They were in the small teaching room off the larger practice floor where Tamalane went each evening to prepare the next day’s lessons. It was a place of bubble and spool readers and other sophisticated means for information storage and retrieval. Duncan far preferred it to the library but he was not allowed in the teaching room unattended. It was a bright room lighted by many suspensor-buoyed glowglobes. At his intrusion, Tamalane turned away from where she laid out his lessons.
“There’s always something of a sacrificial banquet about our major punishments,” she said. “The guards will, of course, receive major punishment.”
“Banquet?” Duncan was puzzled.
Tamalane swung completely around in her swivel seat and looked directly into his eyes. Her steely teeth glittered in the bright lights. “History has seldom been good to those who must be punished,” she said.
Duncan flinched at the word “history.” It was one of Tamalane’s signals. She was going to teach a lesson, another boring lesson.
“Bene Gesserit punishments cannot be forgotten.”
Duncan focused on Tamalane’s old mouth, sensing abruptly that she spoke out of painful personal experience. He was going to learn something interesting!
“Our punishments carry an inescapable lesson,” Tamalane said. “It is much more than the pain.”
Duncan sat on the floor at her feet. From this angle, Tamalane was a black-shrouded and ominous figure.
“We do not punish with the ultimate agony,” she said. “That is reserved for a Reverend Mother’s passage through the spice.”
Duncan nodded. Library records referred to “spice agony,” a mysterious trial that created a Reverend Mother.
“Major punishments are painful, nonetheless,” she said. “They are also emotionally painful. Emotion evoked by punishment is always that emotion we judge to be the penitent’s greatest weakness, and thus we strengthen the punished.”
Her words filled Duncan with unfocused dread. What were they doing to his guards? He could not speak but there was no need. Tamalane was not finished.
“The punishment always ends with a dessert,” she said and she clapped her hands against her knees.
Duncan frowned. Dessert? That was part of a banquet. How could a banquet be punishment?
“It is not really a banquet but the idea of a banquet,” Tamalane said. One clawlike hand described a circle in the air. “The dessert comes, something totally unexpected. The penitent thinks:
Duncan shook his head from side to side. No, he did not understand.
“It is the sweetness of the moment,” she said. “You have been through every course of a painful banquet and come out at the end to something you can savor. But! As you savor it,
“But what will she do to those guards?” The words were wrenched from Duncan.
“I cannot say what the specific elements of the individual punishments will be. I have no need to know. I can only tell you it will be different for each of them.”
Tamalane would say no more. She returned to laying out the next day’s lessons. “We will continue tomorrow,” she said, “teaching you to identify the sources of the various accents of spoken Galach.”
No one else, not even Teg or Patrin, would answer his questions about the punishments. Even the guards, when he saw them afterward, refused to speak of their ordeals. Some reacted curtly to his overtures and none would play with him anymore. There was no forgiveness among the punished. That much was clear.
That was where his deep hatred of her began. All of the old witches shared in his hatred. Would the new young one be the same as the old ones?
When he demanded of Schwangyu: “Why did you have to punish them?” Schwangyu took some time before answering, then: “It is dangerous for you here on Gammu. There are people who wish you harm.”
Duncan did not ask why. This was another area where his questions were never answered. Not even Teg would answer, although Teg’s very presence emphasized the fact of that danger.
And Miles Teg was a Mentat who must know many answers. Duncan often saw the old man’s eyes glisten while his thoughts went far away. But there was no Mentat response to such questions as:
“Why are we here on Gammu?”
“Who do you guard against? Who wants to harm me?”
“Who are my parents?”
Silence greeted such questions or sometimes Teg would growl: “I cannot answer you.”
The library was useless. He had discovered this when he was only eight and his chief instructor was a failed Reverend Mother named Luran Geasa—not quite as ancient as Schwangyu but well along in years, more than a hundred, anyway.
