She called it a T-probe, Teg thought. He looked up at the hood as they brought it over him. There was no Ixian stamp on the thing.
Teg experienced an odd sense of deja vu. He had the feeling that his own captivity here had occurred many times before. No single-incident deja vu, it was a deeply familiar recognition: the captive and the interrogators--these three... the probe. He felt emptied. How could he know this moment? He had never personally employed a probe but he had studied their use thoroughly. The Bene Gesserit often used pain but relied mostly on Truthsayers. Even more than that, the Sisterhood believed that some equipment could put them too much under Ixian influence. It was an admission of weakness, a sign that they could not do without such despicable devices. Teg had even suspected there was something in this attitude of a hangover from the Butlerian Jihad, rebellion against machines that could copy out the essence of a human's thoughts and memories.
Deja vu!
Mentat logic demanded of him: How do I know this moment? He knew that he had never before been a captive. It was such a ridiculous switch of roles. The great Bashar Teg a captive? He could almost smile. But that deep sense of familiarity persisted.
His captors positioned the hood directly over his head and began releasing the medusa contacts one at a time, fixing them to his scalp. The functionary watched his companions work, producing small signs of impatience on an otherwise emotionless face.
Teg moved his attention across the three faces. Which one of these would act the part of "friend"? Ahhhh, yes: the one called Materly. Fascinating. Was it a form of Honored Matre? But neither of the others deferred to her as one would expect from what Teg had heard of those returning Lost Ones.
These were people from the Scattering, though--except possibly for the square-faced male in the brown singlesuit. Teg studied the woman with care: the matt of gray hair, the quiet composure in those widely spaced green eyes, the slightly protruding chin with its sense of solidity and reliability. She had been chosen well for "friend." Materly's face was a map of respectability, someone you could trust. Teg saw a withdrawn quality in her, though. She was one who would also observe carefully to catch the moment when she must become involved. Surely, she was Bene Gesserit--trained at the very least.
Or trained by the Honored Matres.
They finished attaching the contacts to his head. The Gammu type swung the probe's console into position where all three could watch the display. The probe's screen was concealed from Teg.
The woman removed Teg's gag, confirming his judgment. She would be the source of comfort. He moved his tongue around in his mouth, restoring sensation. His face and chest still felt a bit numb from the stunner that had brought him down. How long ago had that been? But if he was to believe the silent words of the functionary, Duncan had escaped.
The Gammu type looked to the observer.
"You may begin, Yar," the functionary said.
Yar? Teg wondered. Curious name. Almost had a Tleilaxu sound. But Yar was not a Face Dancer... or a Tleilaxu Master. Too big for one and no stigmata of the other. As one trained by the Sisterhood, Teg felt confident of this.
Yar touched a control on the probe's console.
Teg heard himself grunt with pain. Nothing had prepared him for that much pain. They must have turned their devil's machine to maximum for the first thrust. No question about it! They knew he was a Mentat. A Mentat could remove himself from some demands of flesh. But this was excruciating! He could not escape it. Agony shivered through his entire body, threatening to blank out his consciousness. Could shere shield him from this?
The pain diminished gradually and went away, leaving only quivering memories.
Again!
He thought suddenly that the spice agony must be like this for a Reverend Mother. Surely, there could be no greater pain. He fought to remain silent but heard himself grunting, moaning. Every ability he had ever learned, Mentat and Bene Gesserit, was called into play, keeping him from forming words, from begging for surcease, from promising to tell them anything if they would only stop.
Once more the agony receded and then surged back.
"Enough!" That was the woman. Teg groped for her name. Materly?
Yar spoke in a sullen voice: "He's loaded with shere, enough to last him a year at least." He gestured at his console. "Blank."
Teg breathed in shallow gasps. The agony! It continued to increase despite Materly's demand.
"I said enough!" Materly snapped.
Such sincerity, Teg thought. He felt the pain recede, withdrawing as though every nerve were being removed from his body, pulled out like threads of the remembered agony.
"It is wrong what we're doing," Materly said. "This man is--"
"He is like any other man," Yar said. "Shall I attach the special contact to his penis?"
"Not while I'm here!" Materly said.
Teg felt himself almost taken in by her sincerity. The last of the agony threads left his flesh and he lay there with a feeling that he had been suspended off the surface that supported him. The sense of deja vu remained. He was here and not here. He had been here and he had not.
"They will not like it if we fail," Yar said. "Are you prepared to face them with another failure?"
Materly shook her head sharply. She bent over to bring her face into Teg's line of vision through the medusa tangle of probe contacts. "Bashar, I am sorry for what we do. Believe me. This is not of my making. Please, I find all of this disgusting. Tell us what we need to know and let me make you comfortable."
Teg formed a smile for her. She was good! He shifted his gaze to the watchful functionary. "Tell your masters for me. She is very good at this."
Blood darkened the functionary's face. He scowled. "Give him the maximum, Yar." His voice was a clipped tenor without any of the deep training apparent in Materly's voice.
"Please!" Materly said. She straightened but kept her attention on Teg's eyes.
Teg's Bene Gesserit teachers had taught him that: "Watch the eyes! Observe how they change focus. As the focus moves outward, the awareness moves inward."
He focused deliberately on her nose. It was not an ugly face. Rather distinctive. He wondered what the figure might be under those bulky clothes.
"Yar!" That was the functionary.
Yar adjusted something on his console and pressed a switch.
The agony that surged through Teg now told him the previous level had, indeed, been lower. With the new pain came an odd clarity. Teg found himself almost capable of removing his awareness from this intrusion. All of that pain was happening to someone else. He had found a haven where little touched him. There was pain. Agony even. He accepted reports about these sensations. That was partly the shere's doing, of course. He knew that and was thankful.
Materly's voice intruded: "I think we're losing him. Better ease off."
Another voice responded but the sound faded into stillness before Teg could identify the words. He realized abruptly that he had no anchor point for his awareness. Stillness! He thought he heard his heart beating rapidly in fear but he was not sure. All was stillness, profound quiet with nothing behind it.
Am I still alive?
He found a heartbeat then, but no certainty that it was his own. Thump-thump! Thump-thump! It was a sensation of movement and no sound. He could not fix the source.
What is happening to me?
Words blazoned in brilliant white against a black background played across his visual centers:
"I'm back to one-third."
"Leave it at that. See if we can read him through his physical reactions."
"Can he still hear us?"
"Not consciously."
None of Teg's instructions had told him a probe could do its evil work in the presence of shere. But they called this a T-probe. Could bodily reactions provide a clue to suppressed thoughts? Were there revelations to be explored by physical means?
Again, words played against Teg's visual centers: "Is he still isolated?"
"Completely."
"Make sure. Take him a little deeper."
Teg tried to lift his awareness above his fears.
I must remain in control!
What might his body reveal if he had no contact with it? He could imagine what they were doing and his mind registered panic but his flesh could not feel it.
Isolate the subject. Give him nowhere to seat his identity.
Who had said that? Someone. The sense of deja vu returned in full force.
I am a Mentat, he reminded himself. My mind and its workings are my center. He possessed experiences and memories upon which a center could rely.
Pain returned. Sounds. Loud! Much too loud!
"He's hearing again." That was Yar.
"How can that be?" The functionary's tenor.
"Perhaps you've set it too low." Materly.
Teg tried to open his eyes. The lids would not obey. He remembered then. They had called it a T-probe. This was no Ixian device. This was something from the Scattering. He could identify where it took over his muscles and senses. It was like another person sharing his flesh, preempting his own reactive patterns. He allowed himself to follow the workings of this machine's intrusions. It was a hellish device! It could order him to blink, fart, gasp, shit, piss--anything. It could command his body as though he had no thinking part in his own behavior. He was relegated to the role of observer.
Odors assailed him--disgusting odors. He would not command himself to frown but he thought of frowning. That was sufficient. These odors had been elicited by the probe. It was playing his senses, learning them.
"Do you have enough to read him?" The functionary's tenor.
"He's still hearing us!" Yar.
"Damn all Mentats!" Materly.
"Dit, Dat, and Dot," Teg said, naming the puppets of the
Winter Show from his childhood on long-ago Lernaeus.
"He's talking!" The functionary.
Teg felt his awareness being blocked off by the machine. Yar was doing something at the console. Still, Teg knew his own Mentat logic had told him something vital: These three were puppets. Only the puppet masters were important. How the puppets moved--that told you what the puppet masters were doing.
The probe continued to intrude. Despite the force being applied, Teg felt his awareness matching the thing. It was learning him but he was also learning it.
He understood now. The whole spectrum of his senses could be copied into this T-probe and identified, tagged for Yar to call up when needed. An organic chain of responses existed within Teg. The machine could trace those out as though it made a duplicate of him. The shere and his Mentat resistance shunted the searchers away from his memories but everything else could be copied.
It will not think like me, he reassured himself.
The machine would not be the same as his nerves and flesh. It would not have Teg-memories or Teg-experiences. It had not been born of woman. It had never traveled down a birth canal and emerged into this astonishing universe.
Part of Teg's awareness applied a memory marker, telling him that this observation revealed something about the ghola.
Duncan was decanted from an axlotl tank.
The observation came to Teg with a sudden sharp biting of acid on his tongue.
The T-probe again!
Teg allowed himself to flow through a multiple simultaneous awareness. He followed the T-probe's workings and continued to explore this observation about the ghola, all the while listening for Dit, Dat, and Dot. The three puppets were oddly silent. Yes, waiting for their T-probe to complete its task.
The ghola: Duncan was an extension of cells that had been born of a woman impregnated by a man.
Machine and ghola!
Observation: The machine cannot share that birth experience except in a remotely vicarious way sure to miss important personal nuances.
Just as it was missing other things in him right now.
The T-probe was replaying smells. With each induced odor, memories revealed their presence in Teg's mind. He felt the great speed of the T-probe but his own awareness lived outside of that headlong rushing search, able to entangle him for as long as he desired in the memories being called up here.
There!
That was the hot wax he had spilled on his left hand when only fourteen and a student in the Bene Gesserit school. He recalled school and laboratory as though his only existence were there at this moment. The school is attached to Chapter House. By being admitted here, Teg knew he had the blood of Siona in his veins. No prescient could track him here.
He saw the lab and smelled the wax--a compound of artificial esters and the natural product of bees kept by failed Sisters and their helpers. He turned his memory to a moment when he watched bees and people at their labors in the apple orchards.
The workings of the Bene Gesserit social structure appeared so complicated until you saw through to the necessities: food, clothing, warmth, communication, learning, protection from enemies (a subset of the survival drive). Bene Gesserit survival took some adjustments before it could be understood. They did not procreate for the sake of humankind in general. No un-monitored racial involvement! They procreated to extend their own powers, to continue the Bene Gesserit, deeming that a sufficient service to humankind. Perhaps it was. Procreative motivation went deep and the Sisterhood was so thorough.
A new smell assailed him.
He recognized the wet wool of his clothing as he came into the command pod after the Battle of Ponciard. The smell filled his nostrils and elicited the ozone of the pod's instruments, the sweat of the other occupants. Wool! The Sisterhood had always thought it a bit odd of him, the way he preferred natural fabrics and shunned the synthetics turned out in captive factories.
No more did he care for chairdogs.
I don't like the smells of oppression in any form.
Did these puppets--Dit, Dat, and Dot--know how oppressed they were?
Mentat logic sneered at him. Were not wool fabrics also a product of captive factories?
It was different.
Part of him argued otherwise. Synthetics could be stored almost indefinitely. Look how long they had endured in the nullentropy bins of the Harkonnen no-globe.
"I still prefer woolens and cottons!"
So be it!
"But how did I come by such a preference?"
It is an Atreides prejudice. You inherited it.
Teg shunted the smells aside and concentrated on the total movement of the intrusive probe. He found presently that he could anticipate the thing. It was a new muscle. He allowed himself to flex it while he continued to examine the induced memories for valuable insights.
I sit outside my mother's door on Lernaeus.
Teg removed part of his awareness and watched the scene: age eleven. He is talking to a small Bene Gesserit acolyte who came as part of the escort for Somebody Important. The acolyte is a tiny thing with red-blond hair and a doll's face. Upturned nose, green-gray eyes. The SI is a black-robed Reverend Mother of truly ancient appearance. She has gone behind that nearby door with Teg's mother. The acolyte, who is named Carlana, is trying her fledgling skills on the young son of the house.
Before Carlana utters twenty words, Miles Teg recognizes the pattern. She is trying to pry information out of him! This was one of the first lessons in delicate dissembling taught by his mother. There were, after all, people who might question a young boy about a Reverend Mother's household, hoping thereby to gain salable information. There is always a market for data about Reverend Mothers.
His mother explained: "You judge the questioner and fit your responses according to the susceptibilities." None of this would have served against a full Reverend Mother, but against an acolyte, especially this one!
For Carlana, he produces an appearance of coy reluctance. Carlana has an inflated view of her own attractions. He allows her to overcome his reluctance after a suitable marshaling of her forces. What she gets is a handful of lies, which, if she ever repeats them to t
he SI behind that closed door, are sure to win Carlana a severe censuring if not something more painful.
Words from Dit, Dat, and Dot: "I think we have him now."
Teg recognized Yar's voice yanking him out of old memories. "Fit your responses according to the susceptibilities." Teg heard the words in his mother's voice.
Puppets.
Puppet masters.
The functionary speaks: "Ask the simulation where they have taken the ghola."
Silence and then a faint humming.
"I'm not getting anything." Yar.
Teg hears their voices with painful sensitivity. He forces his eyes to open against the opposing commands of the probe.
"Look!" Yar says.
Three sets of eyes stare back at Teg. How slowly they move. Dit, Dat, and Dot: the eyes go blink... blink... at least a minute between blinks. Yar is reaching for something on his console. His fingers will take a week to reach their destination.
Teg explores the bindings on his hands and arms. Ordinary rope! Taking his time, he squirms his fingers into contact with the knots. They loosen, slowly at first, and then flying apart. He moves on to the straps holding him to the sling litter. These are easier: simple slip locks. Yar's hand is not even a fourth of the way to the console.
Blink... blink... blink...
The three sets of eyes show faint surprise.
Teg releases himself from the medusa tangle of probe contacts. Pop-pop-pop! The grippers fly away from him. He is surprised to notice a slow start of bleeding on the back of his right hand where it has brushed the probe contacts aside.
Mentat projection: I am moving with dangerous speed.
But now he is off the litter. Functionary is reaching a slow-slow hand toward a bulge in a side pocket. Teg's hand crushes the functionary's throat. Functionary will never again touch that little lasgun he always carries. Yar's outstretched hand is still not a third of the way to the probe console. There is definite surprise in his eyes, though. Teg doubts that the man even sees the hand that breaks his neck. Materly is moving a bit faster. Her left foot is coming toward where Teg had been just the flick of an instant previously. Still too slow! Materly's head is thrown back, the throat exposed for Teg's down-chopping hand.
How slowly they fall to the floor!
Teg became aware of perspiration pouring from him but he could not spare time to worry about this.
I knew every move they would make before they made it! What has happened to me?