LXXXII. The Manuscript, Part One
We exist only to serve.
- BENE GESSERIT SAYING
Excerpt from Reverend Mother Visella Ashejak's manuscript:
"I write these words in the old-fashioned way, my hand pushing on the stylo, the stylo leaving blue-black china ink curves on hard cellulose paper, so that it cannot be said I wrote haphazardly, or under duress, or that I wrote lies easily construed with language. A Truthsayer could, if one was found on this planet, examine my writing and testify it is truth.
The reason why I write, my love, this testimony, is so that if I fail, the truth will reach you one day or the other.
No matter that a death sentence awaits me, should I ever set foot again on Chapterhouse; for Reverend Mothers are supposed to take their oath seriously, and diligently recite it on their way to exile. Stripped of our rank and of our Sisters' recognition, and expelled into the remote corners of the Scattering, we still are expected to profess our loyalty, as I do, to the Order, and apply our skills, as I do, for the benefit of it.
It will make you smile that we do this while we have no hope for redemption. Why do we still care about the Order which has disowned us? But this is the greatest strength of the Sisterhood: that even vilified, and ridiculed, and expelled by our own, we believe in the Order's mission, and work for its many causes. Call it faith, if you want; call it courage; or, as I do now, call it "being hopelessly romantic". I am not delusional. I, myself, had no plan. I only exist to serve, and only in serving I see a reason to put another foot in front of the other. As I believe in the Bene Gesserit's mission, I do the Bene Gesserit's bidding. Nothing more.
Well, until, as it happened to me, a new reason presents itself. That reason is you, my love.
This is not a memoire. I won't bother you with my full life story, or my training. This is not a coming-of-age story. It does not matter what I have learned, how the universe scarred me until I learned to strike back. Lastly, it's not a plea for absolution. I need no sympathy. Whomever I hurt, ruined or killed, I did it with my two hands, no intermediaries and no excuses. No ghafla confused my act.
What follows is the eye-witness account of the events that will open your eyes, and in that understanding you will find solace, I hope. Because my plans require you to fall with me.
If I am successful; if I achieve complete victory, you will never set eyes on this confession of mine. I will burn it into ashes, the way here on Agarath we celebrate the passing of time. All is temporary. All is transitory.
Tell that to my Other Memories, which go back till the dawn of time. Ah yes, what my kind is not allowed, just like yours, Arbatar: forgetting.
You know, the human mind is something beautiful to behold, and so many are the beliefs it created throughout history. One of these beautiful traditions reduces all creation into three primeval forces: creation, sustainance, and destruction.
But as I look at my life, one truth shines through: I am a Destroyer. Three times a destroyer: the first time to save myself, the second to save my future, the third to save the Sisterhood. But I am hiding behind words. The first time I destroyed my family and my village. The second time I annihilated my Sisters. The third time is coming soon, and I will precipitate an entire civilization into bondage.
Did your knees start sharking? No, they don't program you that way.
But none of this is out of pleasure, for I am not a monster. I get no satisfaction doing what is necessary. The Bene Gesserit trainers did not have to instill that in me, for once. Survival turns every moral quandary into an afterthought.
You will see and judge for yourself. Twice already I did what needed to be done, donning the mantle of Shiva. I carry my burden all the way.
Pray that when the third time comes, my love for you won't make me stumble.
The first time was the hardest.
It will seem very human to you, who have experienced humans as friends and lovers, but as a parallel swim lane, free to to think your own other way, colored by android emotions.
I often tell myself I was born on Buzzell, but that is one of the many lies one tells oneself until they feel true. Only then you fool a Truthsayer. If you asked me, I would reply so immediately and convincingly that you would not know that I fooled you.
My home planet was not a cold, oceanic world, home to the mother-of-pearl like tortoises which carapace makes soostones, the royal pearls, fit for interplanetary queens. No. But like Buzzell, it was enveloped by a turquoise ocean, and it was named Huluawala. It was a dull planet of small islands and large seaways. Little land for crops; mineral-poor. My first memory (and you know it's accurate because it is a lucid, agony-acquired Memory) is about being born on the beach, as it was custom. The baby that I was, was trepidant, could not wait to come out of the womb. A warm darkness. The fatigue of labor, then swoosh! cold water everywhere around me. Bubbles caressing my underwater skin. Hands holding me firmly, then lifting me above, in the shivering world of air. Words I could not understand then, but that I know now meant: "quick, warm her up with your body."
Deliveries on Hellas island happened by the beach, in the ocean water. My mother, the beauty queen Morelia, whom my father had won over against seven other young Hellas boys, all pearl divers. My mother sang like a nightingale. She was the light of the small village we lived in. She moved through the land softly, smiling. My father, the only educated member of the family, an engineer, who had set aside a more promising future to stay back in his hometown, marry his childhood sweetheart and settle down selling pearls for a few solaris apiece and catching rainbow tuna to provide for the family.
Idyllic, wasn't it? Miserable living standards often look that way. In retrospect it truly was happy. Compared to what came next.
When the skylance whooshed down from the clouds above to land on our miserable beach, I watched two pairs of black military boots jump down onto the wet sands. The two soldiers set up an improvised staircase on which I saw the most elegant, beautiful foot I had ever seen in my life climb down, quickly followed by its twin, shod in something delicate and ornate and sparkling I had never seen the likes of. Dress shoes.
The fey legs and body and dress, the oval face and flame-igniting eyes that followed were of the Honored Matre. At seven, I had never seen a more alluring creature in my life. As fresh as a flower. I looked back at my mother, whose beauty had withered that very second. I remember looking at my mother with new eyes: her hair, matted and dried by the sea wind; her face, lashed by island sand; her eyes luminous, but naive. Her plain figure. The goddess who had just emerged out of the flying lance embodied all that I yet had to experience about the universe.
I had been blind and now my eyes were open.
My innocence died right then. The blessed creature refused to make direct contact with our dirty shore and sent for a platform to elevate her presence, to avoid ruining her perfect shoes with sandgrains. I don't recall what was said and done there, only how she presented to us her body turned at an angle, smiling, her eyes turning into a cat-like orange to stress a particular word. Indelible in my mind was the impression of power and seduction. The men in the crowd were blushing. She assigned our island seven soldiers; the equipment was unloaded. Orders were intimated, the Honored Matre and her entourage soon taking off into infinity on the silver bird, never to return.
Us villagers were about to learn about the concept of oppression.
The captain wore a red beret, and simply said that our lives were under his protection, and our sole mission to bring in the harvest. "Meet the quota," he said, "and you will continue to live in harmony and happiness." Maybe it was my childish naivete. Amongst the concerned silence, the seven year old me, standing in front of the crowd, raised a hand and asked: "Who is this Dequota we are to meet?"
The soldiers marched to the center of the village, where they chose the tallest and most defensible house, with a large courtyard in the middle, a gate, and few windows. In front of everybody, weapons at the ready, they kicked the family out, including elder Moa, the village's centenarian, throwing at him the cane he used to walk with. In the next few days peace settled in. Some villagers even helped the soldiers open the tanks they had brought, freeing the small turtles in the lagoon. They shared their food with them. The soldiers took the food, the fresh fruit and fish, and sent them to dive for pearls. At the end of the day they returned to take all the pearls they had found, and told them to meet them again in the morning. When predictably nobody showed up the next day, Red Beret called a meeting and ordered all pearls in the village to be given to him. They called it "the pooling". Jolia the redhead, her mother-of-pearl earrings jingling, walked up to them and offered the pearls on her necklace. Fool. The men's eyes lingered on her body a little too long as she walked away.
A trickle of pearls started to fill the soldiers' spacious plasteel containers. Not enough. We were being greedy, they said. Greed was not a trait of my people. In our peculiar ways, we gave everything away. We buried our dead in heavy coffins made of teak wood, with mother-of-pearl inlays and expensive perfumes to make their body last in the sweltering heat of summer. Corpses were buried in elaborate silk dresses, with pearl necklaces and little golden rings. But we kept nothing for ourselves. When the soldiers raided our houses, overturned furniture, broke pottery, ripped open mattresses, they found nothing. They threatened to break our elders' legs until some families took out the bricks from the walls to reveal the gaps where they stored their life savings. The plasteel container filled up a bit.
Anger started to brew. A brown-eyed boy, certainly a teenager but looking like a strong, muscled man to ten-year old me, walked up to the soldiers' house in plain daylight and smacked in the face the man standing guard. He was Moa's grandson, asking for an apology . A single drop of blood came out of the man's mouth, splashing on the boy's forehead, where it stood glistening until it dropped to the ground without a sound. I was loitering nearby, childishly hoping the soldiers would hand out chocolate, as they occasionally did in exchange for information. I saw the blood drop. It was scarlet red, and it disappeared on the brown sand. The other droplets, and then the rivulets that followed, were of an intense carmine; they came when the rifle's gunstock hit the boy's jaw, then his stomach. The boy dropped to his knees without a sound. The guard went back to his post and started smoking, without a word, leaving him there. The boy, the brown-eyed boy, slowly got up and stumbled home. After all of that, I walked there and bent down to slide a finger on the sand. The blood was already dry. The red patch was but a smudge. It smelled of saliva and iron.
I felt sad. The soldiers did not hand out any chocolate that day.
The people of the village were many, and the soldiers seven, but they had firearms. The soldiers sometimes showed kindness to us kids. They would give us candy, chocolate, talk to us about their lives offworld. When off duty. Their food was not our food; on a particular good day they'd share a forkful of their steaming hot rations; they tasted raw, and spicy and outworldly to me. Us kids would steal fresh tuna from the day's catch, wrap the piece in banana leaves and get to the house's courtyard via the back alley. There Red Beret in person would trade their delicacies for local food. They raved about fresh fish and loathed their rations. They withheld the chocolate, period. Older kids would bring in fresh vegetables from the gardens, after sunset, and sit by the corner for hours until the negotiations began. After, you could see them in the moonlight, a tiny red ember glowing rhythmically with each one of their inbreaths. They would breathe in the smoke and cough. And so we learned about cigarettes.
The soldiers were cold, surgical in their exchanges of gifts and words. They wanted to know names, asked about people's occupations, about the size of the crops. They obsessed over the few milk cows, but were afraid to touch them. And the pearls. They murmured amongst themselves, thinking small kids could not make sense of their words; they worried about their quota and the pearl they had promised to the Honored Matres. They gossiped about the village girls, using animals as nicknames.
They asked questions in the evening, when the trades for the next day were planned. They asked where people kept their pearls.
In the gaps between walls, we replied.
No chocolate for you, then, they replied. We found those, they said, we already went through every house.
They did not know us. They did not know about how much we cared about our dead.
That night I slipped out of the courtyard, the last of the kids, and went to bed at my cousin Etta's. That never concerned my parents. When the village is small, every kid is always at somebody's house. The village takes care of them.
I became popular that night. Etta had never tried chocolate, and I had in my hands a full bar.
In the morning I looked up the hill where the old cemetery was, but did not have the courage to go check.
And no, the first time happened some time after that.