ChapterHouse: Dune dc-6

by Frank Herbert

  There! That would forestall Bell's outburst.

  Tamalane shifted slightly in her chair. Odrade looked at the older woman. Tam, composed there behind her mask of critical patience. Snowy hair above that narrow face: the appearance of aged wisdom.

  Odrade saw through the mask to Tam's extreme severity, the pose that said she disliked everything she saw and heard.

  In contrast to the surface softness of Bell's flesh, there was a bony solidity to Tamalane. She still kept herself in trim, her muscles as well-toned as possible. In her eyes, though, was the thing that belied this: a sense of withdrawing there, pulling back from life. Oh, she observed yet, but something had begun the final retreat. Tamalane's famed intelligence had become a kind of shrewdness, relying mostly on past observations and past decisions rather than on what she saw in the immediate present.

  We must begin readying a replacement. It will be Sheeana, I think. Sheeana is dangerous to us but shows great promise. And Sheeana was blooded on Dune.

  Odrade focused on Tamalane's shaggy eyebrows. They tended to hang over her lids in a concealing disarray. Yes. Sheeana to replace Tamalane.

  Knowing the complicated problems they must solve, Tam would accept the decision. At the moment of announcement, Odrade knew she would only have to turn Tam's attention to the enormity of their predicament.

  I will miss her, dammit!

  ***

  You cannot know history unless you know how leaders move with its currents. Every leader requires outsiders to perpetuate his leadership. Examine my career: I was leader and outsider. Do not assume I merely created a Church-State. That was my function as leader and I copied historical models. Barbaric arts of my time reveal me as outsider. Favorite poetry: epics. Popular dramatic ideal: heroism. Dances: wildly abandoned. Stimulants to make people sense what I took from them. What did I take? The right to choose a role in history.

  - Leto II (The Tyrant): Vether Bebe Translation

  I am going to die! Lucilla thought.

  Please, dear Sisters, don't let it come before I pass along the precious burden I carry in my mind!

  Sisters!

  The idea of family seldom was expressed among the Bene Gesserit but it was there. In a genetic sense, they were related. And because of Other Memory, they often knew where. They had no need for special terms such as "second cousin" or "great aunt." They saw the relationships as a weaver sees his cloth. They knew how the warp and weft created the fabric. A better word than Family, it was the fabric of the Bene Gesserit that formed the Sisterhood but it was the ancient instinct of Family that provided the warp.

  Lucilla thought of her sisters only as Family now. The Family needed what she carried.

  I was a fool to seek refuge on Gammu!

  But her damaged no-ship would limp no farther. How diabolically extravagant Honored Matres had been! The hatred this implied terrified her.

  Strewing the escape lanes around Lampadas with deathtraps, the Foldspace perimeter seeded with small no-globes, each containing a field projector and a lasgun to fire on contact. When the laser hit the Holzmann generator in the no-globe, a chain reaction released the nuclear energy. Bzzz into the trap field and a devastating explosion spread silently across you. Costly but efficient! Enough such explosions and even a giant Guildship would become a crippled derelict in the void. Her ship's system of defensive analyses had penetrated the nature of the trap only when it was too late, but she had been lucky, she supposed.

  She did not feel lucky as she looked out the second story window of this isolated Gammu farmhouse. The window was open and an afternoon breeze carried the inevitable smell of oil, something dirty in the smoke of a fire out there. The Harkonnens had left their oily mark on this planet so deep it might never be removed.

  Her contact here was a retired Suk doctor but she knew him as much more, something so secret that only a limited number in the Bene Gesserit shared it. The knowledge lay in a special classification: The secrets of which we do not speak, even among ourselves, for that would harm us. The secrets we do not pass from Sister to Sister in the sharing of lives for there is no open path. The secrets we dare not know until a need arises. Lucilla had stumbled into it because of a veiled remark by Odrade.

  "You know an interesting thing about Gammu? Mmmmm, there's a whole society there that bands itself on the basis that they all eat consecrated foods. A custom brought in by immigrants who have never been assimilated. Keep to themselves, frown on outbreeding, that sort of thing. They ignite the usual mythic detritus, of course: whispers, rumors. Serves to isolate them even more. Precisely what they want."

  Lucilla knew of an ancient society that fitted itself neatly into this description. She was curious. The society she had in mind supposedly had died out shortly after the Second Interspace Migrations. Judicious browsing in Archives whetted her curiosity even more. Living styles, rumor-fogged descriptions of religious rituals - especially the candelabra - and the keeping of special holy days with a proscription against any work on those days. And they were not just on Gammu!

  One morning, taking advantage of an uncommon lull, Lucilla entered the workroom to test her "projective surmise," something not as reliable as a Mentat's equivalent but more than theory.

  "You have a new assignment for me, I suspect."

  "I see you've been spending time in Archives."

  "It seemed a profitable thing to do just now."

  "Making connections?"

  "A surmise." That secret society on Gammu - they're Jews, aren't they?

  "You may have need of special information because of where we are about to post you." Extremely casual.

  Lucilla sank into Bellonda's chairdog without invitation.

  Odrade picked up a stylus, scribbled on a sheet of disposable and passed it to Lucilla in a way that hid it from the comeyes.

  Lucilla took the hint and bent over the message, holding it close beneath the shield of her head.

  "Your surmise is correct. You must die before revealing it. That is the price of their cooperation, a mark of great trust." Lucilla shredded the message.

  Odrade used eye and palm identification to unseal a panel on the wall behind her. She removed a small ridulian crystal and handed it to Lucilla. It was warm but Lucilla felt a chill. What could be so secret? Odrade swung the security hood from beneath her worktable and pivoted it into position.

  Lucilla dropped the crystal into its receptacle with a trembling hand and pulled the hood over her head. Immediately, words formed in her mind, an oral sense of extremely old accents clipped for recognition: "The people to whom your attention has been called are the Jews. They made a defensive decision eons ago. The solution to recurrent pogroms was to vanish from public view. Space travel made this not only possible but attractive. They hid on countless planets - their own Scattering - and they probably have planets where only their people live. This does not mean they have abandoned age-old practices in which they excelled out of survival necessity. The old religion is sure to persist even though somewhat altered. It is probable that a rabbi from ancient times would not find himself out of place behind the Sabbath menorah of a Jewish household in your age. But their secrecy is such that you could work a lifetime beside a Jew and never suspect. They call it 'Complete Cover,' although they know its dangers."

  Lucilla accepted this without question. That which was so secret would be perceived as dangerous by anyone who even suspected its presence. "Else why do they keep it secret, eh? Answer me that!"

  The crystal continued to pour its secrets into her awareness: "At the threat of discovery, they have a standard reaction, 'We seek the religion of our roots. It is a revival, bringing back what is best from our past.' "

  Lucilla knew this pattern. There were always "nutty revivalists." It was guaranteed to blunt most curiosity. "Them? Oh, they're another bunch of revivalists."

  "The masking system (the crystal continued) did not succeed with us. We have our own well-recorded Jewish heritage and a fund of Other Memory to tell
us reasons for secrecy. We did not disturb the situation until I, Mother Superior during and after the battle of Corrin (Very old, indeed!), saw that our Sisterhood had need of a secret society, a group responsive to our requests for assistance."

  Lucilla felt a surge of skepticism. Requests?

  The long-ago Mother Superior had anticipated skepticism. "On occasion, we make demands they cannot avoid. But they make demands on us as well."

  Lucilla felt immersed in the mystique of this underground society. It was more than ultra-secret. Her clumsy questions in Archives had elicited mostly rejections. "Jews? What's that? Oh, yes - an ancient sect. Look it up for yourself. We don't have time for idle religious research."

  The crystal had more to impart: "Jews are amused and sometimes dismayed at what they interpret as our copying them. Our breeding records dominated by the female line to control the mating pattern are seen as Jewish. You are only a Jew if your mother was a Jew. "

  The crystal came to its conclusion: "The Diaspora will be remembered. Keeping this secret involves our deepest honor."

  Lucilla lifted the hood from her head.

  "You are a very good choice for an extremely touchy assignment on Lampadas," Odrade had said, restoring the crystal to its hiding place.

  That is the past and likely dead. Look where Odrade's "touchy assignment" has brought me!

  From her vantage in the Gammu farmhouse, Lucilla noted a large produce carrier had entered the grounds. There was a bustle of activity below her. Workers came from all sides to meet the big carrier with towbins of vegetables. She smelled the pungent juices from the cut stems of marrows.

  Lucilla did not move from the window. Her host had supplied her with local garments - a long gown of drab gray everwear and a bright blue headscarf to confine her sandy hair. It was important to do nothing calling undue attention to herself. She had seen other women pause to watch the farm work. Her presence here could be taken as curiosity.

  It was a large carrier, its suspensors laboring under the load of produce already piled in its articulated sections. The operator stood in a transparent house at the front, hands on the steering lever, eyes straight ahead. His legs were spread wide and he leaned into the web of sloping supports, touching the power bar with his left hip. He was a large man, face dark and deeply wrinkled, hair laced with gray. His body was an extension of the machinery - guiding ponderous movement. He flicked his gaze up to Lucilla as he passed, then back to the track into the wide loading area defined by buildings below her.

  Built into his machine, she thought. That said something about the way humans were fitted to the things they did. Lucilla sensed a weakening force in this thought. If you fitted yourself too tightly to one thing, other abilities atrophied. We become what we do.

  She pictured herself suddenly as another operator in some great machine, no different from that man in the carrier.

  The big machine trundled past her out of the yard, its operator not sparing her another glance. He had seen her once. Why look twice?

  Her hosts had made a wise choice in this hiding place, she thought. A sparsely populated area with trustworthy workers in the immediate vicinity and little curiosity among the people who passed. Hard work dulled curiosity. She had noted the character of the area. when she was brought here. Evening then and people already trudging toward their homes. You could measure the urban density of an area by when work stopped. Early to bed and you were in a loosely-packed region. Night activity said people remained restless, twitchy with inner awareness of others active and vibrating too near.

  What has brought me to this introspective state?

  Early in the Sisterhood's first retreat, before the worst onslaughts of the Honored Matres, Lucilla had experienced difficulty coming to grips with belief that "someone out there is hunting us with intent to kill."

  Pogrom! That was what the Rabbi had called it before going off that morning "to see what I can do for you."

  She knew the Rabbi had chosen his word from long and bitter memory, but not since her first experience of Gammu before this pogrom had Lucilla felt such confinement to circumstances she could not control.

  I was a fugitive then, too.

  The Sisterhood's present situation bore similarities to what they had suffered under the Tyrant, except that the God Emperor obviously (in retrospect) never intended to exterminate the Bene Gesserit, only to rule them. And he certainly ruled!

  Where is that damned Rabbi?

  He was a large, intense man with old-fashioned spectacles. A broad face browned by much sunlight. Few wrinkles despite the age she could read in his voice and movements. The spectacles focused attention on deeply set brown eyes that watched her with peculiar intensity.

  "Honored Matres," he had said (right here in this bare-walled upper room) when she explained her predicament. "Oh, my! That is difficult."

  Lucilla had expected that response and, what was more, she could see he knew it.

  "There is a Guild Navigator on Gammu helping the search for you," he said. "It is one of the Edrics, very powerful, I am told."

  "I have Siona blood. He cannot see me."

  "Nor me nor any of my people and for the same reason. We Jews adjust to many necessities, you know."

  "This Edric is a gesture," she said. "He can do little."

  "But they have brought him. I'm afraid there is no way we can get you safely off the planet."

  "Then what can we do?"

  "We will see. My people are not entirely helpless, you understand?"

  She recognized sincerity and concern for her. He spoke quietly of resisting the sexual blandishments of Honored Matres, "doing it unobtrusively so as not to arouse them."

  "I will go whisper in a few ears," he said.

  She felt oddly restored by this. There often was something coldly remote and cruel about falling into the hands of the medical professions. She reassured herself with the knowledge that Suks were conditioned to be alert to your needs, compassionate and supportive. (All of those things that can fall by the wayside in emergencies.) She bent her efforts to restoring calm, focusing on the personal mantra she had gained in solo death education.

  If I am to die, I must pass along a transcendental lesson. I must leave with serenity.

  That helped but still she felt a trembling. The Rabbi had been gone too long. Something was wrong.

  Was I right to trust him?

  Despite a growing sense of doom, Lucilla forced herself to practice Bene Gesserit naivete as she reviewed her encounter with the Rabbi. Her Proctors had called this "the innocence that goes naturally with inexperience, a condition often confused with ignorance." Into this naivete all things flowed. It was close to Mentat performance. Information entered without prejudgment. "You are a mirror upon which the universe is reflected. That reflection is all you experience. Images bounce from your senses. Hypotheses arise. Important even when wrong. Here is the exceptional case where more than one wrong can produce dependable decisions."

  "We are your willing servants," the Rabbi had said.

  That was guaranteed to alert a Reverend Mother.

  The explanations of Odrade's crystal felt suddenly inadequate. It's almost always profit. She accepted this as cynical but from vast experience. Attempts to weed it out of human behavior always broke up on the rocks of application. Socializing and communistic systems only changed the counters that measured profits. Enormous managerial bureaucracies - the counter was power.

  Lucilla warned herself that the manifestations were always the same. Look at this Rabbi's extensive farm! Retirement retreat for a Suk? She had seen something of what lay behind the establishment: servants, richer quarters. And there must be more. No matter the system it was always the same: the best foods, beautiful lovers, unrestricted travel, magnificent holiday accommodations.

  It gets very tiresome when you've seen it as often as we have.

  She knew her mind was jittering but felt powerless to prevent it.

  Survival. The very bottom of t
he demand system is always survival. And I threaten the survival of the Rabbi and his people.

  He had fawned upon her. Always beware of those who fawn upon us, nuzzling up to all of that power we're supposed to have. How flattering to find great mobs of servants waiting and anxious to do our bidding! How utterly debilitating.

  The mistake of Honored Matres.

  What is delaying the Rabbi?

  Was he seeing how much he could get for the Reverend Mother Lucilla?

  A door slammed below her, shaking the floor under her feet. She heard hurried footsteps on a stairway. How primitive these people were. Stairways! Lucilla turned as the door opened. The Rabbi entered bringing a rich smell of melange. He stood by the door assessing her mood.

  "Forgive my tardiness, dear lady. I was summoned for questioning by Edric, the Guild Navigator."

  That explained the smell of spice. Navigators were forever bathed in the orange gas of melange, their features often fogged by the vapors. Lucilla could visualize the Navigator's tiny v of a mouth and the ugly flap of nose. Mouth and nose appeared small on a Navigator's gigantic face with its pulsing temples. She knew how threatened the Rabbi must have felt listening to the singsong ululations of the Navigator's voice with its simultaneous mechtranslation into impersonal Galach.

  "What did he want?"

  "You."

  "Does he..."

  "He does not know for sure but I am certain he suspects us. However, he suspects everybody."

  "Did they follow you?"

  "Not necessary. They can find me any time they want."

  "What shall we do?" She knew she spoke too fast, much too loud.

  "Dear lady..." He came three steps closer and she saw the perspiration on his forehead and nose. Fear. She could smell it.

  "Well, what is it?"

  "The economic view behind the activities of Honored Matres - we find them quite interesting."

  His words crystallized her fears. I knew it! He's selling me out!

  "As you Reverend Mothers know very well, there are always gaps in economic systems."