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"Excuse me, Duncan. I have a question."
"Only one?"
"Can you tell me how our memories will be restored? What techniques will the Bene Gesserit use, and how old will we be when it happens? I'm already eight. Miles Teg was only ten when they reawakened him."
Duncan stiffened. "They were forced to do that. A time of extremis."
Sheeana had done it herself, using a twisted variation of sexual imprinting techniques. Miles had been in the body of a ten-year-old boy, with the buried mind of an old, old man. The Bene Gesserits were willing to risk scarring his psyche because they had needed his military genius to defeat the Honored Matres. The young Bashar had been given no say in the matter.
"Aren't we in a time of extremis right now?"
Duncan studied the front of the model palace. "You need know only that the restoration of your memories will be a traumatic process. We know of no other way to accomplish it. Because you each have a separate personality"--he glanced around at the children--"the awakening will be different for each of you. Your best defense is to understand who you were, so that when the memories come flooding back, you're ready for them."
Young Wellington Yueh, five years old, piped up in a wavering childish voice. "But I don't want to be who I was."
Duncan felt the heaviness in his chest. "I'm sorry, but none of us has that luxury."
Chani always stayed close to Paul. Her voice was small but the words were large. "Do we have to live up to the Sisterhood's expectations?"
Duncan shrugged and forced a smile. "Why not exceed them?"
Together, they continued to build the walls of the Grand Palace.
Our aimless wandering is a metaphor for all of human history. The participants in great events do not see their place in the overall design. Our failure to see the larger pattern, however, does not disprove that one exists.
--REVEREND MOTHER SHEEANA,
Ithaca logs
S
heeana walked the sands again. Her bare toes sank into the soft, grainy powder. The enclosed air held brittle flint odors and the fertile, cinnamony smell of fresh melange.
She had still not forgotten the strange Other Memory vision in which she had spoken to Sayyadina Ramallo and received her cryptic warning about the gholas. Be careful what you create. Sheeana had taken the admonition seriously; as a Reverend Mother, she could do nothing else.
But exercising caution was not the same as stopping entirely. What had Ramallo meant? Despite searching through her mind, she was unable to find the ancient Fremen Sayyadina again. The clamor was too loud. She did, however, again encounter the even-more-ancient voice of Serena Butler. The legendary Jihad leader offered much wise advice.
Inside the no-ship's kilometer-long great hold, Sheeana trudged across the stirred sand, not bothering to use the careful stutter-step of Fremen on Dune. The captive worms instinctively knew she had entered their domain, and Sheeana could sense them coming.
While waiting for the worms to charge toward her in a froth through the dunes, Sheeana lay down on the sand. She wore no stillsuit as she had done as a little girl. Her legs and arms were bare. Free. She felt the sandy grains pressing against the skin of her arms and legs. Dust clung to the prickles of perspiration from her pores. With the soft dust all around her, she imagined what it would be like to be one of the sandworms in the wild, plunging beneath the surface like a big fish in a great arid sea.
Sheeana got to her feet as the first three worms arrived. She picked up the empty spice-gathering basket from where she had set it and stood to face the sinuous creatures. They extended their round heads, their mouths glittering with crystal teeth and tiny flickers of flame fueled by an inner friction furnace.
The original worms of Arrakis had been aggressively territorial. After the God Emperor went "back into the sand," each of the new worms he spawned contained a pearl of his awareness, and they could work together when they wished to do so.
She cocked her head and lifted her sealed basket to show them. "I have come to gather spice, Shaitan." Long ago, the priests on Rakis had been horrified to hear her speak thus to their Divided God.
Unafraid, Sheeana walked between their ringed bodies, as if they were only towering trees. She and the sandworms had always had an understanding. Few others aboard the no-ship dared to enter the hold now that the creatures had grown so large. Sheeana was the only one who could gather natural spice from the sands, some of which she added to the much greater supply of fresh melange created in the ship's axlotl tanks.
Sniffing, she followed the scent to where a fresh cinnamony bloom might be found. Children from her village had done the same thing long ago. The fragments of windblown melange they scavenged from the dunes helped to buy supplies and tools. Now that whole way of life was gone, as was Rakis itself. . . .
Inside her head, the fascinating and ancient voice of Serena Butler once again bubbled up from deep within her Other Memories. Sheeana carried on her conversation aloud. "Tell me one thing: How can Serena Butler be among my ancestors?"
If you dig deep enough, I am there. Ancestor after ancestor, generation after generation . . .
Sheeana was not so easily convinced. "But Serena Butler's only child was murdered by thinking machines. That was the trigger of the Jihad. You had no heirs, no other descendants. How can you be in my Other Memories, regardless of how far back I go?"
She looked up at the strange forms of the sandworms, as if the martyred woman's face might be there.
Because, Serena said, I am. The ancient voice said no more, and Sheeana knew she would get no better answer.
Brushing past the nearest worm, Sheeana stroked one of the hard, encrusted ring segments. She sensed that these worms dreamed of freedom, too, longing to find a great open landscape through which they could burrow, where they could claim their own territory, fight battles of dominance, and propagate.
Day by day, Sheeana observed them from the viewing gallery above. She saw the worms circling the hold, testing their boundaries, knowing that they must wait . . . wait! Just like the Futars pacing in their arboretum, or the refugee Bene Gesserits and Jews, or Duncan Idaho, Miles Teg, and the ghola children. They were all trapped here, caught in the odyssey. There must be someplace safe where they could go.
Finding a rusty blotch on the sand, she stooped to brush fresh melange into her impermeable basket. The worms produced only small amounts of melange, but because it was fresh and genuine, Sheeana kept much of it for her own uses. Though the axlotl-produced spice was chemically identical, she preferred the close connection to the sandworms, even if it was all in her imagination. Like Serena Butler? Or Sayyadina Ramallo?
The worms passed her and began to plow their great bodies through the sand. Sheeana bent to gather more spice.
INSIDE THE MEDICAL center--torture chamber, more like!--the Rabbi knelt beside the gross female form and prayed, as he did so often.
"May our Ancient God bless and forgive you, Rebecca." Though she was brain dead and her body no longer resembled the woman he had known, he insisted on using her given name. She had said she would be dreaming, living among those myriad lives within her. Was it true? Despite what he saw and smelled in this chamber of horrors, he would remember who she had been and honor her.
Ten years as a tank! "Mother of monsters. Why did you allow them to do this, daughter?" And now, with the ghola project on hiatus, her body no longer even served the purpose for which she had sacrificed it. What a terrible thing.
Her naked abdomen, adorned with tubes and monitors, was no longer swollen, but he had seen her several times as a mound carrying a pregnancy so unnatural that even God must turn his eyes from it. Rebecca and the other two Bene Gesserit women who had volunteered to become such horrors lay on sterile beds. Axlotl tanks! Even the name sounded unnatural, stripped of all humanity.
For years these "tanks" had produced gholas; now they simply secreted chemical precursors that were processed into melange. Their bodies had become nothing more th
an detestable factories. The women were maintained with a constant stream of fluids, nutrients, and catalysts.
"Is any goal worth such a price?" the Rabbi whispered, not sure if he was beseeching the Almighty in prayer or asking Rebecca directly. In either event, he received no answer.
With a shudder, he let his fingers touch Rebecca's belly. The Bene Gesserit doctors had often scolded him, telling him not to touch "the tank." But, though he despised what Rebecca had done to herself, he would never harm her. He was resigned to the fact that he could no longer save her, either.
