Dune

The failure of CHOAM? Quite simple: They ignore the fact that larger commercial powers wait at the edges of their activities, powers that could swallow them the way a slig swallows garbage. This is the true threat of the Scattering—to them and to us all.

—BENE GESSERIT COUNCIL NOTES, ARCHIVES #SXX9OCH

Odrade spared only part of her awareness to the conversation between Teg and Taraza. Their lighter was a small one, its passenger quarters cramped. It would use atmospherics to dampen its descent, she knew, and she prepared herself for the buffeting. The pilot would be sparing of their suspensors on such a craft, saving energy.

She used these moments as she used all such time now to gird herself for the coming necessities. Time pressed; a special calendar drove her. She had looked at a calendar before leaving Chapter House, caught as often happened to her by the persistence of time and its language: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years . . . Standard Years, to be precise. Persistence was an inadequate word for the phenomenon. Inviolability was more like it. Tradition. Never disturb tradition. She held the comparisons firmly in mind, the ancient flow of time imposed on planets that did not tick to the primitive human clock. A week was seven days. Seven! How powerful that number remained. Mystical. It was enshrined in the Orange Catholic Bible. The Lord made a world in six days “and on the seventh day He rested.”

Good for Him! Odrade thought. We all should rest after great labors.

Odrade turned her head slightly and looked across the aisle at Teg. He had no idea how many memories of him she possessed. She could mark how the years had treated that strong face. Teaching the ghola had drained his energies, she saw. That child in the Gammu Keep must be a sponge absorbing anything and everything around him.

Miles Teg, do you know how we use you? she wondered.

It was a thought that weakened her but she allowed it to persist in her awareness almost with a feeling of defiance. How easy it would be to love that old man! Not as a mate, of course . . . but love, nonetheless. She could feel the bond tugging at her and recognized it with the fine edge of her Bene Gesserit abilities. Love, damnable love, weakening love.

Odrade had felt this tugging with the first mate she had been sent to seduce. Curious sensation. Her years of Bene Gesserit conditioning had made her wary of it. None of her proctors had allowed her the luxury of that unquestioning warmth, and she had learned in time the reasons behind such isolating care. But there she was, sent by the breeding mistresses, ordered to get that close to a single individual, to let him enter her. All of the clinical data lay there in her awareness and she could read the sexual excitement in her partner even as she allowed it in herself. She had, after all, been carefully prepared for this role by men the Breeding Mistresses selected and conditioned with exquisite nicety for just such training.

Odrade sighed and looked away from Teg, closing her eyes in remembrance. Training Males never let their emotions reflect a bonding abandonment to their students. It was a necessary flaw in the sexual education.

That first seduction upon which she had been sent: She had been quite unprepared for the melting ecstasy of a simultaneous orgasm, a mutuality and sharing as old as humankind . . . older! And with powers capable of overwhelming the reason. The look on her male companion’s face, the sweet kiss, his total abandonment of all self-protective reserves, unguarded and supremely vulnerable. No Training Male had ever done that! Desperately, she grasped for the Bene Gesserit lessons. Through those lessons, she saw the essence of this man on his face, felt that essence in her deepest fibers. For just an instant, she permitted an equal response, experiencing a new height of ecstasy that none of her teachers had hinted might be attainable. For that instant, she understood what had happened to the Lady Jessica and the other Bene Gesserit failures.

This feeling was love!

Its power frightened her (as the Breeding Mistresses had known it would) and she fell back into the careful Bene Gesserit conditioning, allowing a mask of pleasure to take over the brief natural expression on her face, employing calculated caresses where natural caresses would have been easier (but less effective).

The male responded as expected, stupidly. It helped to think of him as stupid.

Her second seduction had been easier. She could still call up the features of that first one, though, doing it sometimes with a calloused sense of wonder. Sometimes, his face came to her of itself and for no reason she could identify immediately.

With the other males she had been sent to breed, the memory markers were different. She had to hunt her past for the look of them. The sensory recordings of those experiences did not go as deep. Not so with that first one!

Such was the dangerous power of love.

And look at the troubles this hidden force had caused the Bene Gesserit over the millennia. The Lady Jessica and her love for her Duke had been only one example among countless others. Love clouded reason. It diverted the Sisters from their duties. Love could be tolerated only where it caused no immediate and obvious disruptions or where it served the larger purposes of the Bene Gesserit. Otherwise it was to be avoided.

Always, though, it remained an object of disquieting watchfulness.

Odrade opened her eyes and glanced again at Teg and Taraza. The Mother Superior had taken up a new subject. How irritating Taraza’s voice could be at times! Odrade closed her eyes and listened to the conversation, tied to those two voices by some link in her awareness that she could not avoid.

“Very few people realize how much of the infrastructure in a civilization is dependency infrastructure,” Taraza said. “We have made quite a study of this.”

Love is a dependency infrastructure, Odrade thought. Why had Taraza hit on this subject at this time? The Mother Superior seldom did anything without deep motives. “Dependency infrastructure is a term that includes all things necessary for a human population to survive at existing or increased numbers,” Taraza said.

“Melange?” Teg asked.

“Of course, but most people look at the spice and say, ‘How nice it is that we can have it and it can give us so much longer lives than were enjoyed by our ancestors.’”

“Providing they can afford it.” Teg’s voice had a bite in it, Odrade noted.

“As long as no single power controls all of the market, most people have enough,” Taraza said.

“I learned economics at my mother’s knee,” Teg said. “Food, water, breathable air, living space not contaminated by poisons—there are many kinds of money and the value changes according to the dependency.”

As she listened to him, Odrade almost nodded in agreement. His response was her own. Don’t belabor the obvious, Taraza! Get to your point.

“I want you to remember your mother’s teachings very clearly,” Taraza said. How mild her voice was suddenly! Taraza’s voice changed abruptly then and she snapped: “Hydraulic despotism!”

She does that shift of emphasis well, Odrade thought. Memory spewed up the data like a spigot suddenly opened full force. Hydraulic despotism: central control of an essential energy such as water, electricity, fuel, medicines, melange . . . Obey the central controlling power or the energy is shut off and you die!

Taraza was talking once more: “There’s another useful concept that I’m sure your mother taught you—the key log.”

Odrade was very curious now. Taraza was headed somewhere important with this conversation. Key log: a truly ancient concept from the days before suspensors when lumbermen sent their fallen timber rushing down rivers to central mill sites. Sometimes the logs jammed up in the river and an expert was brought in to find the one log, the key log, which would free the jam when removed. Teg, she knew, would have an intellectual understanding of the term but she and Taraza could call up actual witnesses from Other Memories, see the explosion of broken bits of wood and water as a jam was released.

“The Tyrant was a key log,” Taraza said. “He created the jam and he released it.”

The lighter began trembling sharply as it took its first bite of Gammu’s atmosphere. Odrade felt the tightness of her restraining harness for a few seconds, then the craft’s passage became steadier. Conversation stopped for this interval, then Taraza continued:

“Beyond the so-called natural dependencies are some religions that have been created psychologically. Even physical necessities can have such an underground component.”

“A fact the Missionaria Protectiva understands quite well,” Teg said. Again, Odrade heard that undercurrent of deep resentment in his voice. Taraza certainly must hear it, too. What was she doing? She could weaken Teg!

“Ahhh, yes,” Taraza said. “Our Missionaria Protectiva. Humans have such a powerful need that their own belief structure be the ‘true belief.’ If it gives you pleasure or a sense of security and if it is incorporated into your belief structure, what a powerful dependency that creates!”

Again, Taraza fell silent while their lighter went through another atmospheric buffeting.

“I wish he would use his suspensors!” Taraza complained.

“It saves fuel,” Teg said. “Less dependency.”

Taraza chuckled. “Oh, yes, Miles. You know the lesson well. I see your mother’s hand in it. Damn the dam when the child strikes out in a dangerous direction.”

“You think of me as a child?” he asked.

“I think of you as someone who has just had his first direct encounter with the machinations of the so-called Honored Matres.”

So that’s it, Odrade thought. And with a feeling of shock, Odrade realized that Taraza was aiming her words at a broader target than just Teg.

She’s talking to me!

“These Honored Matres, as they call themselves,” Taraza said, “have combined sexual ecstasy and worship. I doubt that they have even guessed at the dangers.”

Odrade opened her eyes and looked across the aisle at the Mother Superior. Taraza’s gaze was fixed intently on Teg, an unreadable expression except for the eyes, which burned with the necessity for him to understand.

“Dangers,” Taraza repeated. “The great mass of humankind possesses an unmistakable unit-identity. It can be one thing. It can act as a single organism.”

“So the Tyrant said,” Teg countered.

“So the Tyrant demonstrated! The Group Soul was his to manipulate. There are times, Miles, when survival demands that we commune with the soul. Souls, you know, are always seeking outlet.”

“Hasn’t communing with souls gone out of style in our time?” Teg asked. Odrade did not like the bantering tone in his voice and noted that it aroused a matching anger in Taraza.

“You think I talk about fashions in religion?” Taraza demanded, her high-pitched voice insistently harsh. “We both know religions can be created! I’m talking about these Honored Matres who ape some of our ways but have none of our deeper awareness. They dare place themselves at the center of worship!”

“A thing the Bene Gesserit always avoids,” he said. “My mother said that worshipers and the worshiped are united by the faith.”

“And they can be divided!”

Odrade saw Teg suddenly fall into Mentat mode, an unfocused stare in his eyes, his features placid. She saw now part of what Taraza was doing. The Mentat rides Roman, one foot on each steed. Each foot is based on a different reality as the pattern-search hurtles him forward. He must ride different realities to a single goal.

Teg spoke in a Mentat’s musing, unaccented voice: “Divided forces will battle for supremacy.”

Taraza gave a sigh of pleasure almost sensual in its natural venting.

“Dependency infrastructure,” Taraza said. “These women from the Scattering would control dividing forces, all of those forces trying mightily to take the lead. That military officer on the Guildship, when he spoke of his Honored Matres, spoke with both awe and hatred. I’m sure you heard it in his voice, Miles. I know how well your mother taught you.”

“I heard.” Teg was once more focused on Taraza, hanging on her every word as was Odrade.

“Dependencies,” Taraza said. “How simple they can be and how complex. Take, for example, tooth decay.”

“Tooth decay?” Teg was shocked off his Mentat track and Odrade, observing this, saw that his reaction was precisely what Taraza wanted. Taraza was playing her Mentat Bashar with a fine hand.

And I am supposed to see this and learn from it, Odrade thought.

“Tooth decay,” Taraza repeated. “A simple implant at birth prevents this bane for most of humankind. Still, we must brush the teeth and otherwise care for them. It is so natural to us that we seldom think about it. The devices we use are assumed to be wholly ordinary parts of our environment. Yet the devices, the materials in them, the instructors in tooth care and the Suk monitors, all have their interlocked relationships.”

“A Mentat does not need interdependencies explained to him,” Teg said. There was still curiosity in his voice but with a definite undertone of resentment.

“Quite,” Taraza said. “That is the natural environment of a Mentat’s thinking process.”

“Then why do you belabor this?”

“Mentat, look at what you now know of these Honored Matres and tell me: What is their flaw?”

Teg spoke without hesitation: “They can only survive if they continue to increase the dependency of those who support them. It’s an addict’s dead-end street.”

“Precisely. And the danger?”

“They could take much of humankind down with them.”

“That was the Tyrant’s problem, Miles. I’m sure he knew it. Now, pay attention to me with great care. And you, too, Dar.” Taraza looked across the aisle and met Odrade’s gaze. “Both of you listen to me. We of the Bene Gesserit are setting very powerful . . . elements adrift in the human current. They may jam up. They are sure to cause damage. And we . . .”

Once more, the lighter entered a period of severe buffeting. Conversation was impossible while they clung to their seats and listened to the roaring, creaking around them. When this interruption eased, Taraza raised her voice.

“If we survive this damnable machine and get down to Gammu, you must go aside with Dar there, Miles. You have seen the Atreides Manifesto. She will tell you about it and prepare you. That is all.”

Teg turned and looked at Odrade. Once more, her features tugged at his memories: a remarkable likeness to Lucilla, but there was something else. He put this aside. The Atreides Manifesto? He had read it because it came to him from Taraza with instructions that he do so. Prepare me? For what?

Odrade saw the questioning look on Teg’s face. Now, she understood Taraza’s motive. The Mother Superior’s orders took on a new meaning as did words from the Manifesto itself.

“Just as the universe is created by the participation of consciousness, the prescient human carries that creative faculty to its ultimate extreme. This was the profoundly misunderstood power of the Atreides bastard, the power that he transmitted to his son, the Tyrant.”

Odrade knew those words with an author’s intimacy but they came back to her now as though she had never before encountered them.

Damn you, Tar! Odrade thought. What if you’re wrong?