“There are some who think we may revert to the pre-Tyrant condition with a very nasty bang.”
“Oh?” Odrade pursed her lips.
“Several groups among our returning Lost Ones are selling arms to anyone who wants to or can buy.”
“Specifics?” Odrade asked.
“Sophisticated arms are flooding onto Gammu and there can be little doubt the Tleilaxu are stockpiling some of the nastier weapons.”
Taraza leaned back and rubbed her temples. She spoke in a low, almost musing voice. “We think we make decisions of the greatest moment and out of the very highest principles.”
Odrade had seen this before, too. She said: “Does the Mother Superior doubt the rightness of the Bene Gesserit?”
“Doubt? Oh, no. But I do experience frustration. We work all of our lives for these highly refined goals and in the end, what do we find? We find that many of the things to which we have dedicated our lives came from petty decisions. They can be traced to desires for personal comfort or convenience and had nothing at all to do with our high ideals. What really was at stake was some worldly working agreement that satisfied the needs of those who could make the decisions.”
“I’ve heard you call that political necessity,” Odrade said.
Taraza spoke with tight control while returning her attention to the display in front of her. “If we become institutionalized in our judgments, that’s a sure way to extinguish the Bene Gesserit.”
“You will not find petty decisions in my bio,” Odrade said.
“I look for sources of weakness, for flaws.”
“You won’t find those, either.”
Taraza concealed a smile. She recognized this egocentric remark: Odrade’s way of needling the Mother Superior. Odrade was very good at seeming to be impatient while actually suspending herself in a timeless flow of patience.
When Taraza did not rise to the bait, Odrade resumed her calm waiting — easy breaths, the mind steady. Patience came without thinking of it. The Sisterhood had taught her long ago how to divide past and present into simultaneous flowings. While observing her immediate surroundings, she could pick up bits and pieces of her past and live through them as though they moved across a screen superimposed over the present.
Memory work, Odrade thought. Necessary things to haul out and lay to rest. Removing the barriers. When all else palled, there was still her tangled childhood.
There had been a time when Odrade lived as most children lived: in a house with a man and woman who, if not her parents, certainly acted in loco parentis. All of the other children she knew then lived in similar situations. They had papas and mamas. Sometimes only papa worked away from home. Sometimes only mama went out to her labors. In Odrade’s case, the woman remained at home and no creche nurse guarded the child in the working hours. Much later, Odrade learned that her birth-mother had given a large sum of money to provide this for the infant female hidden in plain sight that way.
“She hid you with us because she loved you,” the woman explained when Odrade was old enough to understand. “That is why you must never reveal that we are not your real parents.”
Love had nothing to do with it, Odrade learned later. Reverend Mothers did not act from such mundane motives. And Odrade’s birth-mother had been a Bene Gesserit Sister.
All of this was revealed to Odrade according to the original plan. Her name: Odrade. Darwi was what she had always been called when the caller was not being endearing or angry. Young friends naturally shortened it to Dar.
Everything, however, did not go according to the original plan. Odrade recalled a narrow bed in a room brightened by paintings of animals and fantasy landscapes on the pastel blue walls. White curtains fluttered at the window in the soft breezes of spring and summer. Odrade remembered jumping on the narrow bed — a marvelously happy game: up, down, up, down. Much laughter. Arms caught her in mid leap and hugged her close. They were a man’s arms: a round face with a small mustache that tickled her into giggles. The bed thumped the wall when she jumped and the wall revealed indentations from this movement.