Heretics of Dune (Dune Chronicles #5)

Heretics of Dune (Dune Chronicles #5) Page 28

He remembered sitting at the edge of a wide lawn. There was some kind of bowling game in progress - eccentric balls that bounced and darted with no apparent design. The players were young men in a common costume of... Giedi Prime!

"They are practicing to be old men," he said. He remembered saying that.

His companion, a young woman, looked at him blankly.

"Only old men should play these outdoor games," he said.

"Oh?"

It was an unanswerable question. She put him down with only the simplest of verbal gestures.

And betrayed me the next instant to the Harkonnens!

So that was a pre-ghola memory.

Ghola!

He remembered the Bene Gesserit Keep on Gammu. The library: holophotos and triphotos of the Atreides Duke, Leto I. Teg's resemblance was not an accident: a bit taller but otherwise it was all there - that long, thin face with its high-bridged nose, the renowned Atreides charisma...

Teg!

He remembered the old Bashar's last gallant stand in the Gammu night.

Where am I?

Tormsa had brought him here. They had been moving along an overgrown track on the outskirts of Ysai. Barony. It started to snow before they were two hundred meters up the track. Wet snow that clung to them. Cold, miserable snow that set their teeth chattering within a minute. They paused to bring up their hoods and close the insulated jackets. That was better. But it would be night soon. Much colder.

"There is a shelter of sorts up ahead," Tormsa said. "We will wait there for the night."

When Duncan did not speak, Tormsa said: "It won't be warm but it will be dry."

Duncan saw the gray outline of the place in about three hundred paces. It stood out against the dirty snow some two stories tall. He recognized it immediately: a Harkonnen counting outpost. Observers here had counted (and sometimes killed) the people who passed. It was built of native dirt turned into one giant brick by the simple expedient of preforming it in mud bricks and then superheating it with a wide-bore burner, the kind the Harkonnens had used to control mobs.

As they came up to it, Duncan saw the remains of a full-field defensive screen with fire-lance gaps aimed at the approaches. Someone had smashed the system a long time ago. Twisted holes in the field net were partly overgrown with bushes. But the fire-lance gaps remained open. Oh, yes - to allow people inside a view of the approaches.

Tormsa paused and listened, studying their surroundings with care.

Duncan looked at the counting station. He remembered them well. What confronted him was a thing that had sprouted like a deformed growth from an original tubular seed. The surface had been baked to a glassine finish. Warts and protrusions betrayed where it had been superheated. The erosion of eons had left fine scratches in it but the original shape remained. He looked upward and identified part of the old suspensor lift system. Someone had jury-rigged a block and tackle to the outbar.

So the opening through the full-field screen was of recent making.

Tormsa disappeared into this opening.

As though a switch had been thrown, Duncan's memory vision changed. He was in the no-globe's library with Teg. The projector was producing a series of views through modern Ysai. The idea of modern took on an odd overtone for him. Barony had been a modern city, if you thought of modern as meaning technologically usiform up to the norms of its time. It had relied exclusively on suspensor guide-beams for transport of people and material - all of them high up. No ground-level openings. He was explaining this to Teg.

The plan translated physically into a city that used every possible square meter of vertical and horizontal space for things other than movement of goods and humans. The guide-beam openings required only enough head room and elbow room for the universal transport pods.

Teg spoke: "The ideal shape would be tubular with a flat top for the 'thopters."

"The Harkonnens preferred squares and rectangles."

That was true.

Duncan remembered Barony with a clearness that made him shiver. Suspensor tracks shot through it like worm holes - straight, curved, flipping off at oblique angles... up, down, sideways. Except for the rectangular absolute imposed by Harkonnen whim, Barony was built to a particular population-design criterion: maximum stuffing with minimum expenditure of materials.

"The flat top was the only human-oriented space in the damned thing!" He remembered telling that to Teg and Lucilla both.

Up there on top were penthouses, guard stations at all the edges, at the 'thopter pads, at all the entries from below, around all of the parks. People living on the top could forget about the mass of flesh squirming in close proximity just below them. No smell or noise from that jumble was allowed on top. Servants were forced to bathe and change into sanitary clothing before emerging.

Teg had a question: "Why did that massed humanity permit itself to live in such a crush?"

The answer was obvious and he explained it. The outside was a dangerous place. The city's managers made it appear even more dangerous than it actually was. Besides, few in there knew anything about a better life Outside. The only better life they knew about was on top. And the only way up there was through an absolutely abasing servility.

"It will happen and there's nothing you can do about it!"

That was another voice echoing in Duncan's skull. He heard it clearly.

Paul!

How odd it was, Duncan thought. There was an arrogance in the prescient like the arrogance of the Mentat seated in his most brittle logic.

I never before thought of Paul as arrogant.

Duncan stared at his own face in a mirror. He realized with part of his mind that this was a pre-ghola memory. Abruptly, it was another mirror, his own face but different. That darkly rounded face had begun to shape into the harsher lines it could have if it matured. He looked into his own eyes. Yes, those were his eyes. He had heard someone describe his eyes once as "cave sitters." They were deeply inset under the brows and riding atop high cheeks. He had been told it was difficult to determine if his eyes were dark blue or dark green unless the light were just right.

A woman said that. He could not remember the woman.

He tried to reach up and touch his hair but his hands would not obey. He remembered then that his hair had been bleached. Who did that? An old woman. His hair was no longer a cap of dark ringlets.

There was the Duke Leto staring at him in the doorway to the dining room on Caladan.

"We will eat now," the Duke said. It was a royal command saved from arrogance by a faint grin that said: "Somebody had to say it."

What is happening to my mind?

He remembered following Tormsa to the place where Tormsa said the no-ship would meet them.

It was a large building bulking in the night. There were several smaller outbuildings below the larger structure. They appeared to be occupied. Voices and machine sounds could be heard in them. No faces showed at the narrow windows. No door opened. Duncan smelled cooking as they passed the larger of the outbuildings. This reminded him that they had only eaten dry strips of leathery stuff that Tormsa called "travel food" that day.

They entered the dark building.

Light flared.

Tormsa's eyes exploded in blood.

Darkness.

Duncan looked at a woman's face. He had seen a face like this one before: a single tride taken from a longer holo sequence. Where was that? Where had he seen that? It was an almost oval face with just a small widening at the brow to mar its curved perfection.

She spoke: "My name is Murbella. You will not remember that but I share it now as I mark you. I have selected you."

I do remember you, Murbella.

Green eyes set wide under arched brows gave her features a focal region that left chin and small mouth for later examination. The mouth was full-lipped and he knew it could become pouting in repose.

The green eyes stared into his eyes. How cold that look. The power in it.

Something touched his cheek.

He opened his eyes. This was no memory! This was happening to him. It was happening now!

Murbella! She had been here and she had left him. Now she was back. He remembered awakening naked on a soft surface... a sleeping pad. His hands recognized it. Murbella unclothed just above him, green eyes staring at him with a terrible intensity. She touched him simultaneously in many places. A soft humming issued from between her lips.

He felt the swift erection, painful in its rigidity.

No power of resistance remained in him. Her hands moved over his body. Her tongue. The humming! All around him, her mouth touching him. The nipples of her breasts grazed his cheeks, his chest. When he saw her eyes, he saw conscious design.

Murbella had returned and she was doing it once more!

Over her right shoulder, he glimpsed a wide plaz window - Lucilla and Burzmali behind that barrier. A dream? Burzmali pressed his palms against the plaz. Lucilla stood with folded arms, a look of mingled rage and curiosity on her face.

Murbella murmured in his right ear: "My hands are fire."

Her body hid the faces behind the plaz. He felt the fire wherever she touched him.

Abruptly, the flame engulfed his mind. Hidden places within him came alive. He saw red capsules like a string of gleaming sausages passing before his eyes. He felt feverish. He was an engorged capsule, excitement flaring throughout his awareness. Those capsules! He knew them! They were himself... they were...

All of the Duncan Idahos, original and the serial gholas flowed into his mind. They were like bursting seedpods denying all other existence except themselves. He saw himself crushed beneath a great worm with a human face.

"Damn you, Leto!"

Crushed and crushed and crushed... time and again.

"Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!..."

He died under a Sardaukar sword. Pain exploded into a bright glare swallowed by darkness.

He died in a 'thopter crash. He died under the knife of a Fish Speaker assassin. He died and died and died.

And he lived.

The memories flooded him until he wondered how he could hold them all. The sweetness of a newborn daughter held in his arms. The musky odors of a passionate mate. The cascade of flavors from a fine Danian wine. The panting exertions of the practice floor.

The axlotl tanks!

He remembered emerging time after time: bright lights and padded mechanical hands. The hands rotated him and, in the unfocused blurs of the newborn, he saw a great mound of female flesh - monstrous in her almost immobile grossness... a maze of dark tubes linked her body to giant metal containers.

Axlotl tank?

He gasped in the grip of the serial memories that cascaded into him. All of those lives! All of those lives!

Now, he remembered what the Tleilaxu had planted in him, the submerged awareness that awaited only this moment of seduction by a Bene Gesserit Imprinter.

But this was Murbella and she was not Bene Gesserit.

She was here, though, ready at hand and the Tleilaxu pattern took over his reactions.

Duncan hummed softly and touched her, moving with an agility that shocked Murbella. He should not be this responsive! Not this way! His right hand fluttered against the lips of her vagina while his left hand caressed the base of her spine. At the same time, his mouth moved gently over her nose, down to her lips, down to the crease of her left armpit.

And all the time he hummed softly in a rhythm that pulsed through her body, lulling... weakening...

She tried to push away from him as he increased the pace of her responses.

How did he know to touch me there at just that instant? And there! And there! Oh, Holy Rock of Dur, how does he know this?

Duncan marked the swelling of her breasts and saw the congestion in her nose. He saw the way her nipples stood out stiffly, the areolae darkening around them. She moaned and spread her legs wide.

Great Matre, help me!

But the only Great Matre she could think of was locked securely away from this room, restrained by a bolted door and a plaz barrier.

Desperate energy flowed into Murbella. She responded in the only way she knew: touching, caressing - using all of the techniques she had learned so carefully in the long years of her apprenticeship.

To each thing she did, Duncan produced a wildly stimulating countermove.

Murbella found that she no longer could control all of her own responses. She was reacting automatically from some well of knowledge deeper than her training. She felt her vaginal muscles tighten. She felt the swift release of lubricant fluid. When Duncan entered her she heard herself groan. Her arms, her hands, her legs, her entire body moved with both of the response systems - well-trained automation and the deeper, deeper plunging awareness of other demands.

How did he do this to me?

Waves of ecstatic contractions began in the smooth muscles of her pelvis. She sensed his simultaneous response and felt the hard slap of his ejaculation. This heightened her own response. Ecstatic pulsations drove outward from the contractions in her vagina... outward... outward. The ecstasy engulfed her entire sensorium. She saw a spreading blaze of whiteness against her eyelids. Every muscle quivered with an ecstasy she had not imagined possible for herself.

Again, the waves spread outward.

Again and again...

She lost count of the repetitions.

When Duncan moaned, she moaned and the waves swept outward once more.

And again...

There was no sensation of time or surroundings, only this immersion in a continuing ecstasy.

She wanted it to go on forever and she wanted it to stop. This should not be happening to a female! An Honored Matre must not experience this. These were the sensations by which men were governed.

Duncan emerged from the response pattern that had been implanted in him. There was something else he was supposed to do. He could not remember what it was.

Lucilla?

He imagined her dead in front of him. But this woman was not Lucilla; this was... this was Murbella.

There was very little strength in him. He lifted himself off Murbella and managed to sink back onto his knees. Her hands were fluttering in an agitation he could not understand.

Murbella tried to push Duncan away from her and he was not there. Her eyes snapped open.

Duncan knelt above her. She had no idea how much time had passed. She tried to find the energy to sit up and failed. Slowly, reason returned.

She stared into Duncan's eyes, knowing now who this man must be. Man? He was only a youth. But he had done things... things... All of the Honored Matres had been warned. There was a ghola armed with forbidden knowledge by the Tleilaxu. That ghola must be killed!

A small burst of energy surged into her muscles. She raised herself on her elbows. Gasping for breath, she tried to roll away from him and fell back to the soft surface.

By the Holy Rock of Dur! This male could not be permitted to live! He was a ghola and he could do things permitted only to Honored Matres. She wanted to strike out at him and, at the same time, she wanted to pull him back onto her body. The ecstasy! She knew that whatever he asked of her at this moment she would do. She would do it for him.

No! I must kill him!

Once more, she raised herself onto her elbows and, from there, managed to sit up. Her weakened gaze crossed the window where she had confined the Great Honored Matre and the guide. They still stood there looking at her. The man's face was flushed. The face of the Great Honored Matre was as unmoving as the Rock of Dur itself.

How can she just stand there after what she has seen here? The Great Honored Matre must kill this ghola!

Murbella beckoned to the woman behind the plaz and rolled toward the locked door beside the sleeping pad. She barely managed to unbolt and open the door before falling back. Her eyes looked up at the kneeling youth. Sweat glistened on his body. His lovely body...

No!

Desperation drove her off onto the floor. She was on her knees there and then, mostly by will power, she stood. Energy was returning but her legs trembled as she staggered around the foot of the sleeping pad.

I will do it myself without thinking. I must do it.

Her body swayed from side to side. She tried to steady herself and aimed a blow at his neck. She knew this blow from long hours of practice. It would crush the larynx. The victim would die of asphyxiation.

Duncan dodged the blow easily, but he was slow... slow.

Murbella almost fell beside him but the hands of the Great Honored Matre saved her.

"Kill him," Murbella gasped. "He's the one we were warned about. He's the one!"

Murbella felt hands on her neck, the fingers pressing fiercely at the nerve bundles beneath the ears.

The last thing Murbella heard before unconsciousness was the Great Honored Matre saying: "We will kill no one. This ghola goes to Rakis."

The worst potential competition for any organism can come from its own kind. The species consumes necessities. Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. The least favorable condition controls the rate of growth. (Law of the Minimum) -From "Lessons of Arrakis"

The building stood back from a wide avenue behind a screen of trees and carefully tended flowering hedges. The hedges had been staggered in a maze pattern with man-high white posts to define the planted areas. No vehicle entering or leaving could do so at any speed above a slow crawl. Teg's military awareness took all of this in as the armored groundcar carried him up to the door. Field Marshal Muzzafar, the only other occupant in the rear of the car, recognized Teg's assessment and said:

"We're protected from above by a beam enfilading system." A soldier in camouflage uniform with a long lasgun on a sling over one shoulder opened the door and snapped to attention as Muzzafar emerged.

Teg followed. He recognized this place. It was one of the "safe" addresses Bene Gesserit Security had provided for him. Obviously, the Sisterhood's information was out of date. Recently out of date, though, because Muzzafar gave no indication that Teg might know this place.

As they crossed to the door, Teg noted that another protective system he had seen on his first tour of Ysai remained intact. It was a barely noticeable difference in the posts along the trees-and-hedges barriers. Those posts were scanlyzers operated from a room somewhere in the building. Their diamond-shaped connectors "read" the area between them and the building. At the gentle push of a button in the watchers' room, the scanlyzers would make small chunks of meat out of any living flesh crossing their fields.

At the door, Muzzafar paused and looked at Teg. "The Honored Matre you are about to meet is the most powerful of all who have come here. She does not tolerate anything but complete obedience."

"I take it that you are warning me."

"I thought you would understand. Call her Honored Matre. Nothing else. In we go. I've taken the liberty of having a new uniform made for you."

The room where Muzzafar ushered him was one Teg had not seen on his previous visit. Small and crammed with ticking black-paneled boxes, it left little room for the two of them. A single yellow glowglobe at the ceiling illuminated the place. Muzzafar crowded himself into a corner while Teg got out of the grimed and wrinkled singlesuit he had worn since the no-globe.

"Sorry I can't offer you a bath as well," Muzzafar said. "But we must not delay. She gets impatient."

A different personality came over Teg with the uniform. It was a familiar black garment, even to the starbursts at the collar. So he was to appear before this Honored Matre as the Sisterhood's Bashar. Interesting. He was once more completely the Bashar, not that this powerful sense of identity had ever left him. The uniform completed it and announced it, though. In this garment there was no need to emphasize in any other way precisely who he was.

"That's better," Muzzafar said as he led Teg out into the entry hallway and through a door Teg remembered. Yes, this was where he had met the "safe" contacts. He had recognized the room's function then and nothing appeared to have changed it. Rows of microscopic comeyes lined the intersection of ceiling and walls, disguised as silver guide strips for the hovering glowglobes.

The one who is watched does not see, Teg thought. And the Watchers have a billion eyes.

His doubled vision told him there was danger here but nothing immediately violent.

This room, about five meters long and four wide, was a place for doing very high-level business. The merchandise would never be an actual exposure of money. People here would see only portable equivalents of whatever passed for currency - melange, perhaps, or milky soostones about the size of an eyeball, perfectly round, at once glossy and soft in appearance but radiant with rainbow changes directed by whatever light fell on them or whatever flesh they touched. This was a place where a danikin of melange or a small fold-pouch of soostones would be accepted as a natural occurrence. The price of a planet could be exchanged here with only a nod, an eyeblink or a low-voiced murmur. No wallets of currency would ever be produced here. The closest thing might be a thin case of translux out of whose poison-guarded interior would come thinner sheets of ridulian crystal with very large numbers inscribed on them by unforgeable dataprint.

"This is a bank," Teg said.

"What?" Muzzafar had been staring at the closed door in the opposite wall. "Oh, yes. She'll be along presently."

"She is watching us now, of course."

Muzzafar did not answer but he looked gloomy.

Teg glanced around him. Had anything been changed since his previous visit? He saw no significant alterations. He wondered if shrines such as this one had undergone much change at all over the eons. There was a dewcarpet on the floor as soft as brantdown and as white as the underbelly of a fur whale. It shimmered with a false sense of wetness that only the eye detected. A bare foot (not that this place had ever seen a bare foot) would feel caressing dryness.

There was a narrow table about two meters long almost in the center of the room. The top was at least twenty millimeters thick. Teg guessed it was Danian jacaranda. The deep brown surface had been polished to a sheen that drank the vision and revealed far underneath veins like river currents. There were only four admiral's chairs around the table, chairs crafted by a master artisan from the same wood as the table, cushioned on seat and back with lyrleather of the exact tone of the polished wood.

Only four chairs. More would have been an overstatement. He had not tried one of the chairs before and he did not seat himself now, but he knew what his flesh would find there - comfort almost up to the level of a despised chairdog. Not quite at that degree of softness and conformity to bodily shape, of course. Too much comfort could lure the sitter into relaxation. This room and its furnishings said: "Be comfortable here but remain alert."

You not only had to have your wits about you in this place but also a great power of violence behind you, Teg thought. He had summed it up that way before and his opinion had not changed.

There were no windows but the ones he had seen from the outside had danced with lines of light-energy barriers to repel intruders and prevent escape. Such barriers brought their own dangers, Teg knew, but the implications were important. Just keeping the energy flow in them would feed a large city for the lifetime of its longest-lived inhabitant.

There was nothing casual about this display of wealth.

The door that Muzzafar watched opened with a gentle click.

Danger!

A woman in a shimmering golden robe swept into the room. Lines of red-orange danced in the fabric.

She is old!

Teg had not expected her to be this ancient. Her face was a wrinkled mask. The eyes were deeply set green ice. Her nose was an elongated beak whose shadow touched thin lips and repeated the sharp angle of the chin. A black skullcap almost covered her gray hair.

Muzzafar bowed.

"Leave us," she said.

He left without a word, going out through the door by which she had entered. When the door closed behind him, Teg said, "Honored Matre."

"So you recognize this as a bank." Her voice carried only a slight trembling.

"Of course."

"There are always means of transferring large sums or selling power," she said. "I do not speak of the power that runs factories but of the power that runs people."

"And that usually passes under the strange names of government or society or civilization," Teg said.

"I suspected you would be very intelligent," she said. She pulled out a chair and sat but did not indicate that Teg should seat himself. "I think of myself as a banker. That saves a lot of muddy and distressful circumlocutions."

Teg did not respond. There seemed no need. He continued to study her.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" she demanded.

"I did not expect you to be this old," he said.

"Heh, heh, heh. We have many surprises for you, Bashar. Later, a younger Honored Matre may murmur her name to mark you. Praise Dur if that happens."

He nodded, not understanding much of what she said.

"This is also a very old building," she said. "I watched you when you came in. Does that surprise you, too?"

"No."

"This building has remained essentially unchanged for several thousand years. It is built of materials that will last much longer still."

He glanced at the table.

"Oh, not the wood. But underneath, it's polastine, polaz, and pormabat. The three P-Os are never sneered at where necessity calls for them."

Teg remained silent.

"Necessity," she said. "Do you object to any of the necessary things that have been done to you?"

"My objections don't matter," he said. What was she getting at? Studying him, of course. As he studied her.

"Do you think others have ever objected to what you did to them?"

"Undoubtedly."

"You're a natural commander, Bashar. I think you'll be very valuable to us."

"I've always thought I was most valuable to myself."

"Bashar! Look at my eyes!"

He obeyed, seeing little flecks of orange drifting in across the whites. The sense of peril was acute.

"If you ever see my eyes fully orange, beware!" she said. "You will have offended me beyond my ability to tolerate."

He nodded.

"I like it that you can command but you cannot command me! You command the muck and that is the only function we have for such as you."

"The muck?"

She waved a hand, a negligent motion. "Out there. You know them. Their curiosity is narrow gauge. No great issues ever enter their awareness."

"I thought that was what you meant."

"We work to keep it that way," she said. "Everything goes to them through a tight filter, which excludes all but that which has immediate survival value."

"No great issues," he said.

"You are offended but it doesn't matter," she said. "To those out there, a great issue is: 'Will I eat today?' 'Do I have shelter tonight that will not be invaded by attackers or vermin?' Luxury? Luxury is the possession of a drug or a member of the opposite sex who can, for a time, keep the beast at bay."

And you are the beast, he thought.

"I am taking some time with you, Bashar, because I see that you could be more valuable to us even than Muzzafar. And he is extremely valuable indeed. Even now, we are repaying him for bringing you to us in a receptive condition."

When Teg still remained silent, she chuckled. "You do not think you are receptive?"

Teg held himself quiet. Had they given him some drug in his food? He saw the flickering of doubled vision but the movements of violence had receded as the orange flecks left the Honored Matre's eyes. Her feet were to be avoided, though. They were deadly weapons.

"It's just that you think of the muck in the wrong way," she said. "Luckily, they are most self-limiting. They know this somewhere in the damps of their deepest consciousness but cannot spare the time to deal with that or anything else except the immediate scramble for survival."

"They cannot be improved?" he asked.

"They must not be improved! Oh, we see to it that self-improvement remains a great fad among them. Nothing real about it, of course."

"Another luxury they must be denied," he said.

"Not a luxury! Nonexistent! It must be occluded at all times behind a barrier that we like to call protective ignorance."

"What you don't know cannot hurt you."

"I don't like your tone, Bashar."

Again, the orange flecks danced in her eyes. The sense of violence diminished, however, as she once more chuckled. "The thing you beware of is the opposite of what-you-don't-know. We teach that new knowledge can be dangerous. You see the obvious extension: All new knowledge is non-survival!"

The door behind the Honored Matre opened and Muzzafar returned. It was a changed Muzzafar, his face flushed, his eyes bright. He stopped behind the Honored Matre's chair.

"One day, I will be able to permit you behind me this way," she said. "It is in my power to do this."

What had they done to Muzzafar? Teg wondered. The man looked almost drugged.

"You do see that I have power?" she asked.

He cleared his throat. "That's obvious."

"I am a banker, remember? We have just made a deposit with our loyal Muzzafar. Do you thank us, Muzzafar?"

"I do, Honored Matre." His voice was hoarse.

"I'm sure you understand this kind of power generally, Bashar," she said. "The Bene Gesserit trained you well. They are quite talented but not, I fear, as talented as we are."

"And I am told you are quite numerous," he said.

"Our numbers are not the key, Bashar. Power such as ours has a way of becoming channeled so that it can be controlled by small numbers."

She was like a Reverend Mother, he thought, in the way she could appear to answer without revealing much.

"In essence," she said, "power such as ours is allowed to become the substance of survival for many people. Then, the threat of withdrawal is all that's required for us to rule." She glanced over her shoulder. "Would you wish us to withdraw our favor from you Muzzafar?"

"No, Honored Matre." He was actually trembling!