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Murbella found herself missing strange things in her former life. Not the hunting in the streets, seeking new males to captivate and bring under Honored Matre control. The powers that came from creating sexual addicts had lost their savor under Bene Gesserit teaching and her experiences with Duncan. She admitted to missing one element of that power, though: the sense of belonging to a force nothing could stop.
It was both abstract and specific. Not the recurrent conquests but the expectation of inevitable victory that came in part from the drug she shared with Honored Matre Sisters. As the need waned in the shift to melange, she saw the old addiction from a different perspective. Bene Gesserit chemists, tracing the adrenaline substitute from samples of her blood, held it ready if she required it. She knew she did not. Another withdrawal plagued her. Not the captivated males but the flow of them. Something within her said this was gone forever. She would never re-experience it. New knowledge had changed her past.
She had prowled the corridors between her quarters and the practice floor this morning, wanting to watch Duncan with the child, afraid her presence might interfere. This prowling was a thing she often did these days after the more strenuous of her morning lessons with a Reverend Mother teacher. Thoughts of Honored Matres were much with her at these times.
She could not escape this feeling of loss. It was an emptiness such that she wondered if anything could possibly fill it. The sensation was worse than that of growing old. Growing old as an Honored Matre had offered its compensations. Powers gathered in
that Sisterhood had a tendency to grow rapidly with age. Not that. It was an absolute loss.
I have been defeated.
Honored Matres never contemplated defeat. Murbella felt herself forced to it. She knew Honored Matres were sometimes slain by enemies. Those enemies always paid. It was the law: whole planets blackened to get one offender.
Murbella knew Honored Matres hunted for Chapterhouse. As a matter of former loyalties, she was aware she should be assisting those hunters. The poignancy of her personal defeat lay in the fact that she did not want the Bene Gesserit to pay the remembered price.
The Bene Gesserit are too valuable.
They were infinitely valuable to Honored Matres. Murbella doubted that any other Honored Matre even suspected this.
Vanity.
That was the judgment she attached to her former Sisters. And to myself as I was. A terrible pride. It had grown out of being subjugated so many generations before they gained their own ascendancy. Murbella had tried to convey this to Odrade, recounting from history taught by Honored Matres.
"The slave makes an awful master," Odrade said.
There was an Honored Matre pattern, Murbella realized. She had accepted it once but now rejected it and could not give all of her reasons for this change.
I have grown out of those things. They would be childish to me now.
Duncan once more had stopped the practice session. Perspiration poured from both teacher and student. They stood panting, regaining breath, an odd exchange of looks between them. Conspiracy? The child looked strangely mature.
Murbella recalled Odrade's comment: "Maturity imposes its own behavior. One of our lessons--make those imperatives available to consciousness. Modify instincts."
They have modified me and will do so even more.
She could see the same thing at work in Duncan's behavior with the ghola-child.
"This is an activity that creates many stresses in the societies we influence," Odrade had said. "That forces us to constant adjustments."
But how can they adjust to my former Sisters?
Odrade revealed characteristic sangfroid when braced with this question.
"We face major adjustments because of our past activities. It was the same during the reign of the Tyrant."
Adjustments?
Duncan was talking to the child. Murbella moved closer to listen.
"You've been exposed to the story of Muad'Dib? Good. You're an Atreides and that includes flaws."
"Does that mean mistakes, sir?"
"You're damned right it does! Never choose a course just because it offers the opportunity for a dramatic gesture."
"Is that how I died?"
He had the child thinking of his former self in the first person.
"You be the judge. But it was always an Atreides weakness. Attractive things, gestures. Die on the horns of a great bull as Muad'Dib's grandfather did. A grand spectacle for his people. The stuff of stories for generations! You can even hear bits of it around after all of these eons."
"Mother Superior told me that story."
"Your birth-mother probably told it to you, too."
The child shuddered. "It gives me a funny feeling when you say birth-mother." Awe in his young voice.
"Funny feelings are one thing; this lesson is another. I'm talking about something with a persistent label: The Desian Gesture. It used to be Atreidesian but that's too cumbersome."
Once more the child touched that core of mature awareness. "Even a dog's life has its price."
Murbella caught her breath, glimpsing how it would be--an adult mind in that child's body. Disconcerting.
"Your birth-mother was Janet Roxbrough of the Lernaeus Roxbroughs," Idaho said. "She was Bene Gesserit. Your father was Loschy Teg, a CHOAM station factor. In a few minutes I'm going to show you the Bashar's favorite picture of his home on Lernaeus. I want you to keep it with you and study it. Think of it as your favorite place."
Teg nodded but the expression on his face said he was afraid.
Was it possible the great Mentat Warrior had known fear? Murbella shook her head. She had an intellectual knowledge of what Duncan was doing but felt gaps in the accounts. This was something she might never experience. What would the feeling be--reawakening to new life with the memories of another lifetime intact? Much different from a Reverend Mother's Other Memory, she suspected.
"Mind at its beginning," Duncan called it. "Awakening of your True Self. I felt I had been plunged into a magic universe. My awareness was a circle and then a globe. Arbitrary forms became transient. The table was not a table. Then I fell into a trance--everything around me had a shimmering quality. Nothing was real. This passed and I felt I had lost the one reality. My table was a table once more."
She had studied the Bene Gesserit manual "On Awakening a Ghola's Original Memories." Duncan was diverging from those instructions. Why?
He left the child and approached Murbella.
"I have to talk to Sheeana," he said as he passed her. "There's got to be a better way."
Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.
--Mentat Fixe (adacto)
Idaho, seated alone at his console, encountered an entry he had stored in Shipsystems during his first days of confinement, and found himself dumped (he applied the word later) into attitudes and sensory awareness of that earlier time. It no longer was afternoon of a frustrating day in the no-ship. He was back there, stretched between then and now the way serial ghola lives linked this incarnation to his original birth.
Immediately, he saw what he had come to call "the net" and the elderly couple defined by criss-crossed lines, bodies visible through a shimmering of jeweled ropes--green, blue, gold, and a silver so brilliant it made his eyes ache.
He sensed godlike stability in these people, but something common about them. The word ordinary came to mind. The by-now-familiar garden landscape stretched out behind them: floral bushes (roses, he thought), rolling lawns, tall trees.
The couple stared back at him with an intensity that made Idaho feel naked.
New power in the vision! It no longer was confined to the Great Hold, an increasingly compulsive magnet drawing him down there so frequently he knew the watchdogs were alerted.
Is he another Kwisatz Haderach?
There was a level of suspicion the Bene Gesserit could achieve that would kill him if it grew. And they were watching him now! Questions, worried speculations. Despite this, he could not turn away from the vision.
Why did that elderly couple look so familiar? Someone from his past? Family?
Mentat riffling of his memories produced nothing to fit the speculation. Round faces. Abbreviated chins. Fat wrinkles at the jowls. Dark eyes. The net obscured their color. The woman wore a long blue and green dress that concealed her feet. A white apron stained with green covered the dress from ample bosom to just below her waist. Garden tools dangled from apron loops. She carried a trowel in her left hand. Her hair was gray. Wisps of it had escaped a confining green scarf and blew around her eyes, emphasizing laughter lines there. She appeared ... grandmotherly.
The man suited her as though created by the same artist as a perfect match. Bib overalls over a mounded stomach. No hat. Those same dark eyes with reflections twinkling in them. A brush of close-cropped wiry gray hair.
He had the most benign expression Idaho had ever seen. Upcurved smile creases at the corners of his mouth. He held a small shovel in his left hand, and on his extended right palm he balanced what appeared to be a small metal ball. The ball emitted a piercing whistle that made Idaho clap his hands over his ears. This did not stop the sound. It faded away of itself. He lowered his hands.
Reassuring faces. That thought aroused Idaho's suspicions because now he recognized the familia
rity. They looked somewhat like Face Dancers, even to the pug noses.
He leaned forward but the vision kept its distance. "Face Dancers," he whispered.
Net and elderly couple vanished.
They were replaced by Murbella in practice-floor leotards of glistening ebony. He had to reach out and touch her before he could believe she really stood there.
"Duncan? What is it? You're all sweaty."
"I ... think it's something the damned Tleilaxu planted in me. I keep seeing ... I think they're Face Dancers. They ... they look at me and just now ... a whistle. It hurt."
She glanced up at the comeyes but did not appear worried. This was something the Sisters could know without it presenting immediate dangers ... except possibly to Scytale.
