Chapterhouse: Dune by Frank Herbert
"Scytale." How softly she spoke. "The Great Convention is ended. It's a new universe out there."
He tried to swallow in a dry throat. The whole concept of violence had taken on a new dimension. In the Old Empire, the Convention had guaranteed retaliation against anyone who dared burn a planet by attacking from space.
"Escalated violence, Scytale." Odrade's voice was almost a whisper. "We Scatter pods of rage."
He focused on her. What is she saying?
"The hatred being stored up against Honored Matres," she said. You are not the only one with losses, Scytale. Once, when problems arose in our civilization, the cry went out: "Bring a Reverend Mother!" Honored Matres prevent that. And the myths are recomposed. Golden light is cast upon our past. "It was better in the old days when the Bene Gesserit could help us. Where do you go for reliable Truthsayers these days? Arbitration? These Honored Matres have never heard the word! They were always courteous, the Reverend Mothers. You have to say that for them. "
When Scytale did not respond, she said: "Think of what might happen if that rage were loosed in a Jihad!"
When he still did not speak, she said: "You have seen it. Tleilaxu, Bene Gesserit, priests of the Divided God, and who knows how many more--all hunted like wild game."
"They cannot kill us all!" An agonized cry.
"Can't they? Your Scattered ones made common cause with Honored Matres. Is that a sanctuary you would seek in the Scattering?"
And there goes another dream: Little pods of Tleilaxu, persistent as festering sores, awaiting the day of Scytale's Great Revival.
"People grow strong under oppression," he said, but there was no force in his words. "Even the Priests of Rakis are finding holes in which to hide!" Desperate words.
"Who says this? Some of your returned friends?"
His silence was all the answer she needed.
"Bene Tleilax have killed Honored Matres and they know it," she said, hammering at him. "They will be satisfied only with your extermination."
"And yours!"
"We are partners by necessity if not by shared belief." She said it in purest Islamiyat and saw hope leap into his eyes. Kehl and Shariat may yet take on their old meanings among people who compose their thoughts in the Language of God.
"Partners?" Faint and extremely tentative.
She adopted new bluntness. "In some ways, that's a more reliable basis for common action than any other. Each of us knows what the other wants. An instrinsic design: Screen everything through that and something reliable can occur."
"And what is it you want from me?"
"You already know."
"How to make the finest tanks, yes." He shook his head, obviously unsure. The changes implied by her demands!
Odrade wondered if she dared snap at him in open anger. How dense he was! But he was close to panic. Old values had changed. Honored Matres were not the only source of turmoil. Scytale did not even know the extent of changes that had infected his own Scattered Ones!
"Times are changing," Odrade said.
Change, what a disturbing word, he thought.
"I must have my own Face Dancer attendants! And my own tanks?" Almost begging.
"My Council and I will consider it."
"What is there to consider?" Throwing her own words at her.
"You need only your own approval. I require approval of others." She gave him a grim smile. "So you do get time to think." Odrade nodded to Tamalane, who summoned guards.
"Back to the no-ship?" He spoke from the doorway, such a diminutive figure amidst burly guards.
"But tonight you ride all the way."
He gave a last lingering stare at the worm as he left.
When Scytale and guards were gone, Sheeana said: "You were right not to press him. He was ready to panic."
Bellonda entered. "Perhaps it would be best just to kill him."
"Bell! Get the holo and go through our meeting again. This time as a Mentat!"
That stopped her.
Tamalane chuckled.
"You take too much joy in your Sister's discomfiture, Tam," Sheeana said.
Tamalane shrugged but Odrade was delighted. No more teasing of Bell?
"When you spoke of Chapterhouse becoming another Dune, that was when he began to panic," Bellonda said, her voice Mentat distant.
Odrade had seen the reaction but had not yet made the association. This was a Mentat's value: patterns and systems, building blocks. Bell sensed a pattern to Scytale's behavior.
"I ask myself: Is it the thing become real once more?" Bellonda said.
Odrade saw it at once. An odd thing about lost places. As long as Dune had been a known and living planet, there existed a historical firmness about its presence in the Galactic Register. You could point to a projection and say: "That is Dune. Once called Arrakis and, latterly, Rakis. Dune for its total desert character in Muad'Dib's day."
Destroy the place, though, and a mythological patina in-weighed against projected reality. In time, such places became totally mythic. Arthur and his Round Table. Camelot where it only rains at night. Pretty good Weather Control for those days!
But now, a new Dune had appeared.
"Myth power," Tamalane said.
Ahhhh, yes. Tam, close to her final departure from flesh, would be more sensitive to workings of myths. Mystery and secrecy, tools of the Missionaria, had been used also on Dune by Muad'Dib and the Tyrant. The seeds were planted. Even with priests of the Divided God gone to their own perdition, myths of Dune proliferated.
"Melange," Tamalane said.
The other Sisters in the workroom knew immediately what she meant. New hope could be injected into the Bene Gesserit Scattering.
Bellonda said: "Why do they want us dead and not captives ? That has always puzzled me."
Honored Matres might not want any Bene Gesserit alive ... only the spice knowledge, perhaps. But they destroyed Dune. They destroyed the Tleilaxu. It was a cautioning thought to take into any confrontation with the Spider Queen--should Dortujla succeed.
"No useful hostages?" Bellonda asked.
Odrade saw the looks on the faces of her Sisters. They were following a single track as though all of them thought with one mind. Object lessons by Honored Matres, leaving few survivors, only made potential opposition more cautious. It invoked a rule of silence within which bitter memories became bitter myths. Honored Matres were like barbarians in any age: blood instead of hostages. Strike with random viciousness.
"Dar's right," Tamalane said. "We've been seeking allies too close to home."
"Futars did not create themselves," Sheeana said.
"The ones who created them hope to control us," Bellonda said. There was the clear sound of Prime Projection in her voice. "That's the hesitation Dortujla heard in the Handlers."
There it was and they faced it with all of its perils. It came down to people (as it always did). People--contemporaries. You learned valuable things from people living in your own time and from knowledge they carried out of their pasts. Other Memory was not the only conveyance of history.
Odrade felt that she had come home after a long absence. There was a familiarity about the way all four of them were thinking now. It was a familiarity that transcended place. The Sisterhood itself was Home. Not where they lodged in transient housing but the association.
Bellonda voiced it for them. "I fear we have been working at cross purposes."
"Fear does that," Sheeana said.
Odrade dared not smile. It could be misinterpreted and she did not want to explain. Give us Murbella as a Sister and a restored Bashar! Then we might have our fighting chance!
Right there with that good feeling in her, the message signal clicked. She glanced at the projections surface, a pure reflex, and recognized crisis. Such a small thing (relatively) to precipitate crisis. Clairby mortally injured in a 'thopter crash. Mortal unless ... The unless was spelled out for her and it added up to cyborg. Her companions saw the message in reverse but you got good
Where do we draw the line?
Bellonda, with her antique spectacles when she could have had artificial eyes or any of numerous other prosthetics, voted with her body. This is what it means to be human. Try to hold on to youth and it mocks you while it sprints away. Melange is enough ... and perhaps too much.
Odrade recognized what her own emotions were telling her. But what of Bene Gesserit necessity? Bell could lodge her individual vote and everyone recognized it, even respected it. But Mother Superior's vote carried the Sisterhood with her.
First the axlotl tanks and now this.
Necessity said they could not afford to lose specialists of Clairby's caliber. They had few enough as it was. "Spread thin" did not describe it. Gaps were appearing. Cyborg Clairby, though, and that was the opening wedge.
The Suks were prepared. "A precautionary arrangement" should it be required for someone irreplaceable. Such as Mother Superior? Odrade knew she had approved that with her usual cautious reservations. Where were those reservations now?
Cyborg was one of those potpourri words, too. Where did mechanical additions to human flesh become dominant? When was the Cyborg no longer human? Temptations intensified--"Just this one little adjustment." And so easy to adjust until the potpourri-human became unquestioningly obedient.
But ... Clairby?
Conditions of extremis said, "Cyborg him!" Was the Sisterhood that desperate? She was forced to answer in the affirmative.
There it was then--decision not entirely out of her hands, but the ready excuse at hand. Necessity dictates it.
The Butlerian Jihad had left its indelible mark on humans. Fought and won ... for then. And here was another battle in that long-ago conflict.
But now, survival of the Sisterhood was in the balance. How many technical specialists remained on Chapterhouse? She knew the answer without looking. Not enough.
Odrade leaned forward and keyed for transmit. "Cyborg him," she said.
Bellonda grunted. Approval or disapproval? She would never say. This was Mother Superior's arena and welcome to it!
Who won this battle? Odrade wondered.
We walk a delicate line, perpetuating Atreides (Siona) genes in our population because that hides us from prescience. We carry the Kwisatz Haderach in that bag! Willfulness created Muad'Dib. Prophets make predictions come true! Will we ever again dare ignore our Tao sense and cater to a culture that hates chance and begs for prophecy?
--Archival Summary (adixto)
It was just after dawn when Odrade arrived at the no-ship but Murbella was up and working with a training mek when Mother Superior strode onto the practice floor.
Odrade had walked the last klick through ring orchards around the spacefield. Night's limited clouds had thinned at the approach of dawn, then dissipated to reveal a sky thick with stars.
She recognized a delicate weather shift to wrench another crop from this region but decreasing rainfall was barely enough to keep orchards and pastures alive.
As she walked, Odrade was overcome by dreariness. Winter just past had been a hard-bought silence between storms. Life was holocaust. Dusting of pollen by eager insects, fruiting and seeding that followed the flower. These orchards were a secret storm whose power lay hidden in torrential flows of life. But ohhh! the destruction. New life carried change. The Changer was coming, always different. Sandworms would bring the desert purity of ancient Dune.
The desolation of that transforming power invaded her imagination. She could picture this landscape reduced to windswept dunes, habitat for Leto II's descendants.
And the arts of Chapterhouse would undergo mutation-one civilization's myths replaced by another's.
The aura of these thoughts went with Odrade onto the practice floor and colored her mood as she watched Murbella complete a round of flashing exertion, then step back, panting.
A thin scratch reddened the back of Murbella's left hand where she had missed a move by the big mek. The automated trainer stood there in the center of the room like a golden pillar, its weapons flicking in and out--probing mandibles of an angry insect.
Murbella wore tight green leotards and her exposed skin glistened with perspiration. Even with the prominent mounding of her pregnancy, she appeared graceful. Her skin glowed with health. It came from within, Odrade decided, partly the pregnancy but something more fundamental as well. This had impressed itself on Odrade at their first encounter, a thing Lucilla had remarked after capturing Murbella and rescuing Idaho from Gammu. Health lived below the surface in her, there like a lens to focus attention on a deep freshet of vitality.
We must have her!
Murbella saw the visitor but refused to be interrupted.
Not yet, Mother Superior. My baby is due soon but this body's needs will continue.
Odrade saw then that the mek was simulating anger, a programed response brought on by frustration of its circuitry. An extremely dangerous mode!
"Good morning, Mother Superior."
Murbella's voice came out modulated by her exertions as she dodged and twisted with that almost blinding speed she commanded.
The mek slashed and probed for her, its sensors darting and whirring in attempts to follow her movements.
Odrade sniffed. To speak at such a time amplified the peril of the mek. Risk no distractions when you played this dangerous game. Enough!
The mek's controls were in a large green wall panel to the right of the doorway. Murbella's changes could be seen in the circuits--dangling wires, beamfields with memory crystals dislocated. Odrade reached up and stilled the mechanism.
Murbella turned to face her.
"Why did you change the circuitry?" Odrade demanded.
"For the anger."
"Is that what Honored Matres do?"
"As the twig is bent?" Murbella massaged her wounded hand. "But what if the twig knows how it is bent and approves?"
Odrade felt sudden excitement. "Approves? Why?"
"Because there's something ... grand about it."
"You follow your adrenaline high?"
"You know it's not that!" Murbella's breathing returned to normal. She stood glaring at Odrade.
"Then what is it?"
"It's ... being challenged to do more than you ever thought possible. You never suspected you could be this ... this good, this expert and accomplished at anything."
Odrade concealed elation.
Mens sana in corpore sano. We have her at last!
Odrade said: "But what a price you pay!"
"Price?" Murbella sounded astonished. "As long as I have the capacity, I'm delighted to pay."
"Take what you want and pay for it?"
"It's your Bene Gesserit magic cornucopia: As I become increasingly accomplished, my ability to pay increases."
"Beware, Murbella. That cornucopia, as you call it, can become Pandora's box."
Murbella knew the allusion. She stood quite still, her attention fixed on Mother Superior. "Oh?" The sound barely escaped.
"Pandora's box releases powerful distractions that waste energies of your life. You speak glibly of being 'in the chute' and becoming a Reverend Mother but you still don't know what that means nor what we want from you."
"Then it was never our sexual abilities you wanted."
Odrade moved eight paces forward, majestically deliberate. Once Murbella got on that subject there would be no stopping her short of the usual resolution--argument cut short by Mother Superior's peremptory command.
"Sheeana easily mastered your abilities," Odrade said.
"So you will use her on that child!"
Odrade heard displeasure. It was a cultural residue. When did human sexuality begin? Sheeana, waiting now in the no-ship guard chambers, had been forced to deal with it. "I hope you recognize the source of my reluctance and why I was so secretive, Mother Superior. "
"I recognize that a Fremen society filled your mind with inhibitions before we took you in hand!"
There would be repetition. Unresolved issues would emerge. The fact that almost every word Murbella uttered could be anticipated, that would be a trial.
"Why do you evade this tested way of dominating others now that you say you need it with Teg?" Murbella asked.
"Slaves, is that what you want?" Odrade countered.
Eyes almost closed, Murbella considered this. Did I consider the men our slaves? Perhaps. I produced in them periods of wildly unthinking abandon, a giving up to heights of ecstasy they had never dreamed possible. I was trained to give them that and, thereby, make them subject to our control.