a different color, she thought. Sunlight came through dust with a different reflective spectrum. More bounce and sharpness to the light. Absorbed in a different way. The nimbus was tighter. The blowing dust and sand crept into every crevice the way water did but the grating and rasping betrayed its source. The same with Bell's persistence. No lubrication.
'That's desert light,' Odrade said, pointing.
'Stop avoiding me,' Bellonda said.
Odrade chose not to answer. The dusty light was a classical thing, but not reassuring in the way of the elder painters and their misty mornings.
Tamalane came up beside Odrade. 'Beautiful in its own way.' The remote tone said she made Other Memory comparisons similar to Odrade's.
If that's how you were conditioned to look for beauty. But something deep within Odrade said this was not the beauty for which she longed.
In the shallow swales below them, where once there had been greenery, now there was dryness and a sense of the earth being gutted the way ancient Egyptians had prepared their dead - dried to essential matter, preserved for their Eternity. Desert as deathmaster, swaddling the dirt in nitron, embalming our beautiful planet with all of its jewels concealed.
Bellonda stood behind them, muttering and shaking her head, refusing to look at what their planet would become.
Odrade almost shuddered in a sudden thrust of simulflow. Memory flooded her: She felt herself searching Sietch Tabr's ruins, finding desert-embalmed bodies of spice pirates left where killers had dropped them.
What is Sieteh Tabr now? A molten flow solidified and without anything to mark its proud history. Honored Matres: killers of history.
'If you won't eliminate Idaho, then I must protest your using him as a Mentat.'
Bell was such a fussy woman! Odrade noted that she was showing her age more than ever. Reading lenses on her nose even now. They magnified her eyes until she had the look of a great-orbed fish. Use of lenses and not one of the more subtle prostheses said something about her. She flaunted a reverse vanity that announced: 'I am greater than the devices my failing senses require. '
Bellonda was definitely irritated by Mother Superior. 'Why are you staring at me that way?'
Odrade, caught by abrupt awareness of a weakness in her Council, shifted her attention to Tamalane. Cartilage never stopped growing and this had enlarged Tam's ears, nose and chin. Some Reverend Mothers adjusted this by metabolism control or sought regular surgical correction. Tam would not bow to such vanity. 'Here's what I am. Take it or leave it.'
My advisors are too old. And I... I should be younger and stronger to have these problems on my shoulders. Oh, damn this for a lapse into self-pity!
Only one supreme danger: action against survival of the Sisterhood.
'Duncan is a superb Mentat!' Odrade spoke with all the force of her position. 'But I use none of you beyond your capabilities.'
Bellonda remained silent. She knew a Mentat's weaknesses.
Mentats! Odrade thought. They were like walking Archives but when you most needed answers they relapsed into questions.
'I don't need another Mentat,' Odrade said. 'I need an inventor!'
When Bellonda still did not speak, Odrade said: 'I am freeing his mind, not his body.'
'I insist on an analysis before you open all data sources to him!'
Considering Bellonda's usual stance, that was mild. But Odrade did not trust it. She detested those sessions - endless rehashing of Archival reports. Bellonda doted on them. Bellonda of Archival minutiae and boring excursions into irrelevant details! Who cared if Reverend Mother X preferred skimmed milk on her porridge?
Odrade turned her back on Bellonda and looked at the southern sky. Dust! We would sift more dust! Bellonda would be flanked by assistants. Odrade felt boredom just imagining it.
'No more analysis.' Odrade spoke more sharply than she had intended.
'I do have a point of view.' Bellonda sounded hurt.
Point of view? Are we no more than sensory windows on our universe, each with only a point of view?
Instincts and memories of all types... even Archives - none of these things spoke for themselves except by compelling intrusions. None carried weight until formulated in a living consciousness. But whoever produced the formulation tipped the scales. All order is arbitrary! Why this datum rather than some other? Any Reverend Mother knew events occurred in their own flux, their own relative environment. Why couldn't a Mentat Reverend Mother act from that knowledge?
'Do you refuse counsel?' That was Tamalane. Was she siding with Bell?
'When have I ever refused counsel?' Odrade let her outrage show. 'I am refusing another of Bell's Archival merry-go-rounds.'
Bellonda intruded. 'Then, in reality -'
'Bell! Don't talk to me about reality!' Let her simmer in that! Reverend Mother and Mentat! There is no reality. Only our own order imposed on everything. A basic Bene Gesserit dictum.
There were times (and this was one of them) when Odrade wished she had been born in an earlier era - a Roman matron in the long pax of the aristocrats, or a much-pampered Victorian. But she was trapped by time and circumstances.
Trapped forever?
Must face that possibility. The Sisterhood might have only a future confined to secret hideaways, always fearing discovery. The future of the hunted. And here at Central we may be allowed no more than one mistake.
'I've had enough of this inspection!' Odrade called for private transport and hurried them back to her workroom.
What will we do if the hunters come upon us here?
Each of them had her own scenario, a little playlet full of planned reactions. But every Reverend Mother was sufficiently a realist to know her playlet might be more hindrance than help.
In the workroom, morning light harshly revealing on everything around them, Odrade sank into her chair and waited for Tamalane and Bellonda to take their seats.
No more of those damned analysis sessions. She really needed access to something better than Archives, better than anything they had ever used before. Inspiration. Odrade rubbed her legs, feeling muscles tremble. She had not slept well for days. This inspection left her feeling frustrated.
One mistake could end us and I am about to commit us to a no-return decision.
Am I being too tricky?
Her advisors argued against tricky solutions. They said the Sisterhood must move with steady assurance, the ground ahead known in advance. Everything they did lay counterpoised by the disaster awaiting them at the slightest misstep.
And I am on the tightrope over the chasm.
Did they have room to experiment, to test possible solutions? They all played that game. Bell and Tam screened a constant flow of suggestions but nothing more effective than their atomic Scattering.
We must be prepared to kill Idaho at the slightest sign he is a Kwisatz Haderach,' Bellonda said.
'Don't you have work to do? Get out of here, both of you!'
As they stood, the workroom around Odrade took on an alien feeling. What was wrong? Bellonda stared down at her with that awful look of censure. Tamalane appeared more wise than she could possibly be.
What is it about this room?
The workroom would have been recognized for its function by humans from pre-space history. What felt so alien? A worktable was a worktable and the chairs were in convenient positions. Bell and Tam preferred chairdogs. Those would have seemed odd to the early human in Other Memory she suspected was coloring her view. The ridulian crystals might glisten strangely, the light pulsing in them and blinking. Messages dancing above the table might be surprising. Instruments of her labors could appear strange to an early human sharing her awareness.
But it felt alien to me.
