'Everything you do, everything you sense and say is experiment. No deduction final. Nothing stops until dead and perhaps not even then, because each life creates endless ripples. Induction bounces within and you sensitize yourself to it. Deduction conveys illusions of absolutes. Kick the truth and shatter it!'
When Bellonda's questions touched on the relationship between himself and Murbella, he saw vague emotional responses. Amusement? Jealousy? He could accept amusement (and even jealousy) about the compelling sexual demands of this mutual addiction. Is the ecstasy truly that great?
He wandered through his quarters this afternoon feeling displaced, as though newly here and not yet accepting these rooms as home. That is emotion talking to me.
Over the years of his confinement, these quarters had taken on a lived-in appearance. This was his cave, the former supercargo suite: large rooms with slightly curved walls - bedroom, library-workroom, sitting room, a green-tiled bath with dry and wet cleansing systems, and a long practice hall he shared with Murbella for exercise.
The rooms bore a unique collection of artifacts and marks of his presence: that slingchair placed at just the right angle to the console and projector linking him to Shipsystems, those ridulian records on that low side table. And there were stains of occupancy - that dark brown blot on the worktable. Spilled food had left its indelible mark.
He moved restlessly into his sleeping quarters. The light was dimmer. His ability to identify the familiar held true for odors. There was a saliva-like smell to the bed - the residue of last night's sexual collision.
That is the proper word: Collision.
The no-ship's air-filtered, recycled and sweetened - often bored him. No break in the no-ship maze to the exterior world ever remained open long. He sometimes sat silently sniffing, hoping for a faint trace of air that had not been adjusted to this prison's demands.
There is a way to escape!
He wandered out of his quarters and down the corridor, took the dropchute at the end of the passage and emerged in the ship's lowest level.
What is really happening out there in that world open to the sky?
The bits Odrade told him about events filled him with dread and a trapped feeling. No place to run! Am I wise to share my fears with Sheeana? Murbella merely laughed. 'I will protect you, love. Honored Matres won't hurt me.' Another false dream.
But Sheeana... how quickly she had picked up the hand-language and entered the spirit of his conspiracy. Conspiracy? No... I doubt that any Reverend Mother will act against her Sisters. Even the Lady Jessica went back to them in the end. But I don't ask Sheeana to act against the Sisterhood, only that she protect us from Murbella's folly.
The enormous powers of the hunters made only the destruction predictable. A Mentat had but to look at their disruptive violence. They brought something else as well, something hinting at matters out there in the Scattering. What were these Futars Odrade mentioned with such casualness? Part human, part beast? That had been Lucilla's guess. And where is Lucilla?
He found himself presently in the Great Hold, the kilometer-long cargo space where they had carried the last giant sandworm of Dune, bringing it to Chapterhouse. The area still smelled of spice and sand, filling his mind with long-ago and the dead far away. He knew why he came so often to the Great Hold, doing it sometimes without even thinking, as he had just done. It both attracted and repelled. The illusion of unlimited space with traces of dust, sand, and spice carried the nostalgia of lost freedoms. But there was another side. This is where it always happened to him.
Will it happen today?
Without warning, the sense of being in the Great Hold would vanish. Then... the net shimmering in a molten sky. He was aware when the vision came that he was not really seeing a net. His mind translated what the senses could not define.
A shimmering net undulating like an infinite borealis.
Then the net would part and he would see the two people - man and woman. How ordinary they appeared and yet extraordinary. A grandmother and grandfather in antique clothing: bib coveralls for the man and a long dress with headscarf for the woman. Working in a flower garden! He thought it must be more of the illusion. I am seeing this but it is not really what I see.
They always noticed him eventually. He heard their voices. 'There he is again, Marty,' the man would say, calling the woman's attention to Idaho.
'I wonder how it is he can look through?' Marty asked once. 'Doesn't seem possible.'
'He's spread pretty thin, I think. Wonder if he knows the danger?'
Danger. That was the word that always jerked him out of the vision.
'Not at your console today?'
For just an instant, Idaho thought it was the vision, the voice of that odd woman, then he realized it was Odrade. Her voice came from close behind. He whirled and saw he had failed to close the hatch. She had followed him into the Hold, stalking him quietly, avoiding the scattered patches of sand that might have grated underfoot and betrayed her approach.
She looked tired and impatient. Why did she think I would be at my console?
As though answering his unspoken question, she said: ' I find you at your console so often lately. For what do you search, Duncan?'
He shook his head without speaking. Why do I suddenly feel in peril?
It was a rare feeling in Odrade's company. He could remember other occasions, though. Once when she had stared suspiciously at his hands in the field of his console. Fear associated with my console. Do I reveal my Mentat hunger for data? Do they guess that I have hidden my private self there?
'Do I get no privacy at all?' Anger and attack.
She shook her head slowly from side to side as much as to say, 'You can do better than that.'
'This is your second visit today,' he accused.
'I must say you're looking well, Duncan.' More circumlocution.
'Is that what your watchers say?'
'Don't be petty. I came for a chat with Murbella. She said you'd be down here.'
'I suppose you know Murbella's pregnant again.' Was that trying to placate her?
'For which we are grateful. I came to tell you that Sheeana wants to visit you again.'
Why would Odrade announce that?
Her words filled him with images of the Dune waif who had become a full Reverend Mother (the youngest ever, so they said). Sheeana, his confidante, out there watching over that last great sandworm. Had it finally perpetuated itself? Why should Odrade interest herself in Sheeana's visit?
'Sheeana wants to discuss the Tyrant with you.'
She saw the surprise this produced.
'What could I possibly add to Sheeana's knowledge of Leto II?' he demanded. 'She's a Reverend Mother.'
'You knew the Atreides intimately.'
Ahhhhh. She's hunting for the Mentat.
'But you said she wanted to discuss Leto and it's not safe to think of him as Atreides.'
'Oh, but he was. Refined into something more elemental than anyone before him, but one of us, nonetheless.'
One of us! She reminded him that she, too, was Atreides. Calling in his never-ending debt to the family!
'So you say.'
'Shouldn't we stop playing this foolish game?'
Caution gripped him. He knew she saw it. Reverend Mothers were so damnably sensitive. He stared at her, not daring to speak, knowing even this told her too much.
'We believe you remember more than one ghola lifetime.' And when he still did not respond, 'Come, come, Duncan! Are you a Mentat?'
The way she spoke, as much accusation as question, he knew concealment had ended. It was almost a relief.
'And if I am?'
