Heretics of Dune

  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 min
ds 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.