Dune

The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical accounts distract attention from the secret influences behind great events.

—THE BASHAR TEG

When left to his own devices, Idaho often explored his no-ship prison. So much to see and learn about this Ixian artifact. It was a cave of wonders.

He paused on this afternoon’s restless walk through his quarters and looked at the tiny comeyes built into the glittering surface of a doorway. They were watching him. He had the odd sensation of seeing himself through those prying eyes. What did the Sisters think when they looked at him? The blocky ghola-child from Gammu’s long-dead Keep had become a lanky man: dark skin and hair. The hair was longer than when he had entered this no-ship on the last day of Dune.

Bene Gesserit eyes peered below the skin. He was sure they suspected he was a Mentat and he feared how they might interpret that. How could a Mentat expect to hide the fact from Reverend Mothers indefinitely? Foolishness! He knew they already suspected him of Truthsay.

He waved at the comeyes and said: “I’m restless. I think I’ll explore.”

Bellonda hated it when he took that jocular attitude toward surveillance. She did not like him to roam the ship. She did not try to hide it from him. He could see the unspoken question in her glowering features whenever she came to confront him: “Is he looking for a way to escape?”

Exactly what I’m doing, Bell, but not in the way you suspect.

The no-ship presented him with fixed limits: the exterior forcefield he could not penetrate, certain machinery areas where the drive (so he was told) had been temporarily disabled, guard quarters (he could see into some of them but not enter), the armory, the section reserved to the captive Tleilaxu, Scytale. He occasionally met Scytale at one of the barriers and they peered at each other across the silencing field that held them apart. Then there was the information barrier—sections of Shiprecords that would not respond to his questions, answers his warders would not give.

Within these limits lay a lifetime of things to see and learn, even the lifetime of some three hundred Standard Years he could reasonably expect.

If Honored Matres do not find us.

Idaho saw himself as the game they sought, wanting him even more than they wanted the women of Chapterhouse. He had no illusions about what the hunters would do to him. They knew he was here. The men he trained in sexual bonding and sent out to plague the Honored Matres—those men taunted the hunters.

When the Sisters learned of his Mentat ability they would know immediately that his mind carried the memories of more than one ghola lifetime. The original did not have that talent. They would suspect he was a latent Kwisatz Haderach. Look how they rationed his melange. They were clearly terrified of repeating the mistake they had made with Paul Atreides and his Tyrant son. Thirty-five hundred years of bondage!

But dealing with Murbella required Mentat awareness. He entered every encounter with her not expecting to achieve answers then or later. It was a typical Mentat approach: concentrate on the questions. Mentats accumulated questions the way others accumulated answers. Questions created their own patterns and systems. This produced the most important shapes. You looked at your universe through self-created patterns—all composed of images, words, and labels (everything temporary), all mingled in sensory impulses, that reflected off his internal constructs the way light bounced from bright surfaces.

Idaho’s original Mentat instructor had formed the temporary words for that first tentative construct: “Watch for consistent movements against your internal screen.”

From that first hesitant dip into Mentat powers, Idaho could trace the growth of a sensitivity to changes in his own observations, always becoming Mentat.

Bellonda was his most severe trial. He dreaded her penetrating gaze and slashing questions. Mentat probing Mentat. He met her forays delicately, with reserve and patience. Now, what are you after?

As if he didn’t know.

He wore patience as a mask. But fear came naturally and there was no harm in showing it. Bellonda did not hide her wish to see him dead.

Idaho accepted the fact that soon the watchers would see only one possible source for the skills he was forced to use.

A Mentat’s real skills lay in that mental construct they called “the great synthesis.” It required a patience that non-Mentats did not even imagine possible. Mentat schools defined it as perseverance. You were a primitive tracker, able to read minuscule signs, tiny disturbances in the environment, and follow where these led. At the same time, you remained open to broad motions all around and within. This produced naivete, the basic Mentat posture, akin to that of Truthsayers but far more sweeping.

“You are open to whatever the universe may do,” his first instructor had said. “Your mind is not a computer; it is a response-tool keyed to whatever your senses display.”

Idaho always recognized when Bellonda’s senses were open. She stood there, gaze slightly withdrawn, and he knew few preconceptions cluttered her mind. His defense lay in her basic flaw: Opening the senses required an idealism that was foreign to Bellonda. She did not ask the best questions and he wondered at this. Would Odrade use a flawed Mentat? It went against her other performances.

I seek the questions that form the best images.

Doing this, you never thought of yourself as clever, that you had the formula to provide the solution. You remained as responsive to new questions as you did to new patterns. Testing, re-testing, shaping and re-shaping. A constant process, never stopping, never satisfied. It was your own private pavane, similar to that of other Mentats but it carried always your own unique posture and steps.

“You are never truly a Mentat. That is why we call it ‘The Endless Goal.’” The words of his teachers were burned into his awareness.

As he accumulated observations of Bellonda, he came to appreciate a viewpoint of those great Mentat Masters who had taught him. “Reverend Mothers do not make the best Mentats.”

No Bene Gesserit appeared capable of completely removing herself from that binding absolute she achieved in the Spice Agony: loyalty to her Sisterhood.

His teachers had warned against absolutes. They created a serious flaw in a Mentat.

“Everything you do, everything you sense and say is experiment. No deduction final. Nothing stops until dead and perhaps not even then, because each life creates endless ripples. Induction bounces within and you sensitize yourself to it. Deduction conveys illusions of absolutes. Kick the truth and shatter it!”

When Bellonda’s questions touched on the relationship between himself and Murbella, he saw vague emotional responses. Amusement? Jealousy? He could accept amusement (and even jealousy) about the compelling sexual demands of this mutual addiction. Is the ecstasy truly that great?

He wandered through his quarters this afternoon feeling displaced, as though newly here and not yet accepting these rooms as home. That is emotion talking to me.

Over the years of his confinement, these quarters had taken on a lived-in appearance. This was his cave, the former supercargo suite: large rooms with slightly curved walls—bedroom, library-workroom, sitting room, a green-tiled bath with dry and wet cleansing systems, and a long practice hall he shared with Murbella for exercise.

The rooms bore a unique collection of artifacts and marks of his presence: that slingchair placed at just the right angle to the console and projector linking him to Shipsystems, those ridulian records on that low side table. And there were stains of occupancy—that dark brown blot on the worktable. Spilled food had left its indelible mark.

He moved restlessly into his sleeping quarters. The light was dimmer. His ability to identify the familiar held true for odors. There was a saliva-like smell to the bed—the residue of last night’s sexual collision.

That is the proper word: collision.

The no-ship’s air—filtered, recycled, and sweetened—often bored him. No break in the no-ship maze to the exterior world ever remained open long. He sometimes sat silently sniffing, hoping for a faint trace of air that had not been adjusted to the prison’s demands.

There is a way to escape!

He wandered out of his quarters and down the corridor, took the dropchute at the end of the passage and emerged in the ship’s lowest level.

What is really happening out there in that world open to the sky?

The bits Odrade told him about events filled him with dread and a trapped feeling. No place to run! Am I wise to share my fears with Sheeana? Murbella merely laughed. “I will protect you, love. Honored Matres won’t hurt me.” Another false dream.

But Sheeana . . . how quickly she had picked up the hand-language and entered the spirit of his conspiracy. Conspiracy? No . . . I doubt that any Reverend Mother will act against her Sisters. Even the Lady Jessica went back to them in the end. But I don’t ask Sheeana to act against the Sisterhood, only that she protect us from Murbella’s folly.

The enormous powers of the hunters made only the destruction predictable. A Mentat had but to look at their disruptive violence. They brought something else as well, something hinting at matters out there in the Scattering. What were these Futars Odrade mentioned with such casualness? Part human, part beast? That had been Lucilla’s guess. And where is Lucilla?

He found himself presently in the Great Hold, the kilometer-long cargo space where they had carried the last giant sandworm of Dune, bringing it to Chapterhouse. The area still smelled of spice and sand, filling his mind with long-ago and the dead far away. He knew why he came so often to the Great Hold, doing it sometimes without even thinking, as he had just done. It both attracted and repelled. The illusion of unlimited space with traces of dust, sand, and spice carried the nostalgia of lost freedoms. But there was another side. This is where it always happened to him.

Will it happen today?

Without warning, the sense of being in the Great Hold would vanish. Then . . . the net shimmering in a molten sky. He was aware when the vision came that he was not really seeing a net. His mind translated what the senses could not define.

A shimmering net undulating like an infinite borealis.

Then the net would part and he would see two people—man and woman. How ordinary they appeared and yet extraordinary. A grandmother and grandfather in antique clothing: bib coveralls for the man and a long dress with headscarf for the woman. Working in a flower garden! He thought it must be more of the illusion. I am seeing this but it is not really what I see.

They always noticed him eventually. He heard their voices. “There he is again, Marty,” the man would say, calling the woman’s attention to Idaho.

“I wonder how it is he can look through?” Marty asked once. “Doesn’t seem possible.”

“He’s spread pretty thin, I think. Wonder if he knows the danger?”

Danger. That was the word that always jerked him out of the vision.

“Not at your console today?”

For just an instant, Idaho thought it was the vision, the voice of that odd woman, then he realized it was Odrade. Her voice came from close behind. He whirled and saw he had failed to close the hatch. She had followed him into the Hold, stalking him quietly, avoiding the scattered patches of sand that might have grated underfoot and betrayed her approach.

She looked tired and impatient. Why did she think I would be at my console?

As though answering his unspoken question, she said: “I find you at your console so often lately. For what do you search, Duncan?”

He shook his head without speaking. Why do I suddenly feel in peril?

It was a rare feeling in Odrade’s company. He could remember other occasions, though. Once when she had stared suspiciously at his hands in the field of his console. Fear associated with my console. Do I reveal my Mentat hunger for data? Do they guess that I have hidden my private self there?

“Do I get no privacy at all?” Anger and attack.

She shook her head slowly from side to side as much to say, “You can do better than that.”

“This is your second visit today,” he accused.

“I must say you’re looking well, Duncan.” More circumlocution.

“Is that what your watchers say?”

“Don’t be petty. I came for a chat with Murbella. She said you’d be down here.”

“I suppose you know Murbella’s pregnant again.” Was that trying to placate her?

“For which we are grateful. I came to tell you that Sheeana wants to visit you again.”

Why would Odrade announce that?

Her words filled him with images of the Dune waif who had become a full Reverend Mother (the youngest ever, so they said). Sheeana, his confidante, out there watching over that last great sandworm. Had it finally perpetuated itself? Why should Odrade interest herself in Sheeana’s visit?

“Sheeana wants to discuss the Tyrant with you.”

She saw the surprise this produced.

“What could I possibly add to Sheeana’s knowledge of Leto II?” he demanded. “She’s a Reverend Mother.”

“You knew the Atreides intimately.”

Ahhhhh. She’s hunting for the Mentat.

“But you said she wanted to discuss Leto and it’s not safe to think of him as Atreides.”

“Oh, but he was. Refined into something more elemental than anyone before him, but one of us, nonetheless.”

One of us! She reminded him that she, too, was Atreides. Calling in his never-ending debt to the family!

“So you say.”

“Shouldn’t we stop playing this foolish game?”

Caution gripped him. He knew she saw it. Reverend Mothers were so damnably sensitive. He stared at her, not daring to speak, knowing even this told her too much.

“We believe you remember more than one ghola lifetime.” And when he still did not respond, “Come, come, Duncan! Are you a Mentat?”

The way she spoke, as much accusation as question, he knew concealment had ended. It was almost a relief.

“And if I am?”

“The Tleilaxu mixed the cells from more than one Idaho ghola when they grew you.”

Idaho-ghola! He refused to think of himself in that abstraction. “Why is Leto suddenly so important to you?” No escaping the admission in that reponse.

“Our worm has become sandtrout.”

“Are they growing and propagating?”

“Apparently.”

“Unless you contain them or eliminate them, Chapterhouse may become another Dune.”

“You figured that out, did you?”

“Leto and I together.”

“So you remember many lives. Fascinating. It makes you somewhat like us.” How unswerving her stare!

“Very different, I think.” Have to get her off that track!

“You acquired the memories during your first encounter with Murbella?”

Who guessed it? Lucilla? She was there and might have guessed, confiding her suspicions to her Sisters. He had to bring the deadly issue into the open. “I’m not another Kwisatz Haderach!”

“You’re not?” Studied objectivity. She allowed this to reveal itself, a cruelty, he thought.

“You know I’m not!” He was fighting for his life and knew it. Not so much with Odrade as with those others who watched and reviewed the comeye records.

“Tell me about your serial memories.” That was a command from the Mother Superior. No escaping it.

“I know those . . . lives. It’s like one lifetime.”

“That accumulation could be very valuable to us, Duncan. Do you also remember the axlotl tanks?”

Her question sent his thoughts into the misty probings that caused him to imagine strange things about the Tleilaxu—great mounds of human flesh softly visible to the imperfect newborn eyes, blurred and unfocused images, almost-memories of emerging from birth canals. How could that accord with tanks?

“Scytale has provided us with the knowledge to make our own axlotl system,” Odrade said.

System? Interesting word. “Does that mean you also duplicate Tleilaxu spice production?”

“Scytale bargains for more than we will give. But spice will come in time, one way or another.”

Odrade heard herself speak firmly and wondered if he detected uncertainty. We might not have the time to do it.

“The Sisters you Scatter are hobbled,” he said, giving her a small taste of Mentat awareness. “You’re drawing on your spice stockpiles to supply them and those must be finite.”

“They have our axlotl knowledge and sandtrout.”

He was shocked to silence by the possibility of countless Dunes being reproduced in an infinite universe.

“They will solve the problem of melange supply with tanks or worms or both,” she said. This she could say sincerely. It came from statistical expectation. One among those Scattered bands of Reverend Mothers should accomplish it.

“The tanks,” he said. “I have strange . . . dreams.” He had almost said “musings.”

“And well you should.” Briefly, she told him how female flesh was incorporated.

“For making the spice, too?”

“We think so.”

“Disgusting!”

“That’s juvenile,” she chided.

In such moments, he disliked her intensely. Once, he had reproached her for the way Reverend Mothers removed themselves from “the common stream of human emotions,” and she had given him that identical answer.

Juvenile!

“For which there probably is no remedy,” he said. “A disgraceful flaw in my character.”

“Were you thinking to debate morality with me?”

He thought he heard anger. “Not even ethics. We work by different rules.”

“Rules are often an excuse to ignore compassion.”

“Do I hear a faint echo of conscience in a Reverend Mother?”

“Deplorable. My Sisters would exile me if they thought conscience ruled me.”

“You can be prodded, but not ruled.”

“Very good, Duncan! I like you much better when you’re openly Mentat.”

“I distrust your liking.”

She laughed aloud. “How like Bell!”

He stared at her dumbly, plunged by her laughter into sudden knowledge of the way to escape his warders, remove himself from the constant Bene Gesserit manipulations and live his own life. The way out lay not in machinery but in the Sisterhood’s flaws. The absolutes by which they thought they surrounded and held him—there was the way out!

And Sheeana knows! That’s the bait she dangles in front of me.

When Idaho did not speak, Odrade said: “Tell me about those other lives.”

“Wrong. I think of them as one continuous life.”

“No deaths?”

He let a response form silently. Serial memories: the deaths were as informative as the lives. Killed so many times by Leto himself!

“The deaths do not interrupt my memories.”

“An odd kind of immortality,” she said. “You know, don’t you, that Tleilaxu Masters recreated themselves? But you—what did they hope to achieve, mixing different gholas in one flesh?”

“Ask Scytale.”

“Bell felt sure you were a Mentat. She will be delighted.”

“I think not.”

“I will see to it that she is delighted. My! I have so many questions I’m not sure where to begin.” She studied him, left hand to her chin.

Questions? Mentat demands flowed through Idaho’s mind. He let the questions he had asked himself so many times move of themselves, forming their patterns. What did the Tleilaxu seek in me? They could not have included cells from all of his ghola-selves for this incarnation. Yet . . . he had all of the memories. What cosmic linkage accumulated all of those lives in this one self? Was that the clue to the visions that beset him in the Great Hold? Half-memories formed in his mind: his body in warm fluid, fed by tubes, massaged by machines, probed and questioned by Tleilaxu observers. He sensed murmurous responses from semi-dormant selves. The words had no meaning. It was as though he listened to a foreign language coming from his own lips but he knew it was ordinary Galach.

The scope of what he sensed in Tleilaxu actions awed him. They investigated a cosmos no one but the Bene Gesserit had ever dared touch. That the Bene Tleilax did this for selfish reasons did not subtract from it. The endless rebirths of Tleilaxu Masters were a reward worthy of daring.

Face Dancer servants to copy any life, any mind. The scope of the Tleilaxu dream was as awesome as Bene Gesserit achievements.

“Scytale admits to memories of Muad’Dib’s times,” Odrade said. “You might compare notes with him someday.”

“That kind of immortality is a bargaining chip,” he warned. “Could he sell it to the Honored Matres?”

“He might. Come. Let’s go back to your quarters.”

In his workroom, she gestured him to the chair at his console and he wondered if she was still hunting for his secrets. She bent over him to manipulate the controls. The overhead projector produced a scene of desert to a horizon of rolling dunes.

“Chapterhouse?” she said. “A wide band along our equator.”

Excitement gripped him. “Sandtrout, you said. But are there any new worms?”

“Sheeana expects them soon.”

“They require a large amount of spice as catalyst.”

“We’ve gambled a great deal of melange out there. Leto told you about the catalyst, didn’t he? What else do you remember of him?”

“He killed me so many times it’s an ache when I think about it.”

She had the records of Dar-es-Balat on Dune to confirm this. “Killed you himself, I know. Did he just throw you away when you were used up?”

“I sometimes performed up to expectations and was allowed a natural death.”

“Was his Golden Path worth it?”

We don’t understand his Golden Path nor the fermentations that produced it. He said this.

“Interesting choice of word. A Mentat thinks of the Tyrant’s eons as fermentation.”

“That erupted in the Scattering.”

“Driven also by the Famine Times.”

“You think he didn’t anticipate famines?”

She did not reply, held to silence by his Mentat view. Golden Path: humankind “erupting” into the universe . . . never again confined to any single planet and susceptible to a singular fate. All of our eggs no longer in one basket.

“Leto thought of all humankind as a single organism,” he said.

“But he enlisted us in his dream against our will.”

“You Atreides always do that.”

You Atreides! “Then you’ve paid your debt to us?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Do you appreciate my present dilemma, Mentat?”

“How long have the sandtrout been at work?”

“More than eight Standard Years.”

“How fast is our desert growing?”

Our desert! She gestured at the projection. “That’s more than three times larger than it was before the sandtrout.”

“So fast!”

“Sheeana expects to see small worms any day.”

“They tend not to surface until they reach about two meters.”

“So she says.”

He spoke in a musing tone. “Each with a pearl of Leto’s awareness in his ‘endless dream.’”

“So he said and he never lied about such things.”

“His lies were more subtle. Like a Reverend Mother’s.”

“You accuse us of lying?”

“Why does Sheeana want to see me?”

“Mentats! You think your questions are answers.” Odrade shook her head in mock dismay. “She must learn as much as possible about the Tyrant as the center of religious adoration.”

“Gods below! Why?”

“The cult of Sheeana has spread. It’s all over the Old Empire and beyond, carried by surviving priests from Rakis.”

“From Dune,” he corrected her. “Don’t think of it as Arrakis or Rakis. It fogs your mind.”

She accepted his correction. He was fully Mentat now and she waited patiently.

“Sheeana talked to the sandworms on Dune,” he said. “They responded.” He met her questioning stare. “Up to your old tricks with your Missionaria Protectiva, eh?”

“The Tyrant is known as Dur and Guldur in the Scattering,” she said, feeding his Mentat naivete.

“You have a dangerous assignment for her. Does she know?”

“She knows and you could make it less dangerous.”

“Then open your data systems to me.”

“No limits?” She knew what Bell would say to that!

He nodded, unable to allow himself the hope that she might agree. Does she suspect how desperately I want this? It was an ache where he held his knowledge of how he might escape. Unimpeded access to information! She will think I want the illusion of freedom.

“Will you be my Mentat, Duncan?”

“What choice do I have?”

“I will discuss your request in Council and give you our answer.”

Is the escape door opening?

“I must think like an Honored Matre,” he said, arguing for the comeyes and the watchdogs who would review his request.

“Who could do it better than the one who lives with Murbella?” she asked.