Chapterhouse: Dune (Dune Chronicles #6)

Chapterhouse: Dune (Dune Chronicles #6) Page 29

If we win.

The operations console where Logno concentrated her attention was smaller than the showcase ones. Fingerfield manipulation. The hood on a low table beside Logno was smaller and transparent, revealing the medusa tangle of probes.

Shigawire for sure.

The hood showed a close affinity to T-probes from the Scattering Teg and others had described. Did these women possess more technological marvels? They must.

A glittering wall behind Logno, windows on her left opening onto a balcony, a far vista of Junction visible out there with movement of troops and armor. She recognized Teg in the distance, a figure on the shoulders of an adult, but gave no sign she saw anything extraordinary. She continued her slow study. Door to a passage with another nulltube partly visible in a separate area to her immediate left. More green tile on the floor there. Different functions in that space.

A sudden burst of noises erupted beyond the wall. Odrade identified some of them. Boots of soldiers made a distinctive sound on tiles. Swish of exotic fabrics. Voices. She distinguished accents of Honored Matres responding to each other in tones of shock.

We're winning!

Shock was to be expected when the invincible were brought low. She studied Logno. Would it be a plunge into despair?

If so, I may survive.

Murbella's role might be changed. Well, that could wait. Sisters had been briefed on what to do in the event of victory. Neither they nor anyone else in the attack force would lay rough hands on an Honored Matre - erotic or otherwise. Duncan had prepared the men, making the perils of sexual entrapment thoroughly known.

Risk no bondage. Raise no new antagonisms.

The new Spider Queen was revealed now as someone even stranger than Odrade had suspected. Logno left her console and came to within a pace of Odrade. "You have won this battle. We are your prisoners."

No orange in her eyes. Odrade swept her gaze around at the women who had been her guards. Blank expressions, clear eyes. Was this how they showed despair? It did not feel right. Logno and the others revealed no expected emotional responses.

Everything under wraps?

Events of the past hours should create emotional crisis. Logno gave no sign of it. Not a twitch of revealing nerve or muscle. Perhaps a casual concern and that was all.

A Bene Gesserit mask!

It had to be unconscious, something automatic ignited by defeat. So they did not really accept defeat.

We are still in there with them. Latent... but there! No wonder Murbella almost died. She was confronting her own genetic past as a supreme prohibition.

"My companions," Odrade said. "The three women who came with me. Where are they?"

"Dead." Logno's voice was as dead as the word.

Odrade suppressed a pang for Suipol. Tam and Dortujla had lived long and useful lives, but Suipol... dead and never Shared.

Another good one lost. And isn't that a bitter lesson!

"I will identify the ones responsible if you desire revenge," Logno said.

Lesson two.

"Revenge is for children and the emotionally retarded."

A small return of orange in Logno's eyes.

Human self-delusion took many forms, Odrade reminded herself. Aware that the Scattering would produce the unexpected, she had armed herself accordingly with a protective remoteness that would allow her a space to assess new places, new things and new people. She had known she would be forced to put many things in different categories to serve her or deflect threats. She took Logno's attitude as a threat.

"You do not seem disturbed, Great Honored Matre."

"Others will avenge me." Flat, very self-composed.

The words were even stranger than her composure. She held everything under that close cover, bits and pieces revealed now in flickering movements aroused by Odrade's observation. Deep and intense things, but buried. It was all inside there, masked the way a Reverend Mother would mask it. Logno appeared to have no power at all and yet she spoke as though nothing essential had changed.

"I am your captive but that makes no difference."

Was she truly powerless? No! But that was the impression she wished to convey and all of the other Honored Matres around her mirrored this response.

"See us? Powerless except for the loyalty of our Sisters and the followers they have bonded to us."

Were Honored Matres that confident of their vengeful legions? Possible only if they had never before suffered a defeat of this kind. Yet someone had driven them back into the Old Empire. Into the Million Planets.

Teg found Odrade and her captives while seeking a place to assess victory. Battle always required its analytical aftermath, especially from a Mentat commander. It was a comparison test this battle demanded of him more than any other in his experience. This conflict would not be lodged in memory until assessed and shared as far as possible among those who depended on him. It was his invariable pattern and he did not care what it revealed about him. Break that link of interlocking interests and you prepared yourself for defeat.

I need a quiet place to assemble the threads of this battle and make a preliminary summary.

In his estimation, a most difficult problem of battle was to conduct it in a way that did not release human wildness. A Bene Gesserit dictum. Battle must be conducted to bring out the best in those who survived. Most difficult and sometimes all but impossible. The more remote the soldier from carnage, the more difficult. It was one reason Teg always tried to move to the battle scene and examine it personally. If you did not see the pain, you could easily cause greater pain without second thoughts. That was the Honored Matre pattern. But their pains had been brought home. What would they make of this?

That question was in his mind as he and aides emerged from the tube to see Odrade confronting a party of Honored Matres.

"Here is our commander, the Bashar Miles Teg," Odrade said, gesturing.

Honored Matres stared at Teg.

A child riding on the shoulders of an adult? This is their commander?

"Ghola," Logno muttered.

Odrade spoke to Haker. "Take these prisoners somewhere nearby where they can be comfortable."

Haker did not move until Teg nodded, then politely indicated that captives should precede him into the tiled area on their left. Teg's dominance was not lost on Honored Matres. They glowered at him as they obeyed Haker's invitation.

Men ordering women about!

With Odrade beside him, Teg touched a knee to Streggi's neck and they went onto the balcony. There was an oddity to the scene that he was a moment identifying. He had viewed many battle scenes from high vantages, most often from a scout 'thopter. This balcony was fixed in space, giving him a sense of immediacy. They stood about one hundred meters above the botanical gardens where much of the fiercest conflict had taken place. Many bodies lay sprawled in final dislodgment - dolls thrown aside by departing children. He recognized uniforms of some of his troops and felt a pang.

Could I have done something to prevent this?

He had known this feeling many times and called it "Command Guilt." But this scene was different, not just in that uniqueness found in any battle but in a way that nagged at him. He decided it was partly the landscaped setting, a place better suited to garden parties, now torn by an ancient pattern of violence.

Small animals and birds were returning, nervously furtive after the upset of all that noisy human intrusion. Little furry creatures with long tails sniffed at casualties and scampered up neighboring trees for no apparent reason. Colorful birds peered from screening foliage or flitted across the scene - lines of blurred pigmentation that became camouflage when they ducked abruptly under leaves. Feathered accents to the scene, trying to restore that non-tranquility human observers mistook for peace in such settings. Teg knew better. In his pre-ghola life, he had grown up surrounded by wilderness: farm life close by but wild animals just beyond cultivation. It was not tranquil out there.

With that observation he recognized what had tugged at his awareness. Considering the fact they had stormed a well-manned defensive emplacement occupied by heavily armed defenders, the number of casualties down there was extremely small. He had seen nothing to explain this since entering the Citadel. Were they caught off-balance? Their losses in space were one thing - his ability to see defender ships produced a devastating advantage. But this complex held prepared positions where defenders could have fallen back and made the assault more costly. Collapse of Honored Matre resistance had been abrupt and now it remained unexplained.

I was wrong to assume they responded to display of their disasters.

He glanced at Odrade. "That Great Honored Matre in there, did she give the command for defense to stop?"

"That's my assumption."

Cautious and a typical Bene Gesserit answer. She, too, was subjecting the scene to careful observation.

Was her assumption a reasonable explanation for the abruptness with which defenders threw down their arms?

Why would they do it? To prevent more bloodshed?

Given the callousness Honored Matres usually demonstrated, that was unlikely. The decision had been made for reasons that plagued him.

A trap?

Now that he thought about it, there were other strange things about the battle scene. None of the usual calls from wounded, no scurrying about with cries for stretchers and medics. He could see Suks moving among the bodies. That, at least, was familiar, but every figure they examined was left where it had fallen.

All dead? No wounded?

He experienced gripping fear. Not an unusual fear in battle but he had learned to read it. Something profoundly wrong. Noises, things within his view, the smells took on a new intensity. He felt himself acutely attuned, a predatory animal in the jungle, knowing his terrain but aware of something intrusive that must be identified lest he become hunted instead of hunter. He registered his surroundings at a different level of consciousness, reading himself as well, searching out arousal patterns that had achieved this response. Streggi trembled beneath him. So she felt his distress.

"Something's very wrong here," Odrade said.

He pushed a hand at her, demanding silence. Even in this tower surrounded by victorious troops, he felt exposed to a threat his clamoring senses failed to reveal.

Danger!

He was sure of it. The unknown frustrated him. It required every bit of his training to keep from falling into a nervous fugue.

Nudging Streggi to turn, Teg barked an order to an aide standing in the balcony doorway. The aide listened quietly and ran to obey. They must get casualty figures. How many wounded compared to deaths? Reports on captured weapons. Urgent!

When he returned to his examination of the scene, he saw another disturbing thing, a basic oddity his eyes had tried to report. Very little blood on those fallen figures in Bene Gesserit uniforms. You expected battle casualties to show that ultimate evidence of common humanity - flowing red that darkened on exposure but always left its indelible mark in the memories of those who saw it. Lack of bloody carnage was an unknown and, in warfare, unknowns had a history of bringing extreme peril.

He spoke softly to Odrade. "They have a weapon we have not discovered."

Do not be quick to reveal judgment. Hidden judgment often is more potent. It can guide reactions whose effects are felt only when too late to divert them.

- Bene Gesserit Advice to Postulants

Sheeana smelled worms at a distance: cinnamon undertones of melange mingled with bitter flint and brimstone, the crystal-banked inferno of the great Rakian sand-eaters. But she sensed these tiny descendents only because they existed out there in such numbers.

They are so small.

It had been hot here at Desert Watch today and now in late afternoon she welcomed the artificially cooled interior. There was a tolerable temperature adjustment in her old quarters although the window on the west had been left open. Sheeana went to that window and stared out at glaring sand.

Memory told her what this vantage would be tonight: starlight bright in dry air, thin illumination on sand waves that reached to a darkly curved horizon. She remembered Rakian moons and missed them. Stars alone did not satisfy her Fremen heritage.

She had thought of this as retreat, a place and time to think about what was happening to her Sisterhood.

Axlotl tanks, Cyborgs, and now this.

Odrade's plan held no mysteries since their Sharing. A gamble? And if it succeeded?

We will know perhaps tomorrow and then what will we become?

She admitted to a magnet in Desert Watch, more than a place to consider consequences. She had walked in sun-scorched heat today, proving to herself she could still call worms with her dance, emotion expressed as action.

Dance of Propitiation. My language of the worms.

She had gone dervish-whirling on a dune until hunger shattered her memory-trance. And little worms were spread all around in gaping watchfulness, remembered flames within the frames of crystal teeth.

But why so small?

The words of investigators explained but did not satisfy. "It is the dampness."

Sheeana recalled giant Shai-hulud of Dune, "the Old Man of the Desert," large enough to swallow spice factories, ring surfaces hard as plascrete. Masters in their own domain. God and devil in the sands. She sensed the potential from her window vantage.

Why did the Tyrant choose symbiotic existence in a worm?

Did those tiny worms carry his endless dream?

Sandtrout inhabited this desert. Accept them as a new skin and she might follow the Tyrant's path.

Metamorphosis. The Divided God.

She knew the lure.

Do I dare?

Memories of her last moments of ignorance came over her - barely eight then, the month of Igat on Dune.

Not Rakis. Dune, as my ancestors named it.

Not difficult to recall herself as she had been: a slender, dark-skinned child, streaked brown hair. Melange hunter (because that was a task for children) running into open desert with childhood companions. How dear it felt in memory.

But memory had its darker side. Focusing attention into the nostrils, a girl detected intense odors - a pre-spice mass!

The Blow!

Melange explosion brought Shaitan. No sandworm could resist a spice blow in its territory.

You ate it all, Tyrant, that miserable collection of shacks and hovels we called "home" and all of my friends and family. Why did you spare me?

What a rage had shaken that slender child. Everything she loved taken by a giant worm that refused her attempts to sacrifice herself in its flames and carried her into the hands of Rakian priests, thence to the Bene Gesserit.

"She talks to the worms and they spare her."

"They who spared me are not spared by me." That was what she had told Odrade.

And now Odrade knows what I must do. You cannot suppress the wild thing, Dar. I dare call you Dar now that you are within me.

No response.

Was there a pearl of Leto II's awareness in each of the new sandworms? Her Fremen ancestors insisted on it.

Someone handed her a sandwich. Walli, the senior acolyte assistant who had assumed command of Desert Watch.

At my insistence when Odrade elevated me to the Council. But not just because Walli learned my immunity to Honored Matre sexual bonding. And not because she is sensitive to my needs. We speak a secret language, Walli and I.

Walli's large eyes no longer were entrances to her soul. They were filmed barriers giving evidence she already knew how to block probing stares; a light blue pigmentation that soon would be all blue if she survived the Agony. Almost albino and a questionable genetic line for breeding. Walli's skin reinforced this judgment: pale and freckled. A skin you saw as a surface transparency. You did not focus on the skin itself but on what lay beneath: pink, blood-suffused flesh unprotected from a desert sun. Only here in the shade could Walli expose that sensitive surface to questioning eyes.

Why this one in command over us?

Because I trust her best to do what must be done.

Sheeana ate the sandwich absently while she returned her attention to the sandscape. The whole planet thus one day. Another Dune? No... similar but different. How many such places are we creating in an infinite universe? Senseless question.

Desert vagary placed a small black dot in the distance. Sheeana squinted. Ornithopter. It grew slowly larger and then smaller. Quartering the sand. Inspecting.

What are we really creating here?

When she looked at encroaching dunes, she sensed hubris.

Look upon my works, tiny human, and despair.

But we did this, my Sisters and I.

Did you?

"I can feel a new dryness in the heat," Walli said.

Sheeana agreed. No need to speak. She went to the large worktable while she still had daylight to study the topomap spread out there: little flags sticking in it, green thread on pushpins just as she had designed it.

Odrade had asked once: "Is this really preferable to a projection?"

"I need to touch it."

Odrade accepted that.

Projections palled. Too far removed from dirt. You could not draw a finger down a projection and say, "We will go down here." A finger in a projection was a finger in empty air.

Eyes are never enough. The body must feel its world.

Sheeana detected pungency of male perspiration, a musty smell of exertion. She lifted her head and saw a dark young man standing in the doorway, arrogant pose, arrogant look.

"Oh," he said. "I thought you would be alone, Walli. I'll come back later."

One piercing stare at Sheeana and he was gone.

There are many things the body must feel to know them.

"Sheeana, why are you here?" Walli asked.

You who are so busy on the Council, what do you seek? Don't you trust me?

"I came to consider what the Missionaria still thinks I may do. They see a weapon - the myths of Dune. Billions pray to me: 'The Holy One who spoke to the Divided God.' "

"Billions is not an adequate number," Walli said.

"But it measures the force my Sisters see in me. Those worshipers believe I died with Dune. I've become 'a powerful spirit in the pantheon of the oppressed.' "

"More than a missionary?"

"What might happen, Walli, if I appeared in that waiting universe, a sandworm beside me? The potential of such a thing fills some of my Sisters with hope and misgivings."

"Misgivings I understand."

Indeed. The very kind of religious implant Muad'Dib and his Tyrant son set loose on unsuspecting humankind.

"Why do they even consider it?" Walli insisted.

"With me as fulcrum, what a lever they would have to move the universe!"

"But how could they control such a force?"

"That is the problem. Something so inherently unstable. Religions are never really controllable. But some Sisters think they could aim a religion built around me."

"And if their aim is poor?"

"They say the religions of women always flow deeper."

"True?" Questioning a superior source.

Sheeana could only nod. Other Memory confirmed it.

"Why?"

"Because within us, life renews itself."

"That's all of it?" Openly doubting.

"Women often bear the aura of underdog. Humans reserve a special sympathy for ones at the bottom. I am a woman and if Honored Matres want me dead then I must be blessed."

"You sound as though you agree with the Missionaria."

"When you're one of the hunted, you consider any path of escape. I am revered. I cannot ignore the potential."

Nor the danger. So my name has become a shining light in the darkness of Honored Matre oppression. How easy for that light to become a consuming flame!

No... the plan she and Duncan had worked out was better. Escape from Chapterhouse. It was a death trap not only for its inhabitants but for Bene Gesserit dreams.

"I still don't understand why you're here. We may no longer be hunted."

"May?"

"But why just now?"

I cannot speak it openly because then the watchdogs would know.

"I have this fascination with worms. It's partly because one of my ancestors led the original migration to Dune."

You remember this, Walli. We spoke of it once out there on the sand with only the two of us to hear. And now you know why I have come visiting.

"I remember you saying she was a proper Fremen."

"And a Zensunni Master."

I will lead my own migration, Walli. But I will need worms only you can provide. And it must be done quickly. The reports from Junction urge speed. And the first ships will return soon. Tonight... tomorrow. I fear what they bring.

"Are you still interested in taking a few worms back to Central where you can study them closely?"

Oh, yes, Walli! You do remember.

"It might be interesting. I don't have much time for such things but any knowledge we gain may help us."

"It will be too wet for them back there."

"The great Hold of the no-ship on the Flat could be reconverted into a desert lab. Sand, controlled atmosphere. The essentials are there from when we brought the first worm."

Sheeana glanced at the western window. "Sunset. I would like to go down again and walk on the sand."

Will the first ships return tonight?

"Of course, Reverend Mother." Walli stood aside, opening the way to the door.

Sheeana spoke as she was leaving. "Desert Watch will have to be moved before long."

"We are prepared."

The sun was dipping below the horizon when Sheeana emerged from the arched street at the edge of the community. She strode into starlit desert, exploring with her senses as she had done as a child. Ahhh, there was the cinnamon essence. Worms near.

She paused and, turning northeast away from the last sunglow, placed her palms flat above and below her eyes in the old Fremen way, confining view and light. She stared out of a horizontal frame. Whatever fell from heaven must pass this narrow slit.

Tonight? They will come just after dark to delay the moment of explanation. A full night for reflection.

She waited with Bene Gesserit patience.

An arc of fire drew a thin line above the northern horizon. Another. Another. They were positioned right for the Landing Flat.

Sheeana felt her heart beating fast.

They have come!

And what would be their message for the Sisterhood? Returning warriors triumphant or refugees? There could be little difference, given the evolution of Odrade's plan.

She would know by morning.

Sheeana lowered her hands and found she was trembling. Deep breath. The Litany.

Presently, she walked the desert, sandwalking in the remembered stride of Dune. She had almost forgotten how the feet dragged. As though they carried extra weight. Seldom-used muscles were called into play but the random walk, once learned, was never forgotten.

Once, I never dreamed I would ever again walk this way.

If watchdogs detected that thought they might wonder about their Sheeana.

It was a failure in herself, she thought. She had grown into the rhythms of Chapterhouse. This planet talked to her at a subterranean level. She felt earth, trees, and flowers, every growing thing as though all were part of her. And now, here was disturbing movement, something in a language from a different planet. She sensed the desert changing and that, too, was an alien tongue. Desert. Not lifeless but living in a way profoundly different from once-verdant Chapterhouse.

Less life but more intense.

She heard the desert: small slitherings, creaking chirps of insects, a dark rustle of hunting wings overhead and the quickest of ploppings on the sand - kangaroo mice brought here in anticipation of this day when worms would once more begin their rule.

Walli will remember to send flora and fauna from Dune.

She stopped atop a tall barracan. In front of her, darkness blurring its edges, was an ocean caught in stop motion, a shadow surf beating on a shadow beach of this changing land. It was a limitless desert-sea. It had originated far away and it would go to stranger places than this.

I will take you there if I am able.

A night breeze from drylands to moister places behind her deposited a film of dust on her cheeks and nose, lifting the edges of her hair as it passed. She felt saddened.

What might have been.

That no longer was important.

The things that are - they matter.

She took a deep breath. Cinnamon stronger. Melange. Spice and worms near. Worms aware of her presence. How soon would this air be dry enough for the sandworms to grow great and work their crop as they had on Dune?

The planet and the desert.

She saw them as two halves of the same saga. Just as the Bene Gesserit and the humankind they served. Matched halves. Either without the other was diminished, an emptiness with lost purpose. Not better dead, perhaps, but moving aimlessly. There lay the threat of Honored Matre victory. Aimed by blind violence!

Blind in a hostile universe.

And there was why the Tyrant had preserved the Sisterhood.

He knew he only gave us the path without direction. A paper chase laid down by a jokester and left empty at the end.

A poet in his own right, though.

She recalled his "Memory Poem" from Dar-es-Balat, a bit of jetsam the Bene Gesserit preserved.

And for what reason do we preserve it? So I can fill my mind with it now? Forgetting for the moment what I may confront tomorrow?

The fair night of the poet,

Fill it with innocent stars.

A pace apart Orion stands.

His glare sees everything,

Marking our genes forever.

Welcome darkness and stare,

Blinded in the afterglow.

There's barren eternity!

Sheeana felt abruptly that she had won a chance to become the ultimate artist, filled to overflowing and presented with a blank surface where she might create as she wished.

An unrestricted universe!

Odrade's words from those first childhood exposures to Bene Gesserit purpose came back to her. "Why did we fasten onto you, Sheeana? It's really simple. We recognized in you a thing we had long awaited. You arrived and we saw it happen."

"It?" How naive I was!

"Something new lifting over the horizon."

My migration will seek the new. But... I must find a planet with moons.

Looked at one way, the universe is Brownian movement, nothing predictable at the elemental level. Muad'Dib and his Tyrant son closed the cloud chamber where movement occurred.

- Stories from Gammu

Murbella entered a time of incongruent experiences. It bothered her at first, seeing her own life with multiple vision. Chaotic events at Junction had ignited this, creating a jumble of immediate necessities that would not leave her, not even when she returned to Chapterhouse.

I warned you, Dar. You can't deny it. I said they could turn victory into defeat. And look at the mess you dumped in my lap! I was lucky to save as many as I did.

This inner protest always immersed her in the events that had elevated her to this awful prominence.

What else could I have done?

Memory displayed Streggi slumping to the floor in bloodless death. The scene had played on the no-ship's relays like a fictional drama. The projection framework in the ship's command bay added to the illusion that this was not really happening. The actors would arise and take their bows. Teg's comeyes, humming away automatically, missed none of it until someone silenced them.

She was left with images, an eerie afterglow: Teg sprawled on the floor of that Honored Matre aerie. Odrade staring in shock.

Loud protests greeted Murbella's declaration that she must rush groundside. The Proctors were adamant until she laid out the details of Odrade's gamble and demanded: "Do you want total disaster?"