Mentats of Dune

Chapter 19 (The past is always with us)

The traitor Dorotea and her orthodox Sisters had split from Raquella’s teachings because they refused to accept any form of advanced technology, regardless of the need. It was her blind spot, Valya knew. While pretending to be Dorotea’s friend, Valya had noted a disturbing edge of unreason in the other woman’s eyes and comments. During a years-long assignment on Lampadas to observe the Butlerian movement, Dorotea had been poisoned by their beliefs.

It was no wonder Dorotea had let her emotions get the best of her, turning like a viper against the Sisterhood.

Unlike the orthodox Sisters, Valya did not despise advanced technology: It was a tool to be used for her own purposes and for the success of the Sisterhood’s goals. Given the vast complexity of the breeding-record computers and their capacity for predictive analysis, she grasped the necessity for those tamed thinking machines. Besides, those exhaustive databases had allowed her to track down Atreides bloodlines. Technology was a means to an end, and Valya would use any weapon available to achieve her goals, which were far more important than any esoteric moral challenge.

While Butlerians stormed across the Imperium and destroyed anything that resembled a thinking machine, Venport Holdings promoted technology for the benefit of the human race. Now Cioba Venport arranged to transport Valya’s team to Rossak in secret so they could retrieve the buried computers. A loyal Sister, Cioba knew not to ask questions.

As their camouflaged shuttle dropped out of a huge VenHold spacefolder, guided down by a skilled Sisterhood pilot, Valya sat among fifteen women who had demonstrated combat proficiency in test exercises on Wallach IX, specially cleared Sisters from Raquella’s most trusted inner circle. Some of the commando Sisters were armed, and all of them were weapons in their own right. There was a chance they might have to face Imperial soldiers the Emperor had left behind to watch over the abandoned cliff city. If that happened, Valya was confident her Sisters could still prevail, but it would be better if they managed to slip in and out of the jungles without being noticed. She preferred not to have to explain bodies.…

Sister Olivia, one of the recently graduated Sister Mentats, selected a seat next to Valya as the shuttle descended through the atmosphere. “I spent a year on Rossak before going to Lampadas for Mentat training. It will be sad to see our great cliff city abandoned.”

Olivia was young and wide at the hips, with long blond hair and an assertive personality that Valya found grating at times, perhaps because it reminded her of herself. Olivia had formed a solid friendship with Fielle in their time together at the Mentat School, and Valya gauged the influence of all the new Sister Mentats. Fielle in particular was a shining star who already held much of the Mother Superior’s attention. Valya was keeping a close eye on her, assessing whether she would be a powerful ally or rival.

“Stay near me at all times,” she warned Olivia. “The shuttle will land far from any Imperial military defenses, and we’ll make our way through the thickest wilderness. It’s a testing ground, and there are many hazards for the unwary.”

The Sister Mentat gave her an indulgent smile, but quiet anger simmered beneath her controlled expression. “I’m not unwary, nor a fool. And the Lampadas swamps have ferocious predators as dangerous as any Rossak can offer.”

Valya realized that she herself should attempt more finesse. Even before becoming a Reverend Mother, she had observed many subtle connections in the political and personal web of Sisters — factions, alliances, rivalries, resentments, all under the guise of formalized teaching and philosophical debate. But that had changed when the Sisterhood itself split apart. Now, Valya vowed, she would help the true Sisterhood on Wallach IX to be strong, unified, focused.

And since the Mother Superior would have to name her successor soon, Valya needed to make certain the old woman made the correct decision. Valya felt envious when Raquella was with Fielle or when she showed interest in other Sisters — but voices in Valya’s mind, wise voices from Other Memory, counseled her to rise above such pettiness, for the sake of the Sisterhood and its mission to improve mankind. Valya had heeded such advice, but turned a deaf ear when the same voices suggested that she abandon her ambitious goals for House Harkonnen, so she could focus entirely on the Sisterhood.

Valya herself was absurdly young, in physical years, to be considered for such a monumental role. But for a Reverend Mother, with countless generations of experiences inside her, physical age was irrelevant. Her drive and determination, though, were her own.

If she became the Mother Superior, she would need to lead all of the Sisters, from the freshest acolyte like Tula to the wisest Reverend Mother. She couldn’t let Raquella see her act petulantly or childishly. She had to forge alliances, not break them. Their true enemies were the orthodox Sisters on Salusa and the betrayer Dorotea.

Now, she suppressed her feelings of antipathy toward Fielle and considered the good in the other young woman. Fielle was talented, but so new and untested that she could not possibly be Raquella’s replacement. For Valya to keep herself paramount in Raquella’s mind, and to demonstrate that she was rising above pettiness, the best solution was to turn Fielle into an ally, perhaps through her friend Olivia.

After a moment of assessment and consideration, Valya smiled warmly and said to Olivia, “You are part of my team for a good reason. In addition to the jungle hazards, we have to watch for any Imperial troops Salvador left behind. As a Sister Mentat, you might be able to see dangers that even I don’t detect. We have to make this a swift and smooth mission.”

Olivia seemed relieved. All the tense muscles in her face relaxed. “Our work here is vital for the Sisterhood. Each of us is an important member of the team.”

As the shuttle continued its descent, Valya looked through the windowport at the night-darkened planet below. She spotted a few city lights spangled in the murky wilderness. Although the Sisterhood School had been uprooted and the primary cliff city abandoned, many people still lived on Rossak: entrepreneurs, harvesters, scouts, even exiles.

According to an intelligence report that Cioba Venport had obtained from her own VenHold operatives, Emperor Salvador had stationed a small contingent of troops near the former Sisterhood settlement. Although the soldiers had poor service records and substandard equipment, Valya was sure the guards were here at Dorotea’s suggestion to make certain the exiled Sisters didn’t try to return to the cliff city. Dorotea wanted to keep her faction of pandering Sisters important to the Emperor — and keep Raquella irrelevant.

I should have killed Dorotea while she lay writhing from the poison, Valya thought. But no one had expected her to live through the Agony. No previous Sister candidate had survived intact, with the exception of Raquella herself.

Since the Imperial contingent had only rudimentary surveillance equipment, the camouflaged VenHold craft easily slipped past their scans and set down in a jungle clearing several kilometers from their destination. She listened to the low conversations of her team members, heard the excitement and anticipation in their voices. Simply returning to the order’s original home planet felt like a kind of victory for them.

Stepping outside into the heady jungle wearing a night-vision headset, Valya listened to the rustle of animals gliding through the underbrush. She didn’t worry. Many times, she had traveled the depths of the jungle when she assisted Karee Marques in search of natural toxins or drugs.

Through the illumination enhancers she magnified the view and saw the majestic cliff city in the distance, its pockmarked stone face riddled with tunnels and now-empty living quarters. At one time this had been the Sisterhood’s vibrant hub; now it was nothing but faded memories. She could no longer discern the trails or crepelike balconies that had graced the sheer stone wall.

In those days, the breeding computers had been concealed up there in a cavern deep inside the cliff. Egged on by the insistent Dorotea, the paranoid Emperor’s search team had ransacked the tunnels, but Valya had already whisked the dangerous technology away. Undeterred by the lack of proof, the Emperor had slaughtered the Sister Mentats and the remaining Sorceresses, who were merely trying to protect their school. Even though Salvador Corrino had given the order, Valya still placed the blame on Dorotea.

As her team members emerged from the shuttle and gathered their equipment, she inhaled the moist, odor-rich jungle air. While gazing at the haunted-looking cliff city, she remembered the women she’d known there. In the back of her mind, Valya heard what sounded like a murmur of human voices, as if the honeycombed cliffside were saturated with the spirits of dead Sisters. She felt a sudden chill as the voices called out plaintively, moaning for what was lost and would never be again.

Valya had enough ghosts in her own past, and too much blood on her hands. And she wasn’t finished yet. Even with all the struggles of the downtrodden Sisterhood, she thought angrily of her slain brother, Griffin, and the generations of disgrace that House Harkonnen had suffered. The blood Valya wanted on her hands was Atreides blood.

When the rest of her team stood equipped and ready to move through the undergrowth, Valya activated a holomap in the air, and her team gathered around. “We’re here,” she said, pointing. “This sinkhole is our destination. Three of you were with me when we sealed away the computers, and though it’s been less than a year, the jungle reclaims its territory quickly.”

She regarded them all. “We retrieve what is ours, which will bring us one step closer to rebuilding the Sisterhood to what it is meant to be.”

VALYA AND HER comrades trudged through the gloomy Rossak jungles. Carrying electronic locators, they moved behind two trailblazing commandos who wielded melters that dissolved the tangled plants to clear a wide path.

Their tracks would be obvious, but once they escaped with the computers, Valya didn’t care. Imperial scouts would never guess what had really happened, and the fecund silvery purple foliage of Rossak would erase the scars quickly enough.

All of them still wore enhancement goggles, which added a greenish outline to everything around them. Behind the trail-cutters, six commandos guided silent suspensor bins to hold all of the sealed components.

Valya sent two women ahead, with two others on each side to watch for any dangers. They found a game trail trending in the right direction, and the foliage melters cleared the path through vines and tangled shrubs. Sister Olivia and two others maneuvered the suspensor bins. It was warm even in the night, and Valya perspired heavily.

Having led the original operation to hide the computers, she knew where to find the limestone sinkhole. She came upon the dim, moss-blurred outline of a mushroom-shaped rock, recognized the landmark, and moved off the trail to explore, telling the others to wait. Valya found a loose stack of pancake-shaped limestone slabs as high as her shoulders. She walked around it, discovering one of the loose slabs fallen to one side — it looked natural to the casual eye. Using her goggles, she enhanced the detail.

“Over here,” she called. “I need help.”

Valya stood aside and directed two of her commandos to push. Under their effort the stone moved, revealing a concealed cave opening and a sloping passage lined with rough limestone steps. She adjusted her light-enhancing goggles and entered the darkness, leading the way down.

When she and her companions had hidden the components here, they’d had very little time. Mother Superior distracted Dorotea’s followers by inviting them to a debate, fooling the detractors into believing that the subject of computers was open for discussion. And while that was happening, Valya had saved the machines and records.

Now the rest of her team followed Valya down the sloping passage to the underground cenote chamber. The access tunnels had been widened by generations of the Misborn, outcasts from the cliff city who lived in isolation around the underground pools. The Misborn were gone now, having died out in the generations since the end of the Jihad.

Valya removed her night-vision goggles and switched on a bright illuminator. Overhead, the thick, hairy roots of trees penetrated through the ceiling, dangling down like lost ropes. Water dripped and echoed in the tunnels.

Valya remembered the route; she counted her steps, then looked to her right and found a narrow, chest-high opening. She pointed the illuminator beam, revealing a rock tunnel. “This should be the place.”

The other Sisters pressed close, ready to help. Valya looked at Olivia, summoned a sense of command, and altered her voice into a lower, more throaty range. She had been observing Olivia, assessing her, learning her weak points that could be manipulated. Setting the pitch of her voice, she said, “Crawl in there and verify that the components are intact.”

She had been practicing a new technique she had discovered since becoming a Reverend Mother, a way of influencing people by utilizing her voice to manipulate that person’s will. Now she was pleased by how effective the command was against even a Sister Mentat. “Crawl in there.” It was like an invisible push.

Olivia froze for an instant, and then, as if an unseen hand pushed her, she sprang into the tunnel opening. She seemed startled by her reflexive reaction and cried out in alarm, then recovered and proceeded into the passage, crawling along. When she saw Olivia’s response, Valya felt a giddy sense of power.

She analyzed what she had done, trying to memorize the compulsion she had put into her voice. It seemed boosted by the power of Other Memory she carried within herself — she’d noticed that the throaty sound of her compelling Voice bore certain similarities to the cacophony of Other Memory she heard in her mind, a low rumble of background noise from those ancestral females. She could enhance her compulsion with nuances tailored to what she knew of Olivia. And the woman responded as expected.

Valya smiled, knowing she had to practice this further. This would bear greater study.

Olivia crawled into the darkness until she had the presence of mind to activate her own illuminator. In a breathless voice, she called back, “The containers are here, the components still sealed in polymer sheets.”

Valya felt a sense of relief, but wanted to hurry. Trying to summon her commanding voice again, but without as strong an effect this time, she spoke to two of her commandos, Sisters Ulia and Stancy. She added a little push to see what would happen. “Help Olivia move the components. Bring them all out with extreme care. Then we’ll load them in the suspensor bins and make our way back to the shuttle. We can be gone by sunrise.”

Standing back, Valya watched while the other Sisters did the work of retrieving the computers. She took inventory, keeping track of each component.

The Sisters emerged, smeared with dirt and spores, and moved the components up the passage to the suspensor bins. The team members spoke in hushed whispers, not out of fear of Imperial detection, but because the cenote chamber seemed to hold eerie memories.

Valya felt a sense of awe, knowing what the computer records contained, a glimpse into the grand tapestry of the human genome, the near-infinite branches of humanity that had evolved over millions of years, and would continue to evolve … preferably under careful guidance from the Sisterhood.

From the days of the great machine plagues, the Sorceresses of Rossak had compiled a treasure trove of bloodlines from thousands of primary family lines. Raquella had continued that tremendous project — and it could all have been lost because of a superstitious fool like Dorotea and the fanatical Butlerians who feared information for its own sake.

Because of these computers, the Sisterhood had split in two like a block of dry firewood. Was it just a philosophical difference? Or did Dorotea have personal reasons for trying to destroy Raquella?

If Mother Superior Raquella died without a clear successor and the orthodox Sisters subsumed the rest of the order, that would destroy everything Raquella had created. Looking around the dim and mysterious cenote now, Valya thought Dorotea’s abomination of a splinter group was as misborn as the mutated humans who had once lived down here in the pit.

Valya had never spoken aloud to anyone except to her sister, Tula, about the other, personal importance of these records that would allow them to track down the descendants of Vorian Atreides. If they intended to wipe out the Atreides bloodline, first they had to find them.…

Valya could take the reins of the Sisterhood and dispatch Tula to regain Harkonnen honor, while she herself mapped out a long-term plan for the true Sisterhood. She would need skilled fighters, political strategists, Mentats, Truthsayers, and breeders to help shape the human race.

Dorotea could not be allowed to cause further problems.

By the time they emerged into the dark jungle, the women had less than an hour before dawn, but clouds had gathered overhead, adding more cover. Maneuvering the suspensor bins along the already-cleared path, they rushed back to the camouflaged shuttle.