Tamalane chuckled.
'You take too much joy in your Sister's discomfiture, Tam,' Sheeana said.
Tamalane shrugged but Odrade was delighted. No more teasing of Bell?
'When you spoke of Chapterhouse becoming another Dune, that was when he began to panic,' Bellonda said, her voice Mentat distant.
Odrade had seen the reaction but had not yet made the association. This was a Mentat's value: patterns and systems, building blocks. Bell sensed a pattern to Scytale's behavior.
'I ask myself: Is it the thing become real once more?' Bellonda said.
Odrade saw it at once. An odd thing about lost places. As long as Dune had been a known and living planet, there existed a historical firmness about its presence in the Galactic Register. You could point to a projection and say: 'That is Dune. Once called Arrakis and, latterly, Rakis. Dune for its total desert character in Muad'Dib's day.'
Destroy the place, though, and a mythological patina inveighed against projected reality. In time, such places became totally mythic. Arthur and his Round Table. Camelot where it only rains at night. Pretty good Weather Control for those days!
But now, a new Dune had appeared.
'Myth power,' Tamalane said.
Ahhhh, yes. Tam, close to her final departure from flesh, would be more sensitive to workings of myths. Mystery and secrecy, tools of the Missionaria, had been used also on Dune by Muad'Dib and the Tyrant. The seeds were planted. Even with priests of the Divided God gone to their own perdition, myths of Dune proliferated.
'Melange,' Tamalane said.
The other Sisters in the workroom knew immediately what she meant. New hope could be injected into the Bene Gesserit Scattering.
Bellonda said: 'Why do they want us dead and not captives? That has always puzzled me.'
Honored Matres might not want any Bene Gesserit alive... only the spice knowledge, perhaps. But they destroyed Dune. They destroyed the Tleilaxu. It was a cautioning thought to take into any confrontation with the Spider Queen - should Dortujla succeed.
'No useful hostages?' Bellonda asked.
Odrade saw the looks on the faces of her Sisters. They were following a single track as though all of them thought with one mind. Object lessons by Honored Matres, leaving few survivors, only made potential opposition more cautious. It invoked a rule of silence within which bitter memories became bitter myths. Honored Matres were like barbarians in any age: blood instead of hostages. Strike with random viciousness.
'Dar's right,' Tamalane said. 'We've been seeking allies too close to home.'
'Futars did not create themselves,' Sheeana said.
'The ones who created them hope to control us,' Bellonda said. There was the clear sound of Prime Projection in her voice. 'That's the hesitation Dortujla heard in the Handlers.'
There it was and they faced it with all of its perils. It came down to people (as it always did). People - contemporaries. You learned valuable things from people living in your own time and from knowledge they carried out of their pasts. Other Memory was not the only conveyance of history.
Odrade felt that she had come home after a long absence. There was a familiarity about the way all four of them were thinking now. It was a familiarity that transcended place. The Sisterhood itself was Home. Not where they lodged in transient housing but the association.
Bellonda voiced it for them. 'I fear we have been working at cross purposes.'
'Fear does that,' Sheeana said.
Odrade dared not smile. It could be misinterpreted and she did not want to explain. Give us Murbella as a Sister and a restored Bashar! Then we might have our fighting chance!
Right there with that good feeling in her, the message signal clicked. She glanced at the projection surface, a pure reflex, and recognized crisis. Such a small thing (relatively) to precipitate crisis. Clairby mortally injured in a 'thopter crash. Mortal unless... The unless was spelled out for her and it added up to cyborg. Her companions saw the message in reverse but you got good at reading mirrored information in here. They knew.
Where do we draw the line?
Bellonda, with her antique spectacles when she could have had artificial eyes or any of numerous other prosthetics, voted with her body. This is what it means to be human. Try to hold on to youth and it mocks you while it sprints away. Melange is enough... and perhaps too much.
Odrade recognized what her own emotions were telling her. But what of Bene Gesserit necessity? Bell could lodge her individual vote and everyone recognized it, even respected it. But Mother Superior's vote carried the Sisterhood with her.
First the axlotl tanks and now this.
Necessity said they could not afford to lose specialists of Clairby's caliber. They had few enough as it was. 'Spread thin' did not describe it. Gaps were appearing. Cyborg Clairby, though, and that was the opening wedge.
The Suks were prepared. 'A precautionary arrangement' should it be required for someone irreplaceable. Such as Mother Superior? Odrade knew she had approved that with her usual cautious reservations. Where were those reservations now?
Cyborg was one of those potpourri words, too. Where did mechanical additions to human flesh become dominant? When was the Cyborg no longer human? Temptations intensified - 'Just this one little adjustment.' And so easy to adjust until the potpourri-human became unquestioningly obedient.
But... Clairby?
Conditions of extremis said, 'Cyborg him!' Was the Sisterhood that desperate? She was forced to answer in the affirmative.
There it was then - decision not entirely out of her hands, but the ready excuse at hand. Necessity dictates it.
The Butlerian Jihad had left its indelible mark on humans. Fought and won... for then. And here was another battle in that long-ago conflict.
But now, survival of the Sisterhood was in the balance. How many technical specialists remained on Chapterhouse? She knew the answer without looking. Not enough.
Odrade leaned forward and keyed for transmit. 'Cyborg him,' she said.
Bellonda grunted. Approval or disapproval? She would never say. This was Mother Superior's arena and welcome to it!
Who won this battle? Odrade wondered.
We walk a delicate line, perpetuating Atreides (Siona) genes in our population because that hides us from prescience. We carry the Kwisatz Haderach in that bag! Willfulness created Muad'Dib. Prophets make predictions come true! Will we ever again dare ignore our Tao sense and cater to a culture that hates chance and begs for prophecy?
- Archival Summary (adixto)
It was just after dawn when Odrade arrived at the no-ship but Murbella was up and working with a training mek when Mother Superior strode onto the practice floor.
Odrade had walked the last klick through ring orchards around the spacefield. Night's limited clouds had thinned at the approach of dawn, then dissipated to reveal a sky thick with stars.
She recognized a delicate weather shift to wrench another crop from this region but decreasing rainfall was barely enough to keep orchards and pastures alive.
As she walked, Odrade was overcome by dreariness. Winter just past had been a hard-bought silence between storms. Life was holocaust. Dusting of pollen by eager insects, fruiting and seeding that followed the flower. These orchards were a secret storm whose power lay hidden in torrential flows of life. But ohhh! the destruction. New life carried change. The Changer was coming, always different. Sandworms would bring the desert purity of ancient Dune.
The desolation of that transforming power invaded her imagination. She could picture this landscape reduced
