“What do we have there, Dar?”
“Perhaps someday a Mother Superior of extraordinary abilities.”
“Not too extraordinary?”
“We will have to see.”
“Do you think she is capable of killing for us?”
Odrade was startled and showed it. “Now?”
“Yes, of course.”
“The ghola?”
“Teg would not do it,” Taraza said. “I even have doubts about Lucilla. Their reports make it clear that he is capable of forging powerful bonds of . . . of affinity.”
“Even as I?”
“Schwangyu herself was not completely immune.”
“Where is the noble purpose in such an act?” Odrade asked. “Isn’t this what the Tyrant’s warning has –”
“Him? He killed many times!”
“And paid for it.”
“We pay for everything we take, Dar.”
“Even for a life?”
“Never forget for one instant, Dar, that a Mother Superior is capable of making any necessary decision for the Sisterhood’s survival!”
“So be it,” Odrade said. “Take what you want and pay for it.”
It was the proper reply but it reinforced the new strength Odrade felt, this freedom to respond in her own way within a new universe. Where had such toughness originated? Was it something out of her cruel Bene Gesserit conditioning? Was it from her Atreides ancestry? She did not try to fool herself that this came from a decision never again to follow another’s moral guidance rather than her own. This inner stability upon which she now stationed herself was not a pure morality. Not bravado, either. Those were never enough.
“You are very like your father,” Taraza said. “Usually, it’s the dam who provides most of the courage but this time I think it was the father.”
“Miles Teg is admirably courageous but I think you oversimplify,” Odrade said.
“Perhaps I do. But I have been right about you at every turn, Dar, even back there when we were student postulants.”
She knows! Odrade thought.
“We don’t need to explain it,” Odrade said. And she thought: It comes from being born who I am, trained and shaped the way I was . . . the way we both were: Dar and Tar.
“It’s something in the Atreides line that we have not fully analyzed,” Taraza said.
“No genetic accidents?”
“I sometimes wonder if we’ve suffered any real accidents since the Tyrant,” Taraza said.
“Did he stretch out back there in his citadel and look across the millennia to this very moment?”
“How far back would you reach for the roots?” Taraza asked.
Odrade said: “What really happens when a Mother Superior commands the Breeding Mistresses: ‘Have that one go breed with that one’?”
Taraza produced a cold smile.
Odrade felt herself suddenly at the crest of a wave, awareness pushing all of her over into this new realm. Taraza wants my rebellion! She wants me as her opponent!
“Will you see Waff now?” Odrade asked.
“First, I want your assessment of him.”
“He sees us as the ultimate tool to create the ‘Tleilaxu Ascendancy.’ We are God’s gift to his people.”
“They have been waiting a long time for this,” Taraza said. “To dissemble so carefully, all of them for all of those eons!”
“They have our view of time,” Odrade agreed. “That was the final thing to convince them we share their Great Belief.”
“But why the clumsiness?” Taraza asked. “They are not stupid.”
“It diverted our attention from how they were really using their ghola process,” Odrade said. “Who could believe stupid people would do such a thing?”
“And what have they created?” Taraza asked. “Only the image of evil stupidity?”
“Act stupid long enough and you become stupid,” Odrade said. “Perfect the mimicry of your Face Dancers and . . .”
“Whatever happens, we must punish them,” Taraza said. “I see that clearly. Have him brought up here.”
After Odrade had given the order and while they waited, Taraza said: “The sequencing of the ghola’s education became a shambles even before they escaped from the Gammu Keep. He leaped ahead of his teachers to grasp things that were only implied and he did this at an alarmingly accelerated rate. Who knows what he has become by now?”
Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.
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