Frank Herbert - Heretics of Dune

Sirafa scowled. She was obviously startled by Voice, but her tone was just as arrogant when she resumed. "Do I presume that you need no explanation of sexual variations?"

"A safe assumption," Lucilla said.

"And I do not need to tell you that your robe identifies you as a fifth-stage adept in the Order of Hormu?"

It was Lucilla's turn to scowl. "What if I show abilities beyond this fifth stage?"

"Ahhhhh," Sirafa said. "You will continue to heed my words, then?"

Lucilla nodded curtly.

"Very good," Sirafa said. "May I presume you can administer vaginal pulsing?"

"I can."

"From any position?"

"I can control any muscle in my body!"

Sirafa glanced past Lucilla at Burzmali. "True?"

Burzmali spoke from close behind Lucilla: "Or she would not claim it."

Sirafa looked thoughtful, her focus on Lucilla's chin. "This is a complication, I think."

"Lest you get the wrong idea," Lucilla said, "the abilities I was taught are not usually marketed. They have another purpose."

"Oh, I'm sure they do," Sirafa said. "But sexual agility is a -"

"Agility!" Lucilla allowed her tone to convey the full weight of a Reverend Mother's outrage. No matter that this might be what Sirafa hoped to achieve, she had to be put in her place! "Agility, you say? I can control genital temperature. I know and can arouse the fifty-one excitation points. I -"

"Fifty-one? But there are only -"

"Fifty-one!" Lucilla snapped. "And the sequencing plus the combinations number two thousand and eight. Furthermore, in combination with the two hundred and five sexual positions "Two hundred and five?" Sirafa was clearly startled. "Surely, you don't mean -"

"More, actually, if you count minor variations. I am an Imprinter, which means I have mastered the three hundred steps of orgasmic amplification!"

Sirafa cleared her throat and wet her lips with her tongue. "I must warn you then to restrain yourself. Keep your full abilities unexpressed or..." Once more, she looked at Burzmali. "Why didn't you warn me?"

"I did."

Lucilla clearly heard amusement in his voice but did not look back to confirm it.

Sirafa inhaled and expelled two hard breaths. "If any questions are asked, you will say you are about to undergo testing for advancement. That may quiet suspicion."

"And if I'm asked about the test."

"Oh, that is easy. You smile mysteriously and remain silent."

"What if I'm asked about this Order of Hormu?"

"Threaten to report the questioner to your superiors. The questions should stop."

"And if they don't?"

Sirafa shrugged. "Make up any story you like. Even a Truthsayer would be amused by your evasions."

Lucilla held her face in repose while she thought about her situation. She heard Burzmali - Skar! - stirring directly behind her. She saw no serious difficulties in carrying out this deception. It might even provide an amusing interlude she could recount later at Chapter House. Sirafa, she noted, was grinning at Burz - Skar! Lucilla turned and looked at her customer.

Burzmali stood there naked, his battle garb and helmet neatly stacked beside the small mound of rough clothing.

"I can see that Skar does not object to your preparations for this venture," Sirafa said. She waved a hand at his stiffly upcocked penis. "I will leave you, then."

Lucilla heard Sirafa depart through the shimmering curtain. Filling Lucilla's thoughts was an angry realization:

"This should be the ghola here now!"

***

It is your fate, forgetfulness. All of the old lessons of life, you lose and gain and lose and gain again.

"In the name of our Order and its unbroken Sisterhood, this account has been judged reliable and worthy of entry into the Chronicles of Chapter House."

Taraza stared at the words on her display projection with an expression of distaste. Morning light painted a fuzz of yellow reflections in the projection, making the words there appear dimly mysterious.

With an angry motion, Taraza pushed herself back from the projection table, arose and went to a south window. The day was young yet and the shadows long in her courtyard.

Shall I go in person?

Reluctance filled her at this thought. These quarters felt so... so secure. But that was foolishness and she knew it in every fiber. The Bene Gesserit had been here more than fourteen hundred years and still Chapter House Planet must be considered only temporary.

She rested her left hand on the smooth frame of the window. Each of her windows had been positioned to focus the attention on a splendid view. The room - its proportions, furnishing, colors - all reflected architects and builders who had worked single-mindedly to create a sense of support for the occupants.

Taraza tried to immerse herself in that supportive feeling and failed.

The arguments she had just experienced left a bitterness in this room even though the words had been voiced in the mildest tones. Her councillors had been stubborn and (she agreed without reservation) for understandable reasons.

Make ourselves into missionaries? And for the Tleilaxu?

She touched a control plate beside the window and opened it. A warm breeze perfumed by spring blossoms from the apple orchards wafted into the room. The Sisterhood was proud of the fruit they grew here at the power center of all their strongholds. No finer orchards existed at any of the Keeps and Dependent Chapters that wove the Bene Gesserit web through most of the planets humans had occupied under the Old Imperium.

"By their fruits, ye shall know them," she thought. Some of the old religions can still produce wisdom.

From her high vantage, Taraza could see the entire southern sprawl of Chapter House buildings. The shadow of a nearby watchtower drew a long uneven line across rooftops and courtyards.

When she thought about it, she knew this was a surprisingly small establishment to contain so much power. Beyond the ring of orchards and gardens lay a careful checkerboard of private residences, each with its surrounding plantation. Retired Sisters and selected loyal families occupied these privileged estates. Sawtoothed mountains, their tops often brilliant with snow, drew the western limits. The spacefield lay twenty kilometers eastward. All around this core of Chapter House were open plains where grazed a peculiar breed of cattle, a cattle so susceptible to alien odors they would stampede in raucous bellowing at the slightest intrusion of people not marked by the local smell. The innermost homes with their pain-fenced plantings had been sited by an early Bashar in such a way that no one could move through the twisting ground-level channels day or night without being observed.

It all appeared so haphazard and casual, yet there was harsh order in it. And that, Taraza knew, personified the Sisterhood.

The clearing of a throat behind her reminded Taraza that one of those who had argued most vehemently in Council remained waiting patiently in the open doorway.

Waiting for my decision.

The Reverend Mother Bellonda wanted Odrade "killed out of hand." No decision had been reached.

You've really done it this time, Dar. I expected your wild independence. I even wanted it. But this!

Bellonda, old, fat and florid, cold-eyed and valued for her natural viciousness, wanted Odrade condemned as a traitor.

"The Tyrant would have crushed her immediately!" Bellonda argued.

Is that all we learned from him? Taraza wondered.

Bellonda argued that Odrade was not only an Atreides but also a Corrino. There were emperors and vice-regents and powerful administrators to a very large number in her ancestry.

With all of the power hunger this implies.

"Her ancestors survived Salusa Secundus!" Bellonda kept repeating. "Have we learned nothing from our breeding experiences?"

We learned how to create Odrades, Taraza thought.

After surviving the spice agony, Odrade had been sent to Al Dhanab, an equivalent of Salusa Secundus, there to be conditioned deliberately on a planet of constant testing: high cliffs and dry gorges, hot winds and frigid winds, little moisture and too much. It was judged a suitable proving ground for someone whose destiny might take her to Rakis. Tough survivors emerged from such conditioning. The tall, supple, and muscular Odrade was one of the toughest.

How can I salvage this situation?

Odrade's most recent message said that any peace, even the Tyrant's millennia of suppression, radiated a false aura that could be fatal to those who trusted it too much. That was both the strength and flaw in Bellonda's argument.

Taraza lifted her gaze to Bellonda waiting in the doorway.

She is too fat! She flaunts that before us!

"We can no more eliminate Odrade than we can eliminate the ghola," Taraza said.

Bellonda's voice came low and level: "Both are now too dangerous to us. Look how Odrade weakens you with her account of those words at Sietch Tabr!"

"Has the Tyrant's message weakened me, Bell?"

"You know what I mean. The Bene Tleilax have no morals."

"Quit changing the subject, Bell. Your thoughts are darting around like an insect among the blossoms. What is it you really smell here?"

"The Tleilaxu! They made that ghola for their own purposes. And now Odrade wants us to -"

"You're repeating yourself, Bell."

"The Tleilaxu take shortcuts. Their view of genetics is not our view. It is not a human view. They make monsters."

"Is that what they do?"

Bellonda came into the room, walked around the table and stood close to Taraza, blocking the Mother Superior's view of the niche and its statuette of Chenoeh.

"Alliance with the priests of Rakis, yes, but not with the Tleilaxu." Bellonda's robes rustled as she gestured with a clenched fist.

"Bell! The High Priest is now a mimic Face Dancer. Ally with him, you mean?"

Bellonda shook her head angrily. "Believers in Shai-hulud are legion! You find them everywhere. What will be their reaction to us if our part in the deception is ever exposed?"

"No you don't, Bell! We have seen to it that only the Tleilaxu are vulnerable there. In that, Odrade's right."

"Wrong! If we ally with them we are both vulnerable. We will be forced to serve the Tleilaxu design. It will be worse than our long subservience to the Tyrant."

Taraza saw the vicious glinting of Bellonda's eyes. Her reaction was understandable. No Reverend Mother could contemplate the special bondage they had endured under the God Emperor without at least some chilling remembrances. Whipped along against their will, never sure of Bene Gesserit survival from one day to the next.

"You think we assure our spice supply by such a stupid alliance?" Bellonda demanded.

It was the same old argument, Taraza saw. Without melange and the agony of its transformation, there could be no Reverend Mothers. The whores from the Scattering surely had melange as one of their targets - the spice and the Bene Gesserit mastery of it.

Taraza returned to her table and sank into her chairdog, leaning back while it molded itself to her contours. It was a problem. A peculiar Bene Gesserit problem. Although they searched and experimented constantly, the Sisterhood had never found a substitute for the spice. The Spacing Guild might want melange to trance-form its navigators, but they could substitute Ixian machinery. Ix and its subsidiaries competed in the Guild's markets. They had alternatives.

We have none.

Bellonda crossed to the other side of Taraza's table, put both fists on the smooth surface and leaned forward to look down at the Mother Superior.

"And we still don't know what the Tleilaxu did to our ghola!"

"Odrade will find out."

"Not reason enough to forgive her treachery!"

Taraza spoke in a low voice: "We waited for this moment through generation after generation and you would abort the project just like that." She slapped a palm lightly against the table.

"The precious Rakian project is no longer our project," Bellonda said. "It may never have been."

All of her considerable mental powers in hard focus, Taraza reexamined the implications of this familiar argument. It was a thing spoken frequently in the wrangling session they had concluded earlier.

Was the ghola scheme something set in motion by the Tyrant? If so, what could they do about it now? What should they do about it?

During the long dispute, the Minority Report had been in all of their minds. Schwangyu might be dead but her faction survived and it looked now as though Bellonda had joined them. Was the Sisterhood blinding itself to a fatal possibility? Odrade's report of that hidden message on Rakis could be interpreted as an ominous warning. Odrade emphasized this by reporting how she had been alerted by her inner sense of alarm. No Reverend Mother could treat such an event lightly.

Bellonda straightened and folded her arms across her breast. "We never completely escape the teachers of our childhood nor any of the patterns that formed us, do we?"

That was an argument peculiar to Bene Gesserit disputes. It reminded them of their own particular susceptibility.

We are the secret aristocrats and it is our offspring who inherit the power. Yes, we are susceptible to that and Miles Teg is a superb example.

Bellonda found a straight chair and sat down, bringing her eyes level with Taraza's. "At the height of the Scattering," she said, "we lost some twenty percent of our failures."

"It is not failures who are coming back to us."

"But the Tyrant surely knew this would happen!"

"The Scattering was his goal, Bell. That was his Golden Path, humankind's survival!"

"But we know how he felt about the Tleilaxu and yet he did not exterminate them. He could have and he did not!"

"He wanted diversity."

Bellonda pounded a fist on the table. "He certainly got that!"

"We've been through all of these arguments over and over, Bell, and I still see no way to escape what Odrade has done."

"Subservience!"

"Not at all. Were we ever totally subservient to one of the pre-Tyrant emperors? Not even to Muad'dib!"

"We're still in the Tyrant's trap," Bellonda accused. "Tell me, why have the Tleilaxu continued to produce his favorite ghola? Millennia, and still that ghola keeps coming out of their tanks like a dancing doll."

"You think the Tleilaxu still follow a secret order from the Tyrant? If so, then you argue for Odrade. She has created admirable conditions for us to examine this."

"He ordered nothing of the kind! He merely made that particular ghola deliciously attractive to the Bene Tleilax."

"And not to us?"

"Mother Superior, we must get ourselves out of the Tyrant's trap now! And by the most direct method."

"The decision is mine, Bell. I still lean toward a cautious alliance."