Hayt bowed in submission.
Paul glanced up at the spy hole, eyes pleading for Alia to take this gift off his hands and ferret out its secrets. Gholas were ghosts to frighten children. He’d never thought to know one. To know this one, he had to set himself above all compassion … and he wasn’t certain he could do it. Duncan … Duncan … Where was Idaho in this shaped-to-measure flesh? It wasn’t flesh … it was a shroud in fleshly shape! Idaho lay dead forever on the floor of an Arrakeen cavern. His ghost stared out of metal eyes. Two beings stood side by side in this revenant flesh. One was a threat with its force and nature hidden behind unique veils.
Closing his eyes, Paul allowed old visions to sift through his awareness. He sensed the spirits of love and hate spouting there in a rolling sea from which no rock lifted above the chaos. No place at all from which to survey turmoil.
Why has no vision shown me this new Duncan Idaho? he asked himself. What concealed Time from an oracle? Other oracles, obviously.
Paul opened his eyes, asked: “Hayt, do you have the power of prescience?”
“No, m’Lord.”
Sincerity spoke in that voice. It was possible the ghola didn’t know he possessed this ability, of course. But that’d hamper his working as a mentat. What was the hidden design?
Old visions surged around Paul. Would he have to choose the terrible way? Distorted Time hinted at this ghola in that hideous future. Would that way close in upon him no matter what he did?
Disengage … disengage … disengage …
The thought tolled in his mind.
In her position above Paul, Alia sat with chin cupped in left hand, stared down at the ghola. A magnetic attraction about this Hayt reached up to her. Tleilaxu restoration had given him youth, an innocent intensity which called out to her. She’d understood Paul’s unspoken plea. When oracles failed, one turned to real spies and physical powers. She wondered, though, at her own eagerness to accept this challenge. She felt a positive desire to be near this new man, perhaps to touch him.
He’s a danger to both of us, she thought.
***
Truth suffers from too much analysis.
“Reverend Mother, I shudder to see you in such circumstances,” Irulan said.
She stood just inside the cell door, measuring the various capacities of the room in her Bene Gesserit way. It was a three-meter cube carved with cutterays from the veined brown rock beneath Paul’s Keep. For furnishings, it contained one flimsy basket chair occupied now by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, a pallet with a brown cover upon which had been spread a deck of the new Dune Tarot cards, a metered water tap above a reclamation basin, a Fremen privy with moisture seals. It was all sparse, primitive. Yellow light came from anchored and caged glowglobes at the four corners of the ceiling.
“You’ve sent word to the Lady Jessica?” the Reverend Mother asked.
“Yes, but I don’t expect her to lift one finger against her firstborn,” Irulan said. She glanced at the cards. They spoke of the powerful turning their backs on supplicants. The card of the Great Worm lay beneath Desolate Sand. Patience was counseled. Did one require the tarot to see this? she asked herself.
A guard stood outside watching them through a metaglass window in the door. Irulan knew there’d be other monitors on this encounter. She had put in much thought and planning before daring to come here. To have stayed away carried its own perils, though.
The Reverend Mother had been engaged in prajna meditation interspersed with examinations of the tarot. Despite a feeling that she would never leave Arrakis alive, she had achieved a measure of calm through this. One’s oracular powers might be small, but muddy water was muddy water. And there was always the Litany Against Fear.
She had yet to assimilate the import of the actions which had precipitated her into this cell. Dark suspicions brooded in her mind (and the tarot hinted at confirmations). Was it possible the Guild had planned this?
A yellow-robed Qizara, head shaved for a turban, beady eyes of total blue in a bland round face, skin leathered by the wind and sun of Arrakis, had awaited her on the heighliner’s reception bridge. He had looked up from a bulb of spice-coffee being served by an obsequious steward, studied her a moment, put down the coffee bulb.
“You are the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam?”
To replay those words in her mind was to bring that moment alive in the memory. Her throat had constricted with an unmanageable spasm of fear. How had one of the Emperor’s minions learned of her presence on the heighliner?
“It came to our attention that you were aboard,” the Qizara said. “Have you forgotten that you are denied permission to set foot on the holy planet?”
“I am not on Arrakis,” she said. “I’m a passenger on a Guild heighliner in free space.”
“There is no such thing as free space, Madame.”
She read hate mingled with profound suspicion in his tone.
“Muad’dib rules everywhere,” he said.
“Arrakis is not my destination,” she insisted.
“Arrakis is the destination of everyone,” he said. And she feared for a moment that he would launch into a recital of the mystical itinerary which pilgrims followed. (This very ship had carried thousands of them.)
But the Qizara had pulled a golden amulet from beneath his robe, kissed it, touched it to his forehead and placed it to his right ear, listened. Presently, he restored the amulet to its hidden place.
“You are ordered to gather your luggage and accompany me to Arrakis.”
“But I have business elsewhere!”
In that moment, she suspected Guild perfidy … or exposure through some transcendant power of the Emperor or his sister. Perhaps the Steersman did not conceal the conspiracy, after all. The abomination, Alia, certainly possessed the abilities of a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. What happened when those powers were coupled with the forces which worked in her brother?
“At once!” the Qizara snapped.
Everything in her cried out against setting foot once more on that accursed desert planet. Here was where the Lady Jessica had turned against the Sisterhood. Here was where they’d lost Paul Atreides, the kwisatz haderach they’d sought through long generations of careful breeding.
“At once,” she agreed.
“There’s little time,” the Qizara said. “When the Emperor commands, all his subjects obey.”
So the order had come from Paul!
She thought of protesting to the heighliner’s Navigator-Commander, but the futility of such a gesture stopped her. What could the Guild do?
“The Emperor has said I must die if I set foot on Dune,” she said, making a last desperate effort. “You spoke of this yourself. You are condemning me if you take me down there.”
“Say no more,” the Qizara ordered. “The thing is ordained.”
That was how they always spoke of Imperial commands, she knew. Ordained! The holy ruler whose eyes could pierce the future had spoken. What must be must be. He had seen it, had He not?
With the sick feeling that she was caught in a web of her own spinning, she had turned to obey.
And the web had become a cell which Irulan could visit. She saw that Irulan had aged somewhat since their meeting on Wallach IX. New lines of worry spread from the corners of her eyes. Well … time to see if this Sister of the Bene Gesserit could obey her vows.
“I’ve had worse quarters,” the Reverend Mother said. “Do you come from the Emperor?” And she allowed her fingers to move as though in agitation.