Road to Dune (39 page)

The school’s proctors had the Mentat example from which to start. The typical Mentat, after his training, can solve many problems simultaneously. He investigates long chains of logic and circumstances and, to an observer, seems to arrive at his conclusions in a split second. As many Mentats have testified, however, the internal sensations of the computing process frequently are such that he may feel he has taken millennia to solve the given problems. One of the first steps in training Mentats is teaching them awareness of this Time trick.

Muad’Dib, according to many of the Bene Gesserit tests, was the one they sought. He was born Paul Atreides, son of the Duke Leto, a man whose bloodline had been watched carefully for more than a thousand years. His mother, the Bene Gesserit concubine, Lady Jessica, was a natural daughter of the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and carried gene-markers of supreme importance to the program.

Lady Jessica had been ordered to produce an Atreides daughter. The plan was to inbreed such a daughter with Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, a nephew of the Baron. The high probability here was that they would have a Kwisatz Haderach or near-Kwisatz Haderach in the next generation. But Paul Atreides appeared a generation early when the Lady Jessica deliberately defied her orders and bore a son.

These two facts alone should have alerted the Bene Gesserits to the possibility that a wild variable had entered their plans. But there were other indications which they virtually ignored.

1) Paul Atreides as a youth showed ability to predict the future. His prescient visions were accurate, penetrating, and defied four-dimensional explanation.

2) The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, the Bene Gesserit Proctor who tested Paul’s humanity, testified that he surmounted more agony in the test than any other human of record. She failed to make special note of this.

3) When the Atreides Family moved to the planet Arrakis, the Fremen population of that planet hailed Paul as a prophet, “the voice from the outer world.” The Bene Gesserits were well aware that the rigors of such a planet as Arrakis, with its lack of open water, its vast deserts, its emphasis on basic needs for survival, produce a high proportion of sensitives. The Fremen reaction was another clue the Bene Gesserits ignored.

4) When the Harkonnens, aided by the Sardaukar soldier-fanatics of the Padishah Emperor, reoccupied Arrakis, killing Paul’s father and most of his troops, Paul and his mother disappeared. But almost immediately there were reports of a new religious leader among the Fremen, a man called Muad’Dib who was again hailed as a prophet. The reports stated clearly that he was guarded by a new Reverend Mother of the Sayyadina rite, “who was the woman who bore him.” Fremen records available to the Bene Gesserits stated clearly that their legends of the prophet contained these words: “He shall be born of a Bene Gesserit witch.”

(It may be argued that the Bene Gesserits had sent their Missionaria Protectiva onto Arrakis centuries earlier to implant something like this legend as a safeguard should any members of the school be trapped there and need sanctuary, and that this legend of the Lisan al-Gaib was properly to be ignored. But this is true only if you grant that they were correct in ignoring the other clues about Paul-Muad’Dib.)

5) When the Arrakis affair boiled up, the Spacing Guild made overtures to the Bene Gesserits. The Guild hinted that its Navigators, who used the spice drug of Arrakis to produce the limited prescience necessary to guide spaceships through the void, were “bothered about the future.” This could only mean they saw a nexus, a meeting place of countless delicate decisions, beyond which the path was hidden. This was a clear indication that some agency was interfering with higher-order dimensions!

(The Bene Gesserits were well aware that the Guild could not interfere directly with the vital spice source because Guild Navigators already were dealing somewhat with higher-order dimensions such that the slightest misstep could be catastrophic. It was a known fact that Guild Navigators could see no way to take control of the spice without producing just such a nexus. The obvious conclusion was that someone of higher-order powers was taking control of the spice source.)

In the face of these facts, one is led to the inescapable conclusion that the Bene Gesserits’ behavior in this affair was a product of a higher plan of which they were completely unaware.

This is the Summa prepared by her own agents at the request of Lady Jessica immediately following the Arrakis affair. The candor of this report amplifies its value far beyond the ordinary.

New Chapter:
ALIA & THE DUNCAN IDAHO GHOLA

These things I tell you: the sequential nature of real history cannot be repeated precisely by prescience. We grasp incidents cut out of the chain. That is why I deny my own powers. Eternity moves. It inflicts itself upon me. Let my subjects doubt my majesty and my oracular visions. Let them never doubt eternity.

—DUNESDAY PROVERBS

I
t occurred to Alia, studying the ghola in her audience chamber, that he was a religious unknown. The way he serenely surmounted the turmoil around him filled her with disquiet.

There were mother-memories of Duncan Idaho within her grasp and she consulted them for a clue to this creature whose flesh had been a friend’s. With a growing sense of suspicion she realized how she’d leaned on pre-judgments.

Alia-Jessica had always thought of Duncan as a man who could be recognized for what he was—not by lineage or planet of origin but of and by himself: stalwart, isolated, self-supporting. It was the way with many who’d been friends of House Atreides.

Now, she rejected all preconceptions. This was not Duncan Idaho. This was the
ghola.

She turned slightly on the altar steps, looking across the ghola at the Guild navigator and his attendants. The ambassador, swimming in his container of orange gas, gave every appearance of being satisfied with a situation which should not satisfy him.

“Did you hear me correctly, Ambassador Edric?” she demanded. “My suspicions are not to be taken lightly. Perhaps I should order you held prisoner while we seek out and destroy your frigates.”

“Let me remind the sister of the Emperor that I am an ambassador,” the guildsman said. He turned, reclining in his tank, a buoyant figure with hooded eyes which stared up at her. “You cannot threaten my person and escape the consequences. Every civilized man in the Empire will oppose you if this is your choice.”

“Mentat,” Alia said, “what is this prattle?”

As she spoke, she knew what the ambassador meant. There was a limit to the force even the most powerful could apply without destroying themselves.

“Do you truly need me to tell you?” Duncan asked.

She shook her head. The evidence lay all around and she wondered why she hadn’t seen it before this. A Bene Gesserit axiom arose in her mind like a fish surfacing in turbulent waters : “Concentrate on one sense at the expense of the others. This is a danger. Avoid it.” Oracular vision was a sense, she realized. It had blinded her to what could be seen with the naked eye. The primitive forms lay all around her—in money, in culture, in social usages. And the populace was sinking beneath government, being conscripted.

No populace would permit that.

Every misuse of power would be held against the government, stored up until it exploded in one violent overturning.

Alia, staring down at the Guild ambassador, realized she was looking at a martyr. He had been prepared—anointed. He was the sacrifice the Guild offered on the altar of its bid for power.

“So that’s the way it is,” Alia said. “Then by the power invested in me by the Emperor, I invoke a formal trial. Let the Landsraad judges be summoned. Choose your defender, guildsman.”

The ambassador flopped over in sudden agitation, turned his face away from her.
The witch!
he thought. She had always been more dangerous than her brother.

“There is a Fremen saying,” Alia said. “‘It should not be necessary to pay to gain justice.’ To this, let me add that it should not be necessary to pray, as well. Whom do you choose for defender?”

Duncan saw the guildsman give a subtle hand signal to an attendant, leaped to place himself between the group on the audience chamber floor and Alia. It was an instinctive motion which surprised even him.

As he moved, Duncan saw something hurtle from the ambassador’s attendants toward Alia. With a blurring reflex, Duncan swept his hand across the thing’s path, felt the horned calluses on the heel of his hand strike sharp metal. Something buzzed, clattering to the floor. It flopped there like a wounded fish, and he realized they’d dared hurl a hunter-seeker at the Emperor’s sister! The realization accompanied his own reflexive leap as he stamped on the thing, smashing it before it could find warm flesh and burrow into a vital organ.

The chamber erupted in violence around him.

The Fremen guard had plunged as one man onto the Guild entourage.

Knots of struggling battle swayed around the room, churning, rolling—the glitter of knives, grunts, shouts.

Duncan’s gaze took in the scene as he whirled, swept Alia into his arms and plunged with her toward the protective seclusion of the passage behind the dais.

But Alia rolled out of his grasp, her knife in hand, and for an instant he thought she was going to sink the blade into him, but she gasped, “Hold!”

“You must get to a safe place!” he insisted, moving to put himself between her and the violence.

An odd smile twisted her mouth and she said: “I command you to step aside, Duncan. It’s safe enough here.” She gestured and he sensed the sudden silence of the chamber, turned.

Bloody robes, mounded figures lay scattered across the floor. Only Fremen guards remained standing, their chests heaving from the exertion. Remarkably, the guildsman’s tank stood unmarked amidst the carnage, the ambassador reclining in his orange gas, arms folded across his chest, eyes intent upon Alia.

“You can do no more than kill me,” he said, and there was a strange feeling of emotion in the artificial voice.

“Is that so?” Alia asked. She gestured imperiously to a guard captain, said: “Bring me a lasgun.”

“No!” Duncan blurted.

“Do as I command,” Alia ordered.

The guard captain hesitated. “The Guild swine may have a shield in that tank,” he said.

“M’Lady,” Duncan said. “Touch a lasgun beam to a shield and the entire city will go up in the explosion.”

“And the Guild will be charged with using atomic weapons against House Atreides,” she said. “Who can tell a lasgun-shield explosion from the blast of a fusion bomb?”

“I care not how I die,” the ambassador said. “Knife, lasgun beam—however you choose. Offend the law in any way you wish. You have slain my attendants and aides. I know what’s in store for me.”

“Do you now?” Alia asked. The guard captain placed the black rod of a lasgun in her hand.

She took it without looking, descended the steps to the chamber floor, avoided a body, stopped beside the ambassador’s tank.

“Do you have a shield?” she asked, voice conversational.

“I have a shield,” the guildsman admitted, voice tight, “but it’s turned off. I’ll not put the Guild in your hands that easily.”

Duncan, following Alia, put a hand on her arm. “Can you believe him, M’Lady?”

“What do you think, Duncan?” She glanced at him, eyes oddly veiled.

Duncan took a deep breath, put his Mentat awareness to her question. Not likely this man would use a shield. This was a dedicated guildsman. He’d die before betraying his own kind.

“It isn’t likely, M’Lady,” Duncan said. “But must you kill him?”

“You object?” Alia asked. She glanced around at the remains of the violence in the chamber. “Some of my guards died at this creature’s bidding.”

“I do not participate in public homicide,” Duncan said.

“What manner of man are you?” Alia demanded. “You offered your own body to protect me, yet you will not agree to the destruction of my enemies.”

“Savagery has been taken out of me,” Duncan said.

She touched his cheek. “But you have flesh.”

“Do not kill this one, M’Lady,” Duncan said. “I know it is the wrong thing to do.”

“I command here,” she said. “Do you admit that?”

“Yes!”

“Then stand aside.”

Reluctantly, every muscle objecting, he obeyed.

Alia turned, adjusted the lasgun for short range, aimed at the guildsman’s tank, pressed the trigger.

A hole perhaps two centimeters in diameter appeared in the transparent stuff of the tank. Wisps of orange gas emerged, trailed upward in the vagrant air currents of the chamber.

There was a sudden pungency of mélange in the room.

Alia returned the lasgun to the guard captain, kept her attention on the Guild ambassador. Edric the Steersman swam unharmed in his tank, eyes intent on Alia.

She waited without speaking.

As though they were controlled from outside himself, the ambassador’s eyes went to the hole in his tank and the orange gas escaping there.

“Do you smell the spice, Duncan?” Alia asked.

“His air must be saturated with it,” Duncan said. He studied the orange gas diffusing into the audience chamber.

“You witch!” the ambassador blurted. “Kill me and have done with it!”

“Kill you?” she asked. “Without a trial? Do you take me for a barbarian?”

The ambassador’s chest was heaving. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he protested.

“Don’t I?” she asked.

“I should’ve turned on my shield!” Edric snapped.

“You really should have,” Alia said. “Whom do you choose for your defender?”

“Seal my tank this instant!” Edric said.

“Seal it yourself,” Alia said.

Abruptly, the guildsman placed a webbed hand against the hole in his tank, fumbled in the pouch at his waist.

Alia slid the crysknife from its sheath at her neck. Her Fremen guards stiffened. The crysknife carried sacred implications and there were outworlders present. Alia appeared unaware of the disquiet among her guards. She reached out the knife point. Light glimmered from the milky blade. Slowly, deliberately, she thrust the knife into the ambassador’s palm where it lay exposed against the lasgun hole.