"Mind at its beginning," Duncan called it. "Awakening of your True Self. I felt I had been plunged into a magic universe. My awareness was a circle and then a globe. Arbitrary forms became transient. The table was not a table. Then I fell into a trance - everything around me had a shimmering quality. Nothing was real. This passed and I felt I had lost the one reality. My table was a table once more. "
She had studied the Bene Gesserit manual "On Awakening a Ghola's Original Memories." Duncan was diverging from those instructions. Why?
He left the child and approached Murbella.
"I have to talk to Sheeana," he said as he passed her. "There's got to be a better way."
Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.
- Mentat Fixe (adacto)
Idaho, seated alone at his console, encountered an entry he had stored in Shipsystems during his first days of confinement, and found himself dumped (he applied the word later) into attitudes and sensory awareness of that earlier time. It no longer was afternoon of a frustrating day in the no-ship. He was back there, stretched between then and now the way serial ghola lives linked this incarnation to his original birth.
Immediately, he saw what he had come to call "the net" and the elderly couple defined by criss-crossed lines, bodies visible through a shimmering of jeweled ropes - green, blue, gold, and a silver so brilliant it made his eyes ache.
He sensed godlike stability in these people, but something common about them. The word ordinary came to mind. The by-now-familiar garden landscape stretched out behind them: floral bushes (roses, he thought), rolling lawns, tall trees.
The couple stared back at him with an intensity that made Idaho feel naked.
New power in the vision! It no longer was confined to the Great Hold, an increasingly compulsive magnet drawing him down there so frequently he knew the watchdogs were alerted.
Is he another Kwisatz Haderach?
There was a level of suspicion the Bene Gesserit could achieve that would kill him if it grew. And they were watching him now! Questions, worried speculations. Despite this, he could not turn away from the vision.
Why did that elderly couple look so familiar? Someone from his past? Family?
Mentat riffling of his memories produced nothing to fit the speculation. Round faces. Abbreviated chins. Fat wrinkles at the jowls. Dark eyes. The net obscured their color. The woman wore a long blue and green dress that concealed her feet. A white apron stained with green covered the dress from ample bosom to just below her waist. Garden tools dangled from apron loops. She carried a trowel in her left hand. Her hair was gray. Wisps of it had escaped a confining green scarf and blew around her eyes, emphasizing laughter lines there. She appeared... grandmotherly.
The man suited her as though created by the same artist as a perfect match. Bib overalls over a mounded stomach. No hat. Those same dark eyes with reflections twinkling in them. A brush of close-cropped wiry gray hair.
He had the most benign expression Idaho had ever seen. Up-curved smile creases at the corners of his mouth. He held a small shovel in his left hand, and on his extended right palm he balanced what appeared to be a small metal ball. The ball emitted a piercing whistle that made Idaho clap his hands over his ears. This did not stop the sound. It faded away of itself. He lowered his hands.
Reassuring faces. That thought aroused Idaho's suspicions because now he recognized the familiarity. They looked somewhat like Face Dancers, even to the pug noses.
He leaned forward but the vision kept its distance. "Face Dancers," he whispered.
Net and elderly couple vanished.
They were replaced by Murbella in practice-floor leotards of glistening ebony. He had to reach out and touch her before he could believe she really stood there.
"Duncan? What is it? You're all sweaty."
"I... think it's something the damned Tleilaxu planted in me. I keep seeing... I think they're Face Dancers. They... they look at me and just now... a whistle. It hurt."
She glanced up at the comeyes but did not appear worried. This was something the Sisters could know without it presenting immediate dangers... except possibly to Scytale.
She sank to her haunches beside him and put a hand on his arm. "Something they did to your body in the tanks?"
"No!"
"But you said..."
"My body's not just a piece of new baggage for this trip. It has all of the chemistry and substance I ever had. It's my mind that's different."
That worried her. She knew the Bene Gesserit concern over wild talents. "Damn that Scytale!"
"I'll find it," he said.
He closed his eyes and heard Murbella stand. Her hand went away from his arm.
"Maybe you shouldn't do that, Duncan."
She sounded far away.
Memory. Where did they hide the secret thing? Deep in the original cells? Until this moment, he had thought of his memory as a Mentat tool. He could call up his own images from long-ago moments in front of mirrors. Close up, examining an age wrinkle. Looking at a woman behind him - two faces in the mirror and his face full of questions.
Faces. A succession of masks, different views of this person he called myself. Slightly imbalanced faces. Hair sometimes gray, sometimes the jet karakul of his current life. Sometimes humorous, sometimes grave and seeking inward for wisdom to meet a new day. Somewhere in all of that lay a consciousness that observed and deliberated. Someone who made choices. The Tleilaxu had tampered with that.