Heretics of Dune, Page 4

  Still covertly watching the two Reverend Mothers, Duncan did a series of cartwheels. He flexed his striking muscles as he moved, just the way Teg had taught him.

  Teg also instructed in planetary defenses. Gammu was ringed by orbiting monitors whose crews could not have their families aboard. The families remained down here on Gammu, hostage to the vigilance of those guardian orbiters. Somewhere among the ships in space, there were undetectable no-ships whose crews were composed entirely of the Bashar's people and Bene Gesserit Sisters.

  "I would not have taken this assignment without full charge of all defensive arrangements," Teg explained.

  Duncan realized that he was "this assignment." The Keep was here to protect him. Teg's orbiting monitors, including the no-ships, protected the Keep.

  It was all part of a military education whose elements Duncan found somehow familiar. Learning how to defend a seemingly vulnerable planet from attacks originating in space, he knew when those defenses were correctly placed. It was extremely complicated as a whole but the elements were identifiable and could be understood. There was, for instance, the constant monitoring of atmosphere and the blood serum of Gammu's inhabitants. Suk doctors in the pay of the Bene Gesserit were everywhere.

  "Diseases are weapons," Teg said. "Our defense against diseases must be finely tuned."

  Frequently, Teg railed against passive defenses. He called them "the product of a siege mentality long known to create deadly weaknesses."

  When it came to military instructions from Teg, Duncan listened carefully. Patrin and the library records confirmed that the Mentat Bashar Miles Teg had been a famous military leader for the Bene Gesserit. Patrin often referred to their service together and always Teg was the hero.

  "Mobility is the key to military success," Teg said. "If you're tied down in forts, even whole-planet forts, you are ultimately vulnerable."

  Teg did not much care for Gammu.

  "I see that you already know this place was called Giedi Prime once. The Harkonnens who ruled here taught us a few things. We have a better idea, thanks to them, of how terrifyingly brutal humans can become."

  As he recalled this, Duncan observed that the two Reverend Mothers watching from the parapet obviously were discussing him.

  Am I the new one's assignment?

  Duncan did not like being watched and he hoped the new one would allow him some time to himself. She did not look like a tough one. Not like Schwangyu.

  As he continued his exercises, Duncan timed them to a private litany: Damn Schwangyu! Damn Schwangyu!

  He had hated Schwangyu from the age of nine--four years now. She did not know his hate, he thought. She had probably forgotten all about the incident where his hate had been ignited.

  Barely nine and he had managed to slip through the inner guards out into a tunnel that led to one of the pillboxes. Smell of fungus in the tunnel. Dim lights. Dampness. He peered out through the box's weapons slits before being caught and hustled back into the core of the Keep.

  This escapade occasioned a stem lecture from Schwangyu, a remote and threatening figure whose orders must be obeyed. That was how he still thought of her, although he had since learned about the Bene Gesserit Voice-of-Command, that vocal subtlety which could bend the will of an untrained listener.

  She must be obeyed.

  "You have occasioned the disciplining of an entire guard unit," Schwangyu said. "They will be severely punished."

  That had been the most terrible part of her lecture. Duncan liked some of the guards and occasionally lured some of them into real play with laughter and tumbling. His prank, sneaking out to the pillbox, had hurt his friends.

  Duncan knew what it was to be punished.

  Damn Schwangyu! Damn Schwangyu! ...

  After Schwangyu's lecture, Duncan ran to his chief instructor of the moment, Reverend Mother Tamalane, another of the wizened old ones with a cool and aloof manner, snowy hair above a narrow face and a leather skin. He demanded of Tamalane to know about the punishment of his guards. Tamalane fell into a surprising pensive mood, her voice like sand rasping against wood.

  "Punishments? Well, well."

  They were in the small teaching room off the larger practice floor where Tamalane went each evening to prepare the next day's lessons. It was a place of bubble and spool readers and other sophisticated means for information storage and retrieval. Duncan far preferred it to the library but he was not allowed in the teaching room unattended. It was a bright room lighted by many suspensor-buoyed glowglobes. At his intrusion, Tamalane turned away from where she laid out his lessons.

  "There's always something of a sacrificial banquet about our major punishments," she said. "The guards will, of course, receive major punishment."

  "Banquet?" Duncan was puzzled.

  Tamalane swung completely around in her swivel seat and looked directly into his eyes. Her steely teeth glittered in the bright lights. "History has seldom been good to those who must be punished," she said.

  Duncan flinched at the word "history." It was one of Tamalane's signals. She was going to teach a lesson, another boring lesson.

  "Bene Gesserit punishments cannot be forgotten."

  Duncan focused on Tamalane's old mouth, sensing abruptly that she spoke out of painful personal experience. He was going to learn something interesting!

  "Our punishments carry an inescapable lesson," Tamalane said. "It is much more than the pain."

  Duncan sat on the floor at her feet. From this angle, Tamalane was a black-shrouded and ominous figure.

  "We do not punish with the ultimate agony," she said. "That is reserved for a Reverend Mother's passage through the spice."

  Duncan nodded. Library records referred to "spice agony," a mysterious trial that created a Reverend Mother.

  "Major punishments are painful, nonetheless," she said. "They are also emotionally painful. Emotion evoked by punishment is always that emotion we judge to be the penitent's greatest weakness, and thus we strengthen the punished."

  Her words filled Duncan with unfocused dread. What were they doing to his guards? He could not speak but there was no need. Tamalane was not finished.

  "The punishment always ends with a dessert," she said and she clapped her hands against her knees.

  Duncan frowned. Dessert? That was part of a banquet. How could a banquet be punishment?

  "It is not really a banquet but the idea of a banquet," Tamalane said. One clawlike hand described a circle in the air. "The dessert comes, something totally unexpected. The penitent thinks: Ahhh, I have been forgiven at last! You understand?"

  Duncan shook his head from side to side. No, he did not understand.

  "It is the sweetness of the moment," she said. "You have been through every course of a painful banquet and come out at the end to something you can savor. But! As you savor it, then comes the most painful moment of all, the recognition, the understanding that this is not pleasure-at-the-end. No, indeed. This is the ultimate pain of the major punishment. It locks in the Bene Gesserit lesson."

  "But what will she do to those guards?" The words were wrenched from Duncan.

  "I cannot say what the specific elements of the individual punishments will be. I have no need to know. I can only tell you it will be different for each of them."

  Tamalane would say no more. She returned to laying out the next day's lessons. "We will continue tomorrow," she said, "teaching you to identify the sources of the various accents of spoken Galach."

  No one else, not even Teg or Patrin, would answer his questions about the punishments. Even the guards, when he saw them afterward, refused to speak of their ordeals. Some reacted curtly to his overtures and none would play with him anymore. There was no forgiveness among the punished. That much was clear.

  Damn Schwangyu! Damn Schwangyu! ...

  That was where his deep hatred of her began. All of the old witches shared in his hatred. Would the new young one be the same as the old ones?

  Damn Schwangyu!
/>   When he demanded of Schwangyu: "Why did you have to punish them?" Schwangyu took some time before answering, then: "It is dangerous for you here on Gammu. There are people who wish you harm."

  Duncan did not ask why. This was another area where his questions were never answered. Not even Teg would answer, although Teg's very presence emphasized the fact of that danger.

  And Miles Teg was a Mentat who must know many answers. Duncan often saw the old man's eyes glisten while his thoughts went far away. But there was no Mentat response to such questions as:

  "Why are we here on Gammu?"

  "Who do you guard against? Who wants to harm me?"

  "Who are my parents?"

  Silence greeted such questions or sometimes Teg would growl: "I cannot answer you."

  The library was useless. He had discovered this when he was only eight and his chief instructor was a failed Reverend Mother named Luran Geasa--not quite as ancient as Schwangyu but well along in years, more than a hundred, anyway.

  At his demand, the library produced information about Gammu/Giedi Prime, about the Harkonnens and their fall, about various conflicts where Teg had commanded. None of those battles came through as very bloody; several commentators referred to Teg's "superb diplomacy." But, one datum leading to another, Duncan learned about the time of the God Emperor and the taming of his people. This period commanded Duncan's attention for weeks. He found an old map in the records and projected it on the focus wall. The commentator's superim-positions told him that this very Keep had been a Fish Speaker Command Center abandoned during the Scattering.

  Fish Speakers!

  Duncan wished then that he had lived during their time, serving as one of the rare male advisors in the female army that had worshiped the great God Emperor.

  Oh, to have lived on Rakis in those days!

  Teg was surprisingly forthcoming about the God Emperor, calling him always "the Tyrant." A library lock was opened and information about Rakis came pouring out for Duncan.

  "Will I ever see Rakis?" he asked Geasa.

  "You are being prepared to live there."

  The answer astonished him. Everything they taught him about that faraway planet came into new focus.

  "Why will I live there?"

  "I cannot answer that."

  With renewed interest, he returned to his studies of that mysterious planet and its miserable Church of Shai-hulud, the Divided God. Worms. The God Emperor had become those worms! The idea filled Duncan with awe. Perhaps here was something worthy of worship. The thought touched a chord in him. What had driven a man to accept that terrible metamorphosis?

  Duncan knew what his guards and the others in the Keep thought about Rakis and the core of priesthood there. Sneering remarks and laughter told it all. Teg said: "We'll probably never know the whole truth of it, but I tell you, lad, that's no religion for a soldier."

  Schwangyu capped it: "You are to learn about the Tyrant but you are not to believe in his religion. That is beneath you, contemptible."

  In every spare study moment, Duncan pored over whatever the library produced for him: the Holy Book of the Divided God, the Guard Bible, the Orange Catholic Bible and even the Apocrypha. He learned about the long defunct Bureau of the Faith and "The Pearl that IS the Sun of Understanding."

  The very idea of the worms fascinated him. Their size! A big one would stretch from one end of the Keep to the other. Men had ridden the pre-Tyrant worms but the Rakian priesthood forbade this now.

  He found himself gripped by accounts from the archeological team that had found the Tyrant's primitive no-chamber on Rakis. Dar-es-Balat, the place was called. The reports by Archeologist Hadi Benotto were marked "Suppressed by orders of the Rakian Priesthood." The file number on the accounts from Bene Gesserit Archives was a long one and what Benotto revealed was fascinating.

  "A kernel of the God Emperor's awareness in each worm?" he asked Geasa.

  "So it's said. And even if true, they are not conscious, not aware. The Tyrant himself said he would enter an endless dream."

  Each study session occasioned a special lecture and Bene Gesserit explanations of religion until finally he encountered those accounts called "The Nine Daughters of Siona" and "The Thousand Sons of Idaho."

  Confronting Geasa, he demanded: "My name is Duncan Idaho, too. What does that mean?"

  Geasa always moved as though standing in the shadow of her failure, her long head bent forward and her watery eyes aimed at the ground. The confrontation occurred near evening in the long hall outside the practice floor. She paled at his question.

  When she did not answer, he demanded: "Am I descended from Duncan Idaho?"

  "You must ask Schwangyu." Geasa sounded as though the words pained her.

  It was a familiar response and it angered him. She meant he would be told something to shut him up, little information in the telling. Schwangyu, however, was more open than expected.

  "You carry the authentic blood of Duncan Idaho."

  "Who are my parents?"

  "They are long dead."

  "How did they die?"

  "I do not know. We received you as an orphan."

  "Then why do people want to harm me?"

  "They fear what you may do."

  "What is it I may do?"

  "Study your lessons. All will be made clear to you in time."

  Shut up and study! Another familiar answer.

  He obeyed because he had learned to recognize when the doors were closed on him. But now his questing intelligence met other accounts of the Famine Times and the Scattering, the no-chambers and no-ships that could not be traced, not even by the most powerful prescient minds in their universe. Here, he encountered the fact that descendants of Duncan Idaho and Siona, those ancients who had served the Tyrant God Emperor, also were invisible to prophets and prescients. Not even a Guild Steersman deep in melange trance could detect such people. Siona, the accounts told him, was a true-bred Atreides and Duncan Idaho was a ghola.

  Ghola?

  He probed the library for elaborations on this peculiar word. Ghola. The library produced for him no more than bare-boned accounts: "Gholas: humans grown from a cadaver's cells in Tleilaxu axlotl tanks."

  Axlotl tanks?

  "A Tleilaxu device for reproducing a living human being from the cells of a cadaver."

  "Describe a ghola," he demanded.

  "Innocent flesh devoid of its original memories. See Axlotl Tanks."

  Duncan had learned to read the silences, the blank places in what the people of the Keep revealed to him. Revelation swept over him. He knew! Only ten and he knew!

  I am a ghola.

  Late afternoon in the library, all of the esoteric machinery around him faded into a sensory background, and a ten-year-old sat silently before a scanner hugging the knowledge to himself.

  I am a ghola!

  He could not remember the axlotl tanks where his cells had grown into an infant. His first memories were of Geasa picking him up from his cradle, the alert interest in those adult eyes that had so soon faded into wary lidding.

  It was as though the information so grudgingly supplied him by the Keep's people and records had at last defined a central shape: himself.

  "Tell me about the Bene Tleilax," he demanded of the library.

  "They are a people self-divided into Face Dancers and Masters. Face Dancers are mules, sterile and submissive to the Masters."

  Why did they do this to me?

  The information machines of the library were suddenly alien and dangerous. He was afraid, not that his questions might meet more blank walls, but that he would receive answers.

  Why am I so important to Schwangyu and the others?

  He felt that they had wronged him, even Miles Teg and Patrin. Why was it right to take the cells of a human and produce a ghola?

  He asked the next question with great hesitation. "Can a ghola ever remember who he was?"

  "It can be done."

  "How?"

  "The psy
chological identity of ghola to original pre-sets certain responses, which can be ignited by trauma."

  No answer at all!

  "But how?"

  Schwangyu intruded at this point, arriving at the library unannounced. So something about his questions had been set to alert her!

  "All will be made clear to you in time," she said.

  She talked down to him! He sensed the injustice in it, the lack of truthfulness. Something within him said he carried more human wisdom in his unawakened self than the ones who presumed themselves so superior. His hatred of Schwangyu reached a new intensity. She was the personification of all who tantalized him and frustrated his questions.

  Now, though, his imagination was on fire. He would recapture his original memories! He felt the truth of this. He would remember his parents, his family, his friends ... his enemies.

  He demanded it of Schwangyu: "Did you produce me because of my enemies?"

  "You have already learned silence, child," she said. "Rely on that knowledge."

  Very well. That's how I will fight you, damned Schwangyu. I will be silent and I will learn. I won't show you how I really feel.

  "You know," she said, "I think we're raising a stoic."

  She patronized him! He would not be patronized. He would fight them all with silence and watchfulness. Duncan ran from the library and huddled in his room.

  In the following months, many things confirmed that he was a ghola. Even a child knew when things around him were extraordinary. He saw other children occasionally beyond the walls, walking along the perimeter road, laughing and calling. He found accounts of children in the library. Adults did not come to those children and engage them in rigorous training of the sort imposed on him. Other children did not have a Reverend Mother Schwangyu to order every smallest aspect of their lives.

  His discovery precipitated another change in Duncan's life. Luran Geasa was called away from him and did not return.

  She was not supposed to let me know about gholas.

  The truth was somewhat more complex, as Schwangyu explained to Lucilla on the observation parapet the day of Lucilla's arrival.

  "We knew the inevitable moment would come. He would learn about gholas and ask the pointed questions."

  "It was high time a Reverend Mother took over his everyday education. Geasa may have been a mistake."

  "Are you questioning my judgment?" Schwangyu snapped.

  "Is your judgment so perfect that it may never be questioned?" In Lucilla's soft contralto, the question had the impact of a slap.