Murbella came around to the foot of the bed and stared questioningly at Idaho. "I seem to have come in on the middle of a conversation. "
"Balance, that's the key," Odrade said.
Idaho kept his attention on Mother Superior.
"Humans can balance on strange surfaces," Odrade said. "Even on unpredictable ones. It's called 'getting in tune.' Great musicians know it. Surfers I watched when I was a child on Gammu, they knew it. Some waves throw you but you're prepared for that. You climb back up and go at it once more."
For no reason he could explain, Idaho thought of another thing Odrade had said: "We have no attic storerooms. We recycle everything."
Recycle. Cycle. Pieces of the circle. Pieces of the mosaic.
He was random hunting and knew better. Not the Mentat way. Recycle, though - Other Memory was not an attic storeroom then but something they considered as recycling. It meant they used their past only to change it and renew it.
Getting in tune.
A strange allusion from someone who claimed she avoided music.
Remembering, he sensed his mental mosaic. It had become a jumble. Nothing fitted anywhere. Random pieces that probably did not go together at all.
But they did!
Mother Superior's voice continued in his memory. So there is more.
"People who know this go to the heart of it," Odrade said. "They warn that you cannot think about what you're doing. That's a sure way to fail. You just do it!"
Don't think. Do it. He sensed anarchy. Her words threw him back onto resources other than Mentat training.
Bene Gesserit trickery! She did this deliberately, knowing the effect. Where was the affection he sometimes felt radiating from her? Could she have concern for the well-being of someone she treated this way?
When Odrade left them (he barely noticed her departure), Murbella sat on the bed and straightened the robe around her knees.
Humans can balance on strange surfaces. Movement in his mind: the pieces of the mosaic trying to find relationships.
He felt a new surge in the universe. Those two strange people in his vision? They were part of it. He knew this without being able to say why. What was it the Bene Gesserit claimed? "We modify old fashions and old beliefs."
"Look at me!" Murbella said.
Voice? Not quite but now he was sure she tried it on and she had not told him they were training her in this witchery.
He saw the alien look in her green eyes that told him she was thinking about her former associates.
"Never try to be more clever than the Bene Gesserit, Duncan."
Speaking for the comeyes?
He could not be sure. It was the intelligence behind her eyes that gripped him these days. He could feel it growing there, as though her teachers blew into a balloon and Murbella's intellect expanded the way her abdomen expanded with new life.
Voice! What were they doing to her?
That was a stupid question. He knew what they were doing. They were taking her away from him, making a Sister of her. No longer my lover, my marvelous Murbella. A Reverend Mother then, remotely calculating in everything she did. A witch. Who could love a witch?
I could. And always will.
"They grab you from your blind side to use you for their own purposes," he said.
He could see his words take hold. She had awakened to this trap after the fact. The Bene Gesserit were so damnably clever! They had enticed her into their trap, giving her small glimpses of things as magnetic as the force binding her to him. It could only be an enraging realization to an Honored Matre.
We trap others! They do not trap us!
But this had been done by the Bene Gesserit. They were in a different category. Almost Sisters. Why deny it? And she wanted their abilities. She wanted out of this probation into the full teaching she could sense just beyond the ship's walls. Didn't she know why they still kept her on probation?
They know she still struggles in their trap.
Murbella slipped out of her robe and climbed into the bed beside him. Not touching. But keeping that armed sense of nearness between their bodies.
"They originally intended me to control Sheeana for them," he said.
"As you control me?"
"Do I control you?"
"Sometimes I think you're a comic, Duncan."
"If I can't laugh at myself I'm really lost."
"Laugh at your pretensions to humor, too?"
"Those first." He turned toward her and cupped her left breast in his hand, feeling the nipple harden under his palm. "Did you know I was never weaned?"
"Never in all of those..."
"Not once."
"I might have guessed." A smile formed fleetingly on her lips, and abruptly both of them were laughing, clutching each other, helpless with it. Presently, Murbella said, "Damn, damn, damn."
"Damn who?" as his laughter subsided and they pulled apart, forcing the separation.
"Not who, what. Damn fate!"
"I don't think fate cares."
"I love you and I'm not supposed to do that if I'm to be a proper Reverend Mother."
He hated these excursions so close to self-pity. Joke then! "You've never been a proper anything." He massaged the pregnant swelling of her abdomen.
"I am proper!"
"That's a word they left out when they made you."
She pushed his hand away and sat up to look down at him. "Reverend Mothers are never supposed to love."
"I know that." Did my anguish reveal itself?
She was too caught up in her own worries. "When I get to the Spice Agony..."
"Love! I don't like the idea of agony associated with you in any way."
"How can I avoid it? I'm already in the chute. Very soon they'll have me up to speed. I'll go very fast then."
He wanted to turn away but her eyes held him.
"Truly, Duncan. I can feel it. In a way, it's like pregnancy. There comes a point when it's too dangerous to abort. You must go through with it."
"So we love each other!" Forcing his thoughts away from one danger into another.
"And they forbid it."
He looked up at the comeyes. "The watchdogs are watching us and they have fangs."
"I know. I'm talking to them right now. My love for you is not a flaw. Their coldness is the flaw. They're just like Honored Matres!"
A game where one of the pieces can't be moved.
He wanted to shout it but listeners behind the comeyes would hear more than spoken words. Murbella was right. It was dangerous to think you could gull Reverend Mothers.
Something veiled in her eyes as she looked down at him. "How very strange you looked just then." He recognized the Reverend Mother she might become.
Veer away from that thought!
Thinking about the strangeness of his memories sometimes diverted her. She thought his previous incarnations made him somehow similar to a Reverend Mother.
"I've died so many times."
"You remember it?" The same question every time.
He shook his head, not daring to say anything more for the watchdogs to interpret.
Not the deaths and reawakenings.
Those became dulled by repetition. Sometimes he didn't even bother to put them into his secret data-dump. No... it was the unique encounters with other humans, the long collection of recognitions.
That was a thing Sheeana claimed she wanted from him. "Intimate trivia. It's the stuff all artists want."
Sheeana did not know what she asked. All of those living encounters had created new meanings. Patterns within patterns. Minuscule things gained a poignancy he despaired of sharing with anyone... even with Murbella.
The touch of a hand on my arm. A child's laughing face. The glitter in an attacker's eyes.