“Have you ever killed a friend?” he asked and, turning, led the way into the gap which sloped upward to the sietch’s hidden entrance. He moved as quickly as his trance-fatigue would permit, but she was right behind him, clutching his robe and pulling him to a stop.
“What’s this of killing a friend?”
“He’ll die anyway,” Leto said. “I don’t have to do it, but I could prevent it. If I don’t prevent it, is that not killing him?”
“Who is this . . . who will die?”
“The alternative keeps me silent,” he said. “I might have to give my sister to a monster.”
Again he turned away from her, and this time when she pulled at his robe he resisted, refusing to answer her questions.
Natural selection has been described as an environment selectively screening for those who will have progeny. Where humans are concerned, though, this is an extremely limiting viewpoint. Reproduction by sex tends toward experiment and innovation. It raises many questions, including the ancient one about whether environment is a selective agent after the variation occurs, or whether environment plays a pre-selective role in determining the variations which it screens. Dune did not really answer those questions: it merely raised new questions which Leto and the Sisterhood may attempt to answer over the next five hundred generations.
—THE DUNE CATASTROPHE
AFTER HARQ AL-ADA
The bare brown rocks of the Shield Wall loomed in the distance, visible to Ghanima as the embodiment of that apparition which threatened her future. She stood at the edge of the roof garden atop the Keep, the setting sun at her back. The sun held a deep orange glow from intervening dust clouds, a color as rich as the rim of a worm’s mouth. She sighed, thinking:
The inner lives had grown increasingly clamorous of late. There was something about female conditioning in a Fremen society—perhaps it was a real sexual difference, but whatever—the female was more susceptible to that inner tide. Her grandmother had warned about it as they’d schemed, drawing on the accumulated wisdom of the Bene Gesserit but awakening that wisdom’s threats within Ghanima.
“Abomination,” the Lady Jessica had said, “our term for the pre-born, has a long history of bitter experiences behind it. The way of it seems to be that the inner lives divide. They split into the benign and the malignant. The benign remain tractable, useful. The malignant appear to unite in one powerful psyche, trying to take over the living flesh and its consciousness. The process is known to take considerable time, but its signs are well known.”
“Why did you abandon Alia?” Ghanima asked.
“I fled in terror of what I’d created,” Jessica said, her voice low. “I gave up. And my burden now is that . . . perhaps I gave up too soon.”
“What do you mean?”
“I cannot explain yet, but . . . maybe . . . no! I’ll not give you false hopes.
“Leto . . . feared the spice,” Ghanima said, finding that she could talk about him quietly. The terrible price demanded of them!
“And wisely,” Jessica had said. She would say no more.
But Ghanima had risked an explosion of her inner memories, peering past an odd blurred veil and futilely expanding on the Bene Gesserit fears. To explain what had befallen Alia did not ease it one bit. The Bene Gesserit accumulation of experience had pointed to a possible way out of the trap, though, and when Ghanima ventured the inner sharing, she first called upon the
She recalled that sharing as she stood in the sunset glow at the edge of the Keep’s roof garden. Immediately she felt the memory-presence of her mother. Chani stood there, an apparition between Ghanima and the distant cliffs.
“Enter here and you will eat the fruit of the Zaqquum, the food of hell!” Chani said. “Bar this door, my daughter: it is your only safety.”
The inner clamor lifted itself around the vision and Ghanima fled, sinking her consciousness into the Sisterhood’s Credo, reacting out of desperation more than trust. Quickly she recited the Credo, moving her lips, letting her voice rise to a whisper:
