Not difficult to recall herself as she had been: a slender, dark-skinned child, streaked brown hair. Melange hunter (because that was a task for children) running into open desert with childhood companions. How dear it felt in memory.
But memory had its darker side. Focusing attention into the nostrils, a girl detected intense odors--a pre-spice mass!
The Blow!
Melange explosion brought Shaitan. No sandworm could resist a spice blow in its territory.
You ate it all, Tyrant, that miserable collection of shacks and hovels we called "home" and all of my friends and family. Why did you spare me?
What a rage had shaken that slender child. Everything she loved taken by a giant worm that refused her attempts to sacrifice herself in its flames and carried her into the hands of Rakian priests, thence to the Bene Gesserit.
"She talks to the worms and they spare her."
"They who spared me are not spared by me." That was what she had told Odrade.
And now Odrade knows what I must do. You cannot suppress the wild thing, Dar. I dare call you Dar now that you are within me.
No response.
Was there a pearl of Leto II's awareness in each of the new sandworms? Her Fremen ancestors insisted on it.
Someone handed her a sandwich. Walli, the senior acolyte assistant who had assumed command of Desert Watch.
At my insistence when Odrade elevated me to the Council. But not just because Walli learned my immunity to Honored Matre sexual bonding. And not because she is sensitive to my needs. We speak a secret language, Walli and I.
Walli's large eyes no longer were entrances to her soul. They were filmed barriers giving evidence she already knew how to block probing stares; a light blue pigmentation that soon would be all blue if she survived the Agony. Almost albino and a questionable genetic line for breeding. Walli's skin reinforced this judgment: pale and freckled. A skin you saw as a surface transparency. You did not focus on the skin itself but on what lay beneath: pink, blood-suffused flesh unprotected from a desert sun. Only here in the shade could Walli expose that sensitive surface to questioning eyes.
Why this one in command over us?
Because I trust her best to do what must be done.
Sheeana ate the sandwich absently while she returned her attention to the sandscape. The whole planet thus one day. Another Dune? No ... similar but different. How many such places are we creating in an infinite universe? Senseless question.
Desert vagary placed a small black dot in the distance. Sheeana squinted. Ornithopter. It grew slowly larger and then smaller. Quartering the sand. Inspecting.
What are we really creating here?
When she looked at encroaching dunes, she sensed hubris.
Look upon my works, tiny human, and despair.
But we did this, my Sisters and I.
Did you?
"I can feel a new dryness in the heat," Walli said.
Sheeana agreed. No need to speak. She went to the large worktable while she still had daylight to study the topomap spread out there: little flags sticking in it, green thread on pushpins just as she had designed it.
Odrade had asked once: "Is this really preferable to a projection?"
"I need to touch it."
Odrade accepted that.
Projections palled. Too far removed from dirt. You could not draw a finger down a projection and say, "We will go down here." A finger in a projection was a finger in empty air.
Eyes are never enough. The body must feel its world.
Sheeana detected pungency of male perspiration, a musty smell of exertion. She lifted her head and saw a dark young man standing in the doorway, arrogant pose, arrogant look.
"Oh," he said. "I thought you would be alone, Walli. I'll come back later."
One piercing stare at Sheeana and he was gone.
There are many things the body must feel to know them.
"Sheeana, why are you here?" Walli asked.
You who are so busy on the Council, what do you seek? Don't you trust me?
"I came to consider what the Missionaria still thinks I may do. They see a weapon--the myths of Dune. Billions pray to me: 'The Holy One who spoke to the Divided God.'"
"Billions is not an adequate number," Walli said.
"But it measures the force my Sisters see in me. Those worshipers believe I died with Dune. I've become 'a powerful spirit in the pantheon of the oppressed.'"
"More than a missionary?"
"What might happen, Walli, if I appeared in that waiting universe, a sandworm beside me? The potential of such a thing fills some of my Sisters with hope and misgivings."
"Misgivings I understand."
Indeed. The very kind of religious implant Muad'Dib and his Tyrant son set loose on unsuspecting humankind.
"Why do they even consider it?" Walli insisted.
"With me as fulcrum, what a lever they would have to move the universe!"
"But how could they control such a force?"
"That is the problem. Something so inherently unstable. Religions are never really controllable. But some Sisters think they could aim a religion built around me."
"And if their aim is poor?"
"They say the religions of women always flow deeper."
"True?" Questioning a superior source.
Sheeana could only nod. Other Memory confirmed it.
"Why?"
"Because within us, life renews itself."
"That's all of it?" Openly doubting.
"Women often bear the aura of underdog. Humans reserve a special sympathy for ones at the bottom. I am a woman and if Honored Matres want me dead then I must be blessed."
"You sound as though you agree with the Missionaria."
"When you're one of the hunted, you consider any path of escape. I am revered. I cannot ignore the potential."
Nor the danger. So my name has become a shining light in the darkness of Honored Matre oppression. How easy for that light to become a consuming flame!
No ... the plan she and Duncan had worked out was better. Escape from Chapterhouse. It was a death trap not only for its inhabitants but for Bene Gesserit dreams.
"I still don't understand why you're here. We may no longer be hunted."
"May?"
"But why just now?"
I cannot speak it openly because then the watchdogs would know.
"I have this fascination with worms. It's partly because one of my ancestors led the original migration to Dune."
You remember this, Walli. We spoke of it once out there on the sand with only the two of us to hear. And now you know why I have come visiting.
"I remember you saying she was a proper Fremen."
"And a Zensunni Master."
I will lead my own migration, Walli. But I will need worms only you can provide. And it must be done quickly. The reports from Junction urge speed. And the first ships will return soon. Tonight... tomorrow. I fear what they bring.
"Are you still interested in taking a few worms back to Central where you can study them closely?"
Oh, yes, Walli! You do remember.
"It might be interesting. I don't have much time for such things but any knowledge we gain may help us."
"It will be too wet for them back there."
"The great Hold of the no-ship on the Flat could be reconverted into a desert lab. Sand, controlled atmosphere. The essentials are there from when we brought the first worm."
Sheeana glanced at the western window. "Sunset. I would like to go down again and walk on the sand."
Will the first ships return tonight?
"Of course, Reverend Mother." Walli stood aside, opening the way to the door.
Sheeana spoke as she was leaving. "Desert Watch will have to be moved before long."
"We are prepared."
The sun was dipping below the horizon when Sheeana emerged from the arched street at the edge of the community. She strode into starlit desert, exploring with her senses as she had done as
a child. Ahhh, there was the cinnamon essence. Worms near.
She paused and, turning northeast away from the last sun-glow, placed her palms flat above and below her eyes in the old Fremen way, confining view and light. She stared out of a horizontal frame. Whatever fell from heaven must pass this narrow slit.
Tonight? They will come just after dark to delay the moment of explanation. A full night for reflection.
She waited with Bene Gesserit patience.
An arc of fire drew a thin line above the northern horizon. Another. Another. They were positioned right for the Landing Flat.
Sheeana felt her heart beating fast.
They have come!
And what would be their message for the Sisterhood? Returning warriors triumphant or refugees? There could be little difference, given the evolution of Odrade's plan.
She would know by morning.
Sheeana lowered her hands and found she was trembling. Deep breath. The Litany.
Presently, she walked the desert, sandwalking in the remembered stride of Dune. She had almost forgotten how the feet dragged. As though they carried extra weight. Seldom-used muscles were called into play but the random walk, once learned, was never forgotten.
Once, I never dreamed I would ever again walk this way.
If watchdogs detected that thought they might wonder about their Sheeana.
It was a failure in herself, she thought. She had grown into the rhythms of Chapterhouse. This planet talked to her at a subterranean level. She felt earth, trees, and flowers, every growing thing as though all were part of her. And now, here was disturbing movement, something in a language from a different planet. She sensed the desert changing and that, too, was an alien tongue. Desert. Not lifeless but living in a way profoundly different from once-verdant Chapterhouse.
Less life but more intense.
She heard the desert: small slitherings, creaking chirps of insects, a dark rustle of hunting wings overhead and the quickest of ploppings on the sand--kangaroo mice brought here in anticipation of this day when worms would once more begin their rule.
Walli will remember to send flora and fauna from Dune.
She stopped atop a tall barracan. In front of her, darkness blurring its edges, was an ocean caught in stop motion, a shadow surf beating on a shadow beach of this changing land. It was a limitless desert-sea. It had originated far away and it would go to stranger places than this.
I will take you there if I am able.
A night breeze from drylands to moister places behind her deposited a film of dust on her cheeks and nose, lifting the edges of her hair as it passed. She felt saddened.
What might have been.
That no longer was important.
The things that are-they matter.
She took a deep breath. Cinnamon stronger. Melange. Spice and worms near. Worms aware of her presence. How soon would this air be dry enough for the sandworms to grow great and work their crop as they had on Dune?
The planet and the desert.
She saw them as two halves of the same saga. Just as the Bene Gesserit and the humankind they served. Matched halves. Either without the other was diminished, an emptiness with lost purpose. Not better dead, perhaps, but moving aimlessly. There lay the threat of Honored Matre victory. Aimed by blind violence!
Blind in a hostile universe.
And there was why the Tyrant had preserved the Sisterhood.
He knew he only gave us the path without direction. A paper chase laid down by a jokester and left empty at the end.
A poet in his own right, though.
She recalled his "Memory Poem" from Dar-es-Balat, a bit of jetsam the Bene Gesserit preserved.
And for what reason do we preserve it? So I can fill my mind with it now? Forgetting for the moment what I may confront tomorrow?
The fair night of the poet,
Fill it with innocent stars.
A pace apart Orion stands.
His glare sees everything,
Marking our genes forever.
Welcome darkness and stare,
Blinded in the afterglow.
There's barren eternity!
Sheeana felt abruptly that she had won a chance to become the ultimate artist, filled to overflowing and presented with a blank surface where she might create as she wished.
An unrestricted universe!
Odrade's words from those first childhood exposures to Bene Gesserit purpose came back to her. "Why did we fasten onto you, Sheeana? It's really simple. We recognized in you a thing we had long awaited. You arrived and we saw it happen."
"It?" How naive I was!
"Something new lifting over the horizon."
My migration will seek the new. But... I must find a planet with moons.
Looked at one way, the universe is Brownian movement, nothing predictable at the elemental level. Muad'Dib and his Tyrant son closed the cloud chamber where movement occurred.
--Stories from Gammu
Murbella entered a time of incongruent experiences. It bothered her at first, seeing her own life with multiple vision. Chaotic events at Junction had ignited this, creating a jumble of immediate necessities that would not leave her, not even when she returned to Chapterhouse.
I warned you, Dar. You can't deny it. I said they could turn victory into defeat. And look at the mess you dumped in my lap! I was lucky to save as many as I did.
This inner protest always immersed her in the events that had elevated her to this awful prominence.
What else could I have done?
Memory displayed Streggi slumping to the floor in bloodless death. The scene had played on the no-ship's relays like a fictional drama. The projection framework in the ship's command bay added to the illusion that this was not really happening. The actors would arise and take their bows. Teg's comeyes, humming away automatically, missed none of it until someone silenced them.
She was left with images, an eerie afterglow: Teg sprawled on the floor of that Honored Matre aerie. Odrade staring in shock.
Loud protests greeted Murbella's declaration that she must rush groundside. The Proctors were adamant until she laid out the details of Odrade's gamble and demanded: "Do you want total disaster?"
Odrade Within won that argument. But you were prepared for it from the first, weren't you, Dar? Your plan!
The Proctors said: "There's still Sheeana." They gave Murbella a one-man lighter and sent her to Junction alone.
Even though she transmitted her Honored Matre identity ahead of her, there were touchy moments at the Landing Flat.
A squad of armed Honored Matres confronted her as she emerged from the lighter beside a smoking pit. The smoke smelled of exotic explosives.
Where Mother Superior's lighter was destroyed.
An ancient Honored Matre led the squad, her red robe stained, some of its decorations gone and a rip down the left shoulder. She was like some dried-up lizard, still poisonous, still with a bite but running on well-used angers, most of her energy gone. Disarrayed hair like the outer skin of a fresh-dug ginger root. There was a demon in her. Murbella saw it peering from orange-flecked eyes.
For all the fact that a full squad backed up the old one, the two of them faced each other as though isolated at the foot of the lighter's drop, wild animals cautiously sniffing, trying to judge the extent of danger.
Murbella watched the old one carefully. This lizard would dart her tongue a bit, testing the air, giving vent to her emotions, but she was sufficiently shocked to listen.
"Murbella is my name. I was taken captive by the Bene Gesserit on Gammu. I am an adept of the Hormu."
"Why are you wearing a witch's robes?" The old one and her squad stood ready to kill.
"I have learned everything they had to teach and have brought that treasure to my Sisters."
The old one studied her a moment. "Yes, I recognize your type. You're a Roc, one we chose for the Gammu project."
The squad behind her relaxed slightly.
"You
did not come all the way in that lighter," the old one accused.
"I escaped from one of their no-ships."
"Do you know where their nest is?"
"I do."
A wide smile spread on the old one's lips. "Well! You are a prize! How did you escape?"
"Do you have to ask?"
The old one considered this. Murbella could read the thoughts on her face as though they were spoken: These ones we brought from Roc--deadly, all of them. They can kill with hands, feet, or any other movable part of their bodies. They all should carry a sign: "Dangerous in any position. "
Murbella moved away from the lighter, displaying the sinewy grace that was a mark of her identity.
Speed and muscle, Sisters. Beware.