Dune

Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.

—MENTAT FIXE (ADACTO)

Idaho, seated alone at his console, encountered an entry he had stored in Shipsystems during his first days of confinement, and found himself dumped (he applied the word later) into attitudes and sensory awareness of that earlier time. It no longer was afternoon of a frustrating day in the no-ship. He was back there, stretched between then and now the way serial ghola lives linked this incarnation to his original birth.

Immediately, he saw what he had come to call “the net” and the elderly couple defined by criss-crossed lines, bodies visible through a shimmering of jeweled ropes—green, blue, gold, and a silver so brilliant it made his eyes ache.

He sensed godlike stability in these people, but something common about them. The word ordinary came to mind. The by-now-familiar garden landscape stretched out behind them: floral bushes (roses, he thought), rolling lawns, tall trees.

The couple stared back at him with an intensity that made Idaho feel naked.

New power in the vision! It no longer was confined to the Great Hold, an increasingly compulsive magnet drawing him down there so frequently he knew the watchdogs were alerted.

Is he another Kwisatz Haderach?

There was a level of suspicion the Bene Gesserit could achieve that would kill him if it grew. And they were watching him now! Questions, worried speculations. Despite this, he could not turn away from the vision.

Why did that elderly couple look so familiar? Someone from his past? Family?

Mentat riffling of his memories produced nothing to fit the speculation. Round faces. Abbreviated chins. Fat wrinkles at the jowls. Dark eyes. The net obscured their color. The woman wore a long blue and green dress that concealed her feet. A white apron stained with green covered the dress from ample bosom to just below her waist. Garden tools dangled from apron loops. She carried a trowel in her left hand. Her hair was gray. Wisps of it had escaped a confining green scarf and blew around her eyes, emphasizing laughter lines there. She appeared . . . grandmotherly.

The man suited her as though created by the same artist as a perfect match. Bib overalls over a mounded stomach. No hat. Those same dark eyes with reflections twinkling in them. A brush of close-cropped wiry gray hair.

He had the most benign expression Idaho had ever seen. Upcurved smile creases at the corners of his mouth. He held a small shovel in his left hand, and on his extended right palm he balanced what appeared to be a small metal ball. The ball emitted a piercing whistle that made Idaho clap his hands over his ears. This did not stop the sound. It faded away of itself. He lowered his hands.

Reassuring faces. That thought aroused Idaho’s suspicions because now he recognized the familiarity. They looked somewhat like Face Dancers, even to the pug noses.

He leaned forward but the vision kept its distance. “Face Dancers,” he whispered.

Net and elderly couple vanished.

They were replaced by Murbella in practice-floor leotards of glistening ebony. He had to reach out and touch her before he could believe she really stood there.

“Duncan? What is it? You’re all sweaty.”

“I . . . think it’s something the damned Tleilaxu planted in me. I keep seeing . . . I think they’re Face Dancers. They . . . they look at me and just now . . . a whistle. It hurt.”

She glanced up at the comeyes but did not appear worried. This was something the Sisters could know without it presenting immediate dangers . . . except possibly to Scytale.

She sank to her haunches beside him and put a hand on his arm. “Something they did to your body in the tanks?”

“No!”

“But you said . . .”

“My body’s not just a piece of new baggage for this trip. It has all of the chemistry and substance I ever had. It’s my mind that’s different.”

That worried her. She knew the Bene Gesserit concern over wild talents. “Damn that Scytale!”

“I’ll find it,” he said.

He closed his eyes and heard Murbella stand. Her hand went away from his arm.

“Maybe you shouldn’t do that, Duncan.”

She sounded far away.

Memory. Where did they hide the secret thing? Deep in the original cells? Until this moment, he had thought of his memory as a Mentat tool. He could call up his own images from long-ago moments in front of mirrors. Close up, examining an age wrinkle. Looking at a woman behind him—two faces in the mirror and his face full of questions.

Faces. A succession of masks, different views of this person he called myself. Slightly imbalanced faces. Hair sometimes gray, sometimes the jet karakul of his current life. Sometimes humorous, sometimes grave and seeking inward for wisdom to meet a new day. Somewhere in all of that lay a consciousness that observed and deliberated. Someone who made choices. The Tleilaxu had tampered with that.

Idaho felt his blood pumping hard and knew danger was present. This was what he was intended to experience . . . but not by the Tleilaxu. He had been born with it.

This is what it means to be alive.

No memory from his other lives, nothing the Tleilaxu had done to him, none of that changed his deepest awareness one whit.

He opened his eyes. Murbella still stood near but her expression was veiled. So that’s how she will look as a Reverend Mother.

He did not like this change in her.

“What happens if the Bene Gesserit fail?” he asked.

When she did not reply, he nodded. Yes. That’s the worst assumption. The Sisterhood down history’s sewerpipe. And you don’t want that, my beloved.

He could see it in her face when she turned and left him.

Looking up at the comeyes, he said: “Dar. I must talk to you, Dar.”

No response from any of the mechanisms around him. He had not expected one. Still, he knew he could talk to her and she would have to listen.

“I’ve been coming at our problem from the other direction,” he said. And he imagined the busy whirring of recorders as they spun the sounds of his voice into ridulian crystals. “I’ve been getting into the minds of Honored Matres. I know I’ve done it. Murbella resonates.”

That would alert them. He had an Honored Matre of his own. But had was not the proper word. He did not have Murbella. Not even in bed. They had each other. Matched the way those people in his vision appeared to be matched. Was that what he saw there? Two older people sexually trained by Honored Matres?

“I look at another issue now,” he said. “How to overcome the Bene Gesserit.”

That threw down the gauntlet.

“Episodes,” he said. A word Odrade was fond of using.

“That’s how we have to see what’s happening to us. Little episodes. Even the worst-case assumption has to be screened against that background. The Scattering has a magnitude that dwarfs anything we do.”

There! That demonstrated his value to the Sisters. It put Honored Matres in a better perspective. They were back here in the Old Empire. Fellow dwarves. He knew Odrade would see it. Bell would make her see it.

Somewhere out there in the Infinite Universe, a jury had brought in a verdict against Honored Matres. Law and its managers had not prevailed for the hunters. He suspected that his vision had shown him two of the jurors. And if they were Face Dancers, they were not Scytale’s Face Dancers. Those two people behind the shimmering net belonged to no one but themselves.