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"Oh, much more than that. They want our willing participation in their dream."
Another piece of the mosaic!
But who other than a Bene Gesserit knew that dream? The Sisters were actresses, always performing, letting little that was real come through their masks. The real person was walled in and metered out as needed.
"Why does she keep that old painting?" Murbella asked.
Idaho felt his stomach muscles tighten. Odrade had brought him a holorecord of the painting she kept in her sleeping chamber. Cottages at Cordeville by Vincent Van Gogh. Awakening him in this bed at some witching hour of the night almost a month ago.
"You asked for my hold on humanity and here it is." Thrusting the holo in front of his sleep-fogged eyes. He sat up and stared at the thing, trying to comprehend. What was wrong with her? Odrade sounded so excited.
She left the holo in his hands while she turned on all of the lights, giving the room a sense of hard and immediate shapes, everything vaguely mechanical the way you would expect it in a no-ship. Where was Murbella? They had gone to sleep together.
He focused on the holo and it touched him in an unaccountable way, as though it linked him to Odrade. Her hold on her humanity? The holo felt cold to his hands. She took it from him and propped it on the side table where he stared at it while she found a chair and sat near his head. Sitting? Something compelled her to be near him!
"It was painted by a madman on Old Terra," she said, bringing her cheek close to his while both looked at the copy of the painting. "Look at it! An encapsulated human moment."
In a landscape? Yes, dammit. She was right.
He stared at the holo. Those marvelous colors! It was not just the colors. It was the totality.
"Most modern artists would laugh at the way he created that," Odrade said.
Couldn't she be silent while he looked at it?
"That was a human being as ultimate recorder," Odrade said. "The human hand, the human eye, the human essence brought to focus in the awareness of one person who tested the limits. "
Tested the limits! More of the mosaic.
"Van Gogh did that with the most primitive materials and equipment." She sounded almost drunk. "Pigments a cave-man would have recognized! Painted on a fabric he could have made with his own hands. He might have made the tools himself from fur and wild twigs."
She touched the surface of the holo, her finger placing a shadow across the tall trees. "The cultural level was crude by our standards, but see what he produced?"
Idaho felt he should say something but words would not come. Where was Murbella? Why wasn't she here?
Odrade pulled back and her next words burned themselves into him.
"That painting says you cannot suppress the wild thing, the uniqueness that will occur among humans no matter how much we try to avoid it."
Idaho tore his gaze away from the holo and looked at Odrade's lips when she spoke.
"Vincent told us something important about our fellows in the Scattering."
This long-dead painter? About the Scattering?
"They have done things out there and are doing things we cannot imagine. Wild things! The explosive size of that Scattered population insures it."
Murbella entered the room behind Odrade, belting a soft white robe, her feet bare. Her hair was damp from a shower. So that was where she had gone.
"Mother Superior?" Murbella's voice was sleepy.
Odrade spoke over her shoulder without fully turning. "Honored Matres think they can anticipate and control every wildness. What nonsense. They cannot even control it in themselves."
Murbella came around to the foot of the bed and stared questioningly at Idaho. "I seem to have come in on the middle of a conversation."
"Balance, that's the key," Odrade said.
Idaho kept his attention on Mother Superior.
"Humans can balance on strange surfaces," Odrade said. "Even on unpredictable ones. It's called 'getting in tune.' Great musicians know it. Surfers I watched when I was a child on Gammu, they knew it. Some waves throw you but you're prepared for that. You climb back up and go at it once more."
For no reason he could explain, Idaho thought of another thing Odrade had said: "We have no attic storerooms. We recycle everything."
Recycle. Cycle. Pieces of the circle. Pieces of the mosaic.
He was random hunting and knew better. Not the Mentat way. Recycle, though--Other Memory was not an attic storeroom then but something they considered as recycling. It meant they used their past only to change it and renew it.
Getting in tune.
A strange allusion from someone who claimed she avoided music.
Remembering, he sensed his mental mosaic. It had become a jumble. Nothing fitted anywhere. Random pieces that probably did not go together at all.
But they did!
Mother Superior's voice continued in his memory. So there is more.
"People who know this go to the heart of it," Odrade said. "They warn that you cannot think about what you're doing. That's a sure way to fail. You just do it!"
Don't think. Do it. He sensed anarchy. Her words threw him back onto resources other than Mentat training.
Bene Gesserit trickery! She did this deliberately, knowing the effect. Where was the affection he sometimes felt radiating from her? Could she have concern for the well-being of someone she treated this way?
When Odrade left them (he barely noticed her departure), Murbella sat on the bed and straightened the robe around her knees.
Humans can balance on strange surfaces. Movement in his mind: the pieces of the mosaic trying to find relationships.
He felt a new surge in the universe. Those two strange people in his vision? They were part of it. He knew this without being able to say why. What was it the Bene Gesserit claimed? "We modify old fashions and old beliefs."
"Look at me!" Murbella said.
Voice? Not quite but now he was sure she tried it on and she had not told him they were training her in this witchery.
He saw the alien look in her green eyes that told him she was thinking about her former associates.
"Never try to be more clever than the Bene Gesserit, Duncan."
Speaking for the comeyes?
He could not be sure. It was the intelligence behind her eyes that gripped him these days. He could feel it growing there, as though her teachers blew into a balloon and Murbella's intellect expanded the way her abdomen expanded with new life.
Voice! What were they doing to her?
That was a stupid question. He knew what they were doing. They were taking her away from him, making a Sister of her. No longer my lover, my marvelous Murbella. A Reverend Mother then, remotely calculating in everything she did. A witch. Who could love a witch?
I could. And always will.
"They grab you from your blind side to use you for their own purposes," he said.
He could see his words take hold. She had awakened to this trap after the fact. The Bene Gesserit were so damnably clever! They had enticed her
into their trap, giving her small glimpses of things as magnetic as the force binding her to him. It could only be an enraging realization to an Honored Matre.
We trap others! They do not trap us!
But this had been done by the Bene Gesserit. They were in a different category. Almost Sisters. Why deny it? And she wanted their abilities. She wanted out of this probation into the full teaching she could sense just beyond the ship's walls. Didn't she know why they still kept her on probation?
They know she still struggles in their trap.
Murbella slipped out of her robe and climbed into the bed beside him. Not touching. But keeping that armed sense of nearness between their bodies.
"They originally intended me to control Sheeana for them," he said.
"As you control me?"
"Do I control you?"
