Mix the genes.
Expand Lebensraum for your own breeders.
Gather the energies of others: collect slaves, peons, servants, serfs, markets, workers... The terms often were interchangeable.
Odrade saw what he was doing. Knowledge absorbed from the Sisterhood helped make him the incomparable Mentat Bashar. He held these things as instincts. Energy-eating drove war's violence. This was described as "greed, fear (that others will take your hoard), power hunger" and on and on into futile analyses. Odrade had heard these even from Bellonda who obviously was not taking it well that a subordinate should remind them of what they already knew.
"The Tyrant knew," Teg said. "Duncan quotes him: 'War is behavior with roots in the single cell of the primeval seas. Eat whatever you touch or it will eat you.' "
"What do you propose?" Bellonda at her most snappish.
"A feint at Gammu, then strike their base on Junction. For that we need first-hand observations." He stared steadily at Odrade.
He knows! The thought flared in Odrade's mind.
"You think your studies of Junction when it was a Guild base are still accurate?" Bellonda demanded.
"They haven't had time to change the place much from what I stored here." He tapped his forehead in an odd parody of the Sisterhood's gesture.
"Englobement," Odrade said.
Bellonda looked at her sharply. "The cost!"
"Losing everything is more costly," Teg said.
"Foldspace sensors don't have to be large," Odrade said. "Duncan would set them to create a Holzmann explosion on contact?"
"The explosions would be visible and would give us a trajectory." He sat back and looked at an indefinite area on Odrade's rear wall. Would they accept it? He dared not frighten them with another display of wild talent. If Bell knew he could see the no-ships!
"Do it!" Odrade said. "You have the command. Use it."
There was a distinct sense of chuckling from Taraza in Other Memories. Give him his head! That's how I got such a great reputation!
"One thing," Bellonda said. She looked at Odrade. "You're going to be his spy?"
"Who else can get in there and transmit observations?"
"They'll be monitoring every means of transmission!"
"Even the one that tells our waiting no-ship we have not been betrayed?" Odrade asked.
"An encrypted message hidden in the transmission," Teg said. "Duncan has devised an encryption that would take months to break but we doubt they'll detect its presence."
"Madness," Bellonda muttered.
"I met an Honored Matre military commander on Gammu," Teg said. "Slack when it came to necessary details. I think they're overconfident."
Bellonda stared at him and there was the Bashar staring back at her out of a child's innocent eyes. "Abandon all sanity ye who enter here," he said.
"Get out of here, all of you!" Odrade ordered. "You have work to do. And Miles..."
He already had slid off the chair but he stood there looking much as he always had when waiting for Mother to tell him something important.
"Did you refer to the lunacy of dramatic events that warfare always amplifies?"
"What else? Surely you didn't think I referred to your Sisterhood!"
"Duncan plays this game sometimes."
"I don't want us catching the Honored Matre madness," Teg said. "It is contagious, you know."
"They've tried to control the sex drive," Odrade said. "That always gets away from you."
"Runaway lunacy," he agreed. He leaned against the table, his chin barely above the surface. "Something drove those women back here. Duncan's right. They're looking for something and running away at the same time."
"You have ninety Standard days to get ready," she said. "Not one day more."
Ish yara al-ahdab hadbat-u. (A hunchback does not see his own hunch. - Folk Saying.) Bene Gesserit Commentary: The hunch may be seen with the aid of mirrors but mirrors may show the whole being.
- The Bashar Teg
It was a weakness in the Bene Gesserit that Odrade knew the entire Sisterhood soon must recognize. She gained no consolation from having seen it first. Denying our deepest resource when we need it most! The Scatterings had gone beyond the ability of humans to assemble the experiences in manageable form. We can only extract essentials, and that is a matter of judgment. Vital data would remain dormant in great and small events, accumulations called instinct. So that was it finally - they must fall back on unspoken knowledge.
In this age, the word "refugees" took on the color of its pre-space meaning. Small bands of Reverend Mothers sent out by the Sisterhood held something in common with old scenes of displaced stragglers trudging down forgotten roads, pitiful belongings bound in bits of cloth, wheeled on decrepit prams and toy wagons, or piled atop lopsided vehicles, remnant humanity clinging to the outsides and densely packed within, every face blank with despair or heated by desperation.
So we repeat history and repeat it and repeat it.
As she entered a tubeslot shortly before lunch, Odrade's thoughts clung to her Scattered Sisters: political refugees, economic refugees, pre-battle refugees.
Is this your Golden Path, Tyrant?
Visions of her Scattered ones haunted Odrade as she entered Central's Reserved Dining Room, a place only Reverend Mothers might enter. They served themselves here at cafeteria lines.
It had been twenty days since she had released Teg to the cantonment. Rumors were flying in Central, especially among Proctors, although there still was no sign of another vote. New decisions must be announced today and they would have to be more than naming the ones who would accompany her to Junction.