Dune

“Odrade told me she trusts your loyalty to the Atreides.”

“I’m loyal to Atreides honor, Murbella.” And I make my own moral decisions—about the Sisterhood, about this child they’ve thrust into my care, about Sheeana and . . . and about my beloved.

Murbella bent close to him, breast brushing his arm, and whispered in his ear. “Sometimes, I could kill any of them within my reach!”

Does she think they can’t hear? He sat upright, dragging her with him. “What set you off?”

“She wants me to work on Scytale.”

Work on. Honored Matre euphemism. Well, why not? She “worked on” plenty of men before she ran afoul of me. But he had an antique husband’s reaction. Not only that . . . Scytale? A damned Tleilaxu?

“Mother Superior?” He had to be sure.

“The one, the only.” Almost lighthearted now that she had unburdened herself.

“What’s your reaction?”

“She says it was your idea.”

“My . . . No way! I suggested we could try to pry information out of him but . . .”

“She says it’s an ordinary thing for the Bene Gesserit just as it is with Honored Matres. Go breed with this one. Seduce that one. All in a day’s work.”

“I asked for your reaction.”

“Revolted.”

“Why?” Knowing your background . . .

“It’s you I love, Duncan and . . . and my body is . . . is to give you pleasure . . . just as you . . .”

“We’re an old married couple and the witches are trying to pry us apart.”

His words ignited in him a clear vision of Lady Jessica, lover of his long-dead Duke and mother of Maud’Dib. I loved her. She didn’t love me but . . . The look he saw now in Murbella’s eyes, he had seen Jessica look at the Duke that way: blind, unswerving love. The thing the Bene Gesserit distrusted. Jessica had been softer than Murbella. Hard to the core, though. And Odrade . . . she was hard at the beginning. Plasteel all the way.

Then what of the times when he had suspected her of sharing human emotions? The way she spoke of the Bashar when they learned the old man was dead on Dune.

“He was my father, you know.”

Murbella dragged him out of reverie. “You may share their dream, whatever that is, but . . .”

“Grow up, humans!”

“What?”

“That’s their dream. Start acting like adults and not like angry children in a schoolyard.”

“Mama knows best?”

“Yes . . . I believe she does.”

“Is that how you really see them? Even when you call them witches?”

“It’s a good word. Witches do mysterious things.”

“You don’t believe it’s the long and severe training plus the spice and the Agony?”

“What’s belief have to do with it? Unknowns create their own mystique.”

“But you don’t think they trick people into doing what they want?”

“Sure they do!”

“Words as weapons, Voice, Imprinters . . .”

“None as beautiful as you.”

“What’s beauty, Duncan?”

“There’re styles in beauty, sure.”

“Exactly what she says. ‘Styles based on procreative roots buried so deeply in our racial psyche we dare not remove them.’ So they’ve thought of meddling there, Duncan.”

“And they might dare anything?”

“She says, ‘We won’t distort our progeny into what we judge to be non-human.’ They judge, they condemn.”

He thought of the alien figures in his vision. Face Dancers. And he asked: “Like the amoral Tleilaxu? Amoral—not human.”

“I can almost hear the gears whirling in Odrade’s head. She and her Sisters—they watch, they listen, they tailor every response, everything calculated.”

Is that what you want, my darling? He felt trapped. She was right and she was wrong. Ends justifying means? How could he justify losing Murbella?

“You think them amoral?” he asked.

It was as though she did not hear. “Always asking themselves what to say next to get the desired response.”

“What response?” Couldn’t she hear his pain?

“You never know until too late!” She turned and looked at him. “Exactly like Honored Matres. Do you know how Honored Matres trapped me?”

He could not suppress awareness of how avidly the watchdogs would hang on Murbella’s next words.

“I was picked off the streets after an Honored Matre sweep. I think the whole sweep was because of me. My mother was a great beauty but she was too old for them.”

“A sweep?” The watchdogs would want me to ask.

“They go through an area and people disappear. No bodies, nothing. Whole families vanish. It’s explained as punishment because people plot against them.”

“How old were you?”

“Three . . . maybe four. I was playing with friends in an open place under trees. Suddenly, there was a lot of noise and shouting. We hid in a hole behind some rocks.”

He was caught in a vision of this drama.