“Bringing along” meant a certain amount of lording it over the younger but also incorporated essentials better taught by someone closer to peer relationship. Taraza, with access to the private records of her trainee, started calling the younger girl “Dar.” Odrade responded by calling Taraza “Tar.” The two names acquired a certain glue—Dar and Tar. Even after Reverend Mothers overheard and reprimanded them, they occasionally lapsed into error if only for the amusement.
Odrade, looking down at Taraza now, said: “Dar and Tar.”
A smile twitched the edges of Taraza’s mouth.
“What is it in my records that you don’t already know several times over?” Odrade asked.
Taraza sat back and waited for the chairdog to adjust itself to the new position. She rested her clasped hands on the tabletop and looked up at the younger woman.
Since school, though, Taraza had thought of Odrade as completely removed into a younger age group, creating a gap no passage of years could close.
“Care at the beginning, Dar,” Taraza said.
“This project is well past its beginning,” Odrade said.
“But your part in it starts now. And we are launching ourselves into such a beginning as has never before been attempted.”
“Am I now to learn the entire design for this ghola?”
“No.”
That was it. All the evidence of high-level dispute and the “need to know” cast away with a single word. But Odrade understood. There was an organizational rubric laid down by the original Bene Gesserit Chapter House, which had endured with only minor changes for millennia. Bene Gesserit divisions were cut by hard vertical and horizontal barriers, divided into isolated groups that converged to a single command only here at the top. Duties (for which read “assigned roles”) were conducted within separated cells. Active participants within a cell did not know their contemporaries within other parallel cells.
She recognized the necessity. It was an ancient design copied from secret revolutionary societies. The Bene Gesserit had always seen themselves as permanent revolutionaries. It was a revolution that had been dampened only in the time of the Tyrant, Leto II.
“In what you’re about to do,” Taraza said, “tell me if you sense any immediate threat to the Sisterhood.”
It was one of Taraza’s
“We reasoned that there would be danger,” Taraza said. She spoke in a dry, remote voice. Taraza did not like calling up this talent in Odrade. The younger woman possessed a prescient instinct for detecting threats to the Sisterhood. It came from the wild influence in her genetic line, of course—the Atreides with their dangerous talents. There was a special mark on Odrade’s breeding file: “Careful examination of all offspring.” Two of those offspring had been quietly put to death.
Taraza sealed the projector into her tabletop and looked at the blank surface while speaking. “Even if you find a perfect sire, you are not to breed without our permission while you are away from us.”
“The mistake of my natural mother,” Odrade said.
“The mistake of your natural mother was to be recognized while she was breeding!”
Odrade had heard this before. There was that thing about the Atreides line that required the most careful monitoring by the breeding mistresses. The wild talent, of course. She knew about the wild talent, that genetic force which had produced the Kwisatz Haderach and the Tyrant. What did the breeding mistresses seek now, though? Was their approach mostly negative? No more dangerous births! She had never seen any of her babies after they were born, not necessarily a curious thing for the Sisterhood. And she never saw any of the records in her own genetic file. Here, too, the Sisterhood operated with careful separation of powers.
She had found the blank spaces in her memories and opened them. It was probable that only Taraza and perhaps two other councillors (Bellonda, most likely, and one other older Reverend Mother) shared the more sensitive access to such breeding information.
