Dune полностью

Waff’s frozen stare invited Taraza to a daring gambit. The Sisterhood’s deductions, based partly on the disappearance of an Ixian conference ship, were accurate! Maintaining her same smile, she now pursued the optional conjecture line as though it were known fact. “I think,” she said, “the whores might like to learn that they have had Face Dancers among them.”

Waff suppressed his anger. These damnable witches! They knew! Somehow, they knew! His councillors had been extremely doubtful about this meeting. A substantial minority had recommended against it. The witches were so . . . so devilish. And their retaliations!

Time to shift his attention to Gammu, Taraza thought. Keep him off balance. She said: “Even when you subvert one of us, as you did with Schwangyu on Gammu, you learn nothing of value!”

Waff flared: “She thought to . . . to hire us like a band of assassins! We only taught her a lesson!”

Ahhhh, his pride shows itself, Taraza thought. Interesting. The implications of a moral structure behind such pride must be explored.

“You’ve never really penetrated our ranks,” Taraza said.

“And you have never penetrated the Tleilaxu!” Waff managed to produce this boast with passable calm. He needed time to think! To plan!

“Perhaps you would like to know the price of our silence,” Taraza suggested. She took Waff’s stony glare for agreement and added: “For one thing, you will share with us everything you learn about those Scattering-spawned whores who call themselves Honored Matres.”

Waff shuddered. Much had been confirmed by killing the Honored Matres. The sexual intricacies! Only the strongest psyche could resist entanglement in such ecstasies. The potential of this tool was enormous! Must that be shared with these witches?

“Everything you learn from them,” Taraza insisted.

“Why do you call them whores?”

“They try to copy us, yet they sell themselves for power and make a mockery of everything we represent. Honored Matres!”

“They outnumber you at least ten thousand to one! We have seen the evidence.”

“One of us could defeat them all,” Taraza said.

Waff sat in silence, studying her. Was that merely a boast? You could never be sure when it came to the Bene Gesserit witches. They did things. The dark side of the magic universe belonged to them. On more than one occasion the witches had blunted the Shariat. Was it God’s will that the true believers pass through another trial?

Taraza allowed the silence to continue building its own tensions. She sensed Waff’s turmoil. It reminded her of the Sisterhood’s preliminary conference in preparation for this meeting with him. Bellonda had asked the question of deceptive simplicity:

“What do we really know about the Tleilaxu?”

Taraza had felt the answer surge into every mind around the Chapter House conference table: We may know for sure only what they want us to know.

None of her analysts could avoid the suspicion that the Tleilaxu had deliberately created a masking-image of themselves. Tleilaxu intelligence had to be measured against the fact that they alone controlled the secret of the axlotl tanks. Was that a lucky accident as some suggested? Then why had others been unable to duplicate this accomplishment in all of these millennia?

Gholas.

Were the Tleilaxu using the ghola process for their own kind of immortality? She could see suggestive hints in Waff’s actions . . . nothing definite, but highly suspicious.

At the Chapter House conferences, Bellonda had returned repeatedly to their basic suspicions, hammering at them: “All of it . . . all of it, I say! Everything in our archives could be garbage fit only for slig fodder!”

This allusion had caused some of the more relaxed Reverend Mothers around the table to shudder.

Sligs!

Those slowly creeping crosses between giant slugs and pigs might provide meat for some of the most expensive meals in their universe but the creatures themselves embodied everything the Sisterhood held repugnant about the Tleilaxu. Sligs had been one of the earliest Bene Tleilax barter items, a product grown in their tanks and formed with the helical core from which all life took its shapes. That the Bene Tleilax made them added to the aura of obscenity around a creature whose multi-mouths ground incessantly on almost any garbage, passing that garbage swiftly into excrement that not only smelled of the sty but was slimy.

“The sweetest meat this side of heaven,” Bellonda had quoted from a CHOAM promotion.

“And it comes from obscenity,” Taraza had added.

Obscenity.