ChapterHouse: Dune dc-6

by Frank Herbert

  The energy required to bring the ship down to the planet and maintain it spoke of a major commitment. The Sisterhood could not count the cost in any ordinary way. The comptroller of the Bene Gesserit treasury did not deal merely in monetary counters. Not for them the Solar or comparable currencies. They banked on their people, on food, on payments due sometimes for millennia, payments often in kind - both materials and loyalties.

  Pay up, Duncan! We're calling in your note!

  This ship was not just a prison. He had considered several Mentat projections. Prime: it was a laboratory where Reverend Mothers sought a way to nullify a no-ship's ability to confuse human senses.

  A no-ship gameboard - puzzle and warren. All to confine three prisoners? No. There had to be other reasons.

  The game had secret rules, some he could only guess. But he had found it reassuring when Sheeana entered into the spirit of it. I knew she would have her own plans. Obvious when she began practicing Honored Matre techniques. Polishing my trainees!

  Sheeana wanted intimate information about Murbella and much more - his memories of people he had known in his many lives, especially memories of the Tyrant.

  And I want information about the Bene Gesserit.

  The Sisterhood kept him in minimal activity. Frustrating him to increase Mentat abilities. He was not at the heart of that larger problem he sensed outside the ship. Tantalizing fragments came to him when Odrade gave him glimpses of their predicament through her questions.

  Enough to offer new premises? Not without access to data that his console refused to display.

  It was his problem, too, damn them! He was in a box within their box. All of them trapped.

  Odrade had stood beside this console one afternoon a week ago and blandly assured him the Sisterhood's data sources were "opened wide" to him. Right there she had stood, her back to the counter, leaning on it casually, arms folded across her breast. Her resemblance to the adult Miles Teg was uncanny at times. Even to that need (was it a compulsion?) to stand while talking. She disliked chairdogs, too.

  He knew he had an extremely loose comprehension of her motives and plans. But he didn't trust them. Not after Gammu.

  Decoy and bait. That was how they had used him. He was lucky not to have gone the way of Dune - a dead husk. Used up by the Bene Gesserit.

  When he fidgeted this way, Idaho preferred to slump into the chair at his console. Sometimes, he sat here for hours, immobile, his mind trying to encompass complexities of the ship's powerful data resources. The system could identify any human in it. So it has automatic monitors. It had to know who was speaking, making demands, assuming temporary command.

  Flight circuits defy my attempts to break through the locks. Disconnected? That was what his guards said. But the ship's way of identifying who tapped the circuits - he knew his key lay there.

  Would Sheeana help? It was a dangerous gamble to trust her too much. Sometimes when she watched him at his console he was reminded of Odrade. Sheeana was Odrade's student. That was a sobering memory.

  What was their interest in how he used Shipsystems? As if he needed to ask!

  During his third year here he had made the system hide data for him, doing this with his own keys. To thwart the prying comeyes, he hid his actions in plain sight. Obvious insertions for later retrieval but with an encrypted second message. Easy for a Mentat and useful mostly as a trick, exploring the potentials of Shipsystems. He had booby-trapped his data to a random dump without hope of recovery.

  Bellonda suspected, but when she questioned him about it, he only smiled.

  I hide my history, Bell. My serial lives as a ghola - all of them back to the original non-ghola. Intimate things I remember about those experiences: a dumping ground for poignant memories.

  Sitting now at the console, he experienced mixed feelings. Confinement galled him. No matter the size and richness of his prison, it still was a prison. He had known for some time that he very likely could escape but Murbella and his increasing knowledge about their predicament held him. He felt as much a prisoner of his thoughts as of the elaborate system represented by guards and this monstrous device. The no-ship was a device, of course. A tool. A way to move unseen in a dangerous universe. A means of concealing yourself and your intentions even from prescient searchers.

  With accumulated skills of many lifetimes, he looked on his surroundings through a screen of sophistication and naivete. Mentats cultivated naivete. Thinking you knew something was a sure way to blind yourself. It was not growing up that slowly applied brakes to learning (Mentats were taught) but an accumulation of "things I know."

  New data sources the Sisterhood had opened to him (if he could rely on them) raised questions. How was opposition to Honored Matres organized in the Scattering? Obviously there were groups (he hesitated to call them powers) who hunted Honored Matres the way Honored Matres hunted the Bene Gesserit. Killed them, too, if you accepted Gammu evidence.

  Futars and Handlers? He made a Mentat Projection: A Tleilaxu offshoot in the first Scattering had engaged in genetic manipulation. Those two he saw in his vision: were they the ones who created Futars? Could that couple be Face Dancers? Independent of Tleilaxu Masters? All was not singular in the Scattering.

  Dammit! He needed access to more data, to potent sources. His present sources were not even remotely adequate. A tool of limited purpose, his console could be adapted to larger requirements but his adaptations limped. He needed to stride out as a Mentat!

  I've been hobbled and that's a mistake. Doesn't Odrade trust me? She's an Atreides, damn her! She knows what I owe her family.

  More than one lifetime and the debt never paid!

  He knew he was fidgeting. Abruptly, his mind locked on that. Mentat fidgeting! A signal that he stood poised at the edge of breakthrough. A Prime Projection! Something they had not told him about Teg?

  Questions! There were unasked questions lashing at him.

  I need perspective! Not necessarily a matter of distance. You could gain perspective from within if your questions carried few distortions.

  He sensed that somewhere in Bene Gesserit experiences (perhaps even in Bell's jealously guarded Archives) lay missing pieces. Bell should appreciate this! A fellow Mentat must know the excitement of this moment. His thoughts were like tesserae, most of the pieces at hand and ready to fit into a mosaic. It was not a matter of solutions.

  He could hear his first Mentat teacher, the words rumbling in his mind: "Assemble your questions in counterpoise and toss your temporary data onto one side of the scales or the other. Solutions unbalance any situation. Imbalances reveal what you seek."

  Yes! Achieving imbalances with sensitized questions was a Mentat's juggling act.

  Something Murbella had said the night before - what? They had been in her bed. He recalled seeing the time projected on the ceiling: 9:47. And he had thought: That projection takes energy.

  He could almost feel the flow of the ship's power, this giant enclosure cut out of Time. Frictionless machinery to create a mimetic presence no instrument could distinguish from natural background. Except for now when it was on standby, shielded not from eyes but from prescience.

  Murbella beside him: another kind of power, both aware of the force trying to pull them together. The energy it took to suppress that mutual magnetism! Sexual attraction building and building and building.

  Murbella talking. Yes, that was it. Oddly self-analytic. She approached her own life with a new maturity, a Bene Gesserit-heightened awareness and confidence that something of great strength grew in her.

  Every time he recognized this Bene Gesserit change, he felt sad.

  Nearer the day of our parting.

  But Murbella was talking. "She (Odrade was often 'she') keeps asking me to assess my love for you."

  Remembering this, Idaho allowed it to replay.

  "She has tried the same approach with me."

  "What do you say?"

  "Odi et amo. Excrucior."

  She lifted
herself on one elbow and looked down at him. "What language is that?"

  "A very old one Leto had me learn once."

  "Translate." Peremptory. Her old Honored Matre self.

  " 'I hate her and I love her. And I am racked.' "

  "Do you really hate me?" Unbelieving.

  "What I hate is being tied this way, not the master of my self."

  "Would you leave me if you could?"

  "I want the decision to recur moment by moment. I want control of it."

  "It's a game where one of the pieces can't be moved."

  There it was! Her words.

  Remembering, Idaho felt no elation but as though his eyes had suddenly been opened after a long sleep. A game where one of the pieces can't be moved. Game. His view of the no-ship and what the Sisterhood did here.

  There was more to the exchange.

  "The ship is our own special school," Murbella said.

  He could only agree. The Sisterhood reinforced his Mentat capacities to screen data and display what had not gone through. He sensed where this might lead and felt leaden fear.

  "You clear the nerve passages. You block off distractions and useless mind-wanderings."

  You redirected your responses into that dangerous mode every Mentat was warned to avoid. "You can lose yourself there."

  Students were taken to see human vegetables, "failed Mentats," kept alive to demonstrate the peril.

  How tempting, though. You could sense the power in that mode. Nothing hidden. All things known.

  In the midst of that fear, Murbella turning toward him on the bed, he felt the sexual tensions become almost explosive.

  Not yet. Not yet!

  One of them had said something else. What? He had been thinking about the limits of logic as a tool to expose the Sisterhood's motives.

  "Do you often try to analyze them?" Murbella asked.

  Uncanny how she did that, addressing his unspoken thoughts. She denied she read minds. "I just read you, ghola mine. You are mine, you know."

  "And vice versa. "

  "Too true." Almost bantering but it covered something deeper and convoluted.

  There was a pitfall in any analysis of human psyches and he said this. "Thinking you know why you behave as you do gives you all sorts of excuses for extraordinary behavior."

  Excuses for extraordinary behavior! There was another piece in his mosaic. More of the game but these counters were guilt and blame.

  Murbella's voice was almost musing. "I suppose you can rationalize almost anything by laying it on some trauma."

  "Rationalize such things as burning entire planets?"

  "There's a kind of brutal self-determination in that. She says making determined choices firms up the psyche and gives you a sense of identity you can rely on under stress. Do you agree, Mentat mine?"

  "The Mentat is not yours." No force in his voice.

  Murbella laughed and slumped back onto her pillow. "You know what the Sisters want of us, Mentat mine?"

  "They want our children."

  "Oh, much more than that. They want our willing participation in their dream."

  Another piece of the mosaic!

  But who other than a Bene Gesserit knew that dream? The Sisters were actresses, always performing, letting little that was real come through their masks. The real person was walled in and metered out as needed.

  "Why does she keep that old painting?" Murbella asked.

  Idaho felt his stomach muscles tighten. Odrade had brought him a holorecord of the painting she kept in her sleeping chamber. Cottages at Cordeville by Vincent Van Gogh. Awakening him in this bed at some witching hour of the night almost a month ago.

  "You asked for my hold on humanity and here it is." Thrusting the holo in front of his sleep-fogged eyes. He sat up and stared at the thing, trying to comprehend. What was wrong with her? Odrade sounded so excited.

  She left the holo in his hands while she turned on all of the lights, giving the room a sense of hard and immediate shapes, everything vaguely mechanical the way you would expect it in a no-ship. Where was Murbella? They had gone to sleep together.

  He focused on the holo and it touched him in an unaccountable way, as though it linked him to Odrade. Her hold on her humanity? The holo felt cold to his hands. She took it from him and propped it on the side table where he stared at it while she found a chair and sat near his head. Sitting? Something compelled her to be near him!

  "It was painted by a madman on Old Terra," she said, bringing her cheek close to his while both looked at the copy of the painting. "Look at it! An encapsulated human moment."

  In a landscape? Yes, dammit. She was right.

  He stared at the holo. Those marvelous colors! It was not just the colors. It was the totality.

  "Most modern artists would laugh at the way he created that," Odrade said.

  Couldn't she be silent while he looked at it?

  "That was a human being as ultimate recorder," Odrade said. "The human hand, the human eye, the human essence brought to focus in the awareness of one person who tested the limits."

  Tested the limits! More of the mosaic.

  "Van Gogh did that with the most primitive materials and equipment." She sounded almost drunk. "Pigments a caveman would have recognized! Painted on a fabric he could have made with his own hands. He might have made the tools himself from fur and wild twigs."

  She touched the surface of the holo, her finger placing a shadow across the tall trees. "The cultural level was crude by our standards, but see what he produced?"

  Idaho felt he should say something but words would not come. Where was Murbella? Why wasn't she here?

  Odrade pulled back and her next words burned themselves into him.

  "That painting says you cannot suppress the wild thing, the uniqueness that will occur among humans no matter how much we try to avoid it."

  Idaho tore his gaze away from the holo and looked at Odrade's lips when she spoke.

  "Vincent told us something important about our fellows in the Scattering."

  This long-dead painter? About the Scattering?

  "They have done things out there and are doing things we cannot imagine. Wild things! The explosive size of that Scattered population insures it."

  Murbella entered the room behind Odrade, belting a soft white robe, her feet bare. Her hair was damp from a shower. So that was where she had gone.

  "Mother Superior?" Murbella's voice was sleepy.

  Odrade spoke over her shoulder without fully turning. "Honored Matres think they can anticipate and control every wildness. What nonsense. They cannot even control it in themselves."

  Murbella came around to the foot of the bed and stared questioningly at Idaho. "I seem to have come in on the middle of a conversation. "

  "Balance, that's the key," Odrade said.

  Idaho kept his attention on Mother Superior.

  "Humans can balance on strange surfaces," Odrade said. "Even on unpredictable ones. It's called 'getting in tune.' Great musicians know it. Surfers I watched when I was a child on Gammu, they knew it. Some waves throw you but you're prepared for that. You climb back up and go at it once more."

  For no reason he could explain, Idaho thought of another thing Odrade had said: "We have no attic storerooms. We recycle everything."

  Recycle. Cycle. Pieces of the circle. Pieces of the mosaic.

  He was random hunting and knew better. Not the Mentat way. Recycle, though - Other Memory was not an attic storeroom then but something they considered as recycling. It meant they used their past only to change it and renew it.

  Getting in tune.

  A strange allusion from someone who claimed she avoided music.

  Remembering, he sensed his mental mosaic. It had become a jumble. Nothing fitted anywhere. Random pieces that probably did not go together at all.

  But they did!

  Mother Superior's voice continued in his memory. So there is more.

  "People who know this go to the heart of i
t," Odrade said. "They warn that you cannot think about what you're doing. That's a sure way to fail. You just do it!"

  Don't think. Do it. He sensed anarchy. Her words threw him back onto resources other than Mentat training.

  Bene Gesserit trickery! She did this deliberately, knowing the effect. Where was the affection he sometimes felt radiating from her? Could she have concern for the well-being of someone she treated this way?

  When Odrade left them (he barely noticed her departure), Murbella sat on the bed and straightened the robe around her knees.

  Humans can balance on strange surfaces. Movement in his mind: the pieces of the mosaic trying to find relationships.

  He felt a new surge in the universe. Those two strange people in his vision? They were part of it. He knew this without being able to say why. What was it the Bene Gesserit claimed? "We modify old fashions and old beliefs."

  "Look at me!" Murbella said.

  Voice? Not quite but now he was sure she tried it on and she had not told him they were training her in this witchery.

  He saw the alien look in her green eyes that told him she was thinking about her former associates.

  "Never try to be more clever than the Bene Gesserit, Duncan."

  Speaking for the comeyes?

  He could not be sure. It was the intelligence behind her eyes that gripped him these days. He could feel it growing there, as though her teachers blew into a balloon and Murbella's intellect expanded the way her abdomen expanded with new life.

  Voice! What were they doing to her?

  That was a stupid question. He knew what they were doing. They were taking her away from him, making a Sister of her. No longer my lover, my marvelous Murbella. A Reverend Mother then, remotely calculating in everything she did. A witch. Who could love a witch?

  I could. And always will.

  "They grab you from your blind side to use you for their own purposes," he said.

  He could see his words take hold. She had awakened to this trap after the fact. The Bene Gesserit were so damnably clever! They had enticed her into their trap, giving her small glimpses of things as magnetic as the force binding her to him. It could only be an enraging realization to an Honored Matre.