quickly, as though this interruption must be put behind them without delay because time wasted was dangerous.
Even after the others had gone, Odrade was left with the aftershock of Bellonda’s unspoken fears.
And my fears.
She arose and went to the wide window that looked across lower rooftops to part of the ring of orchards and pastures around Central. Late spring and already fruit beginning to form out there. Rebirth. A new Teg was born today! No feeling of elation accompanied the thought. Usually she found the view restorative but not this morning.
What are my real strengths? What are my facts?
The resources at a Mother Superior’s command were formidable: profound loyalty in those who served her, a military arm under a Teg-trained Bashar (far away now with a large portion of their troops guarding the school planet, Lampadas), artisans and technicians, spies and agents throughout the Old Empire, countless workers who looked to the Sisterhood to protect them from Honored Matres, and all the Reverend Mothers with Other Memories reaching into the dawn of life.
Odrade knew without false pride that she represented the peak of what was strongest in a Reverend Mother. If her personal memories did not provide needed information, she had others around her to fill the gaps. Machine-stored data as well, although she admitted to a native distrust of it.
Odrade found herself tempted to go digging in those other lives she carried as secondary memory—these subterranean layers of awareness. Perhaps she could find brilliant solutions to their predicament in experiences of Others. Dangerous! You could lose yourself for hours, fascinated by the multiplicity of human variations. Better to leave Other Memories balanced in there, ready on demand or intruding out of necessity. Consciousness, that was the fulcrum and her grip on identity.
Duncan Idaho’s odd Mentat metaphor helped.
Self-awareness: facing mirrors that pass through the universe, gathering new images on the way—endlessly reflexive. The infinite seen as finite, the analogue of consciousness car-r ying the sensed bits of infinity.
She had never heard words come closer to her wordless awareness. “Specialized complexity,” Idaho called it. “We gather, assemble, and reflect our systems of order.”
Indeed, it was the Bene Gesserit view that humans were life designed by evolution to create order.
And how does that help us against these disorderly women who hunt us? What branch of evolution are they? Is evolution just another name for God?
Her Sisters would sneer at such “bootless speculation.”
Still, there might be answers in Other Memory.
Ahhhh, how seductive!
How desperately she wanted to project her beleaguered self into past identities and feel what it had been to live then. The immediate peril of this enticement chilled her. She felt Other Memory crowding the edges of awareness. “It was like this!” “No! It was more like this!” How greedy they were. You had to pick and choose, discreetly animating the past. And was that not the purpose of consciousness, the very essence of being alive?
Select from the past and match it against the present: Learn consequences.
That was the Bene Gesserit view of history, ancient Santayana’s words resonating in their lives: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. ”
The buildings of Central itself, this most powerful of all Bene Gesserit establishments, reflected that attitude wherever Odrade turned. Usiform, that was the commanding concept. Little about any Bene Gesserit working center was allowed to become non-functional, preserved out of nostalgia. The Sisterhood had no need for archeologists. Reverend Mothers embodied history.
Slowly (much slower than usual) the view out her high window produced its calming effect. What her eyes reported, that was Bene Gesserit order.
But Honored Matres could end that order in the next instant. The Sisterhood’s situation was far worse than what they had suffered under the Tyrant. Many of the decisions she was forced to make now were odious. Her workroom was less agreeable because of actions taken here.
Write off our Bene Gesserit Keep on Palma?
That suggestion was in Bellonda’s morning report waiting on the worktable. Odrade fixed an affirmative notation to it. “Yes.”
Write it off because Honored Matre attack is imminent and we cannot defend them or evacuate them.
Eleven hundred Reverend Mothers and the Fates alone knew how many acolytes, postulants, and others dead or worse because of that one word. Not to mention all of the “Ordinary lives” existing in the Bene Gesserit shadow.
The strain of such decisions produced a new kind of weariness in Odrade. Was it a weariness of the soul? Did such a thing as a soul exist? She felt deep fatigue where