Frank Herbert - Dune Book 5 - Heretics of Dune

by Frank Herbert

  "What is it? What is it?" Sheeana pounded her fists against Tuek's chest as she shouted.

  "Hush, Sheeana! Hush!" Tuek paused on the first landing. Both a chute and suspensor-drop led from this landing into the building's core. Cania stopped beside Tuek, her panting loud in the narrow space.

  "It killed Kipuna and two of your guards," Cania gasped. "Cut them up! I saw it. God preserve us!"

  Tuek's mind was a maelstrom. Both the chute and the suspensor-drop system were enclosed wormholes through the tower. They could be sabotaged. The attack on the roof might be only one element in a far more complex plot.

  "Put me down!" Sheeana insisted. "What's happening?"

  Tuek eased her to the floor but kept one of her hands clutched in his hand. He bent over her, "Sheeana, dear, someone is trying to harm us."

  Sheeana's mouth formed a silent "O," then: "They hurt Kipuna?"

  Tuek looked up at the roof door. Was that an ornithopter he heard up there? Stiros! Conspirators could take three vulnerable people into the desert so easily!

  Cania had regained her breath. "I hear a 'thopter," she said. "Shouldn't we be getting away from here?"

  "We will go down by the stairs," Tuek said.

  "But the --"

  "Do as I say!"

  Keeping a firm hold on Sheeana's hand, Tuek led the way down to the next landing. In addition to the chute and suspensor access, this landing had a door into a wide curving hall. Only a few short steps beyond the door lay the entrance to Sheeana's quarters, once Tuek's own quarters. Again he hesitated.

  "Something's happening on the roof," Cania whispered.

  Tuek looked down at the fearfully silent child beside him. Her hand felt sweaty.

  Yes, there was some sort of uproar on the roof -- shouts, the hiss of burners, much running about. The roof door, now out of sight above them, crashed open. This decided Tuek. He flung open the door into the hallway and dashed out into the arms of a tightly grouped wedge of black-robed women. With an empty sense of defeat, Tuek recognized the woman at the point of the wedge: Odrade!

  Someone plucked Sheeana away from him and hustled her back into the press of robed figures. Before Tuek or Cania could protest, hands were clapped over their mouths. Other hands pinioned them against a wall of the hallway. Some of the robed figures went through the doorway and up the stairs.

  "The child is safe and that's all that's important for the moment," Odrade whispered. She looked into Tuek's eyes. "Make no outcry." The hand was removed from his mouth. Using Voice, she said: "Tell me about the roof!"

  Tuek found himself complying without reservation. "A seeker towing a long shigawire. It came over the parapet. Kipuna saw it and --"

  "Where is Kipuna?"

  "Dead. Cania saw it." Tuek described Kipuna's brave dash toward the threat.

  Kipuna dead! Odrade thought. She concealed a fiercely angry sense of loss. What a waste. There must be admiration for such a brave death, but the loss! The Sisterhood always needed such courage and devotion, but it also required the genetic wealth Kipuna had represented. It was gone, taken by these stumbling fools!

  At a gesture from Odrade, the hand was removed from Cania's mouth. "Tell me what you saw," Odrade said.

  "The seeker whipped the shigawire around Kipuna's neck and. . ." Cania shuddered.

  The dull thump of an explosion reverberated above them, then silence. Odrade waved a hand. Robed women spread along the hallway, moving silently out of sight beyond the curve. Only Odrade and two others, both chill-eyed younger women with intense expressions, remained beside Tuek and Cania. Sheeana was nowhere to be seen.

  "The Ixians are in this somewhere," Odrade said.

  Tuek agreed. That much shigawire . . . "Where have you taken the child?" he asked.

  "We are protecting her," Odrade said. "Be still." She tipped her head, listening.

  A robed woman sped back around the curve of the hallway and whispered something in Odrade's ear. Odrade produced a tight smile.

  "It is over," Odrade said. "We will go to Sheeana."

  Sheeana occupied a softly cushioned blue chair in the main room of her quarters. Black-robed women stood in a protective arc behind her. The child appeared to Tuek quite recovered from the shock of the attack and escape but her eyes glittered with excitement and unasked questions. Sheeana's attention was directed at something off to Tuek's right. He stopped and looked there, gasping at what he saw.

  A naked male body lay against the wall in an oddly crumpled position, the head twisted until the chin lay back over the left shoulder. Open eyes stared out with the emptiness of death.

  Stiros!

  The shredded rags of Stiros' robe, obviously torn from him violently, lay in an untidy heap near the body's feet.

  Tuek looked at Odrade.

  "He was in on it," she said. "There were Face Dancers with the Ixians."

  Tuek tried to swallow in a dry throat.

  Cania shuffled past him toward the body. Tuek could not see her face but Cania's presence reminded him that there had been something between Stiros and Cania in their younger days. Tuek moved instinctively to place himself between Cania and the seated child.

  Cania stopped at the body and nudged it with a foot. She turned a gloating expression on Tuek. "I had to make sure he was really dead," she said.

  Odrade glanced at a companion. "Get rid of the body." She looked at Sheeana. It was Odrade's first chance for a more careful study of the child since leading the assault force here to deal with the attack on the temple complex.

  Tuek spoke behind Odrade. "Reverend Mother, could you explain please what --

  Odrade interrupted without turning. "Later."

  Sheeana's expression quickened at Tuek's words. "I thought you were a Reverend Mother!"

  Odrade merely nodded. What a fascinating child. Odrade experienced the sensations she felt while standing in front of the ancient painting in Taraza's quarters. Some of the fire that had gone into the work of art inspired Odrade now. Wild inspiration! That was the message from the mad Van Gogh. Chaos brought into magnificent order. Was that not part of the Sisterhood's coda?

  This child is my canvas, Odrade thought. She felt her hand tingle to the feeling of that ancient brush. Her nostrils flared to the smells of oils and pigments.

  "Leave me alone with Sheeana," Odrade ordered. "Everybody out."

  Tuek started to protest but stopped when one of Odrade's robed companions gripped his arm. Odrade glared at him.

  "The Bene Gesserit have served you before," she said. "This time, we saved your life."

  The woman holding Tuek's arm tugged at him.

  "Answer his questions," Odrade said. "But do it somewhere else."

  Cania took a step toward Sheeana. "That child is my --"

  "Leave!" Odrade barked, all the powers of Voice in the command.

  Cania froze.

  "You almost lost her to a bumbling lot of conspirators!" Odrade said, glaring at Cania. "We will consider whether you get any further opportunity to associate with Sheeana."

  Tears started in Cania's eyes but Odrade's condemnation could not be denied. Turning, Cania fled with the others.

  Odrade returned her attention to the watchful child.

  "We've been a long time waiting for you," Odrade said. "We will not give those fools another opportunity to lose you."

  Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout?

  -Bene Gesserit Council Proceedings: Archives #XOX232

  Immediately after Taraza and her party left Gammu, Teg threw himself into his work. New in-Keep procedures had to be laid out, holding Schwangyu at arm's length from the ghola. Taraza's orders.

  "She can observe all she wants. She can't touch."

  In spite of the work pressures, Teg found himself staring into space at odd moments, prey to free-floating anxiety. The experience of rescuing Taraza's party from the Guildship and Odrade
's odd revelations did not fit into any data classification he constructed.

  Dependencies . . . key logs . . .

  Teg found himself seated in his own workroom, an assignment schedule projected in front of him with shift changes to approve and, for a moment, he had no idea of the time or even the date. It took a moment to relocate himself.

  Midmorning. Taraza and her party had been gone two days. He was alone. Yes, Patrin had taken over this day's training schedule with Duncan, freeing Teg for the command decisions.

  The workroom around Teg felt alien. Yet, when he looked at each element in it, he found each thing familiar. Here was his own personal data console. His uniform jacket had been draped neatly across a chair-back beside him. He tried to fall into Mentat mode and found his own mind resisting. He had not encountered that phenomenon since training days.

  Training days.

  Taraza and Odrade between them had thrown him back into some form of training.

  Self-training.

  In a detached way, he felt his memory offering up a long-ago conversation with Taraza. How familiar it was. He was right there, caught in the moments of his own memory-snare.

  Both he and Taraza had been quite tired after making the decisions and taking the actions to prevent a bloody confrontation -- the Barandiko incident. Nothing but a hiccough in history now but at the time it had demanded all of their combined energies.

  Taraza invited him into the small parlor of her quarters on her no-ship after the agreement was signed. She spoke casually, admiring his sagacity, the way he had seen through to the weaknesses that would force a compromise.

  They had been awake and active for almost thirty hours and Teg was glad for the opportunity to sit while Taraza dialed her foodrink installation. It dutifully produced two tall glasses of creamy brown liquid.

  Teg recognized the smell as she handed him his glass. It was a quick source of energy, a pick-me-up that the Bene Gesserit seldom shared with outsiders. But Taraza no longer considered him an outsider.

  His head tipped back, Teg took a long swallow of the drink, his gaze on the ornate ceiling of Taraza's small parlor. This no-ship was an old-fashioned model, built in the days when more care had been taken with decoration -- heavily incised cornices, baroque figures carved in every surface.

  The taste of the drink pushed his memory back into childhood, the heavy infusion of melange . . .

  "My mother made this for me whenever I was overly strenuous," he said, looking at the glass in his hand. He already could feel the calming energy flow through his body.

  Taraza took her own drink to a chairdog opposite him, a fluffy white bit of animate furniture that fitted itself to her with the ease of long familiarity. For Teg, she had provided a traditional green upholstered chair, but she saw his glance flick across the chairdog and grinned at him.

  "Tastes differ, Miles." She sipped her drink and sighed. "My, that was strenuous but it was good work. There were moments when it was right on the edge of getting very nasty."

  Teg found himself touched by her relaxation. No pose, no ready-made mask to set them apart and define their separate roles in the Bene Gesserit hierarchy. She was being obviously friendly and not even a hint of seductiveness. So this was just what it seemed to be -- as much as that could be said about any encounter with a Reverend Mother.

  With quick elation, Teg realized that he had become quite adept at reading Alma Mavis Taraza, even when she adopted one of her masks.

  "Your mother taught you more than she was told to teach you," Taraza said. "A wise woman but another heretic. That's all we seem to be breeding nowadays."

  "Heretic?" He was caught by resentment.

  "That's a private joke in the Sisterhood," Taraza said. "We're supposed to follow a Mother Superior's orders with absolute devotion. And we do, except when we disagree."

  Teg smiled and took a deep draught of his drink.

  "It's odd," Taraza said, "but while we were in that tight little confrontation I found myself reacting to you as I would to one of my Sisters."

  Teg felt the drink warming his stomach. It left a tingling in his nostrils. He placed the empty glass on a side table and spoke while looking at it. "My eldest daughter . . ."

  "That would be Dimela. You should have let us have her, Miles."

  "It was not my decision."

  "But one word from you . . ." Taraza shrugged. "Well, that's past. What about Dimela?"

  "She thinks I'm often too much like one of you."

  "Too much?"

  "She is fiercely loyal to me, Mother Superior. She doesn't really understand our relationship and --"

  "What is our relationship?"

  "You command and I obey."

  Taraza looked at him over the lip of her glass. When she put down the glass, she said: "Yes, you've never really been a heretic, Miles. Perhaps . . . someday . . ."

  He spoke quickly, wanting to divert Taraza from such ideas. "Dimela thinks the long use of melange makes many people become like you."

  "Is that so? Isn't it odd, Miles, that a geriatric potion should have so many side effects?"

  "I don't find that odd."

  "No, of course you wouldn't." She drained her glass and put it aside. "I was addressing the way a significant life extension has produced in some people, you especially, a profound knowledge of human nature."

  "We live longer and observe more," he said.

  "I don't think it's quite that simple. Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity."

  "I've never been able to strike an acceptable balance sheet for the spice," he said, referring to a common Mentat process of data sorting.

  Taraza nodded. Obviously, she found the same difficulty. "We of the Sisterhood tend to be more single-track than Mentats," she said. "We have routines to shake ourselves out of it but the condition persists."

  "Our ancestors have had this problem for a long time," he said.

  "It was different before the spice," she said.

  "But they lived such short lives."

  "Fifty, one hundred years; that doesn't seem very long to us, but still . . ."

  "Did they compress more into the available time?"

  "Oh, they were frenetic at times."

  She was giving him observations from her Other Memories, he realized. Not the first time he had shared in such ancient lore. His mother had produced such memories on occasion, but always as a lesson. Was Taraza doing that now? Teaching him something?

  "Melange is a many-handed monster," she said.

  "Do you sometimes wish we had never found it?"

  "The Bene Gesserit would not exist without it."

  "Nor the Guild."

  "But there would have been no Tyrant, no Muad'dib. The spice gives with one hand and takes with all of its others."

  "Which hand contains that which we desire?" he asked. "Isn't that always the question?"

  "You're an oddity, you know that, Miles? Mentats so seldom dip into philosophy. I think it's one of your strengths. You are supremely able to doubt."

  He shrugged. This turn in the conversation disturbed him.

  "You are not amused," she said. "But cling to your doubts anyway. Doubt is necessary to a philosopher."

  "So the Zensunni assure us."

  "All mystics agree on it, Miles. Never underestimate the power of doubts. Very persuasive. S'tori holds up doubt and surety in a single hand."

  Really quite surprised, he asked: "Do Reverend Mothers practice Zensunni rituals?" He had never even suspected this before.

  "Just once," she said. "We achieve an exalted form of s'tori, total. It involves every cell."

  "The spice agony," he said.

  "I was sure your mother told you. Obviously, she never explained the affinity with the Zensunni."

  Teg swallowed past a lump in his throat. Fascinating! She gave him
a new insight into the Bene Gesserit. This changed his entire concept, including his image of his own mother. They were removed from him into an unattainable place where he could never follow. They might think of him as a comrade on occasion but he could never enter the intimate circle. He could simulate, no more. He would never be like Muad'dib or the Tyrant.