"I fear that you have been taken from us," the Rabbi said. "What have I done to you? What have I done? And all in the name of honor."
He looked at the instruments on his study wall that reported the nightly power accumulations from the vertical-axis windmills placed around the farmstead. The instruments said the machines were humming away up there, storing energy for the morrow. That was a gift of the Bene Gesserit: freedom from Ix. Independence. What a peculiar word.
Without looking at Rebecca, he said: "I find this thing of Other Memory very difficult and always have. Memory should bring wisdom but it does not. It is how we order the memory and where we apply our knowledge."
He turned and looked at her, his face falling into shadows. "What is it this one inside you says? This one you think of as Lucilla?"
Rebecca could see it pleased him to say Lucilla's name. If Lucilla could speak through a daughter of Secret Israel, then she still lived and had not been betrayed.
Rebecca lowered her gaze as she spoke. "She says we have these inner images, sounds and sensations that come at command or intrude under necessity."
"Necessity, yes! And what is that except reports of senses from flesh that may have been where you should not have been and done offensive things?"
Other bodies, other memories, Rebecca thought. Having experienced this she knew she could never willingly abandon it. Perhaps I have indeed become Bene Gesserit. That is what he fears, of course.
"I will tell you a thing," the Rabbi said. "This 'crucial intersection of living awareness,' as they call it, that is nothing unless you know how your own decisions go out from you like threads into the lives of others."
"To see our own actions in the reactions of others, yes, that is how the Sisters view it."
"That is wisdom. What is it the lady says they seek?"
"Influence on the maturing of humankind."
"Mmmmmm. And she finds that events are not beyond her influence, merely beyond her senses. That is almost wise. But maturity ... ahhh, Rebecca. Do we interfere with a higher plan? Is it the right of humans to set limits on the nature of Yaweh? I think Leto II understood that. This lady in you denies it."
"She says he was a damnable tyrant."
"He was but there have been wise tyrants before him and doubtless will be more after us."
"They call him Shaitan."
"He had Satan's own powers. I share their fear of that. He was not so much prescient as he was a cement. He fixed the shape of what he saw."
"That is what the lady says. But she says it is their grail that he preserved."
"Again, they are almost wise."
A great sigh shook the Rabbi and once more he looked to the instruments on his wall. Energy for the morrow.
He returned his attention to Rebecca. She was changed. He could not avoid awareness of it. She had become very like the Bene Gesserit. It was understandable. Her mind was filled with all of those people from Lampadas. But they were not Gadarene swine to be driven into the sea and their diabolism with them. And I am not another Jesus.
"This thing they tell you about the Mother Superior Odrade --that she often damns her own Archivists and the Archives with them. What a thing! Are not Archives like the books in which we preserve our wisdom?"
"Then am I an Archivist, Rabbi?"
Her question confounded him but it also illuminated the problem. He smiled. "I tell you something, daughter. I admit to a little sympathy with this Odrade. There is always something grumbling about Archivists."
"Is that wisdom, Rabbi?" How shyly she asked it!
"Believe me, daughter, it is. How carefully the Archivist suppresses even the smallest hint of judgment. One word after another. Such arrogance!"
"How do they judge which words to use, Rabbi?"
"Ahhh, a bit of wisdom comes to you, daughter. But these Bene Gesserit have not achieved wisdom and it is their grail that prevents it."
She could see it on his face. He tries to arm me with doubts about these lives I carry.
"Let me tell you a thing about the Bene Gesserit," he said. Nothing came into his mind then. No words, no sage advice. This had not happened to him for years. There was only one course open to him; speak from the heart.
"Perhaps they have been too long on the road to Damascus without a blinding flash of illumination, Rebecca. I hear them say they act for the benefit of humankind. Somehow, I cannot see this in them, nor do I believe the Tyrant saw it."
When Rebecca started to reply, he stopped her with an upraised hand. "Mature humanity? That is their grail? Is it not the mature fruit that is plucked and eaten?"
On the floor of Junction's Great Hall, Rebecca remembered these words, seeing the personification of them not in the lives she preserved but in the actions of her captors.
Great Honored Matre had finished eating. She wiped her hands on the gown of an attendant.
"Let her approach," Great Honored Matre said.
Pain lanced Rebecca's left shoulder and she lurched forward on her knees. The one called Logno had come up behind with the stealth of a hunter and had jabbed a shuntgoad into the captive's flesh.
Laughter echoed through the room.
Rebecca staggered to her feet and, staying just ahead of the goad, arrived at the foot of the steps leading up to the Great Honored Matre where the goad stopped her.
"Down!" Logno emphasized the command with another jab.
Rebecca sank to her knees and stared straight ahead at the risers of the steps. The yellow tiles displayed tiny scratches. Somehow, these flaws reassured her.
Great Honored Matre said: "Let her be, Logno. I wish answers, not screams." Then to Rebecca: "Look at me, woman!"
Rebecca raised her eyes and stared up at the face of death. What an unremarkable face it was to have that threat in it. So ... so evenly featured. Almost plain. Such a small figure. This amplified the peril Rebecca sensed. What powers the small woman must have to rule these terrible people.
"Do you know why you are here?" Great Honored Matre demanded.
In her most obsequious tones, Rebecca said: "I was told, O Great Honored Matre, that you wished me to recount the lore of Truthsay and other matters of Gammu."
"You were mated to a Truthsayer!" It was accusation.
"He is dead, Great Honored Matre."
"No, Logno!" This was directed at the aide who lunged forward with the goad. "This wretch does not know our ways. Now, go stand at the side, Logno, where I will not be annoyed by your impetuosity."
"You will speak to me only in response to questions or when I command it, wretch!" Great Honored Matre shouted.
Rebecca cringed.
Speaker whispered in Rebecca's head: That was almost Voice. Be warned.
"Have you ever known any of the ones who call themselves Bene Gesserit?" Great Honored Matre asked.
Really now! "Everyone has encountered the witches, Great Honored Matre."
"What do you know of them?"
So this is why they brought me here.
"Only what I have heard, Great Honored Matre."
"Are they brave?"
"It is said they always try to avoid risks, Great Honored Matre."
You are worthy of us, Rebecca. That is the pattern of these whores. The marble rolls down the incline in its proper channel. They think you dislike us.
"Are these Bene Gesserit rich?" Great Honored Matre asked.
"I think the witches are poor beside you, Honored Matre," Rebecca said.
"Why do you say that? Do not speak just to please me!"
"But Honored Matre, could the witches send a great ship from Gammu to here just to carry me? And where are the witches now? They hide from you."
"Yes, where are they?" Honored Matre demanded.
Rebecca shrugged.
"Were you on Gammu when the one they called Bashar fled us?" Honored Matre asked.
She knows you were. "I was there, Great Honored Matre, and heard the stories. I do not believe them."
"Believe what we
tell you to believe, wretch! What are the stories you heard?"
"That he moved with a speed the eye could not see. That he killed many ... people with only his hands. That he stole a no-ship and fled into the Scattering."
"Believe that he fled, wretch." See how she fears! She cannot hide the trembling.
"Speak of the Truthsay," Great Honored Matre commanded.
"Great Honored Matre, I do not understand the Truthsay. I know only the words of my Sholem, my husband. I can repeat his words if you wish."
Great Honored Matre considered this, glancing from side to side at her aides and councillors, who were beginning to show signs of boredom. Why doesn't she just kill this wretch?
Rebecca, seeing the violence in eyes that glared orange at her, shrank into herself. She thought of her husband by his love-name, Shoel, now, and his words comforted. He had shown the "proper talent" while still a child. Some called it an instinct but Shoel had never used that word. "Trust your gut feelings. That's what my teachers always said."
It was such a down-to-earth expression that he said it usually threw off the ones who came seeking "the esoteric mystery."
"There is no secret," Shoel had said. "It's training and hard work like anything else. You exercise what they call 'petit perception,' the ability to detect very small variations in human reactions."
Rebecca could see such small reactions in those who stared down at her. They want me dead. Why?
Speaker had advice. The great ones likes to show off her power over the others. She does not do what others want but what she thinks they do not want.
"Great Honored Matre," Rebecca ventured, "you are so rich and powerful. Surely you must have a place of menial employment where I may be of service to you."
"You wish to enter my service?" What a feral grin!
"It would make me happy, Great Honored Matre."
"I am not here to make you happy."
Logno took a step forward onto the floor. "Then make us happy, Dama. Let us have some sport with--"
"Silence!" Ahhh, that was a mistake, calling her by the intimate name here among the others.
Logno drew back and almost dropped the goad.
Great Honored Matre stared down at Rebecca with an orange glare. "You will go back to your miserable existence on Gammu, wretch. I will not kill you. That would be a mercy. Having seen what we could give you, live your life without it."
"Great Honored Matre!" Logno protested. "We have suspicions about--"
"I have suspicions about you, Logno. Send her back and alive! Hear me? Do you think us incapable of finding her if we ever have need to her?"
"No, Great Honored Matre."
"We are watching you, wretch," Great Honored Matre said.
Bait! She thinks of you as something to capture larger game. How interesting. This one has a head and uses it in spite of her violent nature. So that's how she came to power.
All the way back to Gammu, confined to stinking quarters in a ship that had once served the Guild, Rebecca considered her predicament. Surely, those whores had not expected her to mistake their intent. But ... perhaps they did. Subservience, cringing. They revel in such things.
She knew this came from a bit of her Shoel's Truthsay as much as from the Lampadas advisors.
"You accumulate a lot of small observations, sensed but never brought to consciousness," Shoel had said. "Cumulatively, they say things to you but not in a language anyone speaks. Language isn't necessary."
She had thought this one of the oddest things she had ever heard. But that was before her own Agony. In bed at night, comforted by darkness and the touch of loving flesh, they had acted wordlessly but had shared words, too.
"Language obstructs you," Shoel had said. "What you do is learn to read your own reactions. Sometimes, you can find words to describe this ... sometimes ... not."
"No words? Not even for the questions?"
"Words you want, is it? How are these? Trust. Belief. Truth. Honesty."
"Those are good words, Shoel."
"But they miss the mark. Don't depend on them."
"Then what do you depend on?"
"My own internal reactions. I read myself, not the person in front of me. I always know a lie because I want to turn my back on the liar."
"So that's how you do it!" Pounding his bare arm.
"Others do it differently. One person I heard say she knew a lie because she wanted to put her arm through the liar's arm and walk a ways, comforting the liar. You may think that's nonsense, but it works."
"I think it's very wise, Shoel." Love speaking. She did not really know what he meant.
"My precious love," he said, cradling her head on his arm, "Truthsayers have a Truthsense that, once awakened, works all the time. Please don't tell me I'm wise when it's your love speaking."
"I'm sorry, Shoel." She liked the smell of his arm and buried her head in the crook of it, tickling him. "But I want to know everything you know."
He pushed her head into a more comfortable position. "You know what my Third Stage instructor said? 'Know nothing! Learn to be totally naive.'"
She was astonished. "Nothing at all?"
"You approach everything with a clean slate, nothing on you or in you. Whatever comes is written there by itself."
She began to see it. "Nothing to interfere."
"Correct. You are the original ignorant savage, completely unsophisticated to the point where you back right into ultimate sophistication. You find it without looking for it, you might say."
"Now, that is wise, Shoel. I'll bet you were the best student they ever had, the quickest and the--"
"I thought it was interminable nonsense."
"You didn't!"
"Until one day I read a little twitch in me. It wasn't the movement of a muscle or something someone else might detect. Just a ... a twitch."
"Where was it?"
"Nowhere I could describe. But my Fourth Stage instructor had prepared me for it. 'Grab that thing with gentle hands. Delicately.'One of the students thought he meant your real hands. Oh, how we laughed."
"That was cruel." She touched his cheek and felt the beginning of his dark stubble. It was late but she did not feel sleepy.
"I suppose it was cruel. But when the twitch came, I knew it. I had never felt such a thing before. I was surprised by it, too, because knowing it then, I knew it had been there all along. It was familiar. It was my Truthsense twitching."
She thought she could feel Truthsense stirring within herself. The feeling of wonder in his voice aroused something.
"It was mine then," he said. "It belonged to me and I belonged to it. No separation ever again."
"How wonderful that must be." Awe and envy in her voice.
"No! Some of it I hate. Seeing some people this way is like seeing them eviscerated, their guts hanging out."
"That's disgusting!"
"Yes, but there are compensations, love. These are people you meet, people who are like beautiful flowers extended to you by an innocent child. Innocence. My own innocence responds and my Truthsense is strengthened. That is what you do for me, my love."
The no-ship of the Honored Matres arrived at Gammu and they sent her down to the Landing Flat in the garbage lighter. It disgorged her beside the ship's discards and excrement but she did not mind. Home! I'm home and Lampadas survives.
The Rabbi, however, did not share her enthusiasm.
Once more, they sat in his study, but now she felt more familiar with Other Memory, much more confident. He could see this.
"You are even more like them than ever! It's unclean."
"Rabbi, we all have unclean ancestors. I am fortunate in that I know some of mine."
"What is this? What are you saying?"
"All of us are descendants of people who did nasty things, Rabbi. We don't like to think of barbarians in our ancestry but they're there."
"Such talk!"
"Reverend Mothers can recall them all, Rabbi. Remember, it is the victors who
breed. You understand?"
"I've never heard you talk so boldly. What has happened to you, daughter?"
"I survived, knowing that victory sometimes is achieved at a moral price."
"What is this? These are evil words."
"Evil? Barbarism is not even the proper word for some of the evil things our ancestors did. The ancestors of all of us, Rabbi."
She saw she had hurt him and felt the cruelty of her own words but could not stop. How could he escape the truth of what she said? He was an honorable man.