Dune

A yellow-robed Qizara, head shaved for a turban, beady eyes of total blue in a bland round face, skin leathered by the wind and sun of Arrakis, had awaited her on the heighliner’s reception bridge. He had looked up from a bulb of spice-coffee being served by an obsequious steward, studied her a moment, put down the coffee bulb.

“You are the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam?”

To replay those words in her mind was to bring that moment alive in the memory. Her throat had constricted with an unmanageable spasm of fear. How had one of the Emperor’s minions learned of her presence on the heighliner?

“It came to our attention that you were aboard,” the Qizara said. “Have you forgotten that you are denied permission to set foot on the holy planet?”

“I am not on Arrakis,” she said. “I’m a passenger on a Guild heighliner in free space.”

“There is no such thing as free space, Madame.”

She read hate mingled with profound suspicion in his tone.

“Muad’Dib rules everywhere,” he said.

“Arrakis is not my destination,” she insisted.

“Arrakis is the destination of everyone,” he said. And she feared for a moment that he would launch into a recital of the mystical itinerary which pilgrims followed. (This very ship had carried thousands of them.)

But the Qizara had pulled a golden amulet from beneath his robe, kissed it, touched it to his forehead and placed it to his right ear, listened. Presently, he restored the amulet to its hidden place.

“You are ordered to gather your luggage and accompany me to Arrakis.”

“But I have business elsewhere!”

In that moment, she suspected Guild perfidy . . . or exposure through some transcendant power of the Emperor or his sister. Perhaps the Steersman did not conceal the conspiracy, after all. The abomination, Alia, certainly possessed the abilities of a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. What happened when those powers were coupled with the forces which worked in her brother?

“At once!” the Qizara snapped.

Everything in her cried out against setting foot once more on that accursed desert planet. Here was where the Lady Jessica had turned against the Sisterhood. Here was where they’d lost Paul Atreides, the kwisatz haderach they’d sought through long generations of careful breeding.

“At once,” she agreed.

“There’s little time,” the Qizara said. “When the Emperor commands, all his subjects obey.”

So the order had come from Paul!

She thought of protesting to the heighliner’s Navigator-Commander, but the futility of such a gesture stopped her. What could the Guild do?

“The Emperor has said I must die if I set foot on Dune,” she said, making a last desperate effort. “You spoke of this yourself. You are condemning me if you take me down there.”

“Say no more,” the Qizara ordered. “The thing is ordained.”

That was how they always spoke of Imperial commands, she knew. Ordained! The holy ruler whose eyes could pierce the future had spoken. What must be must be. He had seen it, had He not?

With the sick feeling that she was caught in a web of her own spinning, she had turned to obey.

And the web had become a cell which Irulan could visit. She saw that Irulan had aged somewhat since their meeting on Wallach IX. New lines of worry spread from the corners of her eyes. Well . . . time to see if this Sister of the Bene Gesserit could obey her vows.

“I’ve had worse quarters,” the Reverend Mother said. “Do you come from the Emperor?” And she allowed her fingers to move as though in agitation.

Irulan read the moving fingers and her own fingers flashed an answer as she spoke, saying: “No—I came as soon as I heard you were here.”

“Won’t the Emperor be angry?” the Reverend Mother asked. Again, her fingers moved: imperative, pressing, demanding.

“Let him be angry. You were my teacher in the Sisterhood, just as you were the teacher of his own mother. Does he think I will turn my back on you as she has done?” And Irulan’s finger-talk made excuses, begged.

The Reverend Mother sighed. On the surface, it was the sigh of a prisoner bemoaning her fate, but inwardly she felt the response as a comment on Irulan. It was futile to hope the Atreides Emperor’s precious gene pattern could be preserved through this instrument. No matter her beauty, this Princess was flawed. Under that veneer of sexual attraction lived a whining shrew more interested in words than in actions. Irulan was still a Bene Gesserit, though, and the Sisterhood reserved certain techniques to use on some of its weaker vessels as insurance that vital instructions would be carried out.

Beneath small talk about a softer pallet, better food, the Reverend Mother brought up her arsenal of persuasion and gave her orders: the brother-sister crossbreeding must be explored. (Irulan almost broke at receiving this command.)

“I must have my chance!” Irulan’s fingers pleaded.