the man and a long dress with headscarf for the woman. Working in a flower garden! He thought it must be more of the illusion. I am seeing this but it is not really what I see.
They always noticed him eventually. He heard their voices. “There he is again, Marty,” the man would say, calling the woman’s attention to Idaho.
“I wonder how it is he can look through?” Marty asked once. “Doesn’t seem possible.”
“He’s spread pretty thin, I think. Wonder if he knows the danger?”
Danger. That was the word that always jerked him out of the vision.
“Not at your console today?”
For just an instant, Idaho thought it was the vision, the voice of that odd woman, then he realized it was Odrade. Her voice came from close behind. He whirled and saw he had failed to close the hatch. She had followed him into the Hold, stalking him quietly, avoiding the scattered patches of sand that might have grated underfoot and betrayed her approach.
She looked tired and impatient. Why did she think I would be at my console?
As though answering his unspoken question, she said: “I find you at your console so often lately. For what do you search, Duncan?”
He shook his head without speaking. Why do I suddenly feel in peril?
It was a rare feeling in Odrade’s company. He could remember other occasions, though. Once when she had stared suspiciously at his hands in the field of his console. Fear associated with my console. Do I reveal my Mentat hunger for data? Do they guess that I have hidden my private self there?
“Do I get no privacy at all?” Anger and attack.
She shook her head slowly from side to side as much to say, “You can do better than that.”
“This is your second visit today,” he accused.
“I must say you’re looking well, Duncan.” More circumlocution.
“Is that what your watchers say?”
“Don’t be petty. I came for a chat with Murbella. She said you’d be down here.”
“I suppose you know Murbella’s pregnant again.” Was that trying to placate her?
“For which we are grateful. I came to tell you that Sheeana wants to visit you again.”
Why would Odrade announce that?
Her words filled him with images of the Dune waif who had become a full Reverend Mother (the youngest ever, so they said). Sheeana, his confidante, out there watching over that last great sandworm. Had it finally perpetuated itself? Why should Odrade interest herself in Sheeana’s visit?
“Sheeana wants to discuss the Tyrant with you.”
She saw the surprise this produced.
“What could I possibly add to Sheeana’s knowledge of Leto II?” he demanded. “She’s a Reverend Mother.”
“You knew the Atreides intimately.”
Ahhhhh. She’s hunting for the Mentat.
“But you said she wanted to discuss Leto and it’s not safe to think of him as Atreides.”
“Oh, but he was. Refined into something more elemental than anyone before him, but one of us, nonetheless.”
One of us! She reminded him that she, too, was Atreides. Calling in his never-ending debt to the family!
“So you say.”
“Shouldn’t we stop playing this foolish game?”
Caution gripped him. He knew she saw it. Reverend Mothers were so damnably sensitive. He stared at her, not daring to speak, knowing even this told her too much.
“We believe you remember more than one ghola lifetime.” And when he still did not respond, “Come, come, Duncan! Are you a Mentat?”
The way she spoke, as much accusation as question, he knew concealment had ended. It was almost a relief.
“And if I am?”
“The Tleilaxu mixed the cells from more than one Idaho ghola when they grew you.”
Idaho-ghola! He refused to think of himself in that abstraction. “Why is Leto suddenly so important to you?” No escaping the admission in that reponse.
“Our worm has become sandtrout.”
“Are they growing and propagating?”
“Apparently.”
“Unless you contain them or eliminate them, Chapterhouse may become another Dune.”
“You figured that out, did you?”
“Leto and I together.”
“So you remember many lives. Fascinating. It makes you somewhat like us.” How unswerving her stare!
“Very different, I think.” Have to get her off that track!
“You acquired the memories during your first encounter with Murbella?”
Who guessed it? Lucilla? She was there and might have guessed, confiding her suspicions to her Sisters. He had to bring the deadly issue into the open. “I’m not another Kwisatz Haderach!”
“You’re not?” Studied objectivity. She allowed this to reveal itself, a cruelty, he thought.
“You know I’m not!” He was fighting for his life and knew it. Not so much with Odrade as with those others who watched and reviewed the comeye records.