Reverend Mother: "And Leto II became the Worm."
Rebel: "And I say he was a Wolf!"
Reverend Mother: "He showed the Sisterhood its own limits."
Rebel: "There stood a being, born of the purest Bene Gesserit breeding lines, with complete control over his many pasts. And claws!"
Reverend Mother: "Where we ran away from, where we invested in self-control, he reigned with ease."
Rebel: "You faced your own fears!"
Reverend Mother: "At first we recoiled, denying that there was a lesson to be learned."
Rebel: "But then you listened to the wolf."
Reverend Mother: "We taught our Sisters how to embrace their Memories and remain whole. We are unafraid of seeking the past. We are integrated. We are more alike now to the Tyrant than ever before. We did it for our betterment."
Rebel: "You lie! You did it because the wolf was going to eat you!"
Reverend Mother: "I never said there was nothing at stake."
Rebel: "You are envious. You secretly aspired to become like him."
Reverend Mother: "I never said our motives were worthy."
Rebel: "You are mistaken! The wolf seeded his lesson on purpose."
Reverend Mother: "If so, it made us stronger."
Rebel: "No. He proved to you that you were proud and vain. And you submitted."
Reverend Mother: "To submit is not to agree."
Rebel: "He proved he could control you like a puppet across the centuries, causing you to imitate him, and you did not see that coming!"
Reverend Mother: "Even if he did, we broke free when he died."
Rebel: "No, he let you live."
Reverend Mother (raising her voice): "We broke free, so that for the rest of our existence, we can ensure no wolf will ever be born again."
Rebel (after a pause): "And in that respect, how exactly are you not still his puppet?"
- THE BOOK OF DELUSIONS, A BENE GESSERIT COMMENTARY
Heartbeat.
Heartbeat.
They say, Reverend Mother Visella thought, that if you get lost in a deep cave without a light, disorientation in the dark kicks in so rapidly, you quickly lose track of your own body. People have been found lying down while they think they are standing.
Breathe. Black. You finally know what it's like to be trapped in your own brain.
You can't speak, see, hear, but you can feel.
Those lost in the caverns, they think they are standing, their eyes wide open in total darkness, or closed shut, it does not matter. Their mind is there, disembodied, not able to feel reality in absence of contrast. Their back is against a cold rock, their legs are crossed; no matter. They have the illusion of standing erect in an eerie space. There is no sound that is not created by the chatter of their teeth.
Whether she was in a cave or not, Visella thought, it did not matter; there was no way to know the difference. But, she could feel her body. And, differently from the cave wanderers she heard about when she was little, she could not scream. Such is the power these androids had on her. Have you ever dreamed of feeling trapped, and nobody can hear you? Visella's breath cycled through her lungs and throat, without making a sound. That was her now. Blind, and numb, and lost, and unheard. Like the day she was little, the day the Honored Matres had raided Laplace and her parents had squeezed her small, child body inside the four corners of a wooden box, forcing the lid closed above the twisted bundle of flesh that was her (her ankle was dislocated in the process). There she stood, locked inside as her parents walked back up the stairs to meet the raiders. Visella the little girl had cried herself to sleep, had thought she would die with her skeleton broken in a thousand pieces as time passed - dusk and then dawn and then dusk again, according to the distant cry of a rooster. Then relaxation settled in and as long as she did not try to move, an unnatural comfort kicked in. The third day two soldiers broke the lock open and lifted the lid. The onrushing yellow light annihilated every sense in her. In her drunken stupor she asked the soldiers if they were angels. Not the afterlife, but the purgatory it turned out to be as she was confined to bed for weeks, her limbs and muscles and legaments forced to straighten via constricting mechanical devices. The months of treatment until she could walk again. The Bene Gesserit corps first and then the Sisters had become a new family of sorts, until they unceremoniously shipped her to Buzzell to her new adoptive parents.
Feel your blood.
Visella listened to her pulse, knew she laid horizontally. Maybe still on her bed, maybe somewhere else where the inorganic beings able to manipulate an entire planet would conduct more tests.
Up, down. Left, right. Forward, backward.
She got her torso up, down. She paused to learn the difference. She walked off the bed feeling for obstacles. She turned around to walk back to the bed, then over, mapping cautiously the space pace by pace like a blind scout. She opened her eyes, but black was the color. But she had hands, her hands! She felt and caressed the surfaces, guessing their material. She licked a table. She could taste it! It tasted like eucalyptus. Like on Buzzell, cold, forsaken, windy Buzzell, where at the Equatorian islands, the hottest spot on the planet, icebergs would still float in the sea in spring. Conifers covered the land instead of the tropical palms of other worlds. They collected pine tips, macerated them in sugar and boiled them with honey, reducing it to the viscous syrup parents gave to their children as a cold remedy. The pungent, eucalyptus-like taste did not discourage her as she willingly tasted spoonfuls of the thing, swirling the dense, glossy liquid in her mouth, swallowing it until it coated her throat and tongue in a chilled embrace. Then she dared run out, still undressed, out on the cold beach outside followed by her adoptive mother's angry cries.
That was the same smell that years later pervaded the dark house the Bene Gesserit Proctor had taken her and two other students to for the blind walk, the hundred-pace indoor path where no light could enter. It was pitch dark and the thick carpet muffled her footsteps. The Proctor abandoned them there and told them to feel their way out. And lost they were for a good hour, disoriented but intrigued as they touched their way through rooms designed to deceive and entertain, recognizing the leg of an elephant, a crashed vehicle, a dining table with real food in the many dishes (they had not had a proper meal in a week); they sang to catch echoes and feel hallways, they called each other from the opposites sides of a room. When at last they made their way through the last corridor leading out, the first faint glimpse of daylight hit them with a touch of sadness, a farewell to all her other senses, as they had flourished in the darkness and brought such potent sensations to her body and ears; but by then they were leaving, departing, never to come back as the blinding light of the exit did not reveal the world but instead hid the essence the other, diminished senses had expressed. She stood at the exit, triumphant in spirit but longing in her heart, knowing the comeback to the average reality had stolen away an alternate dimension of existence.
Something pricked Visella's arm.
She froze, slowed down, explored with her hands.
Spikes? She was leaving the safe space, then. If she had been able to hear, at least, maybe she would have been able to discover nearby objects by listening to variation in the white noise of the room. She explored concentric circles around her starting point, naming directions as she went - north, north west west, north west, west north west...
"Master Reta!" she tried to vocalize, not sure whether her vocal chords were cooperating or not. "What do you expect me to do, feel obstacles with my mind?"
Thud. In response, her head had hit somewhere. Her hands felt protruding obstacles at shoulder's height in the southwest corner. What devilish traps had the androids set up to test her, this time? Getting killed here was not her goal. Master Reta's words echoed in her mind: "Goal? You open your eyes every morning, you close them at night to sleep. What goal?"
She stopped mid-pace.
"When you finally give up, when there is more want, no more attachment," the master had said.
"Shut up you and your gibberish," she screamed in her mind, then stood up and calmly went back to the starting point. She sat on the bed, then posed in zazen, starting her meditation. After all, they had taught her the mind had to be empty. This show is over. She had no reason to strive to get out. If they want something from me, let them work at it. But meditation was impaired by her anger, right now, and so her mind wandered. Was there a secret message about light? You open your eyes every morning. As she had done every day during the implacable years of training. From Buzzell until her teenage years, then to Dan, the blue Dan and its hot summers by the sea. Proctor Salera, who had a soft side for new and scared recruits from frontier planets, had taken her under her wing during their endlessly boring voyage aboard the Sisterhood's transport, the Kwisatz Haderach; an inside joke for an old cargo hauler that could bring about 'the shortening of way' in space. Inside, the young twenty-something recruits were packed like sardines, sharing bed pods so small they were called 'the coffins'. One day as news spread that they had entered orbit around their destination planet, Salera, her and two other girls had stolen away and voiced their way to the observation bridge. At only a thousand miles from the surface, Dan towered like a gigantic beach ball taking over the majority of the view. It appeared to Visella that the ship would crash against it anytime soon, swallowed in its deep oceans or taken away by the high winds. The blues and greens glowed and enveloped her awareness as she fainted against the wall. The Proctor recalled she had murmured "the thing... the whole thing" while her body slid down on the floor.
Presently five minutes had passed. She waited in zazen. Then another ten, then an hour.
Visella felt a tap on her left arm, and raised her chin.
She used hand gestures to convey her anger. They were from millennia in the past, but satisfying to use nevertheless. She reached out to feel the people who touched her, and found air.
Another tap, a pressure. A needle?
Then a zap, and her mind was jolted into higher dimensions. Yellow light filled her conscience, a painful, cold light she could not hide from; a splintering headache, a total immersion, like a long time ago the little girl had emerged from the darkness of a wooden box, broken, into the day. Total light. There below stood a room in impossible space, the walls and outline of the furniture laid out in golden transparent lines. Visella looked down to see her own head, every hair clearly laid out in gold, and below her body, visible through her scalp, still in the zazen posture. She looked down at herself. If a drug caused this, she could not name it. Like the other time long ago, she felt blindingly naked, her other senses diminished.
Another tap, another zap. Now she was in her own body, but her eyes closed could see the shapes in front of her in a raging white. She stood up to check, caressing a nearby wardrobe, her vision perfectly matching her touch. Sounds of incredible purity inserted themselves into her mind while her eardrums were quiet. She gasped, but made no sound still.
Another zap, and a thousand-facet vision blossomed in her awareness, as the eye of the mind saw herself and her surroundings from every angle and direction, like in a house or mirrors. It was disorienting at first - she felt for the floor, stumbling. Gradually, she stood up against the vertigo, against the fear of her body dropping through transparent floors and ceilings into a universe without gravity.
And then suddenly, color came rushing back. Like in her first grandiose vision of Dan, the enormous ball of water whose vision had perturbed her balance, she gasped, emotionally lost in an irresistible tide of blues and yellow and reds that shook her to her core.
Now Visella opened her eyes wide, her new eyesight overlapping what her real pupils could see; it was better, more color, more hues, a higher resolution in which every dot of light was exalted, glorious, sunlit. She felt Stendhal's syndrome from the sight of a mere bedroom.
"Master Reta!" she finally called out.
It's Avatasuyara. I am behind you, she heard a voice in her temples.
She faced the Sage firmly through her multi dimensional gaze. She felt his body, saw every single angle and facet. His pores were sweating in the heat of the day.
Is this telepathy? Visella asked.
When you are connected, every silent word has an echo. When you are connected, like us, you can see everything our cameras can see.
"What drug did you inject me with? How does it develop this new sense?"
No drug, just a subcutaneous plug into your nervous system. You are online. Welcome to the world as we see it.
"Why did you do this? Why do you never tell me?"
Sensory deprivation is needed before the brain can adjust to receiving new inputs. By knowing the outcome you may develop blocks against it. My congratulations to you and Master Reta. You have done well.
The Sage had never moved his lips.
The new senses will merge with your native ones in time. Give it time. Turn them off - I will show you where to press on your implant - after each session. Start slow, no more than an hour a day.
"Turn them off?" she gasped. Did he have any idea what she was experiencing?
Leerna stepped into her vision, hesitantly. "I have news from beyond our system. Per your request, we sent agents to scour a number of remote systems near the Imperium."
Visella turned around to face Avatasuyara.
"What time is it?"
"Sunset". A flower vase in front of her seemed to explode like a firework, each petal singing her a story that she felt she would remember and cherish for the rest of her existence. She stared, completely rapt.
"Later!" she replied to Leerna.
Visella took the Sage under her arm. "What are we waiting for? Take me outside!"