Dune

They do not guess how well I know the Ixian ship. It’s here in my head.

He spent the next hour deciding how he would record these moments when it came time to tell his fellows how he had triumphed over the powindah. With God’s help!

They would be glittering words, filled with drama and the tensions of his testing. History, after all, was always written by the victors.

They say Mother Superior can disregard nothing—a meaningless aphorism until you grasp its other significance: I am the servant of all my Sisters. They watch their servant with critical eyes. I cannot spend too much time on generalities nor on trivia. Mother Superior must display insightful action else a sense of disquiet penetrates to the farthest corners of our order.

—DARWI ODRADE

Something of what Odrade called “my servant-self” went with her as she walked the halls of Central this morning, making this her exercise rather than take time on a practice floor. A disgruntled servant! She did not like what she saw.

We are too tightly bound up in our difficulties, almost incapable of separating petty problems from great ones.

What had happened to their conscience?

Although some denied it, Odrade knew there was a Bene Gesserit conscience. But they had twisted and reshaped it into a form not easily recognized.

She felt loath to meddle with it. Decisions taken in the name of survival, the Missionaria (their interminable Jesuitical arguments!)—all diverged from something far more demanding of human judgment. The Tyrant had known this.

To be human, that was the issue. But before you could be human, you had to feel it in your guts.

No clinical answers! It came down to a deceptive simplicity whose complex nature appeared when you applied it.

Like me.

You looked inward and found who and what you believed you were. Nothing else would serve.

So what am I?

“Who asks that question?” It was a skewering thrust from Other Memory.

Odrade laughed aloud and a passing Proctor named Praska stared at her in astonishment. Odrade waved to Praska and said: “It’s good to be alive. Remember that.”

Praska produced a faint smile before going on about her business.

So who asks: What am I?

Dangerous question. Asking it put her in a universe where nothing was quite human. Nothing matched the undefined thing she sought. All around her, clowns, wild animals and puppets reacted to the pull of hidden strings. She sensed the strings that jerked her into movement.

Odrade continued along the corridor toward the tube that would take her up to her quarters.

Strings. What came with the egg? We speak glibly of “the mind at its beginning.” But what was I before the pressures of living shaped me?

It wasn’t enough to seek something “natural.” No “Noble Savage.” She had seen plenty of those in her lifetime. The strings jerking them were quite visible to a Bene Gesserit.

She felt the taskmaster within her. Strong today. It was a force she sometimes disobeyed or avoided. Taskmaster said: “Strengthen your talents. Do not flow gently in the current. Swim! Use it or lose it.”

With a gasping sensation of near panic, she realized she had barely retained her humanity, that she had been on the point of losing it.

I’ve been trying too hard to think like an Honored Matre! Manipulating and maneuvering anyone I could. And all in the name of Bene Gesserit survival!

Bell said there were no limits beyond which the Sisterhood would refuse to go in preserving the Bene Gesserit. A modicum of truth in this boast but it was the truth of all boasting. There were indeed things a Reverend Mother would not do to save the Sisterhood.

We would not block the Tyrant’s Golden Path.

Survival of humankind took precedence over survival of the Sisterhood. Else our grail of human maturity is meaningless.

But oh, the perils of leadership in a species so anxious to be told what to do. How little they knew of what they created by their demands. Leaders made mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward great disasters.

Lemming behavior.

It was right that her Sisters watched her carefully. All governments needed to remain under suspicion during their time of power including that of the Sisterhood itself. Trust no government! Not even mine!