Road to Dune (33 page)

PAUL TURNED BACK to the Reverend Mother; thinking of the exposed idea within this test:
Human or animal?

“If you live as long as I have lived you will still remember your fear and your pain and your hate,” the old woman said. “Never deny it. That would be like denying part of yourself.”

“Would you have killed me?” he asked.

“Suppose you answer that for yourself, young human.”

He studied the wrinkled face, the level eyes. “You would have done it,” he said.

“Believe it,” she said. “Just as I would’ve killed your mother in her day. A human can kill what she … he loves. Given necessity enough. And there’s something always to remember, lad: A human recognizes orders of necessity that animals cannot even imagine.”

“I don’t see this necessity,” he said.

“You will,” she said. “You’re human, and you will.” She looked across at Jessica and their eyes locked. “And when you’ve brought your hate to a level you can manage, when you’ve absorbed it and understood it, here’s another thing for you to consider: Think of what it was
truly
that your mother has just done for you. Think of her waiting outside that door there, knowing full well what went on in here. Think of her with every instinct screaming at her to leap in here and protect you, yet she stood and waited. Think on that, young human. Think on it. There’s a human, indeed, your mother.”

SOUNDS FROM THE assembly yard below the south windows interrupted. The old woman fell silent while Paul ran to the window and looked down.

An assemblage of troop carriers was drawing up in review ranks below and Paul saw his father in full uniform striding out for inspection. Around the perimeter of the field, Paul made out the distorted air that spoke of shields activated there. The troops in the carrier wore the insignia of Hawat’s special corps, the infiltrators.

“What is it?” the old woman asked.

Paul returned to her. “My father the Duke is sending some of his men to Arrakis. They’re here to stand review.”

“Men to Arrakis,” the old woman muttered. “When will we learn?” She took a deep breath. “But I was talking about the Great Revolt when men threw out the machines that enslaved them. You know about the Great Revolt, eh?”

“‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,’” Paul answered.

“Right out of the Orange Catholic Bible,” she said. “Want to know the trouble with that? It leaves too much unspoken. It’s a sop to the counterfeit men among us, the ones who look human but aren’t. They look and talk like humans, but given the wrong pressures they expose themselves as animals. And the unfortunate thing is they think of themselves as human. Oh, yes! They think. But thinking isn’t enough to qualify you as human.”

“You have to think within your thinking,” Paul said. “There’s no end to it.”

She laughed aloud, a quick burst of sound full of warmth, and Paul heard his mother’s laughter joining it. “Bless you,” the old woman said. “You’ve a wonderful turn for language, lad, you fill it with meaning.”

“TELL ME TRULY now, Paul, and remember I’m a Truth-sayer and can see truth. Tell me: Do you often dream a thing and have the dream happen exactly as you dreamed it?”

“Yes.”

“Often?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about another time.”

He looked up to the corner of the room. “I dreamed once that I stood in the rain outside and the castle door was locked and the dogs were barking in their cages and Gurney was beside me and Duncan Idaho and Duncan stumbled against me and bruised my arm. It didn’t hurt much, but Duncan was so very sorry. And that’s how it happened when I was ten.”

“When did you dream this?”

“Oh, a long time ago. Before I had a room by myself. It was when I was little and slept in a room with a nurse beside me.”

“Tell me another time.” There was excitement in the old woman’s voice.

SHE CLEARED HER throat. “Those of our numbers who have not attained the status of Reverend Mother know only so much of the search as we tell them. Now, I will tell you a bit more. A Reverend Mother can
sense
what is within her own bodily cells—every cell. We can peer into the cellular core of selfdom, but there we find …” She took a trembling breath. “This thing of which I spoke earlier. This emptiness which we cannot face. Fearful it is. The direction that is dark … the place where we cannot enter. Long ago, one of us fathomed that a male force is needed to peer into this place. Since then, each of us at attaining the Reverence has seen that this is true.”

“What’s so important about it?” Paul asked, and his voice was sullen.

“Let us imagine,” she said, “that you have a troop carrier with only half its motor. If you find the other half, you’ll have the complete unit needed to move your carrier.”

“You still have to put them together and make them work,” Paul sneered. “May I go now?”

“Don’t you want to hear what I can tell you about the Kwisatz Haderach?” Jessica smiled at the Reverend Mother.

Paul said: “The men who’ve tried to … enter this place, are they the ones you say died?”

“There’s a final hurdle they seem unable to leap,” the old woman said.

His voice was not a child’s voice, but old and grim despite its treble pitch: “What hurdle?”

“We can only give you a hint.”

“Hint then.”

“And be damned to me?” She smiled wryly. “Very well:
That which submits rules.
”

“That’s a hint?”

She nodded. “But submitting, you rule.”

“Ruling and submitting are opposites,” he said.

“Is the place between them empty?” she asked.

“Ohhhh.” He stared at her. “That’s what my mother calls the tension-with-meaning. I’ll think about that.”

“You do that.”

“Why don’t you like me?” Paul asked. “Is it because I’m not a girl?”

The Reverend Mother snapped a questioning look at Jessica.

“I’ve not told him,” Jessica said.

“That’s it, then,” Paul said. “Can a woman help it if her child’s a boy?”

“Women have always controlled what sex their offspring will be,” the old woman said. “By acceptance or rejection of sperm. Even when they didn’t know the mechanism of it, they controlled it. There’s a kind of racial necessity in this, and men must submit to it.”

He nodded. “By submitting, we rule.”

“That’s part of it.”

Jessica spoke from behind him: “Yet, humans must never submit to animals.”

He glanced at his mother, back to the old woman.

“CONCENTRATE ON YOUR training, lad, all of it,” said the old woman. “That’s your one chance to become a ruler.”

“What about my father?” Paul demanded. “Are we just …”

“Your mother warned him,” the old woman said. “Specifically against instructions, I might add, but that isn’t the first Bene Gesserit rule she ever broke.”

Jessica looked away.

The Reverend Mother plunged on without a glance at her. “You naturally love and respect your father. If there’s action you can take to guard him, you’ll want to take that action. But have you ever thought about your duty to the ones who came
before
your father?”

“Before …” The boy shook his head.

“You’re the latest in the Atreides line,” she said. “You carry the family seed. And when you come right down to it, that’s a tenuous thing. There are no other viable members of your line. A once-numerous clan comes to this: If both you and your father die, the name Atreides ends there. Your cousin, the Padishah Emperor, who is Corrino bar Shaddam, will gather the last of the Atreides holdings back into the Regate, a possibility which has not escaped him. Fini Atreides.”

“You must guard yourself for your father’s sake,” Jessica said. “For the sake of all the other Atreides who’ve come to this … to you.”

“YOUR MOTHER WILL tell you of these things. They’re not in any history books, not the way she’ll explain them. But what she tells you, depend on it, lad. Your mother is a container of wisdom.”

Paul stared at the hand that had known pain, then at the Reverend Mother. The sound of her voice held a difference from any other voice he had ever heard. The words were as though outlined in brilliance. There was an edge to them that cut through him. He felt that any question he asked her, she would have the answer. And the answer could lift him out of his flesh-world. But awe held him silent.

“Come, come, ask the question,” she said.

He blurted it out: “Where did you come from?”

She absorbed the words and smiled. “I’ve heard it phrased differently,” she said. “One youngster asked me: ‘How old are you?’ I thought that contained a measure of feminine adroitness.”

She stared at him. He stared back.

“I came from one of the Bene Gesserit schools. There are many such schools to the power of many. Do you know yet about mathematical powers?”

He nodded.

“Good. Routine knowledge is always useful for communication. We teach another order of knowledge. We teach what you might call ‘thingness.’ Does that make any sense to you?”

He shook his head no.

“If you graduate, it’ll mean something to you,” she said.

Paul said, “But this isn’t answering my question.”

“Where did I come from? I am a Bene Gesserit. Thence, where did Bene Gesserit come from? Well, lad, I have only time to give you the outline. We’ll leave it to your mother to fill in the details. Eh?”

He nodded agreement.

“A long time ago,” she said, “men had machines that did more things for them than machines do today. Different things. They even had machines that could, after a fashion, think. They had automatic machines to make useful objects. All of this was supposed to have set man free, but, of course, permitted machines to enslave him. One man with the right kind of automatic machine could make many destructive objects. Do you see that?”

He found his voice and ventured sound: “Yes.”

She noted the change in him, the increased alertness. “Good, lad. What we didn’t have was a machine to make all men good or even to make all men into men. There are many counterfeit men among us, lad. They look human. They can talk like a human. But given the wrong pressure, they expose themselves as animals. The unfortunate thing is, they think of themselves as human. Oh, yes, they think. But thinking isn’t enough to make you human.”

“You have to think about your thinking,” he said. “You have to …” he hesitated, “ … understand how you think.”

She had followed his words, mouthing them silently with him. Now, she wiped her eyes, said: “Ah, that Jessica.”

“What happened to all the machines?” Paul asked.

“It takes a male to ask that kind of question,” she said. “Well, they destroyed them, lad. There was war. Revolution. Anarchy. And when it was over, men were forbidden to make such machines again.”

“You aren’t telling me where you came from,” he said.

She laughed out loud, a quick burst of sound full of warmth. “Bless you, my darling, but I am. You see, there was still the need for some of the things those so-called thinking machines had done. So somebody remembered that certain humans could think in those ways.”

“What ways?”

“They could take in all kinds of information and never be at a loss to repeat it. They had what is called eidetic memory. But more than that. They could answer complicated questions. Mathematical questions. Military questions. Social questions. Probability questions. They could swallow all sorts of information and spew out answers when the answers were needed.”

“They were human,” he said.

“Well, yes they were, most of them.”

“What do you mean most of them?”

“It isn’t important, lad. Your mother can explain about idiot savants and such if you ask her. But I’m explaining where I came from. This was the way of it. Schools were started to train this special kind of human. One such school was called the Bene Gesserit School. In it was a human who saw the need to separate the humans from the animals. As a stock. A breeding stock. But there was a reservoir of chance human births among the animals because of … mixing.” She thought she saw his attention waning, and snapped: “Do you understand all this?”

“I know how we pick the best bulls,” he said. “It’s through the cows. If the cows are brave the bulls will be brave.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “It’s a general rule. Men are the doers, and human males seek out the Bene Gesserit. Well, lad, the Bene Gesserit School was successful. We produced mostly women … breeders. Brave ones. Beautiful ones. But in the new Empire there were only certain ways we could act. Some of the things we did had to remain secret. You know what I’m telling you are secret things, don’t you?”

He nodded absently. The secrecy of her manner had been obvious. There were other things troubling him. He voiced one of them: “But I’m a boy.”

Maybe he is the one,
the old woman thought.
So mature for his years. So very perceptive.

She said: “Men have their uses. And we’ve always been searching for a special kind of man.”

“What kind?”

“Our time is too short,” she said. “Your mother will have to explain it. I can say this to you briefly: The man we need will know himself that he is the man. When he learns this of himself, that will be the moment of his graduation.”

“You’re just putting me off,” he said. He felt resentful. The adult world had no more hateful aspect than this form of frustration.

“Yes, I am,” she admitted. “But you’ll have to take me on faith right now. It’s not only impossible for me to answer your question right now, it could be hurtful for you. It’s as though the knowledge had to grow within you until the day you feel it flowering. It can’t be forced. We think we know the climate it needs, but …” She shook her head.

The apparent uncertainty in the old woman’s manner shook Paul. One moment she had been the Goddess-source of all knowledge. Now … he could see her exposing an area of unknown. And that area concerned himself. He didn’t formulate this feeling as words. He only felt it. It was like being lost.

“Time to call in your mother,” she said. “You’ve a busy day ahead of you.”

PAUL & THUFIR HAWAT