Teg found himself touched by her relaxation. No pose, no ready-made mask to set them apart and define their separate roles in the Bene Gesserit hierarchy. She was being obviously friendly and not even a hint of seductiveness. So this was just what it seemed to be — as much as that could be said about any encounter with a Reverend Mother.
With quick elation, Teg realized that he had become quite adept at reading Alma Mavis Taraza, even when she adopted one of her masks.
“Your mother taught you more than she was told to teach you,” Taraza said. “A wise woman but another heretic. That’s all we seem to be breeding nowadays.”
“Heretic?” He was caught by resentment.
“That’s a private joke in the Sisterhood,” Taraza said. “We’re supposed to follow a Mother Superior’s orders with absolute devotion. And we do, except when we disagree.”
Teg smiled and took a deep draught of his drink.
“It’s odd,” Taraza said, “but while we were in that tight little confrontation I found myself reacting to you as I would to one of my Sisters.”
Teg felt the drink warming his stomach. It left a tingling in his nostrils. He placed the empty glass on a side table and spoke while looking at it. “My eldest daughter . . .”
“That would be Dimela. You should have let us have her, Miles.”
“It was not my decision.”
“But one word from you . . .” Taraza shrugged. “Well, that’s past. What about Dimela?”
“She thinks I’m often too much like one of you.”
“Too much?”
“She is fiercely loyal to me, Mother Superior. She doesn’t really understand our relationship and –”
“What is our relationship?”
“You command and I obey.”
Taraza looked at him over the lip of her glass. When she put down the glass, she said: “Yes, you’ve never really been a heretic, Miles. Perhaps . . . someday . . .”
He spoke quickly, wanting to divert Taraza from such ideas. “Dimela thinks the long use of melange makes many people become like you.”
“Is that so? Isn’t it odd, Miles, that a geriatric potion should have so many side effects?”
“I don’t find that odd.”
“No, of course you wouldn’t.” She drained her glass and put it aside. “I was addressing the way a significant life extension has produced in some people, you especially, a profound knowledge of human nature.”
“We live longer and observe more,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.”
“I’ve never been able to strike an acceptable balance sheet for the spice,” he said, referring to a common Mentat process of data sorting.
Taraza nodded. Obviously, she found the same difficulty. “We of the Sisterhood tend to be more single-track than Mentats,” she said. “We have routines to shake ourselves out of it but the condition persists.”
“Our ancestors have had this problem for a long time,” he said.
“It was different before the spice,” she said.
“But they lived such short lives.”
“Fifty, one hundred years; that doesn’t seem very long to us, but still . . .”
“Did they compress more into the available time?”
“Oh, they were frenetic at times.”
She was giving him observations from her Other Memories, he realized. Not the first time he had shared in such ancient lore. His mother had produced such memories on occasion, but always as a lesson. Was Taraza doing that now? Teaching him something?
“Melange is a many-handed monster,” she said.
“Do you sometimes wish we had never found it?”
“The Bene Gesserit would not exist without it.”
“Nor the Guild.”
“But there would have been no Tyrant, no Muad’dib. The spice gives with one hand and takes with all of its others.”
“Which hand contains that which we desire?” he asked. “Isn’t that always the question?”
“You’re an oddity, you know that, Miles? Mentats so seldom dip into philosophy. I think it’s one of your strengths. You are supremely able to doubt.”