currents. Every leader requires outsiders to perpetuate his leadership. Examine my career: I was leader and outsider. Do not assume I merely created a Church-State. That was my function as leader and I copied historical models. Barbaric arts of my time reveal me as outsider. Favorite poetry: epics. Popular dramatic ideal: heroism. Dancers: wildly abandoned. Stimulants to make people sense what I took from them. What did I take] The right to choose a role in history.
—Leto II (The Tyrant) Vether Bebe Translation
I am going to die! Lucilla thought.
Please, dear Sisters, don’t let it come before I pass along the precious burden I carry in my mind!
Sisters!
The idea of family seldom was expressed among the Bene Gesserit but it was there. In a genetic sense, they were related. And because of Other Memory, they often knew where. They had no need for special terms such as “second cousin” or “great aunt.” They saw the relationships as a weaver sees his cloth. They knew how the warp and weft created the fabric. A better word than Family, it was the fabric of the Bene Gesserit that formed the Sisterhood but it was the ancient instinct of Family that provided the warp.
Lucilla thought of her sisters only as Family now. The Family needed what she carried.
I was a fool to seek refuge on Gammu!
But her damaged no-ship would limp no farther. How diabolically extravagant Honored Matres had been! The hatred this implied terrified her.
Strewing the escape lanes around Lampadas with death-traps, the Foldspace perimeter seeded with small no-globes, each containing a field projector and a lasgun to fire on contact. When the laser hit the Holzmann generator in the no-globe, a chain reaction released the nuclear energy. Bzzz into the trap field and a devastating explosion spread silently across you. Costly but efficient! Enough such explosions and even a giant Guildship would become a crippled derelict in the void. Her ship’s system of defensive analyses had penetrated the nature of the trap only when it was too late, but she had been lucky, she supposed.
She did not feel lucky as she looked out the second story window of this isolated Gammu farmhouse. The window was open and an afternoon breeze carried the inevitable smell of oil, something dirty in the smoke of a fire out there. The Harkonnens had left their oily mark on this planet so deep it might never be removed.
Her contact here was a retired Suk doctor but she knew him as much more, something so secret that only a limited number in the Bene Gesserit shared it. The knowledge lay in a special classification: The secrets of which we do not speak, even among ourselves, for that would harm us. The secrets we do not pass from Sister to Sister in the sharing of lives for there is no open path. The secrets we dare not know until a need arises. Lucilla had stumbled into it because of a veiled remark by Odrade.
“You know an interesting thing about Gammu? Mmmmm, there’s a whole society there that bands itself on the basis that they all eat consecrated foods. A custom brought in by immigrants who have never been assimilated. Keep to themselves, frown on outbreeding, that sort of thing. They ignite the usual mythic detritus, of course: whispers, rumors. Serves to isolate them even more. Precisely what they want.”
Lucilla knew of an ancient society that fitted itself neatly into this description. She was curious. The society she had in mind supposedly had died out shortly after the Second Interspace Migrations. Judicious browsing in Archives whetted her curiosity even more. Living styles, rumor-fogged descriptions of religious rituals—especially the candelabra—and the keeping of special holy days with a proscription against any work on those days. And they were not just on Gammu!
One morning, taking advantage of an uncommon lull, Lucilla entered the workroom to test her “projective surmise,” something not as reliable as a Mentat’s equivalent but more than theory.
“You have a new assignment for me, I suspect.”
“I see you’ve been spending time in Archives.”
“It seemed a profitable thing to do just now.”
“Making connections?”
“A surmise.” That secret society on Gammu—they’re Jews, aren’t they?
“You may have need of special information because of where we are about to post you.” Extremely casual.
Lucilla sank into Bellonda’s chairdog without invitation.
Odrade picked up a stylus, scribbled on a sheet of disposable and passed it to Lucilla in a way that hid it from the comeyes.
Lucilla took the hint and bent over the message, holding it close