Dune

Time does not count itself. You have only to look at a circle and this is apparent.

—LETO II (THE TYRANT)

“Look! Look what we have come to!” the Rabbi wailed. He sat cross-legged on the cold curved floor with his shawl pulled up over his head and almost concealing his face.

The room around him was gloomy and resonating with small machinery sounds that made him feel weak. If those sounds should stop!

Rebecca stood in front of him, hands on her hips, a look of weary frustration on her face.

“Do not stand there like that!” the Rabbi commanded. He peered up at her from beneath the shawl.

“If you despair, then are we not lost?” she asked.

The sound of her voice angered him and he was a moment putting this unwanted emotion aside.

She dares to instruct me? But was it not said by wiser men that knowledge can come from a weed? A great shuddering sigh shook him and he dropped the shawl to his shoulders. Rebecca helped him stand.

“A no-chamber,” the Rabbi muttered. “In here, we hide from . . .” His gaze searched upward at a dark ceiling. “Better left unspoken even here.”

“We hide from the unspeakable,” Rebecca said.

“The door cannot even be left open at Passover,” he said. “How will the Stranger enter?”

“Some strangers we do not want,” she said.

“Rebecca.” He bowed his head. “You are more than a trial and a problem. This little cell of Secret Israel shares your exile because we understand that—”

“Stop saying that! You understand nothing of what has happened to me. My problem?” She leaned close to him. “It is to remain human while in contact with all of those past lives.”

The Rabbi recoiled.

“So you are no longer one of us? Are you a Bene Gesserit then?”

“You will know when I’m Bene Gesserit. You will see me looking at myself as I look at myself.”

His brows drew down in a scowl. “What are you saying?”

“What does a mirror look at, Rabbi?”

“Hmmmmph! Riddles now.” But a faint smile twitched at his mouth. A look of determination returned to his eyes. He stared around him at the room. There were eight of them here—more than this space should hold. A no-chamber! It had been assembled painstakingly with smuggled bits and pieces. So small. Twelve and a half meters long. He had measured it himself. A shape like an ancient barrel laid on its side, oval in cross section and with half-globe closures at the ends. The ceiling was no more than a meter above his head. The widest point here at the center was only five meters and the curve of floor and ceiling made it seem even narrower. Dried food and recycled water. That was what they must live on and for how long? One SY maybe if they were not found. He did not trust the security of this device. Those peculiar sounds in the machinery.

It had been late in the day when they crept into this hole. Darkness up there now for sure. And where were the rest of his people? Fled to whatever sanctuary they could find, drawing on old debts and honorable commitments for past services. Some would survive. Perhaps they would survive better than this remnant in here.

The entrance to the no-chamber lay concealed beneath an ash pit with a free-standing chimney beside it. The reinforcing metal of the chimney contained threads of ridulian crystal to relay exterior scenes into this place. Ashes! The room still smelled of burned things and it already had begun to take on a sewer stink from the small recycling chamber. What a euphemism for a toilet!

Someone came up behind the Rabbi. “The searchers are leaving. Lucky we were warned in time.”

It was Joshua, the one who had built this chamber. He was a short, slender man with a sharply triangular face narrowing to a thin chin. Dark hair swept over his broad forehead. He had widely spaced brown eyes that looked out at his world with a brooding inwardness the Rabbi did not trust. He looks too young to know so much about these things.

“So they are leaving,” the Rabbi said. “They will be back. You will not think us lucky then.”

“They will not guess we hid so near the farm,” Rebecca said. “The searchers were mostly looting.”

“Listen to the Bene Gesserit,” the Rabbi said.

“Rabbi.” What a chiding sound in Joshua’s voice! “Have I not heard you say many times that the blessed ones are they who hide the flaws of others even from themselves?”

“Everybody’s a teacher now!” the Rabbi said. “But who can tell us what will happen next?”

He had to admit the truth of Joshua’s words, though. It is the anguish of our flight that troubles me. Our little diaspora. But we do not scatter from Babylon. We hide in a . . . a cyclone cellar!

This thought restored him. Cyclones pass.

“Who is in charge of the food?” he asked. “We must ration ourselves from the start.”

Rebecca heaved a sigh of relief. The Rabbi was at his worst in the wide oscillations—too emotional or too intellectual. He had himself in hand once more. He would become intellectual next. That would have to be dampened, too. Bene Gesserit awareness gave her a new view of the people around her. Our Jewish susceptibility. Look at the intellectuals!

It was a thought peculiar to the Sisterhood. The drawbacks of anyone placing considerable reliance on intellectual achievements were large. She could not deny all of that evidence from the Lampadas horde. Speaker paraded it for her whenever she wavered.

Rebecca had come almost to enjoy the pursuit of memory fancies, as she thought of them. Knowing earlier times forced her to deny her own earlier times. She had been required to believe so many things she now knew were nonsense. Myths and chimera, impulses of extremely childish behavior.

“Our gods should mature as we mature.”

Rebecca suppressed a smile. Speaker did that to her often—a little nudge in the ribs from someone who knew you would appreciate it.

Joshua had gone back to his instruments. She saw that someone was reviewing the catalogue of food stores. The Rabbi watched this with his normal intensity. Others had rolled themselves into blankets and were sleeping on the cots in the darkened end of the chamber. Seeing all of this, Rebecca knew what her function must be. Keep us from boredom.

“The games master?”

Unless you have something better to suggest, don’t try to tell me about my own people, Speaker.

Whatever else she might say about these inner conversations, there was no doubt that all of the pieces were connected—the past with this room, this room with her projections of consequences. And that was a great gift from the Bene Gesserit. Do not think of “The Future.” Predestination? Then what happens to the freedom you are given at birth?

Rebecca looked at her own birth in a new light. It had embarked her on movement toward an unknown destiny. Fraught with unseen perils and joys. So they had come around a bend in the river and found attackers. The next bend might reveal a cataract or a stretch of peaceful beauty. And here lay the magical enticement of prescience, the lure to which Muad’Dib and his Tyrant son had succumbed. The oracle knows what is to come! The horde of Lampadas had taught her not to seek oracles. The known could beleaguer her more than the unknown. The sweetness of the new lay in its surprises. Could the Rabbi see it?

“Who will tell us what happens next?” he asks.

Is that what you want, Rabbi? You will not like what you hear. I guarantee it. From the moment the oracle speaks your future becomes identical to your past. How you would wail in your boredom. Nothing new, not ever. Everything old in that one instant of revelation.

“But this is not what I wanted!” I can hear you saying it.

No brutality, no savagery, no quiet happiness nor exploding joy can come upon you unexpectedly. Like a runaway tube train in its wormhole, your life will speed through to its final moment of confrontation. Like a moth in the car you will beat your wings against the sides and ask Fate to let you out. “Let the tube undergo a magical change of direction. Let something new happen! Don’t let the terrible things I have seen come to pass!”

Abruptly, she saw that this must have been Muad’Dib’s travail. To whom had he muttered his prayers?

“Rebecca!” It was the Rabbi calling her.

She went to where he stood beside Joshua now, looking at the dark world outside of their chamber as it was revealed in the small projection above Joshua’s instruments.

“There is a storm coming,” the Rabbi said. “Joshua thinks it will make a cement of the ash pit.”

“That is good,” she said. “It is why we built here and left the cover off the pit when we entered.”

“But how do we get out?”

“We have tools for that,” she said. “And even without tools, there’s always our hands.”