Dune

“Rules are often an excuse to ignore compassion.”

“Do I hear a faint echo of conscience in a Reverend Mother?”

“Deplorable. My Sisters would exile me if they thought conscience ruled me.”

“You can be prodded, but not ruled.”

“Very good, Duncan! I like you much better when you’re openly Mentat.”

“I distrust your liking.”

She laughed aloud. “How like Bell!”

He stared at her dumbly, plunged by her laughter into sudden knowledge of the way to escape his warders, remove himself from the constant Bene Gesserit manipulations and live his own life. The way out lay not in machinery but in the Sisterhood’s flaws. The absolutes by which they thought they surrounded and held him—there was the way out!

And Sheeana knows! That’s the bait she dangles in front of me.

When Idaho did not speak, Odrade said: “Tell me about those other lives.”

“Wrong. I think of them as one continuous life.”

“No deaths?”

He let a response form silently. Serial memories: the deaths were as informative as the lives. Killed so many times by Leto himself!

“The deaths do not interrupt my memories.”

“An odd kind of immortality,” she said. “You know, don’t you, that Tleilaxu Masters recreated themselves? But you—what did they hope to achieve, mixing different gholas in one flesh?”

“Ask Scytale.”

“Bell felt sure you were a Mentat. She will be delighted.”

“I think not.”

“I will see to it that she is delighted. My! I have so many questions I’m not sure where to begin.” She studied him, left hand to her chin.

Questions? Mentat demands flowed through Idaho’s mind. He let the questions he had asked himself so many times move of themselves, forming their patterns. What did the Tleilaxu seek in me? They could not have included cells from all of his ghola-selves for this incarnation. Yet . . . he had all of the memories. What cosmic linkage accumulated all of those lives in this one self? Was that the clue to the visions that beset him in the Great Hold? Half-memories formed in his mind: his body in warm fluid, fed by tubes, massaged by machines, probed and questioned by Tleilaxu observers. He sensed murmurous responses from semi-dormant selves. The words had no meaning. It was as though he listened to a foreign language coming from his own lips but he knew it was ordinary Galach.

The scope of what he sensed in Tleilaxu actions awed him. They investigated a cosmos no one but the Bene Gesserit had ever dared touch. That the Bene Tleilax did this for selfish reasons did not subtract from it. The endless rebirths of Tleilaxu Masters were a reward worthy of daring.

Face Dancer servants to copy any life, any mind. The scope of the Tleilaxu dream was as awesome as Bene Gesserit achievements.

“Scytale admits to memories of Muad’Dib’s times,” Odrade said. “You might compare notes with him someday.”

“That kind of immortality is a bargaining chip,” he warned. “Could he sell it to the Honored Matres?”

“He might. Come. Let’s go back to your quarters.”

In his workroom, she gestured him to the chair at his console and he wondered if she was still hunting for his secrets. She bent over him to manipulate the controls. The overhead projector produced a scene of desert to a horizon of rolling dunes.

“Chapterhouse?” she said. “A wide band along our equator.”

Excitement gripped him. “Sandtrout, you said. But are there any new worms?”

“Sheeana expects them soon.”

“They require a large amount of spice as catalyst.”

“We’ve gambled a great deal of melange out there. Leto told you about the catalyst, didn’t he? What else do you remember of him?”

“He killed me so many times it’s an ache when I think about it.”

She had the records of Dar-es-Balat on Dune to confirm this. “Killed you himself, I know. Did he just throw you away when you were used up?”

“I sometimes performed up to expectations and was allowed a natural death.”

“Was his Golden Path worth it?”

We don’t understand his Golden Path nor the fermentations that produced it. He said this.

“Interesting choice of word. A Mentat thinks of the Tyrant’s eons as fermentation.”

“That erupted in the Scattering.”

“Driven also by the Famine Times.”

“You think he didn’t anticipate famines?”

She did not reply, held to silence by his Mentat view. Golden Path: humankind “erupting” into the universe . . . never again confined to any single planet and susceptible to a singular fate. All of our eggs no longer in one basket.

“Leto thought of all humankind as a single organism,” he said.

“But he enlisted us in his dream against our will.”

“You Atreides always do that.”

You Atreides! “Then you’ve paid your debt to us?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Do you appreciate my present dilemma, Mentat?”

“How long have the sandtrout been at work?”