Who had said that? Someone. The sense of deja vu returned in full force.
I am a Mentat, he reminded himself. My mind and its workings are my center. He possessed experiences and memories upon which a center could rely.
Pain returned. Sounds. Loud! Much too loud!
'He's hearing again.' That was Yar.
'How can that be?' The functionary's tenor.
'Perhaps you've set it too low.' Materly.
Teg tried to open his eyes. The lids would not obey. He remembered then. They had called it a T-probe. This was no Ixian device. This was something from the Scattering. He could identify where it took over his muscles and senses. It was like another person sharing his flesh, preempting his own reactive patterns. He allowed himself to follow the workings of this machine's intrusions. It was a hellish device! It could order him to blink, fart, gasp, shit, piss - anything. It could command his body as though he had no thinking part in his own behavior. He was relegated to the role of observer.
Odors assailed him - disgusting odors. He would not command himself to frown but he thought of frowning. That was sufficient. These odors had been elicited by the probe. It was playing his senses, learning them.
'Do you have enough to read him?' The functionary's tenor.
'He's still hearing us!' Yar.
'Damn all Mentats!' Materly.
'Dit, Dat, and Dot,' Teg said, naming the puppets of the Winter Show from his childhood on long-ago Lernaeus.
'He's talking!' The functionary.
Teg felt his awareness being blocked off by the machine. Yar was doing something at the console. Still, Teg knew his own Mentat logic had told him something vital: These three were puppets. Only the puppet masters were important. How the puppets moved - that told you what the puppet masters were doing.
The probe continued to intrude. Despite the force being applied, Teg felt his awareness matching the thing. It was learning him but he was also learning it.
He understood now. The whole spectrum of his senses could be copied into this T-probe and identified, tagged for Yar to call up when needed. An organic chain of responses existed within Teg. The machine could trace those out as though it made a duplicate of him. The shere and his Mentat resistance shunted the searchers away from his memories but everything else could be copied.
It will not think like me, he reassured himself.
The machine would not be the same as his nerves and flesh. It would not have Teg-memories or Teg- experiences. It had not been born of woman. It had never traveled down a birth canal and emerged into this astonishing universe.
Part of Teg's awareness applied a memory marker, telling him that this observation revealed something about the ghola.
Duncan was decanted from an axlotl tank.
The observation came to Teg with a sudden sharp biting of acid on his tongue.
The T-probe again!
Teg allowed himself to flow through a multiple simultaneous awareness. He followed the T-probe's workings and continued to explore this observation about the ghola, all the while listening for Dit, Dat, and Dot. The three puppets were oddly silent. Yes, waiting for their T-probe to complete its task.
The ghola: Duncan was an extension of cells that had been born of a woman impregnated by a man.
Machine and ghola!
Observation: The machine cannot share that birth experience except in a remotely vicarious way sure to miss important personal nuances.
Just as it was missing other things in him right now.
The T-probe was replaying smells. With each induced odor, memories revealed their presence in Teg's mind. He felt the great speed of the T-probe but his own awareness lived outside of that headlong rushing search, able to entangle him for as long as he desired in the memories being called up here.
There!
That was the hot wax he had spilled on his left hand when only fourteen and a student in the Bene Gesserit school. He recalled school and laboratory as though his only existence were there at this moment. The school is attached to Chapter House. By being admitted here, Teg knew he had the blood of Siona in his veins. No prescient could track him here.
He saw the lab and smelled the wax - a compound of artificial esters and the natural product of bees kept by failed Sisters and their helpers. He turned his memory to a moment when he watched bees and people at their labors in the apple orchards.
The workings of the Bene Gesserit social structure appeared so complicated until you saw through to the necessities: food, clothing, warmth, communication, learning, protection from enemies (a subset of the survival drive). Bene Gesserit survival took some adjustments before it could be understood. They did not procreate for the sake of humankind in general. No unmonitored racial involvement! They procreated to extend their own powers, to continue the Bene Gesserit, deeming that a sufficient service to humankind. Perhaps it was. Procreative motivation went deep and the Sisterhood was so thorough.
A new smell assailed him.
He recognized the wet wool of his clothing as he came into the command pod after the Battle of Ponciard. The smell filled his nostrils and elicited the ozone of the pod's instruments, the sweat of the other occupants. Wool! The Sisterhood had always thought it a bit odd of him, the way he preferred natural fabrics and shunned the synthetics turned out in captive factories.
No more did he care for chairdogs.
I don't like the smells of oppression in any form.
Did these puppets - Dit, Dat, and Dot - know how oppressed they were?
Mentat logic sneered at him. Were not wool fabrics also a product of captive factories?
It was different.
Part of him argued otherwise. Synthetics could be stored almost indefinitely. Look how long they had endured in the nullentropy bins of the Harkonnen no-globe.
'I still prefer woolens and cottons!'
So be it!
'But how did I come by such a preference?'
It is an Atreides prejudice. You inherited it.
Teg shunted the smells aside and concentrated on the total movement of the intrusive probe. He found presently that he could anticipate the thing. It was a new muscle. He allowed himself to flex it while he continued to examine the induced memories for valuable insights.
I sit outside my mother's door on Lernaeus.
Teg removed part of his awareness and watched the scene: age eleven. He is talking to a small Bene Gesserit acolyte who came as part of the escort for Somebody Important. The acolyte is a tiny thing with red-blond hair and a doll's face. Upturned nose, green-gray eyes. The SI is a black-robed Reverend Mother of truly ancient appearance. She has gone behind that nearby door with Teg's mother. The acolyte, who is named Carlana, is trying her fledgling skills on the young son of the house.
Before Carlana utters twenty words, Miles Teg recognizes the pattern. She is trying to pry information out of him! This was one of the first lessons in delicate dissembling taught by his mother. There were, after all, people who might question a young boy about a Reverend Mother's household, hoping thereby to gain salable information. There is always a market for data about Reverend Mothers.
His mother explained: 'You judge the questioner and fit your responses according to the susceptibilities.' None of this would have served against a full Reverend Mother, but against an acolyte, especially this one!
For Carlana, he produces an appearance of coy reluctance. Carlana has an inflated view of her own attractions. He allows her to overcome his reluctance after a suitable marshaling of her forces. What she gets is a handful of lies, which, if she ever repeats them to the SI behind that closed door, are sure to win Carlana a severe censuring if not something more painful.
