Dune [Frank Herbert's Dune Saga Collection: Books 1 - 6]

“Sounds like they’re preparing you for the Missionaria teaching. Engineer religions for specific purposes and selected populations.”

“You don’t see anything wrong in that?”

“Morality. I don’t argue that with Reverend Mothers.”

“Why not?”

“Religions founder on that rock. BGs don’t founder.”

Duncan, if you only knew their morality! “It annoys them that you know so much about them.”

“Bell only wanted to kill me because of it.”

“You don’t think Odrade is just as bad?”

“What a question!” Odrade? A terrifying woman if you let yourself dwell on her abilities. Atreides, for all that. I’ve known Atreides and Atreides. This one is Bene Gesserit first. Teg’s the Atreides ideal.

“Odrade told me she trusts your loyalty to the Atreides.”

“I’m loyal to Atreides honor, Murbella.” And I make my own moral decisions—about the Sisterhood, about this child they’ve thrust into my care, about Sheeana and . . . and about my beloved.

Murbella bent close to him, breast brushing his arm, and whispered in his ear. “Sometimes, I could kill any of them within my reach!”

Does she think they can’t hear? He sat upright, dragging her with him. “What set you off?”

“She wants me to work on Scytale.”

Work on. Honored Matre euphemism. Well, why not? She “worked on” plenty of men before she ran afoul of me. But he had an antique husband’s reaction. Not only that . . . Scytale? A damned Tleilaxu?

“Mother Superior?” He had to be sure.

“The one, the only.” Almost lighthearted now that she had unburdened herself.

“What’s your reaction?”

“She says it was your idea.”

“My . . . No way! I suggested we could try to pry information out of him but . . .”

“She says it’s an ordinary thing for the Bene Gesserit just as it is with Honored Matres. Go breed with this one. Seduce that one. All in a day’s work.”

“I asked for your reaction.”

“Revolted.”

“Why?” Knowing your background . . .

“It’s you I love, Duncan and . . . and my body is . . . is to give you pleasure . . . just as you . . .”

“We’re an old married couple and the witches are trying to pry us apart.”

His words ignited in him a clear vision of Lady Jessica, lover of his long-dead Duke and mother of Maud’Dib. I loved her. She didn’t love me but . . . The look he saw now in Murbella’s eyes, he had seen Jessica look at the Duke that way: blind, unswerving love. The thing the Bene Gesserit distrusted. Jessica had been softer than Murbella. Hard to the core, though. And Odrade . . . she was hard at the beginning. Plasteel all the way.

Then what of the times when he had suspected her of sharing human emotions? The way she spoke of the Bashar when they learned the old man was dead on Dune.

“He was my father, you know.”

Murbella dragged him out of reverie. “You may share their dream, whatever that is, but . . .”

“Grow up, humans!”

“What?”

“That’s their dream. Start acting like adults and not like angry children in a schoolyard.”

“Mama knows best?”

“Yes . . . I believe she does.”

“Is that how you really see them? Even when you call them witches?”

“It’s a good word. Witches do mysterious things.”

“You don’t believe it’s the long and severe training plus the spice and the Agony?”

“What’s belief have to do with it? Unknowns create their own mystique.”

“But you don’t think they trick people into doing what they want?”

“Sure they do!”

“Words as weapons, Voice, Imprinters . . .”

“None as beautiful as you.”

“What’s beauty, Duncan?”

“There’re styles in beauty, sure.”

“Exactly what she says. ‘Styles based on procreative roots buried so deeply in our racial psyche we dare not remove them.’ So they’ve thought of meddling there, Duncan.”

“And they might dare anything?”

“She says, ‘We won’t distort our progeny into what we judge to be non-human.’ They judge, they condemn.”

He thought of the alien figures in his vision. Face Dancers. And he asked: “Like the amoral Tleilaxu? Amoral—not human.”

“I can almost hear the gears whirling in Odrade’s head. She and her Sisters—they watch, they listen, they tailor every response, everything calculated.”

Is that what you want, my darling? He felt trapped. She was right and she was wrong. Ends justifying means? How could he justify losing Murbella?

“You think them amoral?” he asked.

It was as though she did not hear. “Always asking themselves what to say next to get the desired response.”

“What response?” Couldn’t she hear his pain?

“You never know until too late!” She turned and looked at him. “Exactly like Honored Matres. Do you know how Honored Matres trapped me?”

He could not suppress awareness of how avidly the watchdogs would hang on Murbella’s next words.

“I was picked off the streets after an Honored Matre sweep. I think the whole sweep was because of me. My mother was a great beauty but she was too old for them.”

“A sweep?” The watchdogs would want me to ask.

“They go through an area and people disappear. No bodies, nothing. Whole families vanish. It’s explained as punishment because people plot against them.”

“How old were you?”

“Three . . . maybe four. I was playing with friends in an open place under trees. Suddenly, there was a lot of noise and shouting. We hid in a hole behind some rocks.”

He was caught in a vision of this drama.

“The ground shook.” Her gaze went inward with the memory. “Explosions. After a while it was quiet and we peeked out. The whole corner where my house had been was a hole.”

“You were orphaned?”

“I remember my parents. He was a big, robust fellow. I think my mother was a servant somewhere. They wore uniforms for such jobs and I remember her in uniform.”

“How can you be sure your parents were killed?”

“The sweep is all I know for sure but they’re always the same. There was screaming and people running about. We were terrified.”

“Why do you think the sweep was because of you?”

“They do that sort of thing.”

They. What a victory the watchers would count in that one word.

Murbella was still deep in memory. “I think my father refused to succumb to an Honored Matre. That was always considered dangerous. Big, handsome man . . . strong.”

“So you hate them?”

“Why?” Really surprised by his question. “Without that, I would never have been an Honored Matre.”

Her callousness shocked him. “So it was worth anything!”

“Love, do you resent whatever brought me to your side?”

Touché! “But don’t you wish it had happened some other way?”

“It happened.”

What utter fatalism. He had never suspected this in her. Was it Honored Matre conditioning or something the Bene Gesserit did?

“You were just a valuable addition to their stables.”

“Right. Enticers, they called us. We recruited valuable males.”

“And you did.”

“I repaid their investment many times over.”

“Do you realize how the Sisters will interpret this?”

“Don’t make a big thing of it.”

“So you’re ready to work on Scytale?”

“I didn’t say that. Honored Matres manipulated me without my consent. The Sisters need me and want to use me the same way. My price may be too high.”

He was a moment speaking past a dry throat. “Price?”

She glared at him. “You, you’re just part of my price. No working on Scytale. And more of their famous candor about why they need me!”

“Careful, love. They might tell you.”

She turned an almost Bene Gesserit stare toward him. “How could you restore Teg’s memories without pain?”

Damn! And just when he thought they were free of that slip. No escape. He could see in her eyes that she guessed.

Murbella confirmed this. “Since I would not agree, I’m sure you’ve discussed it with Sheeana.”

He could only nod. His Murbella had gone farther into the Sisterhood than he suspected. And she knew how his multiple ghola memories had been restored by her imprinting. He suddenly saw her as a Reverend Mother and wanted to cry out against it.

“How does this make you different from Odrade?” she asked.

“Sheeana was trained as an Imprinter.” His words felt empty even as he spoke.

“That’s different from my training?” Accusing.

Anger flared in him. “You’d prefer the pain? Like Bell?”

“You’d prefer the defeat of the Bene Gesserit?” Voice milky soft.

He heard the distance in her tone, as though she already had retreated into the cold observational stance of the Sisterhood. They were freezing his lovely Murbella! There was still that vitality in her, though. It tore at him. She gave off an aura of health, especially in pregnancy. Vigor and boundless enjoyment of life. It glowed in her. The Sisters would take that and dampen it.

She became quiet under his watchful stare.

Desperate, he wondered what he could do.

“I had hoped we were being more open with each other lately,” she said. Another Bene Gesserit probe.

“I disagree with many of their actions but I don’t distrust their motives,” he said.

“I’ll know their motives if I live through the Agony.”

He went very still, caught in realization that she might not survive. Life without Murbella? Yawning emptiness deeper than anything he had ever imagined. Nothing in his many lives compared with it. Without conscious volition, he reached out and caressed her back. Skin so soft and yet resilient.

“I love you too much, Murbella. That’s my Agony.”

She trembled under his touch.

He found himself wallowing in sentimentality, building an image of grief until he recalled a Mentat teacher’s words about “emotional binges.”

“The difference between sentiment and sentimentality is easy to see. When you avoid killing somebody’s pet on the glazeway, that’s sentiment. If you swerve to avoid the pet and that causes you to kill pedestrians, that is sentimentality.”

She took his caressing hand and pressed it against her lips.

“Words plus body, more than either,” he whispered.

His words plunged her back into nightmare but now she went with a vengeance, aware of words as tools. She was filled with special relish for the experience, willingness to laugh at herself.

As she exorcised the nightmare, it occurred to her that she had never seen an Honored Matre laugh at herself.

Holding his hand, she stared down at Duncan. Mentat flickering of his eyelids. Did he realize what she had just experienced? Freedom! It no longer was a question of how she had been confined and driven into inevitable channels by her past. For the first time since accepting the possiblity that she could become a Reverend Mother, she glimpsed what it might mean. She felt awe and shock.

Nothing more important than the Sisterhood?

They spoke of an oath, something more mysterious than the Proctor’s words at the acolyte initiation.

My oath to Honored Matres was only words. An oath to the Bene Gesserit can be no more.

She remembered Bellonda growling that diplomats were chosen for ability to lie. “Would you be another diplomat, Murbella?”

It was not that oaths were made to be broken. How childish! Schoolyard threat: “If you break your word, I’ll break mine! Nyaa, nyaa, nyaaaaa!”

Futile to worry about oaths. Far more important to find that place in herself where freedom lived. It was a place where something always listened.

Cupping Duncan’s hand against her lips, she whispered: “They listen. Oh, how they listen.”