Fish Speakers!
Duncan wished then that he had lived during their time, serving as one of the rare male advisors in the female army that had worshiped the great God Emperor.
Oh, to have lived on Rakis in those days!
Teg was surprisingly forthcoming about the God Emperor, calling him always “the Tyrant.” A library lock was opened and information about Rakis came pouring out for Duncan.
“Will I ever see Rakis?” he asked Geasa.
“You are being prepared to live there.”
The answer astonished him. Everything they taught him about that faraway planet came into new focus.
“Why will I live there?”
“I cannot answer that.”
With renewed interest, he returned to his studies of that mysterious planet and its miserable Church of Shai-hulud, the Divided God. Worms. The God Emperor had become those worms! The idea filled Duncan with awe. Perhaps here was something worthy of worship. The thought touched a chord in him. What had driven a man to accept that terrible metamorphosis?
Duncan knew what his guards and the others in the Keep thought about Rakis and the core of priesthood there. Sneering remarks and laughter told it all. Teg said: “We’ll probably never know the whole truth of it, but I tell you, lad, that’s no religion for a soldier.”
Schwangyu capped it: “You are to learn about the Tyrant but you are not to believe in his religion. That is beneath you, contemptible.”
In every spare study moment Duncan pored over whatever the library produced for him: the Holy Book of the Divided God, the Guard Bible, the Orange Catholic Bible and even the Apocrypha. He learned about the long defunct Bureau of the Faith and “The Pearl that IS the Sun of Understanding.”
The very idea of the worms fascinated him. Their size! A big one would stretch from one end of the Keep to the other. Men had ridden the pre-Tyrant worms but the Rakian priesthood forbade this now.
He found himself gripped by accounts from the archeological team that had found the Tyrant’s primitive no-chamber on Rakis. Dar-es-Balat, the place was called. The reports by Archeologist Hadi Benotto were marked “Suppressed by orders of the Rakian Priesthood.” The file number on the accounts from Bene Gesserit Archives was a long one and what Benotto revealed was fascinating.
“A kernel of the God Emperor’s awareness in each worm?” he asked Geasa.
“So it’s said. And even if true, they are not conscious, not aware. The Tyrant himself said he would enter an endless dream.”
Each study session occasioned a special lecture and Bene Gesserit explanations of religion until finally he encountered those accounts called “The Nine Daughters of Siona” and “The Thousand Sons of Idaho.”
Confronting Geasa, he demanded: “My name is Duncan Idaho, too. What does that mean?”
Geasa always moved as though standing in the shadow of her failure, her long head bent forward and her watery eyes aimed at the ground. The confrontation occurred near evening in the long hall outside the practice floor. She paled at his question.
When she did not answer, he demanded: “Am I descended from Duncan Idaho?”
“You must ask Schwangyu.” Geasa sounded as though the words pained her.
It was a familiar response and it angered him. She meant he would be told something to shut him up, little information in the telling. Schwangyu, however, was more open than expected.
“You carry the authentic blood of Duncan Idaho.”
“Who are my parents?”
“They are long dead.”
“How did they die?”
“I do not know. We received you as an orphan.”
“Then why do people want to harm me?”
“They fear what you may do.”
“What is it I may do?”
“Study your lessons. All will be made clear to you in time.”
Shut up and study! Another familiar answer.
He obeyed because he had learned to recognize when the doors were closed on him. But now his questing intelligence met other accounts of the Famine Times and the Scattering, the no-chambers and no-ships that could not be traced, not even by the most powerful prescient minds in their universe. Here, he encountered the fact that descendants of Duncan Idaho and Siona, those ancients who had served the Tyrant God Emperor, also were invisible to prophets and prescients. Not even a Guild Steersman deep in melange trance could detect such people. Siona, the accounts told him, was a true-bred Atreides and Duncan Idaho was a ghola.