Observing her now, the way she waited so patiently for his thoughts to resolve, Teg reflected that it often was said with truth that Reverend Mothers no longer were completely members of the human race. They moved somehow outside the main flow, perhaps parallel to it, perhaps diving into it occasionally for their own purposes, but always removed from humankind. They removed themselves. It was an identifying mark of the Reverend Mother, a sense of extra identity that made them closer to the long-dead Tyrant than to the human stock from which they sprang.
Manipulation. That was their mark. They manipulated everyone and everything.
“I am to be the Bene Gesserit eyes,” Teg said. “Taraza wants me to make a
Obviously pleased, Odrade squeezed his arm. “What a father I have!”
“Do you really have a father?” he asked and he recounted for her what he had been thinking about the Bene Gesserit removing themselves from humanity.
“Outside humanity,” she said. “What a curious idea. Are Guild navigators also outside their original humanity?”
He thought about this. Guild navigators diverged widely from humankind’s more common shape. Born in space and living out their lives in tanks of melange gas, they distorted the original form, elongated and repositioned limbs and organs. But a young navigator in estrus and before entering the tank could breed with a norm. It had been demonstrated. They became non-human but not in the way of the Bene Gesserit.
“Navigators are not your mental kin,” he said. “They think human. Guiding a ship through space, even with prescience to find the safe way, has a pattern a human can accept.”
“You don’t accept our pattern?”
“As far as I can, but somewhere in your development you shift outside the original pattern. I think you may perform a conscious act even to appear human. This way you hold my arm right now, as though you really were my daughter.”
“I am your daughter but I’m surprised you think so little of us.”
“Quite the contrary: I stand in awe of you.”
“Of your own daughter?”
“Of any Reverend Mother.”
“You think I exist only to manipulate lesser creatures?”
“I think you no longer really feel human. There’s a gap in you, something missing, something you’ve removed. You no longer are one of us.”
“Thank you,” Odrade said. “Taraza told me you would not hesitate to answer truthfully, but I knew that for myself.”
“For what have you prepared me?”
“You will know it when it occurs; that is all I can say . . . all I am permitted to say.”
Odrade cleared her throat. She appeared about to say something more but she remained silent as she guided Teg around and strolled with him back across the chamber.
Even though she had known what Teg must say, his words pained her. She wanted to tell him that she was one of those who still felt human, but his judgment of the Sisterhood could not be denied.
There were sounds behind them. They stopped and turned. Lucilla and Taraza emerged from a lift tube speaking idly about their observations of the ghola.
“You are absolutely right to treat him as one of us,” Taraza said.
Teg heard but made no comment as they awaited the approach of the two women.
Odrade closed her eyes and memory startled her by producing of itself an image of a painting. The thing occupied a space on the wall of Taraza’s morning room. Ixian artifice had preserved the painting in the finest hermetically sealed frame behind a cover of invisible plaz. Odrade often stopped in front of the painting, feeling each time that her hand might reach out and actually touch the ancient canvas so cunningly preserved by the Ixians.
The artist’s name for his work and his own name were preserved on a burnished plate beneath the painting:
The thing dated from a time so ancient that only rare remnants such as this painting remained to send a physical impression down the ages. She had tried to imagine the journeys that painting had taken, the serial chance that had brought it intact to Taraza’s room.
