The lobby was smaller than she had expected. Some interior changes. Only about six meters long and perhaps four meters wide. Reception slot was on their right as they entered. Odrade motioned Suipol to register their party and indicated that the rest of them should wait in the open area well within striking distance of one another. Treachery had not been ruled out.
Dortujla obviously expected it. She looked resigned.
Odrade made a careful inspection and commented on their surroundings. Plenty of comeyes but the rest of it...
Each time she entered one of these places, she had the sensation of being in a museum. Other Memory said hostelries of this sort had not changed significantly in eons. Even in early times she found prototypes. A glimpse of the past in the chandeliers - gigantic glittering things imitative of electric devices but furnished with glowglobes. Two of them dominated the ceiling like imaginary spaceships descending in splendor from the void.
There were more glimpses of the past that few transients in this age would notice. The arrangement of reception area behind grilled slots, space for waiting with its mixture of seats and inconvenient lighting, signs directing them to services - restaurants, narcoparlors, assignation bars, swimming and other exercise facilities, automassage rooms, and the like. Only language and script had changed from ancient times. Given an understanding of the language, the signs would be recognizable to pre-space primitives. This was a temporary stopping place.
Plenty of security installations. Some had the look of artifacts from the Scattering. Ix and Guild had never wasted gold on comeyes and sensors.
A frenetic dance of roboservants in the reception area - dartings here and there, cleaning, picking up litter, guiding newcomers. A party of four Ixians had preceded Odrade's group. She gave them close attention. How self-important yet fearful.
To her Bene Gesserit eye, the people of Ix were always recognizable no matter the disguises. Basic structure of their society colored its individuals. Ixians displayed a Hogbenesque attitude toward their science: that political and economic requirements determined permissible research. That said the innocent naivete of Ixian social dreams had become the reality of bureaucratic centralism - a new aristocracy. So they were headed into a decline that would not be stopped by whatever accommodation this Ixian party made with Honored Matres.
No matter the outcome of our contest, Ix is dying. Witness: no great Ixian innovations in centuries.
Suipol returned. "They ask us to wait for an escort."
Odrade decided to start negotiations immediately with a chat for the benefit of Suipol, the comeyes, and listeners on her no-ship.
"Suipol, did you notice those Ixians ahead of us?"
"Yes, Mother Superior."
"Mark them well. They are products of a dying society. It is naive to expect any bureaucracy to take brilliant innovations and put them to good use. Bureaucracies ask different questions. Do you know what those are?"
"No, Mother Superior." Spoken after a searching look at their surroundings.
She knows! But she sees what I'm doing. What have we here? I've misjudged her.
"These are typical questions, Suipoclass="underline" Who gets the credit? Who will be blamed if it causes problems? Will it shift the power structure, costing us jobs? Or will it make some subsidiary department more important?"
Suipol nodded on cue but her glance at the comeyes might have been a little obvious. No matter.
"These are political questions," Odrade said. "They demonstrate how motives of bureaucracy are directly opposed to the need for adapting to change. Adaptability is a prime requirement for life to survive."
Time to talk directly to our hosts.
Odrade turned her attention upward, picking a prominent comeye in a chandelier. "Note those Ixians. Their 'mind in a deterministic universe' has given way to 'mind in an unlimited universe' where anything may happen. Creative anarchy is the path to survival in this universe."
"Thank you for this lesson, Mother Superior."
Bless you, Suipol.
"After all of their experiences with us," Suipol said, "surely they no longer question our loyalty to one another."
Fates preserve her! This one is ready for the Agony and may never see it.
Odrade could only agree with the acolyte's summation. Compliance with Bene Gesserit ways came from within, from those constantly monitored details that kept their own house in order. It was not philosophical but a pragmatic view of free will. Any claim the Sisterhood might have to making its own way in a hostile universe lay in scrupulous adherence to mutual loyalty, an agreement forged in the Agony. Chapterhouse and its few remaining subsidiaries were nurseries of an order founded in sharing and Sharing. Not based on innocence. That had been lost long ago. It was set firmly in political consciousness and a view of history independent of other laws and customs.
"We are not machines," Odrade said, glancing at the automata around them. "We always rely on personal relationships, never knowing where those may lead us."
Tamalane stepped to Odrade's side. "Don't you think they should be sending us a message at the very least?"
"They've already sent us a message, Tam, putting us up in a second-class hostelry. And I have responded."
***
Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.
Teg took a deep breath. Gammu lay directly ahead, precisely where his navigators had said it would be when they emerged from foldspace. He stood beside a watchful Streggi seeing this in displays of his flagship's command bay.
Streggi did not like it that he stood on his own feet instead of riding her shoulders. She felt superfluous amidst military hardware. Her gaze kept going to the multi-projection fields at command bay center. Aides moving efficiently in and out of pods and fields, bodies draped with esoteric hardware, knew what they were doing. She had only the vaguest idea of these functions.
The comboard to relay Teg's orders lay under his palms, riding there on suspensors. Its command field formed a faint blue glow around his hands. The silvery horseshoe linking him to the attack force rested lightly on his shoulders, feeling familiar there in spite of being much larger relative to his small body than comlinks of his previous lifetime.
None of those around him any longer questioned that this was their famous Bashar in a child's body. They took his orders with brisk acceptance.
The target system looked ordinary from this distance: a sun and its captive planets. But Gammu in center focus was not ordinary. Idaho had been born there, his ghola trained there, his original memories restored there.
And I was changed there.
Teg had no explanation for what he had found in himself under the stresses of survival on Gammu. Physical speed that drained his flesh and an ability to see no-ships, to locate them in an image field like a block of space reproduced in his mind.
He suspected a wild outcropping in Atreides genes. Marker cells had been identified in him but not their purpose. It was the heritage Bene Gesserit Breeding Mistresses had meddled with for eons. There was little doubt they would view this ability as something potentially dangerous to them. They might use it but he would certainly lose his freedom.
He put these reflections out of his mind.
"Send in the decoys."
Action!
Teg felt himself assume a familiar stance. There was a sense of climbing onto a refreshing eminence when planning ended. Theories had been articulated, alternatives carefully worked out, and subordinates deployed, all thoroughly briefed. His key squad leaders had committed Gammu to memory - where partisan help might be available, every bolt hole, every known strongpoint and which access routes were most vulnerable. He had warned them especially about Futars. The possibility that humanoid beasts might be allies could not be overlooked. Rebels who had helped ghola-Idaho escape from Gammu had insisted Futars were created to hunt and kill Honored Matres. Knowing the accounts of Dortujla and others, you could almost pity Honored Matres if this were true, except that no pity could be spared for those who never showed it to others.