Pulling up a chair, Teg seated himself on the opposite side of the table.
Duncan said, “I hate those clocks!”
“You hate everything here,” Teg said, but he took a second look at the clock. It was another antique, a round face with two analog hands and a digital second counter. The two hands were priapean — naked human figures: a large male with enormous phallus and a smaller female with legs spread wide. Each time the two clock hands met, the male appeared to enter the female.
“Gross,” Teg agreed. He pointed to Duncan’s drink: “You like that?”
“It’s all right, sir. Lucilla says I should have it after exercise.”
“My mother used to make me a similar drink for after heavy exertions,” Teg said. He leaned forward and inhaled, remembering the aftertaste, the cloying melange in his nostrils.
“Sir, how long must we stay here?” Duncan asked.
“Until we are found by the right people or until we’re sure we will not be found.”
“But . . . cut off in here, how will we know?”
“When I judge it’s time, I’ll take the life-shield blanket and start keeping watch outside.”
“I hate this place!”
“Obviously. But have you learned nothing about patience?”
Duncan grimaced. “Sir, why are you keeping me from being alone with Lucilla?”
Teg, exhaling as Duncan spoke, locked on the partial exhalation and then resumed breathing. He knew, though, that the lad had observed. If Duncan knew, then Lucilla must know!
“I don’t think Lucilla knows what you’re doing, sir,” Duncan said, “but it’s getting pretty obvious.” He glanced around him. “If this place didn’t take so much of her attention . . . Where does she dash off to like that?”
“I think she’s up in the library.”
“Library!”
“I agree it’s primitive but it’s also fascinating.” Teg lifted his gaze to the scrollwork on the nearby kitchen ceiling. The moment of decision had arrived. Lucilla could not be depended upon to remain distracted much longer. Teg shared her fascination, though. It was easy to lose yourself in these marvels. The whole no-globe complex, some two hundred meters in diameter, was a fossil preserved intact from the time of the Tyrant.
When she spoke about it, Lucilla’s voice took on a husky, whispering quality. “Surely, the Tyrant must have known about this place.”
Teg’s Mentat awareness had been immersed immediately in this suggestion. Why did the Tyrant permit Family Harkonnen to squander so much of their last remaining wealth on such an enterprise?
Perhaps for that very reason — to drain them.
The cost in bribes and Guild shipping from the Ixian factories must have been astronomical.
“Did the Tyrant know that one day we would need this place?” Lucilla asked.
No avoiding the prescient powers that Leto II had so often demonstrated, Teg agreed.
Looking at Duncan seated across from him, Teg felt his neck hairs rising. There was something eerie about this Harkonnen hideaway, as though the Tyrant himself might have been here. What had happened to the Harkonnens who built it? Teg and Lucilla had found absolutely no clues to why the globe had been abandoned.
Neither of them could wander through the no-globe without experiencing an acute sense of history. Teg was constantly confounded by unanswered questions.
Lucilla, too, commented on this.
“Where did they go? There’s nothing in my Other Memories to give the slightest clue.”
“Did the Tyrant lure them out and kill them?”
“I’m going back to the library. Perhaps today I’ll find something.”
For the first two days of their occupation, the globe had received a careful examination by Lucilla and Teg. A silent and sullen Duncan tagged along as though he feared to be left alone. Each new discovery awed them or shocked them.
Twenty-one skeletons preserved in transparent plaz along a wall near the core! Macabre observers of everyone who passed through there to the machinery chambers and the nullentropy bins.
Patrin had warned Teg about the skeletons. On one of his first youthful examinations of the globe, Patrin had found records that said the dead ones were the artisans who had built the place, all slain by the Harkonnens to preserve the secret.