Heretics of Dune (Dune, #5)

by Frank Herbert

“Will I ever see Rakis?” he asked Geasa. “You are being prepared to live there.” The answer astonished him. Everything they taught him about that faraway planet came into new focus. “Why will I live there?” “I cannot answer that.” With renewed interest, he returned to his studies of that mysterious planet and its miserable Church of Shai-hulud, the Divided God. Worms. The God Emperor had become those worms! The idea filled Duncan with awe. Perhaps here was something worthy of worship. The thought touched a chord in him. What had driven a man to accept that terrible metamorphosis?

Teg did not see this note until sorting through his mother’s effects after her death. The words inscribed on a small sheet of ridulian crystal with the Chapter House imprint below them filled him with an odd sense of displacement in time. His memory put him suddenly back on Lampadas where the love-awe he had felt for his mother was deftly transferred to the Sisterhood itself, as originally intended. He had come to understand this only during his later Mentat training but the understanding changed little. If anything, it bound him even more strongly to the Bene Gesserit. It confirmed that the Sisterhood must be one of his strengths. He already knew that the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood was one of the most powerful forces in his universe—equal at least to the Spacing Guild, superior to the Fish Speaker Council that had inherited the core of the old Atreides Empire, superior by far to CHOAM, and balanced somehow with the Fabricators of Ix and with the Bene Tleilax. A small measure of the Sisterhood’s far-reaching authority could be deduced from the fact that they held this authority despite Tleilaxu tank-grown melange, which had broken the Rakian monopoly on the spice, just as Ixian navigation machines had broken the Guild monopoly on space travel. Miles Teg knew his history well by then. Guild Navigators no longer were the only ones who could thread a ship through the folds of space—in this galaxy one instant, in a faraway galaxy the very next heartbeat.

Painfully, Waff disentangled himself from the chair and righted it as he got to his feet. His thigh throbbed. A fraction of a meter more and she would have broken his thigh! He realized that her reaction had not been mediated by her central nervous system. As with some insects, attack could be initiated by the required muscle system. That development would have to be investigated!

The five were taken somewhere deep within the Keep. He heard a guard say later that the four intruders were loaded with “shere.” That was his first encounter with the idea of an Ixian Probe. “An Ixian Probe can raid the mind even of a dead person,” Geasa explained. “Shere is a drug that protects you from the probe. Your cells will be totally dead before the drug effect is gone.” Adroit listening told Duncan the four intruders were being probed in other ways as well. These other ways were not explained to him but he suspected this must be something secret to the Bene Gesserit. He thought of it as another hellish trick of the Reverend Mothers. They must animate the dead and extract information from the unwilling flesh. Duncan visualized depersonalized muscles performing at the will of a diabolical observer.

The Tleilaxu secret must be in their sperm. Our tests prove that their sperm does not carry forward in a straight genetic fashion. Gaps occur. Every Tleilaxu we have examined has hidden his inner self from us. They are naturally immune to an Ixian Probe! Secrecy at the deepest levels, that is their ultimate armor and their ultimate weapon. —BENE GESSERIT ANALYSIS, ARCHIVES CODE: BTXX441WOR

“A REVEREND MOTHER WILL READ MY WORDS!” Something cold settled in Odrade’s guts. She moved to her right with the light, plowing through an empire’s ransom in melange. There was more to the message: “I BEQUEATH TO YOU MY FEAR AND LONELINESS. TO YOU I GIVE THE CERTAINTY THAT THE BODY AND SOUL OF THE BENE GESSERIT WILL MEET THE SAME FATE AS ALL OTHER BODIES AND ALL OTHER SOULS.” Another paragraph of the message backoned to the right of this one. She plowed through the cloying melange and stopped to read. “WHAT IS SURVIVAL IF YOU DO NOT SURVIVE WHOLE? ASK THE BENE TLEILAX THAT! WHAT IF YOU NO LONGER HEAR THE MUSIC OF LIFE? MEMORIES ARE NOT ENOUGH UNLESS THEY CALL YOU TO NOBLE PURPOSE!”

“WHY DID YOUR SISTERHOOD NOT BUILD THE GOLDEN PATH? YOU KNEW THE NECESSITY. YOUR FAILURE CONDEMNED ME, THE GOD EMPEROR, TO MILLENNIA OF PERSONAL DESPAIR.”

“MY WORDS ARE YOUR PAST, “MY QUESTIONS ARE SIMPLE: “WITH WHOM DO YOU ALLY? “WITH THE SELF-IDOLATORS OF TLEILAX? “WITH MY FISH SPEAKER BUREAUCRACY? “WITH THE COSMOS-WANDERING GUILD? “WITH HARKONNEN BLOOD SACRIFICERS? “WITH A DOGMATIC SINK OF YOUR OWN CREATION? “HOW WILL YOU MEET YOUR END? “AS NO MORE THAN A SECRET SOCIETY?”

“He’s a three P-O,” they said, meaning that such a person surrounded himself with cheap copies made from déclassé substances. Even when the supremely rich were forced to employ one of the distressful three P-Os, they disguised it where possible behind O-P (the Only P), pilingitam.