Taboo Breakers
For I saw that humankind's survival was at stake, I took myself out of the flow of humanity and became an alien, a pharaoh, an untold terror onto this countless multitude inside me provides me with the moral compass I seek. How deep can a judge sense what is right and wrong? My senses go all the way down. I created the Golden Path, humanity's guarantee of survival, based on two very simple concepts. For untold billions of people, a captive peace conditioning minds to longing, desire, a subconscious impulse for life. To the few I trained, my breeding program, the concentration of great skill and talent, making way for the best leaders the universe has ever seen. What did that take, you ask? Thousands of years of suffering! And the resolve to use means to an end going beyond anything a single, short-lived man could bear. Will history judge me? I will judge myself!
- LETO II ATREIDES, THE DAR-ES-BALAT DIARIES
Bellonda strode out of Chapterhouse's Archives with a menacing look on her face, so that the acolytes she encountered on the way to the labs would steer clear of her path. Skipping the line where her Sisters waited to grab lunch, she reached out to chef Duana, who handed the ill-tempered Reverend Mother a small package wrapped in thermoplaz.
She covered the distance to the labs in a transportation pod, while gobbling down her lunch – a saute of meat and garden vegetables – with a mix of fury and discomfort. Not only the late Odrade, by means of her own death on Junction, had inflicted Murbella on her; now Murbella had put her in charge of all the tasks she liked the least.
The sand grains were swirled around the pod, lifted in the air by the afternoon breeze. It was the dry, desert air that bothered her. The desert was less than a thousand miles away, its expansion rapidly accelerating as the transplanted Rakis sandtrout encapsulated and confined more and more of Chapterhouse's water. The two remaining oceans were shrinking by the day, and fishing had stopped. No reason to keep moving vessels and equipment down the shore every week, rebuild harbors, extend roads into the old seabed.
The last Tleilaxu Master Scytale, keeper of the secret of spice production, had disappeared with Sheeana and Duncan into the Scattering. But the Sisterhood had already been growing three clones using the very same axolotl tanks the Master had reluctantly helped them build. The best kept secret of the Tleilaxu, these uncanny human wombs/tanks allowed the regrowth of a dead body's cells into a new ghola, capable of remembering his past life's memories.
Bellonda felt revulsion at the thought of the axolotl tanks they housed in what they deceptively called the labs. The late Mother Superior Taraza had correctly guessed that the tanks were not machines, but Tleilaxu females turned into industrial wombs, machinery joined to the grossly expanded organic bodies to grow the Bene Tleilax's twisted creatures. We had to recruit volunteers among our Sisters, and even found them! The war had come, the Honored Matres had almost eliminated the Sisterhood, and survival considerations had prevailed over deep-rooted scruples. What will survival dictate that we do next? At what point will necessity turn us against our very Bene Gesserit identity?
Outside of the window, the ever-increasing desolation of Central paraded through the window. More buildings had been hastily assembled even as the aridity of the soil turned the gardens and the orchards to lifeless husks. Odrade would have fought to keep them alive. The new Central looked more like a dormitory and a campus than the seat of the multi-planetary Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. Whatever it takes to bring in and train the Honored Matres, subtly turning them from uncontrollable deadly creatures to wise Reverend Mothers. There was no doubt Murbella's plan was working. The New Sisters, having crossed from their Matres' conditioning to full Reverend Mother awareness, had a great influence on the unconverted ones. Slowly, we are stabilize them. She suppressed her thoughts as the transport veered toward the labs, coming to a stop. That area of Central was deserted. The Sisters stayed away, from the building causing so many unsettling thoughts. Out of sight, out of mind. Looking out, Bellonda saw in the distance an air twister spiraling away to the south, felt the sand dust that littered the pavement crack under her shoes. Sand, sand dropped in a recycler her unfinished lunch, walking briskly through the entrance and into the endless corridors, carefully skirting the facility housing the tanks. Her Sisters!
And so yes, the Sisterhood had taken those volunteering Sisters, turned them into the docile biological laboratories needed for their ghola experiments. Once that first taboo was broken, it had been surprisingly easy to cover up the details. Nobody wanted to know. But the volunteers who sacrificed themselves to a life of pain and immobility, those we need to remember. Out of the tanks had come the clone of Miles Teg, the best commander of the Sisterhood. Another one who was taken from us the day that Sheeana's no-ship lifted off. And another one we have brought back with Tleilaxu technology. On and on cloning humans... How far until we clone ourselves? She shuddered. Every Sister knew the futility of that Museum mentality. The fallacy of prolonging the past. The Tleilaxu Master's own trap. Adaptation and survival would not permit it. New blood and genes were needed to keep the Sisterhood in sync with the times. And yet, they still needed those clones until their survival was ensured. These are not ordinary people we are bringing back: a new Teg-ghola, and not one but three Scytales to ensure we don't fail. She hoped they could shut off the program soon, but the temptation to continue would be there. The Sisterhood was short of critical talent.
Having reached the ante-chamber of Scytale's section, she stopped to recompose herself.
Scytale-ter – the second replica of the original – was only eleven. The child who was not a child sat on a chair much larger than his body, something that surely made the grown-up mind inside the body uneasy. Bellonda entered the observation room and found Murbella was already there, waiting.
"Has he been there all along?" murmured Bellonda, fearing for a moment that he could hear them through the screen. "I do not have all day, Bell. How long will this take?" Murbella's voice was a whiplash, betraying how often these days the Honored Matres had to be kept in their place. Bell remembered how until recently a Matre could become the Great Matre by killing her predecessor. Murbella herself had slayed Logno on Junction to assert her primacy. The Matres' fighting skills and faster-than-the-eye reflexes remained unattainable with Bene Gesserit training. And that's why we tame them with our other teachings.
"Our Imprinters have been at work earlier this morning," she replied. "He has just recovered his memories. He still believes he is on the no-ship. We built a perfect replica of his quarters to reinforce that belief."
"Better getting started, Bell."
"Where is Odrade?" said Master Scytale-ter as Murbella entered the room, closing the door behind her. The Master's eyes looked deep, his whole being looking inward, adjusting to his recently acquired memories.
"Odrade is dead. I rule now," replied Murbella, finding a chair-dog to sit on, her black robe coming to rest in cascading folds around her.
"Rule? No more elections? An unusual successor. You do not wear the Sisters' aba," he added, looking at Murbella's cobalt dragon robe.
"Things have changed; things have stayed the same."
"I see. I am the new ghola. How much time?"
"One year. Since your last incarnation's death," lied Murbella, glancing at the comeyes that were recording the meeting. Bellonda would be observing the scene and reporting back later.
"How did I die?"
"A Honored Matres' attack on Chapterhouse. Many deaths. We prevailed. There is a truce between the Orders," she suppressed a sigh. She had rehearsed the lie many times.
"Why do you call them Matres?"
"Because that's how they call themselves. Do you want me to call them whores?"
"You were one of them."
"I was. Before giving the Bene Gesserit children."
A long silence. There was no betraying the look of distrust in his eyes. We came to the Tleilaxu pretending to be one with their cult; the other one, Master Waff, fell into the trap so easily – but he is gone, and this smart one is not easily fooled.
"I heard you met Muad'Dib in the old times of the Imperium. Tell me how it was.'' That was the beginning of Murbella's distraction.
"Interested in the old times, Murbella?"
"Remember the little conspiracy you and the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam hatched on Wallach IX?
Scytale-ter had a tic of rubbing his hand on a place on his chest, just like his previous incarnation had done. Except the previous incarnation was not dead, was on a real no-ship somewhere they could not track, away with Sheeana and Duncan, somewhere out of reach in the Scattering.
The Master was lost in thought. A delay in merging his new memories? This moment was as good a test as anything. Did they truly possess the know-how to clone a Tleilaxu Master? Who knew what secrets he had withheld from them.
"I..." a slight stumbling of the words, "... remember I was with Muad'Dib in Sietch Tabr the night of the crisis. His eyes burnt by the stone-burner, empty sockets, but how alive he looked instead! His hand never wavered, his steps so sure making his way through the ancient tunnels."
"Using his prescience to guide him, though it guided him to a bitter end."
"He sacrificed himself so that the Prophet Leto could be born," he reprimanded her, "I was there. I offered him to revive his beloved Chani, to live the life he wanted, to delay the inevitable moment."
Murbella held her breath in silence.
"But he did not take the offer," Scytale continued. "Supreme restraint! He walked into the desert as the law of his Fremen pets prescribed. And thus saved the future of Leto and Ghanima. A supreme act of sacrifice for a much maligned man!"
"There and then you learned you could restore a ghola's memories. Muad'Dib did it with Duncan Idaho. With that secret unlocked, you and the other Masters found the way to live serially for thousands of years. But how can you remember this moment you just described? You were killed at Muad'Dib's hand that fateful night. Did Face Dancers retrieve your body? Did the Tleilaxu infiltrate the deathstills of the Fremen?"
Scytale stared at the wall. "As I died, a look of astonishment came over his face," he continued to remember. "Pure surprise."
"Paul Muad'Dib, the Kwisatch Haderach, came and went, Scytale. The Prophet came and went. Look around. Only we remain now."
"And no more sandworms?"
"That's not accurate. The Prophet's spawn. The sandworms. Come in!" she clapped her hands.
It had already happened with the original Master and it was about to happen again. The door opened and a Sister came in pushing a container floating on suspensors. A three-foot long sandworm was squirming against the transparent plexi. Here we go again.
Bellonda observed all of this as deja vu, and looked at the screens in time to observe a deep panic taking over the Master.
"We have brought back the Prophet," barked Murbella, "and the spice melange is back! For all that you hold sacred, can you not see what we are doing here? You wanted the True Belief to spread like fire in the Universe, why won't you help us in the endeavor? Join us now!"
Scytale's child hands were shaking. An uncontrollable trembling took over his whole body. Bellonda hoped this would play out as they had planned. Will he see through our ploy? We must have his spice-making tanks! The last secret he withheld!
"Give me my own tanks!" shouted Scytale. "If you are on the same side as you profess, why do you take everything away from me!" The shaking did not stop even as he jumped on his legs, stumbled toward the container, fell on his knees near the miniature worm's mouth, the miniature furnace hissing and spitting fire against the plexi walls. He stared.
And just like that, Scytale-ter collapsed.
Screaming to the comeyes, Murbella jumped by the Master's side: "Bring the medics in! I can feel his heart stopped!"
Suk doctors scrambled in from a hidden door, defibrillators in hand, put the body on the portable bed, did what they had done before.
Murbella glared at the point on the false wall where she knew Bellonda sat staring through the glass, in the observation room. "Pray he lives Bell," she roared, "Or next time I will have the medics in for you!"
Bellonda stepped back, fell onto the chair-dog and half slipped to the floor, taken aback at the direct threat she had just received from Sister to Sister.
Scytale-bis died three month ago. This Scytale-ter likely dead. We awake them too early!
Murbella's voice boomed from the other room: "There is only one other ghola left of Scytale. Do not let any of your scruples restrain your hand. None of these Bene Gesserit taboos should weaken us any further!"