He shrugged. This turn in the conversation disturbed him.
“You are not amused,” she said. “But cling to your doubts anyway. Doubt is necessary to a philosopher.”
“So the Zensunni assure us.”
“All mystics agree on it, Miles. Never underestimate the power of doubts. Very persuasive. S’tori holds up doubt and surety in a single hand.”
Really quite surprised, he asked: “Do Reverend Mothers practice Zensunni rituals?” He had never even suspected this before.
“Just once,” she said. “We achieve an exalted form of s’tori, total. It involves every cell.”
“The spice agony,” he said.
“I was sure your mother told you. Obviously, she never explained the affinity with the Zensunni.”
Teg swallowed past a lump in his throat. Fascinating! She gave him a new insight into the Bene Gesserit. This changed his entire concept, including his image of his own mother. They were removed from him into an unattainable place where he could never follow. They might think of him as a comrade on occasion but he could never enter the intimate circle. He could simulate, no more. He would never be like Muad’dib or the Tyrant.
“Prescience,” Taraza said.
The word shifted his attention. She had changed the subject but not changed it.
“I was thinking about Muad’dib,” he said.
“You think he predicted the future,” she said.
“That is the Mentat teaching.”
“I hear the doubt in your voice, Miles. Did he predict or did he create? Prescience can be deadly. The people who demand that the oracle predict for them really want to know next year’s price on whalefur or something equally mundane. None of them wants an instant-by-instant prediction of his personal life.”
“No surprises,” Teg said.
“Exactly. If you possessed such fore-knowledge, your life would become an unutterable bore.”
“You think Muad’dib life was a bore?”
“And the Tyrant’s, too. We think their entire lives were devoted to trying to break out of chains they themselves created.”
“But they believed . . .”
“Remember your philosopher’s doubts, Miles. Beware! The mind of the believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe.”
Teg sat silently for a moment. He sensed the fatigue that had been driven beyond his immediate awareness by the drink, sensed also the way his thoughts were roiled by the intrusion of new concepts. These were things that he had been taught would weaken a Mentat, yet he felt strengthened by them.
She is teaching me, he thought. There is a lesson here.
As though projected into his mind and outlined there in fire, he found his entire Mentat-attention fixated on the Zensunni admonition that was taught to every beginning student in the Mentat School:
By your belief in granular singularities, you deny all movement — evolutionary or devolutionary. Belief fixes a granular universe and causes that universe to persist. Nothing can be allowed to change because that way your non-moving universe vanishes. But it moves of itself when you do not move. It evolves beyond you and is no longer accessible to you.
“The oddest thing of all,” Taraza said, sinking into tune with this mood she had created, “is that the scientists of Ix cannot see how much their own beliefs dominate their universe.”
Teg stared at her, silent and receptive.
“Ixian beliefs are perfectly submissive to the choices they make on how they will look at their universe,” Taraza said. “Their universe does not act of itself but performs according to the kinds of experiments they choose.”
With a start, Teg came out of the memories and awoke to find himself in the Gammu Keep. He still sat in the familiar chair in his workroom. A glance around the room showed nothing moved from where he had put it. Only a few minutes had passed but the room and its contents no longer were alien. He dipped into and out of Mentat mode. Restored.
The smell and taste of the drink Taraza had given him so long ago still tingled on his tongue and in his nostrils. A Mentat blink and he knew he could call up the scene entire once more — the low light of shaded glowglobes, the feeling of the chair beneath him, the sounds of their voices. It was all there for replay, frozen into a time-capsule of isolated memory.