she wanted only to sit here in a safe and well-organized cocoon where she could manipulate others.
Odrade found these observations a welcome affirmation of Bene Gesserit deductions. The Sisterhood knew how to exploit this leverage.
“Have you nothing more to say?” Dama asked.
Stall for time.
Odrade ventured a question. “I am extremely curious why you agreed to this meeting?”
“Why are you curious?”
“It seems so… so out of character for you.”
“We determine what is in character for us!” Quite testy there.
“But what is it about us interests you?”
“You think we find you interesting?”
“Perhaps you even find us remarkable, because that is certainly how we look at you.”
A pleased expression made its fleeting appearance on Dama’s face. “I knew you would be fascinated by us.”
“The exotic interests the exotic,” Odrade said.
This brought a knowing smile to Dama’s lips, the smile of someone whose pet has been clever. She stood and went to the one window. Summoning Odrade to her side, Dama gestured to a stand of trees beyond the first flowering bushes and spoke in that soft accent so difficult to follow.
Something ticked off an inner alarm. Odrade fell into simulflow, seeking the source. Something in the room or in Spider Queen? There was a lack of spontaneity about the setting matched by much that Dama did. So all of this was designed to create an effect. Carefully schemed.
Is this one really my Spider Queen? Or is there a more powerful one watching us?
Odrade explored this thought, sorting swiftly. It was a process that provided more questions than answers, a mental shorthand akin to that of Mentats. Sort for relevance and bring up the latent (but orderly) backgrounds. Order generally was a product of human activity. Chaos existed as raw material from which to create order. That was the Mentat approach, giving no unalterable truths but a remarkable lever for decision-making: orderly assemblage of data in a non-discrete system.
She arrived at a Projective.
They revel in chaos! Prefer it! Adrenaline addicts!
So Dama was Dama, Great Honored Matre. Forever the patroness, forever the superior.
There is no greater one watching us. But Dama believes this is bargaining. One would think she had never done it before. Precisely!
Dama touched an unmarked place below the window and the wall folded back, revealing that the window was but an artful projection. The way was opened onto a high balcony paved with dark green tiles. It overlooked plantations much different from those in the window projection. Here was chaos preserved, wilderness left to its own devices and made more remarkable by ordered gardens in the distance. Brambles, fallen trees, thick bushes. And beyond: evenly spaced rows of what appeared to be vegetables with automated harvesters passing back and forth, leaving bare ground behind them.
Love of chaos, indeed!
Spider Queen smiled and led the way onto the balcony.
As she emerged, Odrade once more was stopped by what she saw. A decoration on the parapet to her left. A life-size figure shaped from an almost ethereal substance, all feathery planes and curved surfaces.
When she squinted at the figure, Odrade saw it was intended to represent a human. Male or female? In some positions male, and in some female. Planes and curves responded to vagrant breezes. Thin, almost invisible wires (looked to be shigawire) suspended it from a delicately curving tube anchored in a translucent mound. The lower extremities of the figure almost touched the pebbled surface of the supporting base.
Odrade stared, captivated.
Why does it remind me of Sheeana’s “The Void”?
When the wind moved it, the whole creation appeared to dance, relapsing sometimes into a graceful walk, then a slow pirouette and sweeping turns with outstretched leg.
“It is called ‘Ballet Master,’” Dama said. “In some winds it will kick its feet high. I have seen it running as gracefully as a marathoner. Sometimes it is just ugly little motions, arms jerking as though they held weapons. Beautiful and ugly—it is all the same. I think the artist misnamed it. ‘Being Unknown’ would have been better.”
Beautiful and ugly—all the same. Being Unknown.
That was a terrible thing about Sheena’s creation. Odrade felt a cold wash of fear. “Who was the artist?”
“I’ve no idea. One of my predecessors took it from a planet we were destroying. Why does it interest you?”
It’s the wild thing no one can govern. But she said: “I presume we’re both seeking a basis for understanding, trying to find similarities between us.”
This brought the orange glare. “You may try to understand us but we have no need to understand you.”