Dune

Woman and man no longer just breeding partners, no longer a comfort and support to each other. Something new has been added. The stakes have been escalated.

In the comeye record playing at the worktable, Murbella said something that caught the Mother Superior’s full attention.

“We Honored Matres did this to ourselves! Can’t blame anyone else.”

“You hear that?” Bellonda demanded.

Odrade shook her head sharply, wanting all of her attention on this exchange.

“You can’t say the same about me,” Idaho objected.

“That’s an empty excuse,” Murbella accused. “So you were conditioned by the Tleilaxu to snare the first Imprinter you encountered!”

“And to kill her,” Idaho corrected. “That’s what they intended.”

“But you didn’t even try to kill me. Not that you could have.”

“That’s when . . .” Idaho broke off with an involuntary glance at the recording comeyes.

“What was he about to say there?” Bellonda pounced. “We must find out!”

But Odrade continued her silent observation of the captive pair. Murbella demonstrated a surprising insight. “You think you caught me through some accident in which you were not involved?”

“Exactly.”

“But I see something in you that accepted all of it! You didn’t just go along with your conditioning. You performed to your limits.”

An inward look filmed Idaho’s eyes. He tipped his head back, stretching his chest muscles.

“That’s a Mentat expression!” Bellonda accused.

All of Odrade’s analysts suggested this but they had yet to wrest an admission from Idaho. If he was a Mentat, why withhold that information?

Because of the other things implied by such abilities. He fears us and rightly so.

Murbella spoke with a sneer. “You improvised and improved on what the Tleilaxu did to you. There was something in you that made no complaint whatsoever!”

“That’s how she deals with her own guilt feelings,” Bellonda said. “She has to believe it’s true or Idaho would not have been able to trap her.”

Odrade pursed her lips. The projection showed Idaho amused. “Perhaps it was the same for both of us.”

“You can’t blame the Tleilaxu and I can’t blame the Honored Matres.”

Tamalane entered the workroom and sank into her chairdog beside Bellonda. “I see it has your interest, too.” She gestured at the projected figures.

Odrade shut down the projector.

“I’ve been inspecting our axlotl tanks,” Tamalane said. “That damned Scytale has withheld vital information.”

“There’s no flaw in our first ghola, is there?” Bellonda demanded.

“Nothing our Suks can find.”

Odrade spoke in a mild tone: “Scytale has to keep some bargaining chips.”

Both sides shared a fantasy: Scytale was paying the Bene Gesserit for rescue from the Honored Matres and sanctuary on Chapterhouse. But every Reverend Mother who studied him knew something else drove the last Tleilaxu Master.

Clever, clever, the Bene Tleilax. Far more clever than we suspected. And they have dirtied us with their axlotl tanks. The very word “tank”—another of their deceptions. We pictured containers of warmed amniotic fluid, each tank the focus of complex machinery to duplicate (in a subtle, discrete and controllable way) the workings of the womb. The tank is there all right! But look at what it contains.

The Tleilaxu solution was direct: Use the original. Nature already had worked it out over the eons. All the Bene Tleilax need do was add their own control system, their own way of replicating information stored in the cell.

“The Language of God,” Scytale called it. Language of Shaitan was more appropriate.

Feedback. The cell directed its own womb. That was more or less what a fertilized ovum did anyway. The Tleilaxu merely refined it.

A sigh escaped Odrade, bringing sharp glances from her companions. Does Mother Superior have new troubles?