Dune

Liberty and Freedom are complex concepts. They go back to religious ideas of Free Will and are related to the Ruler Mystique implicit in absolute monarchs. Without absolute monarchs patterned after the Old Gods and ruling by the grace of a belief in religious indulgence, Liberty and Freedom would never have gained their present meaning. These ideals owe their very existence to past examples of oppression. And the forces that maintain such ideas will erode unless renewed by dramatic teaching or new oppressions. This is the most basic key to my life.

—LETO II, GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE: DAR-ES-BALAT RECORDS

Some thirty kilometers into the thick forest northeast of the Gammu Keep, Teg kept them waiting under the cover of a life-shield blanket until the sun dipped behind the high ground to the west.

“Tonight, we go a new direction,” he said.

For three nights now, he had led them through tree-enclosed darkness with a masterful demonstration of Mentat Memory, each step directed precisely along the track that Patrin had laid out for him.

“I’m stiff from too much sitting,” Lucilla complained. “And it’s going to be another cold night.”

Teg folded the life-shield blanket and put it in the top of his pack. “You two can start moving around a bit,” he said. “But we won’t leave here until full dark.”

Teg sat up with his back against the bole of a thickly branched conifer, looking out from the deeper shadows as Lucilla and Duncan moved into the glade. The two of them stood there a moment, shivering as the last of the day’s warmth fled into the night’s chill. Yes, it would be cold again tonight, Teg thought, but they would have little chance to think about that.

The unexpected.

Schwangyu would never expect them still to be this close to the Keep and on foot.

Taraza should have been more emphatic in her warnings about Schwangyu, Teg thought. Schwangyu’s violent and open disobedience of a Mother Superior defied tradition. Mentat logic would not accept the situation without more data.

His memory brought up a saying from school days, one of those warning aphorisms by which a Mentat was supposed to rein in his logic.

“Given a trail of logic, occam’s razor laid out with impeccable detail, the Mentat may follow such logic to personal disaster.”

So logic was known to fail.

He thought back to Taraza’s behavior on the Guildship and immediately afterward. She wanted me to know I would be completely on my own. I must see the problem in my own way, not in her way.

So the threat from Schwangyu had to be a real threat that he discovered and faced and solved on his own.

Taraza had not known what would happen to Patrin because of all this.

Taraza did not really care what happened to Patrin. Or to me. Or to Lucilla.

But what about the ghola?

Taraza must care!

It was not logical that she would . . . Teg dumped this line of reasoning. Taraza did not want him to act logically. She wanted him to do exactly what he was doing, what he had always done in the tight spots.

The unexpected.

So there was a species of logic to all of this but it kicked the performers out of the nest into chaos.

From which we must make our own order.

Grief welled up in his consciousness. Patrin! Damn you, Patrin! You knew and I didn’t! What will I do without you?

Teg could almost hear the old aide’s response, that stiffly formal voice Patrin always used when he was chiding his commander.

“You will do your best, Bashar.”

The most coldly progressive reasoning said Teg would never again see Patrin in the flesh nor hear the old man’s actual voice. Still . . . the voice remained. The person persisted in memory.

“Shouldn’t we be going?”

It was Lucilla, standing close in front of his position beneath the tree. Duncan waited beside her. Both of them had shouldered their packs.

While he sat thinking, night had fallen. Rich starlight created vague shadows in the glade. Teg lifted himself to his feet, took his pack and, bending to avoid the low branches, emerged into the glade. Duncan helped Teg shoulder his pack.

“Schwangyu will consider this eventually,” Lucilla said. “Her searchers will come after us here. You know it.”

“Not until they have followed out the false trail and found the end of it,” Teg said. “Come.”

He led the way westward through an opening in the trees.

Three nights he had led them along what he called “Patrin’s memory-path.” As he walked on this fourth night, Teg berated himself for not projecting the logical consequences of Patrin’s behavior.

I understood the depths of his loyalty but I did not project that loyalty into a most obvious result. We were together so many years I thought I knew his mind as I knew my own. Patrin, damn you! There was no need for you to die!

Teg admitted to himself then that there had been a need. Patrin had seen it. The Mentat had not permitted himself to see it. Logic could move just as blindly as any other faculty.

As the Bene Gesserit often said and demonstrated.

So we walk. Schwangyu does not expect this.

Teg was forced to admit that walking the wild places of Gammu created a whole new perspective for him. This entire region had been allowed to overgrow with plant life during the Famine Times and the Scattering. It had been replanted later but mostly as a random wilderness. Secret trails and private landmarks guided today’s access. Teg imagined Patrin as a youth learning this region—that rocky butte visible in starlight through a gap in the trees, that spiked promontory, these lanes through giant trees.

“They will expect us to make a run for a no-ship,” he and Patrin had agreed, fleshing out their plan. “The decoy must take the searchers in that direction.”

Patrin had not said that he would be the decoy.

Teg swallowed past a lump in his throat.

Duncan could not be protected in the Keep, he justified himself.

That was true.

Lucilla had jittered through their first day under the life-shield that protected them from discovery by the instruments of aerial searchers.

“We must get word to Taraza!”

“When we can.”

“What if something happens to you? I must know all of your escape plan.”

“If something happens to me, you will not be able to follow Patrin’s path. There isn’t time to put it in your memory.”

Duncan took little part in the conversation that day. He watched them silently or dozed, awakening fitful and with an angry look in his eyes.

On the second day under the shielding blanket, Duncan suddenly demanded of Teg: “Why do they want to kill me?”

“To frustrate the Sisterhood’s plan for you,” Teg said.

Duncan glared at Lucilla. “What is that plan?”

When Lucilla did not answer, Duncan said: “She knows. She knows because I’m supposed to depend on her. I’m supposed to love her!”

Teg thought Lucilla concealed her dismay quite well. Obviously, her plans for the ghola had fallen into disarray, all of the sequencing thrown out of joint by this flight.

Duncan’s behavior revealed another possibility: Was the ghola a latent Truthsayer? What additional powers had been bred into this ghola by the sly Tleilaxu?

At their second nightfall in the wilderness, Lucilla was full of accusations. “Taraza ordered you to restore his original memories! How can you do that out here?”

“When we reach sanctuary.”

A silent and acutely alert Duncan accompanied them that night. There was a new vitality in him. He had heard!

Nothing must harm Teg, Duncan thought. Wherever and whatever sanctuary might be, Teg must reach it safely. Then, I will know!

Duncan was not sure what he would know but now he fully accepted the prize in it. This wilderness must lead to that goal. He recalled staring out at the wild places from the Keep and how he had thought to be free here. That sense of untouched freedom had vanished. The wilderness was only a path to something more important.

Lucilla, bringing up the rear of this march, forced herself to remain calm, alert, and to accept what she could not change. Part of her awareness held firmly to Taraza’s orders:

“Stay close to the ghola and, when the moment comes, complete your assignment.”

One pace at a time, Teg’s body measured out the kilometers. This was the fourth night. Patrin had estimated four nights to reach their goal.

And what a goal!

The emergency escape plan centered on a discovery Patrin had made here as a teenager of one of Gammu’s many mysteries. Patrin’s words came back to Teg: “On the excuse of a personal reconnaissance, I returned to the place two days ago. It is untouched. I am still the only person who has ever been there.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I took my own precautions when I left Gammu years ago, little things that would be disturbed by another person. Nothing has been moved.”

“A Harkonnen no-globe?”

“Very ancient but the chambers are still intact and functioning.”

“What about food, water . . .”

“Everything you could want or need is there, laid down in the nullentropy bins at the core.”

Teg and Patrin made their plans, hoping they would never have to use this emergency bolt hole, holding the secret of it close while Patrin replayed for Teg the hidden way to this childhood discovery.

Behind Teg, Lucilla let out a small gasp as she tripped over a root.

I should have warned her, Teg thought. Duncan obviously was following Teg’s lead by sound. Lucilla, just as obviously, had much of her attention on her own private thoughts.

Her facial resemblance to Darwi Odrade was remarkable, Teg told himself. Back there at the Keep, the two women side by side, he had marked the differences dictated by their differing ages. Lucilla’s youth showed itself in more subcutaneous fat, a rounding of the facial flesh. But the voices! Timbre, accent, tricks of atonal inflection, the common stamp of Bene Gesserit speech mannerisms. They would be almost impossible to tell apart in the dark.

Knowing the Bene Gesserit as he did, Teg knew this was no accident. Given the Sisterhood’s propensity for doubling and redoubling its prized genetic lines to protect the investment, there had to be a common ancestral source.

Atreides, all of us, he thought.

Taraza had not revealed her design for the ghola, but just being within that design gave Teg access to the growing shape of it. No complete pattern, but he could already sense a wholeness there.

Generation after generation, the Sisterhood dealing with the Tleilaxu, buying Idaho gholas, training them here on Gammu, only to have them assassinated. All of that time waiting for the right moment. It was like a terrible game, which had come into frenetic prominence because a girl capable of commanding the worms had appeared on Rakis.

Gammu itself had to be part of the design. Caladanian marks all over the place. Danian subtleties piled atop the more brutal ancient ways. Something other than population had come out of the Danian Sanctuary where the Tyrant’s grandmother, the Lady Jessica, had lived out her days.

Teg had seen the overt and covert marks when he made his first reconnaissance tour of Gammu.

Wealth!

The signs were here to be read. It flowed around their universe, moving amoebalike to insinuate itself into any place where it could lodge. There was wealth from the Scattering on Gammu, Teg knew. Wealth so great that few suspected (or could imagine) its size and power.

He stopped walking abruptly. Physical patterns in the immediate landscape demanded his full attention. Ahead of them lay an exposed ledge of barren rock, its identifying markers planted in his memory by Patrin. This passage would be one of the more dangerous.

“No caves or heavy growth to conceal you. Have the blanket ready.”

Teg removed the life-shield from his pack and carried it over his arm. Once more he indicated that they should continue. The dark weave of the shield fabric hissed against his body as he moved.

Lucilla was becoming less of a cipher, he thought. She aspired to a Lady in front of her name. The Lady Lucilla. No doubt that had a pleasing sound to her. A few such titled Reverend Mothers were appearing now that Major Houses were emerging from the long obscurity imposed by the Tyrant’s Golden Path.

Lucilla, the Seductress-Imprinter.

All such women of the Sisterhood were sexual adepts. Teg’s own mother had educated him in the workings of that system, sending him to well-selected local women when he was quite young, sensitizing him to the signs he must observe within himself as well as in the women. It was a forbidden training outside of Chapter House surveillance, but Teg’s mother had been one of the Sisterhood’s heretics.

“You will have a need for this, Miles.”

No doubt there had been some prescience in her. She had armed him against the Imprinters who were trained in orgasmic amplification to fix the unconscious ties—male to female.

Lucilla and Duncan. An imprint on her would be an imprint on Odrade.

Teg almost heard the pieces go snick as they locked together in his mind. Then what of the young woman on Rakis? Would Lucilla teach the techniques of seduction to her imprinted pupil, arm him to ensnare the one who commanded worms?

Not enough data yet for a Prime Computation.

Teg paused at the end of the dangerous open rock passage. He put away the blanket and sealed his pack while Duncan and Lucilla waited close behind. Teg heaved a sigh. The blanket always worried him. It did not have the deflective powers of a full battle shield but if a lasgun’s beam hit the thing the consequent quick-fire could be fatal.

Dangerous toys!

This was how Teg always classified such weapons and mechanical devices. Better to rely on your wits, your own flesh, and the Five Attitudes of the Bene Gesserit Way as his mother had taught him.

Use the instruments only when they are absolutely required to amplify the flesh: that was the Bene Gesserit teaching.

“Why are we stopping?” Lucilla whispered.

“I am listening to the night,” Teg said.

Duncan, his face a ghostly blur in the tree-filtered starlight, stared at Teg. Teg’s features reassured him. They were lodged somewhere in an unavailable memory, Duncan thought. I can trust this man.

Lucilla suspected that they were stopping here because Teg’s old body demanded respite but she could not bring herself to say this. Teg said his escape plan included a way of getting Duncan to Rakis. Very well. That was all that mattered for the moment.

She already had figured out that this sanctuary somewhere ahead of them must involve a no-ship or a no-chamber. Nothing else would suffice. Somehow, Patrin had been the key to it. Teg’s few hints had revealed that Patrin was the source of their escape route.

Lucilla had been the first to realize how Patrin would have to pay for their escape. Patrin was the weakest link. He remained behind where Schwangyu could capture him. Capture of the decoy was inevitable. Only a fool would suppose that a Reverend Mother of Schwangyu’s powers would be incapable of wresting secrets from a mere male. Schwangyu would not even require the heavy persuasion. The subtleties of Voice and those painful forms of interrogation that remained a Sisterhood monopoly—the agony box and nerve-node pressures—those were all she would require.

The form Patrin’s loyalty would take had been clear to Lucilla then. How could Teg have been so blind?

Love!

That long, trusting bond between the two men. Schwangyu would act swiftly and brutally. Patrin knew it. Teg had not examined his own certain knowledge.

Duncan’s voice shocked her from these thoughts.

“’Thopter! Behind us!”

“Quick!” Teg whipped the blanket from his pack and threw it over them. They huddled in earth-smelling darkness, listening to the ornithopter pass above them. It did not pause or return.

When they felt certain they had not been detected, Teg once more led them up Patrin’s memory-track.

“That was a searcher,” Lucilla said. “They are beginning to suspect . . . or Patrin . . .”

“Save your energy for walking,” Teg snapped.

She did not press him. They both knew Patrin was dead. Argument over this had been exhausted.

This Mentat goes deep, Lucilla told herself.

Teg was the child of a Reverend Mother and that mother had trained him beyond the permitted limits before the Sisterhood took him into their manipulative hands. The ghola was not the only one here with unknown resources.

Their trail turned back and forth upon itself, a game track climbing a steep hill through thick forest. Starlight did not penetrate the trees. Only the Mentat’s marvelous memory kept them on the path.

Lucilla felt duff underfoot. She listened to Teg’s movements, reading them to guide her feet.

How silent Duncan is, she thought. How closed in upon himself. He obeyed orders. He followed where Teg led them. She sensed the quality of Duncan’s obedience. He kept his own counsel. Duncan obeyed because it suited him to do so—for now. Schwangyu’s rebellion had planted something wildly independent in the ghola. And what things of their own had the Tleilaxu planted in him?

Teg stopped at a level spot beneath tall trees to regain his wind. Lucilla could hear him breathing deeply. This reminded her once more that the Mentat was a very old man, far too old for these exertions. She spoke quietly:

“Are you all right, Miles?”

“I’ll tell you when I’m not.”

“How much farther?” Duncan asked.

“Only a short way now.”

Presently, he resumed his course through the night. “We must hurry,” he said. “This saddle-back ridge is the last bit.”

Now that he had accepted the fact of Patrin’s death, Teg’s thoughts swung like a compass needle to Schwangyu and what she must be experiencing. Schwangyu would feel her world falling in around her. The fugitives had been gone four nights! People who could elude a Reverend Mother this way might do anything! Of course, the fugitives probably were off-planet by now. A no-ship. But what if . . .

Schwangyu’s thoughts would be full of what-ifs.

Patrin had been the fragile link but Patrin had been well trained in the removal of fragile links, trained by a master—Miles Teg.

Teg dashed dampness from his eyes with a quick shake of his head. Immediate necessity required that core of internal honesty which he could not avoid. Teg had never been a good liar, not even to himself. Quite early in his training, he had realized that his mother and the others involved in his upbringing had conditioned him to a deep sense of personal honesty.

Adherence to a code of honor.

The code itself, as he recognized its shape in him, attracted Teg’s fascinated attention. It began with recognition that humans were not created equal, that they possessed different inherited abilities and experienced different events in their lives. This produced people of different accomplishments and different worth.

To obey this code, Teg realized early that he must place himself accurately into the flow of observable hierarchies accepting that a moment might come when he could evolve no further.

The code’s conditioning went deep. He could never find its ultimate roots. It obviously was attached to something intrinsic to his humanity. It dictated with enormous power the limits of behavior permitted to those above as well as to those below him in the hierarchical pyramid.

The key token of exchange: loyalty.

Loyalty went upward and downward, lodging wherever it found a deserving attachment. Such loyalties, Teg knew, were securely locked into him. He felt no doubts that Taraza would support him in everything except a situation demanding that he be sacrificed to the survival of the Sisterhood. And that was right in itself. That was where the loyalties of all of them eventually lodged.

I am Taraza’s Bashar. That is what the code says.

And this was the code that had killed Patrin.

I hope you suffered no pain, old friend.

Once more, Teg paused under the trees. Taking his fighting knife from its boot sheath, he scratched a small mark in a tree beside him.

“What are you doing?” Lucilla demanded.

“This is a secret mark,” Teg said. “Only the people I have trained know about it. And Taraza, of course.”

“But why are you . . .”

“I will explain later.”

Teg moved forward, stopping at another tree where he made the tiny mark, a thing which an animal might make with a claw, something to blend into the natural forms of this wilderness.

As he worked his way ahead, Teg realized he had come to a decision about Lucilla. Her plans for Duncan must be deflected. Every Mentat projection Teg could make about Duncan’s safety and sanity required this. The awakening of Duncan’s pre-ghola memories must come ahead of any Imprint by Lucilla. It would not be easy to block her, Teg knew. It required a better liar than he had ever been to dissemble for a Reverend Mother.

It must be made to appear accidental, the normal outcome of the circumstances. Lucilla must never suspect opposition. Teg held few illusions about succeeding against an aroused Reverend Mother in close quarters. Better to kill her. That, he thought he could do. But the consequences! Taraza could never be made to see such a bloody act as obedience to her orders.

No, he would have to bide his time, wait and watch and listen.

They emerged into a small open area with a high barrier of volcanic rock close ahead of them. Scrubby bushes and low thorn trees grew close against the rock, visible as dark blotches in the starlight.

Teg saw the blacker outline of a crawl space under the bushes.

“It’s belly crawling from here in,” Teg said.

“I smell ashes,” Lucilla said. “Something’s been burned here.”

“This is where the decoy came,” Teg said. “He left a charred area just down to our left—simulating the marks of a no-ship’s take-off burn.”

Lucilla’s quickly indrawn breath was audible. The audacity! Should Schwangyu dare bring in a prescient searcher to follow Duncan’s tracks (because Duncan alone among them had no Siona blood in his ancestry to shield him) all of the marks would agree that they had come this way and fled off-planet in a no-ship . . . provided . . .

“But where are you taking us?” she asked.

“It’s a Harkonnen no-globe,” Teg said. “It has been here for millennia and now it’s ours.”