Will the first ships return tonight?
"Of course, Reverend Mother." Walli stood aside, opening the way to the door.
Sheeana spoke as she was leaving. "Desert Watch will have to be moved before long."
"We are prepared."
The sun was dipping below the horizon when Sheeana emerged from the arched street at the edge of the community. She strode into starlit desert, exploring with her senses as she had done as a child. Ahhh, there was the cinnamon essence. Worms near.
She paused and, turning northeast away from the last sunglow, placed her palms flat above and below her eyes in the old Fremen way, confining view and light. She stared out of a horizontal frame. Whatever fell from heaven must pass this narrow slit.
Tonight? They will come just after dark to delay the moment of explanation. A full night for reflection.
She waited with Bene Gesserit patience.
An arc of fire drew a thin line above the northern horizon. Another. Another. They were positioned right for the Landing Flat.
Sheeana felt her heart beating fast.
They have come!
And what would be their message for the Sisterhood? Returning warriors triumphant or refugees? There could be little difference, given the evolution of Odrade's plan.
She would know by morning.
Sheeana lowered her hands and found she was trembling. Deep breath. The Litany.
Presently, she walked the desert, sandwalking in the remembered stride of Dune. She had almost forgotten how the feet dragged. As though they carried extra weight. Seldom-used muscles were called into play but the random walk, once learned, was never forgotten.
Once, I never dreamed I would ever again walk this way.
If watchdogs detected that thought they might wonder about their Sheeana.
It was a failure in herself, she thought. She had grown into the rhythms of Chapterhouse. This planet talked to her at a subterranean level. She felt earth, trees, and flowers, every growing thing as though all were part of her. And now, here was disturbing movement, something in a language from a different planet. She sensed the desert changing and that, too, was an alien tongue. Desert. Not lifeless but living in a way profoundly different from once-verdant Chapterhouse.
Less life but more intense.
She heard the desert: small slitherings, creaking chirps of insects, a dark rustle of hunting wings overhead and the quickest of ploppings on the sand - kangaroo mice brought here in anticipation of this day when worms would once more begin their rule.
Walli will remember to send flora and fauna from Dune.
She stopped atop a tall barracan. In front of her, darkness blurring its edges, was an ocean caught in stop motion, a shadow surf beating on a shadow beach of this changing land. It was a limitless desert-sea. It had originated far away and it would go to stranger places than this.
I will take you there if I am able.
A night breeze from drylands to moister places behind her deposited a film of dust on her cheeks and nose, lifting the edges of her hair as it passed. She felt saddened.
What might have been.
That no longer was important.
The things that are - they matter.
She took a deep breath. Cinnamon stronger. Melange. Spice and worms near. Worms aware of her presence. How soon would this air be dry enough for the sandworms to grow great and work their crop as they had on Dune?
The planet and the desert.
She saw them as two halves of the same saga. Just as the Bene Gesserit and the humankind they served. Matched halves. Either without the other was diminished, an emptiness with lost purpose. Not better dead, perhaps, but moving aimlessly. There lay the threat of Honored Matre victory. Aimed by blind violence!
Blind in a hostile universe.
And there was why the Tyrant had preserved the Sisterhood.
He knew he only gave us the path without direction. A paper chase laid down by a jokester and left empty at the end.
A poet in his own right, though.
She recalled his "Memory Poem" from Dar-es-Balat, a bit of jetsam the Bene Gesserit preserved.
And for what reason do we preserve it? So I can fill my mind with it now? Forgetting for the moment what I may confront tomorrow?
The fair night of the poet,
Fill it with innocent stars.
A pace apart Orion stands.
His glare sees everything,
Marking our genes forever.
Welcome darkness and stare,
Blinded in the afterglow.
There's barren eternity!
Sheeana felt abruptly that she had won a chance to become the ultimate artist, filled to overflowing and presented with a blank surface where she might create as she wished.
An unrestricted universe!
Odrade's words from those first childhood exposures to Bene Gesserit purpose came back to her. "Why did we fasten onto you, Sheeana? It's really simple. We recognized in you a thing we had long awaited. You arrived and we saw it happen."
"It?" How naive I was!
"Something new lifting over the horizon."
My migration will seek the new. But... I must find a planet with moons.
***
Looked at one way, the universe is Brownian movement, nothing predictable at the elemental level. Muad'Dib and his Tyrant son closed the cloud chamber where movement occurred.
Murbella entered a time of incongruent experiences. It bothered her at first, seeing her own life with multiple vision. Chaotic events at Junction had ignited this, creating a jumble of immediate necessities that would not leave her, not even when she returned to Chapterhouse.
I warned you, Dar. You can't deny it. I said they could turn victory into defeat. And look at the mess you dumped in my lap! I was lucky to save as many as I did.
This inner protest always immersed her in the events that had elevated her to this awful prominence.
What else could I have done?
Memory displayed Streggi slumping to the floor in bloodless death. The scene had played on the no-ship's relays like a fictional drama. The projection framework in the ship's command bay added to the illusion that this was not really happening. The actors would arise and take their bows. Teg's comeyes, humming away automatically, missed none of it until someone silenced them.
She was left with images, an eerie afterglow: Teg sprawled on the floor of that Honored Matre aerie. Odrade staring in shock.
Loud protests greeted Murbella's declaration that she must rush groundside. The Proctors were adamant until she laid out the details of Odrade's gamble and demanded: "Do you want total disaster?"
Odrade Within won that argument. But you were prepared for it from the first, weren't you, Dar? Your plan!
The Proctors said: "There's still Sheeana." They gave Murbella a one-man lighter and sent her to Junction alone.
Even though she transmitted her Honored Matre identity ahead of her, there were touchy moments at the Landing Flat.
A squad of armed Honored Matres confronted her as she emerged from the lighter beside a smoking pit. The smoke smelled of exotic explosives.
Where Mother Superior's lighter was destroyed.
An ancient Honored Matre led the squad, her red robe stained, some of its decorations gone and a rip down the left shoulder. She was like some dried-up lizard, still poisonous, still with a bite but running on well-used angers, most of her energy gone. Disarrayed hair like the outer skin of a fresh-dug ginger root. There was a demon in her. Murbella saw it peering from orange-flecked eyes.
For all the fact that a full squad backed up the old one, the two of them faced each other as though isolated at the foot of the lighter's drop, wild animals cautiously sniffing, trying to judge the extent of danger.