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Teg could almost hear the old aide's response, that stiffly formal voice Patrin always used when he was chiding his commander.
"You will do your best, Bashar."
The most coldly progressive reasoning said Teg would never again see Patrin in the flesh nor hear the old man's actual voice. Still ... the voice remained. The person persisted in memory.
"Shouldn't we be going?"
It was Lucilla, standing close in front of his position beneath the tree. Duncan waited beside her. Both of them had shouldered their packs.
While he sat thinking, night had fallen. Rich starlight created vague shadows in the glade. Teg lifted himself to his feet, took his pack and, bending to avoid the low branches, emerged into the glade. Duncan helped Teg shoulder his pack.
"Schwangyu will consider this eventually," Lucilla said. "Her searchers will come after us here. You know it."
"Not until they have followed out the false trail and found the end of it," Teg said. "Come."
He led the way westward through an opening in the trees.
Three nights he had led them along what he called "Patrin's memory-path." As he walked on this fourth night, Teg berated himself for not projecting the logical consequences of Patrin's behavior.
I understood the depths of his loyalty but I did not project that loyalty into a most obvious result. We were together so many years I thought I knew his mind as I knew my own. Patrin, damn you! There was no need for you to die!
Teg admitted to himself then that there had been a need. Patrin had seen it. The Mentat had not permitted himself to see it. Logic could move just as blindly as any other faculty.
As the Bene Gesserit often said and demonstrated.
So we walk. Schwangyu does not expect this.
Teg was forced to admit that walking the wild places of Gammu created a whole new perspective for him. This entire region had been allowed to overgrow with plant life during the Famine Times and the Scattering. It had been replanted later but mostly as a random wilderness. Secret trails and private landmarks guided today's access. Teg imagined Patrin as a youth learning this region--that rocky butte visible in starlight through a gap in the trees, that spiked promontory, these lanes through giant trees.
"They will expect us to make a run for a no-ship," he and Patrin had agreed, fleshing out their plan. "The decoy must take the searchers in that direction."
Patrin had not said that he would be the decoy.
Teg swallowed past a lump in his throat.
Duncan could not be protected in the Keep, he justified himself.
That was true.
Lucilla had jittered through their first day under the life-shield that protected them from discovery by the instruments of aerial searchers.
"We must get word to Taraza!"
"When we can."
"What if something happens to you? I must know all of your escape plan."
"If something happens to me, you will not be able to follow Patrin's path. There isn't time to put it in your memory."
Duncan took little part in the conversation that day. He watched them silently or dozed, awakening fitful and with an angry look in his eyes.
On the second day under the shielding blanket, Duncan suddenly demanded of Teg: "Why do they want to kill me?"
"To frustrate the Sisterhood's plan for you," Teg said.
Duncan glared at Lucilla. "What is that plan?"
When Lucilla did not answer, Duncan said: "She knows. She knows because I'm supposed to depend on her. I'm supposed to love her!"
Teg thought Lucilla concealed her dismay quite well. Obviously, her plans for the ghola had fallen into disarray, all of the sequencing thrown out of joint by this flight.
Duncan's behavior revealed another possibility: Was the ghola a latent Truthsayer? What additional powers had been bred into this ghola by the sly Tleilaxu?
At their second nightfall in the wilderness, Lucilla was full of accusations. "Taraza ordered you to restore his original memories ! How can you do that out here?"
"When we reach sanctuary."
A silent and acutely alert Duncan accompanied them that night. There was a new vitality in him. He had heard!
Nothing must harm Teg, Duncan thought. Wherever and whatever sanctuary might be, Teg must reach it safely. Then, I will know!
Duncan was not sure what he would know but now he fully accepted the prize in it. This wilderness must lead to that goal. He recalled staring out at the wild places from the Keep and how he had thought to be free here. That sense of untouched freedom had vanished. The wilderness was only a path to something more important.
Lucilla, bringing up the rear of this march, forced herself to remain calm, alert, and to accept what she could not change. Part of her awareness held firmly to Taraza's orders:
"Stay close to the ghola and, when the moment comes, complete your assignment."
One pace at a time, Teg's body measured out the kilometers. This was the fourth night. Patrin had estimated four nights to reach their goal.
And what a goal!
The emergency escape plan centered on a discovery Patrin had made here as a teenager of one of Gammu's many mysteries. Patrin's words came back to Teg: "On the excuse of a personal reconnaissance, I returned to the place two days ago. It is untouched. I am still the only person who has ever been there."
"How can you be sure?"
"I took my own precautions when I left Gammu years ago, little things that would be disturbed by another person. Nothing has been moved."
"A Harkonnen no-globe?"
"Very ancient but the chambers are still intact and functioning."
"What about food, water ... "
"Everything you could want or need is there, laid down in the nullentropy bins at the core."
Teg and Patrin made their plans, hoping they would never have to use this emergency bolt hol
e, holding the secret of it close while Patrin replayed for Teg the hidden way to this childhood discovery.
Behind Teg, Lucilla let out a small gasp as she tripped over a root.
I should have warned her, Teg thought. Duncan obviously was following Teg's lead by sound. Lucilla, just as obviously, had much of her attention on her own private thoughts.
Her facial resemblance to Darwi Odrade was remarkable, Teg told himself. Back there at the Keep, the two women side by side, he had marked the differences dictated by their differing ages. Lucilla's youth showed itself in more subcutaneous fat, a rounding of the facial flesh. But the voices! Timbre, accent, tricks of atonal inflection, the common stamp of Bene Gesserit speech mannerisms. They would be almost impossible to tell apart in the dark.
Knowing the Bene Gesserit as he did, Teg knew this was no accident. Given the Sisterhood's propensity for doubling and redoubling its prized genetic lines to protect the investment, there had to be a common ancestral source.
Atreides, all of us, he thought.
Taraza had not revealed her design for the ghola, but just being within that design gave Teg access to the growing shape of it. No complete pattern, but he could already sense a wholeness there.
Generation after generation, the Sisterhood dealing with the Tleilaxu, buying Idaho gholas, training them here on Gammu, only to have them assassinated. All of that time waiting for the right moment. It was like a terrible game, which had come into frenetic prominence because a girl capable of commanding the worms had appeared on Rakis.
Gammu itself had to be part of the design. Caladanian marks all over the place. Danian subtleties piled atop the more brutal ancient ways. Something other than population had come out of the Danian Sanctuary where the Tyrant's grandmother, the Lady Jessica, had lived out her days.
Teg had seen the overt and covert marks when he made his first reconnaissance tour of Gammu.
Wealth!
The signs were here to be read. It flowed around their universe, moving amoebalike to insinuate itself into any place where it could lodge. There was wealth from the Scattering on Gammu, Teg knew. Wealth so great that few suspected (or could imagine) its size and power.
He stopped walking abruptly. Physical patterns in the immediate landscape demanded his full attention. Ahead of them lay an exposed ledge of barren rock, its identifying markers planted in his memory by Patrin. This passage would be one of the more dangerous.
