“To frustrate the Sisterhood’s plan for you,” Teg said.
Duncan glared at Lucilla. “What is that plan?”
When Lucilla did not answer, Duncan said: “She knows. She knows because I’m supposed to depend on her. I’m supposed to love her!”
Teg thought Lucilla concealed her dismay quite well. Obviously, her plans for the ghola had fallen into disarray, all of the sequencing thrown out of joint by this flight.
Duncan’s behavior revealed another possibility: Was the ghola a latent Truthsayer? What additional powers had been bred into this ghola by the sly Tleilaxu?
At their second nightfall in the wilderness, Lucilla was full of accusations. “Taraza ordered you to restore his original memories! How can you do that out here?”
“When we reach sanctuary.”
A silent and acutely alert Duncan accompanied them that night. There was a new vitality in him. He had heard!
Nothing must harm Teg, Duncan thought. Wherever and whatever sanctuary might be, Teg must reach it safely. Then, I will know!
Duncan was not sure what he would know but now he fully accepted the prize in it. This wilderness must lead to that goal. He recalled staring out at the wild places from the Keep and how he had thought to be free here. That sense of untouched freedom had vanished. The wilderness was only a path to something more important.
Lucilla, bringing up the rear of this march, forced herself to remain calm, alert, and to accept what she could not change. Part of her awareness held firmly to Taraza’s orders:
“Stay close to the ghola and, when the moment comes, complete your assignment.”
One pace at a time, Teg’s body measured out the kilometers. This was the fourth night. Patrin had estimated four nights to reach their goal.
And what a goal!
The emergency escape plan centered on a discovery Patrin had made here as a teenager of one of Gammu’s many mysteries. Patrin’s words came back to Teg: “On the excuse of a personal reconnaissance, I returned to the place two days ago. It is untouched. I am still the only person who has ever been there.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I took my own precautions when I left Gammu years ago, little things that would be disturbed by another person. Nothing has been moved.”
“A Harkonnen no-globe?”
“Very ancient but the chambers are still intact and functioning.”
“What about food, water.. . ”
“Everything you could want or need is there, laid down in the nullentropy bins at the core.”
Teg and Patrin made their plans, hoping they would never have to use this emergency bolt hole, holding the secret of it close while Patrin replayed for Teg the hidden way to this childhood discovery.
Behind Teg, Lucilla let out a small gasp as she tripped over a root.
I should have warned her, Teg thought. Duncan obviously was following Teg’s lead by sound. Lucilla, just as obviously, had much of her attention on her own private thoughts.
Her facial resemblance to Darwi Odrade was remarkable, Teg told himself. Back there at the Keep, the two women side by side, he had marked the differences dictated by their differing ages. Lucilla’s youth showed itself in more subcutaneous fat, a rounding of the facial flesh. But the voices! Timbre, accent, tricks of atonal inflection, the common stamp of Bene Gesserit speech mannerisms. They would be almost impossible to tell apart in the dark.
Knowing the Bene Gesserit as he did, Teg knew this was no accident. Given the Sisterhood’s propensity for doubling and redoubling its prized genetic lines to protect the investment, there had to be a common ancestral source.
Atreides, all of us, he thought.
Taraza had not revealed her design for the ghola, but just being within that design gave Teg access to the growing shape of it. No complete pattern, but he could already sense a wholeness there.
Generation after generation, the Sisterhood dealing with the Tleilaxu, buying Idaho gholas, training them here on Gammu, only to have them assassinated. All of that time waiting for the right moment. It was like a terrible game, which had come into frenetic prominence because a girl capable of commanding the worms had appeared on Rakis.