As he accumulated observations of Bellonda, he came to appreciate a viewpoint of those great Mentat Masters who had taught him. “Reverend Mothers do not make the best Mentats.”
No Bene Gesserit appeared capable of completely removing herself from that binding absolute she achieved in the Spice Agony: loyalty to her Sisterhood.
His teachers had warned against absolutes. They created a serious flaw in a Mentat.
“Everything you do, everything you sense and say is experiment. No deduction final. Nothing stops until dead and perhaps not even then, because each life creates endless ripples. Induction bounces within and you sensitize yourself to it. Deduction conveys illusions of absolutes. Kick the truth and shatter it!”
When Bellonda’s questions touched on the relationship between himself and Murbella, he saw vague emotional responses. Amusement? Jealousy? He could accept amusement (and even jealousy) about the compelling sexual demands of this mutual addiction. Is the ecstasy truly that great?
He wandered through his quarters this afternoon feeling displaced, as though newly here and not yet accepting these rooms as home. That is emotion talking to me.
Over the years of his confinement, these quarters had taken on a lived-in appearance. This was his cave, the former supercargo suite: large rooms with slightly curved walls—bedroom, library-workroom, sitting room, a green-tiled bath with dry and wet cleansing systems, and a long practice hall he shared with Murbella for exercise.
The rooms bore a unique collection of artifacts and marks of his presence: that slingchair placed at just the right angle to the console and projector linking him to Shipsystems, those ridulian records on that low side table. And there were stains of occupancy—that dark brown blot on the worktable. Spilled food had left its indelible mark.
He moved restlessly into his sleeping quarters. The light was dimmer. His ability to identify the familiar held true for odors. There was a saliva-like smell to the bed—the residue of last night’s sexual collision.
That is the proper word: Collision.
The no-ship’s air—filtered, recycled and sweetened—often bored him. No break in the no-ship maze to the exterior world ever remained open long. He sometimes sat silently sniffing, hoping for a faint trace of air that had not been adjusted to the prison’s demands.
There is a way to escape!
He wandered out of his quarters and down the corridor, took the dropchute at the end of the passage and emerged in the ship’s lowest level.
What is really happening out there in that world open to the sky?
The bits Odrade told him about events filled him with dread and a trapped feeling. No place to run! Am I wise to share my fears with Sheeana? Murbella merely laughed. “I will protect you, love. Honored Matres won’t hurt me.” Another false dream.
But Sheeana … how quickly she had picked up the hand-language and entered the spirit of his conspiracy. Conspiracy? No … I doubt that any Reverend Mother will act against her Sisters. Even the Lady Jessica went back to them in the end. But I don’t ask Sheeana to act against the Sisterhood, only that she protect us from Murbella’s folly.
The enormous powers of the hunters made only the destruction predictable. A Mentat had but to look at their disruptive violence. They brought something else as well, something hinting at matters out there in the Scattering. What were these Futars Odrade mentioned with such casualness? Part human, part beast? That had been Lucilla’s guess. And where is Lucilla?
He found himself presently in the Great Hold, the kilometer-long cargo space where they had carried the last giant sandworm of Dune, bringing it to Chapterhouse. The area still smelled of spice and sand, filling his mind with long-ago and the dead far away. He knew why he came so often to the Great Hold, doing it sometimes without even thinking, as he had just done. It both attracted and repelled. The illusion of unlimited space with traces of dust, sand, and spice carried the nostalgia of lost freedoms. But there was another side. This is where it always happened to him.
Will it happen today?
Without warning, the sense of being in the Great Hold would vanish. Then … the net shimmering in a molten sky. He was aware when the vision came that he was not really seeing a net. His mind translated what the senses could not define.
A shimmering net undulating like an infinite borealis.
Then the net would part and he would see two people—man and woman. How ordinary they appeared and yet extraordinary. A grandmother and grandfather in antique clothing: bib coveralls for