Taraza went to the hatch, opened it and gave her security signal. She turned once more toward Waff who still sat in his chair.
His elfin features composed, Waff stared back at her.
How bland he looked, Taraza thought. But he could be trapped! An alliance between Sisterhood and Tleilaxu offered new attractions.
“Until Rakis,” she said.
What social inheritances went outward with the Scattering? We know those times intimately. We know both the mental and physical settings. The Lost Ones took with them a consciousness confined mostly to manpower and hardware. There was a desperate need for room to expand driven by the myth of Freedom. Most had not learned the deeper lesson of the Tyrant, that violence builds its own limits. The Scattering was wild and random movement interpreted as growth (expansion). It was goaded by a profound fear (often unconscious) of stagnation and death.
—THE SCATTERING: BENE GESSERIT ANALYSIS (ARCHIVES)
Odrade lay full length on her side along the ledge of the bow window, her cheek lightly touching the warm plaz through which she could see the Great Square of Keen. Her back was supported by a red cushion, which smelled of melange as did many things here on Rakis. Behind her lay three rooms, small but efficient and well removed from both Temple and Bene Gesserit Keep. This removal had been a requirement of the Sisterhood’s agreement with the priests.
“Sheeana must be guarded more securely,” Odrade had insisted.
“She cannot become the ward of only the Sisterhood!” Tuek had objected.
“Nor of the priests,” Odrade countered.
Six stories below Odrade’s bow window vantage, an enormous bazaar spread out in loosely organized confusion, almost filling the Great Square. The silvered yellow light of a lowering sun washed the scene with brilliance, picking out the bright colors of canopies, drawing long shadows across the uneven ground. There was a dusty radiance about the light where scattered clumps of people milled about patched umbrellas and the jumbled alignments of wares.
The Great Square was not actually square. It stretched out around the bazaar a full kilometer across from Odrade’s window and easily twice that distance to the left and right—a giant rectangle of packed earth and old stones, which had been churned into bitter dust by daytime shoppers braving the heat in hopes of gaining a bargain then.
As evening advanced, a different sense of activity unfolded beneath Odrade—more people arriving, a quickening and more frenetic pulse to the movement.
Odrade tipped her head to peer down sharply at the ground near her building. Some of the merchants directly beneath her window had wandered off to their nearby quarters. They would return soon, after a meal and short siesta, ready to make full use of those more valuable hours when people in the open could breathe air that did not burn their throats.
Sheeana was overdue, Odrade noted. The priests dared not delay much longer. They would be working frantically now, firing questions at Sheeana, admonishing her to remember that she was God’s own emissary to His Church. Reminding Sheeana of many contrived allegiances that Odrade would have to ferret out and make humorous before dispatching such trivia into proper perspective.
Odrade arched her back and went through a silent minute of tiny exercises to relieve tensions. She admitted to a certain sympathy for Sheeana. The girl’s thoughts would be chaos right now. Sheeana knew little or nothing about what to expect once she came fully under a Reverend Mother’s tutelage. There was little doubt that the young mind was cluttered with myths and other misinformation.
She could not avoid remembrance at a moment such as this. Her immediate task was clear: exorcism, not only for Sheeana but for herself.
She thought the haunting thoughts of a Reverend Mother in her memories:
