Heretics of Dune

  Odrade put down feelings of sympathy. Sheeana was like herself as a young girl, in so many ways. She had that globular intellect which expanded on all surfaces the way a balloon expanded when filled. Odrade recalled how her own teachers had been admiring of this, but wary, just the way Taraza was now wary. Odrade had recognized this wariness while even younger than Sheeana and held no doubts that Sheeana saw it here. Intellect had its uses.

  "Mmmmmm," Taraza said.

  Odrade heard the humming sound of the Mother Superior's internal reflections as part of a simulflow. Odrade s own memory had surged backward. The Sisters who had brought Odrade her food when she studied late had always loitered to observe her in their special way, just as Sheeana was watched and monitored at all times. Odrade had known about those special ways of observing from an early age. That was, after all, one of the great lures of the Bene Gesserit. You wanted to be capable of such esoteric abilities. Sheeana certainly possessed this desire. It was the dream of every postulant.

  That such things might be possible for me!

  Taraza spoke finally: "What is it you think you want from us, child?"

  "The same things you thought you wanted when you were my age, Mother Superior."

  Odrade suppressed a smile. Sheeana's wild sense of independence had skated close to insolence there and Taraza certainly recognized this.

  "You think that is a proper use for the gift of life?" Taraza asked.

  "It is the only use I know, Mother Superior."

  "Your candor is appreciated but I warn you to be careful in your use of it," Taraza said.

  "Yes, Mother Superior."

  "You already owe us much and you will owe us more," Taraza said. "Remember that. Our gifts do not come cheaply."

  Sheeana has not the vaguest appreciation of what she will pay for our gifts, Odrade thought.

  The Sisterhood never let its initiates forget what they owed and must repay. You did not repay with love. Love was dangerous and Sheeana already was learning this. The gift of life? A shudder began to course through Odrade and she cleared her throat to compensate.

  Am I alive? Perhaps when they took me away from Mama Sibia I died. I was alive there in that house but did I live after the Sisters removed me?

  Taraza said: "You may leave us now, Sheeana."

  Sheeana turned on one heel and left the room but not before Odrade saw the tight smile on the young face. Sheeana knew she had passed the Mother Superior's examination.

  When the door closed behind Sheeana, Taraza said: "You mentioned her natural ability with Voice. I heard it, of course. Remarkable."

  "She kept it well bridled," Odrade said. "She has learned not to try it on us."

  "What do we have there, Dar?"

  "Perhaps someday a Mother Superior of extraordinary abilities."

  "Not too extraordinary?"

  "We will have to see."

  "Do you think she is capable of killing for us?"

  Odrade was startled and showed it. "Now?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "The ghola?"

  "Teg would not do it," Taraza said. "I even have doubts about Lucilla. Their reports make it clear that he is capable of forging powerful bonds of... of affinity."

  "Even as I?"

  "Schwangyu herself was not completely immune."

  "Where is the noble purpose in such an act?" Odrade asked. "Isn't this what the Tyrant's warning has--"

  "Him? He killed many times!"

  "And paid for it."

  "We pay for everything we take, Dar."

  "Even for a life?"

  "Never forget for one instant, Dar, that a Mother Superior is capable of making any necessary decision for the Sisterhood's survival!"

  "So be it," Odrade said. "Take what you want and pay for it."

  It was the proper reply but it reinforced the new strength Odrade felt, this freedom to respond in her own way within a new universe. Where had such toughness originated? Was it something out of her cruel Bene Gesserit conditioning? Was it from her Atreides ancestry? She did not try to fool herself that this came from a decision never again to follow another's moral guidance rather than her own. This inner stability upon which she now stationed herself was not a pure morality. Not bravado, either. Those were never enough.

  "You are very like your father," Taraza said. "Usually, it's the dam who provides most of the courage but this time I think it was the father."

  "Miles Teg is admirably courageous but I think you oversimplify," Odrade said.

  "Perhaps I do. But I have been right about you at every turn, Dar, even back there when we were student postulants."

  She knows! Odrade thought.

  "We don't need to explain it," Odrade said. And she thought: It comes from being born who I am, trained and shaped the way I was... the way we both were: Dar and Tar.

  "It's something in the Atreides line that we have not fully analyzed," Taraza said.

  "No genetic accidents?"

  "I sometimes wonder if we've suffered any real accidents since the Tyrant," Taraza said.

  "Did he stretch out back there in his citadel and look across the millennia to this very moment?"

  "How far back would you reach for the roots?" Taraza asked.

  Odrade said: "What really happens when a Mother Superior commands the Breeding Mistresses: 'Have that one go breed with that one'?"

  Taraza produced a cold smile.

  Odrade felt herself suddenly at the crest of a wave, awareness pushing all of her over into this new realm. Taraza wants my rebellion! She wants me as her opponent!

  "Will you see Waff now?" Odrade asked.

  "First, I want your assessment of him."

  "He sees us as the ultimate tool to create the 'Tleilaxu Ascendancy.'We are God's gift to his people."

  "They have been waiting a long time for this," Taraza said. "To dissemble so carefully, all of them for all of those eons!"

  "They have our view of time," Odrade agreed. "That was the final thing to convince them we share their Great Belief."

  "But why the clumsiness?" Taraza asked. "They are not stupid."

  "It diverted our attention from how they were really using their ghola process," Odrade said. "Who could believe stupid people would do such a thing?"

  "And what have they created?" Taraza asked. "Only the image of evil stupidity?"

  "Act stupid long enough and you become stupid," Odrade said. "Perfect the mimicry of your Face Dancers and... "

  "Whatever happens, we must punish them," Taraza said. "I see that clearly. Have him brought up here."

  After Odrade had given the order and while they waited, Taraza said: "The sequencing of the ghola's education became a shambles even before they escaped from the Gammu Keep. He leaped ahead of his teachers to grasp things that were only implied and he did this at an alarmingly accelerated rate. Who knows what he has become by now?"

  Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

  -Leto II, His Voice, from Dar-es-Balat

  Duncan followed his guide through the dawn light at a punishing clip. The man might look old but he was as springy as a gazelle and seemed incapable of tiring.

  Only a few minutes ago they had put aside their night goggles. Duncan was glad to be rid of them. Everything outside the reach of the glasses had been black in the dim starlight filtering through heavy branches. There had been no world ahead of him beyond the range of the glasses. The view at both sides jerked and flowed--now a clump of yellow bushes, now two silver-bark trees, now a stone wall with a plasteel gate cut into it and guarded by the flickering blue of a burn-shield, then an arched bridge of native rock, all green and black underfoot. After that, an arched entry of polished white stone. The structures all appeared very old and expensive, maintained by costly handwork.

  Duncan had no idea where he was. None of this terrain recalled his memories of the long-lost Giedi Prime
days.

  Dawn revealed that they were following a tree-shielded animal track up a hillside. The climb became steep. Occasional glimpses through trees on their left revealed a valley. A hanging mist stood guard over the sky, hiding the distances, enclosing them as they climbed. Their world became progressively a smaller place as it lost its connection with a larger universe.

  At one brief pause, not for rest but for listening to the forest around them, Duncan studied his mist-capped surroundings. He felt dislodged, removed from a universe that possessed sky and the open features that linked it to other planets.

  His disguise was simple: Tleilaxu cold-weather garments and cheek pads to make his face appear rounder. His curly black hair had been straightened by some chemical applied with heat. The hair was then bleached to a sandy blond and hidden under a dark watchcap. All of his genital hair had been shaved away. He hardly recognized himself in the mirror they held up for him.

  A dirty Tleilaxu!

  The artisan who created this transformation was an old woman with glittering gray-green eyes. "You are now a Tleilaxu Master," she said. "Your name is Wose. A guide will take you to the next place. You will treat him like a Face Dancer if you meet strangers. Otherwise, do as he commands."

  They led him out of the cave complex along a twisting passage, its walls and ceiling thick with the musky green algae. In starlighted darkness, they thrust him from the passage into a chilly night and the hands of an unseen man--a bulky figure in padded clothing.

  A voice behind Duncan whispered: "Here he is, Ambitorm. Get him through."

  The guide spoke in an accent of gutturals: "Follow me." He clipped a lead cord to Duncan's belt, adjusted the night goggles and turned away. Duncan felt the cord tug once and they were off.

  Duncan recognized the use of the cord. It was not something to keep him close behind. He could see this Ambitorm clearly enough with the night goggles. No, the cord was to spill him quickly if they met danger. No need for a command.

  For a long time during the night they crisscrossed small ice-lined watercourses on a flatland. The light of Gammu's early moons penetrated the covering growth only occasionally. They emerged finally onto a low hill with a view of bushy wasteland all silvery with snow cover in the moonlight. Down into this they went. The bushes, about twice the height of the guide, arched over muddy animal passages little larger than the tunnels where they had begun this journey. It was warmer here, the warmth of a compost heap. Almost no light penetrated to a ground spongy with rotted vegetation. Duncan inhaled the fungal odors of decomposing plant life. The night goggles showed him a seemingly endless repetition of thick growth on both sides. The cord linking him to Ambitorm was a tenuous grip on an alien world.

  Ambitorm discouraged conversation. He said "Yes," when Duncan asked confirmation of the man's name, then: "Don't talk."

  The whole night was a disquieting traverse for Duncan. He did not like being thrown back into his own thoughts. Giedi Prime memories persisted. This place was like nothing he remembered from his pre-ghola youth. He wondered how Ambitorm had learned the way through here and how he remembered it. One animal tunnel appeared much like another.

  In the steady, jogging pace there was time for Duncan's thoughts to roam.

  Must I permit the Sisterhood to use me? What do I owe them?

  And he thought of Teg, that last gallant stand to permit two of them to escape.

  I did the same for Paul and Jessica.

  It was a bond with Teg and it touched Duncan with grief. Teg was loyal to the Sisterhood. Did he buy my loyalty with that last brave act?

  Damn the Atreides!

  The night's exertions increased Duncan's familiarity with his new flesh. How young this body was! A small lurch of recollection and he could see that last pre-ghola memory; he could feel the Sardaukar blade strike his head--a blinding explosion of pain and light. Knowledge of his certain death and then... nothing until that moment with Teg in the Harkonnen no-globe.

  The gift of another life. Was it more than a gift or something less? The Atreides were demanding another payment from him.

  For a time just before dawn, Ambitorm led him at a sloshing run along a narrow stream whose icy chill penetrated the waterproof insulated boots of Duncan's Tleilaxu garments. The watercourse reflected bush-shadowed silver from the light of the planet's pre-dawn moon setting ahead of them.

  Daylight saw them come out into the larger, tree-shielded animal track and up the steep hill. This passage emerged onto a narrow rocky ledge below a ridgetop of sawtoothed boulders. Ambitorm led him behind a screen of dead brown bushes, their tops dirty with wind-blown snow. He released the cord from Duncan's belt. Directly in front of them was a shallow declivity in the rocks, not quite a cave, but Duncan saw that it would offer some protection unless they got a hard wind over the bushes behind them. There was no snow on the floor of the place.

  Ambitorm went to the back of the declivity and carefully removed a layer of icy dirt and several flat rocks, which concealed a small pit. He lifted a round black object from the pit and busied himself over it.

  Duncan squatted under the overhang and studied his guide. Ambitorm had a dished-in face with skin like dark brown leather. Yes, those could be the features of a Face Dancer. Deep creases cut into the skin at the edges of the man's brown eyes. Creases radiated from the sides of the thin mouth and lined the wide brow. They spread out beside the flat nose and deepened the cleft of a narrow chin. Creases of time all over his face.

  Appetizing odors began to arise from the black object in front of Ambitorm.

  "We will eat here and wait a bit before we continue," Ambitorm said.

  He spoke Old Galach but with that guttural accent which Duncan had never heard before, an odd stress on adjacent vowels. Was Ambitorm from the Scattering or a Gammu native? There obviously had been many linguistic drifts since the Dune days of Muad'dib. For that matter, Duncan recognized that all of the people in the Gammu Keep, including Teg and Lucilla, spoke a Galach that had shifted from the one he had learned as a pre-ghola child.

  "Ambitorm," Duncan said. "Is that a Gammu name?"

  "You will call me Tormsa," the guide said.

  "Is that a nickname?"

  "It is what you will call me."

  "Why did those people back there call you Ambitorm."

  "That was the name I gave them."

  "But why would you... "

  "You lived under the Harkonnens and you did not learn how to change your identity?"

  Duncan fell silent. Was that it? Another disguise. Ambi... Tormsa had not changed his appearance. Tormsa. Was it a Tleilaxu name?

  The guide extended a steaming cup toward Duncan. "A drink to restore you, Wose. Drink it fast. It will keep you warm."

  Duncan closed both hands around the cup. Wose. Wose and Tormsa. Tleilaxu Master and his Face Dancer companion.

  Duncan lifted the cup toward Tormsa in the ancient gesture of Atreides battle comrades, then put it to his lips. Hot! But it warmed him as it went down. The drink had a faintly sweet flavor over some vegetable tang. He blew on it and drank it down as he saw Tormsa was doing.

  Odd that I should not suspect poison or some drug, Duncan thought. But this Tormsa and the others last night had something of the Bashar about them. The gesture to a battle comrade had come naturally.

  "Why are you risking your life this way?" Duncan asked.

  "You know the Bashar and you have to ask?"

  Duncan fell silent, abashed.

  Tormsa leaned forward and recovered Duncan's cup. Soon, all evidence of their breakfast lay hidden under the concealing rocks and dirt.

  That food spoke of careful planning, Duncan thought. He turned and squatted on the cold ground. The mist was still out there beyond the screening bushes. Leafless limbs cut the view into odd bits and pieces. As he watched, the mist began to lift, revealing the blurred outlines of a city at the far edge of the valley.

  Tormsa squatted beside him. "Very old city," he said. "Harkonnen place. Lo
ok." He passed a small monoscope to Duncan. "That is where we go tonight."

  Duncan put the monoscope to his left eye and tried to focus the oil lens. The controls felt unfamiliar, not at all like those he had learned as a pre-ghola youth or had been taught at the Keep. He removed it from his eye and examined it.

  "Ixian?" he asked.

  "No. We made it." Tormsa reached over and pointed out two tiny buttons raised above the black tube. "Slow, fast. Push left to cycle out, right to cycle back."

  Again, Duncan lifted the scope to his eye.

  Who were the we who had made this thing?

  A touch of the fast button and the view leaped into his gaze. Tiny dots moved in the city. People! He increased the amplification. The people became small dolls. With them to give him scale, Duncan realized that the city at the valley's edge was immense... and farther away than he had thought. A single rectangular structure stood in the center of the city, its top lost in the clouds. Gigantic.

  Duncan knew this place now. The surroundings had changed but that central structure lay fixed in his memory.

  How many of us vanished into that black hellhole and never returned?

  "Nine hundred and fifty stories," Tormsa said, seeing where Duncan's gaze was directed. "Forty-five kilometers long, thirty kilometers wide. Plasteel and armor-plaz, all of it."

  "I know." Duncan lowered the scope and returned it to Tormsa. "It was called Barony."

  "Ysai," Tormsa said.

  "That's what they call it now," Duncan said. "I have some different names for it."

  Duncan took a deep breath to put down the old hatreds. Those people were all dead. Only the building remained. And the memories. He scanned the city around that enormous structure. The place was a sprawling mass of warrens. Green spaces lay scattered throughout, each of them behind high walls. Single residences with private parks, Teg had said. The monoscope had revealed guards walking the wall tops.

  Tormsa spat on the ground in front of him. "Harkonnen place."

  "They built to make people feel small," Duncan said.

  Tormsa nodded. "Small, no power in you."

  The guide had become almost loquacious, Duncan thought.

  Occasionally during the night, Duncan had defied the order for silence and tried to make conversation.

  "What animals made these passages?"