"Sheeana wants to discuss the Tyrant with you."
She saw the surprise this produced.
"What could I possibly add to Sheeana's knowledge of Leto II?" he demanded. "She's a Reverend Mother."
"You knew the Atreides intimately."
Ahhhhh. She's hunting for the Mentat.
"But you said she wanted to discuss Leto and it's not safe to think of him as Atreides."
"Oh, but he was. Refined into something more elemental than anyone before him, but one of us, nonetheless."
One of us! She reminded him that she, too, was Atreides. Calling in his never-ending debt to the family!
"So you say."
"Shouldn't we stop playing this foolish game?"
Caution gripped him. He knew she saw it. Reverend Mothers were so damnably sensitive. He stared at her, not daring to speak, knowing even this told her too much.
"We believe you remember more than one ghola lifetime." And when he still did not respond, "Come, come, Duncan! Are you a Mentat?"
The way she spoke, as much accusation as question, he knew concealment had ended. It was almost a relief.
"And if I am?"
"The Tleilaxu mixed the cells from more than one Idaho ghola when they grew you."
Idaho-ghola! He refused to think of himself in that abstraction. "Why is Leto suddenly so important to you?" No escaping the admission in that response.
"Our worm has become sandtrout."
"Are they growing and propagating?"
"Apparently."
"Unless you contain them or eliminate them, Chapterhouse may become another Dune. "
"You figured that out, did you?"
"Leto and I together."
"So you remember many lives. Fascinating. It makes you somewhat like us." How unswerving her stare!
"Very different, I think." Have to get her off that track!
"You acquired the memories during your first encounter with Murbella?"
Who guessed it? Lucilla? She was there and might have guessed, confiding her suspicions to her Sisters. He had to bring the deadly issue into the open. "I'm not another Kwisatz Haderach!"
"You're not?" Studied objectivity. She allowed this to reveal itself, a cruelty, he thought.
"You know I'm not!" He was fighting for his life and knew it. Not so much with Odrade as with those others who watched and reviewed the comeye records.
"Tell me about your serial memories." That was a command from the Mother Superior. No escaping it.
"I know those... lives. It's like one lifetime."
"That accumulation could be very valuable to us, Duncan. Do you also remember the axlotl tanks?"
Her question sent his thoughts into the misty probings that caused him to imagine strange things about the Tleilaxu - great mounds of human flesh softly visible to the imperfect newborn eyes, blurred and unfocused images, almost-memories of emerging from birth canals. How could that accord with tanks?
"Scytale has provided us with the knowledge to make our own axlotl system," Odrade said.
System? Interesting word. "Does that mean you also duplicate Tleilaxu spice production?"
"Scytale bargains for more than we will give. But spice will come in time, one way or another."
Odrade heard herself speak firmly and wondered if he detected uncertainty. We might not have the time to do it.
"The Sisters you Scatter are hobbled," he said, giving her a small taste of Mentat awareness. "You're drawing on your spice stockpiles to supply them and those must be finite."
"They have our axlotl knowledge and sandtrout."
He was shocked to silence by the possibility of countless Dunes being reproduced in an infinite universe.
"They will solve the problem of melange supply with tanks or worms or both," she said. This she could say sincerely. It came from statistical expectation. One among those Scattered bands of Reverend Mothers should accomplish it.
"The tanks," he said. "I have strange... dreams." He had almost said "musings."
"And well you should." Briefly, she told him how female flesh was incorporated.
"For making the spice, too?"
"We think so."
"Disgusting!"
"That's juvenile," she chided.
In such moments, he disliked her intensely. Once, he had reproached her for the way Reverend Mothers removed themselves from "the common stream of human emotions," and she had given him that identical answer.
Juvenile!
"For which there probably is no remedy," he said. "A disgraceful flaw in my character."
"Were you thinking to debate morality with me?"
He thought he heard anger. "Not even ethics. We work by different rules."
"Rules are often an excuse to ignore compassion."
"Do I hear a faint echo of conscience in a Reverend Mother?"
"Deplorable. My Sisters would exile me if they thought conscience ruled me."
"You can be prodded, but not ruled."
"Very good, Duncan! I like you much better when you're openly Mentat."
"I distrust your liking."
She laughed aloud. "How like Bell!"
He stared at her dumbly, plunged by her laughter into sudden knowledge of the way to escape his warders, remove himself from the constant Bene Gesserit manipulations and live his own life. The way out lay not in machinery but in the Sisterhood's flaws. The absolutes by which they thought they surrounded and held him - there was the way out!
And Sheeana knows! That's the bait she dangles in front of me.
When Idaho did not speak, Odrade said: "Tell me about those other lives."