Yes! Achieving imbalances with sensitized questions was a Mentat's juggling act.
Something Murbella had said the night before - what? They had been in her bed. He recalled seeing the time projected on the ceiling: 9:47. And he had thought: That projection takes energy.
He could almost feel the flow of the ship's power, this giant enclosure cut out of Time. Frictionless machinery to create a mimetic presence no instrument could distinguish from natural background. Except for now when it was on standby, shielded not from eyes but from prescience.
Murbella beside him: another kind of power, both aware of the force trying to pull them together. The energy it took to suppress that mutual magnetism! Sexual attraction building and building and building.
Murbella talking. Yes, that was it. Oddly self-analytic. She approached her own life with a new maturity, a Bene Gesserit-heightened awareness and confidence that something of great strength grew in her.
Every time he recognized this Bene Gesserit change, he felt sad.
Nearer the day of our parting.
But Murbella was talking. "She (Odrade was often 'she') keeps asking me to assess my love for you."
Remembering this, Idaho allowed it to replay.
"She has tried the same approach with me."
"What do you say?"
"Odi et amo. Excrucior."
She lifted herself on one elbow and looked down at him. "What language is that?"
"A very old one Leto had me learn once."
"Translate." Peremptory. Her old Honored Matre self.
" 'I hate her and I love her. And I am racked.' "
"Do you really hate me?" Unbelieving.
"What I hate is being tied this way, not the master of my self."
"Would you leave me if you could?"
"I want the decision to recur moment by moment. I want control of it."
"It's a game where one of the pieces can't be moved."
There it was! Her words.
Remembering, Idaho felt no elation but as though his eyes had suddenly been opened after a long sleep. A game where one of the pieces can't be moved. Game. His view of the no-ship and what the Sisterhood did here.
There was more to the exchange.
"The ship is our own special school," Murbella said.
He could only agree. The Sisterhood reinforced his Mentat capacities to screen data and display what had not gone through. He sensed where this might lead and felt leaden fear.
"You clear the nerve passages. You block off distractions and useless mind-wanderings."
You redirected your responses into that dangerous mode every Mentat was warned to avoid. "You can lose yourself there."
Students were taken to see human vegetables, "failed Mentats," kept alive to demonstrate the peril.
How tempting, though. You could sense the power in that mode. Nothing hidden. All things known.
In the midst of that fear, Murbella turning toward him on the bed, he felt the sexual tensions become almost explosive.
Not yet. Not yet!
One of them had said something else. What? He had been thinking about the limits of logic as a tool to expose the Sisterhood's motives.
"Do you often try to analyze them?" Murbella asked.
Uncanny how she did that, addressing his unspoken thoughts. She denied she read minds. "I just read you, ghola mine. You are mine, you know."
"And vice versa. "
"Too true." Almost bantering but it covered something deeper and convoluted.
There was a pitfall in any analysis of human psyches and he said this. "Thinking you know why you behave as you do gives you all sorts of excuses for extraordinary behavior."
Excuses for extraordinary behavior! There was another piece in his mosaic. More of the game but these counters were guilt and blame.
Murbella's voice was almost musing. "I suppose you can rationalize almost anything by laying it on some trauma."
"Rationalize such things as burning entire planets?"
"There's a kind of brutal self-determination in that. She says making determined choices firms up the psyche and gives you a sense of identity you can rely on under stress. Do you agree, Mentat mine?"
"The Mentat is not yours." No force in his voice.
Murbella laughed and slumped back onto her pillow. "You know what the Sisters want of us, Mentat mine?"
"They want our children."
"Oh, much more than that. They want our willing participation in their dream."
Another piece of the mosaic!
But who other than a Bene Gesserit knew that dream? The Sisters were actresses, always performing, letting little that was real come through their masks. The real person was walled in and metered out as needed.
"Why does she keep that old painting?" Murbella asked.
Idaho felt his stomach muscles tighten. Odrade had brought him a holorecord of the painting she kept in her sleeping chamber. Cottages at Cordeville by Vincent Van Gogh. Awakening him in this bed at some witching hour of the night almost a month ago.
"You asked for my hold on humanity and here it is." Thrusting the holo in front of his sleep-fogged eyes. He sat up and stared at the thing, trying to comprehend. What was wrong with her? Odrade sounded so excited.
She left the holo in his hands while she turned on all of the lights, giving the room a sense of hard and immediate shapes, everything vaguely mechanical the way you would expect it in a no-ship. Where was Murbella? They had gone to sleep together.
He focused on the holo and it touched him in an unaccountable way, as though it linked him to Odrade. Her hold on her humanity? The holo felt cold to his hands. She took it from him and propped it on the side table where he stared at it while she found a chair and sat near his head. Sitting? Something compelled her to be near him!
"It was painted by a madman on Old Terra," she said, bringing her cheek close to his while both looked at the copy of the painting. "Look at it! An encapsulated human moment."
In a landscape? Yes, dammit. She was right.
He stared at the holo. Those marvelous colors! It was not just the colors. It was the totality.
"Most modern artists would laugh at the way he created that," Odrade said.
Couldn't she be silent while he looked at it?
"That was a human being as ultimate recorder," Odrade said. "The human hand, the human eye, the human essence brought to focus in the awareness of one person who tested the limits."
Tested the limits! More of the mosaic.
"Van Gogh did that with the most primitive materials and equipment." She sounded almost drunk. "Pigments a caveman would have recognized! Painted on a fabric he could have made with his own hands. He might have made the tools himself from fur and wild twigs."
She touched the surface of the holo, her finger placing a shadow across the tall trees. "The cultural level was crude by our standards, but see what he produced?"
Idaho felt he should say something but words would not come. Where was Murbella? Why wasn't she here?
Odrade pulled back and her next words burned themselves into him.
"That painting says you cannot suppress the wild thing, the uniqueness that will occur among humans no matter how much we try to avoid it."
Idaho tore his gaze away from the holo and looked at Odrade's lips when she spoke.
"Vincent told us something important about our fellows in the Scattering."
This long-dead painter? About the Scattering?
"They have done things out there and are doing things we cannot imagine. Wild things! The explosive size of that Scattered population insures it."
Murbella entered the room behind Odrade, belting a soft white robe, her feet bare. Her hair was damp from a shower. So that was where she had gone.
"Mother Superior?" Murbella's voice was sleepy.
Odrade spoke over her shoulder without fully turning. "Honored Matres think they can anticipate and control every wildness. What nonsense. They cannot even control it in themselves."