Dune

Murbella talking. Yes, that was it. Oddly self-analytic. She approached her own life with a new maturity, a Bene Gesserit—heightened awareness and confidence that something of great strength grew in her.

Every time he recognized this Bene Gesserit change, he felt sad. Nearer the day of our parting.

But Murbella was talking. “She (Odrade was often ‘she’) keeps asking me to assess my love for you.”

Remembering this, Idaho allowed it to replay.

“She has tried the same approach with me.”

“What do you say?”

“Odi et amo. Excrucior.”

She lifted herself on one elbow and looked down at him. “What language is that?”

“A very old one Leto had me learn once.”

“Translate.” Peremptory. Her old Honored Matre self.

“I hate her and I love her. And I am racked.”

“Do you really hate me?” Unbelieving.

“What I hate is being tied this way, not the master of my self.”

“Would you leave me if you could?”

“I want the decision to recur moment by moment. I want control of it.”

“It’s a game where one of the pieces can’t be moved.”

There it was! Her words.

Remembering, Idaho felt no elation but as though his eyes had suddenly been opened after a long sleep. A game where one of the pieces can’t be moved. Game. His view of the no-ship and what the Sisterhood did here.

There was more to the exchange.

“The ship is our own special school,” Murbella said.

He could only agree. The Sisterhood reinforced his Mentat capacities to screen data and display what had not gone through. He sensed where this might lead and felt leaden fear.

“You clear the nerve passages. You block off distractions and useless mind-wanderings.”

You redirected your responses into that dangerous mode every Mentat was warned to avoid. “You can lose yourself there.”

Students were taken to see human vegetables, “failed Mentats,” kept alive to demonstrate the peril.

How tempting, though. You could sense the power in that mode. Nothing hidden. All things known.

In the midst of that fear, Murbella turning toward him on the bed, he felt the sexual tensions become almost explosive.

Not yet. Not yet!

One of them had said something else. What? He had been thinking about the limits of logic as a tool to expose the Sisterhood’s motives.

“Do you often try to analyze them?” Murbella asked.

Uncanny how she did that, addressing his unspoken thoughts. She denied she read minds. “I just read you, ghola mine. You are mine, you know.”

“And vice versa.”

“Too true.” Almost bantering but it covered something deeper and convoluted.

There was a pitfall in any analysis of human psyches and he said this. “Thinking you know why you behave as you do gives you all sorts of excuses for extraordinary behavior.”

Excuses for extraordinary behavior! There was another piece in his mosaic. More of the game but these counters were guilt and blame.

Murbella’s voice was almost musing. “I suppose you can rationalize almost anything by laying it on some trauma.”

“Rationalize such things as burning entire planets?”

“There’s a kind of brutal self-determination in that. She says making determined choices firms up the psyche and gives you a sense of identity you can rely on under stress. Do you agree, Mentat mine?”

“The Mentat is not yours.” No force in his voice.

Murbella laughed and slumped back onto her pillow. “You know what the Sisters want of us, Mentat mine?”

“They want our children.”

“Oh, much more than that. They want our willing participation in their dream.”

Another piece of the mosaic!

But who other than a Bene Gesserit knew that dream? The Sisters were actresses, always performing, letting little that was real come through their masks. The real person was walled in and metered out as needed.

“Why does she keep that old painting?” Murbella asked.

Idaho felt his stomach muscles tighten. Odrade had brought him a holorecord of the painting she kept in her sleeping chamber. Cottages at Cordeville by Vincent Van Gogh. Awakening him in this bed at some witching hour of the night almost a month ago.

“You asked for my hold on humanity and here it is.” Thrusting the holo in front of his sleep-fogged eyes. He sat up and stared at the thing, trying to comprehend. What was wrong with her? Odrade sounded so excited.

She left the holo in his hands while she turned on all of the lights, giving the room a sense of hard and immediate shapes, everything vaguely mechanical the way you would expect it in a no-ship. Where was Murbella? They had gone to sleep together.