“It was high time a Reverend Mother took over his everyday education. Geasa may have been a mistake.”
“Are you questioning my judgment?” Schwangyu snapped.
“Is your judgment so perfect that it may never be questioned?” In Lucilla’s soft contralto, the question had the impact of a slap.
Schwangyu remained silent for almost a minute. Presently, she said: “Geasa thought the ghola was an endearing child. She cried and said she would miss him.”
“Wasn’t she warned about that?”
“Geasa did not have our training.”
“So you replaced her with Tamalane at that time. I do not know Tamalane but I presume she is quite old.”
“Quite.”
“What was his reaction to the removal of Geasa?”
“He asked where she had gone. We did not answer.”
“How did Tamalane fare?”
“On his third day with her, he told her very calmly: I hate you. Is that what I’m supposed to do?”‘
“So quickly!”
“Right now, he’s watching you and thinking: I hate Schwangyu. Will I have to hate this new one? But he is also thinking that you are not like the other old witches. You’re young. He will know that this must be important.”
Humans live best when each has his place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and you destroy the person.
-Bene Gesserit Teaching
Miles Teg had not wanted the Gammu assignment. Weapons master to a ghola-child? Even such a ghola-child as this one, with all of the history woven around him. It was an unwanted intrusion into Teg’s well-ordered retirement.
But he had lived all of that life as a Military Mentat under the will of the Bene Gesserit and could not compute an act of disobedience.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodiet?
Who shall guard the guardians? Who shall see that the guardians commit no offenses?
This was a question that Teg had considered carefully on many occasions. It formed one of the basic tenets of his loyalty to the Bene Gesserit. Whatever else you might say about the Sisterhood, they displayed an admirable constancy of purpose.
Moral purpose, Teg labeled it.
The Bene Gesserit moral purpose agreed completely with Teg’s principles. That those principles were Bene Gesserit-conditioned in him did not enter into the question. Rational thought, especially Mentat rationality, could make no other judgment.
Teg boiled it down to an essence: If only one person followed such guiding principles, this was a better universe. It was never a question of justice. Justice required one to resort to law and that could be a fickle mistress, subject always to the whims and prejudices of those who administered the laws. No, it was a question of fairness, a concept that went much deeper. The people upon whom judgment was passed must feel the fairness of it.
To Teg, statements such as “the letter of the law must be observed” were dangerous to his guiding principles. Being fair required agreement, predictable constancy and, above all else, loyalty upward and downward in the hierarchy. Leadership guided by such principles required no outside controls. You did your duty because it was right. And you did not obey because that was predictably correct. You did it because the rightness was a thing of this moment. Prediction and prescience had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Teg knew the Atreides reputation for reliable prescience, but gnomic utterances had no place in his universe. You took the universe as you found it and applied your principles where you could. Absolute commands in the hierarchy were always obeyed. Not that Taraza had made it a question of absolute command, but the implications were there.
“You are the perfect person for this task.”
He had lived a long life with many high points and he was retired with honor. Teg knew he was old, slow and with all the defects of age waiting just at the edges of his awareness, but the call to duty quickened him even while he was forced to put down the wish to say “No.”
The assignment had come from Taraza personally. The powerful senior of all (including the Missionaria Protectiva) singled him out. Not just a Reverend Mother but the Reverend Mother Superior.