Chapterhouse: Dune (Dune, #6)

by Frank Herbert

The loosely organized confederation of planetary governments assembled after the Famine Times and the Scattering depended heavily on the Sisterhood for vital services and reliable communications, but old factions persisted—CHOAM, Spacing Guild, Tleilaxu, remnant pockets of the Divided God’s priesthood, even Fish Speaker auxiliaries and schismatic assemblages. The Divided God had bequeathed humankind a divided empire—all of whose factions were suddenly moot because of rampaging Honored Matre assaults from the Scattering. The Bene Gesserit—holding to most of their old forms—were the natural prime target for attack.

Mystery surrounded the period before his death in the destruction of Dune. He did something on Gammu to ignite the unbridled fury of the Honored Matres. His suicidal stand on Dune should not have been enough to bring this berserk response. There were rumors, bits and pieces from his days on Gammu before the Dune disaster. He could move too fast for the human eye to see!

Self-awareness: facing mirrors that pass through the universe, gathering new images on the way—endlessly reflexive. The infinite seen as finite, the analogue of consciousness carrying the sensed bits of infinity.

The Honored Matres behaved hysterically. All outsiders were the enemy. The only people they appeared to trust were the men they sexually enslaved, and those only to a limited degree.

By this time he already had begun learning about the giant sandworm the Sisterhood had spirited from Rakis. Death of that worm had produced creatures called sandtrout. Sandtrout were why the desert grew. Some of this history touched accounts of his previous incarnation—a man they called “The Bashar.” A great soldier who had died when terrible women called Honored Matres destroyed Rakis.

Because of the three people confined there—Scytale, the last surviving Tleilaxu Master; Murbella and Duncan Idaho, the sexually bonded pair, held as much by their mutual entrapment as they were by the no-ship.

“Even Lucilla?” Odrade asked. The Reverend Mother Lucilla, vice chancellor of Lampadas, had been instructed to flee at the first sign of trouble, taking with her as many of the doomed as she could store in Other Memory. “The spies said all dead,” Bellonda insisted.

What did I take? The right to choose a role in history.

If you fitted yourself too tightly to one thing, other abilities atrophied. We become what we do.

There appeared to be no stopping the Missionaria in its preparations for our Sheeana. If the giant sandworms developed—Shai-hulud returned! And the Missionaria Protectiva of the Bene Gesserit was ready to launch her onto an unsuspecting humanity prepared for religious adoration. The myth become real . . . just the way she tried to make that sculpture back there a reality. Holy Sheeana! The God Emperor is her thrall! See how the sacred sandworms obey her! Leto is returned!

And always the lesson of the Honored Matres! Murbella’s clues said Fish Speakers and Reverend Mothers in extremis formed the Honored Matres. Fish Speaker democracy become Honored Matre autocracy! The clues were too numerous to ignore.

What kind of a universe would accept us merely as fugitives and not as the Sacred Sheeana with her consort? Not that Duncan was a consort. That had been the Bene Gesserit’s original plan: “Bond Sheeana to Duncan. We control him and he can control her.”

Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.

No Sister we sent out in the original Scattering ever returned. It was written large in their minds: “Did renegade Bene Gesserit create the Honored Matres?” Much suggested it. Then why did they resort to sexual enslavement of males? Murbella’s historical prattlings did not satisfy. Everything about this went against Bene Gesserit teaching.

Their common Atreides ancestor from the Tyrant’s eons, Siona Ibn Fuad al-Seyefa Atreides, had imparted to her descendants this ability that hid them from prescient searchers. Every person walking openly on Chapterhouse shared that ancestral protection.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

“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.”

Education is no substitute for intelligence. That elusive quality is defined only in part by puzzle-solving ability. It is in the creation of new puzzles reflecting what your senses report that you round out the definition.

“We call his Golden Path ‘the paper chase.’ He blew it into the infinite winds and said: ‘See? There is where it goes.’ That’s the Scattering.” “Some prefer to call it the Seeking.”

“We say Muad’Dib created a future. Leto II un-created it.”

Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant.

Taraza was credited with saving the Sisterhood. That silenced much opposition. Taraza had said Honored Matres were essentially barbarians and their violence, although not totally deflectable, could be guided into bloody displays. Events had more or less verified this.

“Educational bureaucracies dull a child’s questing sensitivity.” Odrade explaining. “The young must be damped down. Never let them know how good they can be. That brings change. Spend lots of committee time talking about how to deal with exceptional students. Don’t spend any time dealing with how the conventional teacher feels threatened by emerging talents and squelches them because of a deep-seated desire to feel superior and safe in a safe environment.”

Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all the legal professions of history have based their job security.

“Show me a completely smooth operation and I’ll show you someone who’s covering mistakes. Real boats rock.”

Schwangyu of the Gammu Keep had gone that way, killed by attacking Honored Matres. Plenty of memories remained to carry her good qualities . . . and complexities. One hesitated to say her mistakes taught more than her successes.

Tamalane frowned. She had disagreed from the first with calling this child a ghola. Gholas were grown from cells of a cadaver. This was a clone, just as Scytale was a clone.

What glue had actually held the Old Empire together? Many things, some small and some large, but mostly economic. Lines of connection thought of often as conveniences. And what kept them from blasting one another out of existence? The Great Convention. “You blast anyone and we unite to blast you.”

There were indeed things a Reverend Mother would not do to save the Sisterhood. We would not block the Tyrant’s Golden Path. Survival of humankind took precedence over survival of the Sisterhood. Else our grail of human maturity is meaningless.

This was Junction, stronghold of the ones who sought extermination of the Bene Gesserit. This was the enemy.

Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible.”

“Laws convey the myth of enforced change. A bright new future will come because of this law or that one. Laws enforce the future. Regulations are believed to enforce the past.”

“Honored Matres originated as terrorists. Bureaucrats first and terror as your chosen weapon.” “When it’s in your hands, use it. But we were rebels. Terrorists? That’s too chaotic.”

Some never participate. Life happens to them. They get by on little more than dumb persistence and resist with anger or violence all things that might lift them out of resentment-filled illusions of security.

They had argued about whether a new sandworm population in the Scattering might restore the Tyrant’s malign influence. That endless dream in each revenant of the worm still worried Bell. But population numbers alone said the Tyrant’s hold on their destiny was ended.

To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen.

It had grown out of being subjugated so many generations before they gained their own ascendancy. Murbella had tried to convey this to Odrade, recounting from history taught by Honored Matres.

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.

Despite warnings to keep awareness of addiction low key, it was never more than an eyeblink away from Odrade and she felt the accumulated resentments.

My serial lives as a ghola—all of them back to the original non-ghola. Intimate things I remember about those experiences: a dumping ground for poignant memories.

I’ve been hobbled and that’s a mistake. Doesn’t Odrade trust me? She’s an Atreides, damn her! She knows what I owe her family. More than one lifetime and the debt never paid!

“That painting says you cannot suppress the wild thing, the uniqueness that will occur among humans no matter how much we try to avoid it.”

Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum.

Sandworm: blind power guarding hidden riches. Artistry in mystic beauty.

This descendant of Siona Atreides had developed an interesting face under the Bene Gesserit patina. Maturity working on her according to both Sisterhood and Atreides designs. Marks of many decisions firmly taken. The slender, dark-skinned waif with sun-streaked brown hair had become this poised Reverend Mother. Skin still dark from long hours in the open. Hair still sun-streaked. The eyes, though—the steely total blue that said: “I have been through the Agony.”

No need even to waste her fallback position—truth: “We’ve been discussing the possibility that I might imprint Teg and restore the Bashar’s memories that way.” Full confession avoided. Mother Superior did not learn that I have weaseled out the way to reactivate our no-ship prison and defuse the mines Bellonda put in it.

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.

“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.”

Once more she claimed to share his Great Belief, the Sufi-Zensunni ecumenism that had spawned the Bene Tleilax. She spoke the language flawlessly, knew the proper words, but he saw falsehoods. She calls God’s Messenger “Tyrant” and disobeys the most basic precepts!

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 in-weighed 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.