“They have no sense of self,” his mother said. “They have only the instinct to preserve their own lives unless ordered to die for their masters.”
“Would they do that?”
“They have done it many times.”
“Who are their masters?”
“Men who seldom leave the planets of the Bene Tleilax.”
“Do they have children?”
“Not Face Dancers. They are mules, sterile. But their masters can breed. We have taken a few of them but the offspring are strange. Few female births and even then we cannot probe their Other Memories.”
Miles frowned. He knew his mother was a Bene Gesserit. He knew the Reverend Mothers carried a marvelous reservoir of Other Memories going back through all the millennia of the Sisterhood. He even knew something of the Bene Gesserit breeding design. Reverend Mothers chose particular men and had children by those men.
“What are the Tleilaxu women like?” Miles asked.
It was a perceptive question that sent a surge of pride through the Lady Janet. Yes, it was almost a certainty that she had a potential Mentat here. The breeding mistresses had been right about the gene potential of Loschy Teg.
“No one outside of their planets has ever reported seeing a Tleilaxu female,” the Lady Janet said.
“Do they exist or is it just the tanks?”
“They exist.”
“Are any of the Face Dancers women?”
“At their own choice, they can be male or female. Observe them carefully. They know what your father is doing and it angers them.”
“Will they try to hurt my father?”
“They don’t dare. We have taken precautions and they know it. See how the one on the left works his jaws. That is one of their anger signs.”
“You said they were com . . . communal beings.”
“Like hive insects, Miles. They have no self-image. Without a sense of self, they go beyond amorality. Nothing they say or do can be trusted.”
Miles shuddered.
“We have never been able to detect an ethical code in them,” the Lady Janet said. “They are flesh made into automata. Without self, they have nothing to esteem or even doubt. They are bred only to obey their masters.”
“And they were told to come here and buy the rice.”
“Exactly. They were told to get it and there’s no other place in this sector where they can do that.”
“They must buy it from father?”
“He’s their only source. At this very moment, son, they are paying in melange. You see?”
Miles saw the orange-brown spice markers change hands, a tall stack of them, which one of the Face Dancers removed from a case on the floor.
“The price is far, far higher than they ever anticipated,” the Lady Janet said. “This will be an easy trail to follow.”
“Why?”
“Someone will be bankrupted acquiring that shipment. We think we know who the buyer is. Whoever it is, we will learn of it. Then we will know what was really being traded here.”
Lady Janet then began to point out the identifiable incongruities that betrayed a Face Dancer to trained eyes and ears. They were subtle signs but Miles picked up on them immediately. His mother told him then that she thought he might become a Mentat . . . perhaps even more.
Shortly before his thirteenth birthday, Miles Teg was sent away to advanced schooling at the Bene Gesserit stronghold on Lampadas, where his mother’s assessment of him was confirmed. Word went back to her:
“You have given us the Warrior Mentat we had hoped for.”
Teg did not see this note until sorting through his mother’s effects after her death. The words inscribed on a small sheet of ridulian crystal with the Chapter House imprint below them filled him with an odd sense of displacement in time. His memory put him suddenly back on Lampadas where the love-awe he had felt for his mother was deftly transferred to the Sisterhood itself, as originally intended. He had come to understand this only during his later Mentat training but the understanding changed little. If anything, it bound him even more strongly to the Bene Gesserit. It confirmed that the Sisterhood must be one of his strengths. He already knew that the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood was one of the most powerful forces in his universe—equal at least to the Spacing Guild, superior to the Fish Speaker Council that had inherited the core of the old Atreides Empire, superior by far to CHOAM, and balanced somehow with the Fabricators of Ix and with the Bene Tleilax. A small measure of the Sisterhood’s far-reaching authority could be deduced from the fact that they held this authority despite Tleilaxu tank-grown melange, which had broken the Rakian monopoly on the spice, just as Ixian navigation machines had broken the Guild monopoly on space travel.
Miles Teg knew his history well by then. Guild Navigators no longer were the only ones who could thread a ship through the folds of space—in this galaxy one instant, in a faraway galaxy the very next heartbeat.
