Odrade turned abruptly on one heel and strode across to the Tleilaxu Master.
She stopped two paces from Waff and glared down at him. Waff met her gaze with defiance.
“You’ve had enough time to consider your position,” she accused. “Why do you remain silent?”
“My position? You think you give us a choice?”
“Man is but a pebble dropped in a pool,” she quoted at him from his own beliefs.
Waff took a trembling breath. She spoke the proper words, but what lay behind such words? They no longer sounded right coming from the mouth of a powindah woman.
When Waff did not respond, Odrade continued her quotation: “And if man is but a pebble, then all his works can be no more.”
An involuntary shudder swept through Odrade, causing a look of carefully masked surprise in the watchful guardian Sisters. That shudder was not part of the required performance.
His barb had gone deep into her.
Could that have been Taraza’s purpose: to make Odrade vulnerable? How could Taraza have known what would be found here on Rakis? The Mother Superior not only displayed no prescient abilities, she tended to avoid this talent in others. On the rare occasions when Taraza had demanded such a performance of Odrade herself, the reluctance had been obvious to the trained eye of a Sister.
Had it been an accident?
Odrade sank into a swift recital of the Litany Against Fear, only a few eyeblinks but in that time Waff visibly came to a decision.
“You would force it upon us,” he said. “But you do not know what powers we have reserved for such a moment.” He lifted his sleeves to show where the dart throwers had been. “These were but paltry toys by comparison with our real weapons.”
“The Sisterhood has never doubted this,” Odrade said.
“Is it to be violent conflict between us?” he asked.
“It is your choice to make,” she said.
“Why do you court violence?”
“There are those who would love to see Bene Gesserit and Bene Tleilax at each other’s throats,” Odrade said. “Our enemies would enjoy stepping in to pick up the pieces after we had weakened ourselves sufficiently.”
“You state the argument for agreement but you give my people no room to negotiate! Perhaps your Mother Superior gave you no authority to negotiate!”
How tempting it was to pass it all back into Taraza’s hands, just as Taraza wanted. Odrade glanced at the guardian Sisters. The two faces were masks betraying nothing. What did they really know? Would they realize if she went against Taraza’s orders?
“Do you have such authority?” Waff persisted.
Odrade decided on a creative truth. “I have such authority,” she said. Her own words made it true. Having taken the authority, she made it impossible for Taraza to deny it. Odrade knew, though, that her own words committed her to a course sharply divergent from the sequential steps of Taraza’s design.
Odrade glanced at the guardian Sisters. “Remain here, please, and see that we are not disturbed.” To Waff, she said: “We might as well be comfortable.” She indicated two chairdogs set at right angles to each other across the room.
Odrade waited until they were seated before resuming the conversation. “We require a degree of candor between us that diplomacy seldom allows. Too much hangs in the balance for us to engage in shallow evasions.”
Waff looked at her strangely. He said: “We know there is dissension in your highest councils. Subtle overtures have been made to us. Is this part of . . .”
“I am loyal to the Sisterhood,” she said. “Even those who approached you had no other loyalty.”
“Is this another trick of—”
“No tricks!”
“With the Bene Gesserit there are always tricks,” he accused.
“What is it you fear from us? Name it.”
“Perhaps I have learned too much from you for you to allow me to go on living.”
“Could I not say the same of you?” she asked. “Who else knows of our secret affinity? This is no
