Frank Herbert - Heretics of Dune

The Tyrant's words in that secret chamber had done more than ignite her fears for the Sisterhood's future.

"I bequeath to you my fear and loneliness."

From that millennial distance, he had planted doubts in her as surely as she had planted them in Waff.

She saw the Tyrant's questions as though they had been limned with glowing light on her inner eye.

"WITH WHOM DO YOU ALLY?"

Are we no more than a secret society? How will we meet our end? In a dogmatic stink of our own creation?

The Tyrant's words had been burned into her consciousness. Where was the "noble purpose" in what the Sisterhood did? Odrade could almost hear Taraza's sneering response to such a question.

"Survival, Dar! That's all the noble purpose we need. Survival! Even the Tyrant knew that!"

Perhaps even Tuek had known it. And what had that bought him in the end?

Odrade felt a haunting sympathy for the late High Priest. Tuek had been a superb example of what a tightly knit family could produce. Even his name was a clue: unchanged from Atreides days on this planet. The founding ancestor had been a smuggler, confidant of the first Leto. Tuek had come from a family that held firmly to its roots, saying: "There is something worth preserving in our past." The example this set for descendants was not lost on a Reverend Mother.

But you failed, Tuek.

These blocks of modernization visible out her window were a sign of that failure - sops to the rising power elements in Rakian society, those elements that the Sisterhood had worked so long to foster and strengthen. Tuek had seen this as a harbinger of the day when he would be too weak politically to prevent the things implied by such modernization:

A shorter and more upbeat ritual.

New songs, more in the modern manner.

Changes in the dancing. ("Traditional dances take so long!") Above all, fewer ventures into the dangerous desert for the young postulants from the powerful families.

Odrade sighed and glanced back at Waff. The little Tleilaxu chewed his lower lip. Good!

Damn you, Albertus! I would welcome your rebellion!

Behind the closed doors of the Temple, the transition of the High Priesthood already was being debated. The new Rakians spoke of the need "to keep up with the times." They meant: "Give us more power!"

It has always been this way, Odrade thought. Even in the Bene Gesserit.

Still, she could not escape the thought: poor Tuek.

Albertus reported that Tuek, just before his death and replacement by the Face Dancer, had warned his kin they might not retain familial control of the High Priesthood when he died. Tuek had been more subtle and resourceful than his enemies expected. His family already was calling in its debts, gathering its resources to retain a power base.

And the Face Dancer in Tuek's place revealed much by his mimic performance. The Tuek family had not yet learned of the substitution and one might almost believe the original High Priest had not been replaced, so good was this Face Dancer. Observing that Face Dancer in action betrayed much to the watchful Reverend Mothers. That, of course, was one of the things that had Waff squirming now.

Odrade turned abruptly on one heel and strode across to the Tleilaxu Master. Time to have at him!

She stopped two paces from Waff and glared down at him. Waff met her gaze with defiance.

"You've had enough time to consider your position," she accused. "Why do you remain silent?"

"My position? You think you give us a choice?"

"Man is but a pebble dropped in a pool," she quoted at him from his own beliefs.

Waff took a trembling breath. She spoke the proper words, but what lay behind such words? They no longer sounded right coming from the mouth of a powindah woman.

When Waff did not respond, Odrade continued her quotation: "And if man is but a pebble, then all his works can be no more."

An involuntary shudder swept through Odrade, causing a look of carefully masked surprise in the watchful guardian Sisters. That shudder was not part of the required performance.

Why do I think of the Tyrant's words at this moment?

Odrade wondered.

"THE BODY AND SOUL OF THE BENE GESSERIT WILL MEET THE SAME FATE AS ALL OTHER BODIES AND ALL OTHER SOULS."

His barb had gone deep into her.

How was I made so vulnerable? The answer leaped into her awareness: The Atreides Manifesto!

Composing those words under Taraza's watchful guidance opened a flaw within me.

Could that have been Taraza's purpose: to make Odrade vulnerable? How could Taraza have known what would be found here on Rakis? The Mother Superior not only displayed no prescient abilities, she tended to avoid this talent in others. On the rare occasions when Taraza had demanded such a performance of Odrade herself, the reluctance had been obvious to the trained eye of a Sister.

Yet she made me vulnerable.

Had it been an accident?

Odrade sank into a swift recital of the Litany Against Fear, only a few eyeblinks but in that time Waff visibly came to a decision.

"You would force it upon us," he said. "But you do not know what powers we have reserved for such a moment." He lifted his sleeves to show where the dart throwers had been. "These were but paltry toys by comparison with our real weapons."

"The Sisterhood has never doubted this," Odrade said.

"Is it to be violent conflict between us?" he asked.

"It is your choice to make," she said.

"Why do you court violence?"

"There are those who would love to see Bene Gesserit and Bene Tleilax at each other's throats," Odrade said. "Our enemies would enjoy stepping in to pick up the pieces after we had weakened ourselves sufficiently."

"You state the argument for agreement but you give my people no room to negotiate! Perhaps your Mother Superior gave you no authority to negotiate!"

How tempting it was to pass it all back into Taraza's hands, just as Taraza wanted. Odrade glanced at the guardian Sisters. The two faces were masks betraying nothing. What did they really know? Would they realize if she went against Taraza's orders?

"Do you have such authority?" Waff persisted.

Noble purpose, Odrade thought. Surely, the Tyrant's Golden Path demonstrated at least one quality of such purpose.

Odrade decided on a creative truth. "I have such authority," she said. Her own words made it true. Having taken the authority, she made it impossible for Taraza to deny it. Odrade knew, though, that her own words committed her to a course sharply divergent from the sequential steps of Taraza's design.

Independent action. The very thing she had desired of Albertus.

But I am on the scene and know what is needed.

Odrade glanced at the guardian Sisters. "Remain here, please, and see that we are not disturbed." To Waff, she said: "We might as well be comfortable." She indicated two chairdogs set at right angles to each other across the room.

Odrade waited until they were seated before resuming the conversation. "We require a degree of candor between us that diplomacy seldom allows. Too much hangs in the balance for us to engage in shallow evasions."

Waff looked at her strangely. He said: "We know there is dissension in your highest councils. Subtle overtures have been made to us. Is this part of..."

"I am loyal to the Sisterhood," she said. "Even those who approached you had no other loyalty."

"Is this another trick of -"

"No tricks!"

"With the Bene Gesserit there are always tricks," he accused.

"What is it you fear from us? Name it."

"Perhaps I have learned too much from you for you to allow me to go on living."

"Could I not say the same of you?" she asked. "Who else knows of our secret affinity? This is no powindah female talking to you here!"

She had ventured the word with some trepidation, but the effect could not have been more revealing. Waff was visibly shaken. He was a long minute recovering. Doubts remained, though, because she had planted them in him.

"What do words prove?" he asked. "You might still take the things you have learned from me and leave my people nothing. You still hold the whip over us."

"I carry no weapons in my sleeves," Odrade said.

"But in your mind is knowledge that could ruin us!" He glanced back at the guardian Sisters.

"They are part of my arsenal," Odrade agreed. "Shall I send them away?"

"And in their minds everything they have heard here," he said. He returned his wary gaze to Odrade. "Better if you all sent your memories away!"

Odrade pitched her voice in its most reasonable tones. "What would we gain by exposing your missionary zeal before you are ready to move? Would it serve us to blacken your reputation by revealing where you have placed your new Face Dancers? Oh, yes, we know about Ix and the Fish Speakers. Once we had studied your new ones, we went searching for them."

"You see!" His voice was dangerously edged.

"I see no other way to prove our affinity than to reveal something equally damaging about ourselves," Odrade said.

Waff was speechless.

"We would plant the worms of the Prophet on uncounted planets of the Scattering," she said. "What would the Rakian priesthood say and do if you revealed that?"

The guardian Sisters looked at her with thinly masked amusement. They thought she was lying.

"I have no guards with me," Waff said. "When only one person knows a dangerous thing, how easy it is to gain that person's eternal silence."

She lifted her empty sleeves.

He looked at the guardian Sisters.

"Very well," Odrade said. She glanced at the Sisters and gave a subtle handsign to reassure them. "Wait outside, please, Sisters."

When the door closed behind them, Waff returned to his doubts. "My people have not searched these rooms. What do I know of the things that could be hidden here to record our words?"

Odrade shifted into the language of the Islamiyat. "Then perhaps we should speak another tongue, one known only to us."

Waff's eyes glittered. In the same tongue, he said: "Very well! I will gamble on it. And I ask you to tell me the real cause of dissension among the... the Bene Gesserit."

Odrade allowed herself a smile. With the change of language, Waff's entire personality, his whole manner, changed. He was performing exactly as expected. None of his doubts had been reinforced in this tongue!

She responded with an equal confidence: "Fools fear that we may bring back another Kwisatz Haderach! That is what a few of my Sisters argue."

"There is no more need of such a one," Waff said. "The one who could be many places simultaneously has been and he has gone. He came only to bring the Prophet."

"God would not send such a message twice," she said.

It was the very sort of thing Waff had heard often in this tongue. He no longer thought it strange that a woman could utter such words. The language and the familiar words were enough.

"Has Schwangyu's death restored unity among your Sisters?" he asked.

"We have a common enemy," Odrade said.

"The Honored Matres!"

"You were wise to kill them and learn from them."

Waff leaned forward, completely caught up in his familiar tongue and the flow of their conversation. "They rule with sex!" he exulted. "Remarkable techniques of orgasmic amplification! We -" Belatedly, he became aware of who was sitting in front of him hearing all of this.

"We already know such techniques," Odrade reassured him. "It will be interesting to compare, but there are obvious reasons why we have never tried to ride to power on such a dangerous conveyance. Those whores are just stupid enough to make that mistake!"

"Mistake?" He was clearly puzzled.

"They are holding the reins in their own hands!" she said. "As the power grows, their control of it must grow. The thing will shatter of its own momentum!"

"Power, always power," Waff muttered. Another thought struck him. "Are you saying this was how the Prophet fell?"

"He knew what he was doing," she said. "Millennia of enforced peace followed by the Famine Times and the Scattering. A message of direct results. Remember! He did not destroy the Bene Tleilax or the Bene Gesserit."

"For what do you hope from an alliance between our two peoples?" Waff asked.

"Hope is one thing, survival another," she said.

"Always pragmatism," Waff said. "And some among you fear that you may restore the Prophet on Rakis with all of his powers intact?"

"Did I not say it?" The language of the Islamiyat was particularly potent in this questioning form. It placed the burden of proof on Waff.

"So they doubt God's hand in the creation of your Kwisatz Haderach," he said. "Do they also doubt the Prophet?"

"Very well, let us have it all out in the open," Odrade said, and launched herself on the chosen course of. deception: "Schwangyu and those who supported her broke away from the Great Belief. We harbor no anger toward any Bene Tleilax for having killed them. They saved us the trouble."

Waff accepted this utterly. Given the circumstances, it was precisely what could be expected. He knew he had revealed much here that might better have been held in reserve but there were still things the Bene Gesserit did not know. And the things he had learned!

Odrade shocked him totally then by saying: "Waff, if you think your descendants from the Scattering have returned to you unchanged, then foolishness has become your way of life."

He held himself silent.

"You have all of the pieces in your hands," she said. "Your descendants belong to the whores of the Scattering. And if you think any of them will abide by an agreement, then your stupidity goes beyond description!"

Waff's reactions told her she had him. The pieces were clicking into place. She had told him truth where it was required. His doubts were refocused where they belonged: against the people of the Scattering. And it had been done in his own tongue.

He tried to speak past a constriction in his throat and was forced to massage his throat before speech returned. "What can we do?"

"It's obvious. The Lost Ones have their eyes on us as just one more conquest. They think of it as cleaning up behind them. Common prudence."

"But they are so many!"

"Unless we unite in a common plan to defeat them, they will chew us up the way a slig chews up its dinner."

"We cannot submit to powindah filth! God will not permit it!"

"Submit? Who suggests that we submit?"

"But the Bene Gesserit always use that ancient excuse: 'If you can't beat them, join them.' "

Odrade smiled grimly. "God will not permit you to submit! Do you suggest He would permit it of us?"

"Then what is your plan? What would you do against such numbers?"

"Exactly what you plan to do: convert them. When you say the word, the Sisterhood will openly espouse the true faith."

Waff sat in stunned silence. So she knew the heart of the Tleilaxu plan. Did she know also how the Tleilaxu would enforce it?