'Once.'
'You resisted?' Remote surprise lurked somewhere within Teg.
'I learned the way of that from Paul Muad'dib himself.'
'She is capable of paralyzing you and -'
'I think her orders prohibit violence.'
'What is violence, Duncan?'
'I'm going to the showers, Bashar. Are you coming?'
'In a few minutes.' Teg took a deep breath, sensing how close he was to exhaustion. This afternoon on the practice floor and afterward had drained him. He watched Duncan leave. Where was Lucilla? What was she planning? How long could she wait? That was the central question and it put the no-globe's peculiar emphasis on their isolation from Time.
Again, he sensed that ebb and flow which their three lives influenced. I must talk to Lucilla! Where has she gone? The library? No! There is something else I must do first.
Lucilla sat in the room she had chosen for her personal quarters. It was a small space with an ornate bed filling an inset into one wall. Gross and subtle signs around her said this had been the room of a favorite Harkonnen hetaira. Pastel blues with darker blue accents shaded the fabrics. Despite the baroque carvings on bed, alcove, ceiling, and every functioning appurtenance, the room itself could be swept out of her consciousness once she relaxed here. She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes against the sexually gross figures on the alcove ceiling.
Teg will have to be dealt with.
It would have to be done in such a way that it did not offend Taraza or weaken the ghola. Teg presented a special problem in many ways, especially in the way his mental processes could dip into and out of deeper sources akin to those of the Bene Gesserit.
The Reverend Mother who bore him, of course!
Something passed from such a mother to such a child. It began in the womb and probably did not end even when they were finally separated. He had never undergone the all-ravening transmutation that produced Abominations... no, not that. But he had subtle and real powers. Those born of Reverend Mothers learned things impossible to others.
Teg knew precisely how Lucilla viewed love in all of its manifestations. She had seen it on his face that once in his quarters at the Keep.
'Calculating witch!'
He might as well have spoken it aloud.
She recalled the way she had favored him with her benign smile and dominating expression. That had been a mistake, demeaning to both of them. She sensed in such thoughts a latent sympathy for Teg. Somewhere within her, despite all of the careful Bene Gesserit training, there were chinks in her armor. Her teachers had warned her about that many times.
'To be capable of inducing real love, you must feel it, but only temporarily. And once is enough!'
Teg's reactions to the Duncan Idaho ghola said much. Teg was both drawn to and repelled by their young charge.
As I am.
Perhaps it had been a mistake not to seduce Teg.
In her sex education, where she had been taught to gain strength from intercourse rather than lose herself in it, her teachers had emphasized analysis and historical comparisons, of which there were many in a Reverend Mother's Other Memories.
Lucilla focused her thoughts on Teg's male presence. Doing this, she could feel a female response, her flesh wanting Teg close to her and aroused to sexual peak - ready for the moment of mystery.
Faint amusement crept into Lucilla's awareness. Not orgasm. No scientific labels! It was purest Bene Gesserit cant: moment of mystery, the Imprinter's ultimate specialty. Immersion in the long Bene Gesserit continuity required this concept. She had been taught to believe deeply in a duality: the scientific knowledge by which the Breeding Mistresses guided them but, at the same time, the moment of mystery that confounded all knowledge. Bene Gesserit history and science said the procreative drive must remain irretrievably buried in the psyche. It could not be removed without destroying the species.
The safety net.
Lucilla gathered her sexual forces around her now as only a Bene Gesserit Imprinter could. She began to focus her thoughts on Duncan. By now, he would be in the showers and thinking about this evening's training session with his Reverend Mother-teacher.
I will go to my student presently, she thought. The important lesson must be taught or he will not be fully prepared for Rakis.
Those were Taraza's instructions.
Lucilla swung the focus of her thoughts fully onto Duncan. It was almost as though she saw him standing naked under the shower.
How little he understood of what there might be to learn!
Duncan sat alone in the dressing cubicle off the showers which adjoined the practice hall. He was immersed in a deep sadness. This brought remembered pains to old wounds that this young flesh had never experienced.
Some things never changed! The Sisterhood was at its old-old games again.
He looked up and around this dark-paneled Harkonnen place. Arabesques were carved into walls and ceiling, strange designs in the tesserae of the floor. Monsters and lovely human bodies intermingled across the same defining lines. Only a flicker of attention separated one from the other.
Duncan looked down at this body that the Tleilaxu and their axlotl tanks had produced for him. It still felt strange at moments. He had been a man of many adult experiences in the last instant he remembered from his pre-ghola life - fighting off a swarm of Sardaukar warriors, giving his young Duke a chance to escape.
His Duke! Paul had been no older than this flesh then. Conditioned, though, the way the Atreides always were: Loyalty and honor above all else.
The way they conditioned me after they saved me from the Harkonnens.
Something within him could not evade that ancient debt. He knew its source. He could outline the process by which it had been embedded in him.
There it remained.
Duncan glanced at the tiled floor. Words had been worked in the tile along the cubicle's splashboard. It was a script that one part of him identified as an ancient thing from the old Harkonnen times but that another part of him found to be an all-too-familiar Galach.
'CLEAN SWEET CLEAN BRIGHT CLEAN PURE CLEAN'
The ancient script repeated itself around the room's perimeter as though the words themselves might create something that Duncan knew was alien to the Harkonnens of his memories.
Over the door to the showers, more script:
A religious admonition in a Harkonnen stronghold? Had the Harkonnens changed in the centuries after his death? Duncan found this hard to believe. These words were things that the builders probably had thought appropriate.
He felt rather than heard Lucilla enter the room behind him. Duncan stood and fastened the clips of the tunic he had appropriated from the nullentropy bins (but only after removing all Harkonnen insignia!).
Without turning, he said: 'What now, Lucilla?'
