Dune

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.

—MENTAT HANDBOOK

Lucilla and Burzmali entered Ysai from the south into a lower-class quarter with widely spaced streetlights. It lacked only an hour of midnight and yet people thronged the streets in this quarter. Some walked quietly, some chatted with drug-enhanced vigor, some only watched expectantly. They wadded up at the corners and held Lucilla’s fascinated attention as she passed.

Burzmali urged her to walk faster, an eager customer anxious to get her alone. Lucilla kept her covert attention on the people.

What did they do here? Those men waiting in the doorway: For what did they wait? Workers in heavy aprons emerged from a wide passage as Lucilla and Burzmali passed. There was a thick smell of rank sewage and perspiration about them. The workers, almost equally divided between male and female, were tall, heavy-bodied and with thick arms. Lucilla could not imagine what their occupation might be but they were of a single type and they made her realize how little she knew of Gammu.

The workers hawked and spat into the gutter as they emerged into the night. Ridding themselves of some contaminant?

Burzmali put his mouth close to Lucilla’s ear and whispered: “Those workers are the Bordanos.”

She risked a glance back at them where they walked toward a side street. Bordanos? Ahhh, yes: people trained and bred to work the compression machinery that harnessed sewer gases. They had been bred to remove the sense of smell and the musculature of shoulders and arms had been increased. Burzmali guided her around a corner and out of sight of the Bordanos.

Five children emerged from a dark doorway beside them and wheeled into line following Lucilla and Burzmali. Lucilla noted their hands clutching small objects. They followed with a strange intensity. Abruptly, Burzmali stopped and turned. The children also stopped and stared at him. It was clear to Lucilla that the children were prepared for some violence.

Burzmali clasped both hands in front of him and bowed to the children. He said: “Guldur!”

When Burzmali resumed guiding her down the street, the children no longer followed.

“They would have stoned us,” he said.

“Why?”

“They are children of a sect that follows Guldur—the local name for the Tyrant.”

Lucilla looked back but the children were no longer in sight. They had set off in search of another victim.

Burzmali guided her around another corner. Now, they were in a street crowded with small merchants selling their wares from wheeled stands—food, clothing, small tools, and knives. A singsong of shouts filled the air as the merchants tried to attract buyers. Their voices had that end of the workday lift—a false brilliance composed of the hope that old dreams would be fulfilled, yet colored by the knowledge that life would not change for them. It occurred to Lucilla that the people of these streets pursued a fleeting dream, that the fulfillment they sought was not the thing itself but a myth they had been conditioned to seek the way racing animals were trained to chase after the whirling bait on the endless oval of the racetrack.

In the street directly ahead of them a burly figure in a thickly padded coat was engaged in loud-voiced argument with a merchant who offered a string bag filled with the dark red bulbs of a sweetly acid fruit. The fruit smell was thick all around them. The merchant complained: “You would steal the food from the mouths of my children!”

The bulky figure spoke in a piping voice, the accent chillingly familiar to Lucilla: “I, too, have children!”

Lucilla controlled herself with an effort.

When they were clear of the market street, she whispered to Burzmali: “That man in the heavy coat back there—a Tleilaxu Master!”

“Couldn’t be,” Burzmali protested. “Too tall.”

“Two of them, one on the shoulders of the other.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“I’ve seen others like that since we arrived, but I didn’t suspect.”

“Many searchers are in these streets,” she said.

Lucilla found that she did not much care for the everyday life of the gutter inhabitants on this gutter planet. She no longer trusted the explanation for bringing the ghola here. Of all those planets on which the precious ghola could have been raised, why had the Sisterhood chosen this one? Or was the ghola truly precious? Could it be that he was merely bait?

Almost blocking the narrow mouth of an alley beside them was a man plying a tall device of whirling lights.

“Live!” he shouted. “Live!”

Lucilla slowed her pace to watch a passerby step into the alleyway and pass a coin to the proprietor, then lean into a concave basin made brilliant by the lights. The proprietor stared back at Lucilla. She saw a man with a narrow dark face, the face of a Caladanian primitive on a body only slightly taller than that of a Tleilaxu Master. There had been a look of contempt on his brooding face as he took the customer’s money.

The customer lifted his face from the basin with a shudder and then left the alley, staggering slightly, his eyes glazed.

Lucilla recognized the device. Users called it a hypnobong and it was outlawed on all of the more civilized worlds.

Burzmali hurried her out of the view of the brooding hypnobong proprietor.

They came to a wider side street with a corner doorway set into the building across from them. Foot traffic all around; not a vehicle in sight. A tall man sat on the first step in the corner doorway, his knees drawn up close to his chin. His long arms were wrapped around his knees, the thin-fingered hands clasped tightly together. He wore a wide-brimmed black hat that shaded his face from the streetlights, but twin gleams from the shadows under that brim told Lucilla that this was no kind of human she had ever before encountered. This was something about which the Bene Gesserit had only speculated.

Burzmali waited until they were well away from the seated figure before satisfying her curiosity.

“Futar,” he whispered. “That’s what they call themselves. They’ve only recently been seen here on Gammu.”

“A Tleilaxu experiment,” Lucilla guessed. And she thought: A mistake that has returned from the Scattering. “What are they doing here?” she asked.

“Trading colony, so the natives here tell us.”

“Don’t you believe it. Those are hunting animals that have been crossed with humans.”

“Ahhh, here we are,” Burzmali said.

He guided Lucilla through a narrow doorway into a dimly lighted eating establishment. This was part of their disguise, Lucilla knew: Do what others in this quarter did, but she did not relish eating in this place, not with what she could interpret from the smells.

The place had been crowded but it was emptying as they entered.

“This commerciel was recommended highly,” Burzmali said as they seated themselves in a mechaslot and waited for the menu to be projected.

Lucilla watched the departing customers. Night workers from nearby factories and offices, she guessed. They appeared anxious in their hurry, perhaps fearful of what might be done to them if they were tardy.

How insulated she had been at the Keep, she thought. She did not like what she was learning of Gammu. What a scruffy place this commerciel was! The stools at the counter to her right had been scarred and chipped. The tabletop in front of her had been scored and rubbed with gritty cleaners until it no longer could be kept clean by the vacusweep whose nozzle she could see near her left elbow. There was no sign of even the cheapest sonic to maintain cleanliness. Food and other evidence of deterioration had accumulated in the table’s scratches. Lucilla shuddered. She could not avoid the feeling that it had been a mistake to separate from the ghola.

The menu had been projected, she saw, and Burzmali already was scanning it.

“I will order for you,” he said.

Burzmali’s way of saying he did not want her to make a mistake by ordering something a woman of the Hormu might avoid.

It galled her to feel dependent. She was a Reverend Mother! She was trained to take command in any situation, mistress of her own destiny. How tiring all of this was. She gestured at the dirty window on her left where people could be seen passing on the narrow street.

“I am losing business while we dally, Skar.”

There! That was in character.

Burzmali almost sighed. At last! he thought. She had begun to function once more as a Reverend Mother. He could not understand her abstracted attitude, the way she looked at the city and its people.

Two milky drinks slid from the slot onto the table. Burzmali drank his in one swallow. Lucilla tested her drink on the tip of her tongue, sorting the contents. An imitation caffiate diluted with a nut-flavored juice.

Burzmali gestured upward with his chin for her to drink it quickly. She obeyed, concealing a grimace at the chemical flavors. Burzmali’s attention was on something over her right shoulder but she dared not turn. That would be out of character.

“Come.” He placed a coin on the table and hurried her out into the street. He smiled the smile of an eager customer but there was wariness in his eyes.

The tempo of the streets had changed. There were fewer people. The shadowy doors conveyed a deeper sense of menace. Lucilla reminded herself that she was supposed to represent a powerful guild whose members were immune to the common violence of the gutter. The few people on the street did make way for her, eyeing the dragons of her robe with every appearance of awe.

Burzmali stopped at a doorway.

It was like the others along this street, set back slightly from the walkway, so tall that it appeared narrower than it actually was. An old-fashioned security beam guarded the entrance. None of the newer systems had penetrated to the slum, apparently. The streets themselves were testimony to that: designed for groundcars. She doubted that there was a roofpad in the entire area. No sign of flitters or ’thopters could be heard or seen. There was music, though—a faint susurration reminiscent of semuta. Something new in semuta addiction? This would certainly be an area where addicts would go to ground.

Lucilla looked up at the face of the building as Burzmali moved ahead of her and made their presence known by breaking the doorway beam.

There were no windows in the building’s face. Only the faint glitterings of surface ’eyes here and there in the dull sheen of ancient plasteel. They were old-fashioned comeyes, she noted, much bigger than modern ones.

A door deep in the shadows swung inward on silent hinges.

“This way.” Burzmali reached back and urged her forward with a hand on her elbow.

They entered a dimly lighted hallway that smelled of exotic foods and bitter essences. She was a moment identifying some of the things that assailed her nostrils. Melange. She caught the unmistakable cinnamon ripeness. And yes, semuta. She identified burned rice, higet salts. Someone was masking another kind of cooking. There were explosives being made here. She thought of warning Burzmali but reconsidered. It was not necessary for him to know and there might be ears in this confined space to hear whatever she said.

Burzmali led the way up a shadowy flight of stairs with a dim glowstrip along the slanting baseboard. At the top he found a hidden switch concealed behind a patch in the patched and repatched wall. There was no sound when he pushed the switch but Lucilla felt a change in the movement all around them. Silence. It was a new kind of silence in her experience, a crouching preparation for flight or violence.

It was cold in the stairwell and she shivered, but not from the chill. Footsteps sounded beyond the doorway beside the patch-masked switch.

A gray-haired hag in a yellow smock opened the door and peered up at them past her straggling eyebrows.

“It’s you,” she said, her voice wavering. She stood aside for them to enter.

Lucilla glanced swiftly around the room as she heard the door close behind them. It was a room the unobservant might think shabby, but that was superficial. Underneath, it was quality. The shabbiness was another mask, partly a matter of this place having been fitted to a particularly demanding person: This goes here and nowhere else! That goes over there and it stays there! The furnishings and bric-a-brac looked a little worn but someone here did not object to that. The room felt better this way. It was that kind of room.

Who possessed this room? The old woman? She was making her painful way toward a door on their left.

“We are not to be disturbed until dawn,” Burzmali said.

The old woman stopped and turned.

Lucilla studied her. Was this another who shammed advanced age? No. The age was real. Every motion was diffused by unsteadiness—a trembling of the neck, a failure of the body that betrayed her in ways she could not prevent.

“Even if it’s somebody important?” the old woman asked in her wavering voice.

The eyes twitched when she spoke. Her mouth moved only minimally to emit the necessary sounds, spacing out her words as though she drew them from somewhere deep within. Her shoulders, curved from years of bending at some fixed work, would not straighten enough for her to look Burzmali in the eyes. She peered upward past her brows instead, an oddly furtive posture.

“What important person are you expecting?” Burzmali asked.

The old woman shuddered and appeared to take a long time understanding.

“Impor-r-rtant people come here,” she said.

Lucilla recognized the body signals and blurted it because Burzmali must know:

“She’s from Rakis!”

The old woman’s curious upward gaze locked on Lucilla. The ancient voice said: “I was a priestess, Hormu Lady.”

“Of course she’s from Rakis,” Burzmali said. His tone warned her not to question.

“I would not harm you,” the hag whined.

“Do you still serve the Divided God?”

Again, there was that long delay for the old woman to respond.

“Many serve the Great Guldur,” she said.

Lucilla pursed her lips and once more scanned the room. The old woman had been reduced greatly in importance. “I am glad I do not have to kill you,” Lucilla said.

The old woman’s jaw drooped open in a parody of surprise while spittle dripped from her lips.

This was a descendant of Fremen? Lucilla let her revulsion come out in a long shudder. This mendicant bit of flotsam had been shaped from a people who walked tall and proud, a people who died bravely. This one would die whining.

“Please trust me,” the hag whined and fled the room.

“Why did you do that?” Burzmali demanded. “These are the ones who will get us to Rakis!”

She merely looked at him, recognizing the fear in his question. It was fear for her.

But I did not imprint him back there, she thought.

With a sense of shock she realized that Burzmali had recognized hate in her. I hate them! she thought. I hate the people of this planet!

That was a dangerous emotion for a Reverend Mother. Still it burned in her. This planet had changed her in a way she did not want. She did not want the realization that such things could be. Intellectual understanding was one thing; experience was another.

Damn them!

But they already were damned.

Her chest pained her. Frustration! There was no escaping this new awareness. What had happened to these people?

People?

The shells were here but they no longer could be called fully alive. Dangerous, though. Supremely dangerous.

“We must rest while we can,” Burzmali said.

“I do not have to earn my money?” she demanded.

Burzmali paled. “What we did was necessary! We were lucky and were not stopped but it could have happened!”

“And this place is safe?”

“As safe as I can make it. Everyone here has been screened by me or by my people.”

Lucilla found a long couch that smelled of old perfumes and composed herself there to scour her emotions of the dangerous hate. Where hate entered, love might follow! She heard Burzmali stretching out to rest on cushions against a nearby wall. Soon, he was breathing deeply, but sleep evaded Lucilla. She kept sensing crowds of memories, things thrust forward by the Others who shared her inner storerooms of thinking. Abruptly, inner vision gave her a glimpse of a street and faces, people moving in bright sunlight. It took a moment for her to realize that she saw all of this from a peculiar angle—that she was being cradled in someone’s arms. She knew then that this was one of her own personal memories. She could place the one who held her, feel the warm heartbeat next to a warm cheek.

Lucilla tasted the salt of her own tears.

She realized then that Gammu had touched her more deeply than any experience since her first days in the Bene Gesserit schools.