this was a required step in the dance.) "Three ounces of sherry in the cooking broth," he said.

  "Heat it to get rid of the alcohol."

  "Of course! But we must not bruise the flavors. Would you like croutons or saltines?"

  "Croutons, please."

  Seated at an alcove table, Odrade ate two bowls of oyster stew, remembering how Sea Child had savored it. Papa had introduced her to this dish when she was barely capable of conveying spoon to mouth. He had made the stew himself, his own specialty. Odrade had taught it to Salat.

  She complimented Salat on the wine.

  "I particularly enjoyed your choice of a chablis for accompaniment."

  "A flinty chablis with a sharp edge on it, Mother Superior. One of our better vintages. It sets off the oyster flavors admirably."

  Tamalane found her in the alcove. They always knew where to find Mother Superior when they wanted her.

  "We are ready." Was that displeasure on Tam's face?

  "Where will we stop tonight?"

  "Eldio."

  Odrade smiled. She liked Eldio.

  Tam catering to me because I'm in a critical mood? Perhaps we have the makings of a small diversion.

  Following Tamalane to the transport docks, Odrade thought how characteristic it was that the older woman preferred to travel by tube. Surface trips annoyed her. "Who wants to waste time at my age?"

  Odrade disliked tubes for personal transport. You were so closed in and helpless! She preferred surface or air and used tubes only when speed was urgent. She had no hesitation about using smaller tubes for chits and notes. Notes don't care just as long as they get there.

  This thought always made her conscious of the network that adjusted to her movements wherever she went.

  Somewhere in the heart of things (there was always a "heart of things") an automated system routed communications and made sure (most of the time) that important missives arrived where addressed.

  When Private Dispatch (they all called it PD) was not needed, stat or viz was available along scrambled sorters and lightlines. Off-planet was another matter, especially in these hunted times. Safest to send a Reverend Mother with memorized message or distrans implant. Every messenger took heavier doses of shere these days. T-probes could read even a dead mind not guarded by shere. Every off-planet message was encrypted but an enemy might hit on the one-time cover concealing it. Great risk off-planet. Perhaps that was why the Rabbi remained silent.

  Now why am I thinking such things at this moment?

  "No word yet from Dortujla?" she asked as Tamalane prepared to enter the Dispatch roundelay where the others in their party waited. So many people. Why so many?

  Odrade saw Streggi up ahead at the edge of the dock talking to a Communications acolyte. There were at least six other people from Communications nearby.

  Tamalane turned in obvious pique. "Dortujla! We have all said we will notify you the instant we hear!"

  "I was just asking, Tam. Just asking."

  Meekly, Odrade followed Tamalane into Dispatch. I should put a monitor on my mind and question everything that rises there. Mental intrusions always had good reason behind them. That was the Bene Gesserit way, as Bellonda often reminded her.

  Odrade felt surprise at herself then, realizing she was more than a little sick of Bene Gesserit ways.

  Let Bell worry about such things for a change!

  This was a time for floating free, for responding like a will o' the wisp to the currents moving around her.

  Sea Child knew about currents.

  ***

  Time does not count itself. You have only to look at a circle and this is apparent.
>
  - Leto II (The Tyrant)

  "Look! Look what we have come to!" the Rabbi wailed. He sat cross-legged on the cold curved floor with his shawl pulled up over his head and almost concealing his face.

  The room around him was gloomy and resonating with small machinery sounds that made him feel weak. If those sounds should stop!

  Rebecca stood in front of him, hands on her hips, a look of weary frustration on her face.

  "Do not stand there like that!" the Rabbi commanded. He peered up at her from beneath the shawl.

  "If you despair, then are we not lost?" she asked.

  The sound of her voice angered him and he was a moment putting this unwanted emotion aside.

  She dares to instruct me? But was it not said by wiser men that knowledge can come from a weed? A great shuddering sigh shook him and he dropped the shawl to his shoulders. Rebecca helped him stand.

  "A no-chamber," the Rabbi muttered. "In here, we hide from..." His gaze searched upward at a dark ceiling. "Better left unspoken even here."

  "We hide from the unspeakable," Rebecca said.

  "The door cannot even be left open at Passover," he said. "How will the Stranger enter?"

  "Some strangers we do not want," she said.

  "Rebecca." He bowed his head. "You are more than a trial and a problem. This little cell of Secret Israel shares your exile because we understand that -"

  "Stop saying that! You understand nothing of what has happened to me. My problem?" She leaned close to him. "It is to remain human while in contact with all of those past lives."

  The Rabbi recoiled.

  "So you are no longer one of us? Are you a Bene Gesserit then?"

  "You will know when I'm Bene Gesserit. You will see me looking at myself as I look at myself."

  His brows drew down in a scowl. "What are you saying?"

  "What does a mirror look at, Rabbi?"

  "Hmmmmph! Riddles now." But a faint smile twitched at his mouth. A look of determination returned to his eyes. He stared around him at the room. There were eight of them here - more than this space should hold. A no-chamber! It had been assembled painstakingly with smuggled bits and pieces. So small. Twelve and a half meters long. He had measured it himself. A shape like an ancient barrel laid on its side, oval in cross section and with half-globe closures at the ends. The ceiling was no more than a meter above his head. The widest point here at the center was only five meters and the curve of floor and ceiling made it seem even narrower. Dried food and recycled water. That was what they must live on and for how long? One SY maybe if they were not found. He did not trust the security of this device. Those peculiar sounds in the machinery.

  It had been late in the day when they crept into this hole. Darkness up there now for sure. And where were the rest of his people? Fled to whatever sanctuary they could find, drawing on old debts and honorable commitments for past services. Some would survive. Perhaps they would survive better than this remnant in here.

  The entrance to the no-chamber lay concealed beneath an ash pit with a free-standing chimney beside it. The reinforcing metal of the chimney contained threads of ridulian crystal to relay exterior scenes into this place. Ashes! The room still smelled of burned things and it already had begun to take on a sewer stink from the small recycling chamber. What a euphemism for a toilet!

  Someone came up behind the Rabbi. "The searchers are leaving. Lucky we were warned in time."

  It was Joshua, the one who had built this chamber. He was a short, slender man with a sharply triangular face narrowing to a thin chin. Dark hair swept over his broad forehead. He had widely spaced brown eyes that looked out at his world with a brooding inwardness the Rabbi did not trust. He looks too young to know so much about these things.

  "So they are leaving," the Rabbi said. "They will be back. You will not think us lucky then."

  "They will not guess we hid so near the farm," Rebecca said. "The searchers were mostly looting."

  "Listen to the Bene Gesserit," the Rabbi said.

  "Rabbi." What a chiding sound in Joshua's voice! "Have I not heard you say many times that the blessed ones are they who hide the flaws of others even from themselves?"

  "Everybody's a teacher now!" the Rabbi said. "But who can tell us what will happen next?"

  He had to admit the truth of Joshua's words, though. It is the anguish of our flight that troubles me. Our little diaspora. But we do not scatter from Babylon. We hide in a... a cyclone cellar!

  This thought restored him. Cyclones pass.

  "Who is in charge of the food?" he asked. "We must ration ourselves from the start."

  Rebecca heaved a sigh of relief. The Rabbi was at his worst in the wide oscillations - too emotional or too intellectual. He had himself in hand once more. He would become intellectual next. That would have to be dampened, too. Bene Gesserit awareness gave her a new view of the people around her. Our Jewish susceptibility. Look at the intellectuals!

  It was a thought peculiar to the Sisterhood. The drawbacks of anyone placing considerable reliance on intellectual achievements were large. She could not deny all of that evidence from the Lampadas horde. Speaker paraded it for her whenever she wavered.

  Rebecca had come almost to enjoy the pursuit of memory fancies, as she thought of them. Knowing earlier times forced her to deny her own earlier times. She had been required to believe so many things she now knew were nonsense. Myths and chimera, impulses of extremely childish behavior.

  "Our gods should mature as we mature."

  Rebecca suppressed a smile. Speaker did that to her often - a little nudge in the ribs from someone who knew you would appreciate it.

  Joshua had gone back to his instruments. She saw that someone was reviewing the catalogue of food stores. The Rabbi watched this with his normal intensity. Others had rolled themselves into blankets and were sleeping on the cots in the darkened end of the chamber. Seeing all of this, Rebecca knew what her function must be. Keep us from boredom.

  "The games master?"

  Unless you have something better to suggest, don't try to tell me about my own people, Speaker.

  Whatever else she might say about these inner conversations, there was no doubt that all of the pieces were connected - the past with this room, this room with her projections of consequences. And that was a great gift from the Bene Gesserit. Do not think of "The Future." Predestination? Then what happens to the freedom you are given at birth?

  Rebecca looked at her own birth in a new light. It had embarked her on movement toward an unknown destiny. Fraught with unseen perils and joys. So they had come around a bend in the river and found attackers. The next bend might reveal a cataract or a stretch of peaceful beauty. And here lay the magical enticement of prescience, the lure to which Muad'Dib and his Tyrant son had succumbed. The oracle knows what is to come! The horde of Lampadas had taught her not to seek oracles. The known could beleaguer her more than the unknown. The sweetness of the new lay in its surprises. Could the Rabbi see it?

  "Who will tell us what happens next?" he asks.

  Is that what you want, Rabbi? You will not like what you hear. I guarantee it. From the moment the oracle speaks your future becomes identical to your past. How you would wail in your boredom. Nothing new, not ever. Everything old in that one instant of revelation.

  "But this is not what I wanted!" I can hear you saying it.

  No brutality, no savagery, no quiet happiness nor exploding joy can come upon you unexpectedly. Like a runaway tube train in its wormhole, your life will speed through to its final moment of confrontation. Like a moth in the car you will beat your wings against the sides and ask Fate to let you out. "Let the tube undergo a magical change of direction. Let something new happen! Don't let the terrible things I have seen come to pass!"

  Abruptly, she saw that this must have been Muad'Dib's travail. To whom had he uttered his prayers?

  "Rebecca!" It was the Rabbi calling her.

  She went to where he stood beside Joshua now, looking
at the dark world outside of their chamber as it was revealed in the small projection above Joshua's instruments.

  "There is a storm coming," the Rabbi said. "Joshua thinks it will make a cement of the ash pit."

  "That is good," she said. "It is why we built here and left the cover off the pit when we entered."

  "But how do we get out?"

  "We have tools for that," she said. "And even without tools, there's always our hands."

  ***

  A major concept guides the Missionaria Protectiva: Purposeful instruction of the masses. This is firmly seated in our belief that the aim of argument should be to change the nature of truth. In such matters, we prefer the use of power rather than force.

  - The Coda

  To Duncan Idaho, life in the no-ship had taken on the air of a peculiar game since the advent of his vision and insights into Honored Matre behavior. Entry of Teg into the game was a deceptive move, not just the introduction of another player.

  He stood beside his console this morning and recognized elements in this game parallel to his own ghola childhood at the Bene Gesserit Keep on Gammu with the aging Bashar as weapons master-guardian.

  Education. That had been a primary concern then as it was now. And the guards, mostly unobtrusive in the no-ship but always there as they had been on Gammu. Or their spy devices present, artfully camouflaged and blended into the decor. He had become an adept at evading them on Gammu. Here, with Sheeana's help, he had raised evasion to a fine art.

  Activity around him was reduced to low background. Guards carried no weapons. But they were mostly Reverend Mothers with a few senior acolytes. They would not believe they needed weapons.

  Some things in the no-ship contributed to an illusion of freedom, chiefly its size and complexity. The ship was large, how large he could not determine but he had access to many floors and to corridors that ran for more than a thousand paces.

  Tubes and tunnels, access piping that conveyed him in suspensor pods, dropchutes and lifts, conventional hallways and wide corridors with hatches that hissed open at a touch (or remained sealed: Forbidden!) - all of it was a place to lock in memory, becoming there his own turf, private to him in a way far different from what it was to guards.