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throne -- time for joking, time for small things, time to enjoy a cool morning
or a sunset, time . . . time . . . time . . . Even danger had been good in those
days -- clean danger from known sources. No need then to strain the limits of
prescience, to peer through murky veils for frustrating glimpses of the future.
Wild Fremen said it well: "Four things cannot be hidden -- love, smoke, a
pillar of fire and a man striding across the open bled."
With an abrupt feeling of revulsion, Alia retreated from the platform into
the shadows of the Fane, strode along the balcony which looked down into the
glistening opalescence of her Hall of Oracles. Sand on the tiles rasped beneath
her feet. Supplicants always tracked sand into the Sacred Chambers! She ignored
attendants, guards, postulants, the Qizarate's omnipresent priest-sycophants,
plunged into the spiral passage which twisted upward to her private quarters.
There, amidst divans, deep rugs, tent hangings and mementos of the desert, she
dismissed the Fremen amazons Stilgar had assigned as her personal guardians.
Watchdogs, more likely! When they had gone, muttering and objecting, but more
fearful of her than they were of Stilgar, she stripped off her robe, leaving
only the sheathed crysknife on its thong around her neck, strewed garments
behind as she made for the bath.
He was near, she knew -- that shadow-figure of a man she could sense in her
future, but could not see. It angered her that no power of prescience could put
flesh on that figure. He could be sensed only at unexpected moments while she
scanned the lives of others. Or she came upon a smoky outline in solitary
darkness when innocence lay coupled with desire. He stood just beyond an unfixed
horizon, and she felt that if she strained her talents to an unexpected
intensity she might see him. He was there -- a constant assault on her
awareness: fierce, dangerous, immoral.
Moist warm air surrounded her in the tub. Here was a habit she had learned
from the memory-entities of the uncounted Reverend Mothers who were strung out
in her awareness like pearls on a glowing necklace. Water, warm water in a
sunken tub, accepted her skin as she slid into it. Green tiles with figures of
red fish worked into a sea pattern surrounded the water. Such an abundance of
water occupied this space that a Fremen of old would have been outraged to see
it used merely for washing human flesh.
He was near.
It was lust in tension with chastity, she thought. Her flesh desired a mate.
Sex held no casual mystery for a Reverend Mother who had presided at the sietch
orgies. The tau awareness of her other-selves could supply any detail her
curiosity required. This feeling of nearness could be nothing other than flesh
reaching for flesh.
Need for action fought lethargy in the warm water.
Abruptly, Alia climbed dripping from the bath, strode wet and naked into the
training chamber which adjoined her bedroom. The chamber, oblong and skylighted,
contained the gross and subtle instruments which toned a Bene Gesserit adept
into ultimate physical and mental awareness / preparedness. There were mnemonic
amplifiers, digit mills from lx to strengthen and sensitize fingers and toes,
odor synthesizers, tactility sensitizers, temperature gradient fields, pattern
betrayers to prevent her falling into detectable habits, alpha-wave-response
trainers, blink-synchronizers to tone abilities in light / dark / spectrum
analysis . . .
In ten-centimeter letters along one wall, written by her own hand in
mnemonic paint, stood the key reminder from the Bene Gesserit Creed:
"Before us, all methods of learning were tainted by instinct. We learned how
to learn. Before us, instinct-ridden researchers possessed a limited attention
span -- often no longer than a single lifetime. Projects stretching across fifty
or more lifetimes never occurred to them. The concept of total muscle / nerve
training had not entered awareness."
As she moved into the training room, Alia caught her own reflection
multiplied thousands of times in the crystal prisms of a fencing mirror swinging
in the heart of a target dummy. She saw the long sword waiting on its brackets
against the target, and she thought: Yes! I'll work myself to exhaustion --
drain the flesh and clear the mind.
The sword felt right in her hand. She slipped the crysknife from its sheath
at her neck, held it sinister, tapped the activating stud with the sword tip.
Resistance came alive as the aura of the target shield built up, pushing her
weapon slowly and firmly away.
Prisms glittered. The target slipped to her left.
Alia followed with the tip of the long blade, thinking as she often did that
the thing could almost be alive. But it was only servomotors and complex
reflector circuits designed to lure the eyes away from danger, to confuse and
teach. It was an instrument geared to react as she reacted, an anti-self which
moved as she moved, balancing light on its prisms, shifting its target, offering
its counter-blade.
Many blades appeared to lunge at her from the prisms, but only one was real.
She countered the real one, slipped the sword past shield resistance to tap the
target. A marker light came alive: red and glistening among the prisms . . .
more distraction.
Again the thing attacked, moving at one-marker speed now, just a bit faster
than it had at the beginning.
She parried and, against all caution, moved into the danger zone, scored
with the crysknife.
Two lights glowed from the prisms.
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