Dune полностью

“You ask too many of the wrong questions, child. And you haven’t told me why I should consider you an instrument of God.”

“Shaitan spares me. I walk on the desert and when Shaitan comes, I talk to him.”

“Why do you call him Shaitan instead of Shai-hulud?”

“Everybody asks that same stupid question!”

“Then give me your stupid answer.”

The sullen expression returned to Sheeana’s face. “It’s because of how we met.”

“And how did you meet?”

Sheeana tipped her head to one side and looked up at Odrade for a moment, then: “That’s a secret.”

“And you know how to keep secrets?”

Sheeana straightened and nodded but Odrade saw uncertainty in the movement. The child knew when she was being led into an impossible position!

“Excellent!” Odrade said. “The keeping of secrets is one of a Reverend Mother’s most essential teachings. I’m glad we won’t have to bother with that one.”

“But I want to learn everything!”

Such petulance in her voice. Very poor emotional control.

“You must teach me everything!” Sheeana insisted.

Time for the whip, Odrade thought. Sheeana had spoken and postured sufficiently that even a fifth-grade acolyte could feel confident of controlling her now.

Using the full power of Voice, Odrade said: “Don’t take that tone with me, child! Not if you wish to learn anything!”

Sheeana went rigid. She was more than a minute absorbing what had happened to her and then relaxing. Presently, she smiled, a warm and open expression. “Oh, I’m so glad you came! It’s been so boring lately.”

Nothing surpasses the complexity of the human mind.

—LETO II: DAR-ES-BALAT RECORDS

The Gammu night, often quickly foreboding in this latitude, was almost two hours away. Gathering clouds shadowed the Keep. At Lucilla’s command, Duncan had returned to the courtyard for an intense session of self-directed practice.

Lucilla observed from the parapet where she had first watched him.

Duncan moved in the tumbling twists of the Bene Gesserit eightfold combat, hurling his body across the grass, rolling, flipping himself from side to side, darting up and then down.

It was a fine display of random dodging, Lucilla thought. She could see no predictable pattern in his movements and the speed was dazzling. He was almost sixteen SY and already coming onto the platform potential of his prana-bindu endowment.

The carefully controlled movements of his training exercises revealed so much! He had responded quickly when she first ordered these evening sessions. The initial step of her instructions from Taraza had been accomplished. The ghola loved her. No doubt of it. She was mother-fixed to him. And it had been accomplished without seriously weakening him, although Teg’s anxieties had been aroused.

My shadow is on this ghola but he is not a supplicant nor a dependent follower, she reassured herself. Teg worries about it for no reason.

Just that morning, she had told Teg, “Wherever his strengths dictate, he continues to express himself freely.”

Teg should see him right now, she thought. These new practice movements were largely Duncan’s own creation.

Lucilla suppressed a gasp of appreciation at a particularly nimble leap, which took Duncan almost to the center of the courtyard. The ghola was developing a nerve-muscle equilibrium that, given time, might be matched to a psychological equilibrium at least equal to Teg’s. The cultural impact of such an achievement would be awesome. Look at all those who gave instinctive allegiance to Teg and, through Teg, to the Sisterhood.

We have the Tyrant to thank for much of that, she thought.

Before Leto II, no widespread system of cultural adjustments had ever endured long enough to approach the balance that the Bene Gesserit held as an ideal. It was this equilibrium—“flowing along the blade of a sword”—that fascinated Lucilla. It was why she lent herself so unreservedly to a project whose total design she did not know, but which demanded of her a performance that instinct labeled repugnant.

Duncan is so young!

What the Sisterhood required of her next had been spelled out explicitly by Taraza: the Sexual Imprint. Only that morning, Lucilla had posed naked before her mirror, forming the attitudes and motions of face and body that she knew she would use to obey Taraza’s orders. In artificial repose, Lucilla had seen her own face appear like that of a prehistoric love goddess—opulent with flesh and the promise of softness into which an aroused male might hurl himself.

In her education, Lucilla had seen ancient statues from the First Times, little stone figures of human females with wide hips and sagging breasts that assured abundance for a suckling infant. At will, Lucilla could produce a youthful simulation of that ancient form.