If indeed Ix would sell such devices to the Sisterhood. Surely the Guild must have some sort of exclusive contract. . . .
Then she realized that even the short-term solution of using navigation machines for her own battle fleet had its drawbacks. Second-and third-order consequences. Only Chapterhouse had spice. With that single substance they could pay and control the Navigators so that no other party could compete. If melange became unnecessary, then the whole worth and strength of the New Sisterhood would diminish.
Only a moment had passed as Murbella considered all of this. "Navigation machines would mean the end of Navigators such as yourself."
"And it would also remove one of the primary customers for your melange, Mother Commander. Therefore, my faction seeks a reliable and secure source of spice, so that Navigators can continue to exist. Your New Sisterhood has driven us to this extreme. We cannot depend on you for the spice we need."
"And you have discovered another supplier of melange?" She let a scoffing tone into her voice. "I find that doubtful. We would know about it."
"We have a high level of confidence in our alternative." Edrik drifted away, came back.
Murbella shrugged nonchalantly. "I offer you an immediate increase in spice." With a gesture, she directed three of her assistants to move a small suspensor barrow into the room; it was heaped high with packages of spice, as much as one Navigator could use in the better part of a Standard Year.
The tank's speakers remained silent, but she could see the hunger in Edrik's strange eyes. Murbella feared for a moment that he would turn her down, and all of her carefully thought out tactics would come to naught.
"One can never possess too much spice," the Navigator said after an interminable pause. "We have learned the painful lesson of relying on any single source. It would be better for the Navigators, and for the New Sisterhood, if we could reach some sort of accommodation."
I was right, she thought. "You need our spice, and we need your ships."
"The Guild will listen to your proposal, Mother Commander--provided it is a discussion rather than a threat. A business proposal between respected partners, not the sting of a bully's lash."
She stared at the tank, surprised by his bold statement. He might really have another source of spice, or at least the possibility of one. But he seems to harbor doubts and wants to play it safe.
"I need two Guild ships for transport to Tleilax. One equipped with a no-field and the other a traditional Heighliner."
"Tleilax? For what purpose?"
"We will grind down the only remaining stronghold and eliminate the last viable threat of the Honored Matres, once and for all."
"It will be arranged, within two days. I will take the spice now."
RENEGADE HONORED MATRES. The mysterious Enemy. Face Dancers. Murbella could not avoid them all, but the process of physical exercise--running, sweating, and straining--helped her to think as she planned her final assault on Tleilax.
Dressed in a clinging singlesuit, she sprinted along a stony path toward a hill near the Keep. She pushed herself until each breath slashed her lungs like a razor. Some of the inner voices scolded her for wasting time when there was so much work to be done. Murbella only ran harder.
She wanted to stimulate and provoke those Other Memories, needed them alert. The clamorous sea of past lives was always there, but not always available, and certainly not always helpful. Making sense out of the collective wisdom was a constant challenge, even for the most influential of Sisters.
Upon passing through the Spice Agony, a new Reverend Mother was like a baby thrown into a vast ocean and commanded to swim through the waves of Other Memory to survive. With so many Sisters inside, she could always ask questions, but she also risked getting sucked down into the whirlpool of churning advice.
Other Memory was a tool. It could be a great boon, or a great peril. Sisters who delved too deeply into this reservoir of the past were in danger of going insane. That had been the fate of the Kwisatz Mother, Lady Anirul Corrino, so long ago during the time of Muad'Dib. It was like reaching for a sword and grabbing the blade instead of the hilt. A matter of balance.
The floating souls viewed Murbella's mind from the inside, and some thought they knew her better than she knew herself. But even though she could see the past Sisters of the Bene Gesserit, her Honored Matre ancestry remained blocked from her by a black wall.
As a little girl Murbella had been captured in one of the Honored Matre sweeps, taken from her family and trained in cruelty and sexual domination. A whore. Yes, the Bene Gesserit name was appropriate.
Those terrible women from the Scattering had their dark secrets, their shame, their ignominious crimes. Somewhere in the past they knew their origin, knew what they had done to provoke the Enemy. If only she could find that information inside herself, she would know the truth about the vicious women she was about to face.
Reaching the rustling grasses and flat brown rocks on the hill, she climbed to the boulder-strewn crest and sat on the highest point of rock. From this vantage she could see Chapterhouse Keep to the east and the encroaching dunes to the west. Her heart pounded from the exertion, and perspiration trickled down her forehead and cheeks. Her body had been pushed to a physical edge, and now it was time to do the same with her mind.
She had accomplished much as Mother Commander. Murbella had managed to keep the two poles of the New Sisterhood from tearing each other apart, but the scars still ran deep. She had crushed or consolidated all but one of the enclaves of renegade Honored Matres.
She needed to know more, needed to understand the Face Dancers that had infiltrated the Old Empire, the Enemy . . . and the Honored Matres. I must have that information before we depart for Tleilax.
Murbella opened a small pack at her waist and removed three wafers of fresh, concentrated melange shipped up from the deep desert. She held the brownish-red wafers in her hand, feeling the spice tingle slightly as it mixed with the perspiration of her palm. She consumed all three wafers, intending to use the spice as a mental battering ram.
I will go deep this time, she thought. Guide me, my Sisters, and bring me back out, for I have important information to discover.
The spice began to work within her. Closing her eyes, she dove inward, following the taste of melange. She could see the sweeping landscape of Bene Gesserit memories extending to an infinite horizon of human history. She seemed to be running down a kaleidoscopic corridor of mirrors, mother to mother to mother. Fear threatened to overwhelm her, but the Sisters within parted and drew her into their midst, absorbing her consciousness.
But Murbella demanded to know about the other half of her existence, to discover what lay behind the black wall that blocked all Honored Matre paths. Yes, the memories were there, but muddled and disorganized, and they seemed to reach a dead end after only a handful of centuries, as if she had sprung from nowhere.
Were the whores descended from lost and corrupted Reverend Mothers, isolated out in the Scattering, as had been postulated? Had they formed their society with surviving Fish Speakers from the God Emperor's private guard, creating a bureaucracy based on violence and sexual domination?
Honored Matres rarely looked to the past, except when they glanced fearfully over their shoulders as the Enemy pursued them.
The spice washed through Murbella, sending her still deeper into her crowded thoughts, slamming her up against the obsidian barrier. In a trance atop the dry rocky hill, Murbella backed through generation after generation. Her breathing constricted, her external vision blurred into blindness; she heard a whimper of pain pass her lips.
Then, like a traveler emerging from a narrow defile, she beheld a mental clearing, in which shadowy ghost-women helped her forward. They showed her where to look. A crack in the wall, a way through. Deeper shadows, cold . . . and then--I see! The answer made her reel.
Yes, during the Famine Times, a splinter group of rogue Bene Gesserits, a few untrained wild Reverend Mothers, and fugitive Fish Spe
akers had indeed escaped in the turmoil after the Tyrant's death. Yet that was only a small part of the answer.
In their flight, those women had also encountered isolated and insular Tleilaxu worlds. For more than ten thousand years, the fanatical Bene Tleilax had used their females only as breeding machines and axlotl tanks. In a closely guarded secret, they kept their women immobilized, comatose, and uneducated, no more than wombs on tables. No Bene Gesserit, no outsider, had ever seen a Tleilaxu female.
When those rogue Bene Gesserits and militant Fish Speakers discovered the horrific truth, their reaction was swift and unforgiving; they left not a single Tleilaxu male alive on those outlying worlds. Liberating the breeding tanks, they took the Tleilaxu females with them on their journey, tending them, trying to bring them back.
A great many of the mindless tanks died, for no medical reason other than that they were unwilling to live, but some Tleilaxu females recovered. When they grew strong, they vowed reprisal for the monstrous crimes the males had committed for a thousand generations. And they never forgot.
The core of the Honored Matres were vengeful Tleilaxu females!
The renegade Reverend Mothers, militaristic Fish Speakers, and recovered Tleilaxu females had united to form the Honored Matres. Lost out in the Scattering for more than a dozen centuries, they had no access to melange, could no longer undergo the Spice Agony, and were unable to find an alternative that would allow them access to Other Memories. Over time, interbreeding with males from populations they encountered, then dominated on other worlds, those women had become something else entirely.
And now Murbella knew why her chain of predecessors ended in dark emptiness. She traveled back, generation to generation, all the way to a Tleilaxu female who had been a comatose breeding tank, a mindless womb.
Gathering her courage and focusing her rage, Murbella pushed harder and became the paralyzed tank that Tleilaxu female had once been. She shuddered as the dim and helpless sensations and memories seeped into her. She had been that young girl raised in captivity, understanding little of the world beyond her pitiful confinement, unable to read, barely able to speak. In the month of her first menstruation, she had been dragged away, strapped to a table, and turned into a flesh vat. No longer conscious, the nameless woman had no idea how many offspring her body had produced. Then she had been awakened and liberated.
The Mother Commander understood what it meant to be that Tleilaxu female and others, and why the Honored Matres became so ferocious. No longer the degraded, despised mothers of Tleilaxu males, they demanded to be revered, to be known from that time forth as "Honored Matres". . . honored mothers. And through her Bene Gesserit eyes, Murbella recognized their humanity after all.
With understanding came release, and then everything else along the Honored Matre line came to her in a flood. She awoke and found herself sitting on the rock again, but no longer in sunlight. Hours had passed as she journeyed through her other lives. Now a dry night wind chilled her.
Shuddering from the aftereffects of the melange and her devastating journey, Murbella lurched to her feet. She finally had her answers, would share this crucial information with her advisors.
Hearing distant shouts, she looked back toward the Keep. Lights were fanning out from the fortress as searchers came looking for her. She had been a searcher, too, and now she needed to tell the rest of the New Sisterhood what she had found.
The Valkyries would be preparing their assault on Tleilax.
A choice can be as dangerous as a weapon. Refusing to choose is in itself a choice.
--PEARTEN,
ancient Mentat philosopher
T
hough nearly two hundred people remained aboard, the Ithaca felt empty to Duncan. The lighter had landed safely on the new planet, bearing Sheeana, Teg, the old Rabbi, and Thufir Hawat. Recovery teams had discreetly collected water and air, then returned to the no-ship. Everything was calm, on schedule.
The Bashar's recent message had indicated no sign of threat from the Handlers, and Duncan took the opportunity to leave the navigation bridge. Now that he had thought of it, he couldn't get the idea out of his head.
He felt like a prowler, sneaking off to do something forbidden as he stood alone before the sealed nullentropy chamber. He hadn't touched it in years, hadn't even thought about those perfectly preserved items it contained. He moved quietly, making certain the corridors were empty. Though Duncan assured himself he was doing nothing wrong, he did not want to have to explain himself to anyone.
He had fooled himself and many of the people aboard. But still he was not free of the addictive, debilitating hold Murbella had over him. He doubted she even realized the strength of the painful bond; when they had been together, when he had been able to get as much of her as he wanted, Duncan had never felt the weakness.
But in all those years since . . .
The corridor's glowpanels were bright. The breathy white noise of air-recirculation systems was the only sound Duncan could hear except for the pounding of his own heart.
Before he could think too much, forsaking his Mentat ability to project possible consequences, he applied his thumbprint ID and deactivated the nullentropy field. The storage locker opened with a faint exhalation of adjusting atmospheric pressures. And with it came Murbella's smell, like a slap across his face . . . as if she were here, in front of him.
Even after nineteen years, her scent was as fresh as if he had just held her. Her garments and other personal articles carried that unmistakable fragrance that was so essentially her. He pulled out the items one by one, a loose tunic, a soft towel, the pair of comfortable leggings she often wore when they engaged in combat practice in the training room. He touched each one with a nervous caution, as if afraid he might find hidden knives there.
Duncan had gathered these items and hidden them in storage very soon after escaping from Chapterhouse. He had not wanted to see traces of Murbella in his personal quarters or in the training rooms. He had sealed them away because he couldn't bear to destroy them. Even then, he had realized the chains she had on him.
Now, he looked at the collar of a rumpled tunic and, as he had hoped, saw a few loose strands of dark amber hair, like fine wires spun from precious metal. And at the end of each strand the pale root. He hoped he had stored these items in time, so many years ago.
Viable cells.
Duncan realized he wasn't breathing. He looked at the strands of loose hair and let his eyes fall closed, intentionally blocking the automatic Mentat trance. The idea was an impossible temptation to him.
It had been years since another ghola baby had been created, though the axlotl tanks remained functional. Sheeana's disturbing vision dream had forced her to call a halt to the project. Nevertheless, they had the capability of growing any ghola they wished. The tanks weren't being used right now. He had every right to consider this, after all he'd done for the people aboard the Ithaca.
He picked up one of Murbella's loose tunics, brought it to his nose and inhaled a long breath. What did he really want?
Duncan had distracted himself with enough duties and problems that her ghost image had faded back into his subconscious. He had thought he was over her. But his obsessive thinking about Murbella had nearly made him lose the ship to the old man and woman several years ago, and only Teg's quick instincts had saved them.
If I hadn't been distracted, preoccupied . . . obsessed! His mistake had almost cost them their freedom. Murbella was dangerous. He had to let her go. Duncan would not allow his weakness to endanger them again.
But when he'd remembered these items in nullentropy storage, when the idea occurred to him that it was possible--possible--to have another Murbella, it was like touching a hot flame to dry tinder.
If he could gather the courage--and ignore his own rational reservations--he could talk to the Tleilaxu Master about the process before Sheeana and the others returned from the planet of the Handlers. He rationalized it to himself, pretending there would be no
harm in simply raising the idea to Scytale. It implied no decision on his part.
He threw the articles back into the storage bin. Doing so seemed like swimming upstream against a strong current. The idea had latched itself firmly onto his mind. He slammed the cubicle door shut and sealed it again.
For now.
The only thing I like better than the smell of spice is the smell of fresh blood.
--FORMER HONORED MATRE DORIA,
records of early training sessions
T
he hunt began at dawn.
The tall, raccoon-faced men used stunner goads to roust the five captive Honored Matres from their stinking cell beneath the wooden tower. Hrrm and the black-striped Futar prowled about; six younger Futars whined and growled anxiously.
With glimmering orange eyes, the women had noticed the Ithaca's lighter on the far side of the clearing. Now, two of the Honored Matres burst impulsively out of the noisome cell, delivering swift kicks and blows, knocking aside the stunner goads.
But the Handlers and Futars were well practiced in fending off any resistance. Before the whores could run, the black-striped Futar pounced, driving one of them to the ground. He bared his long teeth at her throat, barely restraining himself from ripping out her larynx and ending the anticipated hunt too soon. She thrashed wildly, but the Futar dug claws into her shoulder, pinning her with his strength and weight.
Hrrm had trapped the second woman, circling her, his muscles coiled. A hungry growl bubbled in his throat. The younger Futars paced nearby, wanting part of the kill.
"Not yet." The Chief Handler allowed a calm smile to flow across his long, streamlined face. Hrrm and Black Stripe froze; the younger ones howled.
Miles Teg had no great love for the Honored Matres, knowing the havoc they had wrought among the Bene Gesserit and how they had tortured him. They had already killed him once, when they devastated Rakis. But as a military commander, the Bashar viewed them as opponents against whom he should carry no undue malice. Young Thufir Hawat, seeing the Bashar's intense concentration, imitated him, gathering data as the basis for making further decisions.
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